The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

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.
    This passage ran from north to south, so all its rooms faced west. The afternoon was bright, the light came in like blades through the seams 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.
    ‘Pretty crazy, isn’t it?’ said Caroline, laughing too.
    ‘It’s incredible!’ I said. ‘One would never guess at it from the rest of the house—which is all so relatively sober.’
    ‘Ah, well. I dare say the original architect would have wept if he’d known what was coming. It was Ralph Billington Ayres—you remember him? the family blade?—who had this room added, in the 1820s, when he still had most of his money. 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 it’s blazing. That’s original too, but my parents had it electrified when they were first married. They used to throw lots of parties in those days, when the house was still grand enough to bear it. The carpet’s in strips, of course. You can roll them back for dancing.’
    She pointed out one or two other features, lifting off dust-sheets to expose the fine low Regency chair or cabinet or sofa underneath.
    ‘What’s this?’ I asked, of one irregular-looking item. ‘Piano?’
    She put back a corner of its quilted cover. ‘Flemish harpsichord, older than the house. I don’t suppose you play?’
    ‘Good heavens, no.’
    ‘No, nor I. A pity. It ought really to be used, poor thing.’
    But she spoke without much emotion, running her hand in a business-like way over the instrument’s decorated case, then letting the cover fall again and going over to the unshuttered window. I joined her there. 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 when 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. Undeterred, Caroline seized the handle of the doors and opened them up, and we stood on the little precipice in the soft, warm, fragrant air, looking over the west lawn. 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.
    Away to the right was a clutch of outbuildings, the garage and disused stables. Over the stable door was a great white