Authors: Candia McWilliam
A Little Stranger (13 page)
‘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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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 trencherly 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.
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.