The Little Stranger (52 page)

He was silent for a second, then said, ‘You mean, that guff about Myers?’

‘
Was
it guff? You don’t think—I have this feeling, Seeley, of danger. I—’

He was waiting. And when I didn’t finish, he said firmly, ‘You’ve done everything you can. Don’t go troubling yourself now with crazy ideas. Remember what I said to you once before: what’s being asked for here, essentially, is attention. It’s as simple as that. Our patient may dig in her heels tomorrow when it comes to the crunch. But you’ll be giving her what, in her heart, she craves. Get a good night’s sleep now, and don’t brood on it.’

Had our situations been reversed, I would have said exactly the same to him. But I went upstairs, not quite convinced, and had a drink and a cigarette. I ate my supper without appetite, then headed gloomily off to Leamington.

I got through my hours at the hospital in a state of distraction, and when I drove home, at just before midnight, I was still unhappy. As if the thought of Caroline and her mother were exerting some sort of magnetic pull over me, I inadvertently took the turning away from Lidcote, and was a mile along the Hundreds road before I saw what I had done. The weird pallor of the snowy landscape only added to my unease. I felt odd and conspicuous in my black car. For a moment I actually considered carrying on, going out to the Hall; then I realised that to upset the house by arriving late like that would do no good to anyone. So I turned the car around—looking across the bleached fields as I did it, as if searching for a light or some other impossible signal from Hundreds that all was well.

T
he telephone call came through next morning, just as I was sitting down to my breakfast after a broken night’s sleep. There was nothing at all unusual in my being called at that sort of time; patients often rang me then, wanting to be added to my round. But I was already in a keyed-up state, thinking of the difficult day ahead of me, and I sat tensely, straining to hear, as my housekeeper answered. She came back through to me almost at once, looking puzzled and anxious.

‘Excuse me, Doctor,’ she said, ‘but it’s someone wanting to speak to you. I can hardly make her out. But I
think
she said she was calling from over at Hundreds—’

I threw down my knife and fork and ran into the hall.

‘Caroline,’ I said breathlessly, as I picked up the receiver. ‘Caroline, is it you?’

‘Doctor?’ The line was bad because of the snow, but I could tell at once that the voice was not hers. It was high as a child’s, and pinched, with weeping and with panic. ‘Oh, Doctor, can you come? I’m to say, will you come? I’m to tell you—’

It was Betty, I realised at last. But her voice reached me as if from an impossible distance, broken up by puffs and squeals. I heard her say again, ‘I’m to tell you … an accident …’

‘An accident?’ My heart contracted. ‘Who’s hurt? Is it Caroline? What’s happened?’

‘Oh, Doctor, it’s—’

‘For God’s sake,’ I cried. ‘I can hardly hear you! What’s the matter?’

Then, in a sudden burst of clarity: ‘Oh, Dr Faraday, she told me I wasn’t to say!’

And by that, I knew it must be bad.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll come. I’ll come, as quickly as I can!’

I went racing down the stairs to my dispensary, to get my bag, and to throw on my hat and overcoat. Mrs Rush followed me anxiously down. She was used to me racing off to bad confinements and other emergencies, but she had never, I suppose, seen me quite as demented as this. The first of my surgery patients would be arriving soon; I called hastily to her that she must tell them to wait, to come back in the evening, to go elsewhere, do anything. She said, ‘I will. But, Doctor’—holding out a cup—‘you’ve eaten nothing! Drink your tea, at least.’ So I stood for a second longer, gulping the hot tea down, before bowling out of the house and into my car.

It had snowed again in the night, not heavily, but enough to make the drive out to Hundreds a newly treacherous one. Naturally I went too fast, and several times, despite the chains on my tyres, felt the car slip and slide. Had I met another vehicle at those moments I might have added another disaster to that already disastrous day, but as it was, the snow kept other drivers off the roads and I saw almost no one. I looked at my watch as I drove, fretting over the racing minutes. I don’t think I ever felt a journey as keenly as I felt that one; I seemed to sweat out the miles as I covered them, yard by yard. And then, at the gates of the park I had to leave the car altogether and go slithering along the drive. In my haste I’d put on my ordinary shoes, and within a minute my feet were soaked and freezing. Half-way along the drive I caught my ankle and turned it, badly, and had to go running on over the pain.

Betty was at the door of the house as, limping and panting, I arrived at it, and I could see at once from her expression that things were quite as bad as I’d feared. When I joined her at the top of the steps she put her hard little hands across her face and burst into tears.

Her helplessness was no use to me. I said impatiently, ‘Where do you need me?’ She shook her head and couldn’t answer. Beyond her, the house was silent. I peered up the staircase. ‘Up there? Tell me!’ I caught her by the shoulders. ‘Where’s Caroline? Where’s Mrs Ayres?’

She gestured back into the body of the house. I went rapidly along the passage to the door of the little parlour and, finding it ajar, pushed it open, my heart like a hammering fist in my throat.

Caroline was sitting alone on the sofa. I saw her and said, in sick relief, ‘Oh, Caroline, thank God! I thought—I don’t know what I thought.’

Then I saw how strangely she sat there. She wasn’t pale, so much as greyish; but she didn’t tremble, she seemed quite calm. She saw me in the doorway and lifted her head, as if mildly interested—no more—by the sight of me.

I went across to her and took her hand and said, ‘What is it? What’s happened? Where’s your mother?’

She said, ‘Mother’s upstairs.’

‘Upstairs, alone?’

I turned. She drew me back. ‘It’s too late,’ she said.

And then, bit by bit, the whole frightful story came out.

S
he had sat with her mother the day before, it seemed, just as I’d instructed. First she had read aloud to her; then, when Mrs Ayres had begun to doze, she’d put the book aside and had Betty bring her her sewing. They had sat together like that, companionably, until seven o’clock, when Mrs Ayres went alone to the bathroom. Caroline didn’t think she could very well accompany her there, and in fact her mother reappeared, having washed her hands and face, looking ‘rather brighter’ than before; she even insisted on changing her clothes, putting on a smarter gown for dinner. They took the meal in the little parlour, as they usually did these days. Mrs Ayres’s appetite seemed good. Made wary and anxious by me, Caroline watched her very closely, but she seemed ‘just her ordinary self’—just the ordinary self, in other words, that she had lately become, ‘quite quiet, and tired; distracted but not at all nervous’. When the dinner was cleared away, the two women stayed in the little parlour, listening to a crackling music programme on the house’s portable wireless. Betty brought them cocoa at nine o’clock; they read, or sewed, until half past ten. Only then, Caroline said, did her mother grow restless. She went to one of the windows and put back the curtain, and stood looking out at the snow-covered lawn. Once she tilted her head and said, ‘Do you hear that, Caroline?’ Caroline, however, could hear nothing. Mrs Ayres remained at the window until the draught drove her back to the fire. The fit of restlessness, apparently, had passed; she spoke of ordinary things and her voice was steady, again she seemed ‘just herself’.

So calm did she appear, in fact, that at bedtime Caroline was almost embarrassed to insist on sitting with her in her room. She said it made her mother unhappy, too, to see her settling down with a blanket in the not very comfortable armchair, while she herself lay alone in the bed. But, ‘Dr Faraday says I must,’ she told her mother, and her mother smiled.

‘You might be married already.’

‘Hush, Mother,’ said Caroline, self-conscious. ‘How silly you are.’

She had given her mother a Veronal to take, and the drug acts swiftly, Mrs Ayres was asleep within minutes. Caroline tiptoed over to her once, to make sure she was warmly covered by her blankets, then she settled down again as best she could on the uncomfortable chair. She’d brought up a flask of tea with her, and kept a dim lamp burning, and was content enough, for the first couple of hours, with her novel. But when her eyes began to smart she closed the book, and smoked a cigarette, and simply watched her mother sleep; and then, with nothing to check them, her thoughts became gloomy. She pictured all that was to happen the following day, all I planned to do, bringing in David Graham, taking her mother away … My anxiety and sense of urgency had impressed and frightened her, before. Now she began to doubt me. Those old ideas rose up in her, about the house—about there being something in it, or something that came to it, that wished her family harm. She looked through the shadows at her mother, lying slackly in her bed, and she said to herself: ‘Surely he’s wrong. He has to be wrong. In the morning I’ll tell him. I won’t let him take her, not like that. It’s too cruel. I’ll—I’ll take her myself. I’ll go away with her, right away. It’s this house that’s hurting her. I’ll take her away, and she’ll recover. I’ll take Roddie, too—!’

Her thoughts ran wildly like that, until her head began to feel like an engine, churning and hot. By now, several hours had passed: she looked at her watch and found that it was almost five, well past the dead point of the night, but still an hour or two from daybreak. She needed the lavatory, and she wanted to wash and cool her face. Her mother was apparently still deeply asleep, so she went around the landing, past the shut door of Betty’s room, to the bathroom. Then, her flask of tea finished and her eyes still sore, she thought to calm herself down and keep herself awake by smoking another cigarette. The packet in her cardigan pocket was empty, but she knew there was another in the drawer of her bedside table; and since she could see very clearly across the well of the staircase into her mother’s room, she went into her own room, sat on her bed, got a cigarette out, and lit it. To make herself more comfortable she just kicked off her shoes and raised her legs, so that she was sitting against her pillow with the ashtray in her lap. Her bedroom door was wide open, and the view across the landing was a very clear one. She kept impressing this fact on me, when we talked about it later. By turning her head, she said, she could actually see, through the dimness, the footboard of her mother’s bed. The house was so still, she could even hear the steady gentle push and draw of her mother’s breaths …

The next thing she knew, Betty was at her side with the breakfast tray. There was a tray for Mrs Ayres, too, sitting out on the landing. Betty wanted to know what she ought to do with it.

‘What?’ asked Caroline thickly. She had woken from the deepest phase of sleep, unable to understand why she was on her bed rather than in it, fully dressed, very chilled, with a spilling ashtray in her lap. She propped herself up, and rubbed her face. ‘Take the tray in to my mother, can’t you? But if she’s asleep, don’t wake her. Leave it for her beside her bed.’

‘That’s just it, miss,’ said Betty. ‘I think madam must still be asleep, for I’ve knocked and I’ve got no answer. And I can’t take it in; the door’s locked.’

At that, Caroline woke properly. Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was just after eight. The day was bright beyond the curtain—unnaturally bright, because of the snowy ground. Alarmed, queasy, trembling with lack of sleep, she rose and went rapidly around the landing to her mother’s room. Just as Betty had claimed, its door was closed and locked, and when she tapped on the door—lightly at first, but then more firmly, as her anxiety mounted—she received no answer.

‘Mother!’ she called. ‘Mother, are you awake?’

Still no reply. She beckoned to Betty. Could she hear anything? Betty listened, then shook her head. Caroline said, ‘She might, I suppose, be sleeping too deeply. But then, the door—It was closed when you got up?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘But I know I remember—I’m
sure
I remember—that both the doors were open. We don’t have a spare key for this, do we?’

‘I don’t think so, miss.’

‘No, neither do I. Oh, God! Why the hell did I leave her?’

Trembling harder, she knocked on the door again, louder than before. Again no answer. But then she thought to do what Mrs Ayres herself had recently done when faced with an inexplicably locked door: she stooped, and put her eye to the keyhole. And she was reassured to see that the keyhole was empty, and the room beyond it quite light. For, not unnaturally, she took this to mean that her mother was not in the room at all. She must have locked the door when she left it, and taken the key away with her. Why would she have done that? Caroline couldn’t imagine. She got to her feet and, with more confidence than she felt, she said, ‘I don’t think my mother’s in there, Betty. She must be somewhere in the house. I suppose you’ve been in the little parlour?’

‘Oh, yes, miss. I’ve been and laid the fire in there.’

‘She couldn’t be down in the library, I suppose. And she wouldn’t have gone upstairs—would she?’

She and Betty gazed at each other, both thinking back to that horrible incident of a few weeks before.

‘I’d better go up and take a look,’ said Caroline at last. ‘Wait here for me.—No, on second thoughts, don’t wait here. Check all the rooms on this floor, and then check downstairs. My mother might have had some accident.’

They went off in separate directions, Caroline running upstairs, then laboriously trying every door, and calling out. The shady corridors didn’t frighten her. She found the nurseries, as I had, bleak but lifeless, and quite empty. Defeated, she returned to the door of her mother’s room. A moment later Betty joined her. She had also found nothing. She had tried every room—and she had looked from the windows, too, in case Mrs Ayres had gone outside. There were no new footprints in the snow, she said; and madam’s coat, she added, was still on its peg in the porch, and her boots were dry on the rack.