The Little Stranger (3 page)

I said, after a second, ‘You’ve lived here all your life, of course. You couldn’t find some way to reassure her?’

She folded her arms. ‘Start reading her bedtime stories, perhaps?’

‘She’s awfully young, Miss Ayres.’

‘Well, we don’t treat her badly, if that’s what you’re thinking! We pay her more than we can afford. She eats the same food as us. Really, in lots of ways she’s better off than we are.’

‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘your brother said something like that.’

I spoke coldly, and she coloured, not very becomingly, the blush rising into her throat and struggling patchily across her dry-looking cheeks. She turned her gaze from mine, as if in an effort to hold on to her patience. When she spoke again, however, her voice had softened a little.

She said, ‘We’d do a great deal to keep Betty happy, if you want to know the truth. The fact is, we can’t afford to lose her. Our daily woman does what she can, but this house needs more than one servant, and we’ve found it almost impossible to get girls in the past few years; we’re just too far from the bus-routes and things like that. Our last maid stayed three days. That was back in January. Until Betty arrived, I was doing most of the work myself … But I’m glad she’s all right. Truly.’

The blush was fading from her cheek, but her features had sunk slightly and she looked tired. I glanced over her shoulder, to the kitchen table, and saw the heap of vegetables, now washed and peeled. Then I looked at her hands, and noticed for the first time how spoiled they were, the short nails split and the knuckles reddened. That struck me as something of a shame; for they were rather nice hands, I thought.

She must have seen the direction of my gaze. She moved as if self-conscious, turning away from me, making a ball of the tea-cloth and tossing it neatly into the kitchen so that it landed on the table beside the muddy tray. ‘Let me take you back upstairs,’ she said, with an air of bringing my visit to a close. And we mounted the stone steps in silence—the dog going with us, getting under our feet, sighing and grunting as he climbed.

But at the turn of the stairs, where the service door led back on to the terrace, we met Roderick, just coming in.

‘Mother’s looking for you, Caroline,’ he said. ‘She’s wondering about tea.’ He nodded to me. ‘Hullo, Faraday. Did you reach a diagnosis? ’

That ‘Faraday’ grated on me somewhat, given that he was twenty-four and I was nearly forty; but before I could answer, Caroline had moved towards him and looped her arm through his.

‘Dr Faraday thinks we’re brutes!’ she said, with a little flutter of her eyelids. ‘He thinks we’ve been forcing Betty up the chimneys, things like that.’

He smiled faintly. ‘It’s an idea, isn’t it?’

I said, ‘Betty’s fine. A touch of gastritis.’

‘Nothing infectious?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘But we’re to take her breakfast in bed,’ Caroline went on, ‘and generally spoil her, for days and days. Isn’t it lucky I know my way about the kitchen? Speaking of which—’ She looked at me properly now. ‘Don’t run away from us, Doctor. Not unless you have to. Stay and have some tea with us, will you?’

‘Yes, do stay,’ said Roderick.

His tone was as limp as ever; but hers seemed genuine enough. I think she wanted to make up for our disagreement over Betty. And partly because I wanted to make up for it too—but mainly, I must admit, because I realised that in staying to tea I’d be able to see more of the house—I said I would. They moved aside for me to go on ahead of them. I went up the last few steps and emerged in a small, bland hallway, and saw the same baize-curtained arch to which I’d been led by the kindly parlourmaid in 1919. Roderick came slowly up the stairs, his sister with her arm still looped through his, but at the top she moved away from him and casually drew the curtain back.

The passages beyond were dim, and seemed unnaturally bare, but apart from that it was just as I remembered, the house opening up like a fan—the ceiling lifting, the flagged floor becoming marble, the bare gloss service walls giving way to silk and stucco. I immediately looked for the decorative border from which I’d prised that acorn; then my eyes grew used to the gloom and I saw with dismay that a horde of schoolboy vandals might have been at work on the plaster since my first attack on it, for chunks of it had fallen away, and what was left was cracked and discoloured. The rest of the wall was not much better. There were several fine pictures and mirrors, but also darker squares and oblongs where pictures had obviously once hung. One panel of watered silk was ripped, and someone had patched and darned it like a sock.

I turned to Caroline and Roderick, expecting embarrassment or even some sort of apology; but they led me past the damage as if quite unbothered by it. We had taken the right-hand passage, a completely interior stretch, lit only by the light of the rooms opening off it on one side; and since most of the doors we passed were shut, even on that bright day there were quite deep pools of shadow. The black Labrador, padding through them, appeared to be winking in and out of life. The passage made another ninety-degree turn—to the left, this time—and here at last a door stood properly ajar, letting out a blurred wedge of sunlight. It led to the room, Caroline told me, in which the family spent most of their time, and which had been known for years and years as ‘the little parlour’.

Of course ‘little’, as I’d already realised, was a relative term at Hundreds Hall. The room was about thirty feet deep and twenty wide, and it was decorated in a rather hectic manner, with more moulded detail on its ceiling and walls, and an imposing marble fireplace. As in the passage, however, much of the detail was chipped or cracked, or had been lost completely. The floorboards, humped and creaking, were covered with overlapping threadbare rugs. A sagging sofa was half hidden by tartan blankets. Two worn velvet wing-backed chairs stood close to the hearth, and sitting on the floor beside one of them was a florid Victorian chamber-pot, filled with water for the dog.

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.