Free The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters Page B

of reluctance, ‘Well, his big idea is for me to get an extension run out here from the water main. He wants me to bring out electricity while I’m at it. He says that even if the well fills up again, the pump is just about ready to blow. He wants me to replace that; and he’s started saying now that he thinks the milking-shed’s unsafe. He’d like me to pull it down and build a brick one. With a brick shed and an electric milker we could start turning out accredited milk, and make more of a profit. It’s all he talks about.’
    He reached to a table at his side for a gun-metal ashtray, already crowded with worm-like stubs. I leaned across and tapped my cigarette into it too, saying, ‘Well, I fear he’s right about the milk.’
    Roderick laughed. ‘I know he’s right! He’s right about it all. The farm’s absolutely jiggered. But what the hell am I to do about it? He keeps asking me, Why can’t I free up some capital? It’s as though he’s found the phrase in some magazine. I’ve told him frankly that Hundreds doesn’t have any capital to free. He doesn’t believe me. He sees us living here, in this great house; he thinks we’re sitting on piles of gold. He doesn’t see us blundering around in the night with candles and Tilleys because we’ve run out of oil for the generator. He doesn’t see my sister, scrubbing floors, washing dishes in cold water …’ He jerked a hand towards his desk. ‘I’ve been writing letters to the bank, and putting an application together for a building licence. I spoke to a man at the district council yesterday about the water main and the electricity. He didn’t give me much encouragement; he said we’re too isolated out here to make it worth their while. But of course, the whole thing has to be put down on paper. They need plans and surveyor’s reports, and God knows what else. That’s so it can do the rounds of about ten different departments, I suppose, before they reject it properly …’
    He had started speaking almost unwillingly, but it was as if he had some sort of spring inside him, and his own words wound it: as he went on I watched the bitter shifting about of his scarred, finely cut features, the restless dipping and rising of his hands, and suddenly remembered what David Graham had told me, about his having had that touch of ‘nervous trouble’ after his smash. I’d been supposing his manner to be rather casual, all this time. Now I realised that the casualness was actually something else completely: perhaps an exhaustion, perhaps a studied warding off of anxiety; perhaps even a tension, so complete and habitual it resembled languor.
    He became aware of my thoughtful gaze. He fell silent, drawing deeply on his cigarette again, and taking his time over exhaling. He said, in a different voice, ‘You mustn’t let me run on. I can be a frightful bore about it.’
    ‘Not at all,’ I answered. ‘I’d like to hear more.’
    But he was clearly set on turning the subject, and for five or ten minutes we discussed other things. Every so often as we chatted I moved forward to check his leg, and to ask him how the muscle was feeling. ‘It’s fine,’ he’d answer each time, but I could see his face growing flushed, so guessed he was suffering slightly. Soon it was clear that the skin had started to itch. He began to pick and rub at the edge of the electrodes. When I finally switched the thing off and removed the elastics, he worked his fingernails vigorously up and down his calf, grateful to be released.
    The treated flesh, as I’d expected, looked hot and moist, almost scarlet. I dried it off, shook powder on it, and spent another couple of minutes working the muscle with my fingers. But it was clearly one thing for him to be wired up to an impersonal machine, and quite another to have me squatting before him going over his leg with quick warm powdered hands: he shifted about impatiently, and at last I let him rise. He saw to his sock and plimsoll and