The Little Stranger (63 page)

After another hesitation I admitted that Caroline had, in fact, seemed to me to have been behaving erratically, in the final weeks of her life.

He said, ‘What do you mean by “erratically”?’

I said, ‘She was distant, not herself. She had … odd ideas.’

‘Odd ideas?’

‘About her family, and about her house.’

My voice sank on these words. Peering at me rather as he had peered at Betty, he said, ‘Did Miss Ayres ever mention ghosts or phantoms to you, things like that?’

I didn’t answer.

He went on, ‘We have all just heard a quite extraordinary account of life at Hundreds Hall from the family’s maid, that is why I am asking. You’ll appreciate, I think, that this is an important point. Did Miss Ayres ever at any time speak to you about ghosts or phantoms?’

I said finally, ‘Yes, she did.’

There were more murmurs. This time Riddell ignored them. Looking fixedly at me, he said, ‘Miss Ayres seriously believed her home to be haunted?’

I said, with reluctance, that Caroline had believed that the Hall was in the grip of some sort of influence. A supernatural influence. ‘I don’t think she ever believed in an actual ghost.’

‘But she believed she had seen evidence of this … supernatural influence?’

‘Yes.’

‘What form did the evidence take?’

I took a breath. ‘She believed that her brother had more or less been driven mad by it. She believed that her mother had been affected by it, too.’

‘She believed, like the family maid, that the influence was responsible for her mother’s suicide?’

‘Broadly, yes.’

‘Did you encourage her in that belief?’

‘Of course I didn’t. I deplored it. I thought it morbid. I tried my very best to
dis
courage it.’

‘But the belief persisted?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you account for that?’

I said miserably, ‘I can’t. I wish I could.’

‘You don’t think it was evidence of mental derangement?’

‘I don’t know. Caroline herself spoke to me of a—a family taint. She was afraid, I know that. But you have to understand, there were things that happened at the house—I don’t know.’

Riddell looked troubled, removing his spectacles to pinch at the bridge of his nose. And as he worked the wire arms back around his ears he said, ‘I have to tell you, Dr Faraday, I met Miss Ayres, more than once; many people in this room knew her far better than I did. All of us, I think, would agree that she was the most level-headed of young women. That the Hundreds parlourmaid should have given way to supernatural fancies is one thing. But for an intelligent, healthy, well-bred girl like Caroline Ayres to have come to suppose herself haunted—well, surely some quite serious deterioration must have taken place? This is a terribly sad case, and I realise it may be difficult for you to admit that someone for whom you once cared very deeply was of an unbalanced state of mind. But it seems pretty clear to me that what we are dealing with here is a case of inherited family madness—a family “taint”, in Miss Ayres’s own expression. Could it be that when, in the seconds before she died, she called out “You!”, it was in response to some hallucination? That the madness already had her in its grip? We will never know. I am strongly inclined, however, to instruct the jury to return a verdict of “suicide whilst of unsound mind”.

‘But I am not a doctor,’ he continued. ‘You are the family physician, and I would like your support on that verdict. If you do not feel able to give me that support, you must say so, very plainly; in which case, my instruction to the jury may have to be different. Can you offer me that support, or not?’

I gazed down at my hands; they were shaking slightly. The room was warmer than ever, and I was horribly aware of the jurors’ eyes. Again I had the sense that something was on trial here, something in which I was personally and guiltily involved.

Was
there a taint? Is that what had terrorised the family, day after day, month by month, and finally destroyed it? That was what Riddell believed, clearly, and once I would have agreed with him. I would have set out the evidence just as he had, until it told the story I wanted it to tell. But my confidence in that story was shaken now. It seemed to me that the calamity that had overtaken Hundreds Hall was a far stranger thing; not a thing to be decided on, neatly, in a small plain room in a court of law.

But then, what
was
it?

I looked up, into the sea of watchful faces. I caught sight of Graham, and Hepton, and Seeley. I think Seeley nodded slightly—though whether he was urging me to speech, or to silence, I don’t know. I saw Betty, gazing at me with her light, bewildered eyes … Then across that image there came another: the Hundreds landing, lit bright by the moon. And once again I seemed to see Caroline, making her sure-footed way along it. I saw her doubtfully mounting the stairs, as if drawn upwards by a familiar voice; I saw her advance into the darkness, not quite certain of what was before her. Then I saw her face—saw it as vividly as the faces all around me. I saw recognition, and understanding, and horror, in her expression. Just for a moment—as if it were there, in the silvered surface of her moonlit eye—I even seemed to catch the outline of some shadowy, dreadful thing—

I seized the wooden rail in front of me, and heard Riddell say my name. The clerk hastily brought more water; there were more murmurs from the court. But the moment of giddiness had already passed, and the fragment of Hundreds nightmare that I had glimpsed had retreated into darkness. And what did it matter now, anyway? Everything was finished, now; wasted and gone. I wiped my face, and stood more steadily, and turned to Riddell to say in a toneless voice that, yes, I would support him. I believed Caroline’s mind, in the last few weeks of her life, to have become clouded, and her death to have been a suicide.

He thanked me, and stood me down, then gave his summing up of the case. The jury retired, but with such a clear direction, they had little to debate: they soon returned, with the expected verdict and, after the usual formalities, the inquest was closed. People stood, chairs scraped and grated. The voices rose up. I said to Graham, ‘For God’s sake, let’s go quickly, can we?’

He put his hand under my elbow and steered me from the room.

I
didn’t look at any of the newspapers that came out later that week, but I gather they made a great deal of Betty’s account of Hundreds being ‘haunted’. I understand that a few ghoulish people even contacted the house-agent, posing as prospective buyers in an attempt to be given a tour of the Hall; and once or twice when I was out on the Hundreds road at that time I saw cars or bicycles drawn up at the park gates, and people peering through the ironwork—as if the house had become an attraction for trippers, like a castle or a stately home. Caroline’s funeral drew spectators, for the same sort of reason, though it was kept as modest as possible by her uncle and aunt, with no pealing of the church-bell, no display of flowers, and no wake. The crowd of actual mourners was small, and I stayed well to the back of it. I took along the unworn wedding-ring, and held it in my pocket, and turned and turned it between my fingers as the coffin was lowered.

T
hat was just over three years ago. Since then, I have kept very busy. When the new Health Service arrived I didn’t, as I’d feared I would, lose patients; in fact I gained them, probably partly as a result of my connection with the Ayreses, for, like those Oxfordshire squatters, many people had come across my name in the local papers and seemed to see me as a sort of ‘coming man’. I am told now that I am popular, that my manner is down-to-earth. I still practise out of Dr Gill’s old place at the top of Lidcote High Street; it still suits a bachelor, well enough. But the village is rapidly expanding, there are many new young families, and the consulting-room and dispensary look increasingly out-of-date. Graham, Seeley, and I have begun to talk of combining practices in a brand-new health centre, with Maurice Babb to build it.

Roderick’s condition, unfortunately, has failed to improve. I had hoped that the loss of his sister might finally release him from his delusion: for what, I thought, could he possibly still have to fear from Hundreds, after that? But Caroline’s death, if anything, has had the opposite effect. He blames himself for all the tragedies, and seems bent on self-punishment. He has burnt and bruised and scalded himself so many times he’s now kept almost permanently sedated, and is the shadow of the boy he once was. I go to see him when I can. That is easier than it used to be, because with the final drying up of the family income it became impossible for him to remain at Dr Warren’s rather costly private clinic. These days he is a patient at the county mental hospital, sharing a ward with eleven other men.

The council houses on the edge of Hundreds Park have been a great success—so much so that last year a dozen more were added, and others are planned. Many of the families are on my list, so I am out there quite often. The houses are cosy enough, with neat flower and vegetable gardens, and swings and slides set up for the children. Only one real change has been made, and that is that the chain-link fences at the rear of the estate have been replaced by a fence of wood. The families themselves requested this: it seems that none of them much enjoyed gazing out from their back windows at the Hall; they said the house ‘gave them the creeps’. Stories about the Hundreds ghost continue to circulate, mainly among the younger people and the newcomers, people with no real knowledge of the Ayreses themselves. The most popular tale, I gather, is that the Hall is haunted by the spirit of a servant-girl who was badly treated by a cruel master, and who jumped or was pushed to her death from one of the upstairs windows. She’s regularly seen in the park, apparently, weeping and weeping as though her heart will break.

I bumped into Betty once, on the road in front of the houses. One of the families living out there is related to hers. It was a few months after Caroline’s death. I saw a young woman and a young man coming out through a garden gate as I was parking my car; a minute later I drew in my door to let them pass, and the young woman paused and said, ‘Don’t you know me, Dr Faraday?’ I looked into her face, and saw those wide grey eyes of hers, and her little crooked teeth; I wouldn’t have recognised her otherwise. She was wearing a cheap summer frock with a fashionable swing to its skirt. Her colourless hair had been lightened and permed, her lips and cheeks were red with rouge; she was still small, but her slightness had gone, or else she’d found some artificial way to improve her figure. I suppose she was almost sixteen. She told me she was still living with her parents, and her mother was still ‘carrying on’, but she’d at last got the sort of job she wanted, in a bicycle factory. The work was dull enough, but the other girls were ‘a laugh’; she had her evenings and her weekends to herself, and often went dancing up in Coventry. She kept her arm through that of her young man all the time she spoke. He looked about twenty-two or -three: almost the same age as Roderick.

She made no reference to the inquest, or to Caroline’s death, and I began to think, as she chattered on, that she wasn’t going to mention Hundreds at all—as if the whole dark interlude had left no mark on her. But then the people she had been visiting looked out of their house and called to the young man, and once he had moved off her bright manner seemed slightly to fade.

I said quietly, ‘You don’t mind coming so close to Hundreds then, Betty?’

She blushed, and shook her head.

‘I wouldn’t go back in the house, though. Not for a thousand pounds! I have dreams about it, all the time.’

‘Do you?’ I never dreamt about it now.

‘Not bad dreams,’ she said. She wrinkled up her nose. ‘Funny dreams. I dream most about Mrs Ayres. I dream she tries to give me things, jewels and brooches and things like that. And I never want to take them, I don’t know why; and in the end it makes her cry … Poor Mrs Ayres. She were such a nice lady. Miss Caroline, too. It wasn’t fair, was it, what happened to them?’

I agreed that it wasn’t. We stood sadly for a moment, with nothing more to say. I thought what a very unremarkable pair we must have made to anybody watching; and yet, out of the wreckage of that terrible year, she and I were the only survivors.

Then her young man ambled back to us, and she grew pert again. She gave me her hand in farewell, put her arm through his, and they headed off towards the bus-stop. I saw them still there, twenty minutes later, when I returned to my car: they were larking about on the bench, he had pulled her into his lap and she was kicking up her legs and laughing.

H
undreds Hall is still unsold. No one has the money or the inclination to take it on. For a while there was talk of the county council making a teacher-training centre of it. Then a Birmingham businessman apparently considered it for an hotel. But the rumours surface, and come to nothing; and recently they’ve begun to surface less often. Probably the look of the place has begun to put people off—for of course, the gardens are hopelessly overgrown now, and the terrace has been lost to the weeds; children have chalked on the walls and thrown stones at the windows, and the house seems to sit in the chaos like some wounded, blighted beast.

I go out there whenever my busy days will allow. None of the locks has been changed, and I still have my keys. Very occasionally I’ll find that someone has been there in my absence—a tramp or a squatter—and has tried to force the door; the doors are solid ones, however, and on the whole the Hall’s reputation keeps outsiders away. And there is nothing to steal, for what Caroline failed to sell in the weeks before she died, her uncle and aunt disposed of.

The downstairs rooms I tend to keep shuttered. The second floor has been giving me some anxiety lately: there are holes appearing in the roof, where slates have been lost in bad weather; a family of swallows has come right into the old day-nursery and built a nest there. I put down pails to catch the rainwater, and have boarded up the worst of the broken windows. Every so often I go right through the house, sweeping up the dust and the mouse-dirt. The saloon ceiling still holds, though it can only be a matter of time before the bloated stucco tumbles. Caroline’s bedroom continues to fade. Roderick’s room, even now, smells faintly of burning … Despite all this, the house retains its beauty. In some ways it is handsomer than ever, for without the carpets and the furniture and the clutter of occupation, one appreciates the lines and Georgian symmetries, the lovely shifts between shadow and light, the gentle progression of the rooms. Wandering softly through the twilit spaces, I can even seem to see the house as its architect must have done when it was new, with its plaster detail fresh and unchipped, its surfaces unblemished. In those moments there is no trace of the Ayreses at all. It is as if the house has thrown the family off, like springing turf throwing off a footprint.