The Little Stranger (28 page)

She gave a gloomy shrug. ‘Mother thinks that once the room has been cleaned, we might as well just close it up like the others. We certainly don’t have the money to restore it.’

‘What about insurance money?’

She glanced again at Mrs Bazeley and Betty. They were still scrubbing at the walls, and under cover of the rasp of their brushes she said quietly, ‘Rod let the insurance payments go. We just found out.’

‘He let them go!’

‘Months ago, apparently. As a way of saving money.’ She closed her eyes, and slowly shook her head, then moved to the French window. ‘Come outside for a minute, would you?’

We went down the stone steps and I surveyed the damaged furniture, the ruined desk and table, the armchair with its leather covering gone, its springs and horsehair stuffing laid bare like the diseased bones and intestines of some fantastic anatomical model. It made very bleak viewing, and the day, though rainless, was cold; I saw Caroline shiver. I wanted to examine her and Betty, along with her mother and brother, so I said she ought to take me back into the house, to the little parlour or somewhere warm. But after a slight hesitation she looked in through the open window, then drew me further away from it. She coughed again, grimacing against her swollen throat as she swallowed.

She said very quietly, ‘You spoke to Mother yesterday. Did she say anything to you about how the fire might have started?’

She kept her eyes on mine. I said, ‘She told me only that it had broken out in Rod’s room after all of you had gone to bed, and that you found it and put it out. I guessed that Rod, being so drunk, had done something silly with a cigarette.’

‘We thought the same,’ she said, ‘at first.’

I was struck by that ‘at first’. I said warily, ‘What does Rod himself remember?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘I suppose he passed out, and then—what? Could he have woken later, gone to the fire, lit a spill?’

She swallowed uncomfortably again, and spoke with something of an effort. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know what to think.’ She nodded back in through the window. ‘Did you notice the fireplace?’

I looked, and saw the grate covered over with the grey mesh guard. Caroline said, ‘That’s exactly how it was when I left Rod, a few hours before the fire started. When I went back in, the grate was dark as if it hadn’t been disturbed. But the other fires, well, I keep picturing them. There wasn’t just one, you see. There were, I don’t know, maybe five or six.’

‘As many as that?’ I said, shocked. ‘It’s a miracle, Caroline, that none of you is more seriously hurt!’

‘That isn’t what I mean … They taught us about fire in the Wrens. They talked about how fire spreads. It creeps, you know. It doesn’t leap. These fires, they were more like the separate small fires that might have been started by—by incendiaries or something. Look at Rod’s chair: it’s as though flames broke out right in the middle of it; the legs are untouched. The desk and table are the same. And, these curtains.’ She caught up the pair of brocade curtains that had burned themselves free from their rings, and which had been slung over the back of the ruined armchair. ‘The fire starts here, look, half-way up. How can that be? The walls to either side of them are only scorched. It’s as if—’ She glanced back into the room, more afraid than ever of being overheard. ‘Well, Rod’s having been careless with a cigarette or a candle is one thing. But it’s as if these fires were set. Deliberately set, I mean.’

I said, appalled, ‘You think that Rod—?’

She answered quickly, ‘I don’t know. I simply don’t know. But I’ve been thinking about what he told you, that time at your surgery. And those marks we found on his walls—they were burns, weren’t they? Well, weren’t they? They make a horrible sort of sense now. Besides, there’s another thing.’

And then she told me about that odd little incident down in the kitchen, when the parcel of newspaper had apparently burst into flame behind Rod’s back. At the time, as I’ve reported, they’d all supposed it the work of a cinder. But since then Caroline had gone to have another look at the scene, and had found a box of kitchen matches on one of the shelves close by. She didn’t think it very likely, but it seemed to her just possible that, with no one’s eyes upon him, Roderick could have got hold of one of the matches and started the blaze himself.

This seemed to me to be simply too much. I said, ‘I don’t want to doubt you, Caroline. But you’d all been through such an ordeal. I’m not surprised you saw more flames.’

‘You think we imagined the burning paper? All four of us?’

‘Well—’

‘We didn’t imagine it, I promise you that. The flames were real. And if Roddie didn’t start them, then … what did? That’s what scares me, almost more than anything. That’s why I think it
has
to have been Rod.’

I didn’t quite know what she was getting at; but she was plainly very frightened. I said, ‘Look, let’s be calm about this. There’s no proof, is there, that the fire was anything other than an accident?’

She said, ‘I’m not so sure. I wonder, for instance, what a policeman would make of it. You heard that Paget’s man was out here yesterday, bringing the meat? He smelt the smoke, and wandered round to look through the windows before I could stop him. He was a fireman in Coventry during the war, you know. I told him some slush about an oil-heater, but I saw him having a good look round, taking everything in. I could see in his face that he didn’t believe me.’

‘But what you’re suggesting,’ I said softly, ‘is monstrous! To think of Rod, cold-heartedly going about the room—’

‘I know! I know, it’s horrible! And I don’t say he did it deliberately, Doctor. I don’t believe he wanted to hurt anyone. I’ll believe anything but that. But, well—’ Her expression grew pinched, and desperately unhappy. ‘Can’t people do hurtful things, sometimes, and not even know they’re doing them?’

I didn’t answer. I looked around me again, at the ruined furniture: the chair, the table, the desk with its charred and ashy surface, over which I had so often seen Rod poring in a state very like despair. I remembered how, a few hours before the fire, he had been raging against his father, against his mother, against the whole estate.
There’ll be tricks tonight
, he had said to me, with dreadful coyness; and I’d looked from him—hadn’t I?—into the shadows of his room, and seen the walls and ceiling of it marked—almost swarming!—with those unnerving black smudges.

I passed a hand across my face. ‘Oh, Caroline,’ I said. ‘What a ghastly business. I can’t help but feel responsible.’

She said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I should never have left your brother alone! I let him down. I’ve let you all down … Where is he now? What does he say?’

Her look grew odd again. ‘We’ve put him upstairs in his old room. But listen, we can’t get anything sensible out of him. He—he’s in pretty dreadful shape. We think we can rely on Betty, but we don’t want Mrs Bazeley to see him. We don’t want anyone to see him, if we can help it. The Rossiters called yesterday, and I had to send them away, in case he made some sort of fuss. It isn’t shock, it—it’s something else. Mother’s taken his cigarettes and everything like that. She’s—’ Her eyelids fluttered, and a little blood crept into her cheeks. ‘She’s locked him in.’

‘Locked him in?’ I couldn’t believe it.

‘She’s been thinking about the fire, you see, like I have. She supposed it an accident at first; we all did. Then, from the way he was behaving and the things he said, it was clear that something else was going on. I had to tell her about the other things. Now she’s afraid of what he’ll do next.’

She turned away and started coughing, and this time the cough would not subside. She had spoken too long and too feelingly, and the day was too cold. She looked terribly weary and ill.

I took her through to the little parlour, and it was there that I examined her. Then I went upstairs, to look at her mother and her brother.

I went to Mrs Ayres first. She was propped up against her pillows, swathed in bedjackets and shawls, her long hair loose about her shoulders, making her face seem pale and pinched. But she was clearly very glad to see me.

‘Oh, Dr Faraday,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Can you believe this new calamity? I’m beginning to think my family must have some sort of curse upon it. I don’t understand it. What have we done? Whom have we angered? Do you know?’

She asked this almost seriously. I said, as I hitched up a chair and began to examine her, ‘You’ve certainly had more than your share of bad luck. I’m so sorry.’

She coughed, leaning forward to do it, then sinking back into her pillows. But she held my gaze. ‘You’ve seen Roderick’s room?’

I was moving the stethoscope. ‘Just a second, please … Yes.’

‘You saw the desk, the chair?’

‘Do try not to speak for a moment.’

I drew her forward again, in order to listen at her back. Then, putting my stethoscope away, and feeling her eyes still on me, I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘And what do you make of them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think you do. And oh, Doctor, I never imagined I would live to be afraid of my own son! I keep picturing what might have happened. Every time I close my eyes, I see flames.’

Her voice caught. Another fit of coughing overtook her, more serious than the first, and she couldn’t finish. I held her shoulders as she shook, then gave her water to sip, and a clean handkerchief with which to wipe her mouth and eyes. She fell back into her pillows again, flushed and exhausted.

I said, ‘You’re talking too much.’

She shook her head. ‘I have to speak! I’ve no one to discuss this with save you and Caroline, and she and I have been talking each other in circles. She told me things, yesterday—extraordinary things! I couldn’t believe it! She said that Roderick’s been behaving almost like a madman. That his room was burned, before this. That she showed you the marks?’

I moved uncomfortably. ‘She showed me something, yes.’

‘You wouldn’t come to me, either of you?’

‘We didn’t want to unsettle you. We wanted to spare you if we could. Naturally, if I had had any idea that Roderick’s condition would lead to something like this—’

Her expression grew unhappier. ‘His “condition”, you call it. So you knew he was ill.’

I said, ‘I knew he wasn’t well. To be frank, I suspected he was far from well. But I made him a promise.’

‘He came to you, I think, and told you some tale about this house. About there being something in it, wishing him harm? Is that true?’

I hesitated. She saw, and said, with humble earnestness, ‘Please be honest with me, Doctor.’

So I said, ‘Yes, it’s true. I’m sorry.’ And I recounted everything that had happened: Rod’s fit of panic in my dispensary, his bizarre and frightening story, his sulkiness and temper since then, the threats implicit in some of his words …

She listened in silence—putting out her hand, after a moment, and blindly catching hold of mine. Her fingernails, I saw, were ridged and elderly, and still dirty with soot. Her knuckles were marked from flying embers, the scars a little echo of her son’s. Her grip grew tighter the more she learned, and when I had finished speaking she looked at me as if bewildered.

‘My poor dear boy! I had no idea. He was never strong like his father, I knew that. But to think of his mind giving way like this! Did he really—’ She put her other hand to her breast. ‘Did he really speak like that against Hundreds? Against me?’

I said, ‘You see? This is precisely why I hesitated to tell you. He wasn’t himself when he said those things. He hardly knew what he was saying.’

She seemed not to have heard me. ‘Can it be true that he hates us all so much? Is that why this has happened?’

‘No, no. It’s clearly the strain—’

She looked more bewildered than ever. ‘The strain?’

‘The house, the farm. The after-shock of his accident. His time in the service.—Who knows? Does it matter what’s caused it?’

Again, she didn’t seem to be listening. She clutched my fingers and said, as if really anguished, ‘Tell me, Doctor: am I to blame?’

The question, and the obvious force of emotion behind it, surprised me. I said, ‘Of course you aren’t.’

‘But I’m his mother! This is his home! For this thing to have happened—it isn’t natural. It isn’t right. I must have failed him in some way. Have I? Suppose there were something, Dr Faraday—’

She drew away her hand, and lowered her eyes as if ashamed. ‘Suppose there were something,’ she went on, ‘that had got in the way of my feelings for him, when he was a boy. Some shadow, of upset, or grief.’ Her voice flattened. ‘I expect you know that I once had another child, before Caroline and Roderick were born. My little girl, Susan.’

I nodded. ‘I remember it. I’m sorry.’

She made a gesture, turned her head, acknowledging my sympathy, but also shrugging it off, as if it could have no bearing on her grief. She said, in the same almost matter-of-fact way as before, ‘She was my one true love. Does that sound odd to you? I never expected, when I was young, that I should fall in love with my own child, but she and I were like sweethearts. When she died, I felt for a long time that I might as well have died with her. Perhaps I did … People told me that the best and soonest way to get over the loss of a child was to start another, as quickly as one could. My mother told me that, my mother-in-law, my aunts, my sister … And then, when Caroline was born, they said something else. They said, “Well, naturally, a little girl will put you in mind of the lost one, you must try again, you must try for a boy; a mother always loves her sons …” And, after Roderick: “Why, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you know that people of our sort don’t make a fuss? Here you are, in your fine home, with your husband who came through the war, and two healthy children. If you can’t find a way to be happy with that, you must simply stop complaining—” ’

Again she coughed, and wiped her eyes. I said, when the cough had subsided, ‘It was hard for you.’

‘Harder for my children.’

‘Don’t say that. Love isn’t a thing that can be weighed and measured, surely?’

‘Perhaps you’re right. And yet—I
do
love my children, Doctor; truly I do. But what a very dull and half-alive thing that love has seemed to me, sometimes! Because
I
have been half alive, you see … Caroline, I think, it hasn’t harmed. Roderick was always the sensitive one. Could it be that he grew up feeling a sort of falseness in me, and hating me for it?’