A Little Stranger (2 page)

John waited to hear the stranger speak.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ asked Margaret. He looked up. Her smile was all dimples and comfort. He flopped towards her on the blue, just a child again, his fair head in his hands and the bare soles of his feet waving, in the immemorial pose of a boy whose attention has been hooked.

Later, I went downstairs, leaving her to get to know the child. After a time the nanny who was about to leave came down and we sat in the kitchen. She liked black coffee too. I liked her, but she was leaving to be married, and was sorry to go, so I did not make it harder for her by talking about her departure. She was a sensible girl who made things with her hands and enjoyed masochistic sports – potholing, freefalling and such. I had even worked a little while she was with us, though I listened too much for the child.

‘What do you think?’ I asked.

‘She brought a packet of sweets for him,’ she said. ‘So he thinks she’s great.’

She is bound to be jealous, it’s a difficult time, I thought.

I said, and felt disproportionately disloyal as I did so, ‘Do you approve?’

‘Not of sweets,’ said the girl who was to depart, knowing that a part of her life was coming to an end, the important part just beginning.

Chapter 2

Margaret Pride came to live with us and to look after our child. My husband was especially pleased. ‘She’s smartly turned out,’ he said. I thought of a jelly, arriving entire on the dish from its mould, not a curve out of place, sweetly buttressed. John seemed to love her. He was an easy boy, with no temper and a desire to please. He was curious and affectionate and big for his age. He had astonishing looks which caused people to talk to whoever accompanied him in the street. He had brown eyes and white hair and he fell over often because his feet were large and he thought most of the time about private matters. He was a little timorous, and easily shamed. He did not like to be laughed at. He enjoyed bringing new words into his vocabulary, where they would be altered by his lisp and his accent, which combined the country voices of his familiars – cook, nannies, gardeners and so on – with the vowels of his parents and our friends. He also had a trick of substituting ‘f’ for ‘v’, as in ‘ferry nice’. It was as though his grandparental Dutchness was coming out. Excellent linguists, they yet trip on English ‘v’s and ‘w’s. Where the idioms are most contiguous, the Dutchman speaking English is most likely to reveal himself. Asked how many peas are in a pod, he will reply, ‘Ten, of so’ for ‘Ten, or so’. Margaret’s standard English was the off-white kind favoured by hotel receptionists and vendeuses of posh slap.

John’s fourth birthday fell in the first week of Margaret’s employment, also, coincidentally, the beginning of the grouse season. John was gun-shy so far, and I did not want to go north in Margaret’s first weeks; so he, she and I were living in the house. She did not use my Christian name. On the whole I found this an advantage.

John had spoken to his father on the telephone on the eve of his birthday. I had kissed him goodnight; his hair smelled of puppies and milky tea, sweet and smoky, the scent of toy-gun caps held in a soaped hand. Margaret was present during both John’s valedictions to his parents that evening.

She had a position for waiting, which was suggestive of the not sufficiently swift passage of time. She would turn and turn a lock of her own hair, having isolated it from the soft moss standing over her forehead, and turn her right foot over too, so its ankle, or rather leg, touched the ground. Her invariably high heel would in this way be turned inwards like a spur.

Certainly, she drove herself. The buzz of her activity filled the house. She got up early and did laundry and ironing until very late. I knew these things because I listened. Big houses carry sound as water does; the sound is clarified by the space. But she was also quite unmuffled in her activity. Her shoes tapped her presence. She behaved as though I suspected her of sneaking off for a lie-down or a cigarette, and would tell me what she had been and what she intended doing. ‘I’ve just done the ironing and I’m off to sort through the toys.’

‘Don’t take on too much,’ I had said to her. ‘Only do John’s stuff, and please tell me if anything’s not right, if anything doesn’t suit. I can’t always guess everything.’

I had not guessed anything when she surprised me in the nursery kitchen that evening. I had made him a tree, composed of sweets. The trunk was of flaky logs of chocolate, and the leaves and fruits were boiled sweets in twists of coloured paper. My idea was that he would be allowed one sweet after lunch each day until it was finished. By that time it would be autumn.

I was putting his tree beside his place at the nursery table, which Margaret had already laid for breakfast. She was good at thinking ahead. Events did not catch her out. She kept a collapsible umbrella in the back of the car. When it rained she wore a hood of transparent plastic. After the morning walk she always cleaned her gumboots. They put ours to shame. Hers were small and black and shiny. Like all her possessions, they were marked with her name, ‘M. Pride’. Such items as her hairbrush, difficult to label, she had identified with pink nail varnish, ‘M. P.’. She favoured babyish objects of adult necessity: a vanity case with a teddy bear upon it, an electric toothbrush in the shape of a chipmunk, bedroom slippers whose toes were the masks of mice, with grey crewel whiskers. These things were also named, although they could only have been hers.

I was looking about the nursery kitchen, happy with what I saw. Margaret was as orderly as she had claimed to be and as I had stipulated. Nothing was out of place, nothing missing. It was surely in such a rational and ordered state that John’s spirit would grow confident and free, untroubled by chaos.

‘Just before I do this little lot,’ came the voice of Margaret, accompanied presently by her body, hugging a red plastic basket of clothes, and wrapped in an apron. The apron enquired, ‘Have you hugged someone today?’

‘Yes?’ I asked, pleased that she was perhaps about somewhat to fill the hours ahead, maybe with talk of John. I would not have minded contact rather greater than we had. After all, the child was a very personal conduit for conversation. I did not want her to tell me her hopes and fears. I would not tell her mine. Surely we could discuss the boy without danger.

I also wanted to know that she was all right in order to ascertain for how long she might consider staying. If only she could stay for the whole of John’s small boyhood.

‘I just wondered. That is, I wonder if we might have a piece of garden?’ she asked.

‘We?’

‘John and I. He has an interest in growing things. I would make sure he did not tread dirt inside.’

‘What a marvellous idea. I’m only sorry I didn’t think of it before. Where do you think?’

‘I asked Daddy’ (she referred thus to my husband) ‘and Mount’ (our gardener) ‘before He went up to Scotland.’ The ‘h’ was capitalised so that I knew it was of my omnipotent husband that she spoke. Who was our son, if Solomon was God? Little Sol, the sun of man.

I flinched from asking myself whether I felt jealous, and of whom.

I thought of something. ‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked, having forgotten to ask this at the interview. Should I have been so flustered?

‘I believe that things are meant, and my father is a lay reader,’ she replied, putting the basket down upon the polished oxblood floor and looking at me as though I had used strong language against her. She wore a crucifix too small to martyr anything but a fly. I recollected what we had been discussing.

‘Back to the garden,’ I said. ‘John’s, not Eden.’

I did not, as one is supposed to, grow better at judging an audience as I grew older.

‘I thought,’ and her voice went from discomfiture to satisfaction as she spoke, ‘that we’d start with radishes and marigolds, bright and quick- growing.’

‘And how nice, both edible,’ I said, my voice rather too social in my ears. It really was a lovely idea. I imagined John pulling up his first radish, that unearthly pink with its creamy pizzle. We could make radish sandwiches and marigold salad and give a little – what else? – garden party.

‘Edible?’ said Margaret. ‘Marigolds?’

‘Delectable in salads.’ Delectable? Handy hints for cross-cultural cuisinastes. ‘Just scatätered. Not too thickly.’ I was losing confidence. ‘The petals only.’

‘Everything in its place,’ said Margaret. ‘We don’t want him eating laburnum pods for peas. I know how unsettling foreign things can be.’ Sensibly, I felt, she had tried out these foreign things and found them wanting. One could only pity Pascal, Descartes and those old Greeks with beards and unironed drapes.

‘No, of course we don’t. How right you are.’

‘We thought by the thornless blackberries, well away from the glasshouses and frames.’

‘It’s a wonderful idea, Margaret. Why don’t you get cracking in the morning? John would adore it. How are you settling in, by the way, yourself? What about anything you need?’

‘I’ve everything I need,’ she said. ‘There’s a programme I fancy in a while and I’ve got to put these garments in, so I’ll say goodnight.’

‘Goodnight,’ I said. ‘God bless you.’ Who was I, to invoke Him? It was another bit of social speech.

I spent the evening, after a supper of sweetbreads and rye bread, reading. I could not see that there was much on television but serials about the effects of illness or of wealth. I could not differentiate between these programmes, though the outfits worn by the victims sometimes gave a hint, and the terminally ill, or those who impersonated them, appeared to wear even more make-up than the terminally rich.

I was reading and correcting the proofs of a book. It was the author of the book who was doing me a favour, not I him. I did not need the work, rather the idea that I had it. This particular author could not write but could not help selling. The book was intended to be bought rather than read; it was a category book of gossip, easier to write than a bird book or a tree book and less resistible. People have no certain profile in flight and no certain season of falling sap, so research need not be exhaustive.

When my eyes were tired, I went out into the garden through the back door. The sky was quite light still and the flowers no longer bright, but incandescent. Only one particularly scarlet rose had not softened in shade. The flowers glowed like candles behind guards of coloured vellum.

The house stood, a substantial cube among its blue lawns. Within it my son slept, needing nothing I could give him. My husband was far from home. Light fell from Margaret’s window. At its edge a curtain moved, then swept across, a thin wave lipped with lace. Mist filled the lower air, lapping at my knees. I stood outside, alone, at the margin of house and park.

A green star fell. Perhaps I could make solid the expressed desire of my husband and Margaret by conceiving a child. There I would be, with my children, the keystone of the family monument.

There was rain in the air. I did not feel it a threat. I knew that I held, with my husband, the umbrella of family love which will keep out even the most terrible rain.

I followed the path behind two lead hinds and turned left beyond the lily tank, through a gate and into the kitchen garden. The red whips of the thornless blackberries made a Pompeian arch against the grey wall, which bounded a most dapper bit of hoeing about five feet square.

A small clean rake and spade and a duck-shaped watering can stood in a green wheelbarrow which reached only to my calves. The barrow was parcelled like an expensive bouquet in cellophane. A clearly written label within, in writing not my husband’s, read, ‘To John with fond regards from “Daddy”.’ It was from Margaret’s own writing pad, whose paper was headed ‘Love is a warm feeling inside’. I felt cold. Along the bottom of the paper walked, in disciplined manner, two ducks and their fluffy duckling.

She must have been sure of the weather. It was not like her to enterprise the god of rain.

Chapter 3

On the morning of his birthday, John ate most of his tree of sweets before breakfast. How could he know that the sweets were for serial plucking? He was not sick, but he did no justice to his executed egg with its squad of toast soldiers.

Since it was John’s day, he could not be in disgrace, so I put myself there in his stead and said to Margaret, ‘I’m sorry. It was thoughtless of me.’

‘It’s the thought that counts,’ she said, pulling in her stomach and at the same time smoothing the small of her back, as though wiping off chalk dust like an old-fashioned schoolmistress.

I felt gratitude at the mildness of her rebuke. I didn’t think to ask her why she had allowed John to eat the sweets. She had given him her present, a selection of bright seed packets.

‘Must need see garden any minute, Mum,’ announced my son.

‘Mummy,’ said Margaret.

‘Yes?’ I responded facetiously, and the little joke died.

We went to John’s new garden. I had arisen even earlier than Margaret, whose rising was marked by the roaring of machines for washing and for drying clothes. Around the necks of the leaden hinds, I had twisted flowers taken from the border I had patrolled by dusk the previous night. The hinds were bloomed with a dust like talc, more opaque in the creases of the soft metal.

‘Oh how nice. See what the fairies have done,’ said Margaret. The hollyhocks and morning glories at once looked silly to me, whimsical and fey, like a unicorn at Pony Club.