A Little Stranger

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘Have you rung the doctor?’ I asked. I knew he had something to do with all this.

  She regarded me swiftly and said, ‘No.’

  Then, as though in alarm, she continued speaking, maybe to ensure my silence. She appeared terrified at the mention of the doctor. She smelt, suddenly, of acetone. The sockets of her arms were circled with sour cloth. Her lips showed white gums.

  I knew then that I was struggling for the life of my child.

  ‘I can’t see those nannies any more. They say it’s your doing he loves me. He loves me. And so does the child you call your son. He loves me.’

  There being no doubt who he was, I felt with no shock the waters break from me into his bed.

  Chapter 26

  I said that I had love to spare. That happens when you have a child. There must always be more. Not more of everything, but more of love. You never know when it may be needed.

  It was easy to love my beautiful son. I had not found it easy to love Margaret. I did not even like her. I romanticised her because I wanted a quiet life. I thought I did like her because I needed her services. Doing this, I put my child in the care of a scheming fantasist. Most galling, it is the smallest things, and the things which make me despise myself the most, which I mind worst, to this day. I did, while of sound mind and with no particular job to do, allow my son to be defused, disconnected from what is important, alive and funny. I allowed him to be taught not only the natural sins of his fathers, but those sins glorified by their victims. Margaret believed in granite-jawed potentates; men who were men were the men for her. Not as they were, but all cleaned up. Nannied. Lightly castrated, like princes in the ballet.

  Poor Margaret. She would have been scandalised if she’d known of wet-nurses. Bottles only, please, and not of gin. No jugs, no dugs.

  Why did she care for children? Why work with the animals? I still wonder, and can only think that it was the opportunity to participate in the books she’d read and the films she’d seen. These are the books read and the films seen by most young women, but very few have decided to become a pearl. And Margaret was a pearl, of very great price.

  I spoke of the hingelessness I wanted for my son, a life seamless and uninterruptible. But I was wrong. It is for those people I now fear the most, for, when the blow comes, they are unhinged. It is better to have a little grit, a slight abrading. That is what life actually brings, if not worse. The perfect oval smoothness encloses the lives only of the very stupid or the very ill. We give it to our tiny babies until they are accustomed to a little rocking.

  Until that time we shelter them against even the slightest swell. Margaret had swallowed the bait whole; she believed in the calm green sea of money. It rocked her, having sung her its songs (Ecce Homo, Patience Rewarded, and the countless other siren tunes), and then it wrecked her. Unresourceful, pusillanimous, bled of initiative by the long cold wait for the handsome prince, she had neither wish nor wit to build herself a shelter of the wreckage.

  I was all but wrecked too, for I was beginning to roll with that beguiling ocean, and it would have pulled me down as surely as it buoyed me up.

  John and the baby at least made landfall.

  Chapter 27

  Have you ever seen books burnt? The idea is vile; the fact is worse. There is no excuse for it but a new Ice Age. The only excuse for pyres of books is a killing need for warmth.

  The wreck made of our lives, whose chapters were so ordered, whose bindings so handsome, title and verso so clean and clear, was made by such a need in Margaret.

  Yet in my infatuation, turning the pages, engrossed in plot, enamoured of surface, I could not read what I had eyes to see.

  Burnt books leave scum, not light ash. The gum of cows’ feet, the sea-bed minerals, are leached out. Only the twenty-six frail characters are destroyed.

  The doctor relied on my seeing what my eyes told me. Never rely on intelligent people to be so. My eyes told me nothing; my nose, which should have told me something, did not.

  I said I was vain, but I had not looked in any mirror I could avoid for seven months. I veiled them as though for a death. I turned from them as though I drank blood. In Sweetings I did see myself. Not, as I said, invisible, but not wishing to be seen. And impossible not to see. What could the other men have said to a man with a wife the size of a whale? For every pound Margaret lost, I put on two. In two years, the doctor says, I shall be myself and not these three selves in the one skin.

  That weekend when Margaret and John Solomon were in London was a lost weekend, though you will see its scars on my green marble legs and leg-o’-mutton arms. Leonora must have sensed I was about to do wrong. What we did together, I and my conscript accessory to the fat, was attend a children’s party lasting twenty-fours hours, a party for ourselves alone. Seven loaves with chocolate hail, white milk bread paved with butter and the pastel sugared aniseed the Dutch call little mice, mob caps of jelly and lakes of cream, egg sandwiches for a team of hungers, and shoals of herring, pink, silver, white, grey, and the morbid maroon which is so delicious eaten with warm yellow potatoes and cold soured cream off a hot spoon.

  A feast for Dutch children, you see it was. After that, a dyke of chocolate, smooth Droste pebbles, disks as brown as sea coal, or creamy like the best Friesians between their mappy black. We ate truffles rolled in pulverised Verkade until they were as smooth as mushroom caps. I held off the sea with our solid wall of eating, but its fingers broached our dyke.

  Having been made to feel so small, I chose to make myself large.

  Chapter 28

  The only full description of a work of eating I have served you so far was when I described to you the blue and white bowls of nuts, laid out after supper. Enough to keep . . . What is it nannies say? Enough to starve the feeding millions . . .

  And that was after eating supper. Soon after Margaret came into our house, I began my secret eating. It was not easy to keep secret, but no one cared to mention it, and for a time I carried it well, like a Polynesian cannibal queen. Then again, it might have been the bulk of the new life, and no one likes to tempt fate by criticising the unborn.

  Our house, that long full term of pregnancy, contained two countervalent madänesses, both to do with food.

  I did not know, until the conflagration at the very end, of her miserable bringings up.

  My hogging began in joy. I was a pig in muck. Not two, not four, but ten of everything. I moved with the times; I was a decimal eater. I believed in eating only the best and I made it beautiful. I contemplated its beauty before commencing engorgement. The virtue of the food, its rarity and cost, the secrecy of its preparation, the hidden expeditions mounted for it, gave my votive sessions the nocturnal glamour of a love affair. By day I cut normal sections from the pies in the larder. By night no moon of cheese could satisfy me.

  Even when the fat began to heat and chafe, to require powdering between its rolls after any exertion, I felt innocent. The more innocent, if it were possible, the more I ate. The pleasure was so rich and so simple, so harmless, so uncomplicated. Anorectics are said to fear adolescence. My glowing feasts were celebrations of being a child. I lifted from myself the weight of thought as I donned that precious fat.

  The exquisite night-time sense of ceasing to be homesick for some quite fabricated home, some honeymoon of childhood, of engaging with something real and purely unreciprocal, made my eating times almost holy to me. It still seems strange that all that glory turned not to light and radiance but to heavy dullness and the shifty sexlessness of fat.

  At its height, the midnight feasting was Dutch, wanting only an urn of tulips to freeze it to still life. I arranged cold fowl (which I ate, wrenching like a midwife with my hands) and sausages with flecks of white fat. On pewter dishes I dumped clouds of bread and flitches of striped speck. Transparent red smoked beef hung over plates, silky as poppy petals. I tumbled grapes from blue to yellow and the weak purple of primulas. I cushioned myself with Bries rich as white velvet. All this in trencherl
y quantities.

  It was so beautiful; how could it do harm?

  At the same time, Margaret was carrying out her inverted worship of the same god.

  Chapter 29

  I should have smelt her illness. I saw only fertility, imagined only the healthy malaise of pregnancy, when the doctor tried to hint at what was wrong. She was not as ill as she had been, twice before, but each time it grew harder for her body to bear the lightness she laid upon it. To me, she looked simply rather enviably slim, because I knew I was unenviably fat. Yet by now she was weighting her hems with shot and padding her frocks with dressings; dressing up, you might call it.

  I should have thought about her poor hirsute limbs, observed not only the gestures but their reasons. Thick spittle is caused by potent tranquillisers. They clog you up and wring you claggy.

  Bet and Edie had been seeking the source of a bad smell, fearing rats. That was why they went to her room. But it was more than rats, which are to be expected in any house among fields and farm buildings.

  In the end they did trace the smell. It came from one of Margaret’s suitcases. It left with her, never having been opened. Bulimia is frequently the resort of very tidy people. She couldn’t stand the mess inside, perhaps, all that disorderly digestion. She kept surgical gloves in the nursery bathroom, so she didn’t get dirty hands as she put a long feather down her raw throat. She dusted the gloves with talc before entering them, John said. He was familiar with the routine, considering it part of the grown-up woman’s toilette. He told me this after we’d all come back from hospital, and I asked him to powder the baby. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Is she getting ready to do icky-poo?’ The expression wasn’t his own. After she had gone, I found the most silver and babyish of John’s curls in a very small envelope, at the back of one of her drawers. In a way, she was a witch, though her poor spells did not snare the handsome prince. I wondered if the fiancé too was a fairy story, the reliable foil of fiction, in sharp contrast to the flashing attractions of Mr Right.

  She purveyed fairytales. She believed in them too, the social lures and magic potions. Yet, without the prim wisdom of Alice, Margaret in Wonderland had not the education, the upbringing, if you like, to know when to obey the instruction ‘Eat Me’.

  I don’t like the idea of all that upbringing.

  John, reborn by her departure, ceased his more knowing ways and cute contrivances. Perhaps we may even hope he does not grow up to become the baby prince and ideal man of Margaret Pride, godlike, intolerant, made of brass, stupid as the Himalayas.

  Would you like to borrow Patience Rewarded? Here’s a good bit:

  Condemned to be invisible, just Jamie’s nurse, Elsa nevertheless took care to style her soft brown hair and slipped her creamy gown over her slight form. The neat collar and cuffs toned, she reflected, with the colourways of the Duke’s own suite, where the Duchess lay, even now, hideously obese, eating, eating, eating.

  A slim volume to keep you awake at night. We’re none of us innocent. There’s a fairy story for everyone.

  Margaret wrote, too. She kept notebooks of every single thing she ate. One was left behind. It was very neat, a thin blue jotter with ruled pages. In the margin were ticks and crosses, many more ticks. They were bleeding her empty, those little red ticks.

  The jotter she left behind was blue, with the fading green handprints of my son marking its cover.

  Beneath her mattress (we burnt it later and the ash stayed about the farm for a windless summer week) were some of the letters I had sent out to the noble army of unknown friends, and some sheets of our blue paper. With difficulty, words as misangled as little ships in the wrong bottle made their way over it, in a stiff model of my writing. Disliking me, as she certainly must have done, she yet attempted to turn herself into what she imagined I was.

  She was not taken away by her parents, the policeman and the part-time schoolteacher. She was taken away by her parents, the Irish stable lad and his dead wife.

  The poor man stood in the kitchen, Lizzie told me, and he was scared of his daughter. He took a drink of tea, but he left it on the side. His legs were that bowed you could ride through them. All veins and knuckles, said Bet, that’s the wind and the drink; but a nice sort of man. The kind you could tell was good with animals. She sent her dad up to get her cases. She had refused even a drop of water since the new baby had begun, so she was that weak she’d to sit in a chair. Edie had padded the chair because her bones were bruising her – she was hungry to do herself harm – and wound her elbows and the coathanger of hips with rolls of yellow chiropodist’s wool, so’s she couldn’t hurt herself.

  She’d bitten Bet, and set fire to something in her room, so Lizzie reckoned she was dangerous, but Edie said, ‘The poor girl thought she was bettering herself. She spoke to that father like she employed him.’

  The man whom Margaret had told to pick on someone his own size turned out to have been the robust but lovesick Robert, who had also had an appointment with the doctor. After it was all over, he told me that Margaret had threatened John with a beating if he were to tell me Robert had been there. ‘A beating?’ I asked. ‘But she knew she was not allowed to hit John.’

  ‘No,’ said Robert, hot and uncomfortable. ‘She said you would hit him.’

  The thing she burned in her room was an animal. It was a soft rabbit, as tall as John. It turned out that my husband had bought it along with all the other toys, guns, tanks and interstellar death gambits, because she admired it when they were in London.

  ‘I thought it was the kind of thing that sort of rather ugly girl likes. Substitute for a man, something along those lines,’ he said. ‘They charged like the Light Brigade for it too.’

  He did not know the meaning of meanness, but he couldn’t see love if it poked him in the eye.

  If it is so that the fat wish to be a shadow of their former selves, the sickly thin wish to be the flesh of their future selves, not a flesh fed by nourishment, but the plump, taut, muscled and yet tender flesh of romance – ready to be carved. While they reject and vomit food, for what are these girls paying, these girls wanting to be hollow? What fantastic connection has been made between daydreams of beauty and romance and that life of bitter spitting?

  How I longed to be but a shadow. I had taken myself seriously, but had not at any point taken seriously that self.

  Chapter 30

  It is you, blue and white girls, who brought me back, who made a bridge for John and the baby over the dirty waters of that choppy time.

  The baby came after two days. Margaret did nothing for the first two hours of my labour, but then my husband came home. Someone had seen Margaret’s smashed car, and had gone to alert him, which was part of her plan.

  She told me, as I lay in labour, that what she hadn’t expected was to be completely unhurt. She had imagined that he would rescue her, having found her just a little, becomingly, blooded, winged only by her accident, and that would be that.

  She did not wish to acknowledge her real sickness. She longed for the erotic violence of romance, the blood matching the lipstick, the steamy meeting of fire and ice. She had discounted me. I had given her every reason to do so.

  She was strong enough to haul me from the glassy stairs where my evening slipper had spilt me because she was drunk with fury. Some sinister shreds of conscientiousness bound her. She was angry to be mobile. She had hoped, I suppose, to diet herself to beauty and to crash herself into the sights of my husband, who would then act on the love she knew he bore her.

  All she did was destroy the car.

  He came upstairs roaring, ‘Bloody nannies. They’re all the same. They smash a car as soon as look at it. Stupid cow. My son could’ve been in that car. Daisy, Daisy, where are you? Wake up, get up, the car’s crashed. It could have been my son, you bitch, for Christ’s sake.’

  I screamed and screamed, and he came to our room, and saved me, not from the pain, or the mess, but from the vituperative, obsessing voice of Margaret, who had been sitti
ng knitting as I panted and heaved, and telling me her love story. ‘I am glad it’s your body, not mine,’ she began each mad versicle, and then went on to explain why I would die if I had any sense of the proper thing to do. Her plan had not gone entirely awry, she perceived. I might yet die. She had already started taking my name; it was only a little way from taking my life. The longer I was unhelped, the better it would be. She hoped that the baby would live, and she and Solomon would bring it up as their own. It would never know that its mother was a fool, a fat fool, a moon-faced fool with her head in the air. The one thing I could do and she could not was have children, and she would take care of them. She had starved herself to barrenness. The best thing I could do was die. It was what would be most helpful. I was at such a grovelling depth of acquiescence that I almost wished – for politeness’s sake – that I could. Until I felt the tug and assertion of a quite other person from within myself and knew clearly that I too had been mad and now I was fighting sane. I tried to get to the telephone, of course, but she went for my eyes with her knitting needles. They were the finest steel needles, the best for baby clothes. My eyes are fine too; needle sharp. She didn’t touch them.

  The baby is quirky like me, and smiles, dreaming, in the middle of eating. I will teach her what I so painfully learnt: that stupidity is not a virtue, that others do not care the more for you if you bury yourself, that anger will out at the end. I can see already that she does not have my sin of extravagant cooperation, my perverse will to be polite at any cost.