Always keep a hold of nurse . • •
Francis King
A LITTLE STRANGER by Candia Mc William
Bloomsbury, £12.95, pp.135 stranger, outwardly unremarkable
A
and hardly remarked, enters a community, an office or a household. Then, unobtru- sively, insidiously he (or it may be she) sets about changing it, disrupting it, perhaps even destroying it. This theme, common enough both in the theatre and in fiction, is the basis of Candia McWilliam's short, Pungent new novel, successor to her much discussed and lauded A Case of Knives. . The title A Little Stranger can be taken in three different ways. Margaret Pride, engaged by a rich couple (two houses, a number of cars, retainers and tenants to be invited to a New Year dance) to be nanny to their only son John, is a little stranger, raising a small hand to her short neck in embarrassment at a too intimate question, at her preliminary interview for the job. Subsequently John's mother, Daisy, finds herself expecting `a little stranger' (as Margaret or one of her fellow nannies in this affluent area of rural England might Put it). But `a little stranger' can be applied to life itself, as Daisy slowly discovers it to be a little stranger than she had ever supposed before Margaret's advent. . Daisy herself is a lazy, talented, attrac- tive woman, who wanders around a man- sion serviced by other, highly paid people, m a state of designer squalor. When she interviews Margaret it is in a pair of men's Jeans, a jersey far too large for her and some down-trodden party shoes. She posseses numerous duplications of this uniform. Snobbishly she comments (she is the narrator) on `Margaret's standard Eng- lish . . . of the off-white kind favoured by hotel receptionists and vendeuses of posh slap.' Unkindly she records that Margaret's `legs ended in feet; there were no ankles'.
Daisy's husband, Solomon — who re- mains so inadequately realised throughout the novel that one is never sure whether he is Jewish, as his name suggests, or not — is healthy, hearty and crude. `He wore his cars well,' Daisy writes of him, as he gets into the most elegant of these cars to drive off to London.
As the book progresses, Daisy finds Margaret less and less appealing until, near the close, she recognises her as a monster, whose romantic dreams can only become nightmares for all those whose lives touch hers. To what extent are Daisy and Solo- mon also monsters? Since Daisy herself is the narrator, the intended degree of her `falseness' is not wholly clear. But having myself suffered from some reviewers in- capable of realising that the world as seen by the protagonist of my most recent novel was not the world as seen by myself, I willingly give Candia McWilliam the ben- efit of a small doubt. If, therefore, Daisy's continual harping on the vulgarities of speech, dress and behaviour of people of a class different from herself is in itself also vulgar, then that vulgarity is only hers, not her creator's; and if she regards Solomon as an admirable character, then it is she alone, and not her creator, who does so.
Whether some of the peculiarities of style must also be ascribed only to Daisy, I am not so certain. Here is a random example: `His [her small son's] hair smell- ed of puppies and milky tea, sweet and smoky, the scent of toy-gun caps held in a soaped hand.' Even someone with as high- ly developed an olfactory sense as myself cannot possible detect whether a child smells of these four things — puppies, milky tea, toy-gun caps and soap — all at the same time. Again, there is a descrip- tion of the pollen of tulips smelling of Douwe Egberts coffee. One wants to ask `Not Maxwell House? Not Melitta?' At one point Daisy records that she was 'literally submerged weightless in a warm bath'; at another that her doctor's hands 'shook each other ahent [sic] one's blushing colon.' After such oddities one can appreciate what Daisy means when she confesses to being 'abuzz with words, which do not always swarm about their proper hives.'
For three quarters of its short length, this novel generates all the tensions of a first rate thriller. From the start one real- ises that Margaret is up to no good; but it is only slowly that the nature and the extent of her badness is revealed. Of course, like almost every nanny or governess in fiction, she will fall in love with the father of her charge; and of course she will attempt to divert that charge's love for his mother to herself. But there are other, even darker secrets to be revealed — which it would be unfair to Miss McWilliam's highly skilled plotting for me to reveal here. Slowly one sees that, if Margaret is able to get away with so much, that is because Daisy — out of blindness, out of laziness, out of her inability to believe that someone so `com- mon' and ill-educated could possibly pose a threat — allows her to do so. The two women are the complete antitheses of each other, as becomes horrifically apparent in the final denouement.
It is this denouement — reached in the sort of hurry which suggests an author suddenly bored with her story — which mars an otherwise fine short novel. The surprises come thick and fast on each other, with so little preparation that at no time does one say to oneself 'Of course! I should have guessed that all along.' Daisy falls down the stairs, goes into labour and all but loses her life and that of her baby; Margaret, by now demented, gets up to a number of dangerous and/or repulsive things: Solomon rushes in shouting: 'Bloody nannies. They're all the same. They smash a car as soon as look at it. Stupid cow.' It is as though one were watching a soap opera speeded up on a video recorder.
But from the first three-quarters there are innumerable felicities to remember. Some of these felicities are of phrase, as when Daisy records that Margaret 'sang like a radio between stations'. Others, even more numerous, are of a way of examining a character, eventually revealed in all his or, more often, her pitiable and slightly ludicrous arrogance or vulnerabil- ity. There is no doubt about the strength and originality of this talent, even if it is here sometimes maladroitly or over-hastily deployed.
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