The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters Read Free Book Online Page A

with the Health Service looming, private doctoring seemed done for. On top of that, all my poorer patients would soon have the option of leaving my list and attaching themselves to another man, thereby vastly reducing my income. I had had several bad nights over it.
    ‘I shall lose them all,’ I told Graham now, putting my elbows on the table and wearily rubbing my face.
    ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he answered. ‘They’ve no more reason to leave you than they have to leave me—or Seeley, or Morrison.’
    ‘Morrison gives them any amount of cough mixture and liver salts,’ I said. ‘They like that. Seeley has his manners, his little ways with the ladies. You’re a nice clean handsome sort of family chap; they like that, too. They don’t like me. They never have. They’ve never been able to place me. I don’t hunt or play bridge; but I don’t play darts or football, either. I’m not grand enough for the gentry—not grand enough for working people, come to that. They want to look up to their doctor. They don’t want to think he’s one of them.’
    ‘Oh, rubbish. All they want is a man who can do the job! Which you eminently can. If anything, you’re too conscientious. You’ve too much time to fret in. You ought to get married; that’d sort you out.’
    I laughed. ‘God! I can barely keep myself, let alone a wife and family.’
    He had heard it all before, but tolerantly let me grumble on. Anne brought us coffee, and we talked until almost eleven. I should have been happy to stay longer, but, guessing what little time the two of them must get alone together, I at last said good night. Their house is just on the other side of the village from mine, a ten-minute walk away; the evening was still so warm and airless, I went slowly, by a roundabout route, pausing once to light a cigarette, then slipping off my jacket, loosening my tie, and going on in my shirt-sleeves.
    The ground floor of my house is given over to a consulting-room, dispensary and waiting-room, with my kitchen and sitting-room on the floor above, and a bedroom in the attic. It was, as I’d told Caroline Ayres, a very plain sort of place. I’d never had time or money to brighten it, so it still had the same dispiriting decorations it had had when I’d moved in—mustard walls and ‘combed’ paint-work—and a cramped, inconvenient kitchen. A daily woman, Mrs Rush, kept things tidy and cooked my meals. When not actually dealing with patients I spent most of my time downstairs, making up prescriptions or reading and writing at my desk. Tonight I went straight through to my consulting-room to look over my notes for the following day, and to put my bag in order; and it was only as I opened the bag up, and saw the loosely wrapped brown-paper parcel inside it, that I remembered the photograph Mrs Ayres had given me out at Hundreds Hall. I undid the paper and studied the scene again; and then, still unsure about that fair-haired nursemaid, and wanting to compare the picture with other photographs, I took it upstairs. In one of my bedroom cupboards there was an old biscuit-tin, full of papers and family keepsakes, put together by my parents. I dug it out, carried it over to the bed, and began to go through it.
    I hadn’t opened this tin in years, and had forgotten what was in it. Most of its contents, I saw with surprise, were odd little fragments from my own past. My birth certificate was there, for example, along with some sort of christening notice; a furred brown envelope turned out to hold two of my milk teeth and a lock of my baby hair, unfeasibly soft and blond; and then came a mess of whiskery Scouting- and swimming-badges, school certificates, school reports, and records of prizes—the sequence of them all mixed up, so that a torn newspaper cutting announcing my graduation from medical school had snagged itself on a letter from my first headmaster, ‘fervently’ recommending me for a scholarship to Leamington College. There was even, I