Candia McWilliam - A Little Stranger

There was a silence during which she smiled as though seeking a sweet pastille inside her mouth, reluctant, but relishing.

‘He’s well. Eating his chops like a lamb. Very well. Not shrinking.’ This last was pronounced like a verdict on a neonate — ‘Knot shrinking’. She giggled and pulled down her jumper, soft pink bouclé, over a skirt of pastel tartan trellis. Fetchingly ready to square-dance she looked, left toe out as though stubbing an insect, cardigan hanging unentered over her shoulders, a little cape of pure pink hanging down to her — I noticed — handspan waist. She seemed to be losing weight rather fast.

John, confident it was to him that his father wished to speak, said, ‘I think you’ll find that call’s for me, Margaret.’

‘Cheeky,’ she pouted to the son of the father. My husband must have heard the soft clicks of her mouth.

‘Not once. Well, once. I will if you say so. Goodbye.’ She handed the telephone to my bad boy.

‘Yup,’ he said. ‘No prob. Can do. See you about.’ I heard the outrage at the other end. My husband was not accustomed to such casualness.

‘OK, Dad,’ this in a draggy, adult sort of voice. ‘Lots of things. Perdita for tea. Mount raked my garden. Robert said to Margaret Mummy wasn’t a chicken. I knew that anyhow. I will. I am. I do. Cheerybye.’

‘He says he’s being good, love. Is he?’ said my husband to me.

He sounded more affectionate than he had shown himself for months. I wished we were alone on the telephone. I wanted to break my undertaking to Margaret and tell him of the accident.

‘I wondered if John’d like to come up, asked him in fact. If he brings Margaret. I don’t think you should come; it’s so dirty. I always forget.’ He spoke as though it were not London, capital of a fairly untormented democracy; London, where I had lived for ten years; London, where we had our house, protected by money from pestilence and the poor. But I knew he meant it for the best. He was a family man.

‘Ask Horacia to make up beds,’ I said.

‘She does things better if not asked. I’m no good at talking to her,’ he said. He was like that. He only had to wish for something to be done and it was. Charm, or some other white man’s magic.

‘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.