Free A Little Stranger by Candia McWilliam Page B

smaller Harry Lauder, he made with an imagined cane, tipping his headgear. His eyelashes looked as though they had been sectioned into ranged clumps, the lovely vulgarity of after tears, denser yet for the shadow cast by his bowler’s brim. I could not feel anything but love for him; and I felt Margaret must have absolved him of any shadow of blame for the half-blinding.
    ‘It’s detachable,’ said Margaret. ‘It just pops over the crown.’
    I was caught out in my squashing adult fear of bad taste and knew I was a killjoy. To make it better, I did something worse. I gave her fifty pounds, one note to avoid ostentation, to spend on herself. To avoid ostentation?
    They were driven to the station by Basil. John had insisted upon a train journey. I did not drive them because I no longer could in any comfort.
    ‘Call me this evening,’ I shouted, out on the long lawn. The bunched heads of oxslips were beginning to show. No more mowing until they had flowered and gone. I realised it was a long time since I had been outside. The intense nights of undigested reading and torpid days had kept me in the house, with Edie and Bet and Margaret and John.
    It was strange to be without her, stranger really than being without my son. The separation of parent and progeny was commonplace in our world. Public school? Conscription? Each forms of orphanhood. For what but death could it be a rehearsal?
    It was a relief to know that it was Margaret, her very worst fault a cute way with words, who was John’s companion.
    I turned to look at the house, from left to right, slowly, as I did everything by now. It was of the sugary fawn brick which is friendly to the soft lichens which care only for clean air and graveyards. The shape of a lemon-quarter, the dome of the hall gently broke the bow of the façade. From the base of the dome to the ground depended four Corinthian columns, in low relief. They and the sham portico they affected to support were of gardenia-yellow stucco, the yellow deeper among the ornamentation, as the gardenia creamed to butter at its unsimple centre. Wistaria leaves, grey-pink as shrimps from the rocky-grey of their mother-trunk, were beginning to finger the house’s front. I hoped some of those ghostly panicles would burst to welcome the baby.
    Lead sinks stood at each side of the portico, four in all, each one containing a tall conical box tree, complementing the mazed formal box across the gravel. The box was well established and did not reveal its roots. It looked like large green toys, the four green inverted tops and the low recreational labyrinth – decorous amusement for children in farthingales and their pet dwarf.
    It was fake, in fact, only fifty years old, but it pleased my husband. He did not love growing things for their vigour, but he did see a point to their capacity to flourish under discipline. Lavender, just beginning its dry intimations of heat, plumed the corners of the maze. Not to forget rosemary, which was to the garden what yew was to the park, the flinger of shade and deepener of perspective, so that things seen against it were as it were set firm against their darkness and the resinous darkness within them.
    I walked slowly around the back of the house, a collection of botched Victorian innovations including several bathrooms fitted with fluted lavatories named for the family pieties: ‘Humilitas’, ‘Sanitas’, ‘Caritas’. These differed in size and in degrees of impedimental ledge, rendering a long shy stay essential to ensure that the mare’s tail of water had done what was intended. Men, I had noticed, did not wait. That ledge, tactfully painted with quaint scenes from blue and white oriental life (painted in occidental Halifax in a satisfying reversal of yellow men in tartan painted in Peking for the Potteries), would be scrubbed by another hand.
    Bet and Edie came on that Saturday when John and Margaret were gone. The house looked so clean one could not imagine they could