Candia McWilliam: A Little Stranger

‘Oh how nice. See what the fairies have done,’ said Margaret. The hollyhocks and morning glories at once looked silly to me, whimsical and fey, like a unicorn at Pony Club.

John marched on past the water-lily tank. The water was green as bottle-glass. Marägaret held him very tight. ‘It only takes three inches of water for them to d-r-o-w-n,’ she said, spelling out the letters of the frightening word, though she was not walking between the child and the tank but between him and the wall, which was pinned with climbing plants. The tank was at least twenty feet deep, after the ten-foot drop.

John’s garden was a success. He scattered some seeds from Margaret’s packets and was only a little disappointed when nothing sprang up at once.

‘Slowly slowly catchee monkey,’ he said, nodding heavily. He was being Mount.

He watered his garden. The backs of his legs were still fat. He did not yet show the double tendons which web the backs of older boys’ knees. John was like an egg, round and whole.

When he had finished watering his garden, he washed his tools at the garden tap — the smell of earth and water calling up autumn — and said, ‘What does dear are oh double you hen mean, Margaret?’

‘What you’ve just done to your garden,’ almost-interrupted Margaret, and tapped his bottom, not hard, with her hand. The cushion of love at the base of her thumb was soft like the foot of a baby.

It was a happy day and, at tea, when John said, ‘Margaret stay with me always not ever leaving,’ I agreed with him aloud and in my heart. I was sad that he already knew what leaving meant.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Margaret, lifting her glass of chocolate milk to her lips. She looked pretty today, nice for John to look at. I had given up all thought of complaining about her scent. She was wearing a modest and becoming frock, daintily embroidered at neck and hem with dancing people. Its belt was narrow and almost leather, like the collar of a realistic toy dog.

Later, I spoke to my husband on the telephone.

‘Margaret settling in?’ he asked. ‘Are you doing all you can for her?’

‘Yes. And what a lovely idea the garden was. He is delighted. He loves the small wheelbarrow. You chose well.’

His voice, always distant, sounded yet further away, a trick he had when he chose not to go in for unnecessary explanations, as though he had with difficulty remembered some tiresome but not urgent pieces of business.

‘Still toiling away at the galleys?’ he asked, courteously acknowledging my sham work.

‘Still potting away at the enemy?’ I asked, not so courteously riling him for his sham warfare.

‘Getting tricksy without me, I see.’ He sounded amiable. ‘Time for a new addition, and I’m meaning that with an “a”. Margaret would like that. A little stranger for us all. Goodnight, love.’

The house as a perfectible ideal of civilised activity is a less exclusive idea than it has ever been. We visit the palaces of the collector-dukes and bachelor connoisseurs, not only for what we may learn of history and beauty, but for what we may borrow and apply to our own houses. The dwellings of artisans, too, are displayed, and we are invited to observe how stylish was their way with simple materials. We take this innocent style and in embracing it bring it to consciousness. We travel through rooms no longer private and imagine we understand the past, when all we have seen is a varnished plaster sucking pig slowly turning between electrically cranked firedogs. We are ravished by our own ability to save labour and the ability of the dead households to employ and deploy it. And there is money; we feed on the loveliness it has sheltered, deaf to the rolling thud of its demolishing ball, held high over us on a frail chain by a rusting crane.

When one small cushion, embroidered with silk fine as eyelash to resemble a corner of chrysanäthemine meadow, has taken a family of virgins four years of afternoons to stitch, how to understand time?

The great luxury now, as it was not then, in the days of the flowered cushion, is to have other people to carry out what one could oneself be doing. That is supposed to free time in order for one to do what one does best. I was popularly, that is among our acquaintance, supposed to do thinking best, but it is not an easily evidenced accomplishment. I had worked at a series of ill-paid though rewarding jobs with publishers, occasionally jazzed up by bouts on the boards and even, sometimes, if there was nothing else, modelling.

But now, freed from cooking by the cook, from cleaning by the cleaners, from John by Margaret, I was not carefree, nor was I full of thoughts.

I dared not sit still, for fear of being caught in apparent idleness, for which the only excuse might have been beauty or a decent literary output. Mine had been a glamour of animation which stillness had dulled.

Our house and garden were none the less a credit to those they kept employed. I liked to consider them, laid out and labelled, perspective absent and detail disproportionate as in a seventeenth-century estate map. Daily I added detail to this map as I oversaw the establishment of an asparagus bed or the installation of a machine to make hard water soft. As the great houses remind one of a city state, so ours reminded me of a hive, full of business tending to the making of sweetness and its storage. It is true that I did not feel myself the queen bee, but I knew that this would come with time and patience and practice. We had been married only five years.

The days passed and the nights lengthened. I was happy, my husband was happy, and we were happy with Margaret, who kept John happy.

Sometimes I thought the happiness was the better for not thinking. When I did try to think, I too often encountered my own objections to our way of life, as though I were a doctor who carries the disease he is attempting to cure.

It was simple not to think, easier each day.

I lived by instinct and its control, like a properly tended plant, and John was my flower and fruit.

As was natural, orderly, provident, I found out after one of the first very good shooting days on our land, with towering birds and a sporting wind, that I was pregnant.

The shooting cards were sent out to the guns. My husband kept his own. Our cards were pictorial, with each column for the various game shot headed by a reduced Bewick engraving of that creature, in life. One column was for miscellaneous beasts, shot not by design. In this column, my husband wrote ‘baby’.

‘If it’s a girl, it’ll be a left and a right all right,’ he said.

He could be very funny.

That autumn John started school. He learnt about shame and comparison, and a certain amount about short words. At school he met children he already knew and some new children. In the morning they made marks on soft sheets of coloured paper which they brought home after a story and a rest. There was a sandpit at the school and a roll of oil-cloth for handwork-fallout. There was a frieze showing the happier events in the life of Christ, and there was a list of names with stars against them. John seemed to come between decent brandy and a country-house hotel for conduct and was about mid-octane petrol academically.

He made school jokes at home and said ‘Present’ when one called his name. He was, though, endearingly absent, giving perfect attention only to what interested him perfectly.

Margaret drove him to school. At the school she met other nannies and after school they would sometimes go to a tea-shop for coffee and cakes. John would be given glossy crackleware buns which he could not finish. I would find the square sugar crystals in the corners of his pockets. Her pleasures left their sugary dust.