The Little Stranger (49 page)

‘Well,’ said Seeley, stubbing out his cigarette, ‘perhaps she’s on to something.’

I stared at him. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘Why not? Myers’s ideas are the natural extension of psychology, surely?’

I said, ‘Not as I understand psychology, no!’

‘Are you sure? You subscribe, I suppose, to the general principle: a conscious personality, with a subliminal self—a sort of dream-self—attached?’

‘Broadly, yes.’

‘Well, then suppose that dream-self could, in certain circumstances,
break loose
: detach itself, cross space, become visible to others? Isn’t that Myers’s thesis?’

I said, ‘As far as I know. And it makes for a good fireside story. But for God’s sake, there isn’t an ounce of science in it!’

‘Not yet there isn’t,’ he said, smiling. ‘And I wouldn’t like to air the theory in front of the county medical board, certainly. But perhaps in fifty years’ time medicine will have found a way to calibrate the phenomenon, and will have explained it all. Meanwhile, people will go on talking about ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties, simply missing the point …’

He sipped at his whisky, then went on in a different tone. ‘My father saw a ghost once, you know. My grandmother appeared one night at his surgery door. She’d been dead ten years. She said, “Quickly, Jamie! Go home!” He didn’t stop to think it over; he put on his coat and went straight to the family house. He found that his favourite brother, Henry, had injured his hand, and the wound was rapidly turning septic. He cut off a finger, and probably saved his brother’s life. Now, how do you explain that?’

I said, ‘I can’t. But I’ll tell you something.
My
father used to hang a bull’s heart in the chimney, stuck with pins. He had it there to keep evil spirits away. I know how I’d explain
that
.’

Seeley laughed. ‘Not a fair comparison.’

‘Why not? Because your father was a gentleman, and mine a shop-keeper? ’

‘Don’t be so touchy, man! Listen to me, now. I don’t think for a moment that my father truly saw a ghost that night, any more than I think poor Mrs Ayres has been receiving calls from her dead daughter. The idea of one’s deceased relations floating around in the ether, keeping their gimlet eyes on one’s affairs, is really too much to stomach. But suppose the stress of my uncle’s injury, combined with the bond between him and my father—suppose all of that somehow released some sort of … psychic force? The force simply took the shape that would best get my father’s attention. Very bright of it, too.’

‘But what’s been happening at Hundreds,’ I said, ‘there’s nothing benign about that. Quite the reverse.’

‘Is that so surprising, with things for that family so bleak? The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a—a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop—to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of
shadow-self
, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice, and frustration … Caroline suspects her brother. Well, as I said before, she might be right. Maybe it wasn’t only bones that got fractured in that crash of his. Maybe it was something even deeper … Then again, it’s generally women, you know, at the root of this sort of thing. There’s Mrs Ayres, of course, the menopausal mother: that’s a queer time, psychically. And don’t they even have some teenage housemaid out there, too?’

I looked away from him. ‘They do. She’s the one who got them all thinking about spooks in the first place.’

‘Is that right? And how old is she? Fourteen? Fifteen? Doesn’t get much chance to flirt with the boys, I imagine, stuck out there.’

I said, ‘Oh, she’s a child still!’

‘Well, the sexual impulse is the darkest of all, and has to emerge somewhere. It’s like an electrical current; it has a tendency, you know, to find its own conductors. But if it goes untapped—well, then it’s a rather dangerous energy.’

I was struck by the word. I said slowly, ‘Caroline spoke of “energies”.’

‘Caroline’s a clever girl. I always thought she got the thick end of things in that family. Kept at home with a second-rate governess while the boy was packed off to public school. And then, just when she’d got out, to be dragged back again by her mother, so that she could wheel Roderick up and down the terrace in his Bath chair! Next I suppose she’ll be wheeling Mrs Ayres. What she needs, of course—’ He smiled again, and the smile was sly. ‘Well, it’s hardly my place. But the girl isn’t getting any younger; and, my dear fellow, neither are you! You’ve put this whole case before me and haven’t mentioned your own situation once. What exactly is it? You and she have some sort of … understanding, is that it? Nothing firmer than that?’

I felt the whisky inside me. Raising my glass for another gulp I said quietly, ‘The firmness is all on my side. Rather too much of it, to be honest with you.’

He looked surprised. ‘Like that?’

I nodded.

‘Well, well. I’d never have guessed it. Of Caroline, I mean … Though there, perhaps, you have the root of your
miasma
.’

His expression was slyer than ever now, and I took a second to understand him. I said at last, ‘You aren’t suggesting—?’

He held my gaze, then started to laugh. He was enjoying himself enormously, I realised suddenly. He polished off the rest of his whisky, then generously refilled our glasses and lit a second cigarette. He began to tell me another ghost story, this one more fantastic than the last.

But I barely heard it. He’d started me thinking, and the beat of my thoughts, like the ticking arm of a metronome, would not be stilled. It was all nonsense; I knew it was nonsense. Every ordinary thing around me worked against it. The fire was crackling in the grate. The children still thundered on the staircase. The whisky was fragrant in the glass … But the night was dark at the window, too, and a few miles away through the wintry darkness stood Hundreds Hall, where things were different.
Could
what he had suggested have any truth to it?
Could
there be something loose in that house, some sort of ravenous frustrated energy, with Caroline at its heart?

I thought back, to the start of it all—to the night of that unlucky party, when Caroline had been so humiliated, and the Baker-Hyde child had ended up hurt. What if some process had begun that night, some queer seed been sown? I remembered, in the weeks that followed, Caroline’s mounting hostility towards her brother, her impatience with her mother. Both her brother and her mother had become injured, just like Gillian Baker-Hyde. And it was Caroline who had first brought those injuries to my attention—Caroline who had noticed the burns in Roderick’s room, who had discovered the fire, who had heard the taps and felt ‘the little rapping hand’ behind the wall.

Then I thought of something else. The thing that had started with Gyp, perhaps as a ‘nip’ or a ‘whisper’—as Betty, I suddenly recalled, had put it—that thing had been slowly gathering strength. It had moved things about, lit fires, put scribbles on a wainscot. Now it could run on pattering feet. It could be heard, as a struggling voice. It was growing, it was developing …

What would it be next?

Unnerved, I moved forward. Seeley offered the bottle again, but I shook my head.

‘I’ve wasted enough of your time. I really must go. It’s been good of you to listen.’

He said, ‘I’m not sure I’ve done much to reassure you. You look worse than you did when you arrived! Why not stay longer?’

But he was interrupted by the noisy re-entrance of his good-looking son. Loosened up by the whisky, he leapt from his chair and chased the child back out into the hall, and by the time he had returned to me I had finished my drink and had my hat and coat on, ready to leave.

He had a better head for alcohol than I did. He saw me breezily to the door, but I made my way out into the night not quite steady on my feet, and feeling the liquor, hot and sour, in my unlined stomach. I drove the short distance home, then stood in my cold dispensary, the nausea rising like a wave inside me—and, rising with it, something worse than nausea; almost a dread. My heart was beating unpleasantly hard. I took off my coat, and found I was sweating. After a moment of indecision I went through to my consulting-room. I picked up the telephone and, with clumsy fingers, dialled the Hundreds number.

It was after eleven. The phone rang and rang. Then came Caroline’s cautious voice. ‘Yes? Hello?’

‘Caroline! It’s me.’

Her tone at once grew anxious. ‘Is something the matter? We’d gone to bed. I thought—’

I said, ‘Nothing’s the matter. Nothing. I—I just wanted to hear your voice.’

I spoke simply, I suppose. There was a silence, and then she laughed. The laughter was tired, ordinary. The dread and the nausea began to dwindle, as if punctured by a pin.

She said, ‘I think you must be a little drunk.’

I wiped my face. ‘I think I am. I’ve been with Seeley, and he’s been plying me with whisky. God, what a brute that man is! He’s had me thinking … ridiculous things. It’s so good to hear you, Caroline! Say something else.’

She tutted. ‘How silly you are! What on earth will the operator think? What should I say?’

‘Say anything. Say a poem.’

‘A poem! All right.’ And she went on, in a prompt, perfunctory way: ‘ “ The frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind.” Now go to bed, will you?’

‘I will, in a second. I just want to think of you there. Everything’s all right, isn’t it?’

She sighed. ‘Yes, everything’s all right. The house is behaving itself for once. Mother’s asleep, unless you’ve woken her.’

I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Caroline. Good night.’

‘Good night,’ she said, laughing tiredly again.

She put up the receiver, and I heard the laughter fade. Then came the click of the broken connection, followed by the vague hiss and muddle of other people’s voices, trapped in the wire.

T
he next time I called in at Hundreds I found Barrett there: Caroline had brought him in to rip out that troublesome speaking-tube. I saw the tube as he took it away, and, just as I’d guessed, its braiding in places was loose and torn, the rubber beneath quite perished; it looked as harmless and pathetic, coiled in his arms, as a mummified snake. Mrs Bazeley and Betty, however, were reassured by its removal, and began to lose the air of tension and dread that had possessed them both since the day of what we all now referred to as Mrs Ayres’s ‘accident’. Mrs Ayres herself also continued to recover well. Her cuts healed cleanly. She spent her days down in the little parlour, reading, or dozing in her chair. There was just a slight trace of glassiness or remoteness to her, to hint at the ordeal she had been through—and most of that I put down to the effects of the Veronal, which she was continuing to take to help her sleep at nights, and which in the short term, I thought, could do her no harm. I rather regretted that Caroline was kept so much indoors now, sitting with her mother, for it meant that she and I had even fewer opportunities to be alone together. But I was glad to see that she, too, was less preoccupied and fretful. She seemed to have become reconciled to the loss of her brother, for instance, since our visit to the clinic; and, to my very great relief, there was no more talk of poltergeists and spooks.

But then, there were no more mysterious occurrences, either—no rings on the bells, no raps, no footsteps, no more curious incidents of any kind. The house continued to, as Caroline had put it, ‘behave itself’. And as March drew to a close and one uneventful day gave way to another, I really began to think that the strange spell of nervousness that had been cast over Hundreds in the past few weeks must somehow, like a fever, have reached its crisis and worn itself out.

T
hen, at the end of the month, there came changes in the weather. The skies darkened, the temperature plummeted, and we had snow. The snow was a novelty—nothing at all like the impossible blizzards and drifts of the previous winter—but it was a nuisance to me and my fellow GPs, and even with chains on its tyres my Ruby struggled with the roads. My round became something of a slog, and for more than a week the park at Hundreds was quite impassable, the drive too treacherous to be risked. Still, I managed to get out to the Hall quite often, leaving the car at the east gates and going the rest of the way on foot. I went mainly to see Caroline, not liking to think of her out there, cut off from the world. I went to keep an eye on Mrs Ayres, too. But I also liked those journeys for their own sake. Breaking free of the snowy drive, I never got my first glimpse of the house without a thrill of awe and pleasure, for against the white, white ground it looked marvellous, the red of its brick and the green of its ivy more vivid, and all its imperfections softened by a lace-work of ice. There would be no hum from the generator, no snarl of machinery from the farm, no clash of building-work: the building-work had been suspended because of the snow. Only my own quiet footsteps would disturb the silence, and I would move on, almost abashed, trying to muffle them further, as if the place were enchanted—as if it were the castle of the
Belle au Bois Dormant
I remembered Caroline envisaging a few weeks before—and I feared to break the spell. Even the interior of the house was subtly transformed by the weather, the glass dome above the stairwell now translucent with snow, making the hall dimmer than ever, and the windows letting in a chill reflected light from the whitened ground, so that shadows fell puzzlingly.

The stillest of those snowbound days was a Tuesday, the sixth of April. I went out to the house in the afternoon, expecting to find Caroline, as usual, sitting downstairs with her mother; but it was Betty, it seemed, who had been keeping Mrs Ayres company that day. They had a table between them, and were playing draughts, with chipped wooden pieces. A good fire was crackling in the grate, and the room was warm and stuffy. Caroline had gone over to the farm, her mother told me; she was expected back within the hour. Would I stay, and wait for her? I was disappointed not to see her, and it was the quiet period before my evening surgery, so I said I would. Betty went off to make our tea, and I took her place at the draught-board for a couple of games.