The Little Stranger (48 page)

‘What’s all this?’ she asked him mildly. ‘You’re not upsetting your sister, surely?’

‘I won’t talk to bloody fools!’ he said, looking rigidly away, his arms still folded.

‘And I won’t have language,’ said the nurse, folding her own arms. ‘Now, will you apologise? No?’ She tapped her foot. ‘We’re waiting …’

Rod said nothing. She shook her head, and, with her face turned to him but her eyes on Caroline and me, she said, in over-clear nursery tones, ‘Roderick’s a mystery to the clinic, Miss Ayres, Dr Faraday. When he’s in temper he’s the nicest chap, and all we nurses love him. But when he’s out of it—’ She shook her head again, and drew in her breath, and tutted.

Caroline said, ‘It’s all right. He needn’t apologise if he doesn’t want to. I—I don’t want to make him do anything he doesn’t want to do.’

She gazed at her brother, then reached across the table again and spoke quietly and humbly. ‘We miss you, Roddie, that’s all. Mother and I, we miss you so much. We think about you all the time. Hundreds is horrible without you. I just thought you might be … thinking of us, too. I see now that you’re doing fine. I’m—I’m so glad.’

Rod remained stubbornly silent. But his features tightened, and his breathing grew laboured, as if he were keeping in check some tremendous emotion. The nurse moved closer to us and spoke more confidentially.

‘I’d let him alone now, if I were you. I should hate for you to see him in one of his rages.’

We had spent less than ten minutes with him. Caroline rose, reluctantly—unable to believe that her brother would let us go without a word or look. But he didn’t turn, and at last we had to leave him. She went on ahead to the car while I spoke briefly with Dr Warren, and when I joined her, her eyes were red, but dry: she had been crying and had blotted the tears.

I took her hand. ‘That was grim. I’m sorry.’

But she spoke tonelessly. ‘No. We shouldn’t have come. I should have listened to you, before. I’ve been stupid, thinking we’d find something here. There’s nothing, is there? Nothing. It’s all just how you said.’

We began the long trip back to Hundreds. I put my arm around her whenever the driving would allow. She kept her hands open in her lap, and her head moved slackly against my shoulder with the motion of the car—as if, disappointed, bewildered, she had lost all resistance and life.

N
one of this, of course, was particularly inspiring to romance; and our affair, for the moment, rather languished. Between the frustrations of that, and my anxiety about her and about Hundreds generally, I began to feel burdened and fretful, sleeping poorly, with muddled dreams. I thought several times of confiding in Graham and Anne. But it was many weeks since I had spent any proper time with them; I had the impression they were slightly hurt by my neglect, and I didn’t like to go creeping back to them now in a spirit of failure. At last even my work started to suffer. On one of my evenings at the hospital I found myself assisting on some routine piece of minor surgery, and I did the job so badly, the physician in charge laughed at me and finished it off himself.

It happened to be Seeley. We stood together afterwards, washing our hands, and I apologised for my distraction. He answered with his usual affability.

‘Not at all. You look done up! I know the feeling. Too many night calls, I suppose? This bad weather doesn’t help.’

I said, ‘No, it doesn’t, does it?’

I turned away from him, but felt his eyes still on me. We went through to the common-room to retrieve our outdoor things, and as I lifted down my jacket from its hook it somehow slithered through my fingers, spilling the contents of its pockets to the floor. I swore, and bent to gather them up, and when I rose I found that Seeley was watching me again.

‘You’re in a bad way,’ he said, smiling. He lowered his voice. ‘What’s the problem? Patient troubles, or your own?—Forgive my asking.’

‘No, it’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s patient business, I suppose. But then again mine too, in a way.’

I very nearly said more—badly wanting to get the thing off my chest, but thinking back to that unpleasant little moment at the January dance. Perhaps Seeley was also recalling it, and wanted to make up for his behaviour, or perhaps he could simply see from my manner how really troubled I was. He said, ‘Look, I’m all finished here now, and I assume you are, too? How about coming back with me for a drink? Believe it or not, I’ve managed to put my hands on a bottle of Scotch. Gift from a grateful lady patient. Can I tempt you?’

‘To your house?’ I said, in some surprise.

‘Why not? Come on. You’ll be doing my liver a favour by taking a glass or two, for otherwise I’ll only drink the whole damn bottle myself.’

It seemed months, suddenly, since I had done anything as ordinary as sitting down in another man’s home with a glass of liquor, so I said I would. We wrapped ourselves up against the cold and headed out to our cars—he, in his slightly flamboyant way, in a thick brown coat and a pair of fur driving-mittens, which made him look something like a genial bear; I, more modestly, in my overcoat and muffler. I set off first, but he soon overtook me in his Packard, speeding recklessly along the frosty country lanes. When, twenty-five minutes later, I drew up at the gate of his house, he was already inside, already setting out the bottle and glasses and making up the fire.

His house was a rambling Edwardian place, full of bright, untidy rooms. He had married quite late in life, and he and his young wife, Christine, had four good-looking children. As I let myself in through the unlocked front door, two of the children were in the process of chasing each other up and down the staircase. Another was beating a tennis-ball against the drawing-room door.

‘God damn you blasted kids!’ Seeley bellowed, from the doorway of his study. He waved me into the room beyond him, apologising for the chaos. But he had an air, too, of being secretly pleased by it, and proud of it—as people often were, I’d noticed, when complaining of their large, noisy families to bachelors like me.

That thought put a distance between us. He and I had worked together as amiable rivals for nearly twenty years, but we had never exactly been friends. As he uncorked the bottle, I looked at my watch and said, ‘You’d better make it a small one. I’ve a heap of prescriptions to do up tonight.’

But he let the whisky flow. ‘All the more reason to pour it stiff. Give your patients some surprises! God, this smells good, doesn’t it? Here’s fun.’

We touched glasses and drank. He gestured with his tumbler to a couple of dilapidated armchairs, hooking a foot around one to draw it closer to the fire for me, then doing the same with the other for himself; rucking up the dusty rug in the process, and not caring. From out in the hall the thunder of children went on, and in another minute the door was flung open and one of the good-looking boys put in his head and said, ‘Father.’

‘Get out!’ roared Seeley.

‘But, sir—’

‘Get out, or I’ll cut off your ears! Where’s your mother?’

‘She’s out in the kitchen with Rosie.’

‘Well, go and pester her, you little sub!’

The door was closed with a bang. Seeley sipped violently at his whisky, at the same time fishing in his pocket for his case of Players. For once I beat him to it with my own case and lighter, and he sat back with the cigarette gripped between his lips.

‘Scenes from Domestic Life,’ he said, with a show of weariness. ‘Do you envy me, Faraday? You shouldn’t. A family man never makes a good family doctor; he has too many worries of his own. There ought to be a law making physicians single men, like Catholic priests. They’d be the better for it.’

‘You don’t believe that for a moment,’ I said, after drawing on my own cigarette. ‘Besides, if it were true, I’d be the proof of it.’

‘Well, and so you are. You’re a finer doctor than I am. You had a harder journey to get there, too.’

I raised a shoulder. ‘I wasn’t much of a shining example tonight.’

‘Oh, routine work. You bring out the goods when the goods are needed. You said yourself, you’ve things on your mind … Want to talk about that? I’m not trying to pry, by the way. I know it helps sometimes, that’s all, to chew over difficult cases with another medical man.’

He spoke lightly but sincerely, and the slight resistance I’d been feeling—a resistance to the charm of his manner, his untidy house, his handsome family—began to ebb. Perhaps it was simply the whisky doing its work, or the warmth of the fire. The room was such a contrast to my dreary bachelor home—a contrast, too, I realised suddenly, to Hundreds Hall. I had a vision of Caroline and her mother as they probably were at this time of night, hunched and chill and fretful at the heart of that dark, unhappy house.

I turned the glass of whisky in my hand. ‘Perhaps you can guess my trouble, Seeley,’ I said. ‘Or part of it.’

I didn’t look up, but saw him lift his own glass. He took a sip and said quietly, ‘Caroline Ayres, you mean? I thought it must be something along those lines. You took my advice, did you, after that dance?’

I moved uncomfortably, and before I could answer he went on, ‘I know, I know, I was filthy drunk that night, and bloody impertinent. But I meant what I said. What’s gone wrong? Don’t tell me the girl’s turned you down. Too much on her mind, I suppose? Come on, you can trust me, I’m not drunk now. Besides—’

Now I did look up. ‘What?’

‘Well, one can’t help but hear rumours.’

‘About Caroline?’

‘About the whole family.’ He spoke more gravely. ‘A Birmingham friend of mine does some part-time consulting for John Warren. He told me what a shocking state Roderick’s in. A nasty business, isn’t it? I’m not surprised if it’s begun to get Caroline down. Now there’s been some other sort of incident, I gather, out at the Hall?’

‘There has,’ I said, after a moment of silence. ‘And I don’t mind telling you, Seeley, the case is such a bloody queer one, I hardly know what to make of it …’

And I told him pretty much the whole story, beginning with Rod and his delusions, then describing the fire, the scribbles on the walls, the phantom rings on the call-bells, and baldly recounting Mrs Ayres’s horrible experience up in the nurseries. He listened in silence, occasionally nodding, occasionally letting out a bark of grim laughter. But his laughter faded as the tale went on, and when I had finished he sat still for a moment, then leaned forward to flick ash from his cigarette. And what he said as he sat back was: ‘Poor Mrs Ayres. A pretty elaborate way of cutting one’s wrists, wouldn’t you say?’

I looked at him. ‘That’s how you see the case, then?’

‘My dear fellow, what else? Unless the wretched woman was simply the victim of someone’s idea of a nasty joke. I suppose you’ve ruled that out?’

‘I have,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

‘Well, then. The footsteps in the passage, the heavy breathing in the tube: it seems a pretty plain case of psychoneurosis to me. She feels guilty about the loss of her children—Roderick, as well as the little girl. She’s started punishing herself. It was up in the nurseries, you say, that the incident took place? Could she have chosen a more significant setting for the whole affair?’

I had to confess that the same idea had struck me—just as, three months before, I’d been impressed by the fact of the Hundreds fire having broken out in what was effectively the estate office—among the estate papers!—as if it were a concentration of all Roderick’s frustration and dismay.

But something did not ring true to me. I said, ‘I don’t know. Even supposing this experience of Mrs Ayres’s to be purely delusional, and assuming that, incident by incident, we can find a perfectly rational explanation for everything else that’s happened out at the Hall—which, by the way, I think we can. Still, it’s the
cumulative
nature of it all that troubles me.’

He took another sip of his whisky. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, put it like this. A child comes to you with a broken arm; all right, you set the bone and send him home. Two weeks later he returns, with broken ribs this time. Perhaps you patch him up and send him home again. A week later he’s back, with another fracture … The individual broken bones are no longer the main problem, surely?’

‘But we’re not talking about bones,’ said Seeley. ‘We’re talking about hysteria. And hysteria’s altogether stranger—and unfortunately, unlike broken bones, contagious. I was medical officer to a girls’ school years ago, and one term there was a fashion for fainting. You never saw anything like it: girls going down, in assembly, like skittles. In the end even the mistresses were doing it.’

I shook my head. ‘This is a weirder thing even than hysteria. It’s as if—well, as if something’s slowly sucking the life out of the whole family.’

‘Something is,’ he said, with another bark of laughter. ‘It’s called a Labour Government. The Ayreses’ problem—don’t you think?—is that they can’t, or won’t, adapt. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve a lot of sympathy for them. But what’s left for an old family like that in England nowadays? Class-wise, they’ve had their chips. Nerve-wise, perhaps they’ve run their course.’

He sounded like Peter Baker-Hyde now, and I found his briskness rather repellent. After all, I thought, he had never become a friend to the family, as I had. I said, ‘That might be true enough of Rod. Anyone who knew that boy well could have predicted that he was heading for some sort of breakdown. But Mrs Ayres, a suicide? I don’t believe it.’

‘Oh, but I’m not suggesting for a moment that in putting her hands through that window she was really meaning to end her life. I should say that, like most supposedly suicidal women, she was simply creating a nice little drama, with herself at its heart. She’s used to attention, don’t forget, and I can’t imagine she’s been getting too much of it lately … You’ll want to be careful she doesn’t try the same sort of trick again, once all the current fuss has died down. You’re keeping an eye on her?’

‘Of course I am. She seems to be making a full recovery. That baffles me, too.’ I took a gulp of whisky. ‘The whole bloody business baffles me! There are things that have happened, over at Hundreds, that I can’t explain. It’s as if the house is in the grip of some sort of
miasma
. Caroline—’ I spoke reluctantly. ‘Caroline’s even had the idea in her head that there’s been something almost supernatural going on—that Roderick’s been haunting the house, or something, in his sleep. She’s been reading some lurid books. Crank stuff. Frederic Myers, people like that.’