The Little Stranger Read online

  That was perfectly true; though had I been really honest with her, I would have added that I also had hopes of impressing the local gentry—who, hearing perhaps of my success in treating Roderick Ayres’s ailments, might for the first time in twenty years consider sending for me to take a look at their own. We talked the matter over for a minute or two, with the car engine idling; and since she grew more excited about it the more she heard, she at last said, ‘Look, why not come up to the farm with me right now, and put this to Roddie yourself?’

  I glanced at my watch. ‘Well, there’s the patient I promised to look in on.’

  ‘Oh, but can’t they wait a little? Patients must be good at waiting. That’s why they’re called patients, surely … Just five minutes, to explain it to him? Just to tell him what you’ve told me?’

  She spoke, now, like a jolly sort of schoolgirl, and her manner was hard to resist. I said, ‘All right,’ and turned the car into the lane, and after a short jolting ride we found ourselves in the cobbled yard of the farm. Ahead of us was the Hundreds farmhouse, a gaunt Victorian building. To our left were the cow-pen and milking-shed. We’d clearly arrived near the end of milking-time, for only a small group of cows still waited, fretful and complaining, to be taken in from their pen. The rest—about fifty of them, I guessed—could just be seen in an enclosure on the other side of the yard.

  We got out and, with Gyp, began to pick our way over the cobbles. It was hard work: all farm-yards are filthy, but this one was filthier than most, and the mud and slurry had been churned by hooves and then baked solid, in ruts and peaks, by the long dry summer. The shed, when we reached it, turned out to be an old wooden structure in a rather obvious state of dilapidation, reeking of manure and ammonia and giving off heat like a glass hot-house. There were no milking machines, only stools and pails, and in the first two stalls we found the farmer, Makins, and his grown-up son, each at work on a cow. Makins had come in from outside the county a few years before, but I knew him by sight, a harassed-looking lean-faced man in his early fifties, the very image of a struggling dairyman. Caroline called to him, and he gave us a nod, glancing at me in mild curiosity; we walked further and, to my surprise, found Roderick. I’d guessed he was in the farmhouse or busy in some other part of the farm, but here he was, milking along with the others, his face scarlet with heat and exertion, his long lean legs folded up, and his forehead pressed into the cow’s dusty brown flank.

  He looked up and blinked when he saw me—not entirely pleased, I thought, to be caught at work like this, but doing a good job of hiding his feelings, for he called lightly, though without smiling: ‘I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t get up to shake your hand!’ He looked at his sister. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ she answered. ‘Dr Faraday wants to talk to you about something, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, I shan’t be long.—Settle down, you great daft thing.’

  His cow had started moving fretfully about at the sound of our voices. Caroline drew me back.

  ‘They get skittish around strangers. They know me, though. Do you mind if I help?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said.

  She let herself into the cow-pen, slipping on a pair of wellingtons and a filthy canvas apron, moving easily among the waiting animals, then driving one back into the shed and putting it to stand in the stall beside her brother’s. Her arms were bare already, so she had no sleeves to roll up, but she washed her hands at a stand-pipe and gave them a swill with disinfectant; she brought over a stool and a zinc pail, put them down beside the cow—giving the cow a shove with her elbow as she did it, to bring it round to the right position—and set to work. I heard the noisy squirt of the milk in the empty bucket, and saw the brisk rhythmic movement of her arms. Taking a step to one side, I could just make out beneath the cow’s broad hindquarters the flash of her hands tugging on the pale, impossibly elastic-looking udders.

  She had finished that cow and started on another before Roderick finished his. He led the beast out of the shed, emptied his pail of foaming milk into a scrubbed steel vat, then came over to me, wiping his fingers on his apron and jerking up his chin.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  I didn’t want to keep him from his work, so told him briefly what I had in mind, phrasing it all as if I were asking a favour, putting it to him that he’d be helping me out with some rather important research … The scheme sounded less convincing, somehow, than when I had described it to his sister in the car, and he listened with a very dubious expression, especially when I described the electrical nature of the machine. ‘I’m sorry to say we haven’t the fuel to run our generator during the day,’ he said, shaking his head as if that put an end to it. But I assured him that the coil ran off its own dry cells … I could see Caroline watching us, and when she had finished with another cow she came and joined us, adding her arguments to mine. Roderick looked anxiously at the restless waiting cattle as she spoke, and I think he agreed to the scheme in the end purely as a way of shutting us up. As soon as he could, he went limping over to the pen to fetch another beast for milking, and it was Caroline who fixed the date for me to come to the house.

  ‘I’ll make sure he’s there,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t worry.’ And she added, as if just struck by the thought: ‘Come long enough to stay for tea again, will you? I know Mother would want you to.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, pleased. ‘I’d like to. Thank you, Miss Ayres.’

  At that, she put on a comically pained expression. ‘Oh, call me Caroline, won’t you? Lord knows, I’ve years and years ahead of me of being dry Miss Ayres … But I’ll still call you Doctor, if I may. One never quite likes to breach those professional distances, somehow.’

  Smiling, she offered me her warm, milk-scented hand; and we shook on it, there in the cowshed, like a couple of farmers sealing a deal.

  The date I made with her was for the following Sunday: another warm day, as it turned out, with a parched, languished feel to it, and a sky made heavy and hazy with dust and grain. The square red it, front of the Hall looked pale and curiously insubstantial as I approached, and only as I drew up on the gravel did it seem to come into proper focus: I saw again all the shabby detail and, even more than on my first visit, I had an impression of the house being held in some sort of balance. One could see so painfully, I thought, both the glorious thing it had recently been, and the ruin it was on the way to becoming.

  This time Roderick must have been looking out for me. The front door was drawn gratingly open, and he stood at the top of the cracked steps while I emerged from the car. When I made my way over to him with my doctor’s bag in one hand and, in the other, the induction coil in its neat wooden case, he gave a frown.

  ‘This is the gadget you meant? I was picturing something heftier. This looks like something you’d keep sandwiches in.’

  I said, ‘It’s more powerful than you’d think.’

  ‘Well, if you say so … Let me show you to my room.’

  He spoke as if rather regretting having agreed to the whole thing. But he turned and led me inside, taking me to the right of the staircase this time, and along another cool dim passage. He opened up the last of its doors, saying vaguely, ‘I’m afraid it’s a bit of a mess in here.’

  I followed him in, and set down my things; then looked about me in some surprise. When he had spoken of ‘his room’ I’d naturally been picturing an ordinary bedroom, but this room was huge—or seemed huge to me then, when I still hadn’t quite acclimatised myself to the scale of things at Hundreds—with panelled walls, a lattice-work plaster ceiling, and a wide stone fireplace with a Gothic surround.

  ‘This used to be a billiard room,’ Roderick said to me, seeing my face. ‘My great-grandfather kitted it up. I think he must have fancied himself as some sort of baron, don’t you? But we lost the billiards stuff years ago, and when I came home from the Air Force—home from hospital, I mean—well, it took me a while to be able to manage stairs and so on, so
my mother and sister had the idea of putting a bed for me in here. I’ve grown so used to it, it’s never seemed worth going back upstairs. I do all my work in here, too.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘so I see.’

  This was the room, I realised, that I had glimpsed from the terrace in July. It was even more of a jumble than it had seemed to me then. One corner was given over to a punishing-looking iron-framed bed, with a dressing table close beside it and, next to that, an antique washing stand and mirror. Before the Gothic fireplace stood a couple of old leather armchairs, handsome enough, but both very scuffed and split at their seams. There were two curtained windows, one leading out via those convolvulus-choked stone steps to the terrace; in front of the other, and rather spoiling the lovely long line of it, Roderick had set up a desk and swivel chair. He had obviously put the desk there in order to catch the best of the northern daylight, but this also meant that its illuminated surface—which was almost obscured by a litter of papers, ledgers, folders, technical books, dirty teacups, and overflowing ashtrays—acted as a sort of magnet on the eye, irresistibly drawing one’s gaze from every point in the room. The desk was clearly a magnet for Roderick in other ways too, for even while talking to me he had gone across to it and started rooting about for something in the chaos. At last he produced a stub of pencil, then fished in his pocket for a scrap of paper and began copying down what looked like a series of sums into one of the ledgers.

  ‘Sit down, won’t you?’ he said to me over his shoulder. ‘I shan’t be a tick. But I’ve just come back from the farm, and if I don’t make a note of these blasted figures right now, I’m sure to forget.’

  I did sit, for a minute or two. But as he showed no sign of joining me, I thought I might as well prepare my machine, so I brought it over and set it down between the two scuffed leather chairs, unhooking its latch and drawing off its case. I’d used the apparatus many times before, and it was simple enough, a combination of coil, dry-cell battery, and metal plate electrodes; but it looked rather daunting with its terminals and wires, and when I raised my head again I saw that Roderick had left his desk and was gazing down at it in some dismay.

  ‘Quite a little monster, isn’t it,’ he said, plucking at his lip. ‘You mean to set it going right now?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, pausing with the tangled leads in my hands, ‘I thought that was the idea. But if you’d rather not—’

  ‘No, no, it’s all right. Since you’re here, we might as well get on with it. Do I strip off, or how does it work?’

  I said I thought we should get away with him simply rolling his baggy trouser leg up, over the knee. He seemed glad not to have to undress in front of me, but once he had taken off his plimsoll and the much-darned sock beneath it and seen to the trousers, he folded his arms, looking awkward.

  ‘I feel like I’m joining the Freemasons! I don’t have to swear an oath or anything?’

  I laughed. ‘In the first place you simply have to sit here and let me examine you, if you don’t mind. It won’t take long.’

  He lowered himself into the armchair, and I squatted before him and gently took hold of the injured leg, drawing it straight. As the muscle tightened he gave a grunt of pain.

  ‘Not too much for you?’ I asked. ‘I need to move it about a bit, I’m afraid, to get the feel of the injury.’

  The leg was slender in my hands, thick with springing dark hair, but the skin had a yellowish, bloodless look, and in various spots on the calf and shin the hair gave way to polished pink dents and ridges. The knee was as pale and bulbous as some queer root, and terribly stiff. The muscle of the calf was shallow and rigid, knotty with indurated tissue. The ankle joint—which Roderick was drastically overusing, in compensation for the lack of movement above—looked puffy and inflamed.

  ‘Pretty foul, isn’t it?’ he said, in a more subdued tone, as I tried the leg and foot in various positions.

  ‘Well, the circulation’s sluggish, and there are a lot of adhesions. That’s not good. But I’ve certainly seen worse … How’s this?’

  ‘Ouch. Stinking.’

  ‘And this?’

  He jerked away. ‘Christ! What are you trying to do, twist the damn thing off?’

  I gently took hold of the leg again and set it into its natural position, and spent a moment or two simply warming and working the rigid muscle of the calf between my fingers. Then I went through the process of wiring him up: soaking squares of lint with salt solution, fixing these to the electrode plates; putting the plates in position on his leg with elastic bindings. He leaned forward to watch me do it, looking more interested now. As I made a few final adjustments to the machine he said, in a simple, boyish way, ‘That’s the condenser, is it? Yes, I see. And there’s how you interrupt the current, I suppose … Look here, do you have a licence for this? I’m not about to start sparking at the ears or anything?’

  I said, ‘I hope not. But let’s just say the last patient I hooked up to this now saves a fortune on permanent waves.’

  He blinked, mistaking my tone, taking me seriously for a second. Then he met my gaze—met it properly for the first time that day, perhaps for the first time ever; finally ‘seeing’ me—and he smiled. The smile lifted his features completely, and drew attention from his scars. One saw the likeness between him and his mother.

  I said, ‘Are you ready?’

  He grimaced, more boyish than ever. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Right, here goes.’

  I threw the switch. He yelped, his leg jumping forward in an involuntary twitch. Then he started laughing.

  I said, ‘Not painful?’

  ‘No. Like pins and needles, that’s all. Now it’s hotting up! Is that right?’

  ‘Perfect. Once the heat begins to fade, let me know, and I’ll turn it up a bit.’

  We spent five or ten minutes like that, until the sensation of heat in his leg had reached a constant, which meant that the current had found its peak. I left the machine to look after itself then, and sat down in the second leather armchair. Roderick began to feel in his trouser pocket for his tobacco and packet of papers. But I couldn’t bear to see him roll up one of his wretched little ‘coffin nails’ again, so I got out my own case and lighter and we helped ourselves to a cigarette each. He took a long draw on his, closing his eyes and letting his head grow loose on his slender neck.

  I said sympathetically, ‘You look tired.’

  At once, he made an effort to sit straighter. ‘I’m all right. I was up at six this morning, that’s all, for the milking. It isn’t so bad in this weather, of course; it’s in winter that one feels it … Having Makins for a dairyman doesn’t help, though.’

  ‘No? Why not?’

  He changed his pose again, and spoke as if reluctantly. ‘Oh, I oughtn’t to complain. He’s had it tough, with this bloody heat wave: we’ve lost milk, we’ve lost grass, we’ve already had to start the herd off on next winter’s feed. But he wants a thousand impossible things, and doesn’t have a clue about how to achieve them. That’s left to me, unfortunately. ’

  I asked, ‘What sort of things?’ He said, with the same touch of reluctance, ‘Well, his big idea is for me to get an extension run out here from the water main. He wants me to bring out electricity while I’m at it. He says that even if the well fills up again, the pump is just about ready to blow. He wants me to replace that; and he’s started saying now that he thinks the milking-shed’s unsafe. He’d like me to pull it down and build a brick one. With a brick shed and an electric milker we could start turning out accredited milk, and make more of a profit. It’s all he talks about.’

  He reached to a table at his side for a gun-metal ashtray, already crowded with worm-like stubs. I leaned across and tapped my cigarette into it too, saying, ‘Well, I fear he’s right about the milk.’

  Roderick laughed. ‘I know he’s right! He’s right about it all. The farm’s absolutely jiggered. But what the hell am I to do about it? He keeps asking me, Why can’t I free up some capital? It�
��s as though he’s found the phrase in some magazine. I’ve told him frankly that Hundreds doesn’t have any capital to free. He doesn’t believe me. He sees us living here, in this great house; he thinks we’re sitting on piles of gold. He doesn’t see us blundering around in the night with candles and Tilleys because we’ve run out of oil for the generator. He doesn’t see my sister, scrubbing floors, washing dishes in cold water …’ He jerked a hand towards his desk. ‘I’ve been writing letters to the bank, and putting an application together for a building licence. I spoke to a man at the district council yesterday about the water main and the electricity. He didn’t give me much encouragement; he said we’re too isolated out here to make it worth their while. But of course, the whole thing has to be put down on paper. They need plans and surveyor’s reports, and God knows what else. That’s so it can do the rounds of about ten different departments, I suppose, before they reject it properly …’

  He had started speaking almost unwillingly, but it was as if he had some sort of spring inside him, and his own words wound it: as he went on I watched the bitter shifting about of his scarred, finely cut features, the restless dipping and rising of his hands, and suddenly remembered what David Graham had told me, about his having had that touch of ‘nervous trouble’ after his smash. I’d been supposing his manner to be rather casual, all this time. Now I realised that the casualness was actually something else completely: perhaps an exhaustion, perhaps a studied warding off of anxiety; perhaps even a tension, so complete and habitual it resembled languor.

  He became aware of my thoughtful gaze. He fell silent, drawing deeply on his cigarette again, and taking his time over exhaling. He said, in a different voice, ‘You mustn’t let me run on. I can be a frightful bore about it.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I answered. ‘I’d like to hear more.’

  But he was clearly set on turning the subject, and for five or ten minutes we discussed other things. Every so often as we chatted I moved forward to check his leg, and to ask him how the muscle was feeling. ‘It’s fine,’ he’d answer each time, but I could see his face growing flushed, so guessed he was suffering slightly. Soon it was clear that the skin had started to itch. He began to pick and rub at the edge of the electrodes. When I finally switched the thing off and removed the elastics, he worked his fingernails vigorously up and down his calf, grateful to be released.