The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

  ‘Yes, I see that.’

  ‘And you don’t judge me too badly, over the girl? I swear to God, if I had known—’

  ‘No, no. No one could blame you for that. There’s just one thing I’d like to do now. I’d like to examine you, if I may.’

  ‘Examine me? Why?’

  ‘I think you’re pretty tired, aren’t you?’

  ‘Tired? God, I’m out on my feet! I hardly dare close my eyes at night. I’m frightened this thing will return if I do.’

  I had risen to fetch my bag, and, as if in obedience to a signal, he began to draw off his sweater and shirt. He stood on the hearth-rug in his vest and trousers, with that dirty bandage on his wrist, rubbing his arms against the chill and looking shockingly thin and vulnerable and young; and I made a brief, basic examination, listening at his chest, reading his blood-pressure, and so on. But I did it, to be honest, mainly to buy myself a little time, for I could see—anyone could have seen—what the real nature of his trouble was. What he had told me, in fact, had pretty well shaken me to the core, and I needed to think about how to proceed with him.

  As I’d guessed, there was nothing obviously wrong with him beyond the fact that he was underfed and overtired; and that was true of half my neighbours. I took my time putting my instruments away, still thinking. He stood buttoning up his shirt.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You said it yourself, Rod: you’re exhausted. And exhaustion—well, it does odd things to us, plays odd tricks.’

  He frowned. ‘Tricks?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I can’t pretend to you that what you’ve told me has made me anything but extremely alarmed. I don’t want to mince words with you. I think your problem is a mental one. I think—Listen to me, Rod.’ He’d begun to turn away, in disappointment and anger. ‘I think that what you’ve been experiencing can best be described as a sort of nerve-storm. They’re more common than you might think, in certain over-stressed people. And let’s face it, you’ve been under an enormous pressure ever since you came out of the Air Force. I think that that pressure, combined with war-shock—’

  ‘War-shock!’ he said scornfully.

  ‘Delayed war-shock. That’s more common than you would think, too.’

  He shook his head, saying firmly, ‘I know what I know. I know what I saw.’

  ‘You know what you think you saw. What your tired and overstretched nerves persuaded you to see.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that! Don’t you understand? God, I wish I’d said nothing. You asked me to tell you. I didn’t want to, but you made me. Now you throw it back at me like this, making me out to be some sort of loony!’

  ‘If you could just get a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘I told you: the thing will come back if I do.’

  ‘No, Rod. I promise you, it will only return if you don’t, because it’s a delusion—’

  ‘A delusion? That’s what you think?’

  ‘—a delusion which is feeding on your own tiredness. I think you should get away from the Hall for a while. Right away, on some sort of holiday.’

  He was pulling on his sweater, and when his face emerged from the neck of it he looked at me in disbelief. ‘Go away? Haven’t you been listening to a single thing I’ve said? If I were to leave, who knows what would happen!’ He hastily smoothed down his hair and started putting on his overcoat. He’d caught sight of the clock. ‘I’ve been away too long already. That’s your fault, too. I must get back.’

  ‘At least let me give you some Luminal.’

  ‘Dope?’ he said. ‘You think that’ll help me?’ And then, with an edge to his voice, seeing me go to a shelf and bring down a tub of tablets: ‘No. I mean it. They pumped me full of those after my smash. I don’t want them. Don’t give them to me, I’ll throw the damn things away.’

  ‘You might change your mind.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  I came back around the counter empty-handed. ‘Rod, please. Listen to me. If I can’t persuade you to leave the house, well, there’s a man I know, a good physician. He has a clinic, in Birmingham, for cases like yours. Let me bring him in to talk to you; to listen to you. That’s all he’ll want to do: just listen to you while you talk to him as you spoke, just now, to me.’

  His face had set. ‘A mental doctor, you mean. A psychiatrist, or psychologist, or whatever the hell you call them. That’s not my trouble. The trouble isn’t mine at all. The trouble’s at Hundreds. Can’t you see? I don’t need a doctor so much as a,’ he groped for a word, ‘a vicar or something. If you’d felt what I had—’

  I said on impulse, ‘Let me come with you, then! Let me spend some time in your room, and see if this thing appears!’

  He hesitated, thinking it over; and the sight of him doing that, treating the idea as if it were possible, sensible, reasonable, was almost more disturbing than anything else. But then he shook his head and spoke coldly again.

  ‘No. I can’t risk it. I won’t tempt it. It wouldn’t like that.’ He put on his cap. ‘I have to go. I’m sorry I told you any of this. I should have known you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Please listen to me, Rod.’ The thought of losing him, now, was dreadful. ‘I can’t let you go in this state of mind! Have you forgotten how you were just now? That dreadful panic? Suppose that comes over you again?’

  He said, ‘It won’t. You caught me off-guard, that’s all. I shouldn’t have come here in the first place. I’m needed at home.’

  ‘At least talk to your mother, then. Or let me talk to her for you.’

  ‘No,’ he said sharply. He had moved to the door but now turned back to me, and, as once before, I was disconcerted to see real anger in his eyes. ‘She mustn’t know about any of this. Nor my sister. You’re not to tell them. You said you wouldn’t. You gave me your word, and I trusted you. You’re not to talk to that doctor friend of yours, either. You say I’m going crazy. All right, go ahead and believe that, if it makes you feel better; if you’re too much of a coward to face the truth. But at least have the decency to let me go crazy all by myself.’

  His tone was hard and level, and absurdly rational-sounding. He put the strap of his satchel over his shoulder and drew together the lapels of his coat, and only the paleness of his face and the slight redness of his eyes hinted at the fantastic delusion that had him in its grip; apart from that he looked, as he’d looked before, like a youthful country squire. I knew there was no keeping him now. He had moved back to the dispensary door, but it was clear, from sounds beyond it, that the first of my evening patients were arriving, so he gestured impatiently to my consulting-room and I took him in there, to let him out into the garden. But I did it with a very heavy heart, and a dreadful sense of frustration; and as soon as the door was closed I went back to the dispensary window and stood at the dusty net curtain to watch him reappear from around the side of the house and make his rapid, limping way along the High Street to his car.

  What was I to do? It was clear to me—horribly clear—that over the past few weeks Rod had been the victim of some very powerful hallucinations. That, in a sense, was hardly to be wondered at, given the dreadful mix of burdens he’d recently had to bear. Evidently the sense of threat and strain had overspilled in his mind, to the extent that even ‘ordinary things’, as he’d repeatedly put it, seemed to be rising up against him. That the delusion had first struck on the night he was meant to host a party for his more successful neighbour was perhaps no surprise; and I thought it sadly significant, too, that the worst of his experience had centred on a mirror—which, before it had started on its ‘walk’, had been reflecting his scarred face, and had ended up shattered. All this, as I say, was shocking enough, but could be explained away as the product of stress and nerve-strain. More upsetting and worrying, to my mind, was the fact that he was still so attached to the delusion he had produced this logical-seeming fear that his mother and sister would be ‘infected’ by whatever diabolical thing had supposedly invaded his room, unless he was there to ward it
off.

  I spent the next few hours turning his condition over and over in my mind. Even as I sat with my other patients, a part of me seemed still to be with Rod, listening in horror and dismay as he told his dreadful story. I don’t think there has ever been a time in my professional life when I have felt at such a loss as to how to proceed. No doubt my relationship with the family was interfering with my judgement. Probably I should have handed the case over, at once, to another man. But then, it what sense was it a case? Rod had not come to me that day for a medical opinion. He had, as he himself had pointed out, been unwilling to confide in me at all. And there was certainly no question of me or any other physician being paid for our assistance or advice. I didn’t, at this point, suspect him of being a danger to himself or to others. I thought it much more likely that his delusion would slowly gather strength until it had finally consumed him: that he would wear himself, in other words, into a state of complete mental breakdown.

  My biggest dilemma was over what, if anything, to say to Mrs Ayres and Caroline. I had given Rod my word that I would say nothing; and while I had been only half serious in comparing myself to a priest, no doctor takes a promise of secrecy lightly. I passed a terribly fretful evening, deciding now one thing and now another … Finally, at almost ten, I ran over to the Grahams’ house, to talk the matter through with them. I’d been spending less time with them lately, and Graham was surprised to see me. Anne, he said, was upstairs—one of their children was slightly unwell—but he took me into their sitting-room, and heard the story through.

  He was as shocked by it as I had been.

  ‘How on earth did things get so bad? Were there no warnings?’

  I said, ‘I knew something wasn’t right; but not like this.’

  ‘What do you mean to do next?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to work out. I don’t even have a firm diagnosis. ’

  He thought it over. ‘You’ve considered epilepsy, I suppose?’

  ‘It was my very first idea. I still think it might explain some of it. The aura, producing queer sensations—auditory, visual, and so on. The seizure itself, the weariness after; it all fits, to a degree. But I can’t believe it’s the whole story.’

  He said, ‘How about myxœdema?’

  ‘I thought of that, too. But that’s pretty hard to miss, isn’t it? And there are no indications.’

  ‘Could something be interfering with the brain function? A tumour, for example?’

  ‘Christ, I hope not! It’s possible, of course. But again, there are no other signs … No, my hunch is it’s purely nervous.’

  ‘That’s just as bad, in its way.’

  I said, ‘I know. And his mother and sister have no idea. Do you think I should tell them? That’s what’s really troubling me.’

  He shook his head, blowing out his cheeks. ‘You know them better than I do, now. Roderick certainly won’t thank you for it. On the other hand, it might push him to some sort of crisis.’

  ‘Or put him completely out of reach.’

  ‘That’s certainly a risk. Why not take a day or two to think it over?’

  ‘And meanwhile,’ I said gloomily, ‘things at Hundreds inch further into chaos.’

  ‘Well that, at least,’ he said, ‘isn’t your problem.’

  His tone was rather detached: I could recall it from other conversations of ours about the Ayreses, but it slightly jarred with me now. I finished my drink and went slowly home, grateful to him for having listened, relieved to have shared the details of the case, but no wiser as to how to proceed. And it was only as I stepped into my dark dispensary and saw the two chairs still standing at the stove, and seemed to hear again Rod’s halting, desperate voice, that the full force of his story came back to me; and I realised it was my plain duty to the family to give them at least some inkling of his condition, as soon as I could.

  But it was a pretty dismal journey I made out to the house the following day. It seemed that all my business with the Ayreses just now lay either in warning them of something or in carrying out some dreary undertaking on their behalf. With the return of daylight, too, there had come a slight failing in my resolve. I thought again of the promise I’d made, and I drove, if such a thing is possible, in a shrinking, reluctant sort of way, hoping more than anything not to encounter Rod himself, either there in the park or in the house. It was only a few days since my last visit, and neither Mrs Ayres nor Caroline was expecting me; I found them both in the little parlour, but could see at once that, by turning up out of the blue like this, I had rather thrown them.

  ‘Why, Doctor, you keep us on our toes!’ Mrs Ayres said, raising a ringless hand to her face. ‘I shouldn’t have dressed so weekdayishly if I had known you were coming. And have we anything in the kitchen, Caroline, to offer the doctor with his tea? I believe we’ve bread, and margarine. You had better ring for Betty.’

  I hadn’t wanted to telephone ahead for fear of alerting Roderick, and I was so used now to coming and going to and from Hundreds, it hadn’t occurred to me that my visit might put them out. Mrs Ayres spoke politely, but with a faintly querulous tone to her voice. I had never seen her so discomposed before; it was as if I’d surprised her without her charm, as well as without her powder and rings. But the reason for her touch of temper became clear in another moment, for in order to sit down I had to move aside several sagging flat boxes from the sofa: they were boxes of old family photograph albums that Caroline had recently unearthed in one of the morning-room cupboards, and which had proved on inspection to be foxed with damp and spotted with mildew, and practically ruined.

  ‘Such a tragedy!’ said Mrs Ayres, showing me the crumbling pages. ‘There must be eighty years’ worth of pictures here—and not just the Colonel’s family, but my side too, the Singletons and Brookes. And you know, I have been asking Caroline and Roderick for months to find these photographs out and make sure they were safe. I had no idea they were in the morning-room at all; I thought they were locked away somewhere up in the attics.’

  I glanced at Caroline—who, after having rung for Betty, had returned to her chair, and was turning the pages of a book of her own, with a distant, patient air. Without lifting her eyes from the page before her she said, ‘They wouldn’t have been any safer in the attics, I’m afraid. The last time I put my head up there it was to take a look at some leak or other. There were baskets of books from when Roddie and I were children, all foxed to death.’

  ‘Then I wish you had told me, Caroline.’

  ‘I’m sure I did, Mother, at the time.’

  ‘I know you have a great deal to think about, you and your brother, but this is awfully disappointing. Just look here, Doctor.’ She handed me a stiff old carte-de-visite, its already quaint and faded Victorian subject now practically obscured by rust-coloured spots. ‘Here’s the Colonel’s father as a young man. I used to think Roderick very like him.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said absently. I was tense now, waiting my chance to speak. ‘Where is Roderick, by the way?’

  ‘Oh, in his room, I imagine.’ She picked out another. ‘Here’s another one spoiled … This one too … This one I remember—oh, how dreadful! It’s perfectly ruined! My own family, just before the war. My brothers are all there, look, one can just make them out: Charlie, Lionel, Mortimer, Frank; and my sister, Cissie. I’d been married a year, and was home with Baby, and we didn’t know it then, but the family was never to be together like that again, for within six months the fighting had started and two of the boys were lost almost at once.’

  Her voice had changed, a note of real distress creeping into it, and this time Caroline looked up, and she and I exchanged a glance. Betty appeared, and was sent off to bring the tea—which I didn’t want, and didn’t have time for—and Mrs Ayres continued to pick her way, sadly and absently, through the cloudy photographs. I thought of all she had recently been through, and what awful news I had come to break to her; I watched the fretful movement of her hands, which without their rings looked nake
d, and large at the knuckle. And suddenly the idea of burdening her with yet another anxiety seemed too much. I remembered the conversation I’d had with Caroline about her brother, the week before; it occurred to me that perhaps it was to her I should speak, at least in the first place. I spent a useless few minutes trying to catch her eye again; then, once Betty had returned with the tea things I rose as if to help with the tray, and took Caroline’s cup across to her while Betty saw to Mrs Ayres. And as Caroline looked up at me in mild surprise, putting out her hand to receive the saucer, I bent my head to her and whispered: ‘Can you find a way of talking to me alone?’

  She drew back, startled by the words, or simply by the movement of my breath against her cheek. She looked into my face, glanced at her mother, then gave me a nod. I went back to the sofa. We let five or ten minutes pass while we drank our tea and ate the slim, dry slices of cake that had been served up with it.

  Then she moved forward as if just struck by an idea.

  ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘I meant to tell you. I’ve put some of our old books together to give to the Red Cross. I thought perhaps Dr Faraday could take them back to Lidcote for us, in his car. I don’t like to ask Rod. I’m sorry to trouble you with it, Doctor, but would you mind? They’re in the library, boxed up and ready.’

  She spoke without a flicker of self-consciousness, and with no trace of colour in her face; but I must confess, my own heart was pounding. Mrs Ayres said discontentedly that no, she supposed she wouldn’t miss us for a minute or two, and went back to sorting through the crumbling albums.

  ‘I won’t keep you long,’ Caroline said to me, still in her ordinary voice, as I opened the door; but she gestured with her eyes along the passage, and we went quickly and softly together to the library, where she made her way to the window and drew back that single functioning shutter. As the wintry light spilled in, the shrouded bookshelves seemed to spring into life around us, like rearing ghosts. I took a few steps forward out of the worst of the gloom, and Caroline came back, away from the window, to stand before me.