A Little Stranger Read Free

free, untroubled by chaos.
    ‘Just before I do this little lot,’ came the voice of Margaret, accompanied presently by her body, hugging a red plastic basket of clothes, and wrapped in an apron. The apron enquired, ‘Have you hugged someone today?’
    ‘Yes?’ I asked, pleased that she was perhaps about somewhat to fill the hours ahead, maybe with talk of John. I would not have minded contact rather greater than we had. After all, the child was a very personal conduit for conversation. I did not want her to tell me her hopes and fears. I would not tell her mine. Surely we could discuss the boy without danger.
    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