The Little Stranger (33 page)

She nodded, briskly, wanting to believe it. Then she kicked her shoes across the mat again and, with a sigh of reluctance, headed back into the chill and gloomy house to rejoin her mother.

I
found myself recalling that sigh a day or two later, as I was making my arrangements for the district hospital dance. The dance was an annual event, meant as a fund-raiser; no one except the younger people treated it very seriously, but the local doctors liked to attend, along with their wives and grown-up children. We Lidcote physicians took it in turns to go along, and this year it was the turn of Graham and me, while our locum, Frank Wise, and Dr Seeley’s partner, Morrison, remained on call. As a bachelor I was at liberty to take along a guest or two, and a few months earlier, thinking ahead to the night, I’d actually considered asking Mrs Ayres. Now that she was still so relatively unwell, her attendance was out of the question; but it occurred to me that Caroline might be willing to partner me, if it was for the sake of an evening away from Hundreds. Of course, I thought it just as possible she’d be appalled to be asked along, at the last minute, to what was essentially a ‘works do’, and I dithered over whether or not to suggest it. But I’d forgotten that ironic streak of hers.

‘A doctors’ dance!’ she said, delighted, when I finally called her up to invite her. ‘Oh, I should love to.’

‘Are you sure? It’s a funny old event. And it’s more of a nurses’ dance than a doctors’. The women usually far outnumber the men.’

‘I bet they do! All pink and hysterical at being let off the wards, just like the junior Wrens used to be, at naval parties. And does Matron drink too much, and disgrace herself with the surgeons? Oh, say she does.’

‘Now, steady on,’ I said, ‘or there’ll be no surprises.’

She laughed, and even over the imperfect telephone line I could hear the note of real pleasure in her voice, and I was glad I’d asked her. I don’t know if, in agreeing to be my guest, she had any other motive in mind. It would be odd, I suppose, for an unmarried woman of her age to look forward to a dance without giving a thought to the single men who might be there. But if her ideas were running that way, she hid them well. Perhaps her little humiliation with Mr Morley had taught her to be cautious. She spoke about the dance as if she and I would be a pair of elderly lookers-on at the fun. And when I picked her up on the night in question I found her dressed very unshowily, in an olive-coloured sleeveless gown, with her hair hanging loose and uncurled, her throat and hands, as usual, bare, and her heavy face almost free of make-up.

We left Mrs Ayres in the little parlour, apparently not at all unhappy to have an evening to herself. She had a tray across her lap and was going through some old letters of her husband’s, putting them in neat, ordered bundles.

Still, I felt awkward about leaving her alone. ‘Will your mother really be all right?’ I asked Caroline, as she and I set off.

She said, ‘Oh, she has Betty, don’t forget. Betty will sit with her for hours. They’ve started playing games together, did you know that? Mother came across some old boards when we were going through the house. They play draughts, and halma.’

‘Betty, and your mother?’

‘I know, it’s queer, isn’t it? I don’t remember Mother ever wanting to play board-games with Roddie and me. She seems to like it now, though. Betty likes it, too. They play for ha’pennies, and Mother lets her win … I don’t think Betty had much fun at home over Christmas, poor thing. Her own mother sounds frightful, so I suppose it isn’t surprising she prefers mine. And people
do
like Mother, it’s just one of those things …’

She yawned as she said this, and drew in her coat against the cold. And after a while, lulled by the sound and motion of the car—for it was almost a thirty-minute drive to Leamington on the wintry country roads—we lapsed into companionable silence.

But once we reached the hospital grounds and joined the stir of vehicles and people, we both perked up. The dance was held in one of the lecture halls, a large room with a parquet floor; tonight it had been cleared of its desks and benches, its harsh central lights were turned off, and pretty coloured lamps and bunting had been draped from beam to beam. A band, not terribly good, was playing an instrumental number when we went in. The slippery floor had been liberally powdered with chalk, and several obliging couples were already up and dancing. Other people sat at tables around the edge, getting up their nerve to join them.

A long trestle arrangement did service as a bar. We started across towards it, but after only a few yards I was hailed by a couple of colleagues: Bland and Rickett, one a surgeon, the other a Leamington GP. I introduced them to Caroline, and there followed the usual sort of chat. They had paper cups in their hands and, seeing me glancing at the bar, Rickett said, ‘Headed for the chloroform punch? Don’t be taken in by the name; it’s like flat cherryade. Hang on a sec. Here’s the fellow we need.’

He reached around Caroline’s back to catch hold of somebody by the arm: the man was a porter, ‘our resident spiv’, Bland explained to Caroline, while Rickett murmured in the man’s ear. The porter went off, and returned a minute later with four more cups, each brim-full of the watery pink liquid I could see being ladled out from the punch-bowls at the bar, but each, too, as soon became apparent, rather stiffly laced with brandy.

‘Vastly improved,’ said Rickett, having tasted and smacked his lips. ‘Don’t you think so, Miss—?’ He had forgotten Caroline’s name.

The brandy was rough, and the punch itself had been sweetened with saccharine. When Bland and Rickett had moved on I said to Caroline, ‘Can you drink this stuff?’

She was laughing. ‘I’m not going to waste it, after all that. Is it really black?’

‘Probably.’

‘How shocking.’

‘Well, I dare say a bit of black brandy won’t do us any harm.’ I put my hand to the small of her back, to steer her out of the traffic of people going to and from the bar. The hall was filling up.

We began the search for a vacant table. But soon another man greeted me—one of the consultants this time, and, as it happened, the man to whom I’d submitted my paper on the successful treatment of Rod’s leg. There was no question of my not stopping for him, and he ran on for ten or fifteen minutes, wanting my opinion on some therapeutic process of his own. He made little effort to include Caroline, and I kept glancing at her as he spoke: she was gazing around the hall, taking rapid sips from her paper cup, self-conscious. But from time to time, too, she looked at me as the man addressed me, as if seeing me in a slightly new way.

‘You’re quite the somebody here,’ she said to me, when the consultant had finally moved on.

‘Ha!’ I took a mouthful of punch. ‘Quite the nobody, I assure you.’

‘Well, then we can be nobodies together. It makes a nice change from home. I can’t go into any of the villages these days without feeling everyone’s watching me, thinking,
There goes poor Miss Ayres, from up at the Hall
… And now, look.’ She had turned her head. ‘All the nurses have arrived, in a great big flock, just as I’d pictured them! Like blushing goslings. I thought of nursing, you know, during the war. So many people told me I was just cut out for it, it put me off. I couldn’t make that out as a compliment, somehow. That’s why I joined the Wrens. Then I ended up nursing Roddie.’

Catching the touch of wistfulness in her voice, I said, ‘Did you miss it, service life?’

She nodded. ‘Badly, at first. I was good at it, you see. That’s a shameful thing to admit, isn’t it? But I liked all the mucking about with boats. I liked the routines of it. I liked there being only one way to do things, only one sort of stocking, one sort of shoe, one sort of way to wear one’s hair. I was going to stay on at the end of the war, go out to Italy or Singapore. But once I was back at Hundreds—’

Her arm jolted, as a man and a girl pushed hastily past her; her drink slopped, she raised the cup to her mouth to catch the drips with her tongue, and after that she was silent. The band had been joined by a singer, and the music was louder and livelier. People were moving in some excitement to the dance-floor, making it harder for us to stand and talk.

Raising my voice above the music, I said, ‘Let’s not stay here. Why don’t I find you someone to dance with? There’s Mr Andrews, the house surgeon—’

She touched my arm. ‘Oh, don’t introduce me to any more men just yet. Especially not to a surgeon. Every time he looks at me I shall be thinking he’s sizing me up for the knife. Besides, men hate dancing with tall women. You and I can dance, can’t we?’

I said, ‘Of course. If you like.’

We finished our drinks, set down our cups, and made our way on to the floor. There was an awkward moment as we put up our arms and moved together, trying to overcome the essential artificiality of the pose and join the jostling, unwelcoming crowd.

Caroline said, ‘I hate this bit. It’s like having to hurl oneself on to a paternoster lift.’

‘Close your eyes, then,’ I answered, and guided her out in a quick-step. After a moment of being clipped and scuffed by the heels and elbows of other dancers, we found the rhythm of the crowd, and a route through it.

She opened her eyes, impressed. ‘But how on earth will we get off again?’

‘Don’t worry about that just yet.’

‘We’ll have to wait for the slow numbers … You dance rather well, in fact.’

‘So do you.’

‘You sound surprised. I love to dance. I always have. I danced like mad in the war. It was very best thing about it: all that dancing. When I was young I danced with my father. He was so tall, it didn’t matter that I was tall, too. He taught me all my steps. Rod was hopeless. He said I heaved him about, he might as well have been dancing with a boy. I’m not heaving you about, am I?’

‘Not at all.’

‘And I’m not talking too much? I know some men don’t like that. I gather it puts them off their stroke.’

I said she could talk as much as she liked. The fact is, I was delighted to see her in such good spirits, and to feel her so relaxed, so yielding and mobile in my arms. We kept a slight formal distance between us, but every now and then the pressure of the crowd would send her more firmly into my grip and I’d feel the spring of her full bosom against my chest, the solid push of her hips. As we made a turn, the muscular flesh of her lower back would tense and shift beneath my palm and outspread fingers. Her hand in mine was sticky, from the spilled punch; once she turned her head to look across the dance-floor and I caught the scent of brandy on her mouth. I realised that she was slightly drunk. Perhaps I was slightly drunk, too. But I felt a rush of fondness for her, so sudden and so simple it made me smile.

She put back her head to look into my face. ‘Why are you grinning like that? You look like a dancer in a contest. Have they pinned a number on your back?’ She peered over my shoulder, pretending to check; again her bosom came springily against me. Then she spoke into my ear. ‘There’s Dr Seeley! Whizz me round, so you can see his bow-tie and his buttonhole!’

I made a turn, and caught sight of the man, large and bearish, dancing with his wife. The tie was a polka-dotted one, the flower some sort of fleshy orchid; goodness knows where he’d got hold of it. A blade of hair, over-greased, had fallen forward over his brow.

I said, ‘He thinks he’s Oscar Wilde.’

‘Oscar Wilde!’ Caroline laughed. I felt the laughter in my arms. ‘If only he were! When I was young the girls called him “The Octopus”. He was always terribly keen to give one a lift. And no matter how many hands he had on the steering-wheel, there always seemed to be at least one more … Guide me away where he can’t see us. You still have to dish out all the gossip, don’t forget. Keep to the edge of the floor—’

‘Look here, who’s leading? I’m beginning to think I know what Roderick meant, when he said you heaved him about.’

‘Keep to the edge,’ she said, laughing again, ‘and as we go round you can tell me who everybody is, and who has killed the most patients, and which doctors are going to bed with which nurses; and all the scandals.’

So we stayed on the floor through two or three more songs, and I did my best to point out the major hospital personalities, and to offer up a few mild pieces of gossip; after that the music reverted to a waltz and the dancing thinned. We moved back to the bar for more punch. The hall was growing warmer. Looking up, I saw David Graham, just arrived with Anne and making his way through the crowd in our direction. Thinking of the last time he and Caroline had met—when he had come up to Hundreds to second my opinion of Roderick, the day before Rod was taken from the house—I leaned close to her and said, as quietly as I could over the music, ‘Here’s Graham headed our way. Will you mind seeing him?’

She didn’t look, but gave a small, tight shake of her head.

‘No, I don’t mind. I guessed he’d be here.’

The slight awkwardness of the Grahams’ arrival, anyway, was soon dispelled. They had brought guests, a middle-aged Stratford man and his wife and their married daughter; and the daughter and Caroline turned out to be old friends. Laughing and exclaiming, they moved together to exchange kisses.

‘We knew each other,’ Caroline told me, ‘oh, years ago! Way back in the war.’

The daughter, Brenda, was blonde, good-looking—rather worldly looking too, I thought. I was pleased for Caroline’s sake that she had turned up, but also vaguely sorry, for with her and her parents’ arrival it was as if a line were drawn between the older people and the younger. She and Caroline stood slightly apart from the rest of us, and lit cigarettes; and soon they linked arms and headed off in the direction of the Ladies’.

By the time they returned, I’d been thoroughly claimed by the Graham party, who had found a table away from the blare of the band and produced a couple of bottles of Algerian wine. Cups of this were given to Caroline and Brenda, and chairs offered; but they wouldn’t sit, they stood looking over the dance-floor, Brenda swinging her hips impatiently to the rhythm of the music as she drank. The tunes were picking up again and they both wanted to dance.