The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters Read Free Book Online

Graham, spooning up his apple. ‘The old-fashioned squire type.’
    ‘Old-fashioned bully, in other words.’
    ‘Well, I shouldn’t have liked his job. He must have been out of his mind with money worries half the time. I think that estate was already losing income when he inherited it. I know he sold land all through the ’twenties; I remember my own father saying it was like shovelling water from a sinking boat. I heard that the duties, after he died, were astronomical! How that family keeps going at all beats me.’
    I said, ‘And what about Roderick’s smash? His leg looked bad, I thought. I wondered if a course of electrical therapy would help him—assuming he’d ever let me close enough to try. They seem to pride themselves on living like the Brontës out there, cauterising their own wounds and what not … Would you mind?’
    Graham shrugged. ‘Be my guest. As I said, they haven’t called me out in so long, I barely qualify as their doctor. I remember the injury: a nasty break, poorly reset. The burns speak for themselves.’ He ate a little more, then grew thoughtful. ‘There was a touch of nervous trouble too, I believe, when Roderick first came home.’
    This was news to me. ‘Really? It can’t have been too bad. He’s certainly relaxed enough now.’
    ‘Well, it was bad enough for them to want to be a bit hush-hush about it. But then, all those families are touchy like that. I don’t think Mrs Ayres even called in a nurse. She looked after Roderick herself, then brought Caroline home to help her at the end of the war. 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 euphemism for ‘plain’. I didn’t answer, and we finished our puddings in silence. Anne put her spoon into her bowl, then rose from her chair to close a window: we were eating late, and had a candle lit on the table; it was just beginning to be twilight and moths were fluttering around the flame. And as she sat back down she said, ‘Do you remember the first daughter out at Hundreds? Susan, the little girl that died? Pretty, like her mother. I went to her seventh birthday party. Her parents had given her a silver ring, with a real diamond in it. Oh, how I coveted that ring! And a few weeks later she was dead … Was it measles? I know it was something like that.’
    Graham was wiping his mouth with his napkin. He said, ‘Diph, wasn’t it?’
    She pulled a face at the thought. ‘That’s right. Such a nasty way … I remember the funeral. The little coffin, and all the flowers. Heaps and heaps of them.’
    And I realised then that I remembered the funeral, too. I remembered standing with my parents on Lidcote High Street while the coffin went by. I remembered Mrs Ayres, young, heavily veiled in black, like a ghastly bride. I remembered my mother, quietly weeping; my father with his hand on my shoulder; the stiff new sour-smelling colours of my school blazer and cap.
    The thought depressed me, for some reason, more than it ought to have done. Anne and the maid took away the dishes, and Graham and I sat on at the table, discussing various business matters; and that depressed me even more. Graham was younger than me, but was doing rather better: he had entered the practice as a doctor’s son, with money and standing behind him. I had come in as a sort of apprentice to his father’s partner, Dr Gill—that ‘character’, as Roderick had quaintly called him; actually the devil of an idle old man, who, under pretence of being my patron, had let me gradually buy out his stake in the business over many long, hard, poorly paid years. Gill had retired before the war, and lived in a pleasant half-timbered house near Stratford-on-Avon. I had only very recently begun to make a profit. Now,