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

was astonished to see, the very Empire Day medal that had been presented to me out at Hundreds Hall by a youthful Mrs Ayres. It had been carefully wrapped in tissue paper, and it tumbled heavily into my hand, its coloured ribbon unfrayed, its bronze surface dulled but untarnished.
    But of my parents’ own lives, I discovered, there was shockingly little record. I suppose there was simply not much record to be kept. A couple of sentimental wartime postcards, with neat, bland, badly spelled messages; a lucky coin, with a hole for a string hammered through it; a spray of paper violets—that was about it. I had remembered photographs, but there was only one photograph here, a fading postcard sized thing with curling corners. It had been taken in a photographer’s tent at a local Mop Fair, and it showed my mother and father as a courting couple, fantastically posed against an Alpine backdrop, in a roped laundry-hamper meant to be the basket of a hot-air balloon.
    I set this picture beside the Hundreds group, and looked from one to the other. The angle at which my balloonist mother was holding her head, however, together with the droop of a sad-looking feather on her hat, meant that I was still no wiser, and finally I gave the thing up. The Mop Fair photograph, too, had begun to look rather poignant to me; and when I gazed again at the scraps and cuttings recording my own achievements, and thought of the care and pride with which my parents had preserved them, I felt ashamed. My father had taken on debt after debt in order to fund my education. The debts had probably ruined his health; they had almost certainly helped weaken my mother. And what had been the result? I was a good, ordinary doctor. In another setting I might have been better than good. But I had started work with debts of my own, and after fifteen years in the same small country practice I was yet to make a decent income.
    I have never thought of myself as a discontented man. I have been too busy for discontentment to have had a chance to set in. But I’ve had occasional dark hours, dreary fits when my life, laid all before me, has seemed bitter and hollow and insignificant as a bad nut; and one of those fits came upon me now. I forgot the many modest successes of my career, and instead saw every failure: the mishandled cases, the missed opportunities, the moments of cowardice and disappointment. I thought of my undistinguished war years—spent here in Warwickshire, while my younger colleagues, Graham and Morrison, enrolled with the RAMC . I felt the empty rooms below me, and remembered a girl with whom, as a medical student, I’d been very much in love: a girl from a good Birmingham family, whose parents hadn’t considered me to be a suitable match, and who had finally thrown me over for another man. I had rather turned my back on romance after that disenchantment, and the few affairs I had had since then had been very half-hearted things. Now those passionless embraces came back to me too, in all their dry mechanical detail. I felt a wave of disgust for myself, and a pity for the women involved.
    The heat in that attic room was stifling. I switched off my lamp, and lit a cigarette, and lay down among the photographs and fragments on the bed. The window was open and the curtain pulled back. The night was moonless, but the dark was the uneasy dark of summer, fretful with subtle movement and sound. I gazed into it; and what I saw—a sort of curious after-image of my day—was Hundreds Hall. I saw its cool fragrant spaces, the light it held like wine in a glass. And I pictured the people inside it as they must be now: Betty in her room, Mrs Ayres and Caroline in theirs, Roderick in his …
    I lay like that for a long time, open-eyed and unmoving, the cigarette burning slowly down, turning to ash between my fingers.

Chapter 2
    T he fit of discontentment passed with the night; by the morning I had almost forgotten it. That day was the start of a brief busy phase