A Little Stranger Read online

  I also wanted to know that she was all right in order to ascertain for how long she might consider staying. If only she could stay for the whole of John’s small boyhood.

  ‘I just wondered. That is, I wonder if we might have a piece of garden?’ she asked.

  ‘We?’

  ‘John and I. He has an interest in growing things. I would make sure he did not tread dirt inside.’

  ‘What a marvellous idea. I’m only sorry I didn’t think of it before. Where do you think?’

  ‘I asked Daddy’ (she referred thus to my husband) ‘and Mount’ (our gardener) ‘before He went up to Scotland.’ The ‘h’ was capitalised so that I knew it was of my omnipotent husband that she spoke. Who was our son, if Solomon was God? Little Sol, the sun of man.

  I flinched from asking myself whether I felt jealous, and of whom.

  I thought of something. ‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked, having forgotten to ask this at the interview. Should I have been so flustered?

  ‘I believe that things are meant, and my father is a lay reader,’ she replied, putting the basket down upon the polished oxblood floor and looking at me as though I had used strong language against her. She wore a crucifix too small to martyr anything but a fly. I recollected what we had been discussing.

  ‘Back to the garden,’ I said. ‘John’s, not Eden.’

  I did not, as one is supposed to, grow better at judging an audience as I grew older.

  ‘I thought,’ and her voice went from discomfiture to satisfaction as she spoke, ‘that we’d start with radishes and marigolds, bright and quick- growing.’

  ‘And how nice, both edible,’ I said, my voice rather too social in my ears. It really was a lovely idea. I imagined John pulling up his first radish, that unearthly pink with its creamy pizzle. We could make radish sandwiches and marigold salad and give a little – what else? – garden party.

  ‘Edible?’ said Margaret. ‘Marigolds?’

  ‘Delectable in salads.’ Delectable? Handy hints for cross-cultural cuisinastes. ‘Just scatätered. Not too thickly.’ I was losing confidence. ‘The petals only.’

  ‘Everything in its place,’ said Margaret. ‘We don’t want him eating laburnum pods for peas. I know how unsettling foreign things can be.’ Sensibly, I felt, she had tried out these foreign things and found them wanting. One could only pity Pascal, Descartes and those old Greeks with beards and unironed drapes.

  ‘No, of course we don’t. How right you are.’

  ‘We thought by the thornless blackberries, well away from the glasshouses and frames.’

  ‘It’s a wonderful idea, Margaret. Why don’t you get cracking in the morning? John would adore it. How are you settling in, by the way, yourself? What about anything you need?’

  ‘I’ve everything I need,’ she said. ‘There’s a programme I fancy in a while and I’ve got to put these garments in, so I’ll say goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ I said. ‘God bless you.’ Who was I, to invoke Him? It was another bit of social speech.

  I spent the evening, after a supper of sweetbreads and rye bread, reading. I could not see that there was much on television but serials about the effects of illness or of wealth. I could not differentiate between these programmes, though the outfits worn by the victims sometimes gave a hint, and the terminally ill, or those who impersonated them, appeared to wear even more make-up than the terminally rich.

  I was reading and correcting the proofs of a book. It was the author of the book who was doing me a favour, not I him. I did not need the work, rather the idea that I had it. This particular author could not write but could not help selling. The book was intended to be bought rather than read; it was a category book of gossip, easier to write than a bird book or a tree book and less resistible. People have no certain profile in flight and no certain season of falling sap, so research need not be exhaustive.

  When my eyes were tired, I went out into the garden through the back door. The sky was quite light still and the flowers no longer bright, but incandescent. Only one particularly scarlet rose had not softened in shade. The flowers glowed like candles behind guards of coloured vellum.

  The house stood, a substantial cube among its blue lawns. Within it my son slept, needing nothing I could give him. My husband was far from home. Light fell from Margaret’s window. At its edge a curtain moved, then swept across, a thin wave lipped with lace. Mist filled the lower air, lapping at my knees. I stood outside, alone, at the margin of house and park.

  A green star fell. Perhaps I could make solid the expressed desire of my husband and Margaret by conceiving a child. There I would be, with my children, the keystone of the family monument.

  There was rain in the air. I did not feel it a threat. I knew that I held, with my husband, the umbrella of family love which will keep out even the most terrible rain.

  I followed the path behind two lead hinds and turned left beyond the lily tank, through a gate and into the kitchen garden. The red whips of the thornless blackberries made a Pompeian arch against the grey wall, which bounded a most dapper bit of hoeing about five feet square.

  A small clean rake and spade and a duck-shaped watering can stood in a green wheelbarrow which reached only to my calves. The barrow was parcelled like an expensive bouquet in cellophane. A clearly written label within, in writing not my husband’s, read, ‘To John with fond regards from “Daddy”.’ It was from Margaret’s own writing pad, whose paper was headed ‘Love is a warm feeling inside’. I felt cold. Along the bottom of the paper walked, in disciplined manner, two ducks and their fluffy duckling.

  She must have been sure of the weather. It was not like her to enterprise the god of rain.

  Chapter 3

  On the morning of his birthday, John ate most of his tree of sweets before breakfast. How could he know that the sweets were for serial plucking? He was not sick, but he did no justice to his executed egg with its squad of toast soldiers.

  Since it was John’s day, he could not be in disgrace, so I put myself there in his stead and said to Margaret, ‘I’m sorry. It was thoughtless of me.’

  ‘It’s the thought that counts,’ she said, pulling in her stomach and at the same time smoothing the small of her back, as though wiping off chalk dust like an old-fashioned schoolmistress.

  I felt gratitude at the mildness of her rebuke. I didn’t think to ask her why she had allowed John to eat the sweets. She had given him her present, a selection of bright seed packets.

  ‘Must need see garden any minute, Mum,’ announced my son.

  ‘Mummy,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Yes?’ I responded facetiously, and the little joke died.

  We went to John’s new garden. I had arisen even earlier than Margaret, whose rising was marked by the roaring of machines for washing and for drying clothes. Around the necks of the leaden hinds, I had twisted flowers taken from the border I had patrolled by dusk the previous night. The hinds were bloomed with a dust like talc, more opaque in the creases of the soft metal.

  ‘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 w
hole.

  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.’

  Chapter 4

  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.

  Chapter 5

  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.

  I was glad Margaret had made friends. In the evening she might meet the other nannies and they would see a film or go out to eat. Those nannies who were her particular friends tended to be those whose employers were our particular friends.

  The children got on well, only ever divided, and that briefly, over possessions.

  When other children came to see John, to play with his toys or in his birthday-garden, the nannies talked among themselves. They required music all day; the nursery radio played, unlistened to but never unheard, murmurous and inoffensive. John learnt words from the radio; he knew chart positions and dated words of soft hip slang. He described things as ‘fab’ and ‘really over the top’. On Margaret’s day off there was no radio until my husband came home and listened to the shipping forecast. John loved this; he sat, quite silent, with his father, a careworn expression on his uncreaseable brow. He also admired newspapers for their evident importance in the world where things were heavier to bear and trousers and silences were long.

  Like many children’s, John’s first interjection had been ‘Oh dear’. It is what first children hear that parents replace more forceful oaths with, a soft oath, a nursery lament, and from this they learn that life is a dangerous business, though we tell them before they sleep that elephants use lifts and rabbits wear blue coats with brass buttons.

  Naturally, the nannies gossiped. I and my friends knew this because some of these friends gossiped with their nannies. It was cos
y talk, scandal with milk, of babies, fiancés, naughtiness. Perks were compared, skiing holidays, access to video recorders, horses, time off. Wages, of course, and clothes, which were swapped for special parties. The main topic, however, seemed to be weight.

  It did not seem to be the case that a nanny was a necessarily maternal woman. Margaret said that she and her nanny-friends (she described them thus, like nanny-goats) all agreed that they would not care to have children unless they had a nanny. Some of these young women were, like Margaret, saving to be married, others ‘did not like’ the idea of marriage. Two had even been told, according to Margaret, that they could not have children. I thought this sad and possibly dangerous, but she assured me that they felt no more intensely towards the children in their care than the fertile nannies felt. How she knew this, I could not imagine. ‘Fertile’ was her term, rhyming with ‘myrtle’.

  Not that the point of life is reproduction, only its end; but has not a nanny chosen, at any rate temporarily, children as the point of her life?

  I had often thought that most professionals did not in fact care for their parish, or patients, or clients, or material for these things’ own sake, but for the return they brought. What possible return could these ordinary, if fortunate, children offer?

  Whether or not Margaret and her friends were maternal, they were intensely engaged in struggling with what are considered motherly figures.

  I had been right about Margaret when I deduced that she frequently changed shape. Food was of great importance to her, as adversary and as preoccupation. At the moment she was winning her struggle with it. When John ate, she did not; so it was by authority rather than example that she showed him how and what to eat. He was a good eater, with a distaste for puddings.

  Margaret loved sweet things and her shopping bags were full of those strange foods made for consumers addicted to bulk and sweetness but desirous of no nourishment. She bought those strange costly foods whose colours are of an unconvincing brightness. She drank chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion, cheesecake which sighed to the knife. At the end of each day she calculated the value in calories of all she had eaten. The refrigerator in the nursery kitchen was full of bright drinks in clear vessels like aqualungs, and bread the colour of snow. For butter she had grease which reeked faintly of town water and her jam contained neither fruit nor sugar but was red as ric-rac. She did not seem to be aware that a lettuce and an omelette made from our own eggs would taste better and do her less harm than these weightless hefty meals of cloud and promise. In brown bags, John’s food had its own place in the refrigerator, unseductive and plain.