The Little Stranger (32 page)

The wind there was as solid as a velvet curtain; we had almost to fight our way through it. But we walked briskly, Caroline setting the pace, clearly glad to be out of the house, moving easily on those long, thickish legs of hers, her stride more than matching my own. She had her hands thrust deep into her pockets, and her coat, pulled tight by her arms, showed up the flare of her hips and bosom. Her cheeks had pinked with the sting of the wind; her hair, which she had inexpertly tucked up inside a rather frightful wool hat, had here and there escaped and was being lashed by the breezes into dry, demented locks. She seemed not at all breathless, though. Unlike her mother, she’d quickly shaken off the after-effects of the fire, and her face had lost the signs of tiredness I’d seen in it just a few minutes before. Altogether, there was an air of health and easy power to her—as if she could no more help being robust, I thought with a trace of admiration, than a beautiful woman could help good looks.

Her pleasure in the walk was infectious. I began to warm up, and finally to enjoy the buffets of crisp, cold air. It was novel, too, being out in the park on foot, as opposed to driving across it, for the ground that I saw from my car window as a uniform tangle of green looked very different at close range: we found patches of snowdrops, bending gamely in the agitated grass, and here and there, where the grass thinned, tight little coloured buds of crocuses were thrusting their way out of the earth as if ravenous for air and sunlight. All the time we walked, however, we could see ahead of us, at the farthest point of parkland, the breach in the wall and the stretch of muddy ground before it, with six or seven men moving over the area with barrows and spades. And as we drew closer and I caught more detail, I began to understand the true scale of the work. The lovely old grass-snake field was gone completely, gone for ever. Instead, a patch of land a hundred yards or more in length had been stripped of its turf and levelled, and the hard raw earth was already parcelled off into sections by poles and channels and rising walls.

Caroline and I approached one of the trenches. It was still in the process of being filled in, and as we stood at the edge of it I saw with dismay that the rubble being used for the foundations of the new houses consisted mainly of pieces of broken brown stone from the demolished park wall.

‘What a pity!’ I said, and Caroline answered quietly: ‘I know. It’s somehow horrible, isn’t it? Of course people must have homes, and all that. But it’s as if they’re chewing Hundreds up—just so they can spit it all out again in nasty little lumps.’

Her voice dipped lower as she spoke. Maurice Babb himself was there at the edge of the site, talking with his foreman at the open door of his car. He saw us come and, in a leisurely fashion, began picking his way towards us. He was a man in his early fifties, short and rather barrel-chested: prone to boasting, but clever; a good businessman. Like me, he came from labouring stock and had pulled himself up in the world—and he’d done it all, as he’d reminded me once or twice over the years, without the help of a patron. To Caroline he raised his hat. To me, he offered his hand. Despite the coldness of the day his hand was warm, the fingers plump and bunchy and tight in their skin, like half-cooked sausages.

‘I knew you’d be down, Miss Ayres,’ he said affably. ‘My men said the rain would keep you away, but I told them, Miss Ayres isn’t the sort of lady to be kept off by a bit of bad weather. And here you are. Come to keep your eye on us, as usual? Miss Ayres puts my foreman to shame, Doctor.’

‘I can believe it,’ I said, smiling.

Very slightly, Caroline blushed. A few strands of hair were being blown across her lips, and she drew them free to say, not quite truthfully, ‘Dr Faraday was wondering how you’re getting on, Mr Babb. I’ve brought him down to see the work.’

‘Well,’ he answered, ‘I’m very glad to show it! Especially to a medical man. I had Mr Wilson, the sanitary inspector, out here last week. He said there’ll be nothing to beat these places in the way of air and drainage, and I think you’ll find you’ll agree. You see how the ground’s laid out?’ He gestured with one of his thick, short arms. ‘We shall have six houses here, then a break at the curving of the road; and over there, six more. Two homes per house, done semi-detached. Red brick, you’ll notice—’ he indicated the livid, brutal-looking machine-made bricks at our feet—‘to match the Hall. A nice little estate! Step along over here, if you’d care to, and I’ll show you about. Watch your step, Miss Ayres, on these ropes.’

He offered her his bunchy hand. Caroline didn’t need it—she was several inches taller than he was—but obligingly let him guide her over the trench, and we moved further along the site, to a spot where the work was more advanced. He explained again exactly how each house would sit in relation to its neighbours, and then, warming to his theme, he took us into one of the squared-off spaces and sketched the rooms it would soon contain: the ‘lounge’, the fitted kitchen with its gas stove and electric points, the indoor bathroom with a built-in bath … The whole patch looked scarcely bigger than a boxing-ring to me, but apparently they had already had people coming out there, wanting to know how to get their names down for a house. He himself, he told us, had been offered money and ‘any amount of cigarettes and meat’, to ‘pull a few strings’.

‘I told them, it in’t up to me! I said, Go and talk to the Town Hall!’ He lowered his voice. ‘Just between us three, mind, they could talk to the Town Hall till they’re blue in the face. That list’s been filled six months already. My own brother’s boy, Dougie, and his wife, they’ve got their names down for a place, and I hope they gets it, for you know where they’re living just now, Miss Ayres, in two rooms in Southam with the girl’s mother? Well, they can’t go on like that. One of these’d be just the thing for them. Patch of garden they shall have out at the back there, you see, with a path and a chain-link fence. And the Lidcote bus is to be brought this way—had you heard that, Doctor? It’s to come along the Barn Bridge Road. June, I think they’re starting that.’

He ran on like this for a while, until called to by his foreman, at which he made his apologies, offered me his sausage-like hand again, and left us. Caroline moved away to watch another man at work, but I stayed in the squared-off concrete space, standing more or less where I guessed the kitchen window would be placed, and looking back across the park to the Hall. It was clearly visible in the distance, especially with the trees before it so bare; it would be very visible indeed, I realised, from this house’s upper floor. I could see very well, too, how the flimsy wire fences that were to be strung at the back of the houses would do nothing to keep the children of the twenty-four families out of the park …

I joined Caroline at the edge of concrete, and we chatted for a minute with the man she had been watching at work. He was a man I knew quite well; in fact, he was a sort of cousin of mine, on my mother’s side. He and I had shared a desk in the two-roomed council school I’d attended as a young boy; we had been good pals then. Later, once I’d started at Leamington College, the friendship had soured, and for a time he and his elder brother Coddy had rather persecuted me—lying in wait for me, with handfuls of gravel, as I came cycling back home in the late afternoons. But that was a long time ago. Since then he had married, twice. His first wife and child had died, but he had two grown-up sons who had recently moved to Coventry. Caroline asked how they were getting on, and he told us, in the ripe Warwickshire accent I could never quite believe had once also been mine, that they had gone straight into factory jobs, and between them were bringing home a weekly wage of over twenty pounds. I should have been glad to earn that myself; and it was probably more, I thought, than the Ayreses had to live on over a month. But still, the man removed his cap in order to talk to Caroline—though he looked more shyly at me, giving me an awkward sort of nod as we moved off. I knew that even after all this time it was queer for him to call me ‘Doctor’, but out of the question, too, for him either to use my Christian name or to address me as ‘sir’.

I said, as easily as I could, ‘Goodbye, Tom.’ And Caroline said, with real warmth, ‘See you again, Pritchett. It was nice to talk to you. I’m glad your boys are doing so well.’

I wished suddenly, and without quite knowing why, that she wasn’t wearing that ridiculous hat. We turned and began to make our way back to the Hall, and I felt Pritchett pause in his work to watch us, and perhaps to glance at one of his mates.

We went in silence across the grass, following the line of our own dark footprints, both made thoughtful by the visit. When she spoke at last, it was quite brightly, though without meeting my eye.

‘Babb’s a character, isn’t he? And don’t the houses sound marvellous? Very good for your poorer patients, I suppose.’

‘Very good,’ I answered. ‘No more damp floors and low ceilings. Fine sanitation. Separate rooms for the boys and the girls.’

‘A proper start for the children, and so on. And awfully nice for Dougie Babb, if it means he can get away from his horrible mother-in-law … And, oh, Doctor—’ She looked at me at last, then glanced unhappily over her shoulder. ‘I would as soon want to move into a little brick box like that, with a lounge and a fitted kitchen, as live in our old cowshed.’ She leaned to pick up a piece of branch that had been blown across the park, and began to swipe at the ground with it. ‘What
is
a fitted kitchen, anyhow?’

‘There are no nasty gaps,’ I said, ‘and no odd corners.’

‘And no character, I bet. What’s wrong with gaps and odd corners? Who’d want a life without any of those?’

‘Well,’ I said, picturing some of the squalider homes on my round, ‘it’s possible, after all, to have too many.’ And I added almost as an afterthought, ‘My mother would have been glad of a house like that. If I’d been born a different sort of boy, she might well be living in one now, along with my father.’

Caroline looked at me. ‘What do you mean?’

And I told her, briefly, about the struggle my parents had had, simply to keep up with the scholarships and grants that had got me through Leamington College and medical school: the debts they had taken on, the grim economies they had made, my father working extra hours, my mother taking in sewing and laundry when she was barely strong enough to lift the wet clothes from the copper to the pail.

I heard my voice grow bitter, and could not stop it. I said, ‘They put everything they owned into making a doctor of me, and I never even realised my mother was ill. They paid a small fortune for my education, and all I learned was that my accent was wrong, my clothes were wrong, my table manners—all of it, wrong. I learned, in fact, to be ashamed of them. I never took friends home to meet them. They came once to a school speech day; I was receiving a science prize. The look on some of the other boys’ faces was enough. I didn’t invite them again. Once, at seventeen, in front of one of his own customers, I called my father a fool—’

I didn’t finish. She waited a moment, then said, as gently as the blustery day would allow, ‘But they must have been very proud of you.’

I shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But pride doesn’t make for happiness, does it? They’d have been better off, really, if I’d been like my cousins—like Tom Pritchett back there. Maybe
I
’d have been better off, too.’

I saw her frown. She swiped at the ground again. ‘All this time,’ she said, without looking at me, ‘I thought you must hate us slightly, my mother, my brother, and I.’

I said, astonished, ‘Hate you?’

‘Yes, on your parents’ behalf. But now it sounds almost as though—well, as though you hate yourself.’

I didn’t answer, and we walked in silence again, both of us grown rather awkward. Conscious that the day was sliding into evening, we made an effort to quicken our pace. Soon we left our own dark trail, looking for drier ground, and approached the house by a different route, arriving at a spot where the garden fence gave way to an ancient ha-ha, its sides so collapsed and overgrown it was more truthfully, I suggested, a boo-hoo. The comment made Caroline smile, and lifted us out of our low spirits. We struggled through the tangled ditch, then found ourselves in a patch of waterlogged lawn and, as before, had to tiptoe messily across it. My smooth-soled shoes weren’t made for that sort of treatment, and once I slithered very nearly into a splits. She laughed properly at that, the blood creeping up through her throat and into her already pink cheeks, making them glow.

Mindful of our filthy footprints, we went around the house to the garden door. The Hall, as usual now, was unlit, and, though the day was sunless, to move towards it was like stepping into shadow, as if its sheer, rearing walls and blank windows were drawing to themselves the last of the light from the afternoon. When Caroline had wiped her shoes on the bristle mat she paused, looking up, and I was sorry to see lines of tiredness reappearing in her face, the flesh about her eyes puckering faintly like the surface of warming milk.

She said, as she studied the house, ‘The days are still so short. I hate them, don’t you? They make every hard thing harder. I do wish Roddie were here. Now that it’s just Mother and me—’ She lowered her gaze. ‘Well, Mother’s a darling, of course. And it isn’t her fault that she’s unwell. But, I don’t know, sometimes she seems to be growing sillier by the day, and I’m afraid I don’t always keep patience. Rod and I, we used to have fun. Just nonsense things. Before he got ill, I mean.’

I said quietly, ‘It really won’t be too long, before he’s back.’

‘You truly think so? I wish we could see him. It’s so unnatural, to think of him there, ill and alone! We don’t know what’s happening to him. You don’t think we should visit him?’

‘We can go, if you like,’ I said. ‘I’ll happily take you. But Rod himself, he’s given no sign, has he, that he’d like us to visit?’

She shook her head, unhappy. ‘Dr Warren says he likes the isolation. ’

‘Well, Dr Warren should know.’

‘Yes, I suppose so …’

‘Give it more time,’ I told her. ‘As I said before: soon it’ll be spring, and everything will look different then, you’ll see.’