A Little Stranger (5 page)

‘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.

Chapter 9

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.

Chapter 10

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.

Margaret purchased a new jumper. It celebrated the springtime. Although it was made of the wool of lambs, it showed the floral rather than the animal attractions of the season. About her grew tall woollen daffodils, their trumpets little yellow finger stalls, in bas-relief from her curving breast. John loved the jumper; he fingered the trumpets with relish.

‘There was a cardy with foxgloves, but it didn’t look very nice,’ said Margaret.

‘How so?’ asked John, an expression he had from me, so I liked him to use it.

‘Never you mind,’ said Margaret, rolling her eyes at me in alliance, adult female knowledge protecting the child from those flowering purple towers in our minds. I found it hard to imagine spending my professional life knitting priapic mauve cosies, but were my bits of work any more necessary than that? Nor could anyone be said to be kept warm by them.

Inside our house women worked; in the garden men were employed. There were two women who cleaned, and one who cooked; there was Margaret and there was me. No two of us were equal, though I felt that it was not I who established the hierarchy. There was me, useless but essential, with the others below, each at her allotted, or, it may have been, chosen, level. The woman who cooked rarely did so for Margaret, though sometimes there was a bartering of delicacies, if the adults were eating something to John or Margaret’s taste. He loved savouries and would beg for cheese. Margaret discouraged this, so he learnt to approach the big kitchen when she was busy. He liked the peelings of winter vegetables, and might sit beside Lizzie as she made stew; he did not eat them, but he dropped them from a height on to the chapped wooden table to see what letters they made when they landed; ‘J’ came often, and ‘S’, and ‘M’, for ‘Margaret’; and for ‘Mummy’. The clean smell of shucked roots and the sweetness of cooking parsnips clung to his hair, so Margaret would find him out.

‘Eating piggy food again, young sir?’ she would ask, and sweep him off for a hairwash. With the side of her knife, Lizzie would push the squared roots she had been saving for John into the deep pan she clipped to the table with one hip. She was sensible and knew children, having had several. She was not discontented with repetition, but comforted by it, so that her cooking and her conversation had a soothing constancy. She was free of any urban compulsion to entertain, so she was always interesting; her hair was long and rosy grey, and she read books in one hand as she stirred with the other. It used to be on her days off that I composed my tart feasts. Lizzie seemed to like Margaret. I had never heard her discuss people, unless through the foods they favoured. I hoped that she did not realise my tastes.

Her husband worked in the garden; they conspired to grow and to cook really enormous leeks, like organ pipes, from one trunk of which she could wring vichyssoise for ten. Sliced across, these monsters resembled white short-playing records. This seemed to be Lizzie and Basil’s only vagary.

Then there were Edie and Bet. Edie’s mother and father had worked in this kind of household, already fairly anachronistic, when, in their late middle age, Edie was born. She was an old-fashioned girl, a loved late child, quiet and sober. She was in her thirties, pretty, unpainted and stern; she had a straight back and wore straightforward clothes, like those of a middle-class child in the 1950s. Sometimes she laughed until she cried. If anyone exaggerated, including me, she said something to deprecate the needless inflation. She looked like someone who might have a singular, solitary talent, marquetry or the violin. Her husband was a research biologist. Her privacy was complete.

Bet in private was unimaginable; she was entirely public. Her hair was red, her mouth was red, and often her eyes were too. Occasionally one of them was black and yellow. She was a tub with tiny hands and feet; she always wore high heels. She crashed things about as though she were working in a hospital. She made rude jokes, and indented regularly for a pay rise, to keep up, as she explained, with her friend who worked at the meat-packing depot.

‘Hi,’ she would say, ‘it’s the shop steward.’ And she would come into my morning-room with a cup of coffee for me and a list of requests. Her sons were always in trouble, stealing or playing truant, and her husband lost work intermittently when he was ‘badly’. She loved pretty things and was violently maternal. ‘Oh, John,’ she shouted, ‘oh, look at you. I could eat you on toast.’ She kissed him wetly on his neck and played with his striped hair. From most people he flinched, but he loved Bet. She bought him presents she could not afford, and often asked to take him home with her. To John too this was an unspeakably glamorous prospect. She swore terribly but never acknowledged this with apology, so the bad words were not salient. Bet had done everything: she had wed a bigamist, she had been to Canvey Island every summer all her life. Both her natural parents were dead, but had left relicts – Bet’s step-parents – who lived with her and her husband and their boys. Bet had romantic plans for her stepmother and stepfather. Her husband bred fancy guinea-pigs with whorls in their fur; sometimes she brought one for John to look at, in a box, in the back of her car; the box had come as a rule from the supermarket, after dark, containing slightly sub-standard crisps, or imperfect pizzas. Bet knew where to get seconds of the already most inedible foods; her best connection in this way was the friend who got her unlabelled cans. ‘Could be giblets, could be niblets, they’re not fussy but I must say I would not eat those dirty pheasants if I was paid. I seen what they eat.’

Our own pheasants were hand-reared by Robert and his helper and ate pheasant food and then, in the brief glorious autumn of sex and showing off, the berries and worms growing and thriving upon our land. Their crops, when they were drawn, were often fat with soft good grain, grown to perfection under the best supervision, the grain which fed the people. What could she mean?

I was dead-heading the more undimmable camellias, quite pleased to be in at the extinction of their brightness, when Bet came out to me. Something must be worrying her for she did not like the out-of-doors; it spoiled her heels, she said, and gave her a wicked appetite. During the short season of soft fruit, she stopped wearing her tripping heels and wore white plimsolls which were pink by its end.

‘How d’you get them white for next year?’ Edie would ask.

‘Boil them for gym-shoe jam, Ede, what’d you do?’

‘Wear boots.’

Today Bet had come in her high red pumps, down the garden to the longest border. There had been no frost for days and the sun was encouraging the garden to rashness. Tiptoeing so as not to sink into the paths, she recalled someone afraid to wake a sleeper.

I called to her, ‘Go on the grass, in your bare feet,’ but she grimaced and continued her dainty progress. These scarlet roses were grotesque in age; they had bletted like fat tan onions. They plopped on to the canvas donkey I had put down at the border’s edge.

‘Damp grass on my bare feet drives me to feel I’ll vomit,’ said Bet. ‘The worst of all being seaside turf, making the reason why I will not stand picnics. But I’ll stand on this bit of cloth if I may, so’s I don’t end up in Australia, even if in my best shoes.’

‘Might be nice in Australia, at the moment. All that sun.’ I was rocking my clippers about a tough sucker. ‘Still,’ and I clipped through it, ‘I don’t much like the idea of turkey under the sun, do you? Or do you?’

‘You may and you may not like it, but I’m here to say it.’ Bet was a short woman and she was squinting up at my leafy head. I tried to coil up the long thorny sucker, could not, and chopped it in four. Its lowest thorns were hooks of grey, the fresh ones a translucent scarlet in the sun. I laid down these rosy scourges on the earth.

‘Yes?’

‘I can’t talk to a tree.’ I came out of the border altogether; at least Bet let me know exactly where I stood.

‘With my boys, I don’t always listen, but I’ve always got ears to hear.’

‘Something’s happened to one of the boys?’

‘It’s not one of my boys, it’s your one boy; it’s only a small thing, but I don’t like it. Tell me to mind my pros and cons if you like. I don’t want to worry you, or anything.’ She was suppressing her natural gossip’s instinct to spin out a small mystery; that was a mark of her affection for John.

‘What is it, Bet?’ I was not badly concerned, because I trusted her to show upset in proportion to what had caused it. ‘Have you heard him saying something bad, swearing or something?’

‘As if I’d be the one to fuss about that. No; it’s that Margaret. She’s all so ever so nice, I know, but she can’t listen out for him properly.’

I didn’t want to hear petty tale-telling; I had overestimated Bet.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She takes him for a walk, sometimes even in the car, and she has him playing with her, but she can’t hear him. She has her soundtracks on the whole time.’