The Little Stranger (23 page)

‘Why, Doctor, you keep us on our toes!’ Mrs Ayres said, raising a ringless hand to her face. ‘I shouldn’t have dressed so weekdayishly if I had known you were coming. And have we anything in the kitchen, Caroline, to offer the doctor with his tea? I believe we’ve bread, and margarine. You had better ring for Betty.’

I hadn’t wanted to telephone ahead for fear of alerting Roderick, and I was so used now to coming and going to and from Hundreds, it hadn’t occurred to me that my visit might put them out. Mrs Ayres spoke politely, but with a faintly querulous tone to her voice. I had never seen her so discomposed before; it was as if I’d surprised her without her charm, as well as without her powder and rings. But the reason for her touch of temper became clear in another moment, for in order to sit down I had to move aside several sagging flat boxes from the sofa: they were boxes of old family photograph albums that Caroline had recently unearthed in one of the morning-room cupboards, and which had proved on inspection to be foxed with damp and spotted with mildew, and practically ruined.

‘Such a tragedy!’ said Mrs Ayres, showing me the crumbling pages. ‘There must be eighty years’ worth of pictures here—and not just the Colonel’s family, but my side too, the Singletons and Brookes. And you know, I have been asking Caroline and Roderick for months to find these photographs out and make sure they were safe. I had no idea they were in the morning-room at all; I thought they were locked away somewhere up in the attics.’

I glanced at Caroline—who, after having rung for Betty, had returned to her chair, and was turning the pages of a book of her own, with a distant, patient air. Without lifting her eyes from the page before her she said, ‘They wouldn’t have been any safer in the attics, I’m afraid. The last time I put my head up there it was to take a look at some leak or other. There were baskets of books from when Roddie and I were children, all foxed to death.’

‘Then I wish you had told me, Caroline.’

‘I’m sure I did, Mother, at the time.’

‘I know you have a great deal to think about, you and your brother, but this is awfully disappointing. Just look here, Doctor.’ She handed me a stiff old
carte-de-visite
, its already quaint and faded Victorian subject now practically obscured by rust-coloured spots. ‘Here’s the Colonel’s father as a young man. I used to think Roderick very like him.’

‘Yes,’ I said absently. I was tense now, waiting my chance to speak. ‘Where is Roderick, by the way?’

‘Oh, in his room, I imagine.’ She picked out another. ‘Here’s another one spoiled … This one too … This one I remember—oh, how dreadful! It’s perfectly ruined! My own family, just before the war. My brothers are all there, look, one can just make them out: Charlie, Lionel, Mortimer, Frank; and my sister, Cissie. I’d been married a year, and was home with Baby, and we didn’t know it then, but the family was never to be together like that again, for within six months the fighting had started and two of the boys were lost almost at once.’

Her voice had changed, a note of real distress creeping into it, and this time Caroline looked up, and she and I exchanged a glance. Betty appeared, and was sent off to bring the tea—which I didn’t want, and didn’t have time for—and Mrs Ayres continued to pick her way, sadly and absently, through the cloudy photographs. I thought of all she had recently been through, and what awful news I had come to break to her; I watched the fretful movement of her hands, which without their rings looked naked, and large at the knuckle. And suddenly the idea of burdening her with yet another anxiety seemed too much. I remembered the conversation I’d had with Caroline about her brother, the week before; it occurred to me that perhaps it was to her I should speak, at least in the first place. I spent a useless few minutes trying to catch her eye again; then, once Betty had returned with the tea things I rose as if to help with the tray, and took Caroline’s cup across to her while Betty saw to Mrs Ayres. And as Caroline looked up at me in mild surprise, putting out her hand to receive the saucer, I bent my head to her and whispered: ‘Can you find a way of talking to me alone?’

She drew back, startled by the words, or simply by the movement of my breath against her cheek. She looked into my face, glanced at her mother, then gave me a nod. I went back to the sofa. We let five or ten minutes pass while we drank our tea and ate the slim, dry slices of cake that had been served up with it.

Then she moved forward as if just struck by an idea.

‘Mother,’ she said, ‘I meant to tell you. I’ve put some of our old books together to give to the Red Cross. I thought perhaps Dr Faraday could take them back to Lidcote for us, in his car. I don’t like to ask Rod. I’m sorry to trouble you with it, Doctor, but would you mind? They’re in the library, boxed up and ready.’

She spoke without a flicker of self-consciousness, and with no trace of colour in her face; but I must confess, my own heart was pounding. Mrs Ayres said discontentedly that no, she supposed she wouldn’t miss us for a minute or two, and went back to sorting through the crumbling albums.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ Caroline said to me, still in her ordinary voice, as I opened the door; but she gestured with her eyes along the passage, and we went quickly and softly together to the library, where she made her way to the window and drew back that single functioning shutter. As the wintry light spilled in, the shrouded bookshelves seemed to spring into life around us, like rearing ghosts. I took a few steps forward out of the worst of the gloom, and Caroline came back, away from the window, to stand before me.

‘Has something happened?’ she asked me gravely. ‘Is it Rod?’

‘Yes,’ I said. And I proceeded to tell her, as briefly as I could, everything her brother had confessed to me in my dispensary the night before. She listened in growing horror—but also, I thought, with a sort of dawning comprehension, as if my words made a ghastly sense to her, put into her hands the clue to a dark puzzle that up till now had been lying just out of her reach. The only time she interrupted me was when I repeated what Rod had said about the smudge appearing on his ceiling, and then she seized my arm and said, ‘That mark, and the others! We saw them! I
knew
there was something odd about them. You don’t think—? It couldn’t be—?’

I realised with surprise that she was almost ready to take her brother’s claims seriously. I said, ‘Anything could have made those marks, Caroline. Rod might have made them himself, simply to back up his own delusion. Or maybe it was the marks appearing in the first place that set the whole thing off in his head.’

She drew her hand away. ‘Yes, of course … And, you really think that’s how it is? It couldn’t be what you said before? Seizures, and so on?’

I shook my head. ‘I’d rather there
were
some physical problem here; it would be easier to treat. But I’m afraid that what we’re dealing with is some kind of, well, mental illness.’

The words shocked her. She looked frightened for a second, then said, ‘Poor, poor Rod. This is dreadful, isn’t it? What on earth can we do? Do you mean to tell my mother?’

‘I did. That’s why I came out here. But seeing her with those photographs—’

‘It isn’t just the photographs, you know,’ she said. ‘Mother’s changing. Most days she’s quite her old self. But other days she’s like this, vague and maudlin, thinking too much of the past. She and Rod have started almost quarrelling, about the farm. Apparently there are new debts. He takes it all so personally! Then he shuts himself away. Now I understand why. It’s too horrible … He really said those frightful things, and meant them? You couldn’t have misunderstood?’

‘I wish for all our sakes that I had. But no, I’m afraid there was no mistaking him. If he won’t let me treat him, we can only hope that his mind will somehow clear itself. It might do, now that the Baker-Hydes have left the county and all that dreadful business is settled at last; though that’s bad news about the farm. Certainly there’s nothing I can do for him while he remains so fixated on this idea of his that he’s protecting you and your mother.’

‘You don’t think, if I were to talk to him—?’

‘You might try; though I shouldn’t like you to have to hear what I heard, from his own lips. Perhaps the best thing now is for you simply to keep an eye on him—for us both to watch him, and hope to God he doesn’t grow any worse.’

‘And if he does?’ she asked.

‘If he does,’ I replied, ‘well, if this were another house, with a more ordinary family in it, I know what I’d do. I’d bring in David Graham, and have Rod forcibly committed to a psychiatric ward.’

She put a hand across her mouth. ‘It couldn’t come to that, surely?’

‘I’m thinking of those injuries of his. It looks to me like he’s punishing himself. He clearly feels guilty, perhaps because of what’s happening now with Hundreds; perhaps even because of what happened to his navigator, back in the war. He might be trying to harm himself, almost unconsciously. On the other hand, he might be seeking our help. He knows what powers I have, as a doctor. He might be hurting himself precisely in the hope that I’ll step in and do something drastic—’

I stopped. We were standing in the faint light of the unshuttered window, and we had been talking tensely, in murmurs, all this time. Now, from somewhere over my shoulder, as if from the deepest shadows of the room, there came the small sharp creak of metal; we both turned our heads to it, startled. The creak came again: it came, I realised, from the handle of the library door, which was slowly twisting in its socket. Seen through the gloom like that, in our already keyed-up condition, the thing looked almost uncanny. I heard Caroline draw in her breath, and felt her move a little closer to me, as if afraid. As the door was pushed slowly open and the light of the hall revealed Roderick standing there, I think we were both, for a second, relieved. Then we saw the expression on his face, and moved hastily apart.

We looked, I suppose, about as guilty as we felt. Rod said coldly, ‘I heard your car, Doctor. I’d half expected it.’ And then, to his sister: ‘What’s he been telling you? That I’m touched or cracked or something? I suppose he’s told Mother the same thing.’

‘I haven’t said anything to your mother yet,’ I said, before Caroline could answer.

‘Well, isn’t that big of you.’ He looked again at his sister. ‘He gave me his word, you know, that he wouldn’t say anything at all. That’s how much a doctor’s word is worth, clearly. A doctor like him, anyway.’

Caroline ignored that. ‘Roddie,’ she said, ‘we’re worried about you. You aren’t yourself, you know you aren’t. Come into the room, can’t you? We don’t want Mother or Betty to hear us.’

He kept still for a moment, then moved forward, closed the door, and stood with his back to it. He said flatly, ‘So
you
think I’m cracked, too.’

‘I think you need a rest,’ said Caroline, ‘a break—anything, to get you away from here for a while.’

‘Away from here? You’re as bad as him! Why is everyone trying to get me away?’

‘We just want to help you. We think you must be ill, and need treatment. Is it true you’ve been … seeing things?’

He lowered his gaze, impatiently. ‘God, it’s just like after my smash! If I’m to be watched, endlessly watched and fussed and nannied—’

‘Just tell me, Rod! Is it true you believe there’s something—something in the house? Something that wants to hurt you?’

He didn’t answer for a moment. But then he lifted his eyes to hers and said quietly, ‘What do you think?’

And to my surprise, I saw her flinch as if from something in his gaze.

‘I—I don’t know what to think. But Rod, I’m frightened for you.’

‘Frightened! You ought to be frightened, both of you. But not for me. Not
of
me, either, if that’s what’s worrying you. Don’t you understand? I’m all that’s holding this place together!’

I said, ‘I know it seems that way to you, Rod. If you’d just let us help you—’

‘This is your idea of helping me, is it? Running straight to my sister, when you
promised
—’

‘This
is
my idea of helping you, yes. Because I’ve been turning it over in my mind and I don’t think you’re in a position to help yourself.’

‘But don’t you see? How can you not see, after all I told you yesterday! It isn’t
myself
I’m thinking of. God! I’ve never been given any credit for the work I’ve done for this family—not even now, when I’m thrashing myself to death! Perhaps I should pack the whole thing in, close my eyes for once, look the other way. Then we’ll see what happens.’

He sounded almost sulky now—like a boy trying to argue down a bad school-report. He folded his arms, and hunched his shoulders, and the darkness and the horror of what we were actually talking about, which a moment before had felt so palpable, began somehow to slip away from us. I saw Caroline looking at me, for the first time with doubt in her eyes, and I took a step forward, saying urgently, ‘Rod, you must understand, we’re desperately worried. This can’t go on.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said firmly. ‘There’s no point.’

‘I think you’re really ill, Rod. We need to work out exactly what the illness is, so that we can cure it.’

‘All that’s making me ill is you and your prying! If you’d let me alone, if you’d just let all of us alone—But you two have always been in league against me. All that guff about my leg, saying I was doing the hospital a favour.’

‘How can you say that,’ said Caroline, ‘when Dr Faraday was so kind!’

‘Is he being kind now?’

‘Rod, please.’

‘I told you, didn’t I? I don’t want to talk about it!’

He turned, to wrench open the heavy old library door and go out. And as he went he gave the door such a slam, a line of dust came down, like a veil, from a crack in the ceiling, and two of the sheets slid from the bookshelves to land in a musty heap on the floor.

Caroline and I looked helplessly at each other, then went slowly across to lift the sheets back up.

‘What can we do?’ she asked me as we fastened them. ‘If he’s really as bad as you say he is, but won’t let us help him—’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘I truly don’t know. We can only, as I said before, watch him, and hope to try and regain his trust. Most of that will fall to you, I’m afraid.’