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PAGE: 18

EDITION: 1

Candia McWilliam. A LITTLE STRANGER. Bloomsbury, #12.95 (pp 135).

THE book chatterers had a whale of a time with Candia McWilliam's

first novel, A Case of Knives, inspired by a Country Life snap of the

author on the jacket and a recondite vocabulary capable of stumping

panels on Call My Bluff. Little of this had any bearing on the merits of

the novel, but word spread like oil spillage that the Edinburgh-born

writer was worth keeping an eye on. And now, less than a year after

coming out, she has returned to the ball accompanied by a handsome

novella, or longish short story, altruistically set in large type for

the myopic and luxuriating in designer space, with generous prelims and

a sheaf of virgin end pages.

Just a bit flash. But cocooned in the tissue is an exquisite, anorexic

tale with its roots in the Henry James of What Maisie Knew and The Turn

of the Screw.

Like those books A Little Stranger takes us into the world of country

estates -- the Tory blue belt, old money, lords of the manor multiplying

their money with vague schemes in the City and playing butler at

Yuletide, wives biding time and taking tea, governesses and nannies,

them and us, the known and the unknown. And like them also, it is a

chilling story domestic in its essentials and sinister and suffocating

in its intensity.

In the beginning, however, there is language. The way we use it and

the way it defines who and what we are is at the heart of McWilliam's

book, which takes for its epigram Auden's ''Trinculo's Song'': ''There

lies that solid world/ these hands can never reach;/ My history, my

love,/ is but a part of speech.'' Daisy, the belatedly named narrator of

the novel, has had a short career as a clothes horse, and dabbled in

publishing before taking the expediential step of getting wed or, as she

coldly puts it, ''We exchanged vows.'' The three words emphasise a chill

in the relationship with her husband which otherwise is kept at bay with

politeness.

Daisy likes words and collects rarities like zenana, corm, caret,

graminivore, and ric rac, which trip off her tongue as if they were High

Street argot. In contrast, listening to Margaret Pride, nanny to Daisy's

son John, is ''to hear language strangled at birth.'' It is a violent

image and one which demonstrates the dangers inherent in

incomprehension. For upstairs and downstairs are going crazy in their

opposite ways, oblivious to and ignorant of each other.

Language binds but it can also separate, and from the beginning

McWilliam has Daisy serve double Dutch (coached by her Low Country

forebears?) to Margaret, who volleys back homilies. But one is playing

badminton, the other tennis. Each needs someone to interpret the rules

but they are too far gone in self-delusion to realise it.

Their parallel psychoses are painfully but beautifully articulated and

the temptation is to pig on quotes, for McWilliam has an enviable

facility for drawing out the essence of things and for fashioning

aphorisms, even if on occasion she seems to be over-reaching. But A

Little Stranger is -- as well as being an astute social commentary, a

mild political statement, a portrait of a non-marriage, and (almost as

an afterthought) a black mark against nannies -- a cunningly executed

thriller. How is for you to find out.