The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.

[midnight_birth]

Title: The Little Stranger.
Author: Sarah Waters.
Genre: Fiction, Gothic fiction, mystery, ghost stories, class struggle.
Country: Wales, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2009.
Summary: In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to see a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the once-grand house is now crumbling while all around, the world is changing. The family - elegant, widowed Mrs. Ayres, her war-damaged son Roderick, and daughter Caroline - are struggling to adjust. As Dr. Faraday becomes increasingly entwined in the Ayreses' lives, troubling events start to occur at Hundreds, and he begins to wonder if they may all be threatened by something more sinister than a dying way of life.

My rating: 6.5/10
My review:


♥ I was an obedient child, as a rule. But the curtain opened onto the corner junction of two marble-floored passages, each one filled with marvellous things; and once she had disappeared softly in one direction, I took a few daring steps in the other. The thrill of it was astonishing. I don't mean the simple thrill of trespass, I mean the thrill of the house itself, which came to me from every surface-from the polish on the floor, the patina on wooden chairs and cabinets, the bevel of a looking-glass, the scroll of a frame. I was drawn to one of the dustless white walls, which had a decorative plaster border, a representation of acorns and leaves. I had never seen anything like it, outside of a church, and after a second of looking it over I did what strikes me now as a dreadful thing: I worked my fingers around one of the acorns and tried to prise it from its setting; and when that failed to release it, I got out my penknife and dug away with that. I didn't do it in a spirit of vandalism. I wasn't a spiteful or destructive boy. It was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it-or rather, as if the admiration itself, which I suspected a more ordinary child would not have felt, entitled me to it. I was like a man, I suppose, wanting a lock of hair from the head of a girl he had suddenly and blindingly become enamoured of.

♥ "You ought to know better, a clever lad like you," I expect she said.

People were always saying things like that to me when I was young. My parents, my uncles, my schoolmasters-all the various adults who interested themselves in my career. The words used to drive me into secret rages, because on the one hand I wanted desperately to live up to my own reputation for cleverness, and on the other it seemed very unfair, that cleverness, which I gad never asked for, could be turned into something with which to cut me down.

♥ The story ran on, Caroline and Roderick prompting more of it; they spoke to each other rather than to me, and, shut out of the game, I looked from mother to daughter to son and finally caught the likenesses between them, not just the similarities of feature-the long limbs, the high-set eyes-but the almost clannish little tricks of gesture and speech. And I felt a flicker of impatience with them-the faintest stirring of a dark dislike-and my pleasure in the lovely room was slightly spoiled. Perhaps it was the peasant blood in me, rising. But Hundreds Hall had been made and maintained, I thought, by the very people they were laughing at now. After two hundred years, those people had began to withdraw their labour, their belief in the house; and the house was collapsing, like a pyramid of cards. Meanwhile, here the family sat, still playing gaily at gentry life, with the chipped stucco on their walls, and their Turkey carpets worn to the weave, and their riveted china...

♥ "Caroline was doing quite well, wasn't she, with some sort of commission in the Wrens, or the WAAF? Awfully brainy girl, of course."

He said "brainy" in the way I had heard other people say it when discussing Caroline Ayres, and I knew that, like them, he was using the word more or less as a euphemisms for "plain." I didn't answer, and we finished our puddings in silence.

♥ "Are things as bad as that?" And then, when she didn't answer at once: "Do you mind my asking?"

"No, I don't mind. I was just thinking what to say... They're pretty bad to be honest with you. I don't know how bad, because Rod does all the book-keeping himself, and he's quite cagey. All he ever says is that he's going to pull things through. We both try and keep the worst of it from Mother, but it must be obvious even to her that things at Hundreds will never be what they were. We've lost too much land, for one thing. The farm's more or less our only income now. And the world's a changed place, isn't it? That's why we've been so keen to hang on to Betty. I can't tell you what a difference it's made to Mother's spirits, our being able to ring for a servant in the old-fashioned way, instead of having to traipse down to the kitchen for a jug of hot water, or something, ourselves. That sort of thing means such a lot. We had servants at Hundreds, right up to the war."

Again she spoke matter-of-factly; as if to someone of her own class. But she was still for a second, and then she moved as if self-conscious, saying, in quite a different voice, "God, how shallow you must think us. I'm so sorry."

I said, "Not at all."

But it was clear what she meant, and the obviousness of her embarrassment only served to embarrass me.

♥ "Oh, but can't they wait a little? Patients must be good at waiting. That's why they're called patients, surely..."

♥ The square red front of the Hall looked pale and curiously insubstantial as I approached, and only as I drew up on the gravel did it seem to come into proper focus: I saw again all the shabby detail and, even more than on my first visit, I had an impression of the house being held in some sort of balance. One could see so painfully, I thought, both the glorious thing it had recently been, and the ruin it was on the way to becoming.

♥ And she looked healthy enough, and took trouble over handing out the cups and the slices of cake, as if she were settling down all right. When she had finished she even made us a dip, like an unformed curtsey. Mrs Ayres said, "Thank you, Betty, that will do," and she turned and left us. We heard the fading slap and squeak of her stout-soled shoes as she made her way back to the basement.

Caroline, setting down a bowl of tea for Gyp to lap at, said, "Poor Betty. Not a natural parlourmaid."

But her mother spoke indulgently. "Oh, we must give her more time. I always remember my great-aunt saying that a well-run house was like an oyster. Girls come to one as specks of grit, you see; ten years later, they leave one as pearls."

She was addressing me as well as Caroline-clearly forgetting, for the moment, that my own mother had once been one of the specks of grit her great-aunt had meant. I think even Caroline had forgotten it. They both sat comfortably in their chairs, enjoying the tea and the cake that Betty had prepared for them, the awkwardly carried for them, then cut and served for them, from plates and cups which, at the ring of a bell, she would soon remove and wash... I said nothing this time, however. I sat enjoying the tea and cake, too. For if the house, like an oyster, was at work on Betty, finishing and disguising her with layer after minuscule layer of its own particular charm, then I suppose it had already begun a similar process with me.

♥ ..Graham laughed out loud at the sight of me. Anne, more kindly, took a clothes-brush to my shoulders, then had me undo my tie so that she could re-knot it herself.

"There. You look perfectly handsome," she told me when she'd finished, in that voice nice women use for compliments unhandsome men.

♥ So absorbed was I in these tasks that, when I took off my jacket to roll up my sleeves and wash my hands, I was astonished to find it a dress-jacket. I'd forgotten where I was, and thought I was in my regular tweeds.

The fact is, I was often obliged to perform this kind of small operation, either in my surgery or in my patients' own homes. Once, while still in my twenties, I had been called to a farmhouse to find a young man with a dreadfully mangled leg, the result of a threshing injury. I had had to cut the leg off at the knee, at the kitchen table, just like this. The family had invited me to take supper with them a few days later, and we had sat at the same table, now cleaned of its stains-the young man sitting there along with us, pale, but cheerfully eating hid pie, joking about the money he'd save on boot-leather. But those were country people, used to hardship; to the Baker-Hydes it must have looked dreadful, as I soaked the needle and thread in carbolic and scrubbed my knuckles and nails with a vegetable brush.

♥ "I'm thinking about healing, about the strangeness of it. It's a different process for every patient. It's no surprise, surely, that Roderick's injury made him angry? A fit young chap like him? I would have been angry, too, at Rod's age, in a situation like his. To have been born with so much, and then to have lost so much: one's health, one's looks-in a sense, one's freedom."

She shook her head, unconvinced. "It was more than mere anger. It was as though the war itself had changed him, made an utter stranger of him. He seemed to hate himself, and everyone around him. Oh, when I think of all the boys like him, and all the frightful things we asked them to do in the name of making peace-!"

♥ She said, "Oh, take him. Everything else has gone, why not take him, too? I'm sick of fighting it."

Her tone was so bleak, that at least I saw through her stubbornness to other losses and griefs; and I felt I'd been misjudging her.

♥ But still, I wondered about Caroline. Now and then as I drove my car across the park I would catch sight of her, just as I'd used to; and without Gyp trotting beside her she struck me as a terribly forlorn figure. If I stopped the car to speak to her she seemed willing enough to talk, in what was more or less her old manner. She looked as sturdy and as healthy as she always had. Only her face, I thought, betrayed the wretchedness of the past few weeks, for caught at certain angles it seemed heavier and plainer than ever-as if, with the loss of her dog, there had come something like the loss of the last of her optimism and her youth.

♥ "Keep talking, all right. Funny how hard it is to keep talking, when someone asks you to start and not stop. And I'm more used of course, to listening. Have you ever thought of that, Rod? About how much listening one has to do, in this job of mine? I often think that we family doctors are like priests. People tell us their secrets, because they know we won't judge them. They know we're used to looking at human beings as it were without their skins... Some doctors don't like it. I've known one or two who've seen so much weakness they've developed a sort of contempt for mankind. I've known doctors-many doctors, more than you'd guess-who've taken to drink. Others of us, though, it humbles. We see what a punishing business it is, simply being alive. Just being alive, not to mention having wars and whatnot thrown at one, and estates and farms to run... Most people, you know, seem to muddle through all right in the end..."

♥ Now, however, came the most grotesque thing of all. He was still gazing at his own sweating face when, to his disbelief and horror, the shaving-glass gave a sort of shudder. The glass was an old Victorian one, a bevelled circular mirror in a pivoted brass frame, on a porcelain base. It was, as I knew myself, pretty heavy: not a thing that would slip if nudged or shaken by footsteps on the floor around it. Rod stood perfectly still, in that still room, and watched as the shaving-glass shuddered again, then rocked, then began to inch its way across the washing-stand towards him. It was just, he said, as if the glass were walking-or, rather, as if it were in that moment discovering its own ability to walk. It moved with a jerky, halting gait, the unglazed underside of its porcelain base making a frightful, grating sound on the polished marble surface.

"It was the most sickening thing I ever saw," said Rod, describing it to me in a shaking voice, and wiping away the sweat which had started out again on his lip and forehead at the memory. "It was all the more sickening, somehow, for the glass being such an ordinary sort of object. If-I don't know, but if some beast had suddenly appeared in the room, some spook or apparition, I think I would have borne the shock of it better. But this-it was hateful, it wad wrong. It made one feel as though everything around one, the ordinary stuff of one's ordinary life, might all at any moment start up like this and-overwhelm one. That was bad enough. But what happened next-"

What happened next was even worse. All this time Rod had been watching the glass make its shuddering way towards him, sick with horror at what, to me, he kept calling the wrongness of the thing. Part of this wrongness was his sense that the glass was acting somehow impersonally. It had, God knew how, become animate; but he had the feeling that what was animating it was blind, thoughtless motion. He felt that if he were to put his hand flat in the glass's path the porcelain base would find a creeping, dogged way over his fingers. Naturally, he did not put his hand there. If anything, he shrank back. But he could see that the glass was now approaching the edge of the marble stand, and he felt a horrible fascination in watching it teeter and fall. So he kept his place, a yard or so away from it. The glass crept onward, until an inch and then a second inch of its base was projecting over the marble edge. He seemed to see the thing groping for another surface; he saw the mirror tilt as, unbalanced, the base rocked forward. He actually started to put out his hand, in an automatic impulse to keep it from tumbling. But as he did it, the glass suddenly seemed to "gather itself for a spring"-and the next moment it had launched itself at his head. He twisted away, and caught a stinging blow behind his ear. He heard the shattering of the mirror and the porcelain base as the glass struck the floor behind him. He turned, and saw the pieces lying harmlessly on the carpet, as if just knocked there by a clumsy hand.

♥ There have been many times in my medical career when, on examining a patient or on seeing the result of some test or other, it has gradually but ineluctably broken upon me that the case before me is a desperate one. I can think, for example, of a young married woman, just pregnant, who came to see me with a summer cough: I remember very vividly setting the stethoscope to her breast and hearing the first faint but devastating indications of tuberculosis. I can recall a handsome, talented boy brought to me with "growing pains"-actually, the onset of a muscle-wasting illness which, within five years, was to take his life. The thickening tumour, the spreading cancer, the clouding eye: they are part of a family doctor's case-load alongside the rashes and the sprains, but I have never got used to them, never caught my first certain glimpse of them without the heaviest feeling of impotence and dismay.

♥ "It's hard for you."

"Harder for my children."

"Don't say that. Love isn't a thing that can be weighed and measured, surely?"

♥ "He's not doing too badly, all in all," said the man. He was a younger man than Warren, with a slightly breezier approach. "He seems to have shaken off most of his delusions, anyway. We've managed to get some lithium bromide into him, and that's helped. He's certainly sleeping better. I wish I could say his case was an isolated one, but, as I expect you've noticed, we've lots of fellows of about his age: dipsomaniacs, nervous cases, men still claiming "shell-shock"... It's all part of a general post-war malaise, in my opinion; all essentially the same problem, though it affects individuals differently depending on type. If Rod wasn't the boy he was, with the background he's had, he might have turned to gambling, or womanising-or suicide."

♥ She said quietly, "Sometimes this house does seem changed to me, you know. I can't tell if it's just the way I've come to feel about it, or if it's the way it feels about me, or-" She caught my eye, and her voice changed. "You must think me crazy."

♥ I said, "They put everything they owned into making a doctor of me, and I never even realised my mother was ill. They paid a small fortune for my education, and all I learned was that my accent was wrong, my clothes were wrong, my table manners-all of it, wrong. I learned, in fact, to be ashamed of them. I never took friends home to meet them. They came once to a school speech day; I was receiving a science prize. The look on some of the other boys' faces was enough. I didn't invite them again. Once, at seventeen, in front of one of his own customers, I called my father a fool-"

I didn't finish. She waited a moment, then said, as gently as the blustery day would allow, "But they must have been very proud of you."

I shrugged. "Perhaps. But pride doesn't make for happiness, does it? They'd have been better off, really, if I'd been like my cousins-like Tom Pritchett back there. Maybe I'd have been better off, too."

I saw her frown. She swiped at the ground again. "All this time," she said, without looking at me, "I thought you must hate us slightly, my mother, my brother, and I."

I said, astonished, "Hate you?

"Yes, on your parents' behalf. But now it sounds almost as though-well, as though you hate yourself."

♥ The fact that I had brought Caroline there, with no thought for how the thing would look, seemed suddenly incredible. I suppose I'd grown used to the idea of spending time with her, out in the isolation of Hundreds; and if I'd once or twice had a surge of feeling for her-well, that was one of those things brought on, between men and women, by simple closeness: like matches sparking as they jostled in the box. To think that all this time people had been watching us, speculating-rubbing their hands-! It made me feel fooled, somehow; it made me feel exposed. A part of my upset, I'm sorry to say, was simple embarrassment, a basic masculine reluctance to have my name romantically linked with that of a notoriously plain girl. Part of it was shame, at discovering I felt this. A contradictory part, too, was pride: for why the hell shouldn't I-I asked myself-bring Caroline Ayres along to a party, if I chose to? Why the hell shouldn't I dance with the squire's daughter, if the squire's daughter wanted to dance with me?

♥ When they came back, still yawning, I was relieved to see that she had tidied her hair and made a neat, conventional mask of her face and throat with lipstick and powder.

"God, what a fright I looked!" she said, as I helped her into her coat. She gazed around the hall, up into the rafters at the bunting, which had revealed itself in all its faded VE colours. "A bit like this place. Isn't it awful how the glamour goes, once the lights come on?"

♥ "Either that or break a leg," she answered. "I'm in heels, don't forget. Oh, help!" She stumbled, and laughed and seized my arm with both her hands, to draw herself closer.

The gesture jarred with me. She had had the brandy early in the evening, and, after that, a glass or two of wine, and I'd been glad to see her-as I'd thought of it then-letting off steam. But where, for those first few dances, she'd been genuinely loose and tipsy in my arms, it seemed to me now that her giddiness had something just slightly forced about it. She said it again, "Oh, isn't it a shame we have to leave!"-but she said it too brightly. It was as if she wanted more from the night than the night had so far given her, and was broadening and hardening her strokes against it in an effort to make it pay up.

♥ "How people must listen out for your car, and watch for the headlamps. And how glad they must be when you arrive. If we were dashing to a bedside now, how badly those people would be longing for us. I never thought of that before. Doesn't it almost frighten you?"

I reached to change gear. "Why should it frighten me?"

"The responsibility of it, I suppose."

I said, "I told you before, I'm a nobody. People don't even see me half the time. They see "Doctor". They see the bag. The bag's the thong. Old Dr Gill told me that. My father bought me a fine new leather bag when I first qualified. Gill took one look at it and said I wouldn't get anywhere with a thing like that, no one would trust me. He gave me a battered old bag of his own. I've used it for years."

"Still," she said after a moment, as if she hadn't been listening. "How those people must watch, and wait, and want you. Perhaps you like it. Is that it?"

I glanced at her, through the darkness. "Is what what?"

"Do you like it, that there's always someone longing for you, in the night?"

I didn't make her any answer. She didn't seem to want any.

♥ "Just a bit of good luck, for good old Brenda. And after all that. But Brenda's the sort of person that luck happens to-good luck and bad. Some people are like that, don't you think?" She drew on her cigarette. "She asked who you were."

"What? Who did?"

"Brenda did. She thought you might be my stepfather! And when I told her you weren't, she looked at you again with a horrid narrowing of her eyes and said, 'Your sugar-father, then.' That's the way her mind works."

Christ! I thought. That seemed to be the way that everyone's mind worked; and I supposed it was a marvellous joke to all of them.

♥ Then I turned and tried to look at her. It was too dark to make her out properly, but I could picture vividly enough her face, with its handsome combination of strong family lines. I heard again Seeley's words: There's something there, definitely... Oh, I had felt it, hadn't I? I think I had felt it the very first time I'd met her, watching her work her bare brown toes through the fur of Gyp's belly; and I had felt it a hundred times since then, catching sight of the flare of her hips, the swell of her bosom, the easy, solid movement of her limbs. But-again, I was ashamed to acknowledge it, am ashamed to remember it now-the feeling stirred something else in me, some dark current of unease, almost of distaste. It wasn't the difference in our ages. I don't think I even considered that. It was as if what pulled me to her also repelled me. As if I desired her despite myself... I thought again of Seeley. None of this, I knew, would have made many sense to him. Seeley would have kissed her and to hell with it. I've imagined that kiss, many times. The chill of her lip, and the surprise of the heat beyond it. The teasing open, in the darkness, of a seam of moisture, movement, taste. Seeley would have done it.

But I am not Seeley.

♥ "I must go." She leaned to me and kissed my cheek, quite primly at first; then, as the corner of her mouth overlapped with the corner of mine, she put up a hand to the side of my head and clumsily drew my face around. Just for a second, as our lips met, I felt a sort of tremor pass over her features, her mouth twitching and her eyes shutting tight. Then she moved away from me.

She went into the house as if stepping through a rip in the night and instantly sealing it up behind her. I heard her key turn in the lock, and caught the diminishing tap of her heels on the bare stone stairway. And somehow the loss of her made me want her, plainly and physically, more than the nearness of her had done: I stepped to the door and stood against it, frustrated, willing her to return. But she did not return. The silent house was closed to me, the tangled garden still. I waited another minute, and another; then slowly picked my way back, through the almost impenetrable darkness, to my car.

♥ As I think I have said before, I'm not a naturally mendacious man. I've seen too many of the complications, in the lives of my patients, to which lies lead.

♥ Caroline, as if self-conscious, bent to the ground to pick up a sprig of slick brown leaves. But when she had straightened, she followed her mother, meeting my gaze without a blush, and one of the first things she said to me was, "You've recovered, then, from all that dancing? My feet were killing me last week. You should have seen how we punished the parquet, Mother! We were rather splendid, weren't we, Doctor?"

She was the squire's daughter again, her tone light, deliberate, seamless. I said, "We were"-and had to turn away, unable to look at her, for it was only in that moment, feeling the sudden violent dropping or dashing of something inside me, that I knew what she meant to me. All my careful reasoning of the past ten days, I understood, was a sort of sham, a sort of blind, thrown up by my own unsettled heart. She herself had done the unsettling, had raised a cloudy stir of emotions between us; and the thought that she might be able now to seal those emotions up-seal them up, for example, as she had sealed up her grief over Gyp-was very hard to bear.

♥ I looked into her face but didn't answer, not quite trusting my voice; and I suppose my saying nothing was as good as murmuring her name or putting out a hand to her. She saw my expression, then glanced over at her mother, and-I don't know how it happened, but some charge or current at last passed between us, and in it everything was acknowledged, the spring of her hips against mine on the dance-floor, the chill dark intimacy of the car, the expectation, the frustration, the tussle, the kiss...

♥ 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.

♥ She said, "Its queer to hear you say 'your sister' like that. It doesn't sound right. Mother never mentioned her, you see, when Rod and I were children. I knew nothing about her for years and years. Then one day I cam across a book with "Sukey Ayres" written in it, and asked Mother who she was. She reacted so oddly, I was frightened. That's when Daddy told me all about it. He called it 'awfully bad luck'. But I don't remember being sorry for him or for Mother. I just remember being cross, because everyone had always told me I was the eldest child, and I thought it wasn't fair if I hadn't been really." She gazed down at the fire, her forehead creasing. "I seem to have been cross all the time, somehow, when I was a girl. I was horrid to Roddie; I was horrid to the maids. You're supposed to grow out of horridness, aren't you? I don't think I ever grew out of mine. Sometimes I think it's still inside me, like something nasty I swallowed, that got stuck..."

She did, at that moment, look rather like a moody child, with her dirty hands, and a couple of locks of unbrushed brown hair beginning to droop across her face. Like other bad-tempered children, however, she also looked desperately sad.

♥ ..Mrs Ayres abandoned the catch and started banging on the window. She saw her daughter pause and raise her head, looking about, hearing the sound but unable to place it; a second later, to Mrs Ayres's unutterable relief, she saw her lift up her hand in a gesture of recognition. But then she made out more clearly the direction of Caroline's gaze. She realised that she was looking, not up at the nursery window, but straight ahead, across the terrace. Pressing closer to the glass, she caught sight of a stoutish female figure running across the gravel, and recognised Mrs Bazeley. She saw her meet Caroline at the top of the terrace steps, and begin making quick, frightened gestures back to the Hall. They were joined, after a moment, by Betty, who also ran across the terrace, beckoning them agitatedly on... All this time, the unstoppered mouthpiece had been sending out its pitiful whisper. Now, seeing the three women below, Mrs Ayres realised that she and the feeble, clamorous presence at the other end of the tube were alone together in that vast house.

This was the moment when her panic tipped over into hysteria. She raised her fists and pummelled on the window-and two of the fine old panes gave way beneath her hands. Caroline, Mrs Bazeley, and Betty, saw Mrs Ayres shrieking from between the nursery bars, shrieking like a child, Mrs Bazeley said-and beating her hands against the edges of broken window.

What happened to her in the time it took the women to make their stumbling, frightened way up to the nursery, no one could afterwards say.

♥ "She's so much better! Its incredible. Has she been like that all morning?"

"She's been just like that," Caroline answered, not quite meeting my gaze.

"She seems almost her old self."

"You think so?"

I looked at her. "Don't you?"

"I'm not so sure. Mother's very good, you know, at hiding her real feelings. All that generation are; especially the women."

♥ "A year ago I might have said the same. But it's just a word, isn't it? A word for something we don't understand, some sort of energy, or collection of energies. Or something inside us. I don't know. These writers here: Gurney and Myers." She opened the other book. "They talk about 'phantasms'. They're not ghosts. They're parts of a person."

"Parts of a person?"

"Unconscious parts, so strong or so troubled they can take on a life of their own." She showed me a page. "Look. Here's a man in England, anxious, wanting to speak to his friend-appearing to the woman and her companion, at exactly that moment, in an hotel room in Cairo! Appearing as his own ghost! Here's a woman, at night, hearing a fluttering bird-just like Mother! Then she sees her husband, who's in America, standing there before her; later she finds out he's dead! The book says, with some sorts of people, when they're unhappy or troubled, or they want something badly-Sometimes they don't even know it's happening. Something... breaks away from them."

♥ He had married quite late in life, and he and his young wife, Christine, had four good-looking children. As I let myself in through the unlocked front door, two of the children were in the process of chasing each other up and down the staircase. Another was beating a tennis-ball against the drawing-room door.

"God damn you blasted kids!" Seeley bellowed, from the doorway of his study. He waved me into the room beyond him, apologising for the chaos. But he had an air, too, of being secretly pleased by it, and proud of it-as people often were, I'd noticed, when complaining of their large, noisy families to bachelors like me.

That thought put a distance between us. He and I had worked together as amiable rivals for nearly twenty years, but we had never exactly been friends.

♥ I shook my head. "This is a weirder thing even than hysteria. It's as if-well, as if something's slowly sucking the life out of the whole family."

"Something is," he said, with another bark of laughter. "It's called a Labour Government. The Ayreses' problem-don't you think?-is that they can't, or won't, adapt. Don't get me wrong; I've a lot of sympathy for them. But what's left for an old family like that in England nowadays? Class-wise, they've had their chips. Nerve-wise, perhaps they've run their course."

♥ "There are things that have happened, over at Hundreds, that I can't explain. It's as if the house is in the grip of some sort of miasma. Caroline-" I spoke reluctantly. "Caroline's even had the idea in her head that there's been something almost supernatural going on-that Roderick's been haunting the house, or something, in his sleep. She's been reading some lurid books. Crank stuff. Frederic Myers, people like that."

"Well," said Seely, 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 country 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 shopkeeper?"

"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."

..But I barely heard it. He'd started me thinking, and the beat of my thoughts, like the ticking arm of a metronome, would mot 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 objects 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?

♥ "You don't still imagine that-that Susan-?"

"Susan," she murmured, her face still half hidden from me. "Susan is with me all the time. She follows me wherever I go. Why, she's here in this garden with us."

For a second I managed to persuade myself that she was speaking figuratively, that all she meant was that she carried her daughter around with her in her thoughts, in her heart. But then she turned her face back to mine, and her expression had something terrible in it, a mixture of absolute loneliness, huntedness, and fear.

.."I haven't seen her yet. I feel her."

"You feel her."

"I feel her, watching. I feel her eyes. They must be her eyes, mustn't they? Her gaze is so strong, her eyes are like fingers; they can touch. They can press and pinch."

"Mrs Ayres, please stop this."

"I hear her voice. I don't need tubes and telephones to hear it now. She talks to me."

"She talks-!"

"She whispers." She tilted her head, as if listening, then raised her hand. "She's whispering now."

There was something horribly uncanny about the intentness of her pose. I said, not quite steadily. "What is she whispering?"

Her look grew bleak again. "She says the same things, every time. She says, Where are you? She says, Why won't you come? She says, I am waiting."

She spoke these words in a whisper of her own; they seemed to hang for a moment in the air, along with the cloudy breath that made them. Then they vanished, eaten up by the silence.

I stood frozen for a moment, not knowing what to do. A few minutes before, the little garden had appeared almost snug to me. Now the small walled patch, with its single narrow exit leading only to another choked and isolated space, seemed filled with menace. The day, as I have said, was a peculiarly still one. No wind disturbed the branches of the trees, no bird rose, even, in the thin, chill air, and if any sound had come, any movement been made, I would have caught it. Nothing changed, nothing at all-and yet, it began to seem to me that something was there in the garden with us, creeping or edging towards us across the crisp, white snow. Worse than that, I had the bizarre impression that this thing, whatever it was, was in some way familiar: as if its bashful advance towards us was more properly a return. I felt the flesh of my back side, anticipating a touch-as in a childish game of tag. I drew my hands from hers, and twisted round, looking wildly all about.

The garden was empty, the snow unmarked except by our own footprints. But my heart was lurching, my hands trembling. I took off my hat and wiped my face. My brow and lip were sweating, and where the cold air met my flushed wet skin it seemed to burn.

I was just putting my hat back on when I heard Mrs Ayres sharply draw in her breath. I turned back to her, and found her with her gloved hand at her collar, her face creased, her colour rising. I said, "What is it? What's the matter?" She shook her head and wouldn't answer. But she looked so distressed, I thought of her heart: I plucked her hand back, drew open her scarves and coat. Beneath the coat she had on a cardigan; beneath that, a silk blouse. The blouse was pale, the colour of ivory, and as I watched, incredulous, three small drops of crimson seemed to spring from nowhere to the surface of the silk, and then, like ink on blotting-paper, rapidly to spread. I tugged down the blouse's collar and saw beneath it, on her bare skin, a scratch, quite deep, evidently freshly made, still rising, still beading red.

"What have you done?" I said in horror. "How did you do this?" I looked over her gown, for a pin or a brooch. I caught up her hands, examined her gloves. There was nothing. "What did you use?"

She dropped her gaze. "My little girl," she murmured. "She's so eager for me to join her. I'm afraid she... isn't always kind."

When I realised what she was saying, I felt sick. I stepped back, away from her. Then, with a further surge of understanding, I caught hold of her hands again and pulled the gloves from them, and roughly pushed up her sleeves. Where the broken window had cut her a few weeks before, the wounds had healed, pink and healthy against the paler skin. Here and there among the scars, however, it seemed to me that I could see new scratches. And one of her arms bore a faint bruise, curiously shaped, as if the flesh had been pinched and twisted by a small, determined hand.

♥ Then I found myself recalling our conversation in the walled garden. I remembered those three springing drops of blood. My little girl. She isn't always kind... Was it possible? Was it? Or was it even worse than that? Suppose, in willing her daughter to come, she had only given strength and purpose to some other, darker thing?

I couldn't bear to think of it. I drew up the blanket, to put her from my sight. Like Betty, I found myself overcome by a strong, almost guilty desire to get away from the room and the horrors it suggested.

♥ I rejoined Caroline in the little parlour and sat beside her, holding her hand. Her fingers were as chill and anonymous in mine as those of a wax mannequin; I gently raised them to my lips, and she made no response. She only tilted her head as if listening for something. That made me listen, too. We sat with frozen gestures-she with her inclined head, me with her hand still raised to my mouth-but the Hall was soundless. There wasn't so much as the ticking of a clock. Life seemed held, arrested inside it.

She caught my eye and said quietly, "You feel it? The house is still at last. Whatever it was that was here, it has taken everything it wanted. And do you know what the worst thing is? The thing I shan't forgive it for? It made me help it."

♥ At the gates of farms and cottages people had gathered in solemn curiosity to see the coffin go by, and once we turned into Lidcote High Street we found the pavements crowded with watchers, falling silent as we approached, the men removing their hats and caps, a few of the women crying, but all of them craning for a better view. I thought of the time, nearly thirty years before, when I had stood beside my parents in my College blazer to watch another Ayres funeral, its coffin half the size of this one; I thought it with an almost giddy feeling, as if my life were twisting round its head to snap at its own tail.

♥ The service was not a long one, but the vicar, Mr Spender, had known Mrs Ayres for many years, and gave a feeling little speech about her. He called her "an old-fashioned lady"-just the phrase I'd heard other people use. He said she was "part of a different, more gracious age", as if she'd been rather older than she was, almost the last of her generation. He remembered the death of her daughter, Susan; he was sure, he said, that most of us remembered it, too. Mrs Ayres, he reminded us, had walked behind her child's coffin that day, and it seemed to him that, in her heart, she must have continued to walk behind it every day of her life. Our consolation now, in the tragedy of her death, was to know that she had joined it.

♥ "Caroline, do you truly want to stay here? I shan't be easy about it, you know. If anything should happen to toy, your uncle and I would never forgive ourselves."

"Happen to me?" said Caroline, puzzled, her attention drawn back to us. "What do you mean?

"I mean if something should happen to you here, while you're alone in this house."

"But nothing can happen to me now, Aunt Cissie," Caroline said. "There's nothing left to happen."

She was speaking seriously, I think.

♥ We worked quietly together, gently loading trays, tiptoeing with them from the room, and down in the kitchen. I took off my jacket and stood at the girl's side, drying the crockery and glasses as she passed them, soapy, from the sink. She didn't seem to find it odd. I didn't find it odd, either. The Hall had been knocked out of its routines, and there was a comfort to be had-I'd seen it, in other bereaved houses-in little ordinary chores, conscientiously done.

♥ A medal, a photograph, a whistle, a pair of keys, an unworn wedding-ring. They formed the spoil of my time at Hundreds: a queer little collection, it seemed to me. A week before, they would have told a story, with myself as the hero of the tale. Now they were so many unhappy fragments. I looked to them for a meaning, and was defeated.

♥ And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.

♥ "Dr Faraday, did Miss Ayres ever strike you as the sort or person who might be capable of suicide?"

I said after a second that I supposed any person might be capable of suicide, given the right conditions.

♥ 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.

♥ I am no nearer now to understanding just what happened at the hall than I was three years ago. Once or twice I've spoken about it to Seeley. He has come down firmly in favour of his old, rational view that Hundreds was, in effect, defeated by history, destroyed by its own failure to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. In his opinion, the Ayreses, unable to advance with the times, simply opted for retreat-for suicide, and madness. Right across England, he says, other old gentry families are probably disappearing in exactly the same way.

The theory is convincing enough; and yet, sometimes I am troubled. I remember poor, good-natured Gyp; I recall those mysterious black smudges on the walls and ceiling of Roderick's room; I picture the three little drops of blood that I once saw springing to the surface of Mrs Ayres's silk blouse. And I think of Caroline. I think of Caroline, in the moments before she died, advancing across that moonlit landing. I think of her crying out: You!

I've never attempted to remind Seeley of his other, odder theory: that Hundreds was consumed by some dark germ, some ravenous shadow-creature, some "little stranger", spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself. But on my solitary visits, I find myself growing watchful. Every so often I'll sense a presence, or catch a movement at the corner of my eye, and my heart will give a jolt of fear and expectation: I'll imagine that the secret is about to to be revealed to me at last; that I will see what Caroline saw, and recognise it, as she did.

If Hundreds Hall is haunted, however, its ghost doesn't show itself to me. For I'll turn, and am disappointed-realising that what I am looking at is only a cracked window-pane, and that the face gazing distortedly from it, baffled and longing, is my own.