A Little Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page B

a medium of sugar sweetness.
    A group of big men used to machines for cutting through wood and earth stood in one corner, drinking. They were not yet drunk enough to dance. The wives sat in another corner, sipping sweet mixture. Among them was Margaret. She was more smartly dressed than most of them, and she held, but did not drink from, a champagne glass. She resembled a woman in a television advertisement for chocolate mints, who had fallen among women advertising something homelier, washing powder, or discounted carpeting. I felt sorry for her, without her fiancé. No doubt she had bought the black dress for him. He must be curious about her job, concerned to know whether where she worked was pleasant, her employers fair, her wages given for a reasonably restricted amount of work.
    ‘We must invite Margaret’s fiancé some time,’ I said to my husband.
    ‘Whatever for?’ he replied. ‘Does he need a job?’ He was off, elegant and menacingly jovial among his dependants in his festival clothes of white and black.
    Men slapped his back and used his Christian name and our own friends talked to each other and not to us in order to leave us free to mix, to be perceived not sticking to our own kind. I saw him move towards where the wives sat.
    ‘Come the revolution,’ he would say, ‘I’ll be a butler, no problem. I love to fetch funny drinks.’
    I saw him smiling, fetching little glasses of gold and orange and milk colours. Later, he would tell me of the most outlandish concoctions. ‘And the awful thing is, they call them names now, so I’m meant to know the constituent parts of a Snow Goose or an Open Bottom Drawer or whatever. Omo, lemonade and Cointreau, or some such.’
    He was standing, fetching, stopping, never sitting. It was a tradition at these parties that he should wait upon those who waited, every other night, upon him.
    To each wife, as he gave her her drink, he addressed some words. These women had almost all known him since he had been a boy, but now he was not only bigger than they were but looked as though he came from an altogether larger race, meat-fed and clothed in confidence. Down the sides of his trousers ran a hardly shiny silk ribbon and his feet were slippered in black velvet. Black satin faced his jacket. The many surfaces of black about him made him rich and solemn among the little women in pale dresses. Many of them wore cardigans, like children at a party, angora or snowy orlon, showing the creases where they had come from the packet.
    ‘Very nice,’ they said to me when I went over. ‘Very nice to see there’s a new addition on the way. And how is John?’
    And I could ask them about their children and grandchildren, many of whom were at the party. It was easy, being a woman, with the democratic matter of children to discuss. I was quite happy there for a time, but felt I must move on, speak to everyone. As it was her first of these parties, I must see that Margaret was all right.
    She was sitting with her back to me, her black bag set on the red-clothed table, facing one of the corners with its floating cluster of red balloons. I had to move sideways between the tables, though my height kept the bump of my belly above the backs of the little golden chairs, which appeared to be constructed of small gold femurs.
    She was speaking to one of the gamekeepers. Her champagne glass remained an untouched accessory.
    ‘He just works with animals,’ she was saying to him. The keeper was looking at her as though he wished he could describe his own job in some way which omitted all mention of animals. She was looking very pretty. Her eyes were bright, her nails pink, her femininity cocked.
    ‘Hello, Robert,’ I said. ‘Happy New Year, nearly.’
    ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘It could be very happy.’ He was known to ‘see to’ the wife of one of the cowmen, but he needed a wife of his own. His eyelashes reached his eyebrows and the down on his cheeks was thick; his chest escaped his