A Little Stranger Read Free Page A

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