The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  ‘You will go back there. When you’re better, Frances. I’ll take you.’

  ‘No. I shan’t. I shall never go back to Egypt. You know that as well as I do. Please don’t lie to me, Lucy.’

  She spoke quietly, but there was a finality in her voice that silenced me. We walked on a little further, Frances glancing continually at her watch, and at last came to a halt by a large grey boulder. To our right, the river valley narrowed and there was a series of falls, the water rushing over them, churning in pools, then swooping to the next. The spray flung up a diamond brilliance, and the noise of the water was loud, almost drowning Frances’s words when she next spoke, so I had to lean closer to hear her.

  ‘That took us five minutes,’ she said. ‘We have five minutes here before we have to turn back. You’re not to waste it, Lucy – not one second. I’m so watched over – we might not have another chance. Do you recognise this boulder?’

  I examined the rock, which was taller than I was, damp with spray, its crevices containing tiny sproutings of ferns and emerald mosses. At first I couldn’t understand – and then I began to see: a suggestion of female breasts, a slender waist, a curve on the side exposed to the prevailing wind that gave a fleeting impression of a blind, passionless face. Ivy for hair, not limestone rivulets, but even so. I knew Frances’s ways. Yes, I recognised it.

  ‘It’s a truth place. Some places naturally are, some aren’t – and this is. I knew that as soon as I found it. So, don’t lie to me, Lucy, don’t even attempt it. Not here. My father won’t tell me the truth, neither will my mother or the doctors – but I know you will. How long have I? Six months? Another year?’

  I dropped my gaze. I couldn’t have met her eyes, not then. Helen had never discussed this issue with me and I would never have raised it. Taking me aside when he last visited, his face drawn with exhaustion and strain, Herbert Winlock had said: ‘You’d better know, Lucy. We’ll be fortunate if she makes it to the spring. That’s what we’re praying for: another four, perhaps five months.’ I suspected that estimate had been revised downwards since the last pneumothorax procedure.

  ‘Will I make it to the spring? I so want to see the spring. All the plants springing up, and the clouds racing… ’

  Frances turned her face eagerly to the river and then the blue arch of the cloudless sky. My vision had blurred and I couldn’t have spoken. I felt the burn of Frances’s gaze, as she turned back to look at me, though I still didn’t dare meet her eyes. She gave a deep sigh, removed her glove and took my cold hand in her hot one.

  ‘Ah, you can’t lie, not to me. I thought as much. Three months, then? Two? Is that all? That’s not so very long, is it? And I used to think I had all the time in the world… Will you come to my funeral, Lucy? Will you miss me? Will you mourn me?’

  ‘You know the answer to that.’ The tears began to flow from my eyes. Frances leaned forward, kissed the tears and then hugged me tight in her arms, with a strength that surprised me.

  ‘Well, I hope I pass muster when I get to the Weighing of the Heart ceremony,’ she said, speaking lightly and rapidly. ‘I should think I will. I must have a good chance – I’ve always been light-hearted, haven’t I? And I’m not old enough to have sinned too badly. I’m sure I’d have sinned with the best of them, given more time… Such a journey. I am afraid, sometimes. Not always. Dry your eyes, Lucy. If anyone sees you’ve been crying, they’ll guess – and I don’t want you blamed. I knew anyway. I’ve known for quite a while, I think… I expect that’s why I wrote you. I just wanted to be certain. Here.’ She passed me a gauze square. ‘Now mop your eyes. Prove you can smile – ah, you can. How dear you are to me. I have something for you.’

  Reaching into the pocket of her fur coat, she brought out a small and compact object. I couldn’t see what it was, but I caught a kingfisher flash of blue and knew what it must be, even before she opened her hand, pressed the little shabti figure into mine and closed my fingers around it.

  ‘Keep him safe for me, Lucy. He can watch over you. He can see all the things I won’t be able to see – what becomes of you, who you marry, the children you have – I hope you have a boy and a girl, lots of children. My shabti will see them, and the work you do, the journeys you make, the life you live – all the joy ahead. I wish you so much joy and goodness and fulfilment, Lucy – and the wishes of the dying are powerful.’

  So she had planned this, I thought: for how long? I bent my head. Seeing I couldn’t speak, she embraced me again and then clung to me, burying her face in my shoulder. I held her tight against my heart and there was a flurry of words and blind panic: all the things that had not been said were said then. I covered her face in kisses and she kissed my eyes in frantic haste. You taste of salt, she said, that’s how grief tastes, Lucy. Then – time running out on us – we walked slowly back to the cab. We reached it exactly fifteen minutes after we’d left it.

  Two days later, early on the Saturday, her father Herbert arrived from New York. He had planned to leave again the next night, but Frances’s temperature had suddenly soared, her pulse rate was rapid and faint, and her breathing was deteriorating. Seeing Frances’s feverish face, listening to her wild talk, he abandoned that plan. By the Sunday morning, the last time I saw her, I knew she could no longer recognise me: her eyes rested on my face, but looked beyond me. On 18 November, on the Monday morning, when both her parents were with her, there was a sudden change, a leakage of air from lungs that were, by then, too consumed by disease to recover. That caused a fatal pressure to the heart, a final rupture, then haemorrhaging.

  Frances died at two o’clock that same afternoon. As promised, I attended her funeral. A bright winter’s day, the air clear, the sun shining, a glitter of frost where the grass was in shadow. She was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston, in the family plot, next to the small grave of her infant brother William, the little boy to whose picture she’d brought pebbles, ostraka, small treasured finds from the Valley; the lost boy drowned in 1918 in the waters of Penobscot – that bay where it gave her joy to sail. It’s a place I’ve never seen, but which I revisit often in my imagination. I think of her now as I first learned to do in Egypt: reunited with her brother in that Egyptian afterlife that lies beyond heartache, a cool breeze on their faces, their eyes resting on the places they loved. That is where she is. I refuse to contemplate the alternatives.

  Mount Auburn Cemetery, like my neighbouring Highgate, has many famous graves and many unvisited ones. They lie side by side, in the equality of death, the celebrated and the forgotten. Approached through a gate built to resemble an Egyptian temple, it is impeccably maintained, with verdant walks, pavilions, gardens and woodland. It is not, as Frances would have said, some ‘mouldering old churchyard’, and – when I last visited – the inscription on her plain gravestone remained as clear and readable now as it was when first cut. This always mattered to her, and for her sake matters to me also.

  When the ceremony was over, I wished my friend the safest of journeys through the underworld. Then I packed the small blue figure she’d given me, booked a passage on the first ship available and sailed to England.

  A cold crossing. Days of grey swell. I spent the days staring at the waves, trying to hear a voice that had been silenced. It was on the upper deck of that liner, somewhere in mid-Atlantic, that I met the man who would become my first husband. Being green in judgement and grief-stricken, a state that does not improve anyone’s clarity of mind, I lacked the good sense to turn away when he approached me.

  ‘I think we’ve met before.’ He looked me up and down, examined the lineaments of my face. ‘Yes, I’m almost sure… Let me rack my brain. Years ago. A Newnham garden, a truly appalling lunch. Salmon in aspic? You carried the trays. You worked your little socks off. Ah, got it! I met a traveller from an antique land – and you were that traveller. You’ve grown up. Hello again.’

  I examined his clothes, which were flamboyant. I frowned up at his face, which was handsome. A gull shrieked and swo
oped low. The grey Atlantic heaved. I couldn’t see him too well but some memory came swimming towards me, up from the ocean. The remorseless beads on my memory abacus clicked into place. Nicola’s poet friend. Rumoured Cambridge Apostle. Met once, and once mentioned in her lying letters from France, read in my bedroom at Rose and Peter’s farm, the room with two sets of stairs to it, one obvious, one hidden; read late at night, by the flicker of candlelight.

  Ah, got it… The poet. The annoyer of my father. Eddie-something double-barrelled.

  35

  ‘There’s going to be a war. Another bloody war. Sorry to intrude on your grief and all that, but look at this,’ Clair Lennox said, mooching into the dining room at our Newnham house. She tossed the newspaper she’d been reading onto the table. ‘Rallies. Rearmament. You’d have thought they might have learned. Doesn’t history teach them anything?’

  ‘Evidently not. Do you mind not doing that? I’m working.’

  Two days on from my return to England: a Cambridge December: a misery of rain and, as my mother used to claim, the wind blowing in from Siberia. On the dining table – my attic desk space was too small – I’d spread out all the notes and photographs for my next book; I was staring down at pictures of islands. A small fire was dwindling and choking in the narrow fireplace; above it hung the portrait of Nicola Dunsire that Clair Lennox had painted the summer she arrived for a short stay: Newnham Garden, Summer 1928. Seven years on and here she still was, immovable as ever.

  It was Clair who had greeted me when I arrived back from America. She’d announced that while I was inconveniently in mid-Atlantic, Nicola had been summoned to France; there, her invalid mother, ailing for years, had suffered some crisis.

  ‘Probably another false alarm, alas,’ Clair said. ‘She likes to keep Nicola on her toes, does Madame Maladie. If she’s okay, Nicola will be straight back. If she dies, it will take longer. Fingers crossed. I believe there’s a nest egg.’

  Staring down at my notes, I ardently hoped that Nicola’s mother would recover, and recover fast; I could suffer a few days of Clair’s company – any longer than that and I’d throttle her.

  ‘Where’s that?’ she said now, advancing on the table, disarranging my photographs and pointing a paint-stained finger at rocks, sand and a pine tree.

  ‘Nowhere you know, Clair.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ She left the room, slamming the door behind her. I breathed again. I breathed in and out, experimentally; no pain in my side; nothing; all normal.

  I’d been waiting for a thin dry cough to manifest itself – waiting for weeks, waiting since those first days at Saranac Lake; so far there was no sign of it. I could begin work tonight, I thought, or tomorrow morning. If I worked and worked, wrote and wrote, perhaps I’d get through this. A clock ticked; beyond the closed curtains, the Cambridge church bells began to chime: six o’clock. I rearranged the patterns of notes and photographs three times and, when they still made no discernible sense, panicked and abandoned them.

  The next day it stopped raining, and after fighting Islands all morning, I went for a walk. Clair Lennox had made a studio for herself in one of our garden outbuildings, and through the ice on its window-panes I could just see her small intent figure, stabbing paint on a canvas: malachite, chrome yellow, cerulean, cadmium orange – she was a brilliant colourist, even I had to admit that. The admiration for her work that I studiously concealed increased the dislike I felt for her: it seemed unjust that someone so self-centred and rude should possess an angelic sensitivity as an artist. What translation took place when she took up a brush, selected shades, magicked something out of the nothingness of blank canvas?

  I edged along the path, trying to remain out of sight – I had no wish to speak to her. But despite her concentration, which always seemed absolute – A bomb could go off, and if Clair was painting she wouldn’t turn a hair, Nicola liked to claim – she must have glimpsed me, for she threw back the studio door and glared out at me.

  ‘Good news. Nicola’s mother has died,’ she announced – no preamble, as usual. ‘Snuffed it last night. Nicola rang earlier. I didn’t bother you because I knew you were working. She says it’ll take her two weeks to sort things out, maybe longer. So you’re stuck with me for the foreseeable. Sorry about that.’

  She lit a cigarette, cupped it in mittened hands, puffed smoke and frowned at the frostbitten rose bushes. ‘And what’s more there is a nest egg. Madame Maladie must have squirrelled it away – well, she was ever the devout bourgeoise. Thank God for that. Quite a nice little sum, I gather – even once the loony-bin is paid off. Freedom!’

  ‘It isn’t a loony-bin. It’s a nunnery. They take in people with nervous complaints. Nicola’s mother was there of her own free will. De mortuis nil nisi bonum mean anything to you? Clearly not.’

  ‘Loony bin, lunatic asylum, nuthouse, nunnery – who cares? Oh, and there was another call. For you, Lucy. Eddie-bloody-Vain-Chance. I told him you were working. I told him to get stuffed, actually.’

  ‘Thanks, Clair. Any message?’

  ‘Yes. He said to tell you the Furies were after him. They’ve got their claws into him, but the instant they let go, he’ll be in touch. He rang from a party in Chelsea – it was still going strong at nine in the morning. Very rowdy… so I think the Erinyes were poetic licence, but with him, who knows?’ She flicked the cigarette stub onto the path at my feet. It smouldered, then damply went out. She gave me one of her sharp, speculative glances. ‘I didn’t know you knew our beautiful Eddie.’

  ‘Plenty you don’t know, Clair. And I’m not in a hurry to enlighten you.’

  ‘Temper, temper,’ she replied, and returned to her studio, slamming the door. She kept a wind-up gramophone in there, and as I walked on through the garden, I could hear the record she’d chosen: La Traviata, consumptive Violetta’s last dying aria. Chosen for my benefit, I felt; she had it playing full volume.

  I walked into Cambridge along the Backs and went into Trinity College. There I left a note at the porters’ lodge for my father, asking if I might call in and see him on my return from my walk. It was his afternoon for supervisions, but there’d be a brief gap after that, before he’d scurry off to the library, or pre-Hall sherry with another Fellow. I knew better than to telephone; notes had always been the preferred method of communication in Cambridge, and my father saw no reason to change that civilised practice. I felt the one I’d written would pass muster: Dear Father. Neat italic script, two sentences, no exclamation marks.

  ‘I shall make sure Dr Foxe-Payne receives it without delay, miss,’ said Mr Grimshaw, now elevated to Senior Porter. I wasn’t sure if he recognised me; probably not. I rarely risked turning up at the college gates; my father did not encourage social visits. Should I reveal who I was, tell Mr Grimshaw my identity? It seemed pointless, vain. Maybe I wouldn’t keep the appointment anyway. I said nothing.

  I walked purposefully out of the town, along the riverside. The water meadows had flooded. The path was deserted. I was trudging past Ophelia willows, growing aslant the Cam, and a sea of silvery fields, water an inch deep, rippling like silk in the keen wind from the Urals. Take a strand of silk and a strand of steel, Miss Lucy – and the silk is the stronger of the two. I considered those I was bound to: Frances, who was gone; Rose and Peter a world away in London; Nicola, in France, dealing with her late mother’s effects. I tried to fix my mind on her predicament. The nature of her mother’s malady had always remained vague; there were claims and counter-claims (tick your preferred choice). It had never been clear whether she was insane or merely suffering from some minor nervous affliction, whether she was incarcerated or free to leave.

  Some details had emerged over the years, but Nicola blocked questions – perhaps she feared that, whatever the malady was, she herself might have inherited it. This inheritance might explain her menstrual descent into those black caves of depression, I used to think – her mother, she’d once confessed, had suffered similar episodes. It might also explain
the attempted suicide she’d once described to me. She still could not speak of her mother without those violent tremblings and that loss of control that I’d witnessed as a child. How bound was Nicola to her mother? How bound was she to Clair Lennox? Never ask. Inheritance explains everything, and nothing. The ties that bind people are best treated with discretion.

  I came to a halt at the river’s edge; swollen by the heavy rain of the past few days, the Cam was transformed from the easeful sluggish nature it exhibited in summer. It looked quite deep, sufficiently deep, clogged at its edges with a mess of sedge and broken willow branches, but with fierce eddying currents further out. I measured those currents. I wondered if it were true that drowning people surfaced three times before finally going under; if their lives flashed before their eyes in terrible entirety before they surrendered. I placed one experimental foot on the soggy edge; mud sucked at my shoes, the currents pulled me. I put my hand in my pocket and closed it around the little shabti, the little answerer, that Frances had given me. I took a step further. Then another. Something stayed me – or someone. I turned around, clambered back to the bank, faced into the wind and walked back to Cambridge.

  My father gave me tea in his rooms in Nevile’s Court. A college servant arrived, bearing a tray: Earl Grey, with lemon; college biscuits. He tended to the fire, added coals, ensured it was burning brightly.