The Little Stranger (54 page)

It was a horrible business all the same, and I stood in the freezing white-tiled room with the covered body before me, the instruments waiting in the tray, wondering if I could really go through with it. Only once I had put back the sheet did I start to regain my nerve. The injuries were less shocking now that I knew what to expect; those nips and cuts, which had so unnerved me out at Hundreds, began, on inspection, to lose some of their horror. I had supposed them to have covered almost Mrs Ayres’s entire body; now I saw that most were located on areas that had been well within her own reach—her back, for example, being unmarked. What harm she had suffered, she had plainly caused herself: that was a relief to me, though I didn’t quite know why. I pressed on, and began the incisions … I expected secrets, I think; but no secrets came. There were no signs of illness, only the mundane deteriorations of age. There was no evidence that any sort of force had been used against Mrs Ayres in her final days or hours; no damaged bones or internal bruising. Death was plainly the result of asphyxiation by hanging, completely compatible with the facts as Caroline and Betty had described them to me.

Once again, I found myself relieved; this time the feeling was unmistakable. And I realised I had had a darker reason for wanting to perform the post-mortem myself. I had been afraid of some detail emerging that would throw suspicion—I didn’t know what, I didn’t know how exactly—on Caroline. I had still had that niggling doubt about her. Now, finally, the doubt was dispelled. I was ashamed I’d ever entertained it.

I restored the body as best I could, and passed my report on to the coroner. The inquest was held three days later, but with the evidence so pointed, it was a very summary affair. The verdict returned was ‘suicide whilst the balance of mind was disturbed’, and the whole process took less than thirty minutes. The worst thing was the public nature of it all, for though the crowd was kept quite small, several newspaper-men were present and they made rather a nuisance of themselves as I took Caroline and Betty away from the court. The story appeared that week in all the Midland papers, and was swiftly taken up by a couple of nationals. One reporter came up from London and drove out to the Hall, wanting to interview Caroline, and passing himself off as a policeman in order to do it. She and Betty managed to get rid of him without too much trouble, but the thought of that kind of thing happening again appalled me. Remembering the time when the park had been briefly barricaded against the Baker-Hydes, I resurrected those chains and padlocks and refastened the gates. I left one of the keys at the Hall, and kept the other on my own key-chain; I had a duplicate cut from the key to the garden door, too. After that, I felt happier, and could come and go from the house as I needed.

Not surprisingly, Mrs Ayres’s suicide shocked and stunned the whole district. She had rarely been seen outside of Hundreds in recent years, but she was still a very well-known and well-liked figure, and for many days I couldn’t walk through any of the villages without someone stopping me, keen to hear my side of the story, but also wanting to say how upset and sorry and disbelieving they were, that ‘such a lovely lady’, ‘such a real old-fashioned lady’, ‘so handsome and kind’, should have done a dreadful thing like that—‘leaving those two poor children, too’. Many people asked where Roderick was and when he would be coming home. I said he was holidaying with friends, and his sister was trying to get hold of him. Only to the Rossiters and the Desmonds did I give a truer account, for I didn’t want them bothering Caroline with difficult questions. I told them frankly that Rod was in a nursing home, being treated for a breakdown.

Helen Desmond said at once, ‘But this is terrible! I can’t believe it! Why didn’t Caroline come to us sooner? We guessed the family was in trouble, but they seemed bent on managing things by themselves. Bill offered them help many times, you know, and they always refused. We thought it simply a question of money. If we had known things were so bad—’

I said, ‘I don’t think any of us could have predicted this.’

‘But what’s to be done? Caroline can’t possibly stay out there now, in that great big unhappy house. She should be with friends. She should come here, to Bill and me. Oh, that poor, poor girl. Bill, we must go and get her.’

‘Of course we must,’ said Bill.

They were ready to leave for the Hall at once. The Rossiters were exactly the same. But I wasn’t sure Caroline would welcome the interference, however well meant. I asked them to let me speak to her about it first; and, as I’d suspected, when I told her what they wanted for her, she shuddered.

‘It’s very kind of them,’ she said. ‘But the idea of being in someone else’s house, with people watching, every minute, to see how I am—I just couldn’t. I should be afraid of seeming too unhappy; or else of not seeming unhappy enough. I’d rather stay here, at least for now.’

‘Are you sure, Caroline?’

Like everyone else, I felt terribly uneasy at the thought of her there, alone in that house, with only poor, sad Betty for company. But she seemed very resolved to stay, so I went back to the Desmonds and the Rossiters, and this time when I spoke to them I made it plainer that Caroline was not quite as lonely and unsupported as they feared; that she was being pretty well cared for, in fact, by me. After a moment of misunderstanding, they took the hint, looking surprised. The Desmonds were quickest to congratulate me; they said it was by far the best thing that could happen to Caroline now, and ‘a huge weight off their minds’. The Rossiters, though polite, were more wary. Mr Rossiter shook my hand amiably enough, but I could see his wife rapidly thinking the whole thing through, and I learned later that as soon as I left their house she called Caroline up, to have the story confirmed. Caught off guard, distracted, tired, Caroline had little to say. Yes, I was being a great help to her. Yes, a wedding was planned. No, we had no date for it. She couldn’t give it much thought yet. Everything was ‘too unsettled’.

But after that, at least, there were no more attempts to persuade her from the house, and the Desmonds and the Rossiters must have quietly passed on news of our engagement to one or two of their neighbours, who must just as discreetly have passed it on to their own friends. Over the next few days I sensed the slightest of shifts in the district’s attitude towards me; I began to be treated less as the Ayres family physician, who might be companionably pumped for information about that dreadful business out at Hundreds, and more almost as a member of the family itself, worthy of respect and commiseration. The only person I spoke to directly about it was David Graham, and he was absolutely delighted by the news. He had ‘known there was something afoot’, he said, for months. Anne had ‘scented it out’, but they hadn’t liked to press me. He only wished it hadn’t taken such a tragedy to bring it all into the open … He insisted that Caroline be my priority for a while, arranging for the easing of my case-load, taking some of the patients himself. So in that first week after the death I spent a good part of each day at the Hall, helping Caroline with her various chores; sometimes going for gentle walks with her in the gardens or the park, sometimes simply sitting with her in silence, holding her hand. She still gave the impression of being slightly insulated from her own grief, but I think my visits provided a structure for her patternless days. She never spoke about the house; but the house, oddly enough, continued to feel strikingly calm. Over the past few months I had watched life in it dwindle to what had felt like almost impossible proportions; now, astonishingly, it dwindled further, became a matter of murmurs and quiet footsteps in two or three dim rooms.

W
ith the inquest out of the way, the next ordeal was the funeral. Caroline and I arranged it together, and it took place on the Friday of the following week. Given the nature of her mother’s death, we both agreed that the event should be a subdued one; our biggest dilemma at first was whether or not to involve Rod. It seemed out of the question that he should miss it, and we gave much serious thought as to how his presence could be managed—wondering, for example, if he mightn’t come down from Birmingham in the company of a male attendant, who could be passed off as a friend. But we might have saved ourselves the debate: I myself drove up to the clinic to break the news of his mother’s suicide, and his reaction horrified me. The loss itself he seemed hardly to register. It was the fact of her death that impressed him. For he saw it as evidence that she, too, had finally fallen victim to that diabolical ‘infection’ he had struggled so hard to contain.

‘It must have been waiting,’ he said to me, ‘all this time; breeding, in the quiet of the house. I thought I’d beaten it! But you see what it’s doing?’ He reached across the table to grip my arm. ‘No one’s safe there now! Caroline—My God! You mustn’t leave her there alone. She’s in danger! You must get her away! You must get her right away, from Hundreds!’

Just for a moment, I was unnerved; the warning almost rang true to me. Then I caught the wildness in his eye, and saw how far beyond the reach of reason he had strayed—and realised that I was at risk of following him. I spoke calmly and rationally to him. That made his manner grow even wilder. A couple of nurses came running to restrain him, and I left him struggling and shouting in their arms. To Caroline I said only that he was ‘no better’. She could see from my expression what that meant. We gave up as hopeless our idea of his returning to Hundreds even for a day, and, with the Desmonds’ and Rossiters’ help, we put out the story that he was abroad, and unwell, and unable to make the journey home. How much anyone was really deceived by that, I don’t know. I think rumours as to the real nature of his absence had been circulating for some time.

Anyway, the funeral went ahead without him, and it went about as well, I suppose, as such a thing could. The coffin left from the Hall, Caroline and I followed the hearse in the undertaker’s car, and in the three or four cars that came after us there rode the closest family friends, and those relations who had been able to make the difficult journey up to Hundreds from Sussex and Kent. The weather had lifted properly now, but the last of the snow was still on the ground; the black cars looked grimly impressive in the leafless white lanes, and all our attempts to keep the affair a low-key one came to nothing, after all. The family was too well known, and the local feudal spirit too resilient; on top of that, there had always been more than a touch of tragic mystery to Hundreds Hall, and the newspaper coverage of Mrs Ayres’s death had only intensified it. At the gates of farms and cottages people had gathered in solemn curiosity to see the coffin go by, and once we turned into Lidcote High Street we found the pavements crowded with watchers, falling silent as we approached, the men removing their hats and caps, a few of the women crying, but all of them craning for a better view. I thought of the time, nearly thirty years before, when I had stood beside my parents in my College blazer to watch another Ayres funeral, its coffin half the size of this one; I thought it with an almost giddy feeling, as if my life were twisting round its head to snap at its own tail. As we approached the church the crowd grew thicker, and I felt Caroline tense. I took her black-gloved hand and said quietly, ‘They want to show their respect, that’s all.’

She raised her other hand to her face, trying to escape from their gazes.

‘They’re all looking at me. What are they looking for?’

I squeezed her fingers. ‘Be brave.’

‘I don’t know if I can be.’

‘Yes, you can. Look at me. I’m here. I shan’t leave you.’

‘No, don’t leave me!’ she said, turning her face to me, gripping my hand as if the idea startled her.

The church-bell was tolling as we crossed the churchyard, unnaturally loud and plaintive in the crisp, windless air. Caroline kept her head lowered, her arm linked heavily with mine, but once we had entered the church itself she grew calmer, for then it was simply a question of getting through the service, making the correct responses and so on, and she did that in the efficient, perfunctory way she had done all the other tasks and duties of the past few days. She even joined in with the hymns. I had never heard her sing before. She sang as she spoke, tunefully, the words coming clean and whole from her well-shaped mouth.

The service was not a long one, but the vicar, Mr Spender, had known Mrs Ayres for many years, and gave a feeling little speech about her. He called her ‘an old-fashioned lady’—just the phrase I’d heard other people use. He said she was ‘part of a different, more gracious age’, as if she’d been rather older than she was, almost the last of her generation. He remembered the death of her daughter, Susan; he was sure, he said, that most of us remembered it, too. Mrs Ayres, he reminded us, had walked behind her child’s coffin that day, and it seemed to him that, in her heart, she must have continued to walk behind it every day of her life. Our consolation now, in the tragedy of her death, was to know that she had joined it.

I glanced across the congregation as he spoke, and saw many people nodding sadly at his words. None of them, of course, had seen Mrs Ayres in her final few weeks, when she had been in the grip of a delusion so powerful, so grotesque, it had seemed almost to cast a spell of gloom and torment over the solid inanimate objects around her. But as we made our way out to the churchyard, to the opened family plot, it seemed to me that perhaps Spender was right. There was no spell, there was no shadow, there was no kind of mystery. Things were very simple. Caroline stood beside me, blameless; Hundreds, a thing of brick and mortar, was blameless too; and Mrs Ayres, unhappy Mrs Ayres, was to be reunited with her lost little girl at last.

The prayers were said, the coffin was lowered, and we moved away from the grave. People began to approach Caroline, wanting to exchange a few words of condolence with her. Jim Seeley and his wife shook her hand. They were followed by Maurice Babb, the builder, and then by Graham and Anne. They stayed with her for several minutes, and while they spoke I saw that Seeley had hung back and was looking my way. After a slight hesitation I stepped aside to join him.