Authors: Candia McWilliam
A Little Stranger (9 page)
‘That’s lovely, then.’ It was settled. ‘What a time you’ll have.’
Perhaps this short time away would distract her from what must be her central worry. There were places to which I was longing to take John, now he was less at the mercy of small cycles of digestion and sleep. Dishonourably, I suspected they were not the places to which his father and Margaret would take him, and was pleased.
‘That’s settled then. I’m off to a balls-aching City thing tonight. No more loving cup apparently, because of AIDS. As if any one of those old goats was a backwoodsman. Hand in till, maybe, but not, I’d’ve thought, overmuch turd burgling.’
I did not interrupt. I rather missed him, including his baroquely awful vocabulary.
‘We all miss him, don’t we?’ said Margaret. She served out the butterscotch whip. ‘I know just the coat you must wear for town, John.’ She notified the dreaming child of the unmetaphorical world by placing before him a dish of quivering brown dancer’s belly, its jewel a pitless carmine cherry.
Her treatment of John was untouched by rancour; things seemed as they had been before.
They left two days later, on a Friday. John had a suitcase. Margaret had two, which were epauletted like
generalissimi
; they ran on wheels.
‘Even a small woman can pull them behind her with ease,’ said Margaret. ‘Which is needed in this day and age. The English gentleman is a dying breed.’
And would die shortly, if John’s clothing were anything to go by, of embarrassment. He was dressed in a regulation 1920s-nursery overcoat with velvet collar, nicely piped in red.
‘Don’t you just love my hat?’ asked its wearer. It was certainly a creation. A natty bowler in shape, its burthen was, ‘We’re off to London town’. She must have been stitching petersham all night. Like a smaller Harry Lauder, he made with an imagined cane, tipping his headgear. His eyelashes looked as though they had been sectioned into ranged clumps, the lovely vulgarity of after tears, denser yet for the shadow cast by his bowler’s brim. I could not feel anything but love for him; and I felt Margaret must have absolved him of any shadow of blame for the half-blinding.
‘It’s detachable,’ said Margaret. ‘It just pops over the crown.’
I was caught out in my squashing adult fear of bad taste and knew I was a killjoy. To make it better, I did something worse. I gave her fifty pounds, one note to avoid ostentation, to spend on herself. To avoid ostentation?
They were driven to the station by Basil. John had insisted upon a train journey. I did not drive them because I no longer could in any comfort.
‘Call me this evening,’ I shouted, out on the long lawn. The bunched heads of oxslips were beginning to show. No more mowing until they had flowered and gone. I realised it was a long time since I had been outside. The intense nights of undigested reading and torpid days had kept me in the house, with Edie and Bet and Margaret and John.
It was strange to be without her, stranger really than being without my son. The separation of parent and progeny was commonplace in our world. Public school? Conscription? Each forms of orphanhood. For what but death could it be a rehearsal?
It was a relief to know that it was Margaret, her very worst fault a cute way with words, who was John’s companion.
I turned to look at the house, from left to right, slowly, as I did everything by now. It was of the sugary fawn brick which is friendly to the soft lichens which care only for clean air and graveyards. The shape of a lemon-quarter, the dome of the hall gently broke the bow of the façade. From the base of the dome to the ground depended four Corinthian columns, in low relief. They and the sham portico they affected to support were of gardenia-yellow stucco, the yellow deeper among the ornamentation, as the gardenia creamed to butter at its unsimple centre. Wistaria leaves, grey-pink as shrimps from the rocky-grey of their mother-trunk, were beginning to finger the house’s front. I hoped some of those ghostly panicles would burst to welcome the baby.
Lead sinks stood at each side of the portico, four in all, each one containing a tall conical box tree, complementing the mazed formal box across the gravel. The box was well established and did not reveal its roots. It looked like large green toys, the four green inverted tops and the low recreational labyrinth – decorous amusement for children in farthingales and their pet dwarf.
It was fake, in fact, only fifty years old, but it pleased my husband. He did not love growing things for their vigour, but he did see a point to their capacity to flourish under discipline. Lavender, just beginning its dry intimations of heat, plumed the corners of the maze. Not to forget rosemary, which was to the garden what yew was to the park, the flinger of shade and deepener of perspective, so that things seen against it were as it were set firm against their darkness and the resinous darkness within them.
I walked slowly around the back of the house, a collection of botched Victorian innovations including several bathrooms fitted with fluted lavatories named for the family pieties: ‘Humilitas’, ‘Sanitas’, ‘Caritas’. These differed in size and in degrees of impedimental ledge, rendering a long shy stay essential to ensure that the mare’s tail of water had done what was intended. Men, I had noticed, did not wait. That ledge, tactfully painted with quaint scenes from blue and white oriental life (painted in occidental Halifax in a satisfying reversal of yellow men in tartan painted in Peking for the Potteries), would be scrubbed by another hand.
Bet and Edie came on that Saturday when John and Margaret were gone. The house looked so clean one could not imagine they could render it any cleaner. All housework is like that, uncumulative if done, cumulative if undone, a little like unhappy connubial love.
I was about to start on all that I had planned for that weekend alone, when there was the sound of a car arriving at the back of the house. I shut the door on my preparations, and went to see who it was.
‘Hello, Daisy. I gather you’re on your own this weekend. Would you like to come swimming with me? I’m off there and I’ve not seen you properly for ages.’
‘Quite a lot of me to see, too,’ I said, surprising myself. Mostly, I hoped the gained weight of this pregnancy would go unmentioned.
‘Yes, well, it’s all in a good cause, isn’t it? We could even go on a regular basis.’ Leonora had the spare looks of a Madonna of the introspective school, translated into blondeness.
‘It’s kind of you, Leo, I just am so busy.’
‘Come off it. What with? Tidying up after the One-Eyed Monster?’
I went stiff. Who could have told Margaret’s secret? What call had Leonora to be rude about Margaret?
She went on, smiling as though she’d said nothing unusual. She hooked a white lock of hair behind an ear. ‘Am I allowed in, or are you scared I’ll huff and puff and blow your house down? Which reminds me, if I’m not going swimming, I’ll have a cigarette just to make me more unfit. Incentive to swim more next time. Secretly, don’t you love it when the nanny’s away? You can have the babies all to yourself and eat currant buns in bed and never get up. Simon and I always seem to get pregnant when they’re away.’
‘Leo, you’re so childish.’
‘In that case let me in, since you seem to have stopped consorting with adults. Scaredy cat, scaredy cat.’ She was putting on some sort of act, I felt. Her casualness was measured.
‘I won’t, actually, if you don’t mind. I’m just off for a rest.’
‘During which you’ll be busy?’
‘As it might be.’
‘Call me then, if you want anything.’
She gave me a hug. I felt her light elbows on my shoulders, the direct address of her unmisshapen body. She meant me well, I knew.
‘Oh, there is one thing. Margaret’s eye. Did she mention it to you?’
‘She spoke of nothing but, yesterday at tea. Simon told a few National Service stories to get back at her. But it all turns out to have been a false alarm. Frankly, I wonder if it ever was. I suppose you can go blind for a bit, but well . . .’ I must have stiffened again, because she smiled and said, ‘Rather you than me; never mind, you say she suits.’
Because I did not reply to this series of small shocks and calumnies, she continued, ‘Still, you can have a nice weekend just pigging it a bit. We miss you. Call me if you feel like seeing us, I’ll come and get you and everything, if you don’t want to drive.’
She was notoriously tough about other people’s nannies. I was so pleased that Margaret’s hurt eye had mended. Now she would have a full time in London, her sight not reduced to the margins.
I did not cease to exist when they were away, but it is not of interest what the baby, whose activities were unprintable, and I, got up to on that quiet pair of days in late March. It was very calm. We took a great deal in. We grew together.
On the following Tuesday, I made my visit to London and to my husband. Though I longed to see him, we agreed that Tuesday was better. On Mondays I saw my doctor; besides, fish is not at its best on Mondays in any town, even a port. We always had fish when we ate together in restaurants at lunch-time. It was a custom of calcified romantic impulse, which had stayed with us.
Monday’s doctor was fair of face. I preferred the other, whose job it was not to be hortatory but to perform circumspect analyses of titration and glaucometry. I could not avoid the queasy sensation that Monday’s doctor, with his good profile and low handicap, felt each palpated stomach in some way a tribute to his own potency.
Give me the quiet older specialist with his conventional retort and nicely warmed speculum. I was sure that there were women who received more consideration from him than they had in the conceiving of shoesful of children. He even asked how one felt without matching action to enquiry. Performing examinations, he donned half-spectacles which made him other, and ceased to discuss the noble wines of Italy. Monday’s doctor would converse socially as his hands shook each other warmly just ahent one’s blushing colon. Like a dog’s, his eyes were never without emotion.
Tuesday luncheon, and we were to meet like lovers, in a restaurant, not at our house, because, also like lovers, my husband had to be elsewhere at a time appointed by another. I was to return to the country by train later in the afternoon. He had some complicated and no doubt enjoyable engagement with that most absorbing hetaira, money.
We were to meet at Sweetings, a restaurant not suited to advanced pregnancy by anything but its delicious white fish and its delicious black Guinness. More than enough, taken in comfort with the beloved. Around us big boys with good skin talked all at once.
Not one had a white face. Do not misunderstand me. Some had red skin, from the tow-coloured wine sinking in the mirror before them. Some had golden skin from privately gathered sunshine. Some had brown skin, from skiing. Some were blue from an easily laid pipe of port. Two looked rather green and were not drinking at all.
My husband’s skin? His skin, like that of most of those men, was the colour produced when exercise is regularly taken by a man in good health upon land whose whole horizon is his.
Although he knew many men in those crowded rooms, and some of them looked at us, wives were not visible at lunch-time in that part of London. It would be different in the areas of lighter industry – Knightsbridge, Sloane Street, Basil Street.
I had spoken to Margaret on the telephone while they were in London, each of us speaking from a house belonging to my husband. I had heard my child in the background of her voice. I had wondered who he thought of first when he woke up afraid in the night. She had sounded happy, calm, satisfied.
‘Margaret is full of your time together up here,’ I began. It was nice that he did not take it amiss. He often seemed a little deaf. I had decided not to worry him with the story of her eye.
‘And John?’ He was exalted to mention his son. ‘Did he like it?’
‘He’s so like you.’ I smiled guiltily. I had replied before hearing the question. It was a noisy place.
‘That’s hardly surprising,’ said my reasonable spouse. Indeed, whom else might he resemble?
‘Yes,’ I went on, ‘he adored it. I don’t know how she carried all that loot. Is Hamleys closed due to no stock today?’ I was reduced to weak jokes when tired. It kept me smiling.
‘She left some of her tack at Twenty-seven, in fact. In the green room.’
I wondered whether to make a sally about Margaret, and not being able to imagine her treading the boards, let alone in any green room, but my own acting career, before I found myself rescued by marriage, had not been distinguished, mostly a matter of doing other jobs while dressed as an actress. I would advise you that jobs which do not fall happily into this category are waitressing, washing-up, and nannying. Misunderstandings arise.
‘But, darling,’ I asked him, ‘how will she manage without her clothes? She brought up every thread she has for that weekend.’
‘I don’t know about these things,’ he said. ‘I make it my business not to. Though she did appear in some fairly striking fixtures and fittings, I’m bound to say. I had Bats and Cosmo and a couple of others over and they none of them acted allergic. M. was quite the little hostess. Though not the one with the mostest.’ He laughed and rolled his eyes at my belly.
‘But she’s so careful. About staying separate. Segregated, really. Like a little stranger.’ Whenever childcare was irrelevant, she was not there. ‘I’d thought,’ I continued, tasting the silver mug and its less-cold beer as I smelled their metal and yeast, ‘I’d thought she was wonderful with children, not so good with people.’