The Little Stranger Read online

  The picture was a small Edwardian photograph in a tortoiseshell frame. It showed, in crisp sepia detail, what I realised after a moment must be the south face of the Hall, for I could see the long French window of the room we were sitting in, thrown open to the afternoon sunlight just as it was today. Gathered on the lawn before the house was the family of the time, surrounded by a sizeable staff of servants—housekeeper, butler, footman, kitchen-girls, gardeners—they made an informal, almost reluctant group, as if the idea of the picture had occurred belatedly to the photographer, and someone had gone rounding them all up, drawing them away from other tasks. The family itself looked most at ease, the mistress of the house—old Mrs Beatrice Ayres, Caroline and Roderick’s grandmother—seated in a deck chair, her husband standing at her side, one hand on her shoulder, the other tucked loosely into the pocket of his creased white trousers. Lounging with a touch of gaucheness at their feet was the slender fifteen-year-old youth who had grown up and become the Colonel; he looked very like Roderick did now. Seated beside him on a tartan tug were his younger sisters and brothers.

  I looked more closely at this group. Most of them were older children, but the smallest, still an infant, was held in the arms of a fair-haired nursemaid. The child had been in the process of wriggling free when the camera shutter had snapped, so that the nursemaid had tilted back her head in fear of flailing elbows. Her gaze, as a consequence, was drawn from the camera, and her features were blurred.

  Caroline had left her place on the sofa to come and examine the photograph with me. Standing at my side, bending forward, looping up a lock of dry brown hair, she said quietly, ‘Is that your mother, Dr Faraday?’

  I said, ‘I think it might be. Then again—’ Just behind the awkward-looking girl, I noticed now, was another servant, also fair-haired, and in an identical gown and cap. I laughed, embarrassed. ‘It might be this one. I’m not sure.’

  ‘Is your mother still alive? Could you show her the picture, perhaps?’

  I shook my head. ‘My parents are both dead. My mother died while I was still at school. My father had a heart attack a few years later.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, it seems long ago …’

  ‘I hope your mother was happy here,’ Mrs Ayres said to me, as Caroline returned to the sofa. ‘Was she, do you think? Did she ever talk about the house?’

  I didn’t answer for a second, recalling some of my mother’s stories about her time at the Hall—how, for instance, she had had to stand each morning with her hands held out while the housekeeper examined her fingernails; how Mrs Beatrice Ayres would every so often come unannounced to the maids’ bedrooms and turn out their boxes, going through their possessions piece by piece … I said finally, ‘I think my mother made some good friends here, among the other girls.’

  Mrs Ayres looked pleased; perhaps relieved. ‘I’m glad to hear it. It was a different world for servants then, of course. They had their own entertainments, their own scandals and fun. Their own dinner, on Christmas Day …’

  This prompted more reminiscences. I kept my eyes on the picture— slightly thrown, if I’m honest, by the force of my own feelings, for though I’d spoken lightly, I’d found myself more moved by the unexpected appearance of my mother’s face—if it was her face—than I would have guessed. At last I put the picture down on the table at the side of my chair. We spoke about the house and its gardens, the grander times that the place had seen.

  But I kept glancing over at the photograph as we talked, and my distraction must have been obvious. Our tea was finished. I let a few more minutes pass, then looked at the clock and said I ought to be going. And as I got to my feet, Mrs Ayres said gently, ‘You must take that picture with you, Dr Faraday. I should like you to have it.’

  ‘Take it?’ I said, startled. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t.’

  ‘Yes, you must. You must take it just as it is, frame and all.’

  ‘Yes, do take it,’ said Caroline, when I continued to protest. ‘I shall be doing the housework, don’t forget, while Betty recovers. I shall be awfully glad to have one less thing to dust.’

  So, ‘Thank you,’ I said, blushing and almost stammering. ‘It’s awfully kind of you. It’s—Really, it’s far too kind.’

  They found me a piece of used brown paper with which to wrap the picture up, and I tucked it safely into my bag. I said goodbye to Mrs Ayres, and patted the dog’s warm dark head. Caroline, who was already on her feet, got ready to take me back to my car. But Roderick moved forward, saying, ‘It’s all right, Caro. I’ll see the doctor out.’

  He struggled up from the sofa, wincing badly as he did it. His sister watched him, concerned, but he was clearly determined to escort me. So she gave in, and offered me her worn, well-shaped hand for another shake.

  ‘Goodbye, Dr Faraday. I’m so glad we found that picture. Think of us, won’t you, when you look at it?’

  ‘I will,’ I said.

  I followed Roderick from the room, blinking slightly at the plunge back into shade. He led me off to the right, past more shut doors, but soon the passage lightened and widened, and we emerged in what I realised was the entrance hall of the house.

  And here I had to pause and look around me; for the hall was very lovely. Its floor was of pink and liver-coloured marble, laid down like a chequerboard. The walls were pale wooden panels, ruddy with reflected colour from the floor. Dominating it all, however, was the mahogany staircase, which rose in an elegant soft square spiral through two more floors, its polished serpent-headed banister climbing in a single unbroken line. It made a stairwell fifteen feet wide, and easily sixty feet high; and it was lit, coolly and kindly, by a dome of milky glass in the roof above.

  ‘A nice effect that, isn’t it?’ said Roderick, seeing me gazing upwards. ‘The dome was a devil, of course, in the black-out.’

  He tugged open the broad front door. The door had got damp at some point in the past, and was faintly buckled, and grated horribly against the marble as it moved. I joined him at the top of the steps, and the heat of the day billowed in around us.

  He grimaced. ‘Still blistering, I’m afraid. I don’t envy you the run back to Lidcote … What’s that you’re driving? A Ruby? How do you find her?’

  The car was a very basic model, and there wasn’t much to admire in her. But he was clearly the sort of boy to be interested in motors for their own sake, so I took him over, and pointed out a couple of features, finally opening up the bonnet to show him the layout of the engine.

  I said, as I closed the bonnet again, ‘These country roads rather punish her.’

  ‘I’ll bet. How far do you take her, day by day?’

  ‘On a light day? Fifteen, twenty calls. A heavy day might have more than thirty. Local, for the most part, though I’ve a couple of private patients as far out as Banbury.’

  ‘You’re a busy man.’

  ‘Too busy, at times.’

  ‘All those rashes and cuts.—Oh, and that reminds me.’ He put his hand to his pocket. ‘How much do I owe you for seeing to Betty?’

  I didn’t want to take his money at first, thinking of his mother’s generosity with the family photograph. When he pressed me, I said I would send him out a bill. But he laughed and said, ‘Look here, if I were you, I’d take the money while it’s offered. How much do you charge? Four shillings? More? Come on. We’re not at the charity-case stage just yet.’

  So I reluctantly said I would take four shillings, for the visit and the prescription. He brought out a warm handful of small coins and counted them into my palm. He changed his pose as he did it, and the movement must have jarred with him somehow: that puckering reappeared at his cheek, and this time I almost commented on it. As with the cigarettes, however, I didn’t like to embarrass him; so let it go. He folded his arms and stood as if quite comfortable while I started the car, and as I moved off, he languidly raised his hand to me, then turned and headed back to the house. But I kept my eye on him through my rear-view mirror, and sa
w him making his painful-looking way up the steps to the front door. I saw the house seem to swallow him up as he limped back into the shadowy hall.

  Then the drive made a turn between unclipped bushes, the car began to dip and lurch; and the house was lost to me.

  That night, as I often did on a Sunday, I had dinner with David Graham and his wife, Anne. Graham’s emergency case had gone well, against some substantial odds, so we spent most of the meal discussing it; and only as we were starting on our baked-apple pudding did I mention that I’d been out to Hundreds Hall that day on his behalf.

  He at once looked envious. ‘You have? What’s it like there now? The family haven’t called me out in years. I hear the place has gone badly downhill; that they’re rather pigging it, in fact.’

  I described what I had seen of the house and gardens. ‘It’s heart-breaking, ’ I said, ‘to see it all so changed. I don’t know if Roderick knows what he’s doing. It doesn’t look much like it.’

  ‘Poor Roderick,’ said Anne. ‘He’s a nice sort of boy, I’ve always thought. One can’t help but feel sorry for him.’

  ‘Because of his scars, and all that?’

  ‘Oh, partly. But more because he seems so out of his depth. He had to grow up too quickly; all those boys of his age did. But he had Hundreds to think about, as well as the war. And he isn’t his father’s son, somehow.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that might be in his favour. I remember the Colonel as rather a brute of a man, don’t you? I saw him once when I was young, going off pop with a motorist whose car he said had startled his horse. In the end he jumped out of his saddle and kicked the car’s headlamp in!’

  ‘He had a temper, certainly,’ said Graham, spooning up his apple. ‘The old-fashioned squire type.’

  ‘Old-fashioned bully, in other words.’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t have liked his job. He must have been out of his mind with money worries half the time. I think that estate was already losing income when he inherited it. I know he sold land all through the ’twenties; I remember my own father saying it was like shovelling water from a sinking boat. I heard that the duties, after he died, were astronomical! How that family keeps going at all beats me.’

  I said, ‘And what about Roderick’s smash? His leg looked bad, I thought. I wondered if a course of electrical therapy would help him—assuming he’d ever let me close enough to try. They seem to pride themselves on living like the Brontës out there, cauterising their own wounds and what not … Would you mind?’

  Graham shrugged. ‘Be my guest. As I said, they haven’t called me out in so long, I barely qualify as their doctor. I remember the injury: a nasty break, poorly reset. The burns speak for themselves.’ He ate a little more, then grew thoughtful. ‘There was a touch of nervous trouble too, I believe, when Roderick first came home.’

  This was news to me. ‘Really? It can’t have been too bad. He’s certainly relaxed enough now.’

  ‘Well, it was bad enough for them to want to be a bit hush-hush about it. But then, all those families are touchy like that. I don’t think Mrs Ayres even called in a nurse. She looked after Roderick herself, then brought Caroline home to help her at the end of the war. Caroline was doing quite well, wasn’t she, with some sort of commission in the Wrens, or the WAAF? Awfully brainy girl, of course.’

  He said ‘brainy’ in the way I had heard other people say it when discussing Caroline Ayres, and I knew that, like them, he was using the word more or less as a euphemism for ‘plain’. I didn’t answer, and we finished our puddings in silence. Anne put her spoon into her bowl, then rose from her chair to close a window: we were eating late, and had a candle lit on the table; it was just beginning to be twilight and moths were fluttering around the flame. And as she sat back down she said, ‘Do you remember the first daughter out at Hundreds? Susan, the little girl that died? Pretty, like her mother. I went to her seventh birthday party. Her parents had given her a silver ring, with a real diamond in it. Oh, how I coveted that ring! And a few weeks later she was dead … Was it measles? I know it was something like that.’

  Graham was wiping his mouth with his napkin. He said, ‘Diph, wasn’t it?’

  She pulled a face at the thought. ‘That’s right. Such a nasty way … I remember the funeral. The little coffin, and all the flowers. Heaps and heaps of them.’

  And I realised then that I remembered the funeral, too. I remembered standing with my parents on Lidcote High Street while the coffin went by. I remembered Mrs Ayres, young, heavily veiled in black, like a ghastly bride. I remembered my mother, quietly weeping; my father with his hand on my shoulder; the stiff new sour-smelling colours of my school blazer and cap.

  The thought depressed me, for some reason, more than it ought to have done. Anne and the maid took away the dishes, and Graham and I sat on at the table, discussing various business matters; and that depressed me even more. Graham was younger than me, but was doing rather better: he had entered the practice as a doctor’s son, with money and standing behind him. I had come in as a sort of apprentice to his father’s partner, Dr Gill—that ‘character’, as Roderick had quaintly called him; actually the devil of an idle old man, who, under pretence of being my patron, had let me gradually buy out his stake in the business over many long, hard, poorly paid years. Gill had retired before the war, and lived in a pleasant half-timbered house near Stratford-on-Avon. I had only very recently begun to make a profit. Now, with the Health Service looming, private doctoring seemed done for. On top of that, all my poorer patients would soon have the option of leaving my list and attaching themselves to another man, thereby vastly reducing my income. I had had several bad nights over it.

  ‘I shall lose them all,’ I told Graham now, putting my elbows on the table and wearily rubbing my face.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he answered. ‘They’ve no more reason to leave you than they have to leave me—or Seeley, or Morrison.’

  ‘Morrison gives them any amount of cough mixture and liver salts,’ I said. ‘They like that. Seeley has his manners, his little ways with the ladies. You’re a nice clean handsome sort of family chap; they like that, too. They don’t like me. They never have. They’ve never been able to place me. I don’t hunt or play bridge; but I don’t play darts or football, either. I’m not grand enough for the gentry—not grand enough for working people, come to that. They want to look up to their doctor. They don’t want to think he’s one of them.’

  ‘Oh, rubbish. All they want is a man who can do the job! Which you eminently can. If anything, you’re too conscientious. You’ve too much time to fret in. You ought to get married; that’d sort you out.’

  I laughed. ‘God! I can barely keep myself, let alone a wife and family.’

  He had heard it all before, but tolerantly let me grumble on. Anne brought us coffee, and we talked until almost eleven. I should have been happy to stay longer, but, guessing what little time the two of them must get alone together, I at last said good night. Their house is just on the other side of the village from mine, a ten-minute walk away; the evening was still so warm and airless, I went slowly, by a roundabout route, pausing once to light a cigarette, then slipping off my jacket, loosening my tie, and going on in my shirt-sleeves.

  The ground floor of my house is given over to a consulting-room, dispensary and waiting-room, with my kitchen and sitting-room on the floor above, and a bedroom in the attic. It was, as I’d told Caroline Ayres, a very plain sort of place. I’d never had time or money to brighten it, so it still had the same dispiriting decorations it had had when I’d moved in—mustard walls and ‘combed’ paint-work—and a cramped, inconvenient kitchen. A daily woman, Mrs Rush, kept things tidy and cooked my meals. When not actually dealing with patients I spent most of my time downstairs, making up prescriptions or reading and writing at my desk. Tonight I went straight through to my consulting-room to look over my notes for the following day, and to put my bag in order; and it was only as I opened the bag up, and saw the loosely wrapped b
rown-paper parcel inside it, that I remembered the photograph Mrs Ayres had given me out at Hundreds Hall. I undid the paper and studied the scene again; and then, still unsure about that fair-haired nursemaid, and wanting to compare the picture with other photographs, I took it upstairs. In one of my bedroom cupboards there was an old biscuit-tin, full of papers and family keepsakes, put together by my parents. I dug it out, carried it over to the bed, and began to go through it.

  I hadn’t opened this tin in years, and had forgotten what was in it. Most of its contents, I saw with surprise, were odd little fragments from my own past. My birth certificate was there, for example, along with some sort of christening notice; a furred brown envelope turned out to hold two of my milk teeth and a lock of my baby hair, unfeasibly soft and blond; and then came a mess of whiskery Scouting- and swimming-badges, school certificates, school reports, and records of prizes—the sequence of them all mixed up, so that a torn newspaper cutting announcing my graduation from medical school had snagged itself on a letter from my first headmaster, ‘fervently’ recommending me for a scholarship to Leamington College. There was even, I was astonished to see, the very Empire Day medal that had been presented to me out at Hundreds Hall by a youthful Mrs Ayres. It had been carefully wrapped in tissue paper, and it tumbled heavily into my hand, its coloured ribbon unfrayed, its bronze surface dulled but untarnished.

  But of my parents’ own lives, I discovered, there was shockingly little record. I suppose there was simply not much record to be kept. A couple of sentimental wartime postcards, with neat, bland, badly spelled messages; a lucky coin, with a hole for a string hammered through it; a spray of paper violets—that was about it. I had remembered photographs, but there was only one photograph here, a fading postcard sized thing with curling corners. It had been taken in a photographer’s tent at a local Mop Fair, and it showed my mother and father as a courting couple, fantastically posed against an Alpine backdrop, in a roped laundry-hamper meant to be the basket of a hot-air balloon.