The Little Stranger

‘Oh, Doctor, it’s—’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried. ‘I can hardly hear you! What’s the matter?’

  Then, in a sudden burst of clarity: ‘Oh, Dr Faraday, she told me I wasn’t to say!’

  And by that, I knew it must be bad.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll come. I’ll come, as quickly as I can!’

  I went racing down the stairs to my dispensary, to get my bag, and to throw on my hat and overcoat. Mrs Rush followed me anxiously down. She was used to me racing off to bad confinements and other emergencies, but she had never, I suppose, seen me quite as demented as this. The first of my surgery patients would be arriving soon; I called hastily to her that she must tell them to wait, to come back in the evening, to go elsewhere, do anything. She said, ‘I will. But, Doctor’—holding out a cup—‘you’ve eaten nothing! Drink your tea, at least.’ So I stood for a second longer, gulping the hot tea down, before bowling out of the house and into my car.

  It had snowed again in the night, not heavily, but enough to make the drive out to Hundreds a newly treacherous one. Naturally I went too fast, and several times, despite the chains on my tyres, felt the car slip and slide. Had I met another vehicle at those moments I might have added another disaster to that already disastrous day, but as it was, the snow kept other drivers off the roads and I saw almost no one. I looked at my watch as I drove, fretting over the racing minutes. I don’t think I ever felt a journey as keenly as I felt that one; I seemed to sweat out the miles as I covered them, yard by yard. And then, at the gates of the park I had to leave the car altogether and go slithering along the drive. In my haste I’d put on my ordinary shoes, and within a minute my feet were soaked and freezing. Half-way along the drive I caught my ankle and turned it, badly, and had to go running on over the pain.

  Betty was at the door of the house as, limping and panting, I arrived at it, and I could see at once from her expression that things were quite as bad as I’d feared. When I joined her at the top of the steps she put her hard little hands across her face and burst into tears.

  Her helplessness was no use to me. I said impatiently, ‘Where do you need me?’ She shook her head and couldn’t answer. Beyond her, the house was silent. I peered up the staircase. ‘Up there? Tell me!’ I caught her by the shoulders. ‘Where’s Caroline? Where’s Mrs Ayres?’

  She gestured back into the body of the house. I went rapidly along the passage to the door of the little parlour and, finding it ajar, pushed it open, my heart like a hammering fist in my throat.

  Caroline was sitting alone on the sofa. I saw her and said, in sick relief, ‘Oh, Caroline, thank God! I thought—I don’t know what I thought.’

  Then I saw how strangely she sat there. She wasn’t pale, so much as greyish; but she didn’t tremble, she seemed quite calm. She saw me in the doorway and lifted her head, as if mildly interested—no more—by the sight of me.

  I went across to her and took her hand and said, ‘What is it? What’s happened? Where’s your mother?’

  She said, ‘Mother’s upstairs.’

  ‘Upstairs, alone?’

  I turned. She drew me back. ‘It’s too late,’ she said.

  And then, bit by bit, the whole frightful story came out.

  She had sat with her mother the day before, it seemed, just as I’d instructed. First she had read aloud to her; then, when Mrs Ayres had begun to doze, she’d put the book aside and had Betty bring her her sewing. They had sat together like that, companionably, until seven o’clock, when Mrs Ayres went alone to the bathroom. Caroline didn’t think she could very well accompany her there, and in fact her mother reappeared, having washed her hands and face, looking ‘rather brighter’ than before; she even insisted on changing her clothes, putting on a smarter gown for dinner. They took the meal in the little parlour, as they usually did these days. Mrs Ayres’s appetite seemed good. Made wary and anxious by me, Caroline watched her very closely, but she seemed ‘just her ordinary self’—just the ordinary self, in other words, that she had lately become, ‘quite quiet, and tired; distracted but not at all nervous’. When the dinner was cleared away, the two women stayed in the little parlour, listening to a crackling music programme on the house’s portable wireless. Betty brought them cocoa at nine o’clock; they read, or sewed, until half past ten. Only then, Caroline said, did her mother grow restless. She went to one of the windows and put back the curtain, and stood looking out at the snow-covered lawn. Once she tilted her head and said, ‘Do you hear that, Caroline?’ Caroline, however, could hear nothing. Mrs Ayres remained at the window until the draught drove her back to the fire. The fit of restlessness, apparently, had passed; she spoke of ordinary things and her voice was steady, again she seemed ‘just herself’.

  So calm did she appear, in fact, that at bedtime Caroline was almost embarrassed to insist on sitting with her in her room. She said it made her mother unhappy, too, to see her settling down with a blanket in the not very comfortable armchair, while she herself lay alone in the bed. But, ‘Dr Faraday says I must,’ she told her mother, and her mother smiled.

  ‘You might be married already.’

  ‘Hush, Mother,’ said Caroline, self-conscious. ‘How silly you are.’

  She had given her mother a Veronal to take, and the drug acts swiftly, Mrs Ayres was asleep within minutes. Caroline tiptoed over to her once, to make sure she was warmly covered by her blankets, then she settled down again as best she could on the uncomfortable chair. She’d brought up a flask of tea with her, and kept a dim lamp burning, and was content enough, for the first couple of hours, with her novel. But when her eyes began to smart she closed the book, and smoked a cigarette, and simply watched her mother sleep; and then, with nothing to check them, her thoughts became gloomy. She pictured all that was to happen the following day, all I planned to do, bringing in David Graham, taking her mother away … My anxiety and sense of urgency had impressed and frightened her, before. Now she began to doubt me. Those old ideas rose up in her, about the house—about there being something in it, or something that came to it, that wished her family harm. She looked through the shadows at her mother, lying slackly in her bed, and she said to herself: ‘Surely he’s wrong. He has to be wrong. In the morning I’ll tell him. I won’t let him take her, not like that. It’s too cruel. I’ll—I’ll take her myself. I’ll go away with her, right away. It’s this house that’s hurting her. I’ll take her away, and she’ll recover. I’ll take Roddie, too—!’

  Her thoughts ran wildly like that, until her head began to feel like an engine, churning and hot. By now, several hours had passed: she looked at her watch and found that it was almost five, well past the dead point of the night, but still an hour or two from daybreak. She needed the lavatory, and she wanted to wash and cool her face. Her mother was apparently still deeply asleep, so she went around the landing, past the shut door of Betty’s room, to the bathroom. Then, her flask of tea finished and her eyes still sore, she thought to calm herself down and keep herself awake by smoking another cigarette. The packet in her cardigan pocket was empty, but she knew there was another in the drawer of her bedside table; and since she could see very clearly across the well of the staircase into her mother’s room, she went into her own room, sat on her bed, got a cigarette out, and lit it. To make herself more comfortable she just kicked off her shoes and raised her legs, so that she was sitting against her pillow with the ashtray in her lap. Her bedroom door was wide open, and the view across the landing was a very clear one. She kept impressing this fact on me, when we talked about it later. By turning her head, she said, she could actually see, through the dimness, the footboard of her mother’s bed. The house was so still, she could even hear the steady gentle push and draw of her mother’s breaths …

  The next thing she knew, Betty was at her side with the breakfast tray. There was a tray for Mrs Ayres, too, sitting out on the landing. Betty wanted to know what she ought to do with it.

  ‘What?’ asked Caroline thickly. She had woken from
the deepest phase of sleep, unable to understand why she was on her bed rather than in it, fully dressed, very chilled, with a spilling ashtray in her lap. She propped herself up, and rubbed her face. ‘Take the tray in to my mother, can’t you? But if she’s asleep, don’t wake her. Leave it for her beside her bed.’

  ‘That’s just it, miss,’ said Betty. ‘I think madam must still be asleep, for I’ve knocked and I’ve got no answer. And I can’t take it in; the door’s locked.’

  At that, Caroline woke properly. Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was just after eight. The day was bright beyond the curtain—unnaturally bright, because of the snowy ground. Alarmed, queasy, trembling with lack of sleep, she rose and went rapidly around the landing to her mother’s room. Just as Betty had claimed, its door was closed and locked, and when she tapped on the door—lightly at first, but then more firmly, as her anxiety mounted—she received no answer.

  ‘Mother!’ she called. ‘Mother, are you awake?’

  Still no reply. She beckoned to Betty. Could she hear anything? Betty listened, then shook her head. Caroline said, ‘She might, I suppose, be sleeping too deeply. But then, the door—It was closed when you got up?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘But I know I remember—I’m sure I remember—that both the doors were open. We don’t have a spare key for this, do we?’

  ‘I don’t think so, miss.’

  ‘No, neither do I. Oh, God! Why the hell did I leave her?’

  Trembling harder, she knocked on the door again, louder than before. Again no answer. But then she thought to do what Mrs Ayres herself had recently done when faced with an inexplicably locked door: she stooped, and put her eye to the keyhole. And she was reassured to see that the keyhole was empty, and the room beyond it quite light. For, not unnaturally, she took this to mean that her mother was not in the room at all. She must have locked the door when she left it, and taken the key away with her. Why would she have done that? Caroline couldn’t imagine. She got to her feet and, with more confidence than she felt, she said, ‘I don’t think my mother’s in there, Betty. She must be somewhere in the house. I suppose you’ve been in the little parlour?’

  ‘Oh, yes, miss. I’ve been and laid the fire in there.’

  ‘She couldn’t be down in the library, I suppose. And she wouldn’t have gone upstairs—would she?’

  She and Betty gazed at each other, both thinking back to that horrible incident of a few weeks before.

  ‘I’d better go up and take a look,’ said Caroline at last. ‘Wait here for me.—No, on second thoughts, don’t wait here. Check all the rooms on this floor, and then check downstairs. My mother might have had some accident.’

  They went off in separate directions, Caroline running upstairs, then laboriously trying every door, and calling out. The shady corridors didn’t frighten her. She found the nurseries, as I had, bleak but lifeless, and quite empty. Defeated, she returned to the door of her mother’s room. A moment later Betty joined her. She had also found nothing. She had tried every room—and she had looked from the windows, too, in case Mrs Ayres had gone outside. There were no new footprints in the snow, she said; and madam’s coat, she added, was still on its peg in the porch, and her boots were dry on the rack.

  Caroline began to bite nervously at the tips of her fingers. Again she rattled the handle of her mother’s door, and knocked and called. Again, nothing.

  ‘God!’ she said. ‘This is no good. My mother must have gone outside. She must have gone before this latest fall of snow covered up her footprints.’

  ‘Without her coat and her boots?’ asked Betty, in horror.

  Again they looked at each other; then they turned, and hurried down the stairs, and drew back the bolts of the front door. The whiteness of the day almost blinded them, but they went, as quickly as they could, across the gravel, then right along the south terrace to the steps that led down to the lawn. Here, dazzled and frustrated by the unbroken blanket of snow with which the lawn was covered, Caroline came to a halt, and peered across the garden. She cupped her hands to her mouth, calling, ‘Mother! Mother, are you there?’

  ‘Mrs Ayres!’ called Betty. ‘Madam! Mrs Ayres!’

  They listened, and heard nothing.

  ‘We might try the old gardens,’ said Caroline then, moving forward again. ‘My mother was there yesterday with Dr Faraday. I don’t know, perhaps she took it into her head to go back.’

  But as she spoke, her eye was caught by a small imperfection in the snow ahead of her; and warily, she moved towards it. Something had fallen there, some small metal object: she thought at first that it must be a coin, then realised as she drew closer that what she’d mistaken for a tilted shilling was actually the glittering oval end of a long-stemmed key. It was the key—she knew it had to be—to her mother’s locked room, but how it had dropped or tumbled there, into that unmarked stretch of snow, she couldn’t imagine. She could only think, for one wild moment, that it had slipped from the beak of a bird, and she lifted her eyes and turned her head, in search of a magpie or a crow. What her gaze met instead were the windows of her mother’s bedroom. One was closed, its curtains shut. The other was open—wide open to the frosty air. And her heart, at the sight of it, seemed to die in her breast. For suddenly she knew that the key was here because her mother herself, after locking her door from the inside, had thrown it out. She knew that her mother was still in her room, and did not want to be easily found; and she guessed why.

  She ran, then—just as, soon, I myself would be running—ran awkwardly back through the powdery snow, catching hold of a startled Betty and taking her with her, pulling her into the house and up the stairs. The key was as cold as an icicle in her fingers as she fitted it into the lock. Her hand was trembling so violently that, for a second, the metal wouldn’t catch, and her leaden heart gave a desperate kick: she thought that, after all, she had made a mistake, the key was the wrong one, not her mother’s at all … But then the lock shifted. She caught hold of the handle and pushed at the door. She felt it open an inch or two and then stop, as something behind it, something heavy and resisting, got in its path.

  ‘For God’s sake, help me!’ she cried, in a terribly broken voice, and Betty moved forward to push the door with her, until it had opened just far enough for them to be able to put in their heads and look behind it. What they saw made them both cry out. It was Mrs Ayres, slumped and ungainly, her head lolling, her pose queer, as if she had sunk to her knees in a sort of half-faint just inside the threshold. Her face was hidden by her loose greying hair, but as they pushed the door further, her head moved slackly to the side. Then they could see what she had done.

  She had hanged herself, with the cord of her dressing-gown, from an old brass hook on the back of the door.

  There followed several ghastly minutes as they tried to release her, to warm and revive her. The cord was drawn so tightly by her weight they couldn’t unknot it. Betty had to run for scissors, and when she returned, with kitchen shears, they found the blades of them so dull they could only saw away at the thickly braided silk until it frayed, and then they had literally to prise the cord away from the swollen flesh of her throat. There is a particular horror to the appearance of a hanged person, and Mrs Ayres looked dreadful, bloated and dark. She’d clearly been dead for some time—her body was already cool—and yet, according to Betty when I spoke to her later that day, Caroline bent over her, shaking and chiding her—not speaking gently or sorrowfully but telling her, almost playfully, that she must wake up, must pull herself together.

  ‘She didn’t know what she were saying, sir,’ Betty said, sitting at the kitchen table and wiping her eyes. ‘She went on shaking and shaking her, until I said perhaps we ought to get her up on to the bed. So between us we lifted madam up—’ She covered her face. ‘Oh, my God, it were awful! She kept slipping out of our arms, and every time she did Miss Caroline told her not to be silly, speaking just as she would’ve if madam had done some ordinary thing like—like lo
sing her glasses. We got her lying down, and she looked worse than ever with the white pillow by her head, but still Miss Caroline was acting like she couldn’t see it. So I said, “Oughtn’t we to send for someone, miss? Oughtn’t we to send for Dr Faraday?” And she said, “Yes, go and telephone for Doctor! He’ll see my mother’s all right.” Then, as I was going out the door, she calls after me in a different voice: “Don’t you tell him, mind, what’s been done! Not over the telephone! Mother wouldn’t want everyone hearing that! Say there’s been an accident!”

  ‘And after that, you see, Doctor, she must have thought about what she’d said. When I went back in she were sitting down quietly at the side of the bed, and she just looked at me and she said, “She’s dead, Betty”—as if I might not’ve knowed it. I said, “Yes, miss, I know, and I’m ever so sorry.” And we just stopped there, the two of us, not knowing what else we should do … But then I got frit. I got frit terrible. I pulled on Miss Caroline’s arm, and she rose to her feet like she were dreaming. We went out together, and I shut the door and turned the key. And it seems an awful thing to have done, to have left Mrs Ayres lying in there all on her own. She were such a kind lady, she were always nice to me … And then it come to me how, just a bit before, we had been standing there in front of her door, wondering where she could be, not thinking anything of it, and peeping through the keyhole, when all the time—Oh!’ She began to cry again. ‘Why would she have done such a horrible thing to herself, Dr Faraday? Why would she?’

  It was a good hour or so after I’d arrived at the house that she told me all this, and by then I had been up to Mrs Ayres’s room myself. I had to nerve myself to go in there, standing at the door with my hand on the key. I, too, kept thinking of Caroline having been there before me, pushing the door and finding it blocked … My first sight of Mrs Ayres’s swollen, darkened face made me shudder; but worse was to come, for when I opened up her nightgown in order to examine her body, I found a score of little cuts and bruises, apparently all over her torso and limbs. Some were new, some almost faded. Most were simple scratches and nips. But one or two, I saw with horror, had the appearance almost of bites. The freshest, still smeared with blood, had clearly been made very shortly before her death—in other words, in that relatively brief space of time between Caroline’s having left her at five o’clock and Betty’s appearance with the breakfast tray at eight. What terror and despair must have gripped her in those three dark hours, I couldn’t imagine. The Veronal should have kept her sleeping long past the point of Caroline’s departure; instead, somehow, she had woken, had risen, had calculatedly closed and locked her bedroom door and disposed of the key, and begun the systematic business of torturing herself to death.