Hundreds Hall is the great house of the village. The Little Stranger, the new novel by Sarah Waters, opens with an Empire Day Fete in the grounds shortly after the war. For the villagers, Hundreds, built in the 1730s in rural Warwickshire, has always represented something unchanging about England, the families who live in the great houses, and their own place in life. The line between the village and the Ayres family is as clearly drawn as the rope or ribbon that cordons off the doors and French windows of the house itself, leaving the grooms’ and gardeners’ lavatories for the use of the visiting villagers.

But the years following the war bring unprecedented changes in this way of life. Faraday, who first visited the lovely Georgian house as a child, accompanying his mother who once worked there as a maid, returns after 30 years and another war. Only Mrs Ayres, her crippled son Roderick and her daughter Caroline live in the house now, attended on by just one girl from the village. “Hundreds is lovely,” says Caroline. “But it’s a sort of lovely monster! It needs to be fed all the time, with money and hard work.” The estate is crumbling—bits of the grounds are being sold off steadily, and the house itself is in a state of decay. For the family, Hundreds, like a dear friend or another member of the family—is now a prison that keeps them wandering within the pages of a long-gone past of privilege and entitlement, with no way to emerge into the changed present.

... contd.