A Little Stranger

by Candia McWilliam

  A group of chairs to which John, helped by Margaret, had tied towering bunches of balloons, began, at one point, to dance, on their bony gilt points.

  When we were all tired, and the last balloon was tamed, we ate lunch in the marquee, its lining stirred by the snowy wind, which had made us hungry. The light lining, passing against the heavy canvas which supported and protected it, made again and again the sigh of elegance assaulted by cold, the gentle, vain susurration of a consumptive’s ghost.

  Margaret removed her hat. My husband forced it on to one balloon, which seemed at once to become the most rebellious and flighty of them all. John laughed, excited to bouncing. He was impressed by all these new pleasures.

  ‘I am five now,’ he said, ‘because it is a New Year.’

  ‘You’ll die young if you travel that fast,’ said Margaret.

  We were sitting at the only table without its ballast of balloons. The balloons creaked and bumped together. The noise was that of a boat moored in fog, the soft bump and lift and complaining of the fenders and the ordinary yet exaggerated sounds of invisible movement.

  ‘This food really is fabulous,’ said Margaret, though it was only flaccid sweet ham and oozing salads.

  John was interested in the stains made by my beetroot.

  ‘Look at the beetroot carefully and you’ll see how old it is by the number of rings it has,’ said his father.

  ‘Margaret sometimes has one ring,’ said John.

  Chapter 10

  The spring came, unassumingly, as though perhaps it had not been invited. Through their snoods, like garlic-paper, nipped the milk teeth of snowdrops. The cellar smelt more of bulb fibre and less of gun oil. Our social life, which all winter had taken place between freezing days outside and terrifying drives home, began to calm down. We were less often drunk over ice, driving at speed with hot clear heads full of spirits and deaf from gunfire. I began to feel congruent with the year, holding new life.

  Margaret purchased a new jumper. It celebrated the springtime. Although it was made of the wool of lambs, it showed the floral rather than the animal attractions of the season. About her grew tall woollen daffodils, their trumpets little yellow finger stalls, in bas-relief from her curving breast. John loved the jumper; he fingered the trumpets with relish.

  ‘There was a cardy with foxgloves, but it didn’t look very nice,’ said Margaret.

  ‘How so?’ asked John, an expression he had from me, so I liked him to use it.

  ‘Never you mind,’ said Margaret, rolling her eyes at me in alliance, adult female knowledge protecting the child from those flowering purple towers in our minds. I found it hard to imagine spending my professional life knitting priapic mauve cosies, but were my bits of work any more necessary than that? Nor could anyone be said to be kept warm by them.

  Inside our house women worked; in the garden men were employed. There were two women who cleaned, and one who cooked; there was Margaret and there was me. No two of us were equal, though I felt that it was not I who established the hierarchy. There was me, useless but essential, with the others below, each at her allotted, or, it may have been, chosen, level. The woman who cooked rarely did so for Margaret, though sometimes there was a bartering of delicacies, if the adults were eating something to John or Margaret’s taste. He loved savouries and would beg for cheese. Margaret discouraged this, so he learnt to approach the big kitchen when she was busy. He liked the peelings of winter vegetables, and might sit beside Lizzie as she made stew; he did not eat them, but he dropped them from a height on to the chapped wooden table to see what letters they made when they landed; ‘J’ came often, and ‘S’, and ‘M’, for ‘Margaret’; and for ‘Mummy’. The clean smell of shucked roots and the sweetness of cooking parsnips clung to his hair, so Margaret would find him out.

  ‘Eating piggy food again, young sir?’ she would ask, and sweep him off for a hairwash. With the side of her knife, Lizzie would push the squared roots she had been saving for John into the deep pan she clipped to the table with one hip. She was sensible and knew children, having had several. She was not discontented with repetition, but comforted by it, so that her cooking and her conversation had a soothing constancy. She was free of any urban compulsion to entertain, so she was always interesting; her hair was long and rosy grey, and she read books in one hand as she stirred with the other. It used to be on her days off that I composed my tart feasts. Lizzie seemed to like Margaret. I had never heard her discuss people, unless through the foods they favoured. I hoped that she did not realise my tastes.

  Her husband worked in the garden; they conspired to grow and to cook really enormous leeks, like organ pipes, from one trunk of which she could wring vichyssoise for ten. Sliced across, these monsters resembled white short-playing records. This seemed to be Lizzie and Basil’s only vagary.

  Then there were Edie and Bet. Edie’s mother and father had worked in this kind of household, already fairly anachronistic, when, in their late middle age, Edie was born. She was an old-fashioned girl, a loved late child, quiet and sober. She was in her thirties, pretty, unpainted and stern; she had a straight back and wore straightforward clothes, like those of a middle-class child in the 1950s. Sometimes she laughed until she cried. If anyone exaggerated, including me, she said something to deprecate the needless inflation. She looked like someone who might have a singular, solitary talent, marquetry or the violin. Her husband was a research biologist. Her privacy was complete.

  Bet in private was unimaginable; she was entirely public. Her hair was red, her mouth was red, and often her eyes were too. Occasionally one of them was black and yellow. She was a tub with tiny hands and feet; she always wore high heels. She crashed things about as though she were working in a hospital. She made rude jokes, and indented regularly for a pay rise, to keep up, as she explained, with her friend who worked at the meat-packing depot.

  ‘Hi,’ she would say, ‘it’s the shop steward.’ And she would come into my morning-room with a cup of coffee for me and a list of requests. Her sons were always in trouble, stealing or playing truant, and her husband lost work intermittently when he was ‘badly’. She loved pretty things and was violently maternal. ‘Oh, John,’ she shouted, ‘oh, look at you. I could eat you on toast.’ She kissed him wetly on his neck and played with his striped hair. From most people he flinched, but he loved Bet. She bought him presents she could not afford, and often asked to take him home with her. To John too this was an unspeakably glamorous prospect. She swore terribly but never acknowledged this with apology, so the bad words were not salient. Bet had done everything: she had wed a bigamist, she had been to Canvey Island every summer all her life. Both her natural parents were dead, but had left relicts – Bet’s step-parents – who lived with her and her husband and their boys. Bet had romantic plans for her stepmother and stepfather. Her husband bred fancy guinea-pigs with whorls in their fur; sometimes she brought one for John to look at, in a box, in the back of her car; the box had come as a rule from the supermarket, after dark, containing slightly sub-standard crisps, or imperfect pizzas. Bet knew where to get seconds of the already most inedible foods; her best connection in this way was the friend who got her unlabelled cans. ‘Could be giblets, could be niblets, they’re not fussy but I must say I would not eat those dirty pheasants if I was paid. I seen what they eat.’

  Our own pheasants were hand-reared by Robert and his helper and ate pheasant food and then, in the brief glorious autumn of sex and showing off, the berries and worms growing and thriving upon our land. Their crops, when they were drawn, were often fat with soft good grain, grown to perfection under the best supervision, the grain which fed the people. What could she mean?

  I was dead-heading the more undimmable camellias, quite pleased to be in at the extinction of their brightness, when Bet came out to me. Something must be worrying her for she did not like the out-of-doors; it spoiled her heels, she said, and gave her a wicked appetite. During the short season of soft fruit, she stopped wearing her tripping
heels and wore white plimsolls which were pink by its end.

  ‘How d’you get them white for next year?’ Edie would ask.

  ‘Boil them for gym-shoe jam, Ede, what’d you do?’

  ‘Wear boots.’

  Today Bet had come in her high red pumps, down the garden to the longest border. There had been no frost for days and the sun was encouraging the garden to rashness. Tiptoeing so as not to sink into the paths, she recalled someone afraid to wake a sleeper.

  I called to her, ‘Go on the grass, in your bare feet,’ but she grimaced and continued her dainty progress. These scarlet roses were grotesque in age; they had bletted like fat tan onions. They plopped on to the canvas donkey I had put down at the border’s edge.

  ‘Damp grass on my bare feet drives me to feel I’ll vomit,’ said Bet. ‘The worst of all being seaside turf, making the reason why I will not stand picnics. But I’ll stand on this bit of cloth if I may, so’s I don’t end up in Australia, even if in my best shoes.’

  ‘Might be nice in Australia, at the moment. All that sun.’ I was rocking my clippers about a tough sucker. ‘Still,’ and I clipped through it, ‘I don’t much like the idea of turkey under the sun, do you? Or do you?’

  ‘You may and you may not like it, but I’m here to say it.’ Bet was a short woman and she was squinting up at my leafy head. I tried to coil up the long thorny sucker, could not, and chopped it in four. Its lowest thorns were hooks of grey, the fresh ones a translucent scarlet in the sun. I laid down these rosy scourges on the earth.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I can’t talk to a tree.’ I came out of the border altogether; at least Bet let me know exactly where I stood.

  ‘With my boys, I don’t always listen, but I’ve always got ears to hear.’

  ‘Something’s happened to one of the boys?’

  ‘It’s not one of my boys, it’s your one boy; it’s only a small thing, but I don’t like it. Tell me to mind my pros and cons if you like. I don’t want to worry you, or anything.’ She was suppressing her natural gossip’s instinct to spin out a small mystery; that was a mark of her affection for John.

  ‘What is it, Bet?’ I was not badly concerned, because I trusted her to show upset in proportion to what had caused it. ‘Have you heard him saying something bad, swearing or something?’

  ‘As if I’d be the one to fuss about that. No; it’s that Margaret. She’s all so ever so nice, I know, but she can’t listen out for him properly.’

  I didn’t want to hear petty tale-telling; I had overestimated Bet.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She takes him for a walk, sometimes even in the car, and she has him playing with her, but she can’t hear him. She has her soundtracks on the whole time.’

  ‘Soundtracks?’ I thought of a soundtrack for John, full of cooing and yelling and practice-sentences and the disappearing lisp.

  ‘Small earphones with loud music in. A sort of personal record-player. Kind of thing.’

  ‘Oh, those things. But I didn’t know Margaret had one of those. After all, she listens to the radio all day.’

  ‘Probably doesn’t know if it’s off or on. Like those people with no nerves, the ones in Russia. They couldn’t tell you if their appendix had burst, let alone if some little kid had hurt itself.’

  ‘But why should he hurt himself? Isn’t Margaret always with him?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. But you can’t really chat to someone in one of those outfits; I should know that. My boys sleep in them. I’d as soon have had a blind dog look after my boys as a girl in all those wires.’

  ‘Hold on, Bet, I’ve not even seen her doing it.’

  ‘Of course you’ve not.’ She gave a meaning look.

  ‘And is it that bad anyway?’

  Deprived of her pellet of malice, Bet seemed disappointed. She sighed hard, and rolled her right thumb around and around the nail of her right index finger, looking down at her pointed red shoes among the thorns and used roses. She sighed again, theatrically, and muttered. What I heard was, ‘the heart doesn’t grieve after’.

  These spats were to be expected in a house full of women.

  I decided that I would speak to my husband if I saw an opportunity.

  Chapter 11

  Bet and Edie arrived in the morning, just as John left for school. After school, too, he crossed with them, arriving as they left. He was becoming less womaned, losing these first sweethearts with whom he had flirted. That home-bound infant world, in which the broom cupboard and the kitchen are gynaecea, and the smells of Windolene and Brasso as feminine as attar, was shrinking. Bet and Edie, from being his intimates, were becoming to him people who came to clean the house, a thing he saw his parents not doing. To Margaret, I do not think that they were ever more than cleaners, though she did take a break with them halfway through the morning. They drank tea or coffee and ate what Lizzie called ‘ferocious quantities’ of cakes, winged with icing-soldered sponge, or sandwiched with glistening mocha. Margaret drank skimmed-milk milkshakes and valueless ducats of impacted puffed rice.

  There is a fatuous state in pregnancy when you know all is well, not only with yourself but with the world. You know that a species which has evolved this miraculous system of reproducing itself, the natty idea of containing the future empursed within, cannot allow destruction to obtain, will not short-change us. You know that, by placing your gravid body between the light of ugly fact and the undefended of the race, you can cut out the glare. I knew, because I had been pregnant before, that it is a fleeting sense of beneficent glowing power, preceding almost invariably a certainty that all shadows are black and all breaths our last, a time during which tears – selfish tears of easy altruism – are never far away, and the newspapers are sopping before their finer print is even begun. I was at the first stage, though, when Bet brought a box into my bedroom, where I stood, squiffy with optimism, showering benevolence upon the bare trees through my window, and on the birds within them – those organised pheasants and the less well-bred members of the parliament of fowls. My turbine of confidence and virtuous energy was capable of anything. I could have illuminated a city with the touch of my finger. I was equal to anything; after all, what could, in this good world, harm me, who contained the point of it all? I could see clearly that, since there was no argument for destruction, there would be no destruction. This dangerous drunken clarity is the closest I have been to escaping the omnipresence of the end. Painting and music remind me, the greater they are, the more of death.

  I was hailing the broad day when Bet came in with her box.

  ‘I’ve got a guinea-pig. It’s for John. Seeing as my husband breeds them for show, this one won’t do. It was a guinea-pig, you see.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘It is a guinea-pig, but it was a guinea-pig. In a sense. I mean, we were trying something. A bit different.’

  A mutant. Swivelling off its balanced golden axis, my mind went to the beasts we cannot ignore, the footless shrikes and tubeless snakes, the eyeless cats of a poisoned nature, post-war fauna of our future.

  A minute before, I had known all that would never be, and now the word – mutant – had discharged me from my oasis into a desert where war was inevitable and sin weighed as little as good. Pregnancy; is it by definition an hysterical state?

  ‘Bet, is this guinea-pig anything to do with me?’

  ‘My husband says we can’t show it and we wondered if John would like it.’

  Could I accept a possibly bald or tripod or varicose playmate for my lovely boy?

  ‘It is kind of you, Betty, but . . .’

  She ate the inside of her mouth. Lipstick bloodshot the slack skin around it. Her earrings, dependent from fatty lobes, appeared disposable, tatty.

  ‘. . . but let me see,’ I finished.

  Its whorls were too vehement for the strict rules of the guinea-pig fanciers, that was all. It was a fat cadpig with a square head like the heel of a snowboot. It was chinchilla grey, with wet eyes and
coiffed with frosty rosettes. Its hands looked intelligent, as though they might have known what to do with a cigarette.

  ‘It’s got a nice nature. Well, it sleeps all day. If you say the word, I’ll get the husband and my sons to bring up its equipment.’

  Bar-bells, bookcase, Mouli?

  ‘It needs a thorough combing, so I’ve got it this nice brush – a babe’s brush, really. Basil’s said he’ll get a pen.’

  ‘A pen?’ In old-fashioned girls’ stories, the helpless offspring of jungle creatures were always fed with a Waterman bulb. So the same was true of guinea-pigs.

  ‘You know, for it to run around in.’

  ‘Of course. Basil probably doesn’t know his nibs.’

  Bet looked at me without concern. I was increasingly conscious that only I heard the lower layers of my own remarks. She smiled, and I was back on the planet euphoria, all refugees food to my egocentric charity. Let it rain guinea-pigs.

  ‘Bet, John will be so pleased. How can I thank you enough?’

  ‘There’ll come a time,’ said Bet.

  She took the animal downstairs. I did not know its name or sex, but I was committed to it.

  I continued the day’s tasks, gluttonous of action and achievement, certain of immortality, carrying its pledge within me. I wrote letters, paid bills, made of my own desk and my husband’s geometric altars to the rational mind, and was just believing in the perfectibility of all nature – about to eat the, in my eyes, freakishly beautiful boiled eggs Lizzie had made for my lunch, cupped in unimprovable blue and white – when Margaret came in.

  I turned my dazzling smile upon her, urbi et orbi. I could make all things right.