The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters Page A

papers, and Caroline and I took the hint and left him. He promised, with a touch of vagueness, that he would shortly join us for tea.
    His sister shook her head. ‘He’ll be in there for hours now,’ she murmured, as we moved away from his door. ‘I wish he’d let me share the work with him, but he never will … His leg was really better, though, wasn’t it? I can’t thank you enough for helping him like this.’
    ‘He could help himself,’ I said, ‘by doing the right kind of exercises. Or a bit of simple massage every day would make a great deal of difference to the muscle. I’ve given him some liniment; you might see that he uses it?’
    ‘I’ll do my best. But I expect you’ve noticed how careless of himself he is.’ She slowed her step. ‘What do you think of him, honestly?’
    I said, ‘I think he’s fundamentally very healthy. I think he’s charming, too, by the way. It’s a pity he’s been allowed to organise his room like that, with the business side of things dominating everything else.’
    ‘Yes, I know. Our father used to run the estate from the library. It’s his old desk that Roderick uses, but I never remember it looking so chaotic in the old days, and that was with four farms to manage, not just one. We had an agent to help us then, mind; a Mr McLeod. He had to leave us during the war. He had an office of his own, just back there. This side of the Hall was the ‘men’s side’, if you know what I mean, and always busy. Now, apart from Roderick’s room, this whole section of the house might as well not be here at all.’
    She spoke casually, but it was novel and curious to me to think of having grown up in a house with so many spare rooms in it they could be shut up and forgotten. When I said this to Caroline, however, she gave that rueful laugh of hers.
    ‘The novelty soon wears off, I assure you! One starts to think of them pretty quickly as something like tiresome poor relations, for one can’t abandon them completely, but they have accidents, or fall ill, and finish by using up more money than would have been needed to pension them off. It’s a shame, because there are some quite nice features here … But I could show you over the house, if you’d like? If you promise to avert your gaze from the worst bits? The sixpenny tour. What do you say?’
    She seemed genuinely keen to do it, and I said I’d like it very much, if it wouldn’t mean keeping her mother waiting. She said, ‘Oh, Mother’s a true Edwardian at heart: she thinks it a barbarism to take tea before four o’clock. What time is it now?’ It was just after half past three. ‘We’ve plenty of time. Let’s start at the front.’
    She snapped her fingers for Gyp, who had gone trotting on ahead, and took me back past her brother’s door.
    ‘The hall you’ve seen, of course,’ she said, when we reached it and I had set down my therapy machine and bag. ‘The floor’s Carrara marble, and three inches thick—hence the vaulted ceilings in the rooms underneath. It’s a devil to polish. The staircase: considered quite a feat of engineering when it was put in, because of the open second landing; there aren’t many others quite like it. My father used to say it was like something from a department store. My grandmother refused to use it; it gave her vertigo … Over there’s our old morning room, but I won’t show you that: it’s quite empty, and far too shabby. Let’s go in here instead.’
    She opened a door on a darkened room which, once she had gone across to the shuttered windows and let in some light, revealed itself as a pleasant largish library. Most of its shelves, however, were hung with dust-sheets, and some of its furniture was obviously gone: she reached into a mesh-fronted case and carefully drew out a couple of what she said were the house’s best books, but I could see that the room was not what it had been, and there wasn’t much to linger for. She went to the fireplace to peer up the