Authors: Candia McWilliam
A Little Stranger (6 page)
‘Soundtracks?’ I thought of a soundtrack for John, full of cooing and yelling and practice-sentences and the disappearing lisp.
‘Small earphones with loud music in. A sort of personal record-player. Kind of thing.’
‘Oh, those things. But I didn’t know Margaret had one of those. After all, she listens to the radio all day.’
‘Probably doesn’t know if it’s off or on. Like those people with no nerves, the ones in Russia. They couldn’t tell you if their appendix had burst, let alone if some little kid had hurt itself.’
‘But why should he hurt himself? Isn’t Margaret always with him?’
‘In a manner of speaking. But you can’t really chat to someone in one of those outfits; I should know that. My boys sleep in them. I’d as soon have had a blind dog look after my boys as a girl in all those wires.’
‘Hold on, Bet, I’ve not even seen her doing it.’
‘Of course you’ve not.’ She gave a meaning look.
‘And is it that bad anyway?’
Deprived of her pellet of malice, Bet seemed disappointed. She sighed hard, and rolled her right thumb around and around the nail of her right index finger, looking down at her pointed red shoes among the thorns and used roses. She sighed again, theatrically, and muttered. What I heard was, ‘the heart doesn’t grieve after’.
These spats were to be expected in a house full of women.
I decided that I would speak to my husband if I saw an opportunity.
Bet and Edie arrived in the morning, just as John left for school. After school, too, he crossed with them, arriving as they left. He was becoming less womaned, losing these first sweethearts with whom he had flirted. That home-bound infant world, in which the broom cupboard and the kitchen are gynaecea, and the smells of Windolene and Brasso as feminine as attar, was shrinking. Bet and Edie, from being his intimates, were becoming to him people who came to clean the house, a thing he saw his parents not doing. To Margaret, I do not think that they were ever more than cleaners, though she did take a break with them halfway through the morning. They drank tea or coffee and ate what Lizzie called ‘ferocious quantities’ of cakes, winged with icing-soldered sponge, or sandwiched with glistening mocha. Margaret drank skimmed-milk milkshakes and valueless ducats of impacted puffed rice.
There is a fatuous state in pregnancy when you know all is well, not only with yourself but with the world. You know that a species which has evolved this miraculous system of reproducing itself, the natty idea of containing the future empursed within, cannot allow destruction to obtain, will not short-change us. You know that, by placing your gravid body between the light of ugly fact and the undefended of the race, you can cut out the glare. I knew, because I had been pregnant before, that it is a fleeting sense of beneficent glowing power, preceding almost invariably a certainty that all shadows are black and all breaths our last, a time during which tears – selfish tears of easy altruism – are never far away, and the newspapers are sopping before their finer print is even begun. I was at the first stage, though, when Bet brought a box into my bedroom, where I stood, squiffy with optimism, showering benevolence upon the bare trees through my window, and on the birds within them – those organised pheasants and the less well-bred members of the parliament of fowls. My turbine of confidence and virtuous energy was capable of anything. I could have illuminated a city with the touch of my finger. I was equal to anything; after all, what could, in this good world, harm me, who contained the point of it all? I could see clearly that, since there was no argument for destruction, there would be no destruction. This dangerous drunken clarity is the closest I have been to escaping the omnipresence of the end. Painting and music remind me, the greater they are, the more of death.
I was hailing the broad day when Bet came in with her box.
‘I’ve got a guinea-pig. It’s for John. Seeing as my husband breeds them for show, this one won’t do. It was a guinea-pig, you see.’
‘Was?’
‘It is a guinea-pig, but it was a guinea-pig. In a sense. I mean, we were trying something. A bit different.’
A mutant. Swivelling off its balanced golden axis, my mind went to the beasts we cannot ignore, the footless shrikes and tubeless snakes, the eyeless cats of a poisoned nature, post-war fauna of our future.
A minute before, I had known all that would never be, and now the word – mutant – had discharged me from my oasis into a desert where war was inevitable and sin weighed as little as good. Pregnancy; is it by definition an hysterical state?
‘Bet, is this guinea-pig anything to do with me?’
‘My husband says we can’t show it and we wondered if John would like it.’
Could I accept a possibly bald or tripod or varicose playmate for my lovely boy?
‘It is kind of you, Betty, but . . .’
She ate the inside of her mouth. Lipstick bloodshot the slack skin around it. Her earrings, dependent from fatty lobes, appeared disposable, tatty.
‘. . . but let me see,’ I finished.
Its whorls were too vehement for the strict rules of the guinea-pig fanciers, that was all. It was a fat cadpig with a square head like the heel of a snowboot. It was chinchilla grey, with wet eyes and coiffed with frosty rosettes. Its hands looked intelligent, as though they might have known what to do with a cigarette.
‘It’s got a nice nature. Well, it sleeps all day. If you say the word, I’ll get the husband and my sons to bring up its equipment.’
Bar-bells, bookcase, Mouli?
‘It needs a thorough combing, so I’ve got it this nice brush – a babe’s brush, really. Basil’s said he’ll get a pen.’
‘A pen?’ In old-fashioned girls’ stories, the helpless offspring of jungle creatures were always fed with a Waterman bulb. So the same was true of guinea-pigs.
‘You know, for it to run around in.’
‘Of course. Basil probably doesn’t know his nibs.’
Bet looked at me without concern. I was increasingly conscious that only I heard the lower layers of my own remarks. She smiled, and I was back on the planet euphoria, all refugees food to my egocentric charity. Let it rain guinea-pigs.
‘Bet, John will be so pleased. How can I thank you enough?’
‘There’ll come a time,’ said Bet.
She took the animal downstairs. I did not know its name or sex, but I was committed to it.
I continued the day’s tasks, gluttonous of action and achievement, certain of immortality, carrying its pledge within me. I wrote letters, paid bills, made of my own desk and my husband’s geometric altars to the rational mind, and was just believing in the perfectibility of all nature – about to eat the, in my eyes, freakishly beautiful boiled eggs Lizzie had made for my lunch, cupped in unimprovable blue and white – when Margaret came in.
I turned my dazzling smile upon her,
urbi et orbi
. I could make all things right.
‘Can I speak for a moment? It must be a moment, as John’s back in ten minutes.’ She counted her time like her calories.
‘Come in; sit down.’ I was delighted. Perhaps she was about to unbend a little.
‘Betty showed me the guinea-pig, but it makes no difference. I’ve told her time and again I won’t have animals. She’s taken it away, of course. But meanwhile we shall not tell John.’
I said nothing. She appeared to take this as mute resistance.
‘I really hate small things,’ she said.
In her energetically made vernal jersey she seemed firmly planted in the room. My verve left me, as though from a sprung leak. As I formed the sentences with which to defy her, I began queasily to feel that it was Bet and I, not she, who had been sneaky. I heard the gulped slam of a car door and the happy officious voice of my son, towards which Margaret – the pearl – turned and walked.
The pampering spring air and easy days continued through March, and John, who never knew about the pet he almost had, was busy trying out different friends. He had a friend with old knees who had only his parents to care for him at home. I liked this child, though I was afraid of seeing in him virtues our way of life might preclude John from developing. He was a blithe boy, John’s friend Ben, and he had a sensible exploitative attitude to the amenities of our house. Once he arrived with a satchel of mending; to his mother, who was dropping him off, he explained with some tact, ‘I’ve got my work in there,’ the image no doubt of his father.
Now the shooting season was over, the wives living round about were able to have lunch with each other again; the ease of segregation returned. This reversion to a less manned life was part of spring, welcome after the dark, rushed lunches of meat and neat spirits, with the guns talking from both barrels.
Today some of my friends and I were to meet at the house of Leonora, our closest neighbour. She was married to a man who had swarthy skin and blond hair, so he always looked healthy. He was as compact of energy as a battery; he had no languor. His energy seemed wisely invested. You could not mention something he had not done, and show he had done; yet he was modest. He invariably asked the right questions. The parts of his life, I felt, were all of a piece, in spite of their diversity. Yet he seemed to have time to read, and time for his wife.
My friends and their husbands were made for the sun and it sought them out. They were not fashioned for doubt or poverty or disappointment. The women wore gold and blue: golden chains and golden rings; blue and white clothes and blue and white precious stones. They did not paint much, and always smelt sweet. Each of their names ended, feminine to the last, with an ‘a’. At regular times, they went to different and far-flung parts of the blue and white and golden known world. The khaki areas of desert and armies were unvisited.
Like that china which, though unmatching, may be arranged together, always prettily – the blue bridges, blue pagodas, faint cerulean follies, pale azure branchlets, blowsy ultramarine galleons, all on differently white grounds – these girls (women was too biological a term) went happily together, and each also had other sets to which she belonged, all similar of aspect, yet each member individual. They did not displace time with worry or regret. They shared religion; they shared a masseuse. The same wall-eyed Cypriot sold them all heavy cold sheets hoared with lace.
I describe a chorus; yet each had her own tone. They were accomplished, even virtuoso, in some things, but, tactful, they did not overdevelop any trait. Their feet were narrow; their children beautiful. What they told was the truth. They wore flowers in summer, furs in winter. They were tough, too, beneath the freshness and softness. There was nowhere, no hinge or crack, for a blade to slip in. High-fired good china, perfect as an egg, and enclosing good, rich life.
Each had her nanny.
The eating part of lunch was swiftly over and we drank water. I took my lead from my friends, who never paid much attention to food for themselves, though they made sure their husbands had the best. We sat about Leonora’s dining-room table. The door of the hexagonal room was a little ajar and through it came the singing yells of children. The nannies’ voices did not carry.
‘Close the door, Antonia, would you? Just a short break from the monkey-house, I think, don’t you?’ Leonora was pouring coffee into cups the colours of different fondants. In her place I might have worried about shutting out a fatal accident.
The room was full of that dazzling spring sunshine which makes you unreasonably pleased. A faint smell of warm cloth exuded from the green silk walls, mixing with the smells of coffee and blossom. A large bowl of viburnum filled the fireplace with lace.
‘At least
we’ve
got zookeepers,’ said Antonia. She had five children, all of them light-hearted and intelligent and devoted to their mother, who now chocked her square face abruptly into her left hand, and waved her right, hailing a light for her cigarette. The ashtrays were like flat silver sombreros. Looking around at my slender, unpregnant friends, I felt as though I were barded with a suit of fat.
Victoria stretched in front of me, with a flaming knuckle, and the smell of smoke threaded among us. As she reached, her fringe caught and tossed away the sun. She had a sandy face with dark eyes and thin hands and legs like a boy, or the sort of fashion model who is chosen for her physical embodiment of intelligence; her voice was thorny. To drive, she wore glasses, whose rims were the peat-red of her hair.
‘What if they turn out to be real horrors?’ she asked. ‘I mean liars, or cruel.’
‘I wouldn’t have it,’ replied Leonora.
‘No choice,’ hooted Julia over the table, picking up a pebble of sugar and nipping it between her front teeth.
‘Who’re we talking about?’ Clara was rifling in her basket and when she lifted her head her hair rocked back into place, smooth as a ball. Her eyes were sad at their outer edge, set into her head like two almonds of blue paisley. They were outlined with black. She began to sew, the looping movements of the needles less restful than the formal quietus of smoking.
‘Who d’you think, Clara?’
‘What do we always talk about?’
‘Children.’
‘Try again. I mean, would the little angels ever lie or be unkind?’
‘I meant nannies,’ said Leonora.