The Little Stranger (10 page)

‘How cynical you are!’ said her mother. ‘I think the Baker-Hydes sound charming. There are so few really nice people left in the county these days, we ought to be grateful for them for taking Standish on. When I think of all the great houses and what’s become of them, I feel almost marooned. There’s Umberslade Hall, where the Colonel’s father used to go shooting: filled with secretaries now. Woodcote stands empty; I believe Meriden Hall is the same. Charlecote and Coughton have both been turned over to the public …’

She spoke with a sigh, her tone growing serious and almost plangent; and just for a second she looked her age. Then she turned her head, her expression changing. She had caught, as I had, the faint echoey rattle of china and teaspoons, out in the passage. Putting a hand to her breast, she leaned towards me and said in a mock-anxious murmur, ‘Here comes what my son calls “the skeletons’ polka”. Betty has a positive genius, you know, for dropping cups. And we simply haven’t the china—’ The rattle grew louder, and she closed her eyes. ‘Oh, the suspense!’ She called through the open door, ‘Do watch your step, Betty!’

‘I’m watching it, madam!’ came the indignant reply; and in another moment the girl appeared in the doorway, frowning and blushing as she manoeuvred in the large mahogany tray.

I got up to help her, but Caroline rose at the same time. She took the tray capably from Betty’s hands, set it down, and looked it over.

‘Not a single drop spilled! That must be in your honour, Doctor. You see we have Dr Faraday with us, Betty? He sorted you out with a miracle cure that time, you remember?’

Betty put down her head. ‘Yes, miss.’

I said, smiling, ‘How are you, Betty?’

‘I’m all right, thank you, sir.’

‘I’m glad to hear it, and to see you looking so well. So smart, too!’

I spoke guilelessly, but her expression slightly darkened, as if she suspected me of teasing; and then I remembered her having complained to me about the ‘awful dress and hat’ that the Ayreses made her wear. The fact is, she
was
rather quaintly dressed, in a black frock with a white apron, and with starched cuffs and a collar dwarfing her childish wrists and throat; and on her head was a fussy frilled cap, the kind of thing I couldn’t remember having seen in a Warwickshire drawing-room since before the war. But in that old-fashioned, shabby-elegant setting, it was somehow hard to imagine her dressed any other way.

And she looked healthy enough, and took trouble over handing out the cups and the slices of cake, as if she were settling down all right. When she had finished she even made us a dip, like an unformed curtsey. Mrs Ayres said, ‘Thank you, Betty, that will do,’ and she turned and left us. We heard the fading slap and squeak of her stout-soled shoes as she made her way back to the basement.

Caroline, setting down a bowl of tea for Gyp to lap at, said, ‘Poor Betty. Not a natural parlourmaid.’

But her mother spoke indulgently. ‘Oh, we must give her more time. I always remember my great-aunt saying that a well-run house was like an oyster. Girls come to one as specks of grit, you see; ten years later, they leave one as pearls.’

She was addressing me as well as Caroline—clearly forgetting, for the moment, that my own mother had once been one of the specks of grit her great-aunt had meant. I think even Caroline had forgotten it. They both sat comfortably in their chairs, enjoying the tea and the cake that Betty had prepared for them, then awkwardly carried for them, then cut and served for them, from plates and cups which, at the ring of a bell, she would soon remove and wash … I said nothing this time, however. I sat enjoying the tea and cake, too. For if the house, like an oyster, was at work on Betty, fining and disguising her with layer after minuscule layer of its own particular charm, then I suppose it had already begun a similar process with me.

J
ust as Caroline had predicted, her brother failed to join us that day: it was she who, a little later, walked with me out to my car. She asked if I was driving straight back to Lidcote; I told her I was planning to call on someone in another village. And when I named the village in question, she said, ‘Oh, then you should carry on across the park and go out by the other gates. It’s much quicker than going back the way you came and driving round. That drive’s as bad as this one, mind, so watch out for your tyres.’ Then she was struck by an idea. ‘But, listen here. Would it help you to use the park more often? As a short-cut between patients, I mean?’

‘Well,’ I answered, thinking it over, ‘yes, I suppose it would, very much.’

‘Then you must use it whenever you like! I’m only sorry we never thought of it before. You’ll find the gates are kept shut with wire, but that’s simply because since the war we’ve begun to have problems with ramblers wandering in. Just fasten them behind you, they’re never actually locked.’

I said, ‘You really won’t mind? Nor your mother, or your brother? I’ll take you at your word, you know, and be out here every day.’

She smiled. ‘We’d like it. Wouldn’t we, Gyp?’

She moved back, putting her hands on her hips to watch me start the car and turn it. Then she snapped her fingers for the dog, and they headed off across the gravel.

I picked my way around the north side of the house, looking for the entrance to the other drive: going slowly, not quite certain of the way, and incidentally getting a view of the windows of Roderick’s room. He didn’t notice my car, but I saw him there, as I passed, very clearly: he was sitting at his desk, with his cheek on his hand, gazing at the papers and open books before him as if impossibly baffled and weary.

I
t became a part of my routine, after that, to call in at the Hall on a Sunday to treat Rod’s leg, and then to stay on to tea with his mother and sister. And once I’d started to use Hundreds on my trips between cases, I was out there often. I looked forward to the visits; they made such a contrast with the rest of my rather workaday existence. I never let myself into the park and closed the gates behind me, then made my way along the overgrown drive, without a small, adventurous thrill. Arriving at that crumbling red house, I’d have the sense, every time, that ordinary life had fractionally tilted, and that I had slipped into some other, odder, rather rarer realm.

I’d begun to like the Ayreses for their own sake, too. It was Caroline I saw most. I discovered that she walked in the park almost daily, so I’d often catch sight of her unmistakable long-legged, broad-hipped figure, with Gyp cutting a way through the long grass at her side. If she was close enough I would stop the car and wind down my window, and we’d chat, as we had that time in the lane. She seemed to be always in the middle of some chore, always had a bag or a basket with her, filled with fruit, or mushrooms, or sticks for kindling. She might as well, I thought, have been a farmer’s daughter; the more I saw of things at Hundreds, the sorrier I was that her life, like that of her brother, had so much work in it and so few pleasures. One day a neighbour of mine presented me with a couple of jars of honey from his hives, for having seen his son safely through a bad dose of whooping cough. I remembered Caroline’s having longed for honey on my very first visit to the house, so I gave one of the jars to her. I did it casually, but she seemed amazed and delighted by the gift, holding up the jar to catch the sunlight, showing her mother.

‘Oh, you shouldn’t have!’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘An old bachelor like me.’

And Mrs Ayres said softly, with a shade almost of reproach, ‘You’re really too kind to us, Dr Faraday.’

But the fact is, my kindnesses were very small things; it was simply that the family lived in so isolated and precarious a way, they felt with extra force the impact of any chance nudge of fortune, good or bad. In the middle of September, for example, when I had been treating Roderick for nearly a month, the long summer finally broke. A day of thunderstorms led to a drop in temperature and two or three spells of heavy rain: the Hundreds well was saved, the milking ran smoothly for the first time in months; and Rod’s relief was so palpable, it was almost painful to observe it. His whole mood lightened. He spent more time away from his desk, and began to talk almost brightly about making improvements at the farm. He brought in a couple of labourers to help in the fields. And because the house’s already overgrown lawns had sprung into life with the shift in season, he set the estate’s odd-jobber, Barrett, to go over them with a scythe. They emerged lush and trimly textured as a newly shorn sheep, making the house look more impressive—more, I thought, as it was meant to look; more as I remembered it having looked on that childhood visit of mine, thirty years before.

M
eanwhile, at that neighbouring manor house, Standish, Mr and Mrs Baker-Hyde were now quite settled in. They began to be seen more in the neighbourhood; Mrs Ayres ran into the wife, Diana, on one of her rare shopping trips to Leamington, and found her to be just as charming as she had hoped. On the strength of that encounter, in fact, she began to think of hosting a ‘little gathering’ at Hundreds, as a way of welcoming the newcomers to the district.

This must have been in late September. She told me all about it while I was sitting with her and Caroline after treating Rod’s leg. The thought of the Hall being opened up to strangers unsettled me slightly, and the feeling must have shown in my expression.

‘Oh, we used to throw two or three parties a year here, you know, in the old days,’ she said. ‘Even during the war I managed to put together a regular supper for the officers billeted with us. It’s true that one’s points went further then. I couldn’t manage a supper now. But we have Betty, after all. A servant makes all the difference at that sort of thing, and she can just about be trusted to go around with a decanter. I thought, a quiet sort of drinks party, no more than ten people. Perhaps the Desmonds, and the Rossiters …’

‘You must come too, of course, Dr Faraday,’ said Caroline, as her mother’s voice tailed away.

And, ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ayres. ‘Yes, of course you must.’

She said it warmly enough, but with the briefest of hesitations; and I couldn’t blame her for that, for though I was now such a regular at the house, I was hardly a family friend. Having invited me, however, she gamely saw the thing through. My only free evening was a Sunday; I usually spent it with the Grahams. But she said Sunday evenings were as good as any other, and she promptly brought out her engagement book and suggested some dates.

That was as far as we got with it, that day; and when there was no further mention of the party on my next visit I wondered if, after all, the idea had fizzled out. But a few days later, taking my short-cut across the park, I saw Caroline. She told me that, after a flurry of correspondence between her mother and Diana Baker-Hyde, an evening had finally been settled on, three Sundays ahead.

She spoke without much enthusiasm. I said, ‘You don’t sound very excited.’

She turned up the collar of her jacket, drawing the tips of it across her chin.

‘Oh, I’m simply bowing to the inevitable,’ she said. ‘Most people think Mother’s awfully dreamy, you know, but once she has an idea about something it’s no use trying to talk her out of it. Rod says throwing a party with the house in the state it’s in now will be like Sarah Bernhardt playing Juliet with one leg; and I must say, he has a point. I might just stay in the little parlour on the night, with Gyp and the wireless. That sounds much more fun to me than getting all glamoured up for people we don’t even know, and probably won’t much like.’

She seemed self-conscious as she spoke, and her tone did not ring quite true to me; and though she continued to grumble, it was clear that she was looking forward to the party to some extent, for over the next couple of weeks she threw herself into cleaning and tidying the Hall, often tucking up her hair in a turban and getting down on her hands and knees alongside Betty and the daily woman, Mrs Bazeley. Every time I visited the house I found carpets being hoisted up and beaten, pictures appearing on empty walls, and various bits of furniture emerging from storage.

‘You’d think His Majesty were coming!’ Mrs Bazeley said to me, when I went down to the kitchen one Sunday to make up some salt water for Rod’s treatment. She had come in for the extra day. ‘All this fuss, I dunno. Poor Betty’s got calluses! Show Doctor your fingers, Betty.’

Betty was sitting at the table, cleaning various pieces of silver with metal polish and a piece of white scrim, but at Mrs Bazeley’s words she readily put the scrim down and turned up her palms for me—liking the attention, I think. After three months at Hundreds her childlike hands had become thickened and stained, but I caught hold of the tip of one of her fingers and gave it a shake.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘That’s no worse than you’d get in the fields—or in a factory, for that matter. They’re good country hands, they are.’

‘Country hands!’ said Mrs Bazeley, as Betty, with a wounded air, went back to her polishing. ‘Her got the worst of that from doing over the glass chandeliers. Every blasted drop, Miss Caroline’s put her to, this last week.—Excuse my language, Doctor. But them chandeliers, they ought to be brought right down. In years gone by men would come and take ’em off to Brummagem, and dip ’em. All this throwing us in a flummox,’ she said again, ‘for a couple o’ drinks; not even a dinner. And they’re only London folks as are coming, in’t they?’

But the preparations continued; and Mrs Bazeley, I noticed, worked as hard as anyone. It was difficult, after all, not to be seduced by the novelty of the thing, for in that year of strict rationing even a small private party was something to relish. I hadn’t yet met the Baker-Hydes, so I was curious to see them—curious, too, to see the Hall decked out in the style of its grander days. I was also, I discovered to my own surprise and annoyance, a little nervous. I felt I had to live up to the occasion, and wasn’t quite sure I knew how. On the Friday of the weekend in question I had my hair cut. On the Saturday I asked my housekeeper, Mrs Rush, to dig out my evening clothes. She found the jacket with moths in its seams, and the shirt so worn in places she had to cut off its own tail in order to patch it. When I finally looked myself over in the cloudy strip of mirror on my wardrobe door, my make-do-and-mend appearance was not very heartening. My hair had recently started to thin, and, freshly barbered, I seemed bald at the temples. I had been out with a patient in the night, and was bleary with lack of sleep. I looked like my father, I realised in dismay; or, like my father would have looked if he had ever worn evening dress: as if I’d be happier in a brown shopkeeper’s coat and an apron.