The Little Stranger (6 page)

I have never thought of myself as a discontented man. I have been too busy for discontentment to have had a chance to set in. But I’ve had occasional dark hours, dreary fits when my life, laid all before me, has seemed bitter and hollow and insignificant as a bad nut; and one of those fits came upon me now. I forgot the many modest successes of my career, and instead saw every failure: the mishandled cases, the missed opportunities, the moments of cowardice and disappointment. I thought of my undistinguished war years—spent here in Warwickshire, while my younger colleagues, Graham and Morrison, enrolled with the
RAMC
. I felt the empty rooms below me, and remembered a girl with whom, as a medical student, I’d been very much in love: a girl from a good Birmingham family, whose parents hadn’t considered me to be a suitable match, and who had finally thrown me over for another man. I had rather turned my back on romance after that disenchantment, and the few affairs I had had since then had been very half-hearted things. Now those passionless embraces came back to me too, in all their dry mechanical detail. I felt a wave of disgust for myself, and a pity for the women involved.

The heat in that attic room was stifling. I switched off my lamp, and lit a cigarette, and lay down among the photographs and fragments on the bed. The window was open and the curtain pulled back. The night was moonless, but the dark was the uneasy dark of summer, fretful with subtle movement and sound. I gazed into it; and what I saw—a sort of curious after-image of my day—was Hundreds Hall. I saw its cool fragrant spaces, the light it held like wine in a glass. And I pictured the people inside it as they must be now: Betty in her room, Mrs Ayres and Caroline in theirs, Roderick in his …

I lay like that for a long time, open-eyed and unmoving, the cigarette burning slowly down, turning to ash between my fingers.

T
he fit of discontentment passed with the night; by the morning I had almost forgotten it. That day was the start of a brief busy phase for Graham and me, for with the hot weather there had come a variety of small epidemics in the district, and now a bad summer fever began to do the rounds of the villages. One already delicate child was severely affected, and I spent a lot of time on him, calling in at the house sometimes two or three times a day until he was better. There was no money in it: he was a ‘club’ patient, which meant I received only a handful of shillings for treating him and his brothers and sisters over the course of an entire year. But I knew his family well, and was fond of them, and was glad to see him recover; and the parents were touchingly grateful.

I just about remembered, in the midst of all this, to send out Betty’s prescription to the Hall, but I had no further contact with her or with the Ayreses. I continued to pass the walls of Hundreds on my regular round, and now and then I’d catch myself thinking with something like wistfulness of the unkempt landscape beyond it, with that poor neglected house at its heart, quietly sliding into decay. But as we turned the high point of summer and the season started to wane, that was as much thought as I began to give it. My visit to the Ayreses soon felt vaguely unreal—like some vivid but improbable dream.

Then, one evening at the end of August—more than a month, in other words, since I had gone out to treat Betty—I was driving along one of the lanes outside Lidcote and caught sight of a large black dog sniffing around in the dust. It must have been half past seven or so. The sun was still quite high in the sky, but the sky itself was beginning to pink; I’d finished my evening surgery and was on my way to visit a patient in one of the neighbouring villages. The dog started barking when he heard my car, and as he put up his head and moved forward I saw the grey in his fur, and recognised him as the elderly Hundreds Labrador, Gyp. A second later I saw Caroline. She was right at the edge of the lane, on the shadowy side. Hatless and bare-legged, she was reaching into one of the hedges—had managed to work her way into the brambles so completely that without Gyp to alert me I would have driven past without spotting her. Drawing closer, I saw her call for the dog to be quiet; she turned her head to my car, narrowing her eyes against what must have been the glare of the windscreen. I noticed then that she had the strap of a satchel over her breast, and was carrying what I took to be an old spotted handkerchief, done up as a bundle like Dick Whittington’s. Drawing level with her, I put on the brake and called through my open window.

‘Are you running away from home, Miss Ayres?’

She recognised me then, and smiled, and began to back out of the bushes. She did it gingerly, putting up a hand to free her hair from the brambles, then giving a final spring to the dusty surface of the road. Brushing down her skirt—she was dressed in the same badly fitting cotton frock she’d been wearing when I’d seen her last—she said, ‘I’ve been into the village, doing errands for my mother. But then I got tempted from the path. Look.’

She carefully opened the bundle up, and I realised that what I had taken for spots on the handkerchief were actually purple juice-stains: she had lined the cloth with dock leaves, and was filling it with blackberries. She picked out one of the largest berries for me, lightly blowing the dust from it before she handed it over. I put it into my mouth and felt it break against my tongue, warm as blood, and fantastically sweet.

‘Aren’t they good?’ she said, as I swallowed. She gave me another, then took one for herself. ‘My brother and I used to come berrying here when we were young. It’s the best spot for blackberries in the whole of the county, I don’t know why. It can be dry as the Sahara everywhere else, but the fruit here are always good. They must be fed by a spring, or something.’

She put her thumb to the corner of her mouth to catch a trickle of dark juice, and pretended to frown. ‘But that was an Ayres family secret, and I shouldn’t have blabbed. Now I’m afraid I may have to kill you. Or do you swear to keep the knowledge to yourself?’

‘I swear,’ I said.

‘Honour bright?’

I laughed. ‘Honour bright.’

She warily gave me another berry. ‘Well, I suppose I shall have to trust you. It must be frightfully bad form to kill a doctor, after all; just a step or two down from shooting an albatross. Also quite hard, I imagine, since you must know all the tricks yourselves.’

She tucked back her hair, seeming happy to talk, standing a yard or so from my window, tall and easy on those thickish legs of hers; and because I was mindful of the engine, idling away and wasting fuel, I switched it off. The car seemed to sink, as if glad to be released, and I became aware of the treacly weight and exhaustion of the summer air. From across the fields, muted by heat and distance, there came the grind and snap of farm machinery, and calling voices. On those light late-August evenings the harvesters worked until gone eleven.

Caroline picked out more fruit. She said, with a tilt of her head, ‘You haven’t asked after Betty.’

‘I was just about to,’ I said. ‘How has she been? Any more trouble?’

‘Not a peep! She spent a day in bed, then made a miraculous recovery. We’ve been doing our best since then to make her feel more comfortable. We told her she needn’t use the back stair any more, if she doesn’t like it. And Roddie’s got hold of a wireless for her; that’s bucked her up no end. Apparently they used to have a wireless at home, but it got broken in some argument. Now one of us has to drive into Lidcote once a week to recharge the battery; but we think it’s worth it, if it keeps her happy … Tell the truth, though. That medicine you sent over was pure chalk, wasn’t it?
Was
there ever anything wrong with her?’

‘I couldn’t possibly say,’ I answered loftily. ‘The patient-doctor bond, and all that. Besides, you might sue for malpractice.’

‘Ha!’ Her expression grew rueful. ‘You’re on safe ground, there. We couldn’t afford the lawyers’ fees—’

She turned her head, as Gyp let out two or three sharp barks. While we had been talking he had been nosing his way through the grass at the edge of the lane, but now there was an agitated flapping on the other side of the hedge and he disappeared into a gap in the brambles.

‘He’s going after a bird,’ Caroline said, ‘the old fat-head. These used to be our birds once, you know; now they’re Mr Milton’s. He won’t like it if Gyp gets hold of a partridge.—Gyp! Gyppo! Come back! Come
here
, you idiotic thing!’

Hastily thrusting the bundle of blackberries at me, she went off in pursuit. I watched her leaning into the hedge, parting the brambles to reach and call, apparently unafraid of spiders or thorns, her brown hair catching again. It took her a couple of minutes to retrieve the dog, and by the time she had done that and he had trotted back to the car, looking terribly pleased with himself, with his mouth open and his pink tongue loose, I had remembered my patient and said I should be going.

‘Well, take some berries with you,’ she said good-naturedly, as I restarted the engine. But seeing her begin to separate the fruit it occurred to me that I would be driving more or less towards Hundreds, and, since it was a good two or three miles’ journey, I offered her a lift. I hesitated about doing it, not knowing if she’d care to accept; apart from anything else she looked very much at home there on the dusty country lane, rather as a tramp or a gypsy would. She seemed to hesitate, too, once I had asked her—but it turned out she was simply thinking the thing over. Glancing at her wrist-watch, she said, ‘I’d like that, very much. And if you could bear to drop me at the lane to our farm, instead of at the park gates, I’d be even more grateful. My brother’s there. I was going to leave him to it. I expect they’d be glad of some help, though; they usually are.’

I said I’d be happy to. I opened up the passenger door, to let Gyp into the back; and once he had turned and slithered fussily about for a second or two on the rear seat, she moved the front seat back into place and got in beside me.

I felt the weight of her as she sat, in the tilt and creak of the car; and I suddenly wished that the car weren’t quite so small and so ancient. She didn’t seem to mind it, however. She placed the satchel flat on her knees, and rested the bundle of berries on top, and gave a sigh of pleasure, apparently grateful to be sitting down. She was wearing her flat boyish sandals, and her bare legs were still unshaven; each little hair, I noticed, was laden with dust, like an eye-blacked lash.

Once I’d moved off she offered me another blackberry, but this time I shook my head, not wanting to eat up all her crop. When she had taken one herself I asked after her mother and her brother.

‘Mother’s fine,’ she answered, swallowing. ‘Thanks for asking. She was very glad to meet you that time. She does like to know who’s who in the county. We go about so much less than we used to, you see, and she’s rather proud about visitors, with the house so shabby, so she feels a bit cut off. Roddie is—well, how he usually is, working too hard, eating too little … His leg is a nuisance.’

‘Yes, I wondered about that.’

‘I don’t know how much it really troubles him. Quite a lot, I suspect. He says he hasn’t time to get it treated. What he means, I think, is that there isn’t the money for it.’

This was the second time she had mentioned money, but now there was no trace of ruefulness in her voice, she spoke as if merely stating a fact. Changing gear at a bend in the road, I said, ‘Are things as bad as that?’ And then, when she didn’t answer at once: ‘Do you mind my asking?’

‘No, I don’t mind. I was just thinking what to say … They’re pretty bad, to be honest with you. I don’t know how bad, because Rod does all the book-keeping himself, and he’s quite cagey. All he ever says is that he’s going to pull things through. We both try and keep the worst of it from Mother, but it must be obvious even to her that things at Hundreds will never be what they were. We’ve lost too much land, for one thing. The farm’s more or less our only income now. And the world’s a changed place, isn’t it? That’s why we’ve been so keen to hang on to Betty. I can’t tell you what a difference it’s made to Mother’s spirits, our being able to ring for a servant in the old-fashioned way, instead of having to traipse down to the kitchen for a jug of hot water, or something, ourselves. That sort of thing means such a lot. We had servants at Hundreds, you see, right up to the war.’

Again she spoke matter-of-factly; as if to someone of her own class. But she was still for a second, and then she moved as if self-conscious, saying, in quite a different voice, ‘God, how shallow you must think us. I’m so sorry.’

I said, ‘Not at all.’

But it was clear what she meant, and the obviousness of her embarrassment only served to embarrass me. The road we had taken, too, was one I remembered going up and down as a boy at just about this time of year—carrying out the midday ‘snap’ of bread and cheese to my mother’s brothers as they helped with the Hundreds harvest. No doubt those men would have been very tickled to think that, thirty years on, a qualified doctor, I would be driving up that same road in my own car with the squire’s daughter at my side. But I felt overcome suddenly with an absurd sense of gaucheness, and falseness—as if, had my plain labourer uncles actually appeared before me now, they would have seen me for the fraud I was, and laughed at me.

So for a while I said nothing, and neither did Caroline, and all our former ease seemed lost. It was a shame, for the drive was a pleasant one, the hedges colourful and fragrant, thick with dog-rose and red valerian and creamy white keck. Where the bushes gave way to gates one caught glimpses of the fields beyond them, some stripped already to stubble and soil and being picked over by rooks, some still with wheat in them, the pale of the crop streaked scarlet with poppies.

We reached the end of the Hundreds Farm lane, and I slowed the car in preparation for turning into it. But she straightened up as if ready to get out.

‘Don’t trouble to take me all the way down. It’s no distance.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘Well, all right.’

I supposed she had had enough of me, and couldn’t blame her. But when I had put on the brake and let the engine idle she reached to the catch of her door, then paused with her hand upon it. Half turning to me, she said awkwardly, ‘Thank you so much for the lift, Dr Faraday. I’m sorry to have gone on, before. I expect you think what most people must think, when they’ve seen Hundreds as it is nowadays: that we’re absolutely mad to go on living there, trying to keep it the way it was; that we ought to just … give up. The truth is, you see, we know how lucky we are to have lived there at all. We have to sort of keep the place in order, keep up our side of the bargain. That can feel like an awful pressure, sometimes.’