The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

  He sat back in his chair, his arms folded defensively. He took one or two furtive puffs on his cigarette, then tilted his head and began to glance around the room, his eyes seeming very large and dark in his lean, pale face. I knew what he was watching for, and felt almost sick with frustration and dismay. There had been no mention of the old delusion before this; his behaviour had been troubling, unpleasant, but rational enough. But I could see now that nothing had changed. His mind was still clouded. The drinking, perhaps, was simply to give him courage, and the truculence was a desperate form of bluster.

  He said, with his gaze still moving, ‘There’ll be tricks, tonight. I can sense it. I’ve a feeling for it now. I’m like a weather-vane, I start twitching when the wind’s on the turn.’

  He spoke almost lugubriously, so that I couldn’t tell how much of this was theatrics, how much was in deadly earnest. But—it was impossible to resist—I found my gaze following his. Again my eye was drawn to the washing-stand; this time, too, I tilted back my head to look at the ceiling above it. I could just make out, through the darkness, that peculiar stain or smudge—and then my heart sank as I spotted, a yard or so from it, a similar mark. Further off I thought I saw another. I looked at the wall behind Rod’s bed, and saw one there. Or, thought I did. I couldn’t be sure; the shadows played such tricks. But my gaze went darting about from one surface to another until it seemed to me that the room might be teeming with those mysterious smudges; and suddenly the thought of leaving Rod among them for another night—another hour!—was too much. I drew my eyes away from the darkness and leaned forward out of my chair to say urgently, ‘Rod, come back to Lidcote with me, will you?’

  ‘To Lidcote?’

  ‘I think you’ll be safer there.’

  ‘I can’t leave now. I told you, didn’t I? The wind’s on the turn—’

  ‘Stop talking like that!’

  He blinked, as if in sudden understanding. He tilted his head again and said, almost coyly, ‘You’re afraid.’

  ‘Rod, listen to me.’

  ‘You can feel it, can’t you? You can feel it, and you’re afraid. You didn’t believe me before. All that talk of nerve-storms, of war-shock. Now you’re more frightened than I am!’

  I was afraid, I realised—not of the things he’d been babbling about, but of something vaguer and more dreadful. I reached to try and catch hold of his wrist.

  ‘Rod, for God’s sake! I think you’re in danger!’

  The action startled him; he moved back. And then—it was the drink, I suppose—he flew into a rage.

  ‘God damn you!’ he cried, pushing me away. ‘Get your hands off me! Don’t you f—g well tell me how to behave! That’s all you ever do. And when you’re not doling out your doctor’s advice you’re making a grab at me, with your filthy doctor’s fingers. And when you’re not grabbing you’re watching, watching, with your filthy doctor’s eyes. Who the f—g hell are you, anyway? Why the hell are you here? How did you manage to get such a footing in this house? You’re not a part of this family! You’re no one!’

  He thumped his glass down on the table, so that the gin slopped over the papers. ‘I’m calling for Betty,’ he said absurdly, ‘to see you out.’

  He moved clumsily to the chimney-breast and caught hold of the lever that worked the call-bell, jerking and jerking it, so that we could hear the faint hectic clanging of it down in the basement. It sounded bizarrely like the bell that the village air-raid wardens had used to ring, and it added an extra atavistic flutter of agitation to the shock and upset that had already begun to swirl inside me at his words.

  I rose and went across to the door, and opened it just as, breathless and startled, Betty appeared. I tried to keep her from coming in.

  I said, ‘It’s all right, nothing’s wrong. There’s been a mistake. Go back downstairs.’

  But, ‘Dr Faraday’s leaving, Betty!’ called Roderick, over my words. ‘He has other patients to see. Isn’t that a pity? Take him out to the hall, will you, and pick up his coat and his hat on the way?’

  The girl and I looked at each other; but what on earth could I do? I myself had reminded Rod, a few minutes before, that he was ‘the head of the household’, a grown man, master of the estate and its servants. I said stiffly at last, ‘Very well.’ She stepped aside so that I could pass her, and then I heard her hurrying off to fetch my things.

  I felt so agitated now, I actually had to stand for a minute at the little parlour door, to collect myself; and when finally I went in I was still so shaken, I imagined my face or manner would betray me at once. But my entrance impressed no one. Caroline had an open novel in her lap, and Mrs Ayres, in her chair beside the fire, was frankly snoozing. That gave me another jolt: I had never seen her sleeping before, and when I went over to her and she woke, she looked at me, briefly, with what might have been the frightened, unmoored gaze of a bewildered old woman. She had placed a shawl across her lap and it was slipping to the floor. I bent to retrieve it, and by the time I had straightened up, she could take it from me and tuck it back around her knees, herself again.

  She asked me how Roderick was. I hesitated, then said, ‘Not wonderful, to be honest. I—I wish I knew what to say. Caroline, you might look in on him, in a minute or two?’

  ‘Not if he’s drunk,’ she answered. ‘He’s too boring.’

  And, ‘Drunk!’ said Mrs Ayres, with a touch of scorn. ‘Thank goodness his grandmother isn’t alive to see him—the Colonel’s mother, I mean. She always said there was nothing more depressing than the sight of a man in liquor; I must say I agree with her. As for my own mother’s side—I think my great-grandparents were Temperance people. Yes, I’m almost sure they were.’

  ‘Still,’ I said, looking hard at Caroline, ‘you might just pay your brother a visit, before you go to bed, to be sure all’s well?’

  She at last caught the meaning behind my words, and looked up to meet my gaze. She closed her eyes in a weary gesture, but gave me a nod.

  That reassured me a little, but I was quite unable to sit calmly beside the fire and talk of ordinary things. I thanked them for my supper and said good night. Betty was waiting out in the hall with my hat and overcoat, and the sight of her brought Rod’s words back to me: Who the hell are you? You’re no one!

  Outside, the weather was still filthy, and seemed to whip up my mood. The upset and anger grew on me as I drove home—so that I drove badly, clashing the gears, once taking a curve too sharply and very nearly running the car off the road. In an effort to calm myself down I worked on various bills and papers until well past midnight; but when I finally went to bed I lay fretful—almost hoping for a call to a patient, to take my mind away from the snag of my own thoughts.

  No call came, and at last I switched on the lamp and got up to pour myself a drink. On my way back to bed I caught sight of that old photograph of the Hall, in its handsome tortoiseshell frame: I had kept it out all this time, together with that Empire Day medal, on my bedside table. I picked it up, and looked at my mother’s face. Then I shifted my gaze to the house behind her, and, as I’d sometimes done before, I thought of the people inside it now, wondering if they were lying more restfully than I was, in their chill, dark, separate rooms. Mrs Ayres had given me the picture in July, and it was now early December. How on earth, I asked myself, had my life, in those few months, become so tangled with that family’s as to trouble and unsettle me like this?

  With the alcohol inside me my anger blunted, and eventually I slept. But I slept badly; and while I lay tussling with dark, violent dreams, something dreadful happened out at Hundreds Hall.

  SEVEN

  The story, as I pieced it together afterwards, was this.

  Once I left the house, Mrs Ayres and Caroline stayed in the little parlour for just over an hour; and during that hour, feeling slightly uneasy after what I’d hinted to her, Caroline went in to check on Rod. She found him sprawled open-mouthed, nursing an empty gin bottle, too drunk to speak, and her first reaction, she said,
was one of annoyance: she was very tempted simply to leave him there, to ‘stew in his chair’. But then he gazed blearily up at her, and there was something in his eyes that moved her—some spark of his former self. For a moment she was almost overcome with the hopelessness of their situation. She knelt beside him and took his hand, lifting it to her face and resting her brow against his knuckles. ‘What’s happened to you, Roddie?’ she asked him quietly. ‘I don’t know you. I miss you. What’s happened?’

  He moved his fingers against her cheek, but didn’t or couldn’t answer. She stayed at his side for another few moments, then, pulling herself together, decided to put him into his bed. She guessed he needed the lavatory, so she got him to his feet and sent him off to the ‘gentlemen’s hoo-hah’ along the passage, and when he’d come lurching back she took off his shoes and his collar and got him out of his trousers. She was used to helping him in and out of his clothes, from having nursed him after his accident, so this sort of thing was nothing to her. She said he more or less passed out the moment his head touched his pillow, and then he lay snoring, and reeking horribly of drink. He was lying on his back, and that made her remember some wartime training and try to heave him over on to his side, in case he should be sick. But he resisted all her efforts, and finally, tired and frustrated, she gave them up.

  She made sure he was well covered with blankets before she left him, and she went to the fire, drew back the mesh guard, and added more wood. She closed the guard again when she had finished, she was later quite certain of that; and she was equally certain that no cigarettes were burning in any of the ashtrays, and that no lamps or candles were lit. She returned to the little parlour, where she spent another half-hour with her mother. They went to bed well before midnight; Caroline read for ten or fifteen minutes before putting out her light; and she fell asleep almost at once.

  She was woken a few hours later—around half past three, as it turned out—by the faint but distinctive sound of breaking glass. The sound came from just below her own windows—that is, from one of the windows of her brother’s room. Startled, she sat up in bed. She assumed that Rod had woken and was blundering about, and her one thought was to prevent him from coming upstairs and disturbing their mother. She got wearily to her feet and put on her dressing-gown; she was just nerving herself up to go downstairs and deal with him when it occurred to her that the sound might not have been made by her brother at all, but might have come from a burglar trying to force a way into the house. Perhaps she was remembering Rod’s words about pirates and cutlasses. Anyway, she went softly across to her window, put back the curtain, and looked out. She saw the garden bathed in a leaping yellow light, and smelt smoke—and realised that the house was on fire.

  Fire is a thing that is always dreaded in a great house like Hundreds Hall. Once or twice in the old days there had been small kitchen fires, which had fairly easily been put out. During the war Mrs Ayres had had a constant fear of air-raids, and buckets of sand and water, and hoses and stirrup-pumps, had been left out on every floor—and, as it turned out, were never needed. Now those pumps had been put away; there were no mechanical extinguishers; there was only, hanging up in one of the basement passages, a line of ancient leather pails, bloomy with age and probably leaky—kept there more for picturesque value than anything else. It is a wonder that Caroline, knowing all this, and seeing the dancing yellow light, did not panic. Instead, she confessed to me later that, for a single, wild moment, what she felt was a sort of excitement. She thought of all the problems that would be solved if the Hall were simply to burn to the ground. She had a vision of the work she had done on the house in the past few years, all the wooden floors and panels she had polished, all the glass, all the plate; and instead of resenting the fire for threatening to snatch these things from her, she wanted to give them all up in a sort of orgy of surrender.

  Then she remembered her brother. She caught up the rug from before her hearth, and the blankets from her bed, and went racing out to the staircase—calling wildly to her mother as she went. Downstairs in the hall the smell of smoke grew stronger; in the passage the air was already soupy, and began to prickle at her eyes. She ran through the boot room to the gentlemen’s lavatory, to douse the rug and blankets with water at the basin. She found the call-bell, and rang and rang on it—much, I suppose, as I’d seen Roderick ringing, a few hours before. By the time she had gathered together the sodden blankets and gone staggering out with them, a frightened-looking Betty had appeared at the curtained arch, barefoot and in her nightdress.

  ‘Bring water!’ Caroline called to her. ‘There’s a fire! Can’t you smell it? Bring your bedclothes, bring anything! Quickly!’

  And, hoisting the wet blankets higher against her breast, she ran panting and sweating to Roderick’s room.

  She began to cough and catch at her breath, she said, even before opening the door. When she went in, the smoke was so thick and so stinging, she was reminded of a gas-practice chamber she had once been sent into during her time in the Wrens. Then, of course, she had had a respirator with her; the point of the exercise was to put it on. Now she could do nothing but bury her nose and mouth in the wet bundle in her arms and fight her way forward. The heat was already terrific. She could see flames on every side of the room: there seemed to be fire everywhere, so that for one desperate moment she thought she was beaten and would have to turn back. But then she did turn—and lost her bearings, and grew sick with absolute panic. She saw flames close beside her, and wildly flung her blankets at them. She began to beat at another patch of fire with the rug, and soon she became aware of Betty and her mother, beating with blankets of their own. The smoke billowed and briefly thinned, and she caught a glimpse of Roderick, on the bed where she had left him, dazed and coughing, as if just coming to. Two of the brocade curtains at the windows were alight; two others had burned almost completely and were in the process of falling away. She was able to force a path to them and reach between them to fling open the glass doors.

  I shuddered when she told me this, for had the fire’s grip on the room been much stronger, the sudden rush of cold air would surely have been fatal. But the flames, at that point, must have already been under control, and the night, thankfully, was still a damp one. Caroline helped a staggering Roderick out on to the stone steps, and then went back to see to her mother. The smoke was clearing, she said, but the room as she plunged back into it was like some small scene from hell: unimaginably hot, lit up at a thousand diabolical points, and thick with whirling embers and tongues of fire that seemed to dart viciously at her face and hands. Mrs Ayres was coughing and gasping for breath, her hair wild, her nightdress filthy. Betty had begun to bring pans of water, and the ash and smoke and smouldering fragments of carpet, blanket, and paper were turning to pools of thick black sludge beneath the three women’s feet.

  They worked on the room for far longer, probably, than they really needed to, for at first they would beat out a patch of flame, only to turn their backs on it and find that, a few minutes later, it had begun to glow again; so after that they took no chances, and made their grim, methodical way from one ruined surface to another, pouring water, and using pokers and fire-tongs to riddle up and beat out embers and sparks. They were all three of them sick and wheezing from the smoke, with running eyes that left pale tear-marks on their soot-stained cheeks, and soon they found themselves shivering, partly in response to the drama of it all, partly simply with the cold, which seemed to rise up in the hot room with appalling swiftness the moment the last flame was doused.

  Roderick, apparently, kept at the open window, clinging to the frame. He was still very drunk, but added to that—and not surprisingly, I suppose, bearing in mind everything he’d been through during the war—the sight of the flames and the choking smoke seemed to paralyse him. He looked on wildly but uselessly as his mother and sister made the room safe; he let himself be helped indoors, but by the time they had got him down to the kitchen and put him to sit at the table with a blanket
around him he had begun to understand just how near they had all come to disaster, and he clutched at his sister’s hand.

  ‘You see what’s happened, Caro?’ he said to her. ‘You see what it wanted? My God, it’s cleverer than I thought! If you hadn’t woken—! If you hadn’t come—!’

  ‘What is he saying?’ asked Mrs Ayres, distressed by his manner and not understanding. ‘Caroline, what does he mean?’

  ‘He doesn’t mean anything,’ answered Caroline—knowing full well what he meant, but wanting to protect her mother from it. ‘He’s still drunk. Roddie, please.’

  But now, she said, he started acting ‘like a madman’, putting the heels of his hands to his eyes, then catching at his hair, then looking in horror at his fingers—for his hair had oil on it, and the oil had turned, in the smoke, to a gritty sort of tar. He wiped his hands on his blackened shirt-front, compulsively. He began to cough, and then to struggle for his breath, and the struggling sent him into one of his panics. He reached for Caroline again. ‘I’m sorry!’ he kept saying, over and over. His breath was ragged and boozy, his eyes were crimson in his sooty face, his shirt was soaked through with rainwater. He grabbed, with shaking hands, at his mother. ‘Mother, I’m sorry!’

  After their ordeal in the burning room, his behaviour was too much. Mrs Ayres looked at him for a second in absolute horror, then, ‘Be quiet!’ she cried, her voice breaking. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, be quiet!’ And when he still babbled and wept, Caroline went to him, and swung back her hand, and struck him.