Authors: Candia McWilliam

A Little Stranger (14 page)

BOOK: A Little Stranger

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I should have thought about her poor hirsute limbs, observed not only the gestures but their reasons. Thick spittle is caused by potent tranquillisers. They clog you up and wring you claggy.

Bet and Edie had been seeking the source of a bad smell, fearing rats. That was why they went to her room. But it was more than rats, which are to be expected in any house among fields and farm buildings.

In the end they did trace the smell. It came from one of Margaret’s suitcases. It left with her, never having been opened. Bulimia is frequently the resort of very tidy people. She couldn’t stand the mess inside, perhaps, all that disorderly digestion. She kept surgical gloves in the nursery bathroom, so she didn’t get dirty hands as she put a long feather down her raw throat. She dusted the gloves with talc before entering them, John said. He was familiar with the routine, considering it part of the grown-up woman’s toilette. He told me this after we’d all come back from hospital, and I asked him to powder the baby. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Is she getting ready to do icky-poo?’ The expression wasn’t his own. After she had gone, I found the most silver and babyish of John’s curls in a very small envelope, at the back of one of her drawers. In a way, she was a witch, though her poor spells did not snare the handsome prince. I wondered if the fiancé too was a fairy story, the reliable foil of fiction, in sharp contrast to the flashing attractions of Mr Right.

She purveyed fairytales. She believed in them too, the social lures and magic potions. Yet, without the prim wisdom of Alice, Margaret in Wonderland had not the education, the upbringing, if you like, to know when to obey the instruction ‘Eat Me’.

I don’t like the idea of all that upbringing.

John, reborn by her departure, ceased his more knowing ways and cute contrivances. Perhaps we may even hope he does not grow up to become the baby prince and ideal man of Margaret Pride, godlike, intolerant, made of brass, stupid as the Himalayas.

Would you like to borrow
Patience Rewarded
? Here’s a good bit:

Condemned to be invisible, just Jamie’s nurse, Elsa nevertheless took care to style her soft brown hair and slipped her creamy gown over her slight form. The neat collar and cuffs toned, she reflected, with the colourways of the Duke’s own suite, where the Duchess lay, even now, hideously obese, eating, eating, eating.

A slim volume to keep you awake at night. We’re none of us innocent. There’s a fairy story for everyone.

Margaret wrote, too. She kept notebooks of every single thing she ate. One was left behind. It was very neat, a thin blue jotter with ruled pages. In the margin were ticks and crosses, many more ticks. They were bleeding her empty, those little red ticks.

The jotter she left behind was blue, with the fading green handprints of my son marking its cover.

Beneath her mattress (we burnt it later and the ash stayed about the farm for a windless summer week) were some of the letters I had sent out to the noble army of unknown friends, and some sheets of our blue paper. With difficulty, words as misangled as little ships in the wrong bottle made their way over it, in a stiff model of my writing. Disliking me, as she certainly must have done, she yet attempted to turn herself into what she imagined I was.

She was not taken away by her parents, the policeman and the part-time schoolteacher. She was taken away by her parents, the Irish stable lad and his dead wife.

The poor man stood in the kitchen, Lizzie told me, and he was scared of his daughter. He took a drink of tea, but he left it on the side. His legs were that bowed you could ride through them. All veins and knuckles, said Bet, that’s the wind and the drink; but a nice sort of man. The kind you could tell was good with animals.
She
sent her dad up to get her cases. She had refused even a drop of water since the new baby had begun, so she was that weak she’d to sit in a chair. Edie had padded the chair because her bones were bruising her – she was hungry to do herself harm – and wound her elbows and the coathanger of hips with rolls of yellow chiropodist’s wool, so’s she couldn’t hurt herself.

She’d bitten Bet, and set fire to something in her room, so Lizzie reckoned she was dangerous, but Edie said, ‘The poor girl thought she was bettering herself. She spoke to that father like she employed him.’

The man whom Margaret had told to pick on someone his own size turned out to have been the robust but lovesick Robert, who had also had an appointment with the doctor. After it was all over, he told me that Margaret had threatened John with a beating if he were to tell me Robert had been there. ‘A beating?’ I asked. ‘But she knew she was not allowed to hit John.’

‘No,’ said Robert, hot and uncomfortable. ‘She said you would hit him.’

The thing she burned in her room was an animal. It was a soft rabbit, as tall as John. It turned out that my husband had bought it along with all the other toys, guns, tanks and interstellar death gambits, because she admired it when they were in London.

‘I thought it was the kind of thing that sort of rather ugly girl likes. Substitute for a man, something along those lines,’ he said. ‘They charged like the Light Brigade for it too.’

He did not know the meaning of meanness, but he couldn’t see love if it poked him in the eye.

If it is so that the fat wish to be a shadow of their former selves, the sickly thin wish to be the flesh of their future selves, not a flesh fed by nourishment, but the plump, taut, muscled and yet tender flesh of romance – ready to be carved. While they reject and vomit food, for what are these girls paying, these girls wanting to be hollow? What fantastic connection has been made between daydreams of beauty and romance and that life of bitter spitting?

How I longed to be but a shadow. I had taken myself seriously, but had not at any point taken seriously that self.

Chapter 30

It is you, blue and white girls, who brought me back, who made a bridge for John and the baby over the dirty waters of that choppy time.

The baby came after two days. Margaret did nothing for the first two hours of my labour, but then my husband came home. Someone had seen Margaret’s smashed car, and had gone to alert him, which was part of her plan.

She told me, as I lay in labour, that what she hadn’t expected was to be completely unhurt. She had imagined that he would rescue her, having found her just a little, becomingly, blooded, winged only by her accident, and that would be that.

She did not wish to acknowledge her real sickness. She longed for the erotic violence of romance, the blood matching the lipstick, the steamy meeting of fire and ice. She had discounted me. I had given her every reason to do so.

She was strong enough to haul me from the glassy stairs where my evening slipper had spilt me because she was drunk with fury. Some sinister shreds of conscientiousness bound her. She was angry to be mobile. She had hoped, I suppose, to diet herself to beauty and to crash herself into the sights of my husband, who would then act on the love she knew he bore her.

All she did was destroy the car.

He came upstairs roaring, ‘Bloody nannies. They’re all the same. They smash a car as soon as look at it. Stupid cow. My son could’ve been in that car. Daisy, Daisy, where are you? Wake up, get up, the car’s crashed. It could have been my son, you bitch, for Christ’s sake.’

I screamed and screamed, and he came to our room, and saved me, not from the pain, or the mess, but from the vituperative, obsessing voice of Margaret, who had been sitting knitting as I panted and heaved, and telling me her love story. ‘I am glad it’s your body, not mine,’ she began each mad versicle, and then went on to explain why I would die if I had any sense of the proper thing to do. Her plan had not gone entirely awry, she perceived. I might yet die. She had already started taking my name; it was only a little way from taking my life. The longer I was unhelped, the better it would be. She hoped that the baby would live, and she and Solomon would bring it up as their own. It would never know that its mother was a fool, a fat fool, a moon-faced fool with her head in the air. The one thing I could do and she could not was have children, and she would take care of them. She had starved herself to barrenness. The best thing I could do was die. It was what would be most helpful. I was at such a grovelling depth of acquiescence that I almost wished – for politeness’s sake – that I could. Until I felt the tug and assertion of a quite other person from within myself and knew clearly that I too had been mad and now I was fighting sane. I tried to get to the telephone, of course, but she went for my eyes with her knitting needles. They were the finest steel needles, the best for baby clothes. My eyes are fine too; needle sharp. She didn’t touch them.

The baby is quirky like me, and smiles, dreaming, in the middle of eating. I will teach her what I so painfully learnt: that stupidity is not a virtue, that others do not care the more for you if you bury yourself, that anger will out at the end. I can see already that she does not have my sin of extravagant cooperation, my perverse will to be polite at any cost.

Margaret had been the stranger whom our family could not accommodate. Though we were four, we were almost overcome by her single strength. What was the strangest thing of all? I took her in because I hated her on sight, and was ashamed of myself for doing so. When she went, so did the fear which had made my life little better than a stretched skin against the weather. Together we had turned the gingerbread house of family life into the smelt blood and ground bones of the most cruel tales.

While I was getting better my friends came and read to me, real stories about Olivia who has a garden, Katherine and her battling husband, double-crossed Viola, Helena whose husband beats her and says her love annoys him like a stone in his shoe, and Brutus’s wife, who dwells in the suburbs of her lord’s good pleasure. Each of these stories has a hard centre.

Our daughter emerged into this world of pearls and swine, eccentric, laughing, at the heart of things. Held by her slapped satin feet, she bellowed disapproval and glee and the resolution to wear out twelve dozen pairs of dancing slippers before morning.

It is possible, without knowing it, to live at the margin of your own life. Life leaks away and you watch it go, a rope of water coiling down to nothing and the dark. It was my good luck that the tide came inshore and carried me past the shipwrecks and lost things of my former existence, and out once more into the day’s eye and the loud resounding blue and white.

Candia McWilliam
was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of
A Case of Knives
(1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize,
A Little Stranger
(1989),
Debatable Land
(1994), which was awarded the
Guardian
Fiction Prize and its Italian translation the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year, and a collection of stories
Wait Till I Tell You
(1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent surgery that cut off her eyelids and harvested tendons from her leg to hold up what remained. Her most recent book is her critically-acclaimed memoir,
What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness
.