The Little Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page A

around.’
    I smiled. ‘Well, every doctor likes a challenge now and then. During the war I spent a good deal of time on the wards of a military hospital, up at Rugby. I rather miss it.’ I glanced at her son, who had produced a tin of tobacco and a packet of papers and was rolling himself a cigarette. ‘I did a little muscle therapy, as it happens. Electrical work and so on.’
    He gave a grunt. ‘They wanted to sign me up for some of that, after my smash. I couldn’t spare the time away from the estate.’
    ‘A pity.’
    Mrs Ayres said, ‘Roderick was with the Air Force, Doctor, as I expect you know.’
    ‘Yes. What kind of action did you see? Pretty stiff, I gather?’
    He tilted his head and stuck out his jaw, to draw attention to his scars.
    ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you, from the look of these? But I spent most of my flying time on reconnaissance work, so I can’t claim too much glory. A bit of bad luck over the south coast brought me down in the end. The other chap got the worst of it, though; him and my navigator, poor devil. I ended up with these lovely beauty spots and a bashed-up knee.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘Oh, I expect you saw a lot worse at that hospital of yours.—But look here, forgive my manners. Can I offer you a cig? I smoke so many of these damn things I forget I’m doing it.’
    I looked at the cigarette he had rolled—which was pretty wretched, the sort of cigarette we had used, as medical students, to call a ‘coffin nail’—and decided I wouldn’t take his tobacco. And though I had some decent cigarettes of my own in my pocket, I didn’t want to embarrass him by bringing them out. So I shook my head. I had the feeling, anyway, that he had only offered me one as a way of changing the subject.
    Perhaps his mother thought that, too. She was gazing at her son with a troubled expression, but turned from him to me to smile and say, ‘The war feels far away now, doesn’t it? How did that happen, in only two years? We had an army unit billeted with us for part of it, you know. They left odd things about the park, barbed wire, sheets of iron: they’re already rusting away, like something from another age. Goodness knows how long this peace will last, of course. I’ve stopped listening to the news; it’s too alarming. The world seems to be run by scientists and generals, all playing with bombs like so many schoolboys.’
    Roderick struck a match. ‘Oh, we’ll be all right, here at Hundreds,’ he said, his mouth tight around his cigarette and the paper flaring, alarmingly close to his scarred lips. ‘It’s the original quiet life, out here at Hundreds.’
    As he spoke, there came the sound of Gyp’s claws on the marble floor of the passage, like the clicking beads of an abacus, and the slap of Caroline’s flat-soled sandals. The dog nosed open the door—something he clearly did often, for the door-frame was darkened from the rub of his coat, and the fine old door itself was quite wrecked, in its lower panels, where he or dogs before him had repeatedly scratched at the wood.
    Caroline entered with a heavy-looking tea-tray. Roderick gripped the arm of the sofa and began to push himself up, to help her; but I beat him to it.
    ‘Here, let me.’
    She looked gratefully at me—not so much on her own account, I thought, as on her brother’s—but she said, ‘It’s no trouble. I’m used to it, remember.’
    ‘Let me clear a spot for you, at least.’
    ‘No, you must let me do it myself! That way, you see, when I’m obliged to earn my living in a Corner House, I shall know how.—Gyp, get out from under my heels, will you?’
    So I moved back, and she set the tray down among the books and papers on a cluttered table, then poured the tea and passed round the cups. The cups were of handsome old bone china, one or two of them with riveted handles; I saw her keep those back for the family. And she followed the tea with plates of cake: a fruit cake, sliced so thinly I guessed she