The Little Stranger

  The treated flesh, as I’d expected, looked hot and moist, almost scarlet. I dried it off, shook powder on it, and spent another couple of minutes working the muscle with my fingers. But it was clearly one thing for him to be wired up to an impersonal machine, and quite another to have me squatting before him going over his leg with quick warm powdered hands: he shifted about impatiently, and at last I let him rise. He saw to his sock and plimsoll and unrolled his trouser leg, all without speaking. But once he had taken a few paces across the room he looked back at me and said, as if pleased and surprised, ‘You know, that’s not too bad. That’s really not too bad at all.’

  I realised then how much I had wanted the thing to be a success. I said, ‘Walk again, and let me watch you … Yes, you’re definitely moving more freely. Just don’t overdo it. It’s a good start, but we must take things slowly. For now, you must keep that muscle warm. You’ve some liniment, I suppose?’

  He glanced doubtfully around the room. ‘I think they gave me some lotion or other when they sent me home.’

  ‘Never mind. I’ll give you a new prescription.’

  ‘Oh, now, look here. You mustn’t trouble any more than you already have.’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I? You’re doing me the favour.’

  ‘Well—’

  I’d anticipated exactly this, and had brought along a bottle in my bag. He took it from me, then stood gazing at the label while I went back to the machine. As I was tidying away the lint there was a knock on the door, which startled me slightly, for I had heard no footsteps: the room had those two great windows, but the wooden panelling on its walls gave it an insulated feel, as if it were the below-decks cabin of an ocean liner. Roderick called out, and the door was opened. Gyp appeared, thrusting his way into the room and trotting straight to me; and behind him, more tentatively, came Caroline. She was wearing an Aertex blouse today, tucked haphazardly into the waistband of a shapeless cotton skirt.

  She said, ‘Are you cooked, Roddie?’

  ‘Quite fried,’ he answered.

  ‘And is that the machine? Crikey. Like something of Dr Frankenstein’s, isn’t it?’

  She watched me lock the thing back in its case, then noticed her brother, who was absently flexing and bending his leg. She must have seen from his pose and expression the relief the treatment had brought him, for she gave me a serious, grateful look, which somehow pleased me almost more than the success of the therapy itself. But then, as if embarrassed by her own emotion, she turned away from me to pick up a stray piece of paper from the floor, and began complaining light-heartedly about Roderick’s untidiness.

  ‘If only there were some sort of machine for keeping rooms in order!’ she said.

  Roderick had unstoppered the bottle of liniment and was lifting it to his nose.

  ‘I thought we had one of those already. It’s called Betty. Or else why do we pay her?’

  ‘Don’t listen to him, Doctor. He never lets poor Betty in here.’

  ‘I can’t keep her out!’ he said. ‘And she moves things around where I can’t find them, and then pretends she hasn’t touched them.’

  He spoke absently now, already having drifted back to that magnetic desk of his, the bottle put aside and his leg forgotten; and when he had opened up the cover of a dog-eared manila file and was frowning down at it he began, just as automatically, to bring out papers and tobacco in order to roll a cigarette.

  I saw Caroline watching him, her expression growing serious again.

  ‘I wish you’d give those filthy things up,’ she said. She went to one of the oak-panelled walls and ran her hand across the wood. ‘Look at these poor panels. The smoke’s ruining them. They ought to be waxed or oiled or something.’

  ‘Oh, the whole house needs something,’ said Roderick, yawning. ‘If you know a way of doing something with nothing—no money, I mean— then go ahead, be my guest. Besides’—he had raised his head and caught my eye, and made another obvious effort to speak more brightly—‘it’s a fellow’s duty to smoke in this room, wouldn’t you say, Dr Faraday?’

  He gestured to the lattice-work ceiling, which I had taken to be ivory-coloured with age, but which I now realised had been stained an irregular nicotine-yellow by half-a-century’s worth of cigar-puffing billiard players.

  Soon he returned to his papers, and Caroline and I took the hint and left him. He promised, with a touch of vagueness, that he would shortly join us for tea.

  His sister shook her head. ‘He’ll be in there for hours now,’ she murmured, as we moved away from his door. ‘I wish he’d let me share the work with him, but he never will … His leg was really better, though, wasn’t it? I can’t thank you enough for helping him like this.’

  ‘He could help himself,’ I said, ‘by doing the right kind of exercises. Or a bit of simple massage every day would make a great deal of difference to the muscle. I’ve given him some liniment; you might see that he uses it?’

  ‘I’ll do my best. But I expect you’ve noticed how careless of himself he is.’ She slowed her step. ‘What do you think of him, honestly?’

  I said, ‘I think he’s fundamentally very healthy. I think he’s charming, too, by the way. It’s a pity he’s been allowed to organise his room like that, with the business side of things dominating everything else.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Our father used to run the estate from the library. It’s his old desk that Roderick uses, but I never remember it looking so chaotic in the old days, and that was with four farms to manage, not just one. We had an agent to help us then, mind; a Mr McLeod. He had to leave us during the war. He had an office of his own, just back there. This side of the Hall was the ‘men’s side’, if you know what I mean, and always busy. Now, apart from Roderick’s room, this whole section of the house might as well not be here at all.’

  She spoke casually, but it was novel and curious to me to think of having grown up in a house with so many spare rooms in it they could be shut up and forgotten. When I said this to Caroline, however, she gave that rueful laugh of hers.

  ‘The novelty soon wears off, I assure you! One starts to think of them pretty quickly as something like tiresome poor relations, for one can’t abandon them completely, but they have accidents, or fall ill, and finish by using up more money than would have been needed to pension them off. It’s a shame, because there are some quite nice features here … But I could show you over the house, if you’d like? If you promise to avert your gaze from the worst bits? The sixpenny tour. What do you say?’

  She seemed genuinely keen to do it, and I said I’d like it very much, if it wouldn’t mean keeping her mother waiting. She said, ‘Oh, Mother’s a true Edwardian at heart: she thinks it a barbarism to take tea before four o’clock. What time is it now?’ It was just after half past three. ‘We’ve plenty of time. Let’s start at the front.’

  She snapped her fingers for Gyp, who had gone trotting on ahead, and took me back past her brother’s door.

  ‘The hall you’ve seen, of course,’ she said, when we reached it and I had set down my therapy machine and bag. ‘The floor’s Carrara marble, and three inches thick—hence the vaulted ceilings in the rooms underneath. It’s a devil to polish. The staircase: considered quite a feat of engineering when it was put in, because of the open second landing; there aren’t many others quite like it. My father used to say it was like something from a department store. My grandmother refused to use it; it gave her vertigo … Over there’s our old morning room, but I won’t show you that: it’s quite empty, and far too shabby. Let’s go in here instead.’

  She opened a door on a darkened room which, once she had gone across to the shuttered windows and let in some light, revealed itself as a pleasant largish library. Most of its shelves, however, were hung with dust-sheets, and some of its furniture was obviously gone: she reached into a mesh-fronted case and carefully drew out a couple of what she said were the house’s best books, but I could see that the room was not what it had been, and there wasn’t mu
ch to linger for. She went to the fireplace to peer up the chimney, concerned about a fall of soot in the grate; then she closed the shutter and led me to the neighbouring room—the old estate office she had already mentioned, which was panelled like Roderick’s and had similar Gothic touches. Her brother’s door was next, and just beyond that was the curtained arch that led to the basement. We went quietly past them both and found the ‘boot room’, a musty-smelling chamber full of mackintoshes and perished wellingtons and tennis racquets and mallets but really, she told me, a sort of tiring-room from the days when the family still ran a stables. A door inside it led to a quaint delft-tiled lavatory that had been known for over a century, she said, as ‘the gentlemen’s hoo-hah’.

  She snapped her fingers again for Gyp, and we moved on.

  ‘You’re not bored?’ she asked.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Do I make a good guide?’

  ‘You make a capital guide.’

  ‘But now, oh dear, here’s one of those bits from which you must turn your gaze. Oh, and now you’re laughing at us! That’s unfair.’

  I had to explain why I was smiling: the panel she meant was the one from which I’d prised that plaster acorn, all those years before. I told the story rather warily, not quite sure how she would take it. But she widened her eyes as if thrilled.

  ‘Oh, but that’s too funny! And Mother really gave you a medal? Like Queen Alexandra? I wonder if she remembers.’

  ‘Please don’t mention it to her,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t. I was one of about fifty nasty little grubby-kneed boys that day.’

  ‘But you liked the house, even then?’

  ‘Enough to want to vandalise it.’

  ‘Well,’ she said kindly, ‘I don’t blame you for wanting to vandalise these silly mouldings. They were simply asking to be snapped off. What you started I’m afraid Roddie and I, between us, probably finished … But isn’t that queer? You saw Hundreds before he or I ever did.’

  ‘So I did,’ I said, struck by the thought.

  We moved away from the broken mouldings, and continued our tour. She drew my attention to a short line of portraits, murky canvases in heavy gold frames. And, just as in some American movie mock-up of a stately home, they turned out to be what she called ‘the family album’.

  ‘None of them is terribly good or valuable or anything, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘All the valuable ones have been sold, along with the best of the furniture. But they’re fun, if you can bear the bad light.’

  She pointed to the first. ‘Here’s William Barber Ayres. He’s the man who had the Hall built. A good county chap, like all the Ayreses, but evidently rather near: we have letters to him from the architect, complaining of outstanding fees and more or less threatening to send round the heavies … Next is Matthew Ayres, who took troops to Boston. He came back in disgrace, with an American wife, and died three months later; we like to say she poisoned him … This is Ralph Billington Ayres, Matthew’s nephew—the family gambler, who for a time ran a second estate, in Norfolk, and just like a Georgette Heyer rake lost the whole of it in a single game of cards … And this is Catherine Ayres, his daughter-in-law and my great-grandmother. She was an Irish racehorse heiress, and restored the family fortune. It was said that she could never go near a horse herself, for fear of frightening it. Pretty clear where I get my looks from, wouldn’t you say?’

  She laughed as she spoke, because the woman in the painting was strikingly ugly; but the fact is, Caroline did resemble her, just a little—though it gave me a slight shock to realise it, for I found I had grown as used to her mismatched masculine features as I had to Roderick’s scars. I made some gesture of polite demurral, but she had already turned away. She had two more rooms, she said, to show me, but would ‘save the best till last’. I thought the one she took me to next was arresting enough: a dining-room, done up in a pale chinoiserie theme, with a hand-painted paper on its walls and, on its polished table, two ormolu candelabra with writhing branches and cups. But then she led me back to the centre of the passage and, opening up another door, made me stand just inside the threshold while she crossed through the darkness of the room beyond to unfasten the shutters at one of its windows.

  This passage ran from north to south, so all its rooms faced west. The afternoon was bright, the light came in like blades through the seams in the shutters, and even as she lifted the bolt I could see that the space we were in was a large and impressive one, with various sheeted pieces of furniture dotted about. But when she drew the creaking shutters back and details leapt into life around me, I was so astonished, I laughed.

  The room was an octagonal saloon, about forty feet across. It had a vivid yellow paper on its walls and a greenish patterned carpet; the fireplace was unblemished white marble, and from the centre of the heavily moulded ceiling there hung a large gilt-and-crystal chandelier.

  ‘Pretty crazy, isn’t it?’ said Caroline, laughing too.

  ‘It’s incredible!’ I said. ‘One would never guess at it from the rest of the house—which is all so relatively sober.’

  ‘Ah, well. I dare say the original architect would have wept if he’d known what was coming. It was Ralph Billington Ayres—you remember him? the family blade?—who had this room added, in the 1820s, when he still had most of his money. Apparently they were all madly keen on yellow in those days; God knows why. The paper’s original, which is why we’ve hung on to it. As you can see’—she pointed out various spots where the ancient paper was drooping from the walls—‘it seems less interested in hanging on to us. I can’t show you the chandelier in all its glory, unfortunately, with the generator off; it’s quite something when it’s blazing. That’s original too, but my parents had it electrified when they were first married. They used to throw lots of parties in those days, when the house was still grand enough to bear it. The carpet’s in strips, of course. You can roll them back for dancing.’

  She pointed out one or two other features, lifting off dust-sheets to expose the fine low Regency chair or cabinet or sofa underneath.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, of one irregular-looking item. ‘Piano?’

  She put back a corner of its quilted cover. ‘Flemish harpsichord, older than the house. I don’t suppose you play?’

  ‘Good heavens, no.’

  ‘No, nor I. A pity. It ought really to be used, poor thing.’

  But she spoke without much emotion, running her hand in a business-like way over the instrument’s decorated case, then letting the cover fall again and going over to the unshuttered window. I joined her there. The window was actually a pair of long glass doors and, like the ones in Roderick’s room and the little parlour, it opened on to a set of flying stone steps leading down to the terrace. As I saw when I drew closer, these particular steps had collapsed: the top one still jutted from the sill, but the rest lay scattered on the gravel four feet below, dark and weathered as if they had lain there some time. Undeterred, Caroline seized the handle of the doors and opened them up, and we stood on the little precipice in the soft, warm, fragrant air, looking over the west lawn. The lawn must once, I thought, have been trimmed and level: perhaps a space for croquet. Now the ground was lumpy with molehills and thistles, and the grass in places was knee-high. The straggling shrubs all around it gave way to clumps of purple beech, beautifully vivid in colour but quite out of control; and the two huge unlopped English elms beyond them would, I saw, once the sun sank lower, cast the whole of the scene in shadow.

  Away to the right was a clutch of outbuildings, the garage and disused stables. Over the stable door was a great white clock.

  ‘Twenty to nine,’ I said, smiling, looking at the stuck ornamental hands.

  Caroline nodded. ‘Roddie and I did that when the clock first broke.’ And then, seeing my puzzled expression: ‘Twenty to nine is the time Miss Havisham’s clocks are stopped at in Great Expectations. We thought it awfully funny, then. It seems a bit less funny now, I must admit … Beyond the stables are
the old gardens—the kitchen gardens, and so on.’

  I could just see the wall of them. It was made of the same uneven mellow red brick as the house; an arched opening in it gave a glimpse of cinder paths and overgrown borders and what I thought might be a quince or a medlar and, since I am fond of walled gardens, I said without thinking that I’d like to take a look at them.

  Caroline glanced at her watch and said gamely, ‘Well, we still have almost ten minutes. It’s quickest to go this way.’

  ‘This way?’

  She put her hand to the door-frame, leaning forward and bending her legs. ‘I mean, jump.’

  I drew her back. ‘Oh, no. I’m too old for that sort of thing. Take me some other time, would you?’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘Well, all right.’

  She seemed sorry. I think our tour had made her restless; or else she was simply showing her youth. She stayed at my side for a few minutes more, but then went around the room again, making sure that the furniture was properly wrapped, and lifting one or two corners of carpet to check for silver-fish and moth.

  ‘Goodbye, poor neglected saloon,’ she said, when she had closed the window and fastened the shutter and we had made our way, half blind, back out to the passage. And because she had spoken with something like a sigh, as she turned the key on the room I said, ‘I’m so glad to have seen the house. It’s lovely.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Well, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not such a bad old pile, I suppose.’

  For once, her jolly fifth-form manner grated on me. I said, ‘Come on, Caroline, be serious.’