The Little Stranger - PowerPoint Presentation

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The Little Stranger

Sarah WatersSlide2

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I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old. It was the summer after the war, and the Ayreses still had most of their money then, were still big people in the district. The event was an Empire Day fête: I stood with a line of other village children making a Boy Scout salute while Mrs Ayres and the Colonel went past us, handing out commemorative medals; afterwards we sat to tea with our parents at long tables on what I suppose was the south lawn. Mrs Ayres would have been twenty-four or –five, her husband a few years older; their little girl, Susan, would have been about six. They must have made a very handsome family, but my memory of them is vague. I recall most vividly the house itself, which struck me as an absolute mansion. I remember its lovely ageing details: the worn red brick, the cockled window glass, the weathered sandstone edgings. They made it look blurred and slightly uncertain – like an ice, I thought, just beginning to melt in the sun.

There were no trips inside, of course. The doors and French windows stood open, but each had a rope or a ribbon tied across it; the lavatories set aside for our use were the grooms’ and the gardeners’, in the stable block. My mother, however, still had friends among the servants, and when tea was finished and people were given the run of the grounds, she took me quietly into the house by a side door, and we spent a little time with the cook and the kitchen girls. The visit impressed me terribly.Slide3

… I took a few daring steps in the other. The thrill of it was astonishing. I don’t mean the simple thrill of trespass, I mean the thrill of the house itself, which came to me from every surface – from the polish on the floor, the patina on wooden chairs and cabinets, the bevel of a looking glass, the scroll of a frame. I was drawn to one of the dustless white walls, which had a decorative plaster border, a representation of acorns and leaves. I had never seen anything like it, outside of church, and after a second of looking it over I did what strikes me now as a dreadful thing: I worked my fingers around one of the acorns and tried to prise it from its setting: and when that failed to release it, I got my penknife and dug away with that. I didn’t do it in a spirit of vandalism. I wasn’t a spiteful or destructive boy. It was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it – or rather, as if the admiration itself, which I suspect a more ordinary child would not have felt, entitled me to it. I was like a man, I suppose, wanting a lock of hair from the head of a girl he had suddenly and blindingly become enamoured of.

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… That must have been the last grand year for Hundreds Hall, anyway. … Hundreds had started its steady decline. Soon afterwards the Ayreses’ daughter died, and Mrs Ayres and the Colonel began to live less publicly. I dimly remember the births of their next two children, Caroline and Roderick – but by then I was … My mother died when I was fifteen. She had had miscarriage after

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iscarriage, it turned out, all through my childhood, and the last one killed her. My father lived just long enough to see me graduate from medical school and return to Lidcote a qualified man. Colonel Ayres died a few years later – an aneurism, I think.

With his death, Hundreds Hall withdrew even further from the world. The gates of the park were kept almost permanently closed. The solid brown stone boundary wall, though not especially high, was high enough to seem forbidding. And for all that the house was such a grand one, there was no spot, on any of the lanes in that part of Warwickshire, from which it could be glimpsed. I sometimes thought of it, tucked away in there, as I passed the wall on my rounds – picturing it always as it had seemed to me that day in 1919, with its handsome brick faces, and its cool marble passages, each one filled with marvellous things.

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So when I did see the house again – almost thirty years on from that first visit, and shortly after the end of another war – the changes in it appalled me. … My heart began to sink almost the moment I let myself into the park. I remembered a long approach to the house through neat rhododendron and laurel, but the park was now so overgrown and untended, my small car had to fight its way down the drive. When I broke free of the bushes at last and found myself on a sweep of lumpy gravel with the Hall directly

ahead of me, I put on the

brake,

and gaped in dismay. The house was smaller than in memory, of course – not quite the mansion I’d been recalling – but I’d been expecting that. What horrified me were the signs of decay. Sections of the lovely weathered edgings seemed to have fallen completely away, so that the house’s uncertain Georgian outline was even more tentative than before. Ivy had spread, then patchily died, and hung like tangled rat’s-tail hair. The steps leading up to the broad front door were cracked, with weeds growing lushly up through the seams.

I

parked my car, climbed out, and almost feared to slam the door. The place, for so large and solid a structure, felt precarious. No one appeared to have heard me arrive, so after a little hesitation I went crunching over the gravel and gingerly climbed the cracked stone steps. It was a hot, still summer’s day – so windless that when I tugged on the tarnished old brass and ivory bell-pull I caught the ring of it, pure and clear, but distant, as if in the belly of the house. The ring was immediately followed by the faint, gruff barking of a dog.

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He had taken me along a gravelled terrace that ran the length of the north side of the Hall; he indicated a spot where the terrace had subsided, making for treacherous dips and cracks. I picked my way around them, interested to have been given a chance to see this side of the house – but aghast, again, at how badly the place had been allowed to decline. The garden was a chaos of nettle and bindweed. There was a faint but definite whiff of blocked drains. The windows we passed were streaked and dusty; all were closed, and most were shuttered, except for a pair of glass doors that stood open at the top of a set of flying stone steps wound about with convolvulus. They gave me a view of a large untidy room, a desk with a mess of papers on it, an edge of brocade curtain … That was all I had time to see. We had reached a narrow service doorway, and Roderick was standing aside to let me pass.

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Soon we were hemmed in with trees, which in places arched right over the road way till we passed as through a tunnel; and again great frowning rocks guarded us boldly on either side. Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches of the trees crashed together as we swept along. It grew colder and colder still, and fine, powdery snow began to fall, so that soon we and all around us were covered with a white blanket. The keen wind still carried the howling of the dogs, though this grew fainter as we went on our way. The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side.

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… The time seemed interminable as we swept on our way, now in almost complete darkness, for the rolling clouds obscured the moon. We kept on ascending, with occasional periods of quick descent, but in the main always ascending. Suddenly I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whole tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.

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In the gloom the courtyard

[of

the

castle]

looked of considerable size, and

as several

dark ways led from it under great round

arches it perhaps seemed bigger than it really was. I have not yet been able to see it by daylight.

… as I

stood close to a great door, old and studded with large iron nails, and set in a

projecting doorway

of massive stone. I could see even in the dim light that the stone was massively carved, but that the

carving

had been much worn by time and weather.

…

I stood in silence where I was, for I did not know what to do. Of bell or knocker there was no sign; through these frowning walls and dark window openings it was not likely that my voice

could penetrate. The

time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears

crowding

upon me

. …

… I

heard a heavy step approaching behind the great

door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light.

Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back

.

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But I went quietly, myself. This narrow doorway,

I had realised was the one through which my mother had more or less smuggled me, all those years before. I remembered the bare stone stairway it led to, and, following the steps down, I found myself in the dim vaulted passage that had so impressed me then. But here was another disappointment. I had been picturing this passage as something like a crypt or a dungeon; in fact its walls were the glossy cream-and-green of police- and fire-stations, there was a strip of coconut matting on the flagstone floor, and a mop sat sourly in a bucket. Nobody emerged to greet me, but to my right a half-open door offered a glimpse of the kitchen, so I went softly over and looked inside. Yet another damp squib: I found a large, lifeless room with Victorian counters and mortuary surfaces, all brutally scoured and scrubbed. Only the old deal table – the very table, by the look of it, where I had eaten my jellies and ‘shapes’ – recalled the excitement of that first visit. It was also the only thing in the room to bear any sign of activity, for there was a small pile of muddy vegetables put out on it, together with a bowl of water and a knife – the water discoloured, and the knife wet, as if someone had recently started the task and been called away.

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The passages beyond were dim and seemed unnaturally bare, but apart form that it was just as I remembered, the house opening up like a fan – the ceiling lifting, the flagged floor becoming marble, the bare gloss service walls giving way to silk and stucco, I immediately looked for the decorative border from which I’d prised that acorn; then my eyes grew used to the gloom and I saw

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ith dismay that a horde of schoolboy vandals might have been at work on the plaster since my first attack on it, for chunks of it had fallen away, and what was left was cracked and discoloured. The rest of the wall was not much better. There were several fine pictures and mirrors, but also darker squares and oblongs where pictures had obviously once hung. One panel of watered silk was ripped, and someone had patched and darned it like a sock.

I turned to Caroline and Roderick, expecting embarrassment or even some sort of apology, but they led me past the damage as if quite unbothered by it. … and since most of the doors we passed were shut, even on that bright day there were quite deep pools of shadow. … and here at last a door stood properly ajar, letting out a blurred wedge of sunlight. It led to the room, Caroline told me, in which the family spent most of their time, and which had been known for years and years as ‘the little parlour’.

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Of course ‘little’, as I’d already realised, was a relative term at Hundreds Hall. The room was about thirty feet deep and twenty wide, and it was decorated in a rather hectic manner, with more moulded detail on its ceiling and walls, and an imposing marble fireplace. As in the passage, however, much of the detail was chipped or cracked, or had been lost completely. The floorboards humped and creaking, were covered with overlapping threadbare rugs. A sagging sofa was half hidden by tartan blankets. Two worn velvet wing-backed chairs stood close to the hearth, and sitting on the floor beside one of them was a florid Victorian chamber-pot, filled with water for the dog.

And yet, somehow, the essential loveliness of the room stood out, like the handsome bones behind a ravaged face. The scents were all of summer flowers: sweet pea, mignonette and stock. The light was soft and mildly tinted, and seemed held, really embraced and held, by the pale walls and ceiling.

A French window stood open on another set of flying stone steps, leading down to the terrace and the lawn on this, the south side of the house.

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… A bird in the garden gave some distinctive throbbing call, and we turned our heads to listen to it. I looked around the room again, at all the lovely faded detail; then twisting further in my seat, with a shock of surprise and pleasure I got my first proper view through the open window. An overgrown lawn ran away from the house for what looked like thirty or forty yards. It was bordered by flower-beds, and ended at a wrought iron fence. But the fence gave onto a meadow, which in turn gave onto the fields of the park; the fields stretched off into the distance for a good three-quarters of a mile. The Hundreds boundary wall was just about visible at the end of them, but since the land beyond the wall was pasture, giving way to tilth and cornfield, the prospect ran on, uninterrupted, finishing only where its paling colours bled away completely into the haze of day.

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After breakfast I did a little exploring in the castle. I went out on the stairs and found a room looking towards the south. The view was magnificent, and from where I stood there was every opportunity of seeing it. The castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree-tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through the forests.

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I followed Roderick … but soon the passage lightened and widened, and we emerged in what I realised was the entrance hall of the house.

And here I had to pause and look around me; for the hall was very lovely. Its floor was of pink and liver-coloured marble, laid down like a chequerboard. The walls were pale wooden panels, ruddy with reflected colour from the floor. Dominating it all, however, was the mahogany staircase, which rose in an elegant soft square spiral through two more floors, its polished serpent-headed banister climbing in a single unbroken line. It made a stairwell fifteen feet wide, and easily sixty feet high; and it was lit, coolly and kindly, by a dome of milky glass in the roof above.

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[Caroline] … You live above your surgery, don’t you? In old Dr Gill’s place?’

I said, ‘I do. I moved in there as a junior partner, and have never moved out. It’s a plain enough place. But my patients know it; and it suits a bachelor, I suppose.’

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The ground floor of my house is given over to a consulting-room, dispensary and waiting-room, with my

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itchen 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’ paintwork – and a cramped, inconvenient kitchen. A daily woman, Mrs Rush, kept things tidy and cooked my meals.

(Page 37)

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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 if 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 mush to linger for. She went to the fireplace to peer up the 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 les to the basement. …

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In the library I found, to my great delight, a vast number of English books, whole shelves full of them, and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers. A table in the centre was littered with English magazines and newspapers, though none of them were of a recent date. The books were of the most varied kind – history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law – all relating to England and English life and customs and manners.

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… 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 in a pale

chinoiserie

theme, with a hand-painted paper on its walls and, on its polished table, two ormolu candelabra with writhing branches and cups. But then she led me back to the centre of the passage and, opening up another door, made me stand just inside the threshold while she crossed through the darkness of the room beyond to unfasten the shutters at one of its windows

.

(

Page 65

)

… The afternoon was bright, the light came in like blades through the seams of in the shutters, and even as she lifted the bolt I could see that the space we were in was a large and impressive one, with various sheeted pieces of furniture dotted about. But when she drew the creaking shutters back and details leapt into life around me, I was so astonished, I laughed.

The room was an octagonal saloon, about forty feet across. It had a vivid yellow paper on its walls and a greenish patterned carpet; the fireplace was unblemished white marble, and from the centre of the heavily moulded ceiling there hung a large gilt-and-crystal chandelier.

[1820s] … Apparently they were all madly keen on yellow in those days; God knows why. The paper’s original, which is why we’ve hung on to it. As you can see’ – she pointed out various spots where the ancient paper was drooping from the walls – ‘it seems less interested in hanging on to us. I can’t show you the chandelier in all its glory, unfortunately, with the generator off; it’s quite something when its blazing. … The carpet’s in strips, of course. You can roll them back for dancing.’

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… He insisted on carrying my traps along the passage, and then up a great winding stair, and along another great passage, on whose stone floor our steps rang heavily. AT the end of this he threw open a heavy door, and I rejoiced to see within a well-lit room in which a table was

s

pread for supper, and on whose mighty hearth a great fore of logs flamed and flared.

The Count halted, putting down my bags, closed the door, and crossing the room, opened another door, which led into a small octagonal room lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort. Passing through this, he opened another door, and motioned me to enter. It was a welcome sight; for here was a great bedroom well lighted and warmed with another log fire, which sent a hollow roar up the wide chimney.

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… There are certainly odd deficiencies in the house, considering the extraordinary evidences of wealth which are around me. The table service is of gold, and so beautifully wrought that it must be of immense value. The curtains and upholstery of the chairs and sofas and the hangings of my bed are of the costliest and most beautiful fabrics, and must have been of fabulous value when they were made, for they are centuries old, though in excellent order. … But still in none of the rooms is there a mirror. Thee is not even a toilet glass on my table, … I have not yet seen a servant anywhere, or heard a sound near the castle except the howling of wolves. …

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… The window was actually a pair of long glass doors and, like the ones in Roderick’s room and the little parlour, it opened on to a set of flying stone steps leading down to the terrace. As I saw as I drew closer, these particular steps had collapsed: the top one still jutted from the sill, but the rest lay scattered on the gravel four feet below, dark and weathered as if they had lain there some time.

… The lawn must once, I thought, have been trimmed and level: perhaps a space for croquet. Now the ground was lumpy with molehills and thistles, and the grass in places was knee-high. The straggling shrubs all around it gave way to clumps of purple beech, beautifully vivid in colour but quite out of control; and the two huge unlopped English elms beyond them would, I saw, once the sun sank lower, cast the whole of the scene in shadow.

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[The estate at Purfleet as described by Jonathan Harker] … It is surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of years. The closed gates were of heavy old oak and iron, all eaten with rust.

The estate is called Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old

Quatre Face,

as the house is four-sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of the compass. It contains in all some twenty acres, quite surrounded by the solid stone wall above mentioned. There are many trees on it, which make it in places gloomy, and there is a deep, dark-looking pond or small lake, evidently fed by some springs, as the water is clear and flows away in a fair-sized stream. The house is very large and of all periods back, I should say, to mediaeval times, for one part is of stone immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily barred with iron. It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an old chapel or church. … The house has been added to, but in a very straggling way, and I can only guess at the amount of ground it covers, which must be very great. There are but a few houses close at hand, one being a very large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic asylum. It is not, however, visible from the grounds.

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… At last, however, I found one door at the top of a stairway which, though it seemed to be locked, gave a little under pressure. … From the windows I could see that the suite of rooms lay along to the south of the castle, … The castle was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable, and great windows were placed here where sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach,… This was evidently the portion of the castle occupied in bygone days, for the furniture had more air of comfort than any I had seen. The windows were curtainless, and the yellow moonlight, flooding in through the diamond panes, enabled me to see even colours, whilst it softened the wealth of dust which lay over all and disguised in some measure the ravages if time and the moth.

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[Harker has climbed down the outside of the building and entered the Count’s room]

The room was empty! It was barely furnished with odd things, which seemed to have never been used; the furniture was something the same style as that in the south rooms, and was covered with dust. … The only thing I found was a great heap of gold in one corner … covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground. … There were also chains and ornaments, some jewelled, but all of them old and stained.

At one corner of the room was a heavy door. I tried it, … It was open, and led through a stone passage to a circular stairway, which went steeply down. I descended, minding carefully where I went, for the stairs were dark, being only lit by loopholes in the heavy masonry. AT the bottom there was a dark, tunnel-like passage, through which came a deathly, sickly odour, the odour of old earth newly turned. As I went through the passage the smell grew closer and heavier. At last I pulled open a heavy door which stood ajar, and found myself in an old, ruined chapel, which had evidently been used as a graveyard. The roof was broken, and in two places were steps leading to vaults, but the ground had recently been dug over, and the earth placed in great wooden boxes, …

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