A Little Stranger by Candia McWilliam Read Free Book Online Page B

continued the day’s tasks, gluttonous of action and achievement, certain of immortality, carrying its pledge within me. I wrote letters, paid bills, made of my own desk and my husband’s geometric altars to the rational mind, and was just believing in the perfectibility of all nature – about to eat the, in my eyes, freakishly beautiful boiled eggs Lizzie had made for my lunch, cupped in unimprovable blue and white – when Margaret came in.
    I turned my dazzling smile upon her, urbi et orbi . I could make all things right.
    ‘Can I speak for a moment? It must be a moment, as John’s back in ten minutes.’ She counted her time like her calories.
    ‘Come in; sit down.’ I was delighted. Perhaps she was about to unbend a little.
    ‘Betty showed me the guinea-pig, but it makes no difference. I’ve told her time and again I won’t have animals. She’s taken it away, of course. But meanwhile we shall not tell John.’
    I said nothing. She appeared to take this as mute resistance.
    ‘I really hate small things,’ she said.
    In her energetically made vernal jersey she seemed firmly planted in the room. My verve left me, as though from a sprung leak. As I formed the sentences with which to defy her, I began queasily to feel that it was Bet and I, not she, who had been sneaky. I heard the gulped slam of a car door and the happy officious voice of my son, towards which Margaret – the pearl – turned and walked.

Chapter 12
    The pampering spring air and easy days continued through March, and John, who never knew about the pet he almost had, was busy trying out different friends. He had a friend with old knees who had only his parents to care for him at home. I liked this child, though I was afraid of seeing in him virtues our way of life might preclude John from developing. He was a blithe boy, John’s friend Ben, and he had a sensible exploitative attitude to the amenities of our house. Once he arrived with a satchel of mending; to his mother, who was dropping him off, he explained with some tact, ‘I’ve got my work in there,’ the image no doubt of his father.
    Now the shooting season was over, the wives living round about were able to have lunch with each other again; the ease of segregation returned. This reversion to a less manned life was part of spring, welcome after the dark, rushed lunches of meat and neat spirits, with the guns talking from both barrels.
    Today some of my friends and I were to meet at the house of Leonora, our closest neighbour. She was married to a man who had swarthy skin and blond hair, so he always looked healthy. He was as compact of energy as a battery; he had no languor. His energy seemed wisely invested. You could not mention something he had not done, and show he had done; yet he was modest. He invariably asked the right questions. The parts of his life, I felt, were all of a piece, in spite of their diversity. Yet he seemed to have time to read, and time for his wife.
    My friends and their husbands were made for the sun and it sought them out. They were not fashioned for doubt or poverty or disappointment. The women wore gold and blue: golden chains and golden rings; blue and white clothes and blue and white precious stones. They did not paint much, and always smelt sweet. Each of their names ended, feminine to the last, with an ‘a’. At regular times, they went to different and far-flung parts of the blue and white and golden known world. The khaki areas of desert and armies were unvisited.
    Like that china which, though unmatching, may be arranged together, always prettily – the blue bridges, blue pagodas, faint cerulean follies, pale azure branchlets, blowsy ultramarine galleons, all on differently white grounds – these girls (women was too biological a term) went happily together, and each also had other sets to which she belonged, all similar of aspect, yet each member individual. They did not displace time with worry or regret. They shared religion; they shared a