A Little Stranger

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘John, you go upstairs. Margaret wants to talk to Mummy,’ said Margaret. She often spoke of herself in the third person, as though telling a story. It was comforting; it seemed the story’s ending could only be happy, for the telling of it was so dull, a small narrative of journeys up and down stairs, of food taken in, of unrememberable acts.

  He began to hurl up the back stairs, the banana-coloured crêpe of his shoes kissing the treads alternately, as he leaned his left side against the wall; he was torn between getting upstairs to play and staying downstairs with . . . Margaret, or me, or perhaps just the possibility of a biscuit.

  Margaret led the way to my morning-room; it was as though she felt more able to talk in there, as if people might be listening elsewhere.

  ‘It’s nothing serious,’ she said. Certain denials declare their opposites; this was one of them. I felt the beat of panic, but asked, ‘What isn’t serious?’

  ‘I went to see the doctor yesterday. He gave me a piece of news.’

  ‘Our doctor?’ She was registered with him, but had wished to keep her own doctor too.

  ‘My doctor.’ She must have seen my puzzled look. ‘I thought I’d better make it my doctor. You see, it’s something John did.’

  ‘John? But he’s a child.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing. But I thought I’d better tell you in case anything happened.’

  So far I was not very worried. I did not think it possible that John had done anything very bad, and the mystification was beginning to irritate me.

  ‘What on earth is it, Margaret? I can’t bear the suspense.’

  She gave me a look of dignified injury.

  ‘I am sorry; were you rough-housing?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I don’t do that. But I am afraid he has blinded me in one eye.’

  ‘BLINDED you, Margaret? You don’t mean blinded, he can’t have . . .’ I was aware of gabbling; I only wanted it not to be true. ‘When did it happen, where, no really, I mean how bad is it?’

  I looked (my own two eyes a guilty weight in their sockets) hard at her eyes. They were surrounded with a powdery colour, sort of carrageen green. The irises were a clear hazel; the pupils identical unadapting black circles. Did one, the left one, look rather puffy? I was beginning to feel very sick.

  Margaret stared back at me with a kind of weird, holy stillness. I remember thinking, dazedly, that it couldn’t be a joke, because she didn’t have a sense of humour.

  If someone says they are blind in one eye, one cannot very well disbelieve them. They are halfway to Gloucester; and in a great deal worse than a shower of rain. I felt bad for Margaret, and also frightened and defensive about my gentle son.

  ‘It happened a couple of days ago; it could have happened to anybody.’

  ‘But it happened to you, for God’s sake.’

  She looked very put out at the personal turn the conversation was taking. If she could have indicated her indisposition, like a Chinese lady, with a chopstick pointing to the relevant part of an ivory figurine, I felt she would have.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it’ll get better; the doctor almost said so.’

  A fit of blindness, a passing blindness; was it possible?

  ‘I must ring him. I want to know exactly. Oh Margaret, how did it happen? It must be the most appalling shock.’

  I felt as though we had breached some biblical law of hospitality: do not blind your house guest or your servant. I thought of the charry stick poking Polyphemus’s eye, a huge, blood-red anemone.

  Although the information was desperate, Margaret’s attitude seemed so mild that I didn’t know how to behave.

  ‘I think I’ll just be philosophical,’ she said. ‘I’d rather you didn’t call my doctor until I’ve . . .’

  I interrupted her. ‘You’ll want to stop working right away, won’t you?’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I will not. It’s just a small thing.’

  I thought wildly of what a person is condemned to without their sight, of the value of seeing, of equivalent circumstances in Ameräica, where people sue for loss of libido at the sting of an insect.

  ‘It’s a huge thing, Margaret.’ The poor girl was in shock, and in the habit of unselfishness. ‘You still haven’t told me when it happened.’

  ‘A couple of days ago. John did it with his finger.’

  ‘Which finger?’ I had hellish thoughts. Would the offending finger be chopped off by some retributive scissor-man?

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s only a child. It was an accident, best forgotten. We can’t cry over spilt milk.’

  I grieved for the ineptness of that, for the beauty of the earth which was – perhaps only temporarily, oh pray God – divided in two for Margaret, and one half hidden.

  ‘I can’t forget it.’ How could I forget that my son, no matter in how much innocence, had halved the sight of a young woman? Yet I felt guilty for the emphasis on my own pain and worry, which must be nothing to hers, and here she was behaving, as ever, so well.

  ‘I’d rather carry on as though nothing had happened. I can drive, the doctor says, and carry right on as normal.’

  Was he an adequate doctor? Were not eyes sympathetic? Would she live in a slowly darkening world on account of a child’s finger? Was the awful truth not that I was not happy, not pleased, but relieved, that the harm was to one eye of Margaret’s rather than to one hair of John’s?

  Her parents must care for her as I did for him.

  ‘Have you told your parents?’ I asked. ‘And what does your fiancé say?’

  ‘I’d rather keep it dark,’ she said, without a hint of irony.

  So now I knew that the strange man was the doctor, the declarer of blindness.

  ‘Was John with you when the doctor told you?’

  ‘Oh, no. He sat outside with a person.’

  I could hardly trouble this compulsively discreet girl for further details.

  I felt in those minutes so ashamed by her calmness and goodness that I wished I could offer her my two whole eyes in return for her injured one.

  Chapter 15

  With my husband gone, I had to establish a regency, John the regent and I the protectrix. It was a household used to male thrall. Margaret came into her own. Without her support – beldame of the bedchamber, perhaps – I might in lethargy simply have allowed the spring days to roll on towards Easter and beyond that to my own rolling away of a stone, the birth of the baby in late April. Sometimes for hours together I would forget Margaret’s blindness; it seemed miraculously not to affect her. I could hardly understand this; several times in the night I had fallen into sleep only to awaken sharply in the dark, knowing that something terrible had happened.

  But Margaret made sure that John’s time was filled. The two of them were out most of the day after school, and she was busy in the mornings, with washing and ironing and her correspondence.

  I was busy with my letters too. I had finished the small editing job for my friend. I seemed not any longer to have the vocabulary to remain in contact with my former life. I feared questions, the speed at which life was lived, on salary and achievement. Yet I wanted to see my old friends and for them to see John. Perhaps when they began to have children, it would happen naturally.

  So when I wrote my many letters, they were almost all to people I would never meet, and at addresses of my own concoction. I was particularly touched and impressed by ordinary people. Now, after it all, I cannot imagine how I thought such a thing existed, but then I was moved to write to old dears with birthdays, children with fearful cancers, beauty queens who were Montessori teachers, even a croupíre who had become a missionary. I had love to spare. I wrote to them in my comely writing on my blue paper with its repetitive address. I wrote from my fine desk, with its daily nosegay, and I created for them a world of enviable boundless grace, a letter from the blue. A letter from a person the recipient would never be confused by knowing. The letters were heavy because their paper was made of linen saturated and milled to the smoothness of eyeli
ds and the ink of ground cobalt. They contained, on occasion, money.

  Margaret took my letters with her own when she went to collect John from school. She had told me she wrote twice a week to her fiancé. She saw him at weekends and sometimes he drove over from where he worked and they met in a pub they favoured, which had, she said, a non-alcoholic cocktail lounge and a tropical salad bar. Each of them had a car which went with their job. Margaret was a fast, competent driver. When I asked her if it was really all right for her to drive, and at night, she replied, ‘I don’t have night blindness, if that’s what you mean.’

  The remark puzzled me, not least by its naked use of the word blindness. If I had had an affliction, I was sure, I would be superstitiously wary of alluding to it in other contexts than its own solemn one. It was as though she had momentarily forgotten her truly blind eye, or as if I had dreamed it.

  ‘I don’t see how we’ll ever do this on less than two,’ she said to me. She was peeling grapes at the time, to put on something she was baking. Some other nannies and their charges were expected to tea. She was referring to the number of cakes the visitors might be expected to eat. She extracted the pips from the pale grapes with the previously sterilised loop of a kirby-grip.

  ‘What is your fiancé’s name?’ I asked. The question sounded rude. She moved to folding nibbed hazelnuts, soaked for a period in dilute green food colouring, into a cake mix poured from a box labelled ‘Creamy Dreams Flavor Release Cake’.

  ‘I call him Ronald.’ She did not say whether it was his name.

  ‘Scots or Irish?’ I asked. John was making handprints under the table, with the food colouring. One of those green fingers had blinded a person. I conspired with him by keeping silent. Margaret had not seen him. He was only using a tatty old jotter. I was making conversation.

  ‘Oh, nothing like that,’ she said. ‘Not a Jocky or a Micky.’

  John was sufficiently absorbed not to respond to the name of the great mouse. She diminutised the ugly terms and made them sound like little puppies instead of the bad dogs of sect and race.

  If she had been my equal, I would have asked her what she meant, but I thought it might appear like bullying. We are not, after all, sisters under the skin. Under the skin of us all, what you will find is fat. She might really think that Scots were drunk and mean, Irish drunk and stupid. What did that make the English? Or, indeed, the Dutch? Avuncular? Courageous? What the English were not, in Margaret’s book, was black or brown or yellow. The idea of England did mean something to her, I knew, for she loved the Royal Family and would describe things as being ‘very nice, in the English way’. She had thus described, for example, the hotel where her parents took their annual golfing holiday, in Spain. Long hair, left-wing politicians, cowardice, films in other languages, late meals, poetry, men kissing their sons, none of these was English to Margaret. Bombs were English; more than once Margaret had asked me to hire The Dambusters for her to watch on the video. She seemed not to think beyond these merry, bouncing bombs. In that story, the dog it was that died, being called Nigger.

  ‘My brother is like you. He went to university. He is against the nuclear bomb,’ Margaret had said to me, one day when she was regretting the untidiness of the maenads camped around the local airforce base. I was flattered when she spoke of her family to me, though surprised to learn that it was only higher education which endows a person with the desire to survive.

  Of course, like most people, she flinched from bombs to avoid thinking about them. The two of us probably just flinched to dissimilar effect. I could not remember having told her my opinions and suspected she deduced them from my clothes. Anyway, she and I were engaged upon the rearing of the fodder or the dropper of the undistinguished thing.

  On the third day of my husband’s absence, I was exhausted by lunch-time. All night I had read and wandered from bedroom to bedroom, seeking not sleep but a new confinement for my teeming body. I was reading like one starved. I progressed along two corridors of bedrooms, reading what I came across, changing books as I went. I dropped Eros and Civilisation for Lady with a Lapdog. I read too much too quickly and wanted really only to read long simple stories with happy endings. Can you think of any?

  While we ate our lunch, I with Margaret and John since my husband’s absence, the telephone rang. I could not move quickly. Margaret took it.

  ‘How are you enjoying town?’

  There was a silence during which she smiled as though seeking a sweet pastille inside her mouth, reluctant, but relishing.

  ‘He’s well. Eating his chops like a lamb. Very well. Not shrinking.’ This last was pronounced like a verdict on a neonate – ‘Knot shrinking’. She giggled and pulled down her jumper, soft pink bouclé, over a skirt of pastel tartan trellis. Fetchingly ready to square-dance she looked, left toe out as though stubbing an insect, cardigan hanging unentered over her shoulders, a little cape of pure pink hanging down to her – I noticed – handspan waist. She seemed to be losing weight rather fast.

  John, confident it was to him that his father wished to speak, said, ‘I think you’ll find that call’s for me, Margaret.’

  ‘Cheeky,’ she pouted to the son of the father. My husband must have heard the soft clicks of her mouth.

  ‘Not once. Well, once. I will if you say so. Goodbye.’ She handed the telephone to my bad boy.

  ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘No prob. Can do. See you about.’ I heard the outrage at the other end. My husband was not accustomed to such casualness.

  ‘OK, Dad,’ this in a draggy, adult sort of voice. ‘Lots of things. Perdita for tea. Mount raked my garden. Robert said to Margaret Mummy wasn’t a chicken. I knew that anyhow. I will. I am. I do. Cheerybye.’

  ‘He says he’s being good, love. Is he?’ said my husband to me.

  He sounded more affectionate than he had shown himself for months. I wished we were alone on the telephone. I wanted to break my undertaking to Margaret and tell him of the accident.

  ‘I wondered if John’d like to come up, asked him in fact. If he brings Margaret. I don’t think you should come; it’s so dirty. I always forget.’ He spoke as though it were not London, capital of a fairly untormented democracy; London, where I had lived for ten years; London, where we had our house, protected by money from pestilence and the poor. But I knew he meant it for the best. He was a family man.

  ‘Ask Horacia to make up beds,’ I said.

  ‘She does things better if not asked. I’m no good at talking to her,’ he said. He was like that. He only had to wish for something to be done and it was. Charm, or some other white man’s magic.

  ‘That’s lovely, then.’ It was settled. ‘What a time you’ll have.’

  Perhaps this short time away would distract her from what must be her central worry. There were places to which I was longing to take John, now he was less at the mercy of small cycles of digestion and sleep. Dishonourably, I suspected they were not the places to which his father and Margaret would take him, and was pleased.

  ‘That’s settled then. I’m off to a balls-aching City thing tonight. No more loving cup apparently, because of AIDS. As if any one of those old goats was a backwoodsman. Hand in till, maybe, but not, I’d’ve thought, overmuch turd burgling.’

  I did not interrupt. I rather missed him, including his baroquely awful vocabulary.

  ‘We all miss him, don’t we?’ said Margaret. She served out the butterscotch whip. ‘I know just the coat you must wear for town, John.’ She notified the dreaming child of the unmetaphorical world by placing before him a dish of quivering brown dancer’s belly, its jewel a pitless carmine cherry.

  Her treatment of John was untouched by rancour; things seemed as they had been before.

  Chapter 16

  They left two days later, on a Friday. John had a suitcase. Margaret had two, which were epauletted like generalissimi; they ran on wheels.

  ‘Even a small woman can pull them behind her with ease,’ said Margaret. ‘Which is needed in this day and age. The E
nglish gentleman is a dying breed.’

  And would die shortly, if John’s clothing were anything to go by, of embarrassment. He was dressed in a regulation 1920s-nursery overcoat with velvet collar, nicely piped in red.

  ‘Don’t you just love my hat?’ asked its wearer. It was certainly a creation. A natty bowler in shape, its burthen was, ‘We’re off to London town’. She must have been stitching petersham all night. Like a smaller Harry Lauder, he made with an imagined cane, tipping his headgear. His eyelashes looked as though they had been sectioned into ranged clumps, the lovely vulgarity of after tears, denser yet for the shadow cast by his bowler’s brim. I could not feel anything but love for him; and I felt Margaret must have absolved him of any shadow of blame for the half-blinding.

  ‘It’s detachable,’ said Margaret. ‘It just pops over the crown.’

  I was caught out in my squashing adult fear of bad taste and knew I was a killjoy. To make it better, I did something worse. I gave her fifty pounds, one note to avoid ostentation, to spend on herself. To avoid ostentation?

  They were driven to the station by Basil. John had insisted upon a train journey. I did not drive them because I no longer could in any comfort.

  ‘Call me this evening,’ I shouted, out on the long lawn. The bunched heads of oxslips were beginning to show. No more mowing until they had flowered and gone. I realised it was a long time since I had been outside. The intense nights of undigested reading and torpid days had kept me in the house, with Edie and Bet and Margaret and John.

  It was strange to be without her, stranger really than being without my son. The separation of parent and progeny was commonplace in our world. Public school? Conscription? Each forms of orphanhood. For what but death could it be a rehearsal?

  It was a relief to know that it was Margaret, her very worst fault a cute way with words, who was John’s companion.