The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Umberslade Hall, where the Colonel’s father used to go shooting: filled with secretaries now. Woodcote stands empty; I believe Meriden Hall is the same. Charlecote and Coughton have both been turned over to the public …’
    She spoke with a sigh, her tone growing serious and almost plangent; and just for a second she looked her age. Then she turned her head, her expression changing. She had caught, as I had, the faint echoey rattle of china and teaspoons, out in the passage. Putting a hand to her breast, she leaned towards me and said in a mock-anxious murmur, ‘Here comes what my son calls “the skeletons’ polka”. Betty has a positive genius, you know, for dropping cups. And we simply haven’t the china—’ The rattle grew louder, and she closed her eyes. ‘Oh, the suspense!’ She called through the open door, ‘Do watch your step, Betty!’
    ‘I’m watching it, madam!’ came the indignant reply; and in another moment the girl appeared in the doorway, frowning and blushing as she manoeuvred in the large mahogany tray.
    I got up to help her, but Caroline rose at the same time. She took the tray capably from Betty’s hands, set it down, and looked it over.
    ‘Not a single drop spilled! That must be in your honour, Doctor. You see we have Dr Faraday with us, Betty? He sorted you out with a miracle cure that time, you remember?’
    Betty put down her head. ‘Yes, miss.’
    I said, smiling, ‘How are you, Betty?’
    ‘I’m all right, thank you, sir.’
    ‘I’m glad to hear it, and to see you looking so well. So smart, too!’
    I spoke guilelessly, but her expression slightly darkened, as if she suspected me of teasing; and then I remembered her having complained to me about the ‘awful dress and hat’ that the Ayreses made her wear. The fact is, she
was
rather quaintly dressed, in a black frock with a white apron, and with starched cuffs and a collar dwarfing her childish wrists and throat; and on her head was a fussy frilled cap, the kind of thing I couldn’t remember having seen in a Warwickshire drawing-room since before the war. But in that old-fashioned, shabby-elegant setting, it was somehow hard to imagine her dressed any other way.
    And she looked healthy enough, and took trouble over handing out the cups and the slices of cake, as if she were settling down all right. When she had finished she even made us a dip, like an unformed curtsey. Mrs Ayres said, ‘Thank you, Betty, that will do,’ and she turned and left us. We heard the fading slap and squeak of her stout-soled shoes as she made her way back to the basement.
    Caroline, setting down a bowl of tea for Gyp to lap at, said, ‘Poor Betty. Not a natural parlourmaid.’
    But her mother spoke indulgently. ‘Oh, we must give her more time. I always remember my great-aunt saying that a well-run house was like an oyster. Girls come to one as specks of grit, you see; ten years later, they leave one as pearls.’
    She was addressing me as well as Caroline—clearly forgetting, for the moment, that my own mother had once been one of the specks of grit her great-aunt had meant. I think even Caroline had forgotten it. They both sat comfortably in their chairs, enjoying the tea and the cake that Betty had prepared for them, then awkwardly carried for them, then cut and served for them, from plates and cups which, at the ring of a bell, she would soon remove and wash … I said nothing this time, however. I sat enjoying the tea and cake, too. For if the house, like an oyster, was at work on Betty, fining and disguising her with layer after minuscule layer of its own particular charm, then I suppose it had already begun a similar process with me.

    J ust as Caroline had predicted, her brother failed to join us that day: it was she who, a little later, walked with me out to my car. She asked if I was driving straight back to Lidcote; I told her I was planning to call on someone in another village. And when I named the village in question, she said,