A Little Stranger

by Candia McWilliam

  We cut them only when all five stamens were visible. I changed their water three times a day, discarding it when the oxygen had left. I kept the flowers until every petal had fallen. I did not pick up the dropped petals until they had turned through translucency to transparency, to lassitude. The streaks on the whitest of the tulips were the red of Bols redcurrant gin, bloodless singing red. After the petals’ fall, they turned very slowly through mauve to deep venous blue.

  Chapter 23

  ‘Monday again,’ said John.

  ‘You could call it something else,’ I suggested.

  His shoes were on the correct feet. He was getting old more swiftly than I was, just for a time. At some point we would be level, then he would be indulging me and teaching me to ride my wheelchair.

  ‘A rose by any other name,’ said Margaret. She looked quite mended. I said so.

  ‘Was she cracked?’ asked John. A wisecracker, like his grandfather.

  Margaret began to bustle. She was in a hurry. Her make-up was done to a less high finish than usual.

  ‘Meeting the other nannies?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head, lips pursed. I was packing a red plastic lunchbox. Red apple, chunk of Edam cut like a clog-toe, tub of yoghurt with cinnamon, two Speculaas biscuits in the shape of windmills. It was John’s first morning at his new school.

  ‘Eat the sails off the windmill one at a time and only if you have finished the other stuff,’ I told him. I had bought a chocolate ‘J’ to give him when he got back. Zwarte Piet leaves these chocolate letters in the clogs of good children on Sinterklaas, the feast of Saint Nicholas. Not Old Nick but Fat Nick.

  Margaret was revving the car. She regarded her mouth in the driving mirror, lifting her chin as though settling a stock. I saw her nick the corners of her mouth with her index fingernail, and wipe that finger on something. It was as though she did it to widen her smile. She then rolled down her bottom lip, and I saw her scoop along inside it with the fourth finger of her right hand. She wiped that finger too.

  She leant on the horn.

  ‘Bye, Mum,’ said John. ‘If you can’t be good, be careful.’

  The car wrote the thousand thousand names of God on the gravel with its clenching tyres.

  One more letter. Perhaps a reply to one of my fan letters. I liked to think of them as fan letters. It gave an eighteenth-century silhouette to my picture of myself and my correspondents. There I sat at my desk, enceinte but nimble-wristed, quilltip to well of ink, pelisse becomingly tied. I could imagine the recipient of my letters, a lady poised in the application of a mouche, the infant growing strong enough now to bestride his ribboned hobby horse, the gentleman quizzing histrionically, one hand flung beneath his coats and out, as though shaking off the dust of the street.

  The letter ran:

  Dear – it gave my name –

  Your tapes are in. We regret to inform you that Human Kindness is out of stock. Stark Mad, Arcadia and Ecce Homo are in. Yours truly, M. Cabally.

  Junk mail, by any name. But who could they have confused me with? Who could possibly be interested in pretending to be me? What had I to offer the disciple of Ecce Homo?

  Edie and Bet came. There was no sign that Margaret had mentioned her worries to them. Had she really been trying to express something else? Very shy or very conventional people could use these codes. Was I too wrapped up in the baby? Was it too wrapped up in me? Women all together could affect each other like small moons. Did she feel somehow excluded from the coming excitement? Did she feel she was not part of our family? She was after all so young. Love was demanded from her, yet never too much. She had to mother, without being a wife. She could never receive the sum of love given to parents. How good she was – though not good enough to eat.

  ‘Just off,’ said Bet, stamping in to my morning-room. ‘I came to give you this, only I did not want Madam to see.’

  There had been this sort of jealousy betäween Bet and a nanny before, because Bet so loved John she wanted him to do messy things with her, tarnishy brass-cleaning and wild hooplas with suds and sopping laundry.

  ‘All part of growing up,’ Bet said. ‘I don’t reckon much to growing up without a bit of mess. Got to eat a peck of dirt before you go.’

  Bet had brought me a white knitted shawl, a soft wheel of web. She had made one before John’s birth, too. Made for the entanglement of those pink star-fish baby fingers, but warm and soft.

  ‘It’s really lovely. Thank you, Bet. You shouldn’t have. You said I’d have cause to thank you and this is it. Thanks so much.’

  ‘I’d rather far give you the big thing to thank me for but I dare not, God help me, for I don’t know myself what’s going on.’ There was a cold pause. ‘Well, you can’t stop being sweet on babies, can you?’ she said. Then, not enduring my forbearance, she said, ‘No, but really, don’t tell her.’ This last in a demon-king whisper.

  I began the soft answer which turneth up wrath to a rolling boil.

  ‘Needs must when the devil drives. I’ve got to get back and feed the guineas,’ she said, seeping reluctantly into a normal voice.

  I would not condone gossip.

  Margaret must have her own reasons for objectäing to an unexceptionable white woollen baby shawl. I would respect those reasons.

  ‘How many guineas at the moment?’ I asked, feeling fraudulent at the borrowing of her familiar term.

  ‘Three,’ she said.

  I laughed too much, as I did at private jokes shared with my invisible companion before that birth.

  ‘Gordon Bennett,’ said Betty. I could no longer control my laughter, at this offbeat literary attribution. ‘Takes you that way, does it? I couldn’t stop crying myself, when I was fallen.’

  Chapter 24

  I was so close to confinement that I had to visit Monday’s doctor every Wednesday, too. Fair of face he was, and he seemed to have far to go as well, for today he was togged up in enough outdoor gear to go trapping geese at Gander. When I left home for the clinic, Margaret was still out; she liked the odd mystery, so we did not utterly know her life.

  ‘All’s well?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup,’ I replied, giving no entry for his fingers of concern. He said the Christian name of my husband in an interrogative tone.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘You? In yourself?’

  In whom else?

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I’d like to talk with you about baby. He’s coming any day now. The second’s almost always early. He’ll be happiest with a happy mother. Are you?’

  ‘The mother? Certainly.’

  ‘This joking, Daisy, it’s got to stop. Have you always been depressed?’

  I could not reply. I didn’t have the answer ready. He saw this and he moved in. Being a sportsman, he understood the tactics of pace. He had time. I was a private patient.

  ‘I think you may have a few problems there. Nothing too grave, don’t misunderstand me. Nothing diet won’t put right.’

  Eclampsia? Placenta praevia? I was waiting. It turned out to be none of them, none of Lucina’s foes.

  He cleared his throat, as though to signal a change of subject, and nipped up his trousers with too clean hands before sitting down.

  ‘I hope you won’t feel I’m breaking a confidence if I say you are in loco parentis?’

  ‘I think the world can see I’m in loco parentis.’

  ‘It may well be partly my fault.’

  ‘Hardly.’ Surely, no matter how flirtatious his manner, he hadn’t fathered the baby? He misliked that hard tone of mine, I saw. He made retriever eyes and a soft mouth at me; no hard pads in this surgery.

  I looked at the height-weight chart up on the wall. It advertised a natural and delicious-tasting laxative named Enobarb. I thought of burnished thrones, and put aside the thoughts. The trouble with having an invented companion was that they never said no to even the weakest offering.

  ‘You are in loco parentis to’ – I didn’t interrupt him – ‘Margaret P
ride, are you not?’

  ‘Yes, though she’s not a minor. But we’d take care of her if she ever needed it.’

  ‘If ever?’ He had a serious look, whose sincerity his good looks threw into doubt. ‘You mean she’s not told you?’

  ‘She knows she can tell me anything. What is it?’

  Again I felt the foggy despair of the night when Margaret had raised spectres and then shown them to be only old sheets.

  ‘Daisy, you are bright but dim. If she’s not told you, it’s worse than I thought, but I can’t possibly tell you unless she authorises me. Call me tonight.’

  That ‘authorise’ told me we were in the big world. But the counterfeit lust was back in his eyes. I agreed to call him that night.

  Chapter 25

  She must be pregnant. That was what she had been trying to tell me, in other words. Why had I not just taken her in my arms and helped her to cry? Had Betty been trying to tell me, in the morning? Of course she had. Poor Margaret, until she knew what was to become of her baby, she could not begin to acquire its small clothes. How terrible an upbringing which does not allow the expression of simple things directly.

  I drove home, the discomfort of the wheel against my high belly properly distracting and solid against my vague fears for Margaret. All the way home, through the freshly ploughed madder purple fields and the grey-lavender of copses in bud, I was making speeches to Margaret. I must not ask her why she had concealed the pregnancy.

  She was not after all accustomed to free discussion. To listen to her was to hear language strangled at birth. Oh, not that. I would adopt the baby, care for it, whatever she wanted.

  I went immediately up the back stairs to the nursery kitchen, taking the day’s second post as I went. I couldn’t run as fast as I wished. I began to call her name. She must be in the house. The outside doors had all been open and she would not have left it empty. I ran along the landing. The front stairs were uncarpeted and sleek. I enjoyed my own high pregnancy as I trod. Through the cusp of lunette over the portico I saw the slowly swaying coming green of the poplars’ flames. Soon I should have a brood of children. All that luck, and poor Margaret –

  The fall was not bad. It served me right for continuing to wear party shoes with my jeans. It was just that my feet seemed the only recognisable part of me, so I rewarded them with shoes.

  The heel of the right shoe snapped off halfway down the front stairs. It lay there like a glassy clue. I twisted and fell to the bottom from that point. I hit first my coccyx then my belly against the two lowest banisters, which stood on the last curves of the glacier of pale wood which was our staircase. These final banisters were cast in bronze, plunder from a greater house. Bound in brazen unthinking reeds, their strong poles bore the fasces, two green-gold double-headed axes.

  They were the reason we never let John use these stairs.

  I couldn’t move. I lay. When I had collected some breath I spent it all on a yell. I yelled her name. I hoped I was not frightening John. If she were not here, he could not be. I thought I could hear the radio, a man and a woman in unconvincing loveplay. Poor girl, how lonely she must be, to omit to turn off that machine. She must fear silence.

  I stopped yelling when I realised I made no sound. I decided to be calm. I wasn’t uncomfortable. I counted the knots on the underside of the rug which I’d flipped over like a ray’s fin in my fall.

  She got me upstairs. I do not know how she did it. She said she must have been in the garden when I got home.

  I remembered at once that there was a thing about which she wanted to talk to me. Soon I would remember what it was.

  I was in my bed, but, like a drunk, not dressed to be there. I was in the clothes of my fall, stiff maternity jeans, hard blue sweater. Margaret was reading at my bedside. At the foot of my bed small pillows were laid in a clutch upon the chaise-longue; its silk was stretched tight as though for tanning. The white sun flayed a heap of papers at the bed’s end. Some of them were cornered with gay paper squares. They had some message for me which floated just out of reach, slipping away from me down the next wave.

  Some of the small pillows were the shape of Chinese lanterns, or seedheads, and two were ‘bone pillows’, the softly quadrilateral shape which rests the neck or the toppling belly. The last time you need pillows, when you are bone. Margaret was right to discard the pillows; they were the last thing I needed.

  Her book was Patience Rewarded; its cover showed a couple embracing between a large house and a large car. She was small and he was big. Poor Margaret. Even her books were low in calories, and puffy with synthetic sugars. Still, I could see she was enjoying her reading. I watched her, soothing myself with the pretty sight.

  ‘Well done, you had a nice sleep,’ she said. Hurt, I was a child, and she spoke to me as though I were her charge. I was still feeling for the thing I must say to her. I was sore, but I did not want to burden her with that. I knew there was some reason I should be tactful to her. I lay for a time and did not sleep, watching her, slight and poised, in my old nursing chair. She was so small its truncated legs did not make her awkward on its low seat.

  The room had been emulsioned before the war, the yellow of coltsfoot. Chafed in places, the old paint sucked in light as chalk does water. The ceiling’s rose was a plain wreath of white apples upon white boughs. Dropping white muslin in a tent over our bed, crossed double axes of gilded pear wood surmounted the four pillars between which I sprawled.

  Margaret, on the low chair, its cambric cover tied like a pinafore behind, fitted in, as she had since the first day. She put her book to the floor; it had no spine to snap as she splayed it.

  ‘You fit in so well, Margaret,’ I said. I was reluctant to nick the silence. ‘Is that John I hear?’ I heard nothing, in fact, but I wanted, without appearing to question her care, to know where he was. I wondered how his first lunch had been.

  ‘I gave him to Lizzie for the afternoon. There are some betimes chicks in the partridge pens and Robert says they feed well from children.’ She was using Robert’s country phrases easily.

  She thought of everything. But whose was he to ‘give’? When had she done this? Before or after my fall?

  ‘Did you meet the other nannies?’ I asked. I was surprised by how it hurt to talk.

  I knew the look she gave me, but not from her face. I remembered it from the face of my father when he tried to make my mother’s total disappearance another nursery absence, as though she had just gone to fetch a pail of water or to pull out a plum.

  ‘Aren’t you getting on with Jackie and Sue and the others?’

  The pain made me careless of the courtesies.

  ‘Oh they’re fine. It’s not up to me.’ I knew that the best friendships shifted now and again, changing with weight lost or admirers gained.

  There must have been some teasing over the loveshot keeper. But could that be enough to cause the severance? I remembered the poor girl was pregnant. Nannies must be able to tell immediately. Look at Margaret, with me. After all, they worked with the animals. A pregnant nanny. She was condemning herself to invisibility.

  ‘Is there something you would like to tell me?’ I seemed recently to have asked the same question.

  ‘No. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.’ She twisted her wristwatch and rotated the pearls at her earlobes. Dated, womanly signs of distress, learnt no doubt from mother and from screen.

  ‘Is it something about yourself?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘I think I can guess. Do you want me to say?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ It was as though I might spoil something. Already the progressive slow waltz of mother and foetus had begun between Margaret and the child she carried. She did not want me to make her lose the beat.

  ‘Margaret, are you in trouble?’ I do not know where the phrase came from.

  ‘No. It’s you.’ Well, I knew that. She and the handsome doctor must both think me very dumb.

  ‘Try talking to me, Margaret. Try, love.’ My back
was burning, slowly, like lit gun cotton soaked in spirit. My skin was smoking to crackling with the heat of the pain.

  ‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. It isn’t nice.’ Her eyes filled with tears. So, she had got a child, but had not enjoyed the getting. Was it Robert’s? Was it the child of Ronald who was neither Scots nor Irish?

  ‘Is it something I could help with?’ After all, she had said, ‘It’s you.’ What did she mean? Did she feel trapped in our rich life, was there something we had not done?

  ‘It’s quite natural, you know,’ I said, exhausted with diplomacy and pain.

  ‘They think so.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The other nannies.’ She might as well have said ‘navvies’. I heard the contempt in her voice.

  ‘Weren’t you planning a night out soon? A birthday? Dawn’s? I seem to remember something of the sort.’

  ‘I’ve had to tell them I can’t go.’

  Could there really be no comradeship among women? I was sure the father’s friends must be drawing shoulder to shoulder, buying him drinks, congratulating and commiserating. Like eels or alligators, women move over each other, ruthless and unimpressionable, rushing for the warm seas of mating and rearing.

  ‘Don’t let yourself be hurt by what other people say,’ I said.

  Again she said, ‘It’s you.’

  I was losing patience.

  ‘You’ll have to explain. I’m lost.’ The pain in my back reached round and keelhauled me. I was drawing out Margaret, and my guts were being drawn out of me.

  ‘It’s what the other nannies say.’

  ‘About me? Come on, sticks and stones.’

  That was a bit prissy of her, really, if loyal. Surely they all discussed us at scurrilous length? Why should she object? We took on their attention in remunerating their labour.

  ‘Not you, as such.’

  I was now in real pain. I knew it from somewhere, though it seemed fresh. In the air I smelled the bubble of blood you smell before a big fight. My forehead was cold with sweat. Something I could not prevent was expelling myself from me. I began to breathe very carefully as though I were hiding from someone who sought my life, behind only the thinnest of curtains. This pain had a familiar face, but its expression was twisted. I did not want brutally to ask her how pregnant she was. I did not care to hurt or scare her.