The Little Stranger Read online

  Even as the realisation struck me, Mrs Rossiter got to her feet.

  ‘We must let the young people talk,’ she murmured, with a roguish middle-aged look at her husband and me. And then, holding out her empty glass, ‘Dr Faraday, would you be a perfect lamb and fetch me a little more sherry?’

  I took the glass over to the sideboard and poured out the drink. I caught sight of myself as I did it, in one of the room’s many mirrors: in the unforgiving light, with the bottle in my hand, I looked more than ever like a balding grocer. When I returned the glass to Mrs Rossiter, she spoke extravagantly: ‘Thank you so much.’ But she smiled as Mrs Ayres had, when I had done the same favour for her, her gaze sliding away from me even as she spoke. And then she resumed her conversation with her husband.

  Perhaps it was my own sinking mood that did it; perhaps it was the Baker-Hyde polish, against which nothing could compete; but the party, which had barely got going, seemed somehow to lose its lustre. Even the saloon was strangely diminished, I thought, now that the Standish crowd were in it. As the evening went on I saw them do their best to admire it, praising the Regency decorations, the chandelier, the paper, the ceiling, and Mrs Baker-Hyde in particular went slowly and appreciatively about, looking from one thing to another. But the room was a large one, and had long gone unheated: a decent fire was kept going in the grate, but there was a creeping chill and dampness in the air, which once or twice made her shiver and rub her bare arms. Finally she drew nearer to the fireplace, saying she wanted to look more closely at a pair of delicate gilded chairs that stood to either side of it; and on being told that the chairs’ tapestry seats were the original 1820s ones, commissioned with the building of the octagonal room, she said, ‘I thought they must be. How lucky that they’ve survived! There were wonderful tapestries at Standish when we moved in, but they were practically eaten up by moth; we had to get rid of them. I did think it a shame.’

  ‘Oh, that is a shame,’ said Mrs Ayres. ‘Those tapestries were marvellous things.’

  Mrs Baker-Hyde turned casually to her. ‘You saw them?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Mrs Ayres answered; for she and the Colonel must have been regular visitors to Standish in the old days. I had been to the house once myself, to treat one of the servants, and I knew she was thinking now, as the rest of us were, of the fine dark rooms and passageways there, with their ancient carpets and hangings, and of the lovely linenfold panelling that covered virtually every wall, almost half of which—as Peter Baker-Hyde now proceeded to tell us—had proved on close inspection to be infested with beetle, and would have to be removed.

  ‘It’s awful to have to let things go,’ said his wife, perhaps in response to our grave faces, ‘but one can’t hang on to things for ever, and we saved what we could.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘a few more years and the whole place would have been completely beyond repair. The Randalls seemed to think they were doing their bit for the nation by sitting tight and letting the modernising slide; but in my opinion, if they hadn’t the money to maintain the house they should have packed up ages ago, let it go to an hotel or a golf club.’ He nodded, pleasantly enough, to Mrs Ayres. ‘You’re managing here all right, though? I’m told you sold off most of your farmland. I don’t blame you; we’re thinking of doing the same with ours. We like our park, though.’ He called to his daughter. ‘Don’t we, kitten?’

  She was sitting beside her mother. ‘I’m going to have a white pony!’ she told us brightly. ‘I’m going to learn to jump it.’

  Her mother laughed. ‘And so am I.’ She reached to stroke the little girl’s hair. There were silver slave bracelets on her wrist, which rang like bells. ‘We’re to learn together, aren’t we?’

  ‘You don’t ride already?’ asked Helen Desmond.

  ‘Not at all, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Unless you count motor bikes,’ piped up Mr Morley, from his place on the sofa. He had just given Caroline a cigarette, but now twisted away from her with the lighter in his hand. ‘We’ve a friend with one of those. You should see Diana tear about on it! She’s like one of the Valkyries.’

  ‘Don’t, Tony!’

  They laughed together at what was clearly a private joke. Caroline put her hand to her hair, slightly dislodging her diamanté comb. Peter Baker-Hyde said, to Mrs Ayres, ‘You keep horses, I suppose? Everyone seems to, up here.’

  Mrs Ayres shook her head. ‘I’m far too old to ride. Caroline hires a horse from old Patmore, in Lidcote, from time to time; though his stable isn’t what it was. When my husband was alive we ran a stable of our own.’

  ‘A very fine one,’ put in Mr Rossiter.

  ‘But then, with the war, that sort of thing grew harder. And once my son was injured, we let the whole thing go … Roderick was with the RAF, you know.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Baker-Hyde. ‘Well, we won’t hold that against him, will we, Tony? What did he fly? Mosquitoes? Good for him! A pal took me up in one of those once and I couldn’t get out of it quick enough. It was like being hurled around in a sardine tin. Bit of paddling at Anzio, that was more my line. Hurt his leg, I gather. I’m sorry to hear it. How does he manage?’

  ‘Oh, well enough.’

  ‘It’s keeping a sense of humour that’s the great thing, of course … I’d like to meet him.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Mrs Ayres uneasily, ‘I know he’d like to meet you.’ She peered at the face of her bracelet wrist-watch. ‘Really, I can’t apologise enough for his not being here to greet you. That’s the worst of running one’s own farm, I’m afraid: the unpredictability of it …’ She lifted her head, and looked around; I thought for a second she might be about to gesture to me. But she called, instead, to Betty.

  ‘Betty, just run to Mr Roderick’s room, will you, and see what’s keeping him? Be sure to tell him we’re all waiting for him.’

  Betty pinked with the importance of the task, and slipped away. She returned a few minutes later to say that Roderick was dressing, and would join us as soon as he could.

  The evening lengthened, however, and still Rod did not appear. Our glasses were refilled, and the little girl grew livelier, clamouring for another taste of wine. Someone suggested she might be tired, and what a great treat it must be to be allowed up past her bedtime; at which her mother stroked her hair again and said indulgently, ‘Oh, we more or less let her run about till she drops. I don’t see the point of sending them to bed just for the sake of it. It breeds all sorts of neuroses.’

  The girl herself confirmed, in a high, hectic voice, that she never went to bed before midnight—and, what’s more, that she was regularly allowed to drink brandy after her supper, and had once smoked half a cigarette.

  ‘Well, you had better not have brandy or cigarettes here,’ said Mrs Rossiter, ‘for I hardly think Dr Faraday would approve of children doing that.’

  I said with mock sternness that I wouldn’t, most certainly not. Caroline put in, quietly but distinctly, ‘And neither would I. It’s bad enough the little wretches getting their hands on all the oranges’—at which Mr Morley turned his head to her with an astonished expression, and there was a second’s disconcerted silence, broken by Gillian’s declaring that if she wanted to smoke a cigarette, we would not be able to stop her; and if she really cared to, she would jolly well smoke cigars!

  Poor little girl. She was not what my mother would have called a ‘taking’ child. But I think we were all glad to have her there, for, like a kitten with a ball of wool, she gave us something at which to gaze and smile when the conversation lagged. Only Mrs Ayres, I noticed, remained distracted—thinking of Roderick, clearly. When, after another fifteen minutes, there was still no sign of him, she again sent Betty to his room; and this time the girl returned almost at once. She came back looking flustered, I thought, walking swiftly to Mrs Ayres to whisper something in her ear. I had been buttonholed by Miss Dabney by now—she wanted advice on one of her ailments—and couldn’t politely have made an escape, otherwise I might have gone over.
As it was, I had to watch as Mrs Ayres apologised to the company and went off to see to Roderick herself.

  After that, even with the little girl to entertain us, the party floundered. Someone noticed that it was still raining, and we all turned our heads gratefully to the patter of rain on the windows, to discuss the weather, and the farming, and the state of the land. Diana Baker-Hyde saw a gramophone and a cabinet of records and asked if we mightn’t have some music. But the records evidently didn’t appeal to her, for she gave the idea up, disappointed, after briefly leafing through them.

  How about the piano? she asked then.

  ‘That isn’t a piano, you philistine,’ said her brother, looking round. ‘It’s a spinet. Isn’t it?’

  Discovering that it was in fact a Flemish harpsichord, Mrs Baker-Hyde said, ‘Not really? How marvellous! And, may one play it, Miss Ayres? It isn’t too awfully old and fragile? Tony can play any sort of piano. Don’t look like that, Tony, you know you can!’

  Without a look or a word for Caroline, her brother left the sofa, went over to the harpsichord, and pressed a key. The sound was quaint, but wildly out of tune; delighted by it, he settled himself on the stool and started up a burst of crazy jazz. Caroline sat alone for a moment, pulling at a thread that had worked its way loose from one of the fingers of her silver gloves. Then, abruptly, she rose, and went to the fireplace, to add more wood to the smoking hearth.

  Presently Mrs Ayres returned. She glanced in surprise and dismay at Mr Morley at the keyboard, then shook her head as Mrs Rossiter and Helen Desmond asked hopefully, ‘No sign of Roderick?’

  ‘I’m afraid Roderick isn’t quite well,’ she said, turning the rings on her fingers, ‘and won’t be joining us tonight after all. He’s so very sorry.’

  ‘Oh, what a pity!’

  Caroline looked up. ‘Anything I can do for him, Mother?’ she asked. And I stepped forward, to ask the same thing. But Mrs Ayres said only, ‘No, no, he’s quite all right. I’ve given him some aspirin. He’s slightly overdone it at the farm, that’s all.’

  She picked up her glass and rejoined Mrs Baker-Hyde, who looked feelingly up at her and said, ‘His injury, I suppose?’

  Mrs Ayres hesitated, then nodded—at which point I knew that there was something definitely wrong, for Roderick’s leg could be a nuisance, but, largely thanks to my treatments, it was many weeks now since it had given him serious trouble. But at that moment Mr Rossiter looked around the company and said: ‘Poor Roderick. And in his youth he was such an active boy. Do you remember the time he and Michael Martin made off with the schoolmaster’s motor?’

  This proved to be something of an inspiration, and in a sense saved the party: the story took a minute or two to tell, and was immediately followed by another. Everyone, it seemed, had fond memories of Roderick, and I suppose the poignancy, first of his accident, then of his having come so early into the responsibilities of modern landed life, made them fonder. But again, there was little that I could contribute to the conversation; nor was there much to interest the Standish group. Mr Morley kept up his discordant plinkety-plunking at the harpsichord. The Baker-Hydes listened to the anecdotes politely enough, but with rather fixed expressions; soon Gillian whispered noisily to her mother about a lavatory, and Mrs Baker-Hyde, after speaking to Caroline, led her away. Her husband took the opportunity to detach himself from the group and drift a little around the room. Betty was going about at the same time with a tray of anchovy toast, and eventually they met.

  ‘Hello,’ I heard him say to her. I was making my way over to the sideboard, to fetch some lemonade for Miss Dabney. ‘You’re working hard, aren’t you? First you take our coats; now you bring the sandwiches. Don’t you have a butler to help you, or somebody like that?’

  I suppose it was the casual modern way, to chat with servants. But it wasn’t the way Mrs Ayres was training Betty, and I saw her look at him blankly for a moment, as if uncertain whether he really wanted an answer. Finally she said, ‘No, sir.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, that’s too bad. If I were you I’d join a trade union. I tell you what, though: I like the fancy headgear.’ He reached to flick the frill on her cap. ‘I’d like to see the look on our maid’s face, if we tried one of those on her!’

  He said this last more to me than to Betty, having looked up and caught my eye. Betty put down her head and moved on, and as I poured out the lemonade he wandered over to my side.

  ‘Extraordinary place this, isn’t it?’ he murmured, with a glance at the others. ‘I don’t mind admitting, I was glad to be invited, simply for the chance to have a bit of a look around. You’re the family doctor, I gather. They like to keep you on hand, do they, for the sake of the son? I hadn’t realised he was in such poor shape.’

  I said, ‘He isn’t, as it happens. I’m here on a social call tonight, just like you.’

  ‘You are? Oh, I had the impression you were here for the son, I don’t know why … Rotten do, that, by the sound of it. Scars and so on. Doesn’t care for company, I suppose?’

  I told him that, as far as I knew, Roderick had been looking forward to the party, but that he tended to take on too much farm work, and must have overtaxed himself. Mr Baker-Hyde nodded, not really interested. He drew back his cuff to look at his wrist-watch, and spoke through the end of a stifled yawn.

  ‘Well, I think it’s time I was getting my gang back to Standish—always assuming, of course, that I can prise my brother-in-law away from that lunatic piano.’ He gazed over at Mr Morley, narrowing his eyes. ‘Did you ever see such a grade-one ass? And he’s the reason we’re here! My wife, God bless her, is determined to see him married. She and our hostess cooked up this whole do, as a way of introducing him to the daughter of the house. Well, I saw in two minutes how that would turn out. Tony’s an ugly little brute, but he does like a pretty face …’

  He spoke entirely without malice, simply as one chap to another. He didn’t see Caroline, looking our way from her place beside the hearth; he gave no thought to the acoustics of that queerly shaped room, which meant that murmurs could sometimes carry across it while louder comments were lost. He swallowed the rest of his drink and put down his glass, and then he nodded to his wife, who had just returned with Gillian. I could see that he was only waiting for the right kind of break in the conversation, now, to make his excuses and take his family home.

  And so there came one of those moments—there were to be several, in the months that followed—that I would forever look back on with a sense of desperate regret—almost with guilt. For I could so easily have done something to ease his departure and speed him on his way; but if anything, I did just the opposite. Mr and Mrs Rossiter finished their latest account of one of Roderick’s youthful adventures, and though I’d barely exchanged a word with them all evening, as I made my way back to Miss Dabney I called over to them something—something perfectly inconsequential like, ‘And what did the Colonel make of that?’—which started them straight off on another long reminiscence. Mr Baker-Hyde’s face fell, and I was childishly glad to see it. I’d had a pointless, almost spiteful urge to make life difficult for him.

  But I wish to God I had acted differently; for now something terrible happened to his little girl, Gillian.

  Ever since her arrival she’d been keeping up a rather monotonous show of being frightened of Gyp, ducking ostentatiously behind her mother’s skirts whenever his friendly wanderings around the room took him near her. Just recently, though, she had changed her tack and begun to make small advances towards him. Mr Morley’s plucking at the harpsichord had, I think, begun to bother the dog; he had taken himself to one of the windows and had settled down behind a curtain. Pursuing him there now, Gillian drew up a footstool and began gingerly petting and stroking his head, chattering nonsense to him: ‘Good dog. You’re a very good dog. You’re a brave dog’—and so on, like that. She was partly out of our view, being over by the window. Her mother, I noticed, kept turning round to her, as if nervous that Gyp might snap at her, and
once she called, ‘Gillie, be careful, darling!’—making Caroline snort slightly, for Gyp had the gentlest temperament imaginable, the only risk was that the child would tire him with her chatter and her constant dabbings at his head. So Caroline kept turning to Gillian, just as Mrs Baker-Hyde did; and now and then Helen Desmond or Miss Dabney, or one of the Rossiters, would glance over, attracted by the little girl’s voice; and I also found myself looking. In fact, I’d say that probably the only person who wasn’t watching Gillian was Betty. After going around with the toast, she had put herself over by the door, and had been standing there with her gaze lowered, just as she had been trained. And yet—it was an extraordinary thing, but none of us could afterwards say that we had been looking at Gillian exactly when the incident occurred.

  We all heard the sounds of it, however—horrible sounds, I can hear them even now—a sort of tearing yelp from Gyp, with, laid across it, Gillian’s shriek, a single piercing note that sank at once to a thin, low, liquid wail. I think the dog, poor thing, was as startled as any of us: he came rushing away from the window, sending the curtain billowing, and distracting us, for a moment, from the child herself. Then one of the women, I don’t know which, saw what had happened and let up a cry. Mr Baker-Hyde, or perhaps his brother-in-law, gave a shout: ‘Christ! Gillian!’ The two men sprang forward, one of them catching his foot on a loose seam of carpet and almost falling. A glass was set hurriedly down on the mantelpiece and went crashing into the hearth. The little girl was hidden from me for a moment by a confusion of bodies: I looked and saw only her bare arm and hand, with blood running down it. Even then—I suppose the sound of the shattering glass must have put the idea in my head—even then I thought only that a window had broken, and cut her arm, and perhaps cut Gyp. But Diana Baker-Hyde had darted up out of her place and, pushing her way to her daughter, began to scream; and when I moved forward, I saw what she had seen. The blood was coming not from Gillian’s arm, but from her face. Her cheek and lip had turned into drooping lobes of flesh—had been practically severed. Gyp had bitten her.