The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

for Graham and me, for with the hot weather there had come a variety of small epidemics in the district, and now a bad summer fever began to do the rounds of the villages. One already delicate child was severely affected, and I spent a lot of time on him, calling in at the house sometimes two or three times a day until he was better. There was no money in it: he was a ‘club’ patient, which meant I received only a handful of shillings for treating him and his brothers and sisters over the course of an entire year. But I knew his family well, and was fond of them, and was glad to see him recover; and the parents were touchingly grateful.
    I just about remembered, in the midst of all this, to send out Betty’s prescription to the Hall, but I had no further contact with her or with the Ayreses. I continued to pass the walls of Hundreds on my regular round, and now and then I’d catch myself thinking with something like wistfulness of the unkempt landscape beyond it, with that poor neglected house at its heart, quietly sliding into decay. But as we turned the high point of summer and the season started to wane, that was as much thought as I began to give it. My visit to the Ayreses soon felt vaguely unreal—like some vivid but improbable dream.
    Then, one evening at the end of August—more than a month, in other words, since I had gone out to treat Betty—I was driving along one of the lanes outside Lidcote and caught sight of a large black dog sniffing around in the dust. It must have been half past seven or so. The sun was still quite high in the sky, but the sky itself was beginning to pink; I’d finished my evening surgery and was on my way to visit a patient in one of the neighbouring villages. The dog started barking when he heard my car, and as he put up his head and moved forward I saw the grey in his fur, and recognised him as the elderly Hundreds Labrador, Gyp. A second later I saw Caroline. She was right at the edge of the lane, on the shadowy side. Hatless and bare-legged, she was reaching into one of the hedges—had managed to work her way into the brambles so completely that without Gyp to alert me I would have driven past without spotting her. Drawing closer, I saw her call for the dog to be quiet; she turned her head to my car, narrowing her eyes against what must have been the glare of the windscreen. I noticed then that she had the strap of a satchel over her breast, and was carrying what I took to be an old spotted handkerchief, done up as a bundle like Dick Whittington’s. Drawing level with her, I put on the brake and called through my open window.
    ‘Are you running away from home, Miss Ayres?’
    She recognised me then, and smiled, and began to back out of the bushes. She did it gingerly, putting up a hand to free her hair from the brambles, then giving a final spring to the dusty surface of the road. Brushing down her skirt—she was dressed in the same badly fitting cotton frock she’d been wearing when I’d seen her last—she said, ‘I’ve been into the village, doing errands for my mother. But then I got tempted from the path. Look.’
    She carefully opened the bundle up, and I realised that what I had taken for spots on the handkerchief were actually purple juice-stains: she had lined the cloth with dock leaves, and was filling it with blackberries. She picked out one of the largest berries for me, lightly blowing the dust from it before she handed it over. I put it into my mouth and felt it break against my tongue, warm as blood, and fantastically sweet.
    ‘Aren’t they good?’ she said, as I swallowed. She gave me another, then took one for herself. ‘My brother and I used to come berrying here when we were young. It’s the best spot for blackberries in the whole of the county, I don’t know why. It can be dry as the Sahara everywhere else, but the fruit here are always good. They must be fed by a spring, or something.’
    She put her thumb to the corner of her mouth to catch a