The Little Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page B

we more or less lived in this one room. Roddie and I brought in our mattresses and slept here like squatters. The pipes froze, the generator broke; outside there were icicles three feet long. We never dared leave the house, for fear of being harpooned … You live above your surgery, don’t you? In old Dr Gill’s place?’
    I said, ‘I do. I moved in there as a junior partner, and have never moved out. It’s a plain enough place. But my patients know it; and it suits a bachelor, I suppose.’
    Roderick tapped ash from his cigarette.
    ‘Dr Gill was a bit of a character, wasn’t he? I went into his surgery once or twice when I was a boy. He had a great glass bowl he said he used to keep leeches in. It frightened the pants off me.’
    ‘Oh, everything frightened you,’ said his sister, before I could respond. ‘You were so easy to scare. Do you remember that giantess of a girl who used to work in the kitchen when we were young? Do you remember her, Mother? What was her name? Was it Mary? She was six foot two-and-a-half; and she had a sister who was six foot three. Daddy once made her try on one of his boots. He’d made a bet with Mr McLeod that the boot would be too small. He was right, too. But her hands were the thing. She could wring clothes better than a mangle. And her fingers were always cold—always freezing, like sausages straight from the meat-safe. I used to tell Roddie that she crept into his room while he was sleeping and put her hands under his blankets, to warm them up; and it used to make him cry.’
    ‘Little beast,’ said Roderick.
    ‘What
was
her name?’
    ‘I believe it was Miriam,’ said Mrs Ayres, after a moment’s consideration. ‘Miriam Arnold; and the sister you’re thinking of was Margery. But there was another girl, too, less huge: she married a Tapley boy, and the two of them went off to be chauffeur and cook at some house out of the county. Miriam went from us to Mrs Randall, I think. But Mrs Randall didn’t take to her, and only kept her for a month or two. I don’t know what became of her then.’
    ‘Perhaps she took up garrotting,’ said Roderick.
    ‘Perhaps she joined a circus,’ said Caroline. ‘We really did have a girl once, didn’t we, who ran away to join the circus?’
    ‘She certainly married a circus man,’ said Mrs Ayres. ‘And she broke her mother’s heart by doing it. She broke her cousin’s heart too, because the cousin—Lavender Hewitt—was also in love with the circus man, and when the other girl went off with him, she gave up eating and would have died. And she was saved, as her mother used to say, by rabbits. For she could resist any dish except her mother’s stewed rabbit. And for a time we let her father take a ferret over the park, to get all the rabbits he pleased; and it was the rabbits that saved her …’
    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 begun 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 …
    Mrs Ayres had recalled another servant. ‘Oh, she was a moron,’ Roderick said.
    ‘She wasn’t a
moron
,’ said Caroline, fairly. ‘But it’s true she was