A Little Stranger

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘Can I speak for a moment? It must be a moment, as John’s back in ten minutes.’ She counted her time like her calories.

  ‘Come in; sit down.’ I was delighted. Perhaps she was about to unbend a little.

  ‘Betty showed me the guinea-pig, but it makes no difference. I’ve told her time and again I won’t have animals. She’s taken it away, of course. But meanwhile we shall not tell John.’

  I said nothing. She appeared to take this as mute resistance.

  ‘I really hate small things,’ she said.

  In her energetically made vernal jersey she seemed firmly planted in the room. My verve left me, as though from a sprung leak. As I formed the sentences with which to defy her, I began queasily to feel that it was Bet and I, not she, who had been sneaky. I heard the gulped slam of a car door and the happy officious voice of my son, towards which Margaret – the pearl – turned and walked.

  Chapter 12

  The pampering spring air and easy days continued through March, and John, who never knew about the pet he almost had, was busy trying out different friends. He had a friend with old knees who had only his parents to care for him at home. I liked this child, though I was afraid of seeing in him virtues our way of life might preclude John from developing. He was a blithe boy, John’s friend Ben, and he had a sensible exploitative attitude to the amenities of our house. Once he arrived with a satchel of mending; to his mother, who was dropping him off, he explained with some tact, ‘I’ve got my work in there,’ the image no doubt of his father.

  Now the shooting season was over, the wives living round about were able to have lunch with each other again; the ease of segregation returned. This reversion to a less manned life was part of spring, welcome after the dark, rushed lunches of meat and neat spirits, with the guns talking from both barrels.

  Today some of my friends and I were to meet at the house of Leonora, our closest neighbour. She was married to a man who had swarthy skin and blond hair, so he always looked healthy. He was as compact of energy as a battery; he had no languor. His energy seemed wisely invested. You could not mention something he had not done, and show he had done; yet he was modest. He invariably asked the right questions. The parts of his life, I felt, were all of a piece, in spite of their diversity. Yet he seemed to have time to read, and time for his wife.

  My friends and their husbands were made for the sun and it sought them out. They were not fashioned for doubt or poverty or disappointment. The women wore gold and blue: golden chains and golden rings; blue and white clothes and blue and white precious stones. They did not paint much, and always smelt sweet. Each of their names ended, feminine to the last, with an ‘a’. At regular times, they went to different and far-flung parts of the blue and white and golden known world. The khaki areas of desert and armies were unvisited.

  Like that china which, though unmatching, may be arranged together, always prettily – the blue bridges, blue pagodas, faint cerulean follies, pale azure branchlets, blowsy ultramarine galleons, all on differently white grounds – these girls (women was too biological a term) went happily together, and each also had other sets to which she belonged, all similar of aspect, yet each member individual. They did not displace time with worry or regret. They shared religion; they shared a masseuse. The same wall-eyed Cypriot sold them all heavy cold sheets hoared with lace.

  I describe a chorus; yet each had her own tone. They were accomplished, even virtuoso, in some things, but, tactful, they did not overdevelop any trait. Their feet were narrow; their children beautiful. What they told was the truth. They wore flowers in summer, furs in winter. They were tough, too, beneath the freshness and softness. There was nowhere, no hinge or crack, for a blade to slip in. High-fired good china, perfect as an egg, and enclosing good, rich life.

  Each had her nanny.

  The eating part of lunch was swiftly over and we drank water. I took my lead from my friends, who never paid much attention to food for themselves, though they made sure their husbands had the best. We sat about Leonora’s dining-room table. The door of the hexagonal room was a little ajar and through it came the singing yells of children. The nannies’ voices did not carry.

  ‘Close the door, Antonia, would you? Just a short break from the monkey-house, I think, don’t you?’ Leonora was pouring coffee into cups the colours of different fondants. In her place I might have worried about shutting out a fatal accident.

  The room was full of that dazzling spring sunshine which makes you unreasonably pleased. A faint smell of warm cloth exuded from the green silk walls, mixing with the smells of coffee and blossom. A large bowl of viburnum filled the fireplace with lace.

  ‘At least we’ve got zookeepers,’ said Antonia. She had five children, all of them light-hearted and intelligent and devoted to their mother, who now chocked her square face abruptly into her left hand, and waved her right, hailing a light for her cigarette. The ashtrays were like flat silver sombreros. Looking around at my slender, unpregnant friends, I felt as though I were barded with a suit of fat.

  Victoria stretched in front of me, with a flaming knuckle, and the smell of smoke threaded among us. As she reached, her fringe caught and tossed away the sun. She had a sandy face with dark eyes and thin hands and legs like a boy, or the sort of fashion model who is chosen for her physical embodiment of intelligence; her voice was thorny. To drive, she wore glasses, whose rims were the peat-red of her hair.

  ‘What if they turn out to be real horrors?’ she asked. ‘I mean liars, or cruel.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have it,’ replied Leonora.

  ‘No choice,’ hooted Julia over the table, picking up a pebble of sugar and nipping it between her front teeth.

  ‘Who’re we talking about?’ Clara was rifling in her basket and when she lifted her head her hair rocked back into place, smooth as a ball. Her eyes were sad at their outer edge, set into her head like two almonds of blue paisley. They were outlined with black. She began to sew, the looping movements of the needles less restful than the formal quietus of smoking.

  ‘Who d’you think, Clara?’

  ‘What do we always talk about?’

  ‘Children.’

  ‘Try again. I mean, would the little angels ever lie or be unkind?’

  ‘I meant nannies,’ said Leonora.

  ‘I meant children,’ said Victoria, ‘but now we’re on nannies let’s stay there. It’s not as though they weren’t discussing us. I wonder whose husband is being turned into sausages right now.’

  ‘Something rather more solid, I bet,’ said Clara.

  ‘Dawn tells me they snaffle the blue videos the men watch after shooting teas, and look at them after bath-time.’

  ‘She never told you herself?’

  ‘Not totally. Freddie saw a bit of one when he went down to her with a bad dream. He said she was looking at a telly programme about schoolteachers and naughty boys and I took it from there. Any luck it’ll put him off and he can look after his poor old ma in her latter years.’

  ‘D’you remember that one who said she was the Red Hand of God? Some muddle there?’

  ‘The holy rolling one with the sacred-text soap?’

  ‘The very one.’

  ‘And the homesick one with the telephone calls to Ballachulish.’

  ‘I like those ones. It’s the ones with men in the bed and moans of pleasure who make me feel tired.’

  ‘What about the one who was addicted to ringing ambulances? Had to go in the end when Viv fractured his skull and they wouldn’t come out here. She’d a thing about the uniform.’

  ‘How would you feel, looking after someone else’s kids, though? You might fancy a bit of company.’

  ‘And in the end they usually go and the children love us and forget them. It isn’t such a great job. You can’t get rid of your mum, short of murder. It’s not like it was for nannies.’

  ‘Nannies aren’t like they were. I wouldn’t want to have a devoted nympho of ninety-two living in the north wing, listening to
Hard Crack on the Walkman and thinking dope fudge was interesting.’

  ‘They go when they’re unhappy, anyway.’

  ‘There must be something up with Dawn. She seems to’ve been happy with us for eight years.’

  ‘It’s because you let each other be but you know what goes on, I guess.’

  ‘I don’t draw the line very low, do you?’

  They were all laughing by now, butting in. I didn’t answer Victoria’s question.

  They were all fortunate in the girls they had to help them bring up their children. We all were.

  ‘Stealing. I s’pose. Big stealing, not just wee extras on the side of bills.’

  ‘Stealing my husband.’

  ‘Going for people with knives.’

  ‘Blind drunkenness on the school run, maybe.’

  ‘Killing one or more of the children.’

  ‘Alienating the affections.’

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

  ‘It’s never in a proper home,’ I said.

  Chapter 13

  Late in March, when the game birds of the country concentrate on reproduction and revenge (chuckering asterisks of feather forcing fast cars to brake on bad corners, dying to teach their drivers a lesson), my husband was ready to leave for a fortnight in London. Even before the shooting had ended he was bored, so the sport of the season was oysters, before the town’s blossom came.

  The wheat was drilled and the lambs born, the fiscal year’s end a fortnight off. I was too heavy and too tired to join him. These bouts of man’s business and men’s company transfused him. He would come back important and happy, ready again for home. John and Margaret, John and I, would go up to visit him. He missed John terribly but always said London was no place for the child. Besides, there was school, and Easter was late that year, so we could spend it all together.

  I was pleased. Solomon would be safe and amused in London. I was restive and uncomfortable at night, sleepy by day, no companion for a man in spring-time. Moreover, I was by now very large. It was as though the baby was growing to enclose me, wrist for wrist, ankle for ankle.

  Once you are pregnant, you have an unbreakable appointment to meet a stranger. I spent hours in a state of mental submersion, just lying or sitting; my eyes might as well have been shut. I was happiest literally submerged weightless in a warm bath. Then I felt my mind lift and play its light among the bland rotund considerations of that time. Mostly I was living off a sustaining solipsism, contemplating for hours tiny changes in my body, ribbons of silvery stretched skin on my legs and arms, blue stars of exploded capillaries, little junks and caiques of white beneath my moony nails. I watched the plundering of my own body for minerals by the miner within. I wondered, indulgently, which part of myself I would find missing next. A sense of the self has never been my strongest suit: I deemed it no dishonour that I was being dismantled.

  One night, I even dreamed a person of no gender came and took my teeth, with a special tool a bit like a dibber. There was no pain, but I knew I needed my teeth for something.

  Unable to sleep after that dream, though as a rule my creamiest sleep was in the early morning, I went to see John. He was not asleep either, I could hear from the pigeon-sounds from his room. He was singing and talking. He had not yet become, as he did later in the day, some sort of vehicle.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, without looking up. ‘Tell me again about the scissor-man. Like last night.’

  ‘It’s me, John.’ I particularly disliked the scissor-man, the bladed creature who jetés across a page in Struwwelpeter, and whose vocation it is to chop off the thumbs of children who suck them. I read it in German first, so perhaps I’m not being fair; maybe I inherited something of my father’s antipathy. But even in the unGothic English script, I didn’t like it.

  The most unpleasant thing, to me, are the severed stumps where the thumbs have been, which spout blood like the roses of watering cans. But we didn’t have a copy of the book in the house.

  ‘Hello, Mummy. Did you suck your thumb when you were young?’

  ‘Yes, and I’ve still got two thumbs. The scissor-man isn’t true, you know.’

  ‘It is so.’

  ‘He is not.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘Not.’

  We began one of those padded tickling matches which end up on the floor. I was wrapped in my shrinking dressing-gown like a Sumo after a bout.

  We were lying on the floor, out of breath. John said, ‘Pick on someone your own size. That’s what Margaret said.’

  ‘Isn’t Margaret bigger than you?’ I asked with sleepy pedantry.

  ‘She said it to the man.’

  ‘What man?’ I was a bit confused. John knew the names of most of the people he saw.

  But he heard my interest and didn’t like the draught it let in from the grown-up world. Like his father, he had a way of cutting out when a subject had stopped being convenient. I resisted it sometimes, but that morning I thought he had as much right to be lazy, to have a time off thinking, as I had. When I had thoughts, I did not much like them.

  Later, when I was dressed, I went up to the nursery to fetch John to say goodbye to his father.

  ‘Margaret, are you very against the sucking of thumbs?’ I was unnecessarily nervous, may even have spoonerised my question.

  She looked up with surprise from John’s nape, at which she was doing up some Fair Isle buttons that were cleft like toffee-coloured beetles, and replied, ‘It’s nothing a spot of aloes can’t cure.’ She enunciated very clearly and patiently.

  ‘Aren’t they awfully bitter?’

  ‘They are known as bitter aloes.’

  ‘That’s undeniable.’

  John raised his eyebrows at me. This adult gesture on his unlined face was funny, and he saw that I was doting on him. I felt quite warm with it. How could I ask questions about strange men, scissor-limbed or not, in front of him?

  Chapter 14

  He wore his cars well, my husband. In the country they were green or nicely combat-muddied milk-white, of a square and accommodating cut. For town they were sharp and slim, though long enough for evening glamour. A car once bought loses its value; among the many ways we notionally lost money, this was one of the swiftest. One of the town cars was black and the other the hardly different blue which is darker than black. It is the blue of a king’s greatcoat when he inspects his maritime forces, themselves a sea of merely navy blue.

  Today he was driving himself, in the blue car. Having shut his papers in the boot, he allowed John in on his knee to say goodbye. It seemed strange, within that tank of pearly leather, tortoiseshell-walnut veneer and needled numbers, to see so much naked flesh, four unshelled limbs sticking out of shorts and a shirt, and a face without reserve, smiling beneath his father’s face.

  My husband lowered the window to allow me to look through air, not glass, at his son and himself. I stood away from the car so that I might bend, seeing as I did so my wide and layered reflection, like a pile of tyres, in the sleek side of the car. Thin as the line of red alcohol in an Arctic thermometer, the stripe down the side of the car sliced my inflated reflection at the belly.

  ‘Look at Mummy,’ said my husband. ‘She’s got a surprise for you, Johnboy. A secret surprise.’ He paused. ‘And I’ll bring you back lots of surprises too.’

  ‘Boys or girls?’ asked John, greedy but nervous.

  ‘Cars, maybe, even,’ said his father.

  I could see John thinking. His eyes went black and he flicked the silvery barrels of his sandals’ buckles, which were between his father’s blue-clothed knees. I thought I knew what he was thinking. He had connected my size with the baby to come, but he had just worked out that there might also be within me a train set, a fire engine, a build-it-yourself airport, with planes.

  He put on a foolish voice. His father could be wooed with disingenuous words. I had seen him with the shady sapphire merchant, the mandrill-faced bullion-brokers with a line on Cayman postes restantes. Jo
hn could be quite as effective.

  ‘Is Mum having a sportscar then?’ he asked, in the horrid clever voice of a punchlining comedian entertaining the mentally unadvantaged. This was a good voice for reaching my husband, who preferred his jokes signposted. But he had lost the thread, was thinking his way into Holland Park and down to our house.

  ‘Mmmm?’ he asked. It was an endearing noise, lazy. He had heard, but did not want to make the effort to think up a reply.

  ‘No,’ came a voice from behind me. ‘No. And what’s more you know no.’

  It was Margaret, come to say goodbye. She was removing her apron, a polythene-coated one, with a noise like a struggling fish. It was a large apron for a short person, but it had a lot to say. It related the calorific value of many basic foods; its one pocket, big enough to hold perhaps 50,000 calories in potato form, said:

  But lovin’ good

  Consumes dat food.

  ‘Hop in, Margaret. Ever been in one of these?’ said my husband.

  She opened the back door for herself, as though that were the new part of the experience, and sat in the middle of the back, the least comfortable spot in that fast comfortable machine. Looking at her face, I understood suddenly the romance of cars. It was like watching a chicken getting into an orgone box. The car curved and returned. She emerged a phoenix.

  ‘You’re nice to please. Easy to please, too,’ said my husband, letting out the radiant bird.

  We all three waved him off as he turned slowly along the front of the house. It was still too cold for the gravel to spit. Instead it crunched like rich cake and no dust rose to dull the low dense hedges of box that flexed like congers in the wake of the big car.

  The question of John’s strange man again occurred to me, but I couldn’t see a way of bringing the subject up tactfully. Looking around, I could see nothing of which to make an apropos. Our house, the day, the flowers, it all appeared so feminine; how could I fracture it just because my son had invented a person whose only characteristic was that he was bigger than Margaret? Perhaps all children did it; something to do with challenging authority. I decided to wait until a clear opportunity arrived.