Candia McWilliam: A Little Stranger

A group of big men used to machines for cutting through wood and earth stood in one corner, drinking. They were not yet drunk enough to dance. The wives sat in another corner, sipping sweet mixture. Among them was Margaret. She was more smartly dressed than most of them, and she held, but did not drink from, a champagne glass. She resembled a woman in a television advertisement for chocolate mints, who had fallen among women advertising something homelier, washing powder, or discounted carpeting. I felt sorry for her, without her fiancé. No doubt she had bought the black dress for him. He must be curious about her job, concerned to know whether where she worked was pleasant, her employers fair, her wages given for a reasonably restricted amount of work.

‘We must invite Margaret’s fiancé some time,’ I said to my husband.

‘Whatever for?’ he replied. ‘Does he need a job?’ He was off, elegant and menacingly jovial among his dependants in his festival clothes of white and black.

Men slapped his back and used his Christian name and our own friends talked to each other and not to us in order to leave us free to mix, to be perceived not sticking to our own kind. I saw him move towards where the wives sat.

‘Come the revolution,’ he would say, ‘I’ll be a butler, no problem. I love to fetch funny drinks.’

I saw him smiling, fetching little glasses of gold and orange and milk colours. Later, he would tell me of the most outlandish concoctions. ‘And the awful thing is, they call them names now, so I’m meant to know the constituent parts of a Snow Goose or an Open Bottom Drawer or whatever. Omo, lemonade and Cointreau, or some such.’

He was standing, fetching, stopping, never sitting. It was a tradition at these parties that he should wait upon those who waited, every other night, upon him.

To each wife, as he gave her her drink, he addressed some words. These women had almost all known him since he had been a boy, but now he was not only bigger than they were but looked as though he came from an altogether larger race, meat-fed and clothed in confidence. Down the sides of his trousers ran a hardly shiny silk ribbon and his feet were slippered in black velvet. Black satin faced his jacket. The many surfaces of black about him made him rich and solemn among the little women in pale dresses. Many of them wore cardigans, like children at a party, angora or snowy orlon, showing the creases where they had come from the packet.

‘Very nice,’ they said to me when I went over. ‘Very nice to see there’s a new addition on the way. And how is John?’

And I could ask them about their children and grandchildren, many of whom were at the party. It was easy, being a woman, with the democratic matter of children to discuss. I was quite happy there for a time, but felt I must move on, speak to everyone. As it was her first of these parties, I must see that Margaret was all right.

She was sitting with her back to me, her black bag set on the red-clothed table, facing one of the corners with its floating cluster of red balloons. I had to move sideways between the tables, though my height kept the bump of my belly above the backs of the little golden chairs, which appeared to be constructed of small gold femurs.

She was speaking to one of the gamekeepers. Her champagne glass remained an untouched accessory.

‘He just works with animals,’ she was saying to him. The keeper was looking at her as though he wished he could describe his own job in some way which omitted all mention of animals. She was looking very pretty. Her eyes were bright, her nails pink, her femininity cocked.

‘Hello, Robert,’ I said. ‘Happy New Year, nearly.’

‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘It could be very happy.’ He was known to ‘see to’ the wife of one of the cowmen, but he needed a wife of his own. His eyelashes reached his eyebrows and the down on his cheeks was thick; his chest escaped his shirt. He looked at Margaret, who looked at her own hands. She was not wearing her engagement ring this evening, perhaps in pique at her fiancé’s absence.

She took out a handkerchief from her bag, kissed it, leaving a pink mouth-shape on the cotton, and returned it to the bag. Had she suddenly felt the weight of all that pink frosting? My husband joined us briefly, standing behind Margaret’s chair. The black jersey of her dress was seemly beneath his own swart radiance. I was glad she was having a nice time.

‘Look, Robert,’ he addressed the keeper. ‘She’s a nice girl to take out for an evening. Sober and cheap. You haven’t touched a drop, Margaret. It’s perfectly good, you know. The real thing.’

‘It’s very nice,’ she said. ‘Pleasant.’ She took a sip, leaving, mysteriously, another pink mouth mark on the rim of the glass.

‘Nothing could induce me to touch strong drink,’ she had said to me. Evidently she had not meant ‘no one’.

My husband looked relieved, Robert hot and helpless. He gazed into his own glass, which contained nothing.

‘Let me see you right, Robert,’ said my husband. ‘What’s it to be? Black and tan?’

Robert’s glass was a tall straight flute, on a stem.

At midnight we released the balloons from the tethered bunches where they struggled for free air. They floated up to the roof of the marquee, bobbing against its inner membrane, striving to reach its highest points. Their ribbons hung down straight as stems from the light jostling red fruits.

Optimistic, frail and ignorant of the future, we sang. You might have thought we were all workers in the established legal firm Auld, Laing & Syne.

The next morning, the balloons were for John. He and Margaret and my husband and I, wrapped against the snow, collected them in the cold marquee. We three adults climbed ladders to catch the tails of the balloons, and passed these wilful bouquets down to John. He was simmering with pleasure. Margaret was wearing a hat which said, around its woolly brim, ‘Nanny Knows Best’. My husband had found it for her Christmas present.

A group of chairs to which John, helped by Margaret, had tied towering bunches of balloons, began, at one point, to dance, on their bony gilt points.

When we were all tired, and the last balloon was tamed, we ate lunch in the marquee, its lining stirred by the snowy wind, which had made us hungry. The light lining, passing against the heavy canvas which supported and protected it, made again and again the sigh of elegance assaulted by cold, the gentle, vain susurration of a consumptive’s ghost.

Margaret removed her hat. My husband forced it on to one balloon, which seemed at once to become the most rebellious and flighty of them all. John laughed, excited to bouncing. He was impressed by all these new pleasures.

‘I am five now,’ he said, ‘because it is a New Year.’

‘You’ll die young if you travel that fast,’ said Margaret.

We were sitting at the only table without its ballast of balloons. The balloons creaked and bumped together. The noise was that of a boat moored in fog, the soft bump and lift and complaining of the fenders and the ordinary yet exaggerated sounds of invisible movement.

‘This food really is fabulous,’ said Margaret, though it was only flaccid sweet ham and oozing salads.

John was interested in the stains made by my beetroot.

‘Look at the beetroot carefully and you’ll see how old it is by the number of rings it has,’ said his father.

‘Margaret sometimes has one ring,’ said John.

The spring came, unassumingly, as though perhaps it had not been invited. Through their snoods, like garlic-paper, nipped the milk teeth of snowdrops. The cellar smelt more of bulb fibre and less of gun oil. Our social life, which all winter had taken place between freezing days outside and terrifying drives home, began to calm down. We were less often drunk over ice, driving at speed with hot clear heads full of spirits and deaf from gunfire. I began to feel congruent with the year, holding new life.