A Little Stranger Read Online Free PDF

I put them into satin shoes with heels like knives.
    ‘Fat wicked queen,’ said John.
    ‘Pretty Mummy,’ said Margaret, her mouth neat and smacking as though at a soft centre.
    Was school bad for my son?
    The bump at my front looked like a corm. John appeared not to notice it. Margaret said he would not connect it with the baby she had told him was coming (she had explained that the news, from me, might make him jealous). I could see that it would be complicated to relate the bump and the baby in his mind without unnecessary information.
     
    The day before the party, snow had fallen. The house in its park looked just snowy enough, as though figured in the recollection of a sweltering expatriate. We lived in a balmy part of England, much sung in war, always photogenic, conjured at times when memory and sentiment made of wives and hearths and smoothly looping rivers something desirable in their predictability. Our valley held no scrub and no untended woodland. It was impossible, as it is not in the north, to imagine wolves. If they had been there, they would have been as sleek and tame and good with children as the supreme vulpine champion of Assisi.
    The house was terribly hot and full of noise. There was a smell of flowers and food, both meaty. People I did not know moved about with cables, drugget and keys. The policemen in their chesty dinner jackets arrived first, showing an area of shirt the shape and size of an unshriven sole.
    By six o’clock, the policemen had stopped refusing drinks.
    John went to bed at seven, very docile. I was not yet dressed for the party.
    It was to begin at ten o’clock, and before that we had a few of our own friends to dine. I kissed John, bending over at the waist where my jeans could no longer fasten and were tied with an old tie of my husband’s. My jersey was of that oily wool which cannot be washed in water, only with ash. Upon my face was a clay mask, dry as a grass court’s lines.
    ‘Mad witch,’ said John, touching my lips with his hand to make sure they were not chalky before kissing me.
    ‘John Solomon, you solemn man.’ It was an old joke, and had always worked before. John’s second name was his father’s first. Sometimes, to myself, I called him Sol. His father, in his wisdom, ruled out any such abbreviation for himself. But the shortness of children does not make them less whole. We kissed, more in the air than on the lips, and I watched him roost into his pillow, insert his shining thumb, and fall down suddenly beneath the horizon of sleep.
    Just before I dressed, Margaret came to me.
    ‘He’s unable to come,’ she said, clearly referring to her fiancé. ‘It’s a last-minute emergency. No one else has the expertise. He’s a responsible job to do.’
    I had missed the telephone’s shrill in the bustle.
    ‘I’ve put on John’s alarm,’ she said, ‘as the house will be noisier than usual. We’re all going to listen for him.’ She meant everyone who worked in the house.
    I first saw her pretty black dress when I was going down the main staircase. At a certain turn, the door of John’s room was visible.
    She was wearing shoes with high heels and seemed to be slimmer. Her hair was not frizzy, but soft. It contained colours. At her neck it waved where before there had been stubble.
    A soft bar of light from John’s room cut the corner of the dark corridor, before she closed the door and turned on the landing light.
    I smelled her scent. I had almost come to like it.
    ‘Goodnight, pretty Margaret,’ said the awakened voice of my son, the words audäible on the alarm, though distorted by amplification.

Chapter 8
    In winter, a marquee full of dancers is a romantic thing, frivolous as a stall at an ice fair. In each corner were tied bouncing bunches of balloons, filled with a gas lighter than air. They were red like redcurrants, thin scarlet stretched with brightness. They stirred as the dancers moved, with a slow seething motion as though agglutinated in