The Little Stranger

  The girl looked torn for a moment, then put down her head and half turned away from us. I stood in silence, frustrated; then dropped my voice.

  ‘Caroline,’ I said, ‘I’m begging you. Please think again. I don’t care if you don’t feel … quite enough for me. You feel something, I know you do. Don’t pretend there’s nothing. That time, at the dance—or, when we stood outside, on the terrace—’

  She said wearily, ‘I made a mistake.’

  ‘There was no mistake.’

  ‘There was. It was all a mistake, from start to finish. I made a mistake, and I’m sorry.’

  ‘I can’t let you go.’

  ‘God! Do you want to make me hate you? Please don’t keep coming out here like this. It’s over. All of it.’

  I grabbed at her wrist, suddenly furious again.

  ‘How can you talk like that? How can you do what you’re doing? For Christ’s sake, look at you! Destroying this house. Abandoning Hundreds! How can you? How—how dare you? Didn’t you tell me once that living here was a sort of bargain? You had to keep up your side of it? Is that what you’re doing now?’

  Her wrist twisted out of my hand. She said, ‘That bargain was killing me! You know it was. I wish I’d left a year ago, and taken my mother and my brother with me.’

  She’d started to move away from me, wanting to get on with her work. Watching her go, I said levelly, ‘Are you sure about that?’

  I’d been struck, once again, by her air of competence and purpose. As she turned back to me, frowning, I said, ‘A year ago, what did you have? A house you claimed drained all your time. An ageing mother, a sick brother. What was your future? And yet, look at you now. You’re free, Caroline. You’ll have money, I suppose, once Hundreds is sold. It seems to me, you know, that you’ve done really rather nicely.’

  She stared at me for a second, and then the blood flew into her face. I realised what a terrible thing I had suggested, and grew flustered.

  ‘Caroline, forgive me.’

  ‘Get out,’ she said.

  ‘Please—’

  ‘Get out. Get out of my house.’

  I didn’t look at Betty, but somehow saw her expression anyway, embarrassed and startled and shaded with pity. I turned and fumbled for the door, and went blindly down the steps and across the gravel to the car. Anne saw my face and said gently, ‘No good? I’m so very sorry.’

  I drove us back to Lidcote in silence, defeated at last—defeated not so much by the knowledge that I had lost Caroline, as by the thought that I had had a chance to win her back, and had thrown that chance away. When I remembered what I had said to her, what I’d implied, I felt ill with shame. But I knew in my heart that the shame would pass, and my misery rise, and that then I would go to Hundreds again, and finish by saying something worse. So, in order to put the business utterly beyond recovery, when I had dropped Anne off I drove straight to the Desmonds, to tell them that Caroline and I had parted and that the wedding had been called off.

  It was the first time I had said the words, and they came more easily than I’d been expecting. Bill and Helen were concerned, sympathetic. They gave me a glass of wine and a cigarette. They asked who else had heard the news; I told them they were more or less the first, but that as far as I was concerned they could pass it on to whoever they liked. The sooner everyone knew, I said, the better.

  ‘Is there really no hope at all?’ Helen asked me, as she saw me out.

  I said, ‘None at all, I’m afraid,’—smiling ruefully as I said it, managing to suggest, I think, that I was reconciled to the separation; possibly even giving the impression that Caroline and I had arrived at the decision together.

  Lidcote has three public houses. I left the Desmonds just on opening-up time, and stopped for a drink at each of them. At the last I bought a bottle of gin—the only spirit they had—to take away with me; and once again I stood in my dispensary, squalidly knocking back the liquor. This time, however, for all that I drank, I remained obstinately sober, and when I summoned up Caroline’s image, I did it with an oddly clear head. It was just as though my ravings of the past few days had worn out my capacity for violent feeling. I left the dispensary and went upstairs, and my house, which recently had begun to seem flimsy as a stage-set to me, now, with every step I took, seemed to harden, to reassert itself in all its dreary colours and lines. But even that failed to depress me somehow. Almost in an effort to stoke up some misery I carried on up to my attic bedroom, and I got out everything I could find that I had ever had from Hundreds, or that connected me to the house. There was the Empire Day medal, of course, and the sepia photograph that Mrs Ayres had given me on my first visit, that might or might not contain a portrait of my mother. But there was also the ivory whistle I had drawn from the kitchen end of the speaking-tube, that time in March: I had put it in my waistcoat pocket that day, and had inadvertently brought it home with me. I had kept it in a drawer with my studs and cuff-links since then, but now I fished it out and set it down, on my bedside table, beside the photograph and medal. I added the keys to the park and the house itself and next to them I put the shagreen box that held Caroline’s ring.

  A medal, a photograph, a whistle, a pair of keys, an unworn wedding-ring. They formed the spoil of my time at Hundreds: a queer little collection, it seemed to me. A week before, they would have told a story, with myself as the hero of the tale. Now they were so many unhappy fragments. I looked to them for a meaning, and was defeated.

  The keys I returned to my own key-chain; I couldn’t quite give them up, not yet. But the other things I hid away as if ashamed of them. I went to bed early, and next morning I began the joyless task of picking up the threads of my old routines—the routines I’d had, I mean, before life at Hundreds so absorbed me. That afternoon I learned that the Hall and its lands had been put up for sale with a local agent. Makins, the dairyman, had been given the option of leaving the farm or buying it up for himself, and was choosing to leave: he hadn’t the money to go into business on his own; the sudden sale had put him in a difficult spot and he was said to be very bitter about it. More pieces of information filtered through as the week progressed; vans were seen coming and going from the Hall, slowly emptying it of its contents. Most people naturally assumed that this was some plan of Caroline’s and mine, and I had a trying few days, repeatedly explaining that the wedding had been cancelled and that Caroline was leaving the district alone. Then the news must have spread, for the questions abruptly died down, and the subsequent awkwardness was almost harder to bear than anything. I threw myself back into hospital work. There was, at that time, a great deal to do. I made no more visits to Hundreds; I’d already given up my short-cut across the park. I saw nothing of Caroline, though I thought about her, and dreamt about her, unnervingly often. I heard at last from Helen Desmond that she was due to leave the county, with the minimum of fuss, on the last day of May.

  After that, there was only one desire in my heart, and that was for the rest of that month to pass as quickly and as painlessly as possible. I had a calendar on my consulting-room wall, and when the date of the wedding had first been decided I had taken it down and added jolly ink doodles to the square representing the twenty-seventh. Now a pride or a stubbornness prevented me from putting the calendar away. I wanted to see the day out: four days after it, Caroline would disappear properly from my life, and I had a superstitious feeling that once I could turn the page to June, I should be a new man. Meanwhile I watched the inked square approaching with a queasy mixture of longing and dread. In the final week of the month I grew increasingly distracted, unable to concentrate much on my work, and sleeping badly again.

  As a result, the day itself passed off rather flatly. At one o’clock—the hour fixed for our wedding—I was sitting at the bedside of an elderly patient, concentrating on the case before me. When I left the patient’s house and heard the half-hour struck, I felt almost unmoved—wondering vaguely which other couple had taken our slot at the registry office, that was all
. I saw a few more cases; evening surgery was quiet, and I spent the rest of the evening at home. By half past ten I was weary, and was actually thinking of my bed; in fact, I had got as far as kicking off my shoes and was heading upstairs in my bedroom slippers, when there was a furious knocking and ringing at my surgery door. I found a boy of about seventeen there, so breathless he could hardly speak. He’d run five and a half miles to fetch me out for his sister’s husband, who was in terrible trouble, he said, with pains in his belly. I gathered up my things and drove him back to his sister’s house: it turned out to be the worst sort of place imaginable—an abandoned hut, with holes in its roof and gaps in its windows, and without light or water. The family were squatters, Oxfordshire people who had moved north looking for work. The husband had been ill ‘on and off’ for days, they told me, with vomiting, fever, and stomach pain; they had been treating him with castor oil, but over the past few hours he had grown so poorly they’d become frightened. Having no regular doctor, they hadn’t known who to send out for. They had come to me in the end because they could remember having seen my name in the local paper.

  The poor man was lying in the candle-lit parlour on a sort of truckle-bed, fully clothed and with an old army greatcoat across him. His temperature was high, his abdomen swollen, and so painful that when I started to examine him he screamed and swore and drew up his knees and feebly tried to kick me off. It was the plainest case of acute appendix I had ever seen, and I knew I had to get him to hospital at once, or risk the appendix bursting. The family were horrified at the thought of the expense that would be involved in submitting him for an operation. ‘Can’t you do nothing for him here?’ the wife kept asking me, tugging at my sleeve. She and her mother knew of a girl who’d had her stomach washed after swallowing a bottle of pills; they wanted me to do the same for him. The man himself, even, had fastened on to this one idea: if I would ‘just wash the poison out of him’ he would be fine; that was all he wanted, and all he’d stand for. He hadn’t let them fetch me, he said, to have me send him off to be cut up and pulled about by a lot of f—g doctors.

  Then he was seized by a dreadful fit of vomiting, and passed beyond the point of speech. The family grew more frightened than ever, I managed to persuade them at last of the seriousness of his condition, and the issue then became how to get him to the hospital without delay. Ideally he should have gone by ambulance. But the hut was an isolated one, and the nearest telephone was at a post-office two miles away. I could see nothing for it but to take him myself, so the brother-in-law and I, between us, carried him outside on his truckle-bed, then carefully laid him on the back seat of my car. The wife squeezed herself in beside him, the boy sat in the front, and the couple’s children were left in the care of the elderly mother. It was a pretty frightful journey we made, seven or eight miles mostly on lanes and back roads, the man groaning or screaming with every jolt of the car, now and then vomiting into a bowl; the woman weeping so much she was more or less useless; the boy scared out of his wits. The only thing in our favour was the moon, which was full, and bright as a lamp. Once we joined the Leamington road I could go faster; by half past twelve we were pulling up at the hospital doors, and twenty minutes later the man was taken off to the operating theatre—looking so ill by then, I really feared for his chances. I sat with the woman and the boy, not wanting to leave them until I had seen how the case turned out. At last the surgeon, Andrews, came to tell us that all had gone well. He had caught the appendix before perforation could take place, so there was now no threat of peritonitis; the man was weak but, apart from that, recovering nicely.

  Andrews had the worst kind of public-school accent, and the wife was so dazed with worry I could see that she hardly understood him. When I explained that her husband had been saved, she almost fainted with relief. She wanted to see him; there was no chance of that. Nor would they let her and the boy stay in the waiting-room overnight. I offered to drive them home again on my way back to Lidcote, but they didn’t want to stray so far from the hospital—possibly they were thinking of the bus-fares they would have to pay in coming back the next day. They said they had friends just outside Leamington who would let them have the use of a pony and cart; the boy would go back in it to let the old mother know that all was well, the woman would spend the night in town and return to see her husband in the morning. They seemed as fixated on the pony and cart idea as they had previously been on the stomach-washing, and I secretly wondered if they weren’t simply going to go and sleep in some ditch until daylight. But again I offered them a lift, and this time they accepted; the place they led me to was another squatters’ hut, just as dismal as their own, with a couple of dogs and horses tethered outside. The dogs set up a crazy barking as we arrived, and the door of the hut was opened by a man with a shotgun in his hands. But when he recognised his visitors he put the gun down and welcomed them in. They asked me to join them—they had ‘plenty of tea and cider’, they told me, warmly. For a second I was almost tempted. In the end I thanked them, but said good night. Before the door closed again I caught a glimpse of the room beyond, its floor a chaos of mattresses and sleeping bodies: adults, children, babies, dogs, and squirming blind-eyed puppies.

  After the race to the hospital, followed by the dread of waiting and the subsequent relief, there was something mildly hallucinatory about the whole encounter, and my car, as I drew away, seemed by contrast very hushed and lonely. It’s a queer thing, being plunged in and out of the dramas of one’s patients—especially at night. The experience can leave one feeling drained, but also oddly wakeful and edgy, and now my mind, with nothing to anchor it, began to run over the details of the past few hours like a film on a loop. I remembered the boy, speechless and panting at my surgery door; the man, drawing up his knees and weakly kicking out at me; the woman’s tears, the vomiting and yelling; Andrews, with his surgeon’s manner and voice; the impossible cottage; the bodies and the puppies—On and on it went, over and over, compelling and exhausting, until, to break the spell of it, I wound down my window and lit a cigarette. And something about doing that, in the darkness of the car, with the soft white glare of the moon and the headlamps lighting my hands—something made me realise that the journey I was making was the journey I had made back in January, after the hospital dance. I looked at my watch: it was two a.m., on what should have been my wedding-night. I was meant to have been lying in a train now, with Caroline in my arms.

  The loss and the grief rose up and swamped me, all over again. It was just as bad as it had ever been. I didn’t want to go home to the empty bedroom in my cramped and cheerless house. I wanted Caroline; I wanted Caroline and couldn’t have her—that was all I knew. I had joined the Hundreds road by now, and the thought that she was so near, and yet so lost to me, made me shake. I had to throw away my cigarette and stop the car until the worst of the sensations had passed. But still I couldn’t face going home. I drove on, slowly; and soon I reached the turning into the lane that led to that shady overgrown pond. I took it, and bumped along the track, and parked where Caroline and I had parked that time—the time I had reached to kiss her and she had first pushed me away.

  The moon was so bright, the trees cast shadows, and the water seemed white as milk. The whole scene was like a photograph of itself, oddly developed and slightly unreal: I gazed at it, and it seemed to absorb me, I began to feel out of time and out of place, an absolute stranger. I think I smoked another cigarette. I know that presently I grew cold, and groped about on the back seat for the old red blanket I kept in the car—the blanket I had once tucked around Caroline—and wrapped myself up in it. I felt not at all weary, in the ordinary sense. I think I expected to sit there, wakeful, for the rest of the night. But I turned, and drew up my legs, and lowered my cheek to the back of the seat; and I sank into a fretful sort of slumber almost at once. And in the slumber I seemed to leave the car, and to press on to Hundreds: I saw myself doing it, with all the hectic, unnatural clarity with which I’d been recalling the dash to the h
ospital a little while before. I saw myself cross the silvered landscape and pass like smoke through the Hundreds gate. I saw myself start along the Hundreds drive.

  But there I grew panicked and confused—for the drive was changed, was queer and wrong, was impossibly lengthy and tangled with, at the end of it, nothing but darkness.

  I woke in daylight, chastened and cramped. It was just after six. The windows of the car were running with condensation and my head was bare: my hat had worked its way down between my shoulder and the seat, to be crushed beyond recovery, and the blanket was lumped around my waist as if I’d been wrestling with it. I opened the door to the fresh air, and climbed awkwardly out. There was a scuffling at my feet—I thought of rats, but it was hedgehogs, a pair of them, they had been nosing at the tyres of the car and now disappeared into the long grass. They left dark trails behind them, the grass was pale with dew. The pond had a faint mist across it—the water was grey now instead of white—the place had lost the air of unreality it had had in the early hours. I felt rather as I could remember feeling after a bad air-raid in the city: coming blinking out of the shelter, seeing the houses marked but still standing, when in the midst of the worst of the bombing it had seemed as though the world were being blasted to bits.

  But I felt, not dazed, so much simply as washed-out. The passion was gone from me. I wanted coffee, and a shave; and I needed the lavatory, badly. I moved to one side, and saw to that; then I combed my hair and did my best to straighten my crumpled clothes. I tried the car. It was damp, and cold, and wouldn’t start at once, but after I’d lifted the bonnet and wiped the spark-plugs I got it going—the engine hammering open the country silence, frightening the birds from the trees. I drove back along the lane, briefly rejoined the Hundreds road, then turned off towards Lidcote. I met no one on the way, but the village was just coming to life, the labouring families already stirring, the bakery with a smoking chimney; the sun was low and shadows were long, and all the little details on the cobbled church, the red-brick houses and the shops, the empty pavements and the carless road—all looked crisp and clean and handsome.