Free A Little Stranger by Candia McWilliam

its own solemn one. It was as though she had momentarily forgotten her truly blind eye, or as if I had dreamed it.
     
    ‘I don’t see how we’ll ever do this on less than two,’ she said to me. She was peeling grapes at the time, to put on something she was baking. Some other nannies and their charges were expected to tea. She was referring to the number of cakes the visitors might be expected to eat. She extracted the pips from the pale grapes with the previously sterilised loop of a kirby-grip.
    ‘What is your fiancé’s name?’ I asked. The question sounded rude. She moved to folding nibbed hazelnuts, soaked for a period in dilute green food colouring, into a cake mix poured from a box labelled ‘Creamy Dreams Flavor Release Cake’.
    ‘I call him Ronald.’ She did not say whether it was his name.
    ‘Scots or Irish?’ I asked. John was making handprints under the table, with the food colouring. One of those green fingers had blinded a person. I conspired with him by keeping silent. Margaret had not seen him. He was only using a tatty old jotter. I was making conversation.
    ‘Oh, nothing like that,’ she said. ‘Not a Jocky or a Micky.’
    John was sufficiently absorbed not to respond to the name of the great mouse. She diminutised the ugly terms and made them sound like little puppies instead of the bad dogs of sect and race.
    If she had been my equal, I would have asked her what she meant, but I thought it might appear like bullying. We are not, after all, sisters under the skin. Under the skin of us all, what you will find is fat. She might really think that Scots were drunk and mean, Irish drunk and stupid. What did that make the English? Or, indeed, the Dutch? Avuncular? Courageous? What the English were not, in Margaret’s book, was black or brown or yellow. The idea of England did mean something to her, I knew, for she loved the Royal Family and would describe things as being ‘very nice, in the English way’. She had thus described, for example, the hotel where her parents took their annual golfing holiday, in Spain. Long hair, left-wing politicians, cowardice, films in other languages, late meals, poetry, men kissing their sons, none of these was English to Margaret. Bombs were English; more than once Margaret had asked me to hire The Dambusters for her to watch on the video. She seemed not to think beyond these merry, bouncing bombs. In that story, the dog it was that died, being called Nigger.
    ‘My brother is like you. He went to university. He is against the nuclear bomb,’ Margaret had said to me, one day when she was regretting the untidiness of the maenads camped around the local airforce base. I was flattered when she spoke of her family to me, though surprised to learn that it was only higher education which endows a person with the desire to survive.
    Of course, like most people, she flinched from bombs to avoid thinking about them. The two of us probably just flinched to dissimilar effect. I could not remember having told her my opinions and suspected she deduced them from my clothes. Anyway, she and I were engaged upon the rearing of the fodder or the dropper of the undistinguished thing.
     
    On the third day of my husband’s absence, I was exhausted by lunch-time. All night I had read and wandered from bedroom to bedroom, seeking not sleep but a new confinement for my teeming body. I was reading like one starved. I progressed along two corridors of bedrooms, reading what I came across, changing books as I went. I dropped Eros and Civilisation for Lady with a Lapdog . I read too much too quickly and wanted really only to read long simple stories with happy endings. Can you think of any?
    While we ate our lunch, I with Margaret and John since my husband’s absence, the telephone rang. I could not move quickly. Margaret took it.
    ‘How are you enjoying town?’
    There was a silence during which she smiled as though seeking a sweet pastille inside her mouth, reluctant, but