The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

My mother died when I was fifteen. She had had miscarriage after miscarriage, it turned out, all through my childhood, and the last one killed her.

My father lived just long enough to see me graduate from medical school and return to Lidcote a qualified man.

few weeks later she was dead . . . Was it measles?

If I don’t go bothering him, she says, he won’t come bothering me.’

his hand was warm, the fingers plump and bunchy and tight in their skin, like half-cooked sausages.

A part of my upset, I’m sorry to say, was simple embarrassment, a basic masculine reluctance to have my name romantically linked with that of a notoriously plain girl. Part of it was shame, at discovering I felt this.

‘But I’ll tell you something. If this is pencil, I’m King George. This is stuck fast, this is.

A thirteen-year-old girl had got herself pregnant, and had been badly beaten by her labourer father.

Then again, it’s generally women, you know, at the root of this sort of thing. There’s Mrs Ayres, of course, the menopausal mother: that’s a queer time, psychically.

sometimes I am troubled. I remember poor, good-tempered Gyp;