The Little Stranger (4 page)

‘Oh for a scone, and jam, and cream!’ said Mrs Ayres, as the plates were handed out. ‘Or even a really good biscuit. I say that with you in mind, Dr Faraday, not us. We’ve never been a sweet-toothed family; and naturally’—she looked mischievous again—‘as dairy farmers, one would hardly expect us to have butter. But the worst of rationing is, it has quite killed hospitality. I do think that a pity.’

She sighed, breaking her cake into pieces and dipping them daintily into her milkless tea. Caroline, I noticed, had folded her slice in half and eaten it down in two bites. Roderick had set his plate aside in order to concentrate on his cigarette and now, after idly picking out the peel and the sultanas, he threw the rest of his cake to Gyp.

‘Roddie!’ said Caroline, reproachfully. I thought she was protesting at the waste of food; it turned out she didn’t like the example her brother was setting to the dog. She caught the animal’s eye. ‘You villain! You know that begging isn’t allowed! Look at the sidelong glances he’s giving me, Dr Faraday. The old sly boots.’ She drew her foot from her sandal, extended a leg—her legs, I saw now, were bare, and tanned, and quite unshaven—and prodded his haunches with her toes.

‘Poor old thing,’ I said politely, at the dog’s forlorn expression.

‘Don’t be taken in. He’s a dreadful ham—aren’t you, hey? You Shylock!’

She gave him another nudge with her foot, then turned the nudge into a rough caress. The dog at first rather struggled to keep his balance under the pressure of it; then, with the defeated, slightly bewildered air of a helpless old man, he lay down at her feet, lifting his limbs and showing the grey fur of his chest and his balding belly. Caroline worked her foot harder.

I saw Mrs Ayres glance over at her daughter’s downy leg.

‘Really, darling, I do wish you would put some stockings on. Dr Faraday will suppose us savages.’

Caroline laughed. ‘It’s far too warm for stockings. And I should be very surprised indeed if Dr Faraday had never seen a bare leg before!’

But she did, after a moment, draw her leg back and make an effort to sit more demurely. The dog, disappointed, lay with his limbs still raised and crooked. Then he rolled on to his front and began to gnaw wetly at one of his paws.

The smoke of Roderick’s cigarette hung bluely in the hot, still air. A bird in the garden gave some distinctive throbbing call, and we turned our heads to listen to it. I looked around the room again, at all the lovely faded detail; then, twisting further in my seat, with a shock of surprise and pleasure I got my first proper view through the open window. An overgrown lawn ran away from the house for what looked like thirty or forty yards. It was bordered by flower-beds, and ended at a wrought-iron fence. But the fence gave on to a meadow, which in turn gave onto the fields of the park; the fields stretched off into the distance for a good three-quarters of a mile. The Hundreds boundary wall was just about visible at the end of them, but since the land beyond the wall was pasture, giving way to tilth and cornfield, the prospect ran on, uninterrupted, finishing only where its paling colours bled away completely into the haze of the sky.

‘You like our view, Dr Faraday?’ Mrs Ayres asked me.

‘I do,’ I said, turning back to her. ‘When was this house built? 1720? 1730?’

‘How clever you are. It was finished in 1733.’

‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘I think I can see what the architect must have had in mind: the shady corridors, with the rooms opening from them, large and light.’

Mrs Ayres smiled; but it was Caroline who looked over at me as if pleased.

‘I’ve always liked that, too,’ she said. ‘Other people seem to think our gloomy passages a bit of a bore … But you should see the place in winter! We’d happily brick up all the windows then. For two months last year we more or less lived in this one room. Roddie and I brought in our mattresses and slept here like squatters. The pipes froze, the generator broke; outside there were icicles three feet long. We never dared leave the house, for fear of being harpooned … You live above your surgery, don’t you? In old Dr Gill’s place?’

I said, ‘I do. I moved in there as a junior partner, and have never moved out. It’s a plain enough place. But my patients know it; and it suits a bachelor, I suppose.’

Roderick tapped ash from his cigarette.

‘Dr Gill was a bit of a character, wasn’t he? I went into his surgery once or twice when I was a boy. He had a great glass bowl he said he used to keep leeches in. It frightened the pants off me.’

‘Oh, everything frightened you,’ said his sister, before I could respond. ‘You were so easy to scare. Do you remember that giantess of a girl who used to work in the kitchen when we were young? Do you remember her, Mother? What was her name? Was it Mary? She was six foot two-and-a-half; and she had a sister who was six foot three. Daddy once made her try on one of his boots. He’d made a bet with Mr McLeod that the boot would be too small. He was right, too. But her hands were the thing. She could wring clothes better than a mangle. And her fingers were always cold—always freezing, like sausages straight from the meat-safe. I used to tell Roddie that she crept into his room while he was sleeping and put her hands under his blankets, to warm them up; and it used to make him cry.’

‘Little beast,’ said Roderick.

‘What
was
her name?’

‘I believe it was Miriam,’ said Mrs Ayres, after a moment’s consideration. ‘Miriam Arnold; and the sister you’re thinking of was Margery. But there was another girl, too, less huge: she married a Tapley boy, and the two of them went off to be chauffeur and cook at some house out of the county. Miriam went from us to Mrs Randall, I think. But Mrs Randall didn’t take to her, and only kept her for a month or two. I don’t know what became of her then.’

‘Perhaps she took up garrotting,’ said Roderick.

‘Perhaps she joined a circus,’ said Caroline. ‘We really did have a girl once, didn’t we, who ran away to join the circus?’

‘She certainly married a circus man,’ said Mrs Ayres. ‘And she broke her mother’s heart by doing it. She broke her cousin’s heart too, because the cousin—Lavender Hewitt—was also in love with the circus man, and when the other girl went off with him, she gave up eating and would have died. And she was saved, as her mother used to say, by rabbits. For she could resist any dish except her mother’s stewed rabbit. And for a time we let her father take a ferret over the park, to get all the rabbits he pleased; and it was the rabbits that saved her …’

The story ran on, Caroline and Roderick prompting more of it; they spoke to each other rather than to me, and, shut out of the game, I looked from mother to daughter to son and finally caught the likenesses between them, not just the similarities of feature—the long limbs, the high-set eyes—but the almost clannish little tricks of gesture and speech. And I felt a flicker of impatience with them—the faintest stirring of a dark dislike—and my pleasure in the lovely room was slightly spoiled. Perhaps it was the peasant blood in me, rising. But Hundreds Hall had been made and maintained, I thought, by the very people they were laughing at now. After two hundred years, those people had begun to withdraw their labour, their belief in the house; and the house was collapsing, like a pyramid of cards. Meanwhile, here the family sat, still playing gaily at gentry life, with the chipped stucco on their walls, and their Turkey carpets worn to the weave, and their riveted china …

Mrs Ayres had recalled another servant. ‘Oh, she was a moron,’ Roderick said.

‘She wasn’t a
moron
,’ said Caroline, fairly. ‘But it’s true she was awfully dim. I remember she once asked me what sealing-wax was, and I told her it was a very special sort of wax for putting on ceilings. I made her stand on a pair of ladders and try some out on the ceiling of Daddy’s study. And it made a horrible mess, and the poor girl got into dreadful trouble.’

She shook her head, embarrassed, but laughing again. Then she caught my eye; and my expression must have been chilly. She tried to stifle her smiles.

‘I’m sorry, Dr Faraday. I can see you don’t approve. Quite right, too. Rod and I were frightful children; but we’re much nicer now. You’re thinking of poor little Betty, I expect.’

I took a sip of my tea. ‘Not at all. As it happens, I was thinking of my mother.’

‘Your mother?’ she repeated, a trace of laughter still in her voice.

And in the silence that followed, Mrs Ayres said, ‘Of course. Your mother was nursery maid here once, wasn’t she? I remember hearing that. When was she here? Slightly before my time, I think.’

She spoke so smoothly and so nicely, I was almost ashamed; for my own tone had been pointed. I said, less emphatically, ‘My mother was here until about nineteen seven. She met my father here; a grocer’s boy. A back-door romance, I suppose you’d call it.’

Caroline said uncertainly, ‘What fun.’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’

Roderick tapped more ash from his cigarette, saying nothing. Mrs Ayres, however, had begun to look thoughtful.

‘Do you know,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘I do believe—Now, am I right?’

She went across to a table, on which a number of framed family pictures were set out. She drew one from the arrangement, held it at arm’s length, peered at it, then shook her head.

‘Without my spectacles,’ she said, bringing it to me, ‘I can’t be sure. But I
think
, Dr Faraday, that your mother might be here.’

The picture was a small Edwardian photograph in a tortoiseshell frame. It showed, in crisp sepia detail, what I realised after a moment must be the south face of the Hall, for I could see the long French window of the room we were sitting in, thrown open to the afternoon sunlight just as it was today. Gathered on the lawn before the house was the family of the time, surrounded by a sizeable staff of servants—housekeeper, butler, footman, kitchen-girls, gardeners—they made an informal, almost reluctant group, as if the idea of the picture had occurred belatedly to the photographer, and someone had gone rounding them all up, drawing them away from other tasks. The family itself looked most at ease, the mistress of the house—old Mrs Beatrice Ayres, Caroline and Roderick’s grandmother—seated in a deck chair, her husband standing at her side, one hand on her shoulder, the other tucked loosely into the pocket of his creased white trousers. Lounging with a touch of gaucheness at their feet was the slender fifteen-year-old youth who had grown up and become the Colonel; he looked very like Roderick did now. Seated beside him on a tartan tug were his younger sisters and brothers.

I looked more closely at this group. Most of them were older children, but the smallest, still an infant, was held in the arms of a fair-haired nursemaid. The child had been in the process of wriggling free when the camera shutter had snapped, so that the nursemaid had tilted back her head in fear of flailing elbows. Her gaze, as a consequence, was drawn from the camera, and her features were blurred.

Caroline had left her place on the sofa to come and examine the photograph with me. Standing at my side, bending forward, looping up a lock of dry brown hair, she said quietly, ‘Is that your mother, Dr Faraday?’

I said, ‘I think it might be. Then again—’ Just behind the awkward-looking girl, I noticed now, was another servant, also fair-haired, and in an identical gown and cap. I laughed, embarrassed. ‘It might be this one. I’m not sure.’

‘Is your mother still alive? Could you show her the picture, perhaps?’

I shook my head. ‘My parents are both dead. My mother died while I was still at school. My father had a heart attack a few years later.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Well, it seems long ago …’

‘I hope your mother was happy here,’ Mrs Ayres said to me, as Caroline returned to the sofa. ‘Was she, do you think? Did she ever talk about the house?’

I didn’t answer for a second, recalling some of my mother’s stories about her time at the Hall—how, for instance, she had had to stand each morning with her hands held out while the housekeeper examined her fingernails; how Mrs Beatrice Ayres would every so often come unannounced to the maids’ bedrooms and turn out their boxes, going through their possessions piece by piece … I said finally, ‘I think my mother made some good friends here, among the other girls.’

Mrs Ayres looked pleased; perhaps relieved. ‘I’m glad to hear it. It was a different world for servants then, of course. They had their own entertainments, their own scandals and fun. Their own dinner, on Christmas Day …’

This prompted more reminiscences. I kept my eyes on the picture— slightly thrown, if I’m honest, by the force of my own feelings, for though I’d spoken lightly, I’d found myself more moved by the unexpected appearance of my mother’s face—if it
was
her face—than I would have guessed. At last I put the picture down on the table at the side of my chair. We spoke about the house and its gardens, the grander times that the place had seen.

But I kept glancing over at the photograph as we talked, and my distraction must have been obvious. Our tea was finished. I let a few more minutes pass, then looked at the clock and said I ought to be going. And as I got to my feet, Mrs Ayres said gently, ‘You must take that picture with you, Dr Faraday. I should like you to have it.’

‘Take it?’ I said, startled. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t.’

‘Yes, you must. You must take it just as it is, frame and all.’

‘Yes, do take it,’ said Caroline, when I continued to protest. ‘I shall be doing the housework, don’t forget, while Betty recovers. I shall be awfully glad to have one less thing to dust.’

So, ‘Thank you,’ I said, blushing and almost stammering. ‘It’s awfully kind of you. It’s—Really, it’s far too kind.’

They found me a piece of used brown paper with which to wrap the picture up, and I tucked it safely into my bag. I said goodbye to Mrs Ayres, and patted the dog’s warm dark head. Caroline, who was already on her feet, got ready to take me back to my car. But Roderick moved forward, saying, ‘It’s all right, Caro. I’ll see the doctor out.’

He struggled up from the sofa, wincing badly as he did it. His sister watched him, concerned, but he was clearly determined to escort me. So she gave in, and offered me her worn, well-shaped hand for another shake.