The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters Page B

chimney, concerned about a fall of soot in the grate; then she closed the shutter and led me to the neighbouring room—the old estate office she had already mentioned, which was panelled like Roderick’s and had similar Gothic touches. Her brother’s door was next, and just beyond that was the curtained arch that led to the basement. We went quietly past them both and found the ‘boot room’, a musty-smelling chamber full of mackintoshes and perished wellingtons and tennis racquets and mallets but really, she told me, a sort of tiring-room from the days when the family still ran a stables. A door inside it led to a quaint delft-tiled lavatory that had been known for over a century, she said, as ‘the gentlemen’s hoo-hah’.
    She snapped her fingers again for Gyp, and we moved on.
    ‘You’re not bored?’ she asked.
    ‘Not at all.’
    ‘Do I make a good guide?’
    ‘You make a capital guide.’
    ‘But now, oh dear, here’s one of those bits from which you must turn your gaze. Oh, and now you’re laughing at us! That’s unfair.’
    I had to explain why I was smiling: the panel she meant was the one from which I’d prised that plaster acorn, all those years before. I told the story rather warily, not quite sure how she would take it. But she widened her eyes as if thrilled.
    ‘Oh, but that’s too funny! And Mother really gave you a medal? Like Queen Alexandra? I wonder if she remembers.’
    ‘Please don’t mention it to her,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t. I was one of about fifty nasty little grubby-kneed boys that day.’
    ‘But you liked the house, even then?’
    ‘Enough to want to vandalise it.’
    ‘Well,’ she said kindly, ‘I don’t blame you for wanting to vandalise these silly mouldings. They were simply asking to be snapped off. What you started I’m afraid Roddie and I, between us, probably finished … But isn’t that queer? You saw Hundreds before he or I ever did.’
    ‘So I did,’ I said, struck by the thought.
    We moved away from the broken mouldings, and continued our tour. She drew my attention to a short line of portraits, murky canvases in heavy gold frames. And, just as in some American movie mock-up of a stately home, they turned out to be what she called ‘the family album’.
    ‘None of them is terribly good or valuable or anything, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘All the valuable ones have been sold, along with the best of the furniture. But they’re fun, if you can bear the bad light.’
    She pointed to the first. ‘Here’s William Barber Ayres. He’s the man who had the Hall built. A good county chap, like all the Ayreses, but evidently rather near: we have letters to him from the architect, complaining of outstanding fees and more or less threatening to send round the heavies … Next is Matthew Ayres, who took troops to Boston. He came back in disgrace, with an American wife, and died three months later; we like to say she poisoned him … This is Ralph Billington Ayres, Matthew’s nephew—the family gambler, who for a time ran a second estate, in Norfolk, and just like a Georgette Heyer rake lost the whole of it in a single game of cards … And this is Catherine Ayres, his daughter-in-law and my great-grandmother. She was an Irish racehorse heiress, and restored the family fortune. It was said that she could never go near a horse herself, for fear of frightening it. Pretty clear where I get my looks from, wouldn’t you say?’
    She laughed as she spoke, because the woman in the painting was strikingly ugly; but the fact is, Caroline did resemble her, just a little—though it gave me a slight shock to realise it, for I found I had grown as used to her mismatched masculine features as I had to Roderick’s scars. I made some gesture of polite demurral, but she had already turned away. She had two more rooms, she said, to show me, but would ‘save the best till last’. I thought the one she took me to next was arresting enough: a dining-room, done up