The Little Stranger (18 page)

His reaction appalled me.

‘That’s my mother’s idea of keeping a confidence, is it?’ he said, moving furiously about in his chair. ‘I suppose I should have expected it. Just what did she tell you? That she found me in a blue funk?’

‘She was worried about you.’

‘God! I simply didn’t feel like turning out for some idiotic party! My head was killing me. I sat in my room and had a drink. Then I went to bed. Is that a crime?’

‘Rod, of course it isn’t. It’s just, the way she described it—’

‘For God’s sake. She exaggerates! She imagines things, all the time! As for what’s actually under her nose—Oh, forget it. If she thinks I’m about to go off my head, leave her to it. She has no idea. You none of you have. If you only knew—’

He bit the words back. Puzzled by the intensity of his manner, I said, ‘If we knew what?’

He sat rigid for a moment, clearly struggling with himself. Then, ‘Oh, forget it,’ he said again. And he moved sharply forward, catching hold of the wires that ran from his leg to the coil and pulling them free. ‘Forget all this, too. I’m tired of it. It’s no damn good.’

The electrodes sprang out of their bindings and tumbled to the floor. He tugged the elastics loose, then clumsily rose and, with his trouser leg still rolled high and his foot bare, he went over to stand at his desk, turning his back to me.

I gave the treatment up that day, and abandoned him to his temper. The following week he apologised, and we ran through the process as normal; he seemed to have quite calmed down. By my next visit, however, something new had started happening. I arrived at the house to find him with a cut on the bridge of his nose and a bad black eye.

‘Now, don’t look like that,’ he said, when he saw my face. ‘I’ve had Caroline fussing over me all morning, trying to stick bits of bacon to me and God knows what else.’

I glanced at his sister—she was sitting there with him, in his room; I think she had been waiting for me—then went over to him, to take his head in my hands and turn his face to the light of the window.

‘What on earth happened?’

‘A very stupid thing indeed,’ he said, irritably drawing himself free, ‘and I’m almost too embarrassed to mention it. I woke in the night, that’s all, and went blundering out to the lavatory, and some fool—i.e., me—had left the door wide open, so that I went smack into the edge of it.’

‘He knocked himself out,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s only thanks to Betty that he didn’t—I don’t know, swallow his own tongue.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said her brother. ‘I didn’t knock myself out.’

‘You did! He was flat on the floor, Doctor. And he’d given such a cry, he’d woken up Betty, downstairs. Poor girl, I think she thought we had burglars. She crept up and saw him lying there, and very sensibly came and woke me. He was still out cold when I came down to him.’

Rod scowled. ‘Don’t listen to her, Doctor. She’s exaggerating.’

‘I’m not, you know,’ said Caroline. ‘We had to throw water in his face to bring him round, and when he came to he was most ungrateful, told us in very nasty language to leave him alone—’

‘All right,’ said her brother. ‘We seem to have proved that I’m an idiot. But I think I told you that myself. Now, can we leave it?’

He spoke sharply. Caroline looked disconcerted for a moment, then found a way to turn the subject. He wouldn’t join in, however, but sat in moody silence while she and I chatted; and for the first time, when I prepared to treat him, he refused outright to let me do it—saying again that he was ‘tired of it’, that it was ‘doing no good’.

His sister stared at him in amazement. ‘Oh, Rod, you know that’s not true!’

He answered peevishly, ‘It’s my leg, isn’t it?’

‘But for Dr Faraday to have gone to so much trouble—’

‘Well, if Dr Faraday wants to put himself out for people he hardly knows,’ he said, ‘that’s his look-out. I tell you, I’m tired of being pinched and pulled about! Or are my legs estate property, like everything else around here? Got to patch them up, get a bit more wear out of them; never mind that you’re grinding them down to stumps. Is that what you’re thinking?’

‘Rod! You aren’t being fair!’

‘It’s all right,’ I said quietly. ‘Rod doesn’t have to have the treatment if he doesn’t want it. It isn’t as though he’s paying for it.’

‘But,’ said Caroline, as if she hadn’t heard, ‘your paper—’

‘My paper’s practically written. And, as I think Rod knows, the best effect’s already been achieved. All I’m doing now is keeping the muscle ticking over.’

Rod himself had moved away and wouldn’t talk to us. In the end we left him to it, and joined Mrs Ayres in the little parlour for a subdued tea. But before I left, I went quietly down to the basement to have a word with Betty, and she confirmed what Caroline had told me about the previous night. She had been fast asleep, she said, and had been woken by a cry; muddled with slumber, she’d thought that one of the family wanted her, and had gone dozily upstairs. She found Rod’s door open, and Rod himself lying on the floor with blood on his face, so still and white that for a second she’d supposed him dead, and had ‘very nearly screamed’. Pulling herself together, she had run to fetch Caroline, and between them they had brought him round. He had woken up ‘cursing, and saying funny things’.

I said, ‘What sort of things?’

She screwed up her face, trying to remember. ‘Just funny things. Queer things. Like when the dentist gives you gas.’

And that was all she could tell me; so I was obliged to let the matter go.

A few days later, however—when the bruise on his eye had turned a lovely shade of what Caroline called ‘greenery-yallery’, but well before it had faded completely—Rod suffered another small injury. Again he had apparently woken in the night and gone ‘blundering’ across his room. This time he had walked into a footstool that had mysteriously left its usual place to set itself directly in his path, and he had tripped and fallen, and hurt his wrist. He tried to play the incident down to me, and he let me bind up the injured wrist with a tremendous air of ‘humouring the old man’. But I could tell from the look of his arm, and from his reaction when I handled it, that the sprain was quite a bad one, and his attitude baffled me.

I spoke about it later to his mother. She at once looked anxious—putting her hands together, as she often did now, to turn her old-fashioned rings.

‘What do you think the matter is, truly?’ she asked me. ‘He won’t tell me anything; I’ve tried and tried. Clearly, he’s not sleeping. Then again, I don’t think any of us is sleeping well just now … But all this wandering about at night! It can’t be healthy, can it?’

‘You think he did stumble, then?’

‘What else? His leg is at its stiffest when he’s been lying down.’

‘That’s true. But, the footstool?’

‘Well, he keeps that room in such a frightful state. He always has.’

‘But doesn’t Betty tidy it?’

She caught the note of concern in my voice, and her gaze sharpened with alarm. She said, ‘You don’t think, do you, that there’s something seriously wrong with him? He can’t have been suffering from more of those headaches?’

But I had already thought of that. I had asked him about his headaches while bandaging his wrist, and he’d answered that, apart from his two small injuries, he had no physical ailments at all. He seemed to be speaking truthfully; and though he looked tired, I could see no sign of actual illness in him, in his eyes, his manner or complexion. There was only that elusive
something
, faint as a scent or a shadow, that continued to perplex me. His mother looked so concerned I didn’t like to burden her further. I remembered her tears on the night I had gone out there after the party. I told her I was probably worrying needlessly—rather playing the whole thing down, just like Rod himself.

But I was bothered enough to want to talk to someone about it. So I made an excuse to call in at the Hall later that week, and I sought out Caroline, to speak to her alone.

I found her in the library. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a tray of leather-bound books in front of her; she was rubbing lanolin into their covers. She had just enough weak north light to work by, for in the recent damp weather the window-shutters had begun to warp, and she had only been able to open one of them, and that only partly. White sheets still hung across most of the shelves, like so many shrouds. She hadn’t bothered to light a fire, and the room was very chill and cheerless.

She seemed pleasantly surprised to see me there on a weekday afternoon.

‘Look at these lovely old editions,’ she said, showing me a couple of small tan books, their bindings still glossy and moist from the lanolin, like newly exposed conkers. I hitched up a stool and sat beside her; she opened one of the books and began to turn its pages.

She said, ‘I haven’t got very far, to tell the truth. It’s always more tempting to read than to work. I found something just now, a bit of Herrick, that made me smile. Here it is.’ The book creaked as she eased back its covers. ‘Just listen to this, and tell me what it reminds you of.’ And she began to read aloud, in her low-pitched, pleasant voice:

The tongues of Kids shall be thy meate,
Their Milke thy drinke; and thou shalt eate
The Paste of Filberts for thy bread
With Cream of Cowslips butterèd:
Thy Feasting-Tables shall be Hills
With Daisies spread, and Daffodils;
Where thou shalt sit, and Red-brest by,
For meat, shall give thee melody.

She lifted her head. ‘That might have been put out as a broadcast by the Ministry of Food, don’t you think? It’s all there except the ration book. I wonder what the Paste of Filberts tastes like.’

I said, ‘Like peanut butter, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘You’re right; only even nastier.’

We smiled at each other. She put down the Herrick and picked up the book she had been working on when I arrived, and started rubbing at it with firm, even strokes. But when I told her what was on my mind—that I wanted to talk about Roderick—her hand slowed and her smile faded.

She said, ‘I was wondering how much it had all struck you. I’ve been thinking of talking to you myself. But what with everything else—’

That was as close as she ever came to mentioning the business with Gyp; and as she spoke she dipped her head, so that I saw her lowered eyelids, heavy and moist and curiously nude-looking above her dry cheeks.

She said, ‘He keeps saying he’s all right, but I know he isn’t. Mother knows it, too. That business with the door, for instance. When did Rod ever leave his door open at night? And he
was
almost raving when he came to, despite what he says. I think he’s having nightmares. He keeps hearing noises when nothing’s there.’ She reached for the jar of lanolin and dabbled her fingers inside it. ‘He didn’t tell you, I suppose, about coming up to my room in the night, last week?’

‘To your room?’ I’d heard nothing of this.

She nodded, glancing up at me as she worked. ‘He woke me up. I don’t know what time it was; long before dawn, anyway. I didn’t know what on earth was going on. He came barging in, saying would I for God’s sake please stop shifting things about, it was driving him mad! Then he saw me in bed, and I swear, he turned
green
—greenery-yallery, just like his eye. His room is almost underneath mine, you know, and he said he’d been lying there for an hour, listening to me dragging things across the floor. He thought I’d been rearranging the furniture! He’d been dreaming, of course. The house was quiet as a church; it always is. But the dream seemed realer to him than I did, that was the horrible thing. It took him forever to calm down. In the end I made him get into bed beside me. I went back to sleep, but I don’t know if he did. I think he lay awake all the rest of that night—wide awake, I mean, as if he were watching or waiting or something.’

Her words made me thoughtful. I said, ‘He didn’t pass out, anything like that?’

‘Pass out?’

‘He couldn’t have been having some sort of … seizure?’

‘A fit, you mean? Oh, no. It was nothing like that. There was a girl when I was young who threw fits; I remember, they were horrible things. I don’t think I could make a mistake about that.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘not all seizures are the same. It makes a sort of sense, after all. His injuries, his confusion, his queer behaviour …’

She shook her head, looking sceptical. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it was that. And why should he start having seizures now? He’s never had them before.’

‘Well, perhaps he has. Would he have told you? People have an odd sense of shame about epilepsy.’

She frowned, thinking it over; then she shook her head again. ‘I just don’t think that’s it.’

Wiping the lanolin from her fingers, then screwing on the lid of the jar, she got to her feet. The narrow strip of window showed a swiftly darkening sky, and the room seemed colder and gloomier than ever. She said, ‘God, it’s like an ice-house in here!’ She blew into her hands. ‘Help me with this, could you?’

She meant the tray of treated books. I moved forward to lift it with her and we set it on a table. She dusted down her skirt, and said, without looking up, ‘Where’s Rod now, do you know?’

I said, ‘I saw him outside with Barrett when I arrived, heading over to the old gardens. Why? You think we should talk to him?’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s just—have you been to his room lately?’

‘His room? Not lately, no. He doesn’t seem to want me there.’

‘He doesn’t seem to want me there, either. But I happened to go in a couple of days ago when he was out, and I noticed something—well, something odd. I don’t know if it’ll back up your epilepsy theory or not; I rather think not. But will you come and let me show you? If Barrett’s got hold of Rod, they’ll be ages.’

I didn’t care for the idea. ‘I’m not sure we ought to, Caroline. Rod wouldn’t like it, would he?’

‘It won’t take long. And it’s the sort of thing I’d like you to see for yourself … Please will you come? I’ve no one else to talk to about it.’

That was more or less the feeling that had brought me to her; and since she was clearly so troubled, I said I would. She led me out into the hall, and we went quietly on down the passage towards Rod’s room.