Candia McWilliam: A Little Stranger

I had also taken to writing enthusiastic letters to people I had admired on the television or had heard on the radio. I agreed with or differed so acutely from people I’d never heard of that I had to write to them. I was sheepish if they replied; by then I had generally forgotten them.

At New Year we had a large party for tenants and employees. Such occasions are intended for the continued good relations between the hosts and their guests in the dealings the coming year must bring. Their aim is not solely pleasure. Our New Year party was our office party, but we and our guests lived on and from the office, the land, and for its cultivation, disposal, allotment, finance, maintenance and that of the beasts, people and wild things living on it.

We engaged electricians to fill the garden with lights. We locked small treasures in the safe. John was interested in the safe, with its tubular oily bars and spinning combination disc.

‘Twenty children a year die in disused refrigerators on tips, and they don’t even lock,’ said Margaret. She had stopped spelling out words she considered unsuitable, since by now John could coarsely spell.

‘I could live nice in here,’ he said. For him, the safe was indeed the size of a house. ‘There are all stuff for eating.’

‘For eating off. Or with. Not for eating,’ I said. ‘Not for feeding off.’

‘We don’t say feed, we say food,’ said my son and his nanny, like an old couple doing a turn. The cream, silky hair grew like a star on John’s crown. The underhair was growing in grey-gold, the no-colour of wheat after the harvest and its hot moon. Margaret’s soft hair was dun; over one temple a bright comb showed its teeth. She smiled.

‘Do please bring your young man,’ my husband said to her. ‘We’ll be all sorts, most informal.’

‘Will you bring him?’ I asked later, at nursery tea. I would not by now have minded a more close relationship.

‘Who?’

I realised I knew no name for him. I could not have been referring to anyone but her fiancé, but Margaret required clarity.

‘Your beau.’ She must read that sort of romance.

She gave no reply; I might have been talking millinery. I saw clearly my own tendency to wrap up and enfold meaning, her own laudable cleanliness of mind, where all was what it seemed.

‘Your boyfriend. The person you hope to marry.’

She composed her face, retrieving its features from the throes of surprise admirably quickly.

‘It’s very difficult; the animals he works with are very demanding.’

‘No more demanding than John, surely?’ I was making a joke.

She did not appear to enjoy the suggestion that she worked with animals.

‘Johnny’s a real little person,’ she said, in a voice made for church.

‘Yes. A card,’ I replied, wondering why we denigrate what we love best, knowing it was to keep off the gods’ covetous eyes.

I asked what she intended wearing.

‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ she replied, smiling with her cheeks. ‘What are you wearing, we all want to know? There’s talk of nothing but.’ We were back in the safe world of romance, hierarchy, display, garmentry.

I was getting bigger and could be comfortable in only two of my party dresses. I had hardly changed size while pregnant with John. Unprepared to find myself so swollen in this second pregnancy, I showed Margaret the two frocks, pulled out from the fallow silks, discarded peaux d’oranges and ashes of faille roses in my dressing-room.

It was to be either a wide black tent with a suggestion of jet at the shoulders, or a violet sheath with much orange lashing. Margaret liked the purple, and that decided me, as she was not loose with praise.

‘You can carry it,’ she said, and encouraged me to put it on to show her and John.

I made up my face as it would be at our party, very pale, with an orange mouth and mauve eyelids. I tied a turban in my hair and tucked into its front a piece of jewellery the size of a fried egg, with two rashers of pavé rubies. My feet remained slim, so I put them into satin shoes with heels like knives.

‘Fat wicked queen,’ said John.

‘Pretty Mummy,’ said Margaret, her mouth neat and smacking as though at a soft centre.

Was school bad for my son?

The bump at my front looked like a corm. John appeared not to notice it. Margaret said he would not connect it with the baby she had told him was coming (she had explained that the news, from me, might make him jealous). I could see that it would be complicated to relate the bump and the baby in his mind without unnecessary information.

The day before the party, snow had fallen. The house in its park looked just snowy enough, as though figured in the recollection of a sweltering expatriate. We lived in a balmy part of England, much sung in war, always photogenic, conjured at times when memory and sentiment made of wives and hearths and smoothly looping rivers something desirable in their predictability. Our valley held no scrub and no untended woodland. It was impossible, as it is not in the north, to imagine wolves. If they had been there, they would have been as sleek and tame and good with children as the supreme vulpine champion of Assisi.

The house was terribly hot and full of noise. There was a smell of flowers and food, both meaty. People I did not know moved about with cables, drugget and keys. The policemen in their chesty dinner jackets arrived first, showing an area of shirt the shape and size of an unshriven sole.

By six o’clock, the policemen had stopped refusing drinks.

John went to bed at seven, very docile. I was not yet dressed for the party.

It was to begin at ten o’clock, and before that we had a few of our own friends to dine. I kissed John, bending over at the waist where my jeans could no longer fasten and were tied with an old tie of my husband’s. My jersey was of that oily wool which cannot be washed in water, only with ash. Upon my face was a clay mask, dry as a grass court’s lines.

‘Mad witch,’ said John, touching my lips with his hand to make sure they were not chalky before kissing me.

‘John Solomon, you solemn man.’ It was an old joke, and had always worked before. John’s second name was his father’s first. Sometimes, to myself, I called him Sol. His father, in his wisdom, ruled out any such abbreviation for himself. But the shortness of children does not make them less whole. We kissed, more in the air than on the lips, and I watched him roost into his pillow, insert his shining thumb, and fall down suddenly beneath the horizon of sleep.

Just before I dressed, Margaret came to me.

‘He’s unable to come,’ she said, clearly referring to her fiancé. ‘It’s a last-minute emergency. No one else has the expertise. He’s a responsible job to do.’

I had missed the telephone’s shrill in the bustle.

‘I’ve put on John’s alarm,’ she said, ‘as the house will be noisier than usual. We’re all going to listen for him.’ She meant everyone who worked in the house.

I first saw her pretty black dress when I was going down the main staircase. At a certain turn, the door of John’s room was visible.

She was wearing shoes with high heels and seemed to be slimmer. Her hair was not frizzy, but soft. It contained colours. At her neck it waved where before there had been stubble.

A soft bar of light from John’s room cut the corner of the dark corridor, before she closed the door and turned on the landing light.

I smelled her scent. I had almost come to like it.

‘Goodnight, pretty Margaret,’ said the awakened voice of my son, the words audäible on the alarm, though distorted by amplification.

In winter, a marquee full of dancers is a romantic thing, frivolous as a stall at an ice fair. In each corner were tied bouncing bunches of balloons, filled with a gas lighter than air. They were red like redcurrants, thin scarlet stretched with brightness. They stirred as the dancers moved, with a slow seething motion as though agglutinated in a medium of sugar sweetness.