Candia McWilliam - A Little Stranger

I would not condone gossip.

Margaret must have her own reasons for objectäing to an unexceptionable white woollen baby shawl. I would respect those reasons.

‘How many guineas at the moment?’ I asked, feeling fraudulent at the borrowing of her familiar term.

‘Three,’ she said.

I laughed too much, as I did at private jokes shared with my invisible companion before that birth.

‘Gordon Bennett,’ said Betty. I could no longer control my laughter, at this offbeat literary attribution. ‘Takes you that way, does it? I couldn’t stop crying myself, when I was fallen.’

I was so close to confinement that I had to visit Monday’s doctor every Wednesday, too. Fair of face he was, and he seemed to have far to go as well, for today he was togged up in enough outdoor gear to go trapping geese at Gander. When I left home for the clinic, Margaret was still out; she liked the odd mystery, so we did not utterly know her life.

‘All’s well?’ he asked.

‘Yup,’ I replied, giving no entry for his fingers of concern. He said the Christian name of my husband in an interrogative tone.

‘Yup.’

‘You? In yourself?’

In whom else?

‘Yup.’

‘I’d like to talk with you about baby. He’s coming any day now. The second’s almost always early. He’ll be happiest with a happy mother. Are you?’

‘The mother? Certainly.’

‘This joking, Daisy, it’s got to stop. Have you always been depressed?’

I could not reply. I didn’t have the answer ready. He saw this and he moved in. Being a sportsman, he understood the tactics of pace. He had time. I was a private patient.

‘I think you may have a few problems there. Nothing too grave, don’t misunderstand me. Nothing diet won’t put right.’

Eclampsia? Placenta praevia? I was waiting. It turned out to be none of them, none of Lucina’s foes.

He cleared his throat, as though to signal a change of subject, and nipped up his trousers with too clean hands before sitting down.

‘I hope you won’t feel I’m breaking a confidence if I say you are in loco parentis ?’

‘I think the world can see I’m in loco parentis .’

‘It may well be partly my fault.’

‘Hardly.’ Surely, no matter how flirtatious his manner, he hadn’t fathered the baby? He misliked that hard tone of mine, I saw. He made retriever eyes and a soft mouth at me; no hard pads in this surgery.

I looked at the height-weight chart up on the wall. It advertised a natural and delicious-tasting laxative named Enobarb. I thought of burnished thrones, and put aside the thoughts. The trouble with having an invented companion was that they never said no to even the weakest offering.

‘You are in loco parentis to’ — I didn’t interrupt him — ‘Margaret Pride, are you not?’

‘Yes, though she’s not a minor. But we’d take care of her if she ever needed it.’

‘If ever?’ He had a serious look, whose sincerity his good looks threw into doubt. ‘You mean she’s not told you?’

‘She knows she can tell me anything. What is it?’

Again I felt the foggy despair of the night when Margaret had raised spectres and then shown them to be only old sheets.

‘Daisy, you are bright but dim. If she’s not told you, it’s worse than I thought, but I can’t possibly tell you unless she authorises me. Call me tonight.’

That ‘authorise’ told me we were in the big world. But the counterfeit lust was back in his eyes. I agreed to call him that night.

She must be pregnant. That was what she had been trying to tell me, in other words. Why had I not just taken her in my arms and helped her to cry? Had Betty been trying to tell me, in the morning? Of course she had. Poor Margaret, until she knew what was to become of her baby, she could not begin to acquire its small clothes. How terrible an upbringing which does not allow the expression of simple things directly.

I drove home, the discomfort of the wheel against my high belly properly distracting and solid against my vague fears for Margaret. All the way home, through the freshly ploughed madder purple fields and the grey-lavender of copses in bud, I was making speeches to Margaret. I must not ask her why she had concealed the pregnancy.

She was not after all accustomed to free discussion. To listen to her was to hear language strangled at birth. Oh, not that. I would adopt the baby, care for it, whatever she wanted.

I went immediately up the back stairs to the nursery kitchen, taking the day’s second post as I went. I couldn’t run as fast as I wished. I began to call her name. She must be in the house. The outside doors had all been open and she would not have left it empty. I ran along the landing. The front stairs were uncarpeted and sleek. I enjoyed my own high pregnancy as I trod. Through the cusp of lunette over the portico I saw the slowly swaying coming green of the poplars’ flames. Soon I should have a brood of children. All that luck, and poor Margaret –

The fall was not bad. It served me right for continuing to wear party shoes with my jeans. It was just that my feet seemed the only recognisable part of me, so I rewarded them with shoes.

The heel of the right shoe snapped off halfway down the front stairs. It lay there like a glassy clue. I twisted and fell to the bottom from that point. I hit first my coccyx then my belly against the two lowest banisters, which stood on the last curves of the glacier of pale wood which was our staircase. These final banisters were cast in bronze, plunder from a greater house. Bound in brazen unthinking reeds, their strong poles bore the fasces, two green-gold double-headed axes.

They were the reason we never let John use these stairs.

I couldn’t move. I lay. When I had collected some breath I spent it all on a yell. I yelled her name. I hoped I was not frightening John. If she were not here, he could not be. I thought I could hear the radio, a man and a woman in unconvincing loveplay. Poor girl, how lonely she must be, to omit to turn off that machine. She must fear silence.

I stopped yelling when I realised I made no sound. I decided to be calm. I wasn’t uncomfortable. I counted the knots on the underside of the rug which I’d flipped over like a ray’s fin in my fall.

She got me upstairs. I do not know how she did it. She said she must have been in the garden when I got home.

I remembered at once that there was a thing about which she wanted to talk to me. Soon I would remember what it was.

I was in my bed, but, like a drunk, not dressed to be there. I was in the clothes of my fall, stiff maternity jeans, hard blue sweater. Margaret was reading at my bedside. At the foot of my bed small pillows were laid in a clutch upon the chaise-longue ; its silk was stretched tight as though for tanning. The white sun flayed a heap of papers at the bed’s end. Some of them were cornered with gay paper squares. They had some message for me which floated just out of reach, slipping away from me down the next wave.

Some of the small pillows were the shape of Chinese lanterns, or seedheads, and two were ‘bone pillows’, the softly quadrilateral shape which rests the neck or the toppling belly. The last time you need pillows, when you are bone. Margaret was right to discard the pillows; they were the last thing I needed.

Her book was Patience Rewarded ; its cover showed a couple embracing between a large house and a large car. She was small and he was big. Poor Margaret. Even her books were low in calories, and puffy with synthetic sugars. Still, I could see she was enjoying her reading. I watched her, soothing myself with the pretty sight.