The council houses on the edge of Hundreds Park have been a great success—so much so that last year a dozen more were added, and others are planned. Many of the families are on my list, so I am out there quite often. The houses are cosy enough, with neat flower and vegetable gardens, and swings and slides set up for the children. Only one real change has been made, and that is that the chain-link fences at the rear of the estate have been replaced by a fence of wood. The families themselves requested this: it seems that none of them much enjoyed gazing out from their back windows at the Hall; they said the house ‘gave them the creeps’. Stories about the Hundreds ghost continue to circulate, mainly among the younger people and the newcomers, people with no real knowledge of the Ayreses themselves. The most popular tale, I gather, is that the Hall is haunted by the spirit of a servant-girl who was badly treated by a cruel master, and who jumped or was pushed to her death from one of the upstairs windows. She’s regularly seen in the park, apparently, weeping and weeping as though her heart will break.
I bumped into Betty once, on the road in front of the houses. One of the families living out there is related to hers. It was a few months after Caroline’s death. I saw a young woman and a young man coming out through a garden gate as I was parking my car; a minute later I drew in my door to let them pass, and the young woman paused and said, ‘Don’t you know me, Dr Faraday?’ I looked into her face, and saw those wide grey eyes of hers, and her little crooked teeth; I wouldn’t have recognised her otherwise. She was wearing a cheap summer frock with a fashionable swing to its skirt. Her colourless hair had been lightened and permed, her lips and cheeks were red with rouge; she was still small, but her slightness had gone, or else she’d found some artificial way to improve her figure. I suppose she was almost sixteen. She told me she was still living with her parents, and her mother was still ‘carrying on’, but she’d at last got the sort of job she wanted, in a bicycle factory. The work was dull enough, but the other girls were ‘a laugh’; she had her evenings and her weekends to herself, and often went dancing up in Coventry. She kept her arm through that of her young man all the time she spoke. He looked about twenty-two or -three: almost the same age as Roderick.
She made no reference to the inquest, or to Caroline’s death, and I began to think, as she chattered on, that she wasn’t going to mention Hundreds at all—as if the whole dark interlude had left no mark on her. But then the people she had been visiting looked out of their house and called to the young man, and once he had moved off her bright manner seemed slightly to fade.
I said quietly, ‘You don’t mind coming so close to Hundreds then, Betty?’
She blushed, and shook her head.
‘I wouldn’t go back in the house, though. Not for a thousand pounds! I have dreams about it, all the time.’
‘Do you?’ I never dreamt about it now.
‘Not bad dreams,’ she said. She wrinkled up her nose. ‘Funny dreams. I dream most about Mrs Ayres. I dream she tries to give me things, jewels and brooches and things like that. And I never want to take them, I don’t know why; and in the end it makes her cry … Poor Mrs Ayres. She were such a nice lady. Miss Caroline, too. It wasn’t fair, was it, what happened to them?’
I agreed that it wasn’t. We stood sadly for a moment, with nothing more to say. I thought what a very unremarkable pair we must have made to anybody watching; and yet, out of the wreckage of that terrible year, she and I were the only survivors.
Then her young man ambled back to us, and she grew pert again. She gave me her hand in farewell, put her arm through his, and they headed off towards the bus-stop. I saw them still there, twenty minutes later, when I returned to my car: they were larking about on the bench, he had pulled her into his lap and she was kicking up her legs and laughing.
Hundreds Hall is still unsold. No one has the money or the inclination to take it on. For a while there was talk of the county council making a teacher-training centre of it. Then a Birmingham businessman apparently considered it for an hotel. But the rumours surface, and come to nothing; and recently they’ve begun to surface less often. Probably the look of the place has begun to put people off—for of course, the gardens are hopelessly overgrown now, and the terrace has been lost to the weeds; children have chalked on the walls and thrown stones at the windows, and the house seems to sit in the chaos like some wounded, blighted beast.
I go out there whenever my busy days will allow. None of the locks has been changed, and I still have my keys. Very occasionally I’ll find that someone has been there in my absence—a tramp or a squatter—and has tried to force the door; the doors are solid ones, however, and on the whole the Hall’s reputation keeps outsiders away. And there is nothing to steal, for what Caroline failed to sell in the weeks before she died, her uncle and aunt disposed of.
The downstairs rooms I tend to keep shuttered. The second floor has been giving me some anxiety lately: there are holes appearing in the roof, where slates have been lost in bad weather; a family of swallows has come right into the old day-nursery and built a nest there. I put down pails to catch the rainwater, and have boarded up the worst of the broken windows. Every so often I go right through the house, sweeping up the dust and the mouse-dirt. The saloon ceiling still holds, though it can only be a matter of time before the bloated stucco tumbles. Caroline’s bedroom continues to fade. Roderick’s room, even now, smells faintly of burning … Despite all this, the house retains its beauty. In some ways it is handsomer than ever, for without the carpets and the furniture and the clutter of occupation, one appreciates the lines and Georgian symmetries, the lovely shifts between shadow and light, the gentle progression of the rooms. Wandering softly through the twilit spaces, I can even seem to see the house as its architect must have done when it was new, with its plaster detail fresh and unchipped, its surfaces unblemished. In those moments there is no trace of the Ayreses at all. It is as if the house has thrown the family off, like springing turf throwing off a footprint.
I am no nearer now to understanding just what happened at the Hall than I was three years ago. Once or twice I’ve spoken about it to Seeley. He has come down firmly in favour of his old, rational view that Hundreds was, in effect, defeated by history, destroyed by its own failure to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. In his opinion, the Ayreses, unable to advance with the times, simply opted for retreat—for suicide, and madness. Right across England, he says, other old gentry families are probably disappearing in exactly the same way.
The theory is convincing enough; and yet, sometimes I am troubled. I remember poor, good-tempered Gyp; I recall those mysterious black smudges on the walls and ceiling of Roderick’s room; I picture the three little drops of blood that I once saw springing to the surface of Mrs Ayres’s silk blouse. And I think of Caroline. I think of Caroline, in the moments before she died, advancing across that moonlit landing. I think of her crying out: You!
I’ve never attempted to remind Seeley of his other, odder theory: that Hundreds was consumed by some dark germ, some ravenous shadow-creature, some ‘little stranger’, spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself. But on my solitary visits, I find myself growing watchful. Every so often I’ll sense a presence, or catch a movement at the corner of my eye, and my heart will give a jolt of fear and expectation: I’ll imagine that the secret is about to be revealed to me at last; that I will see what Caroline saw, and recognise it, as she did.
If Hundreds Hall is haunted, however, its ghost doesn’t show itself to me. For I’ll turn, and am disappointed—realising that what I am looking at is only a cracked window-pane, and that the face gazing distortedly from it, baffled and longing, is my own.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to all my supportive and generous early readers: Alison Oram, Sally O-J, Antony Topping, Hirāni Himona, Jennifer Vaughan, Terry Vaughan, and Ceri Williams. Thanks to my agent, Judith Murray; and to my editors in the U.K., the U.S., and Canada: Lennie Goodings, Megan Lynch, and L
ara Hinchberger. Thanks to the staff at Greene & Heaton Ltd; Little, Brown; Riverhead; and McClelland & Stewart who read and commented on the manuscript. Thanks to Hilda Walsh for advice on muscles. Special thanks to Angela Hewins for her patient answers to my fumbling queries on Warwickshire life. Extra special thanks to Lucy Vaughan.
Part of The Little Stranger was written during an inspiring month at Hedgebrook women writers’ retreat on Whidbey Island, and I am hugely grateful both to the staff of Hedgebrook for facilitating that visit, and to the authors I met while I was there.
I am also indebted to various works of nonfiction. These include: Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living (London, 1886); Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature (London, 1848); Harry Price, Poltergeist Over England (London, 1945); Hereward Carrington and Nandor Fodor, Haunted People (New York, 1951); Nandor Fodor, On the Trail of the Poltergeist (New York, 1958); A. R. G. Owen, Can We Explain the Poltergeist? (New York, 1964); Kenneth Lane, Diary of a Medical Nobody (London, 1982) and West Country Doctor (London, 1984); John Pemberton, Will Pickles of Wensleydale (London, 1970); Dawn Robertson, A Country Doctor (Kirkby Stephen, 1999); Geoffrey Barber, Country Doctor (Ipswich, 1974); Geoffrey Tyack, Warwickshire Country Houses (Chichester, 1994); George Hewins, The Dillen, edited by Angela Hewins (London, 1981); and Angela Hewins, Mary, After the Queen (Oxford, 1985).
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger
(Series: # )
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