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Good Reading : April 2009
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BOOKBITE 2 stranger the little by Sarah Waters In our extract from a forthcoming novel by SARAH WATERS, we introduce you to Hundreds Hall, a grand and slightly sinister estate. Synopsis In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty-to-nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? 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 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. The kitchen was a basement one, reached by a cool vaulted corridor with something of the feel of a castle dungeon. An extraordinary number of people seemed to be coming and going along it with hampers and trays. The girls had such a mountain of crockery to wash, my I wasn’t a spiteful or destructive boy. It was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it. Chapter One 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 52 goodreading i APRIL 2009 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 the tea was finished and mother rolled up her sleeves to help them; and to my very great delight, as a reward for her labour I was allowed to take my pick of the jellies and ‘shapes’ that had come back uneaten from the fête. I was put to sit at a deal-topped table, and given a spoon from the family’s own drawer – a heavy thing of dulled silver, its bowl almost bigger than my mouth. But then came an even greater treat. High up on the wall of the
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