The Little Stranger Read online

  And yet, somehow, the essential loveliness of the room stood out, like the handsome bones behind a ravaged face. The scents were all of summer flowers: sweet-pea, mignonette, and stock. The light was soft and mildly tinted, and seemed held, really embraced and held, by the pale walls and ceiling.

  A French window stood open on another set of flying stone steps, leading down to the terrace and the lawn on this, the south, side of the house. Standing at the top of these steps as we went in, just kicking off some outdoor sandals and working her stockinged feet into shoes, was Mrs Ayres. She had a wide-brimmed hat on her head, with a light silk scarf draped over the top, tied loosely under her chin; and when her children caught sight of her, they laughed.

  ‘You look like something from the early days of motoring, Mother,’ said Roderick.

  ‘Yes,’ said Caroline, ‘or a bee-keeper! I wish you were one; wouldn’t the honey be nice? Here’s Dr Faraday, look—Dr Graham’s partner, from Lidcote. He’s all finished with Betty already and I said we’d give him tea.’

  Mrs Ayres came forward, taking off her hat, letting the scarf fall loosely over her shoulders, and holding out her hand.

  ‘Dr Faraday, how do you do? Such a very great pleasure to meet you properly at last. I’ve been gardening—or anyway, what passes for gardening, in our wilderness—so I hope you’ll excuse my Sundayish appearance. And isn’t that strange?’ She raised the back of her hand to her forehead, to move aside a strand of hair. ‘When I was a child Sundays meant being dressed in one’s finest. One had to sit on a sofa in white lace gloves, and hardly dared to breathe. Now Sunday means working like a dustman—and dressing like one, too.’

  She smiled, her high cheeks rising higher in her heart-shaped face, giving her handsome dark eyes a mischievous tilt. A figure less like a dustman’s, I thought, it would have been hard to imagine, for she looked perfectly well groomed, in a worn linen dress, with her long hair pinned up loosely, showing the elegant line of her neck. She was a good few years over fifty, but her figure was still good, and her hair was still almost as dark as it must have been the day she handed me my Empire Day medal, when she was younger than her daughter was now. Something about her—perhaps the scarf, or the fit of her dress, or the movement of her slender hips inside it—something, anyway, seemed to lend her a Frenchified air, slightly at odds with her children’s light brown English looks. She gestured me to one of the chairs beside the hearth, and took the other across from it; and as she sat, I noticed the shoes she had just slipped on. They were dark patent leather with a cream stripe, too well-made to be anything other than pre-war, and, like other well-made women’s shoes, to a man’s eye absurdly over-engineered—like clever little nonsense gadgets—and faintly distracting.

  On a table beside her chair was a small heap of bulky old-fashioned rings, which she now began to work on to her fingers, one by one. With the movement of her arms the silk scarf slid from her shoulders to the floor, and Roderick, who was still on his feet, leaned forward with an awkward motion to pick it up and set it back around her neck.

  ‘My mother’s like a paper-chase,’ he said to me as he did it. ‘She leaves a trail of things behind her wherever she goes.’

  Mrs Ayres settled the scarf more securely, her eyes tilting again. ‘You see how my children abuse me, Dr Faraday? I fear I shall end my days as one of those neglected old women left starving to death in their beds.’

  ‘Oh, I dare say we’ll chuck you a bone now and then, you poor old thing,’ yawned Roderick, going over to the sofa. He lowered himself down, and this time the awkwardness of his movements was unmistakable. I paid more attention, saw a puckering and whitening appear at his cheek—and realised at last how much his injured leg still troubled him, and how carefully he’d been trying to disguise it.

  Caroline had gone to fetch our tea, taking the dog off with her. Mrs Ayres asked after Betty, seeming very relieved to discover that the problem was not a serious one.

  ‘Such a bore for you,’ she said, ‘having to come out all this way. You must have far graver cases to deal with.’

  I said, ‘I’m a family doctor. It’s mostly rashes and cut fingers, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Now I’m sure you’re being modest … Though why one should judge the worth of a doctor by the severity of the cases on his books, I can’t imagine. If anything, it ought to be the other way around.’

  I smiled. ‘Well, every doctor likes a challenge now and then. During the war I spent a good deal of time on the wards of a military hospital, up at Rugby. I rather miss it.’ I glanced at her son, who had produced a tin of tobacco and a packet of papers and was rolling himself a cigarette. ‘I did a little muscle therapy, as it happens. Electrical work and so on.’

  He gave a grunt. ‘They wanted to sign me up for some of that, after my smash. I couldn’t spare the time away from the estate.’

  ‘A pity.’

  Mrs Ayres said, ‘Roderick was with the Air Force, Doctor, as I expect you know.’

  ‘Yes. What kind of action did you see? Pretty stiff, I gather?’

  He tilted his head and stuck out his jaw, to draw attention to his scars.

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you, from the look of these? But I spent most of my flying time on reconnaissance work, so I can’t claim too much glory. A bit of bad luck over the south coast brought me down in the end. The other chap got the worst of it, though; him and my navigator, poor devil. I ended up with these lovely beauty spots and a bashed-up knee.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, I expect you saw a lot worse at that hospital of yours.—But look here, forgive my manners. Can I offer you a cig? I smoke so many of these damn things I forget I’m doing it.’

  I looked at the cigarette he had rolled—which was pretty wretched, the sort of cigarette we had used, as medical students, to call a ‘coffin nail’—and decided I wouldn’t take his tobacco. And though I had some decent cigarettes of my own in my pocket, I didn’t want to embarrass him by bringing them out. So I shook my head. I had the feeling, anyway, that he had only offered me one as a way of changing the subject.

  Perhaps his mother thought that, too. She was gazing at her son with a troubled expression, but turned from him to me to smile and say, ‘The war feels far away now, doesn’t it? How did that happen, in only two years? We had an army unit billeted with us for part of it, you know. They left odd things about the park, barbed wire, sheets of iron: they’re already rusting away, like something from another age. Goodness knows how long this peace will last, of course. I’ve stopped listening to the news; it’s too alarming. The world seems to be run by scientists and generals, all playing with bombs like so many schoolboys.’

  Roderick struck a match. ‘Oh, we’ll be all right, here at Hundreds,’ he said, his mouth tight around his cigarette and the paper flaring, alarmingly close to his scarred lips. ‘It’s the original quiet life, out here at Hundreds.’

  As he spoke, there came the sound of Gyp’s claws on the marble floor of the passage, like the clicking beads of an abacus, and the slap of Caroline’s flat-soled sandals. The dog nosed open the door—something he clearly did often, for the door-frame was darkened from the rub of his coat, and the fine old door itself was quite wrecked, in its lower panels, where he or dogs before him had repeatedly scratched at the wood.

  Caroline entered with a heavy-looking tea-tray. Roderick gripped the arm of the sofa and began to push himself up, to help her; but I beat him to it.

  ‘Here, let me.’

  She looked gratefully at me—not so much on her own account, I thought, as on her brother’s—but she said, ‘It’s no trouble. I’m used to it, remember.’

  ‘Let me clear a spot for you, at least.’

  ‘No, you must let me do it myself! That way, you see, when I’m obliged to earn my living in a Corner House, I shall know how.—Gyp, get out from under my heels, will you?’

  So I moved back, and she set the tray down among the books and papers on a cluttered table, then poured
the tea and passed round the cups. The cups were of handsome old bone china, one or two of them with riveted handles; I saw her keep those back for the family. And she followed the tea with plates of cake: a fruit cake, sliced so thinly I guessed she had made the best of a rather meagre store.

  ‘Oh for a scone, and jam, and cream!’ said Mrs Ayres, as the plates were handed out. ‘Or even a really good biscuit. I say that with you in mind, Dr Faraday, not us. We’ve never been a sweet-toothed family; and naturally’—she looked mischievous again—‘as dairy farmers, one would hardly expect us to have butter. But the worst of rationing is, it has quite killed hospitality. I do think that a pity.’

  She sighed, breaking her cake into pieces and dipping them daintily into her milkless tea. Caroline, I noticed, had folded her slice in half and eaten it down in two bites. Roderick had set his plate aside in order to concentrate on his cigarette and now, after idly picking out the peel and the sultanas, he threw the rest of his cake to Gyp.

  ‘Roddie!’ said Caroline, reproachfully. I thought she was protesting at the waste of food; it turned out she didn’t like the example her brother was setting to the dog. She caught the animal’s eye. ‘You villain! You know that begging isn’t allowed! Look at the sidelong glances he’s giving me, Dr Faraday. The old sly boots.’ She drew her foot from her sandal, extended a leg—her legs, I saw now, were bare, and tanned, and quite unshaven—and prodded his haunches with her toes.

  ‘Poor old thing,’ I said politely, at the dog’s forlorn expression.

  ‘Don’t be taken in. He’s a dreadful ham—aren’t you, hey? You Shylock!’

  She gave him another nudge with her foot, then turned the nudge into a rough caress. The dog at first rather struggled to keep his balance under the pressure of it; then, with the defeated, slightly bewildered air of a helpless old man, he lay down at her feet, lifting his limbs and showing the grey fur of his chest and his balding belly. Caroline worked her foot harder.

  I saw Mrs Ayres glance over at her daughter’s downy leg.

  ‘Really, darling, I do wish you would put some stockings on. Dr Faraday will suppose us savages.’

  Caroline laughed. ‘It’s far too warm for stockings. And I should be very surprised indeed if Dr Faraday had never seen a bare leg before!’

  But she did, after a moment, draw her leg back and make an effort to sit more demurely. The dog, disappointed, lay with his limbs still raised and crooked. Then he rolled on to his front and began to gnaw wetly at one of his paws.

  The smoke of Roderick’s cigarette hung bluely in the hot, still air. A bird in the garden gave some distinctive throbbing call, and we turned our heads to listen to it. I looked around the room again, at all the lovely faded detail; then, twisting further in my seat, with a shock of surprise and pleasure I got my first proper view through the open window. An overgrown lawn ran away from the house for what looked like thirty or forty yards. It was bordered by flower-beds, and ended at a wrought-iron fence. But the fence gave on to a meadow, which in turn gave onto the fields of the park; the fields stretched off into the distance for a good three-quarters of a mile. The Hundreds boundary wall was just about visible at the end of them, but since the land beyond the wall was pasture, giving way to tilth and cornfield, the prospect ran on, uninterrupted, finishing only where its paling colours bled away completely into the haze of the sky.

  ‘You like our view, Dr Faraday?’ Mrs Ayres asked me.

  ‘I do,’ I said, turning back to her. ‘When was this house built? 1720? 1730?’

  ‘How clever you are. It was finished in 1733.’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘I think I can see what the architect must have had in mind: the shady corridors, with the rooms opening from them, large and light.’

  Mrs Ayres smiled; but it was Caroline who looked over at me as if pleased.

  ‘I’ve always liked that, too,’ she said. ‘Other people seem to think our gloomy passages a bit of a bore … But you should see the place in winter! We’d happily brick up all the windows then. For two months last year we more or less lived in this one room. Roddie and I brought in our mattresses and slept here like squatters. The pipes froze, the generator broke; outside there were icicles three feet long. We never dared leave the house, for fear of being harpooned … You live above your surgery, don’t you? In old Dr Gill’s place?’

  I said, ‘I do. I moved in there as a junior partner, and have never moved out. It’s a plain enough place. But my patients know it; and it suits a bachelor, I suppose.’

  Roderick tapped ash from his cigarette.

  ‘Dr Gill was a bit of a character, wasn’t he? I went into his surgery once or twice when I was a boy. He had a great glass bowl he said he used to keep leeches in. It frightened the pants off me.’

  ‘Oh, everything frightened you,’ said his sister, before I could respond. ‘You were so easy to scare. Do you remember that giantess of a girl who used to work in the kitchen when we were young? Do you remember her, Mother? What was her name? Was it Mary? She was six foot two-and-a-half; and she had a sister who was six foot three. Daddy once made her try on one of his boots. He’d made a bet with Mr McLeod that the boot would be too small. He was right, too. But her hands were the thing. She could wring clothes better than a mangle. And her fingers were always cold—always freezing, like sausages straight from the meat-safe. I used to tell Roddie that she crept into his room while he was sleeping and put her hands under his blankets, to warm them up; and it used to make him cry.’

  ‘Little beast,’ said Roderick.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘I believe it was Miriam,’ said Mrs Ayres, after a moment’s consideration. ‘Miriam Arnold; and the sister you’re thinking of was Margery. But there was another girl, too, less huge: she married a Tapley boy, and the two of them went off to be chauffeur and cook at some house out of the county. Miriam went from us to Mrs Randall, I think. But Mrs Randall didn’t take to her, and only kept her for a month or two. I don’t know what became of her then.’

  ‘Perhaps she took up garrotting,’ said Roderick.

  ‘Perhaps she joined a circus,’ said Caroline. ‘We really did have a girl once, didn’t we, who ran away to join the circus?’

  ‘She certainly married a circus man,’ said Mrs Ayres. ‘And she broke her mother’s heart by doing it. She broke her cousin’s heart too, because the cousin—Lavender Hewitt—was also in love with the circus man, and when the other girl went off with him, she gave up eating and would have died. And she was saved, as her mother used to say, by rabbits. For she could resist any dish except her mother’s stewed rabbit. And for a time we let her father take a ferret over the park, to get all the rabbits he pleased; and it was the rabbits that saved her …’

  The story ran on, Caroline and Roderick prompting more of it; they spoke to each other rather than to me, and, shut out of the game, I looked from mother to daughter to son and finally caught the likenesses between them, not just the similarities of feature—the long limbs, the high-set eyes—but the almost clannish little tricks of gesture and speech. And I felt a flicker of impatience with them—the faintest stirring of a dark dislike—and my pleasure in the lovely room was slightly spoiled. Perhaps it was the peasant blood in me, rising. But Hundreds Hall had been made and maintained, I thought, by the very people they were laughing at now. After two hundred years, those people had begun to withdraw their labour, their belief in the house; and the house was collapsing, like a pyramid of cards. Meanwhile, here the family sat, still playing gaily at gentry life, with the chipped stucco on their walls, and their Turkey carpets worn to the weave, and their riveted china …

  Mrs Ayres had recalled another servant. ‘Oh, she was a moron,’ Roderick said.

  ‘She wasn’t a moron,’ said Caroline, fairly. ‘But it’s true she was awfully dim. I remember she once asked me what sealing-wax was, and I told her it was a very special sort of wax for putting on ceilings. I made her stand on a pair of ladders and try some out on the ceiling of
Daddy’s study. And it made a horrible mess, and the poor girl got into dreadful trouble.’

  She shook her head, embarrassed, but laughing again. Then she caught my eye; and my expression must have been chilly. She tried to stifle her smiles.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Faraday. I can see you don’t approve. Quite right, too. Rod and I were frightful children; but we’re much nicer now. You’re thinking of poor little Betty, I expect.’

  I took a sip of my tea. ‘Not at all. As it happens, I was thinking of my mother.’

  ‘Your mother?’ she repeated, a trace of laughter still in her voice.

  And in the silence that followed, Mrs Ayres said, ‘Of course. Your mother was nursery maid here once, wasn’t she? I remember hearing that. When was she here? Slightly before my time, I think.’

  She spoke so smoothly and so nicely, I was almost ashamed; for my own tone had been pointed. I said, less emphatically, ‘My mother was here until about nineteen seven. She met my father here; a grocer’s boy. A back-door romance, I suppose you’d call it.’

  Caroline said uncertainly, ‘What fun.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’

  Roderick tapped more ash from his cigarette, saying nothing. Mrs Ayres, however, had begun to look thoughtful.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘I do believe—Now, am I right?’

  She went across to a table, on which a number of framed family pictures were set out. She drew one from the arrangement, held it at arm’s length, peered at it, then shook her head.

  ‘Without my spectacles,’ she said, bringing it to me, ‘I can’t be sure. But I think, Dr Faraday, that your mother might be here.’