The Little Stranger (40 page)

For a moment, it seemed to Caroline that her mother might have lost her mind. Once she understood what the matter was, she helped Mrs Ayres to her feet and took over the prising of the flap herself, and when she had opened it up she fetched a broomstick and poked about in the flue until her arm ached. By then she was black as a minstrel, having brought down a shower of soot. The soot had not so much as a feather in it, but so certain was Mrs Ayres about the trapped bird—and so ‘peculiarly upset about it’ was she, apparently—that Caroline cleaned herself up and went out into the garden with a pair of opera glasses to examine the chimney-stack. She found the pots of all the chimneys on that side of the Hall covered with wire guards, the wire here and there broken, but so pasted with wet, dead leaves it seemed unlikely to her that a bird could have made its way into one of those cages and gone from there into a flue. But after thinking the matter over on her way back into the house, she told her mother that the pot in question looked to her as though it might recently have held a nest. She said she had seen a bird ‘go into it and then fly out again, quite freely’. That seemed to reassure Mrs Ayres a little, and she dressed and took her breakfast.

But only an hour or so later, while Caroline was finishing off her own breakfast in her room, she was startled to hear her mother cry out. The cry was a piercing one, and sent her running across the landing. She found Mrs Ayres at the open door of her dressing-room, apparently backing feebly away, her arms held out, from something inside it. Only much later would it occur to Caroline that her mother’s pose at this moment might not, in fact, have been one of retreat; at the time she simply dashed to her mother’s side, imagining she’d been struck seriously ill. But Mrs Ayres was not ill—at least, not in the ordinary way. She let Caroline walk her to her chair, pour a glass of water, kneel at her side with her hand in hers. ‘I’m all right,’ she said, wiping her glistening eyes; startling Caroline all the more by her tears. ‘You mustn’t trouble. So foolish of me, after so much time.’

As she spoke, she kept looking over at the dressing-room. Her expression was so odd—so apprehensive and yet somehow so
avid
—Caroline grew afraid.

‘What
is
it, Mother? Why are you looking? What can you see?’

Mrs Ayres shook her head and wouldn’t answer. So Caroline rose and went warily across to the dressing-room door. She told me later that she didn’t know what frightened her more, the prospect of discovering something dreadful in the room beyond it, or the possibility—which at that moment, given her mother’s behaviour, seemed quite strong—of there being nothing untoward in there at all. All she saw at first, in fact, was a jumble of boxes, which her mother had obviously pulled out of their usual place in an attempt to dust them free of the soot that had settled on them from the unsealed chimney. Then her gaze was caught by what in the dimness she took to be a thicker smear of soot low down on one of the walls, which the drawing back of the boxes had exposed. She moved closer and, as her eyes grew used to the light, the patch resolved itself into a block of smudged dark childish writing, exactly like the scribbles she had recently seen downstairs:

At first all she was struck by was the
age
of the marks. They were clearly much older than everyone had been guessing so far, and must have been made not by poor Gillian Baker-Hyde, but by another child entirely, years before. Could she herself, she wondered, have made them? Or Roderick? She thought of cousins, family friends … And then, with a queer little dropping of her heart, she looked again at what had been written, and suddenly understood her mother’s tears. To her own amazement, she felt herself blush. She had to stay in the small dim room for a minute or two in order to let the blush subside.

‘Well,’ she said, when she finally rejoined her mother, ‘at least now we can be sure it wasn’t the Baker-Hyde girl.’

Mrs Ayres answered simply, ‘I never thought it was.’

Caroline stood at her side. ‘I’m sorry, Mother.’

‘What have you to be sorry for, darling?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t say it, then.’ Mrs Ayres sighed. ‘How this house likes to catch us out, doesn’t it? As if it knows all our weaknesses and is testing them, one by one … God, how dreadfully tired I am!’ She made a pad of her handkerchief and pressed it to her forehead, tightly closing her eyes.

‘Is there something I can do for you, or fetch for you?’ asked Caroline. ‘Why don’t you go back to bed for a while?’

‘I’m tired even of my bed.’

‘Stay in your chair and doze, then. I’ll make up the fire.’

‘Like an old woman again,’ grumbled Mrs Ayres.

But she wearily settled herself in the chair, while Caroline saw to the grate; and by the time the flames were lapping at the wood she had put back her head and appeared to be dozing. Caroline looked at her for a moment, struck by the lines of age and sadness in her face, and suddenly seeing her—as, when we are young, we are now and then shocked to see our parents—as an individual, a person of impulses and experiences of which she herself knew nothing, and with a past, with a sorrow in it, which she could not penetrate. All she could do for her mother just then, she thought, was to make her more comfortable, so she moved softly around the room, drawing the curtains part-way across, closing the dressing-room door, adding a blanket to the shawl that lay across her mother’s knees. Then she went downstairs. She didn’t mention the incident to Betty or Mrs Bazeley, but she found she wanted company, so she made up some chore to see to in the kitchen. When she looked in on the bedroom again later she saw her mother sleeping soundly, her pose apparently unchanged.

Mrs Ayres must have woken at some point, though, for now the blanket lay in a heap on the floor, as if brushed or tugged aside; and the dressing-room door, Caroline noticed, which she had gently but firmly closed, stood open again.

I
was still in London while all this was going on. I came home, in the third week of February, in a rather perturbed state of mind. My trip, in many ways, had been a great success. The conference had gone well for me. I’d made the most of my time at the hospital, and become good friends with its staff; in fact, on my final morning one of the doctors had taken me aside to suggest that at some point in the future I might like to consider joining them down there on the wards. He was a man, like me, who had made the move into medicine from humble beginnings. He was determined, he said, to ‘shake things up’, and preferred to work with doctors who had ‘come in from outside the system’. He was the sort of man, in other words, I had once naively imagined I might myself become; but the fact was, he was thirty-three and already head of his department, while I, several years older, had achieved nothing much at all. I spent the train journey back to Warwickshire thinking over his words, wondering if I could live up to his estimation of me, debating with myself whether I could seriously consider abandoning David Graham; wondering, too, rather cynically, what really bound me to my Lidcote life, and whether anyone would miss me if I left it.

The village looked desperately narrow and quaint as I made my way home from the station, and the list of calls awaiting me was the usual round of country ailments—arthritis, bronchitis, rheumatism, chills—it seemed to me suddenly that I had been battling uselessly against conditions like that for the whole of my career. Then there were one or two other cases, discouraging in a different way. A thirteen-year-old girl had got herself pregnant, and had been badly beaten by her labourer father. A cottager’s son had contracted pneumonia: I went to see him at the family home and found him appallingly ill and wasted. He was one of eight children, all of them sick in one way or another; the father was injured and out of work. The mother and grandmother had been treating the boy with old-fashioned remedies, binding fresh rabbit-skins to his chest to ‘draw out the cough’. I prescribed penicillin, more or less paying for the mixture myself. But I doubted they would even use it. They gazed warily at the bottle, ‘not liking the look of the yellow’. Dr Morrison was their regular doctor, they told me, and his mixture was red.

I left their cottage with my spirits thoroughly depressed, and on my way home I took my short-cut across Hundreds Park. Letting myself in through the gate, I planned to call in at the Hall; I’d already been back three days by then, and had had no contact with the Ayreses. But as I drew closer to the house, and saw its marred and wasted faces, I felt a surge of angry frustration, and put my foot down and carried on. I told myself that I was too busy, that there was no point calling in there only to have to give my apologies and rush straight off again …

I told myself something similar the next time I crossed the park, and again the time after that. So I had no clue as to the latest shift in mood in the house until, a few days later, I received a telephone call from Caroline, asking me if I wouldn’t mind dropping in and, as she put it, ‘seeing if I thought everything was all right’.

She rarely called me by telephone, and I wasn’t expecting her to call now. The sound of her low, clear, handsome voice sent a thrill of surprise and pleasure through me, that almost at once became a flutter of concern. Was something wrong? I asked her, and she answered vaguely that, no, nothing was wrong. They had had ‘some trouble with leaking water’, but that was ‘all fixed now’. And, she was well? And her mother? Yes, they were both quite well. There were just ‘one or two things’ she’d like my opinion on, if I could ‘spare the time for it’.

That was all she would say. A sense of guilt flared up in me and I drove more or less straight out there, putting off a patient in order to do it; worrying about what was awaiting me; imagining that she had graver things to tell me but wouldn’t share them on the open line. But when I arrived at the house I found her in the unlit little parlour, in a pose that couldn’t have been more mundane. She was kneeling at the hearth with a pail of water and some crumpled sheets of newsprint, making balls of papier-mâché and rolling them in coal-dust, to be burned on the fire.

Her sleeves were turned up to her elbows and her arms were filthy. Her hair was straggling over her face. She looked like a servant, a plain Cinderella; and the sight of her, for some reason, absolutely enraged me.

She got awkwardly to her feet, trying to wipe off the worst of the muck. She said, ‘You needn’t have come so quickly. I wasn’t expecting you to.’

‘I thought something was the matter,’ I said. ‘
Is
something wrong? Where’s your mother?’

‘She’s up in her room.’

‘Not ill again?’

‘No, not ill. At least—I don’t know.’

She was looking about for something with which to clean her arms, and finally caught up a piece of newspaper and rubbed ineffectually with that. I said, ‘For goodness’ sake!’—moving forward, offering her my handkerchief.

She saw the crisp white square of linen and began to protest. ‘Oh, I mustn’t.’

‘Just take the wretched thing,’ I said, holding it out. ‘You aren’t a skivvy, are you?’ And when she still hesitated, I dipped the handkerchief into the pail of ink-stained water and, possibly not very kindly, rubbed at her arms and hands myself.

In the end we were both slightly filthy, but she, at least, was cleaner than before. She drew down her sleeves and moved back. ‘Sit down, will you?’ she said. ‘Can I get you some tea?’

I stayed standing. ‘You can tell me what the trouble is, that’s all.’

‘There’s nothing to tell, really.’

‘You’ve brought me all this way for nothing?’

‘All this way,’ she repeated, quietly.

I folded my arms, and spoke more gently. ‘I’m sorry, Caroline. Go on.’

‘It’s just,’ she began hesitantly; then, bit by bit she told me what had happened since my last visit: the appearance of the scribbles, first in the saloon and then in the hall; the ‘bouncing ball’ and the ‘trapped bird’; her mother’s discovery of that final patch of writing. To be honest, at this point it didn’t sound like much. I hadn’t then seen the scribbles for myself, but even when I did eventually go to the saloon and examine those phantom irregular
S
’s, I didn’t find them particularly troubling. Now, in response to Caroline’s story, I said, ‘But isn’t it clear what’s happened? Those marks must have been there,’ I thought it over, ‘well, nearly thirty years. The paint must be thinning and letting them through. Probably the damp has caused that. No wonder they won’t rub away; there must be still just enough of a varnish to seal them in.’

‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully, ‘I suppose so. But those creaks, or raps, or whatever you want to call them?’

‘This house creaks like a galleon! I’ve heard it, many times.’

‘It’s never creaked quite like that before.’

‘Perhaps it’s never been quite so damp before; and the place has certainly never been so neglected. Probably the timbers are shifting about.’

She still looked doubtful. ‘But isn’t it strange, the way the tapping seemed to lead us to the scribbles?’

I said, ‘There have been three young children living here. There could be scribbles on every wall … It’s possible too,’ I added, as I thought it over, ‘that your mother knew—I mean, as a sort of forgotten memory—where that second and third patch of handwriting were. The uncovering of the first one might have put the idea in her head. And then, once the creaking started, she might unconsciously have guided the search.’

‘She couldn’t have made those knocks! I felt them!’

‘That, I must admit, I can’t explain—except to suppose that your first idea was right: that it was mice or beetles or some other creature, the sound of it getting magnified somehow by the hollowness of the walls. As for the trapped bird—’ I lowered my voice. ‘Well, I expect it’s already crossed your mind that your mother might have imagined that whole incident?’

‘Yes, it has,’ she answered, speaking quietly, too. ‘She hadn’t been sleeping. But then again, according to her it was the bird that was keeping her awake. And Betty also heard the sound, don’t forget.’

I said, ‘I think Betty, in the middle of the night, would hear just about any sound suggested to her. These things have a circularity to them. Something woke your mother, I don’t doubt that, but then her very sleeplessness may have kept her awake—or kept her dreaming she was awake—and after that, her mind was vulnerable in some way—’