The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  Peter agreed: neither of us wanted this discussed, gossiped over, analysed, muddied.

  ‘I’m still not divorced.’

  ‘Unimportant.’

  ‘I’m older than you are.’

  ‘In certain respects. Not in others. You’re catching up fast. Come over here… You see? No age gap. No gaps of any kind between us. And never will be.’

  We met in secret whenever Peter could get leave, sometimes in London and, when summer came, the last summer before the war, we’d go to Hampshire, to Nuthanger, which was empty of tenants and which Rose’s trustees were trying to sell: not many takers in 1939.

  ‘I expect they’ll requisition it when the war comes,’ Peter said. ‘Meanwhile, we will.’

  We were careful to leave no traces of these visits. I never spoke of them to anyone and I will not write of them now. But I knew they could not continue for long, that even our meetings in London might cease, certainly become briefer and more snatched, once the war came. So it proved: Peter was posted to Yorkshire for further training that November. His squadron moved and was briefly based in East Anglia, then it regrouped and was posted to Sussex in the spring of 1940. We went to Nuthanger for the last time that May, just a month or so before the Battle of Britain began. Two days’ leave, the poignancy of stolen time, owls calling from the beech hangers, larks singing above the hayfields, the drone of planes at night. Our valley – and our house, which I always thought of as Peter had drawn it in childhood, protected eternally by a scribbled rainbow, by a red sun, a blue moon, two gold-foil stars: weLcOm lUcY.

  Bare feet on old elm floorboards; a room striped with moonlight. I knew what would happen, and it did; how inward that experience makes you, how unstable and yet serene – I waited until I was sure. I told him, but apart from that, old habits die hard, I told no one.

  I hugged the knowledge to me and took it back to London. I’d left the room in World’s End by then, and we’d taken the cheap tail-end of a lease on a small flat in Marylebone – fifth floor, a view over the doctor-land of Harley Street and its environs, roofs, chimneys, church steeples – and from late August, when the nightly German bombing raids began, a view of the fires at the docks and in the East End; fires they said you could see from ten miles away, the whole skyline red, London burning. When he had leave, Peter would join me there. When he did not have leave, we wrote letters. His commanding officer had my telephone number, in case of – emergencies.

  It was a short walk from Marylebone to Nicola and Clair’s flat. I visited them often, hiding my fears, which were acute, and concealing the joy that possessed me. I’d walk to their apartment and try to get back before blackout. I’d look up at the silver barrage balloons, flying high over Regent’s Park. I’d walk past Warren Street tube, where mothers and children carrying cardboard suitcases and gas masks would emerge in the mornings, pale from sleepless nights underground. I’d pass them in the afternoons, as they began to queue again for another night’s shelter. I was superstitious – well, everyone was. I’d avoid cracks on the pavement, touch my shabti figure before I left the flat and on my return. I counted the barrage balloons and if their number altered, it was a bad omen; if it remained the same, a good one.

  The timing of my visits to Bloomsbury was difficult: sometimes I’d be at Nicola’s flat, and the first wave of Luftwaffe bombers would come in earlier than expected. The sirens would begin wailing, and I’d be forced to remain there. Sometimes Clair would succeed in persuading Nicola to take refuge in the house cellars; sometimes Nicola – who hated being underground – would refuse and would pace her drawing room, listening to the crunch of bombs in the distance. As the days passed and the Blitz intensified, the crunch of bombs came closer, then closer still: proximity to railway stations, to King’s Cross, to Euston, to St Pancras was no advantage now; main-line stations were targets.

  Once the ‘All Clear’ sounded, Nicola would cease her restless pacing and sink down in a chair, and sooner or later she and Clair would resume the bickering of the pre-war period. That was their routine, their preferred habit. Once the iniquities of war and food rationing had been exhausted as subjects, they’d return to the ever-dependable topic, the one that never failed them: my divorce – and my lamentable failure to secure it. I took no part in those conversations; Eddie had sailed for America the week before war was declared. He was not answering any letters, especially those from solicitors – and I no longer cared. In my mind and heart, I was not married to him, never had been; the formalities could wait. I had other, more pressing priorities.

  I made what would be my last visit to Nicola’s flat that October. I know that the Blitz lasted from August 1940 to the following May, with fifty-seven consecutive nights of heavy bombing, but at the time it seemed much longer than that, a nightly bombardment that left me dazed and deafened in daylight, lost in areas once known well that had become, overnight, an unrecognisable wasteland. Where were the landmarks? I calculate that it must have been day forty-five of the Blitz when I made that visit to Nicola’s flat. I sat there hugging my secrets to me, shivering by a miserable fire – their coal supply was running out. It was still only four o’clock when I arrived, but the blackout blinds were already drawn. Only one table lamp had been switched on: money was tight, Clair and Nicola were economising.

  I was sitting next to a table piled with Nicola’s current reading – light novels, borrowed from a lending library. The flat was looking neglected. Behind the books, relegated to a dusty corner, scarcely given space, was the blue shabti figure I’d given Nicola in Paris, all those years before. For Nicola, with love, the real thing! I wondered when she had last held the little figure, or looked at him.

  I was hoping for tea, but as usual Clair produced some foul vinegary red wine – it was all they could get their hands on, she said. Nicola fretted; there had been bomb damage to Mecklenburgh Square the other night, and that, she said, was too close for comfort. Clair dismissed this; the damage there was not that extensive, Mecklenburgh was much closer to main-line stations than their square was and therefore more vulnerable. Their part of London was still safe, and if it wasn’t, too bad… Nicola said the bombing frightened her: they should move out to the country.

  ‘We can’t. Do shut up about that, Nicola,’ Clair said. ‘We can’t afford it. You’ve burned your boats. We’re stuck in this mausoleum you insisted on buying. Who’s going to take on the lease now? Who’d even rent it?’

  They continued this bickering as if I were not there, as they usually did. I was five months’ pregnant by then. My baby had begun to move in the fourth month, punctually, on schedule, as the books I’d anxiously consulted had assured me would happen. I’d felt stirrings, shiftings, a surreptitious assertion – new life, within me. Now, my baby, my he-or-she would often give me a fierce little kick, or perform some gymnastic manoeuvre in the womb, a gentle roll, a flexing, a somersault.

  The alteration in my figure, not that evident anyway, had gone unremarked. Neither Nicola nor Clair noticed my hands laced across my stomach; no one noticed my dreaminess or abstraction, though I think they must have been very evident. The wine, which I shouldn’t have touched, was making me feel sick. I pushed the glass aside. I was nauseous much of the time, and it was worst in the afternoons and evenings. I had cravings too, which would come upon me without warning – at that moment, sitting there by the reluctant fire, I had a fierce desire for salt and sweetness. Sardines. Peaches.

  I had been given a new ration book now, the special blue one that all pregnant women received. It entitled me to one pint of milk a day and first choice of the fruit at the greengrocer’s. I dreamed of peaches, the unobtainable tang of oranges, lemons, pineapples: first choice made little difference, since all they had on offer was apples… I closed my eyes. As my baby turned in the womb, lazily stretched, gave me a small punch, I slipped into a greedy reverie of salted almonds, of maple syrup and bacon, Egyptian honey cakes and the salted popcorn Frances and I had once shared in some movie-theatre long
ago. Sardines. Peaches. No, sardines and peaches. Together.

  Clair rose to put a record on the gramophone: Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro – and the last act of that opera. She had the volume turned down low, and as the sequence of intrigues and hidden identities of the opera’s final scenes began to play themselves out with sweet, sharp melancholy, I gazed dreamily around the room. I saw it had grown shabby, its fine cornice yellowed: the abode of two women who spent much of their life indoors, one of whom smoked heavily. The walls were stained with pale rectangles where Clair’s paintings had formerly hung; they’d been removed to her studio, where she was preparing them for a new exhibition at a small gallery. It was owned by a friend, who was giving her this show as a favour.

  ‘A complete waste of time,’ Nicola had said snappishly. ‘Who’s going to buy paintings in wartime? No one understands Clair’s work anyway.’

  ‘Give it a rest,’ Clair had replied. ‘One painting will buy two cases of this foul wine we’re drinking. That’s better than nothing. I’m giving them away. It breaks my bloody heart. Five guineas a canvas. A steal.’

  Reaching across Nicola’s library books, as they talked on and the music wound its delicate phrases, I picked up the little shabti figure and brushed the dust from his head. I replaced him where he was visible, where the lamp shone its light on him.

  ‘Ah, how beautiful he is, such an enigmatic smile,’ Nicola had cried, when I’d given him to her on my arrival in Paris from Egypt. When I’d confessed his dubious history, she’d laughed in delight. ‘So he’s stolen goods? Who cares – who will know? He can be our secret,’ she’d said – and then, catching me by the hand, she’d rushed me outside: the moment had come to show me, for the first time, the beauty of Paris.

  One fine day a million years ago. Weeks of fine, fine days: the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Right Bank, the Left Bank, the Seine sparkling; the Comédie Française, where I heard the true power of Racine’s alexandrines, understood for the first time how cold and remorseless was the advance of Corneille’s tragedies. Nicola took me to the Tuileries, out to Versailles, out to the wooded walks of the Bois de Vincennes and then back to the Jardin du Luxembourg – we’d stopped for a café noir here, a vin rouge there; shopped for a length of silk in the Rue Saint-Honoré one morning when she felt extravagant, and for little rustic cooking dishes in the Rue Mouffetard one morning when she felt poor. To that day, I could not revisit those places without remembering them as Nicola Dunsire showed them to me.

  Afterwards, I had wondered if these explorations were an attempt to rid me of Egypt and replace my fascination for that country with a new one. Were they a deliberate assault on those old loyalties? It was possible. Nicola could be jealous of interests she did not share; she could regard them as a challenge to her hegemony. So perhaps that stay in Paris was a campaign of attack, a series of persuasions. Perhaps it was designed to cement our confederacy. French was her mother tongue, she’d remind me, laughing, as she introduced me to further proofs of French civilisation, to the refinements of French hedonism.

  ‘Now do you understand?’ she’d said once – when, after a day of such dazzlements, we’d returned to the apartment by the Seine that she’d persuaded my father to rent. He was elsewhere. ‘Now do you see, Lucy?’ she said, her eyes meeting mine across the glimmering river reflections of its salon, as the room’s many looking glasses reflected us back upon ourselves, as the traffic outside fell suddenly silent. A long, level, appraising look. She waited for my answer before she moved towards me… And I did see, could Nicola not understand that? I could speak this silver tongue of hers. I’d abandoned resistance our first day here; the windings of the Seine had seduced me.

  My baby stirred. I opened my eyes and found myself back in a room in Bloomsbury, a room that felt suddenly unsteady, freighted with the weight of the past, as unreliable as the deck of a ship in a storm. The Mozart had ceased and the gramophone needle was scratching back and forth, stuck in the black grooves at the end of the record. ‘What’s the matter with you, Lucy?’ Clair was saying. ‘You haven’t touched your wine. You’re white as a ghost.’

  ‘Is she going to faint? What’s wrong? Clair, quickly – fetch her some water.’

  ‘No, no. I’m fine.’ I stood up. ‘But I think I should go now.’

  ‘Oh, don’t go yet.’ Nicola rose and crossed to my side. ‘Sit down again – you don’t look well, truly. You’re safe for another half-hour at least. Stay a little, dear. Are you hungry? Let me find something for you to eat – eggs – Clair, do we have any eggs left? It’s only five o’clock, Lucy. Please don’t go. The planes never come over before six… ’

  ‘Even so.’

  I managed to extricate myself. At the door to the flat, Nicola gently embraced me. Clair escorted me downstairs. I ducked out into the square’s gathering dark and walked home past blacked-out buildings. As I reached my own street, the wails of the sirens started up; shortly after, the planes began to come over. Wave after wave of them: one of the worst of the raids of the war, eight unbroken hours of bombs falling. I never saw Nicola or Clair again. Their Bloomsbury house received its direct hit during that raid, at around three that morning.

  I went there as soon as I heard the news on the wireless. I found the remainder of their Bloomsbury terrace almost unscathed, but the house in which Nicola and Clair had lived had gone. I stood behind the barriers the wardens had erected, and there was nothing: no trace of lives lived, only singed air, lingering smoke, dying fires, smouldering rubble. The building had become vacancy. At attic height, a fireplace was still attached to a party wall; on the floor that had been hers, shreds of wallpaper remained, clinging obstinately; where the basement and cellars had been, there was a black hole, already filled with water from a burst main. I was standing in a litter of sharp glass, in pools of water from the firemen’s hoses.

  Clair Lennox’s studio, in that mews building at the far end of the house’s long rear garden, escaped the blast. I was allowed to inspect it eventually; after prolonged frantic argument, the ARP warden in charge agreed to escort me there. I think I had some unreasonable hope that, after I’d left them, Clair and Nicola might have gone to the studio, and that I would find them there.

  That was not so. The studio was unlocked and empty – or so I thought at first. Its windows had been taped, but had shattered. There were two shiny, well-oiled bolts on the inside of its door. I inspected a sink, a gas-ring, a wind-up gramophone, orderly brushes and stacked tubes of oil paint. The air smelled of turpentine and smoke. Broken glass was scattered everywhere, but the small building was otherwise undamaged. So too were Clair Lennox’s paintings. There they were, some packed, some unpacked, awaiting her new exhibition. I stared at one of them: Nicola Dunsire, in a white dress, standing next to a rose arch in a Newnham garden. Across the space between us her painted stare met mine and held it.

  ‘No, wait – one more minute,’ I said, when the warden tried to persuade me to leave. I went on staring at the past, at Nicola as seen by Clair Lennox, she whose vision differed from mine, whose artist’s vision was no doubt more acute than mine. I could not read that painted stare of Nicola’s, couldn’t decide whether Clair had made it searching or lost, challenging or defeated.

  The warden finally took my arm and led me outside. ‘You’re in shock, miss,’ he said, closing the studio door firmly behind us. ‘I see it every day.’ He sighed in resignation. He was not young, and I could see how exhausted he was. Hanging on by a thread.

  ‘Far to go, love?’ he said. ‘Forgive me asking, but – are you expecting? I’m a family man myself. Three nippers, and one more on the way. You don’t want to be taking any risks – not in your condition. Nothing you can do here. On your way now.’

  Some months later, in December, Clair’s gallery friend invited me to the exhibition planned before her death. Her paintings had been left to Nicola, with this gallery as backstop. It was a small place, behind the British Museum, and the show of Lennox’s work had been on view for seve
ral weeks before I went there. None of the paintings had sold; not one had a welcome red sticker.

  ‘Hopeless,’ said her friend. She lit a cigarette. ‘Look at them – marvels. No one’s interested. It’s this bloody war, of course, but it’s not just that. People can’t see it. Poor Clair. I’m glad she’s not around to witness it – knew her well, did you?’

  ‘No, not well,’ I replied – and that was true: inspecting her grouped paintings had made me understand that. I bought that portrait of Nicola, and in my will I’ve left it to the Tate Modern. The curators are delighted; they will hang it next to the three other Lennoxes now in their possession, they tell me, and they plan a major Lennox retrospective. Times change, of course, and what we value – the way we value, alters. How do we decide this is worthless, and that is a treasure? Unless the object concerned is of gold, of course, whose value never declines, whose glitter can never be resisted.

  Clair’s painting has travelled with me down the years, down the decades, from house to house, from youth to age, until it finally came to rest here on the north wall of my sitting room in Highgate. I look at it often, must have looked at it a million times. I’ve been looking at it every day this winter, and still I can’t decide – is that painted stare resigned or rebellious? What are you thinking? I ask it sometimes, in those moments when I permit or cannot evade such weaknesses. What are you saying, Nicola?

  And then I turn away from it. I examine Sargent’s version of my mother Marianne, or turn to the Degas ballet dancer who, fleetingly, from certain angles and depending on the light, resembles Frances. And I think of those who were never portrayed: I think of Peter, whose plane was shot down over the Channel that winter, and whose body was never recovered. I think of our daughter, born a month afterwards. The delivery went well, and the two midwives assisting me marvelled at the lucky speed with which I, a first-time mother, gave birth. But I knew there was something wrong almost immediately: I heard my daughter’s first cry – but from the midwives, silence.