Candia McWilliam - A Little Stranger

Her full bosom’s promise was never broken, no matter how deep the ‘V’ of her flowered frock or furling cardigan. Sensibly, she did not patronise a style which could be termed, even remotely, fashionable. She was a classic dresser, the undemanding and eye-easy classic of neo-Georgian, rather than the classic uniforms of my friends, the blue and white beauties. Margaret dressed as though her classical heroes were Berkertex and his legendary protector Aquascutum. Tonight, she was in her kimono, before retiring.

‘They look quite good, don’t they, those nuts? Have a couple,’ I said.

‘I won’t, thank you. There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip.’ The phrase seemed loose-fitting. She spoke with care, recommencing as though I had forced her to overshoot some preordained point.

‘There is something I must say.’ I thought of her bad eye. Was it not better, after all?

‘What is it? What can I do? I hope it’s not John?’

‘No. He’s a dear little boy. The image of his daddy. But. . oh, I don’t like to say.’

‘Margaret, what is it? Are you ill? Anything you want to tell me, do.’

‘I can’t. I feel too bad.’

‘Would you like me to call a doctor? Tell me, Margaret. Nothing is ever so bad once it’s out.’

‘I really don’t feel I should.’

She looked at me. I was stretched out along a sofa, hands atop the baby.

‘Is it something personal? Is it something you’d prefer to discuss with your parents?’ It had crossed my mind she might be having some trouble with her fiancé, and I felt it was not fair I should know before her mother and father, the policeman and the teacher.

‘It is personal. There again it isn’t. I mean it’s all so nice here and you are so kind and busy.’ She named two of my missing characteristics. She sounded like someone writing a thank-you letter for a stay in Toy Town. She looked after children, yet, being an adult, had adult preoccupations. I was worried lest I had been insensitive. Perhaps she had after all wished me to take some initiative towards friendship?

‘Margaret, let me be completely open with you, and perhaps that will help you to say what’s upsetting you. We are all devoted to you. You must know that.’ I was speaking like a greetings card but I did want to reassure her. She was beginning, to the discomposure of her pinned hair and softly powdered face, to cry.

‘Perhaps it’s something you think is awful, Margaret, but I am sure I should not think so.’ I laughed. I almost began to tell her some worries of mine which had shrunk on revelation. I nearly told her of the inelegant bargains struck for square meals, the telephoning at two in the morning, the shoes with thin soles. Not big things, but threads leading to their black caves.

‘It’s so nice here. Really, really nice.’ She spoke with regret, as though she had no choice but to break an anthrax capsule in our attractive home.

‘Yes, I think so too, but that’s not the point, is it? I mean, one tries to make things nice because life is such. .’ It was fortunate that I stopped. Hell, was the word.

‘I’m afraid I have to tell you something very bad.’

‘Nothing is ever as bad as you fear.’ I sounded like a nanny. I went on. ‘Is someone dying?’

She did not reply.

‘Is someone ill?’

She did not reply.

‘Are you worried about love?’ I had gone too far now, surely? I blurted, to make it less intimate, ‘Or, or, money?’

She winced hard.

‘So it is money. Are you worried?’ This was delicate country, the province of my absent husband.

‘No, of course not. I’m afraid I just don’t think it’s very nice to talk about money.’

‘I’m sorry to be so unhelpful, but what else, if you are sure you are well and your family are well, and your fiancé. And John. .’ I was by now very worried. For her, of course, but I was desperate for John. I was sure that they had visited some specialist in London. John was dying. The haircut was pre-operative. The garish treats were his last taste of simple fun, such fun as children are due. And I had sneered. I thought of him, sweet and shaken-down now, heavy and light as chestnut flour, the faint bright paper stars on his ceiling.

She began to shake and weep.

‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘Is it the child? Is it John?’ I did not stand, for fear of upsetting her. My voice was under a control which tightened all my chest and its foolish milky weight.

‘Not as such,’ she said, mildly. Perhaps she knew to talk calmly to deranged people.

I was trying so hard not to be cross. ‘What as such, then?’

‘It’s something. . just something. . you ought to know.’

Somewhere in the room my breathing settled. She was going to tell me that my husband saw tarts. Poor silly girl.

‘If it is anything personal, I ought not,’ I said, furious instantly at having shown her there could be anything.

‘No, no, nothing like that.’ She even smiled.

‘What then? What, Margaret?’

‘Bet and Edie. .’

What could it be? Did they read her letters? Borrow her clothes? Eat her Diuretic Rhubarb Aero?

‘Bet and Edie came into my room.’

‘And?’

She looked surprised that I should ask for worse than the fact of entry.

‘And what did they do there?’ Shred her garments, put razors in the scales, pump the toothpaste tube with glue?

‘They cleaned it. But I clean it for myself.’

‘I think they must have wanted you to come back, to come home to, a nice clean room.’ We were back in Toy Town.

‘But I don’t like the hint I don’t keep it nice myself,’ she wailed.

And that was that. Time of the month, I reflected, having missed nine such times.

I was rinsed with anger at myself for having at once assumed her own preoccupations identical with mine.

By the time Margaret was soothed, the television was offering only a good film. I would have preferred a bad one. I did not think I could fancy any more suggestive dialogue. I felt as though I had collaborated in the trumping-up of a charge. The whole thing had been oddly artificial. Margaret even seemed, in retrospect, to have dressed for effect. But that was not fair of me; she was simply flesh-coloured, untinctured, and I wasn’t used to it. She had been wearing her scent, though, or perhaps it had become part of her? She had been so upset that at the corners of her mouth dense little cuckoo-spits of froth had formed. These were whiter than her teeth, and she nicked them away, one, two, as though it were a regular, unconsidered aspect of hygienic maintenance. Who does not look out for the eventual destination of such flocci? Consider a quantum cotton bud and speak with a straight face of lost wax. I can’t believe you have never wondered how many pounds of this, pints of that, each of us lays on the burdened earth in one quick life. Think of the secret deposits, under things, in linen, in silk, in cotton, in tissues. And then in the living tissue, too, you place deposits, if you are, as you may be, a man who does not sleep with corpses. There are men who don’t.

Margaret used a paper handkerchief, drawn from the sleeve of her kimono, which at the same moment fell a little open. A lilac nightdress and her two legs were submitted to my eyes. She must have been occupied in her mind about Bet and Edie’s visit to her room (why both of them?), for her legs were not, I remember, new-shaven.

That, later, as I lay in the night’s first bedroom, relieved me. Perhaps she was settling in, letting go a little. Her time with us so far was already almost a quarter of John’s life. She would never not be part of him.

I picked up the first book of the night. I read with only anatomical attention. My eyeballs were taking in, refracting, rotating and reassembling the images of the words. Whichever organ takes in their sounding aroma was doing so. But my fancy, unleashed from my imagination, which was obedient to the books and kept to heel, turned and turned about, trying to flatten a place among the whispering grass for myself and my baby to sleep.