A Little Stranger

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘They look quite good, don’t they, those nuts? Have a couple,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t, thank you. There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip.’ The phrase seemed loose-fitting. She spoke with care, recommencing as though I had forced her to overshoot some preordained point.

  ‘There is something I must say.’ I thought of her bad eye. Was it not better, after all?

  ‘What is it? What can I do? I hope it’s not John?’

  ‘No. He’s a dear little boy. The image of his daddy. But . . . oh, I don’t like to say.’

  ‘Margaret, what is it? Are you ill? Anything you want to tell me, do.’

  ‘I can’t. I feel too bad.’

  ‘Would you like me to call a doctor? Tell me, Margaret. Nothing is ever so bad once it’s out.’

  ‘I really don’t feel I should.’

  She looked at me. I was stretched out along a sofa, hands atop the baby.

  ‘Is it something personal? Is it something you’d prefer to discuss with your parents?’ It had crossed my mind she might be having some trouble with her fiancé, and I felt it was not fair I should know before her mother and father, the policeman and the teacher.

  ‘It is personal. There again it isn’t. I mean it’s all so nice here and you are so kind and busy.’ She named two of my missing characteristics. She sounded like someone writing a thank-you letter for a stay in Toy Town. She looked after children, yet, being an adult, had adult preoccupations. I was worried lest I had been insensitive. Perhaps she had after all wished me to take some initiative towards friendship?

  ‘Margaret, let me be completely open with you, and perhaps that will help you to say what’s upsetting you. We are all devoted to you. You must know that.’ I was speaking like a greetings card but I did want to reassure her. She was beginning, to the discomposure of her pinned hair and softly powdered face, to cry.

  ‘Perhaps it’s something you think is awful, Margaret, but I am sure I should not think so.’ I laughed. I almost began to tell her some worries of mine which had shrunk on revelation. I nearly told her of the inelegant bargains struck for square meals, the telephoning at two in the morning, the shoes with thin soles. Not big things, but threads leading to their black caves.

  ‘It’s so nice here. Really, really nice.’ She spoke with regret, as though she had no choice but to break an anthrax capsule in our attractive home.

  ‘Yes, I think so too, but that’s not the point, is it? I mean, one tries to make things nice because life is such . . .’ It was fortunate that I stopped. Hell, was the word.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you something very bad.’

  ‘Nothing is ever as bad as you fear.’ I sounded like a nanny. I went on. ‘Is someone dying?’

  She did not reply.

  ‘Is someone ill?’

  She did not reply.

  ‘Are you worried about love?’ I had gone too far now, surely? I blurted, to make it less intimate, ‘Or, or, money?’

  She winced hard.

  ‘So it is money. Are you worried?’ This was delicate country, the province of my absent husband.

  ‘No, of course not. I’m afraid I just don’t think it’s very nice to talk about money.’

  ‘I’m sorry to be so unhelpful, but what else, if you are sure you are well and your family are well, and your fiancé. And John . . .’ I was by now very worried. For her, of course, but I was desperate for John. I was sure that they had visited some specialist in London. John was dying. The haircut was pre-operative. The garish treats were his last taste of simple fun, such fun as children are due. And I had sneered. I thought of him, sweet and shaken-down now, heavy and light as chestnut flour, the faint bright paper stars on his ceiling.

  She began to shake and weep.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘Is it the child? Is it John?’ I did not stand, for fear of upsetting her. My voice was under a control which tightened all my chest and its foolish milky weight.

  ‘Not as such,’ she said, mildly. Perhaps she knew to talk calmly to deranged people.

  I was trying so hard not to be cross. ‘What as such, then?’

  ‘It’s something . . . just something . . . you ought to know.’

  Somewhere in the room my breathing settled. She was going to tell me that my husband saw tarts. Poor silly girl.

  ‘If it is anything personal, I ought not,’ I said, furious instantly at having shown her there could be anything.

  ‘No, no, nothing like that.’ She even smiled.

  ‘What then? What, Margaret?’

  ‘Bet and Edie . . .’

  What could it be? Did they read her letters? Borrow her clothes? Eat her Diuretic Rhubarb Aero?

  ‘Bet and Edie came into my room.’

  ‘And?’

  She looked surprised that I should ask for worse than the fact of entry.

  ‘And what did they do there?’ Shred her garments, put razors in the scales, pump the toothpaste tube with glue?

  ‘They cleaned it. But I clean it for myself.’

  ‘I think they must have wanted you to come back, to come home to, a nice clean room.’ We were back in Toy Town.

  ‘But I don’t like the hint I don’t keep it nice myself,’ she wailed.

  And that was that. Time of the month, I reflected, having missed nine such times.

  I was rinsed with anger at myself for having at once assumed her own preoccupations identical with mine.

  Chapter 21

  By the time Margaret was soothed, the television was offering only a good film. I would have preferred a bad one. I did not think I could fancy any more suggestive dialogue. I felt as though I had collaborated in the trumping-up of a charge. The whole thing had been oddly artificial. Margaret even seemed, in retrospect, to have dressed for effect. But that was not fair of me; she was simply flesh-coloured, untinctured, and I wasn’t used to it. She had been wearing her scent, though, or perhaps it had become part of her? She had been so upset that at the corners of her mouth dense little cuckoo-spits of froth had formed. These were whiter than her teeth, and she nicked them away, one, two, as though it were a regular, unconsidered aspect of hygienic maintenance. Who does not look out for the eventual destination of such flocci? Consider a quantum cotton bud and speak with a straight face of lost wax. I can’t believe you have never wondered how many pounds of this, pints of that, each of us lays on the burdened earth in one quick life. Think of the secret deposits, under things, in linen, in silk, in cotton, in tissues. And then in the living tissue, too, you place deposits, if you are, as you may be, a man who does not sleep with corpses. There are men who don’t.

  Margaret used a paper handkerchief, drawn from the sleeve of her kimono, which at the same moment fell a little open. A lilac nightdress and her two legs were submitted to my eyes. She must have been occupied in her mind about Bet and Edie’s visit to her room (why both of them?), for her legs were not, I remember, new-shaven.

  That, later, as I lay in the night’s first bedroom, relieved me. Perhaps she was settling in, letting go a little. Her time with us so far was already almost a quarter of John’s life. She would never not be part of him.

  I picked up the first book of the night. I read with only anatomical attention. My eyeballs were taking in, refracting, rotating and reassembling the images of the words. Whichever organ takes in their sounding aroma was doing so. But my fancy, unleashed from my imagination, which was obedient to the books and kept to heel, turned and turned about, trying to flatten a place among the whispering grass for myself and my baby to sleep.

  My fancy began in its old hunting grounds of love, and took the scent from there.

  The first book I had taken up was . . . or would you rather guess? Each of our guest bedrooms contained books chosen for it. There were standing orders at two booksellers; their proprietors could read your house like fishermen selecting flies for a river.

  Our own bedroom contained the Bible and whatever yarn my husband was reading. He enjoyed true adventure stories
and brave tales of butchery. A thin book, unread usually, and indicative of esoteric learning to all but the learned, would lie at my bedside, changed like the flowers.

  John’s room contained all the books from my childhood, not all of them yet comprehensible to him. There were the books about shopkeeping cats and pleasant lands of counter-pain, and the books for older children about walled gardens and maid-servants sent hot chocolate by rajahs, made fairytales by time to all but a very few readers. Margaret had collected a good library of books which were composed of a cardboard cover and a cassette tape within.

  The six bedrooms I slept in that night were:

  The White Room, in which long-married couples were put to sleep. The Yellow Room, in which happy lovers, long married, were put to sleep. The Pink Room, in which solipsists of either sex were put to sleep. The Dressing Room, in which tired belles or young bachelors were put to sleep. The Tulip Room, in which the truly tired were put to sleep. The Explorers’ Room, in which the brave slept.

  As my habit had become, I would go from room to room, not entering the sheets, sleeping on top of the beds, selecting and reading and forgetting the books, like an examinee who is too late to start learning. So, that night, my fancy took me to thoughts of love, and to thoughts of him with whom I was living happily ever after. I shall tell you the story as it told itself to me as I read those other stories. You must not mind if the telling is affected by what I read as within me the old story told itself. Perhaps you can even tell me what the books were.

  Arrived at a moment in my life which must be considered by all prudent persons a great opportunity for a young woman, and launched into the higher society of my now native city, I, with my inward consciousness of a painful past, but no presentiment of a troublous future, did, when the sun of attention from young gentlemen, or the cooler light of criticism from contemporaries of my own sex, became too strong, try to run away from my own shadow, which I perceived was at once too insubstantial, too large, too quixotic and too ungiving of relief when most I needed its shade. The oyster’s pearly mouth now open, its temptations revealed, I wished the tide to take and rock me and wash from me all that had been, uncertain impulses, painful secrets, and lift me to the wondrous aerial land of the West. I sought one from whom in death I would not be divided.

  I found him. He moved among men, men distinguishable from the rest of the crowd by a family likeness, which cut across all differences of age or appearance. His coats looked better cut. His sheets were embroidered with large monograms. His nonchalant glances reflected the quietude of passions daily gratified; behind his gentleness of manner one could detect that peculiar brutality inculcated by dominance in not over-exacting activities. We entered a marvellous world where all was passion, ecstasy, delirium. A misty blue immensity lay about us. We exchanged vows.

  Fear is a very big thing, and there’s a great variety of kinds. I think that I had them all. So when I met so handsome, so milord, so very dressed, such a man as I had dreamed of and he confessed on several occasions to some sort of fear, Honi soit qui mal y pense, as the blue ribbon unwinds it. In that he could be afraid of himself, his fear was sweet to me. We were the best thing that either of us had ever known. Came John. What in the world was our connexion but this love of the child who was our duty and our life?

  By now, every man we knew had a wife.

  But let it remain a caution, for all those who contemplate taking small children out in small boats on the open water, that decking should be enclosed with a double row of guard-railing, firmly netted. In heavy weather, the child must be made fast in his bunk with a lee-cloth.

  In case you don’t speak Dutch, I’ll leave out the Dutch books I read. Two lips sealed.

  Chapter 22

  The books John cannot yet understand are the Dutch ones. He, unlike me, is not bilingual. My Dutch came before my English. It was my first language and it is the language in which I cook best. It is good for the nursery too. Rhymes which sound silly in English sound very silly in Dutch. Its farmyard noises are like chuckles even before the story has reached the farm gate. Is it because no one takes Dutch seriously that it has such a richness of baby-words? Dutch uncles or not, Dutch families are good places in which to grow up.

  Mine was only half Dutch. My English mother waltzed off to Vienna, bored by Amsterdam.

  Like women, the Low Countries are used to invasion. Also like women, they are overborne not only by men but by something even less personal and much more devastating: water. Women are eroded by the moon, Holland by water. Great facelifts of polder hold off corrosion a while.

  When Holland took Empire, she was accused of shrillness, nagging, mental cruelty and bad food. Retrenched, almost uncolonied, colonised briefly by the hated Nazis, she is now a mysterious nation, open, fair, resourceful, rich, decent. What is mysterious about that? Precisely those balanced virtues in a less balanced world. How do they do it, maintain civic virtue? They are accustomed to seeing their very rich queen on a bicycle. They are an unenvious race. Is this because of their wealth? No. The British, even the rich ones, drink envy with ice and a slice. Is it their long bourgeois past, attested to by calm paintings of doctors, advocates, ladies at carpeted tables? Is it their religion with its civilised Imitatio Maris in the roar of the organ, rigged schooners six feet long, up in the rolling vaults of the Grote Kerk, hanging up there with the calm chandeliers?

  Is it the light? Living within that enormous painting, the sky of Holland, the Dutch know that life is not still nor nature dead. They all partake of the same bread. In all flat lands, the sky is bigger.

  They understand light, a Dutchman having developed the abutting glasses which can spy space outer and space microscopic. They have painted it again and again, so still you wait for the plushy first boughful of snow to fall at the next move of a brown fur boot, for the noise of a striped petal making its disconnection.

  They made and lost the formula for that mauve glass which shows to the family at ease the canal without but shows to the observer on the bridge over the canal nothing within, though he is surrounded by clear air. All he sees in the mauve window is mauve water, mauve houses, his own mauve face on a short mauve bridge over the mauve canal. He sees a scene of mauve lustre.

  From inside, the burgher sees his city, not mauve, but all the colours man sends. It is in the museum the observer will be able to see Lawyer and his Family at Ease in their House Overlooking the Canal.

  The food, too, must steady them. No English jokes, please, about carrying ballast low. You may be thinking of the Germans. Dutch, not Deutsch. Dutch women, I can say this in modesty having an English mother, are often beautiful. In their allocation of racial dainties they have gold or silver hair, good teeth, small waists, clear blue eyes and a hint of gusto. The men, often plain, are used to pretty women so they understand courtship.

  Why did my father stay in the same house after my mother left slagroom met chocolade for Schlagsahne mit Schokolade? A lawyer, full of Latin, and too prone to puns, he said it was the hook of Holland. It had him fast exactly where he was; one Amsterdam house was much like another (Interior with Lawyer and his Daughter; Mother Absent), so why change? We were happy, weren’t we?

  We had a heavy yawl, with storm keels like a seal’s flippers, clumsy to handle and not very stable. Stepping its mast was enough work for two men, not a sedentary man and his child. We took buckets and darrows and caught eels inside the dykes, where the water was sweet. They hung like birdscarers in a pea field, metallic in the green water. We would trail them behind us until we had made fast to the dyke, by groaning hempen springs, so as not to tangle the lines. Later, we smoked the eels in a box my father made from the largest size of hopje tin. To skin an eel, imagine taking down the socks of a soaked child, swiftly and mercifully. To eat a smoked eel as the Dutch did in my childhood, lift your head and swallow like a cormorant.

  Like those ugly birds (the shag is a limber diver), the Dutch have condign and discreet skills of elegance: skating, printing an
d the breeding of tulips. Dutch flowers and Dutch food and Dutch books were what I had made about me of Holland in this very English England. But John (or Jan) looked absolutely Dutch, even with his cropped linen hair. At first Rembrandt’s little Prince of Orange, he had now become a Little Dutch Boy.

  My Dutch tulips were grown for cutting. One whole side of the walled garden was cleaned and mulched for them. They were lifted, sorted and stored in darkness according to their age and type, and planted again in the soft days of autumn. Mount and I had found at a sale a quartet of cabinets which had contained moths (wafers of buff and silver drifting out of drawers without the panic of living moths told us this, also pins headed with brown sealing wax). We kept the tulip bulbs in these cabinets. We had lined the drawers with black acid-free tissue paper, best for wedding dresses too, since it keeps out the cruel light. Mount liked the fussing over the tulips, but Basil preferred his vegetable kingdom.

  The first year the tulips came up, Mount said, ‘I never liked proper tulips anyroad.’ These tulips were improper. They squared up no smart formations of cardinal red and Sunday School pink.

  Some of the tulips were very tall; some were white and green as ice, with dark brown pollen smelling of Douwe Egberts coffee. Some, shorter, twisted a little to offer torn white frills of ragged, overdressed but formal skirt. We planted each type of tulip in a block, with a thin gully between each, like paint in the pans of a paintbox. Every one of the tulips being white or cream or unsalted-butter yellow, with a fringe or a dash or sport or streak or eye or ripple or stipple or freckle or mane or dusting of one other very clear colour, or combination of clear colour, so that colour was pricked with colour.