The Night Visitor

by Lucy Atkins

  As she and Jess came back into the living room she heard a splash: Paul was in the pool. Dom was still dressed, standing on the side. He called something in a deep voice to Paul, who ducked, displaying his boxers and very white feet. David was still in the kitchen, unloading a box of beer that he’d bought at Carrefour.

  The master suite was palatial, with floor-to-ceiling windows, a pitched ceiling, pale walls and an ornate dove-grey French bed. Under different circumstances she would have looked forward to falling into it with David, but right now the thought of him touching her filled her with cold, chemical fury.

  She cranked the shutters open and looked at the bruised hills and the valley below, with pale village rooftops clustered around a church tower. At that moment, its bell tolled, a forlorn sound that echoed off the hills and grew louder and louder until she felt as if it had entered her brain and would never stop.

  Dom had stripped off and was in the water with Paul, then Jess burst out of the house in a polka-dot bikini. Currents of light spiralled to the ends of her hair as she ran to the edge and leaped.

  She heard the floorboards creak behind her. David was at the doorway. They stared at each other across the room for a second and neither of them spoke. Then he stepped in. ‘Well,’ he said, jovially, ‘this is very nice.’

  He came over and they looked down at their children. Paul bombed into the deep end, almost hitting Dom, who cuffed him, spraying water; Jess was waist deep, roaring at her big brothers, wading through the shallows, the ends of her hair released of their tension and spread across the water’s surface.

  ‘They’re happy.’ She folded her arms and managed to swallow the ‘at least’.

  He looked at her. ‘We aren’t?’

  It was such a preposterous question that she couldn’t even reply.

  ‘Let’s not let it spoil the holiday, Liv,’ he said, gently. ‘I don’t want to keep apologizing. We’re here now, let’s make the best of it.’

  She moved away, went over to the bed and tested the mattress. It was hard, but she longed to crawl onto it anyway and blot everything out with sleep. She sat on the edge and yanked at the heels of her sweaty plimsolls.

  ‘Do you think it’s bad if we take the master suite?’ David threw himself on the bed behind her. He folded his arms behind his head and let the air out of his lungs. His linen shirt was half unbuttoned; dark chest hairs fanned out.

  ‘We should probably ask the others.’ She hated the strangled, uptight sound of her own voice. She wished that she could parcel up the past fortnight and pretend that everything was still fundamentally working between them.

  The dust from David’s trainers had scraped a long grey shadow on the bedspread. ‘You know best thing about this room?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s about as far away from the children as we can possibly get. They could be murdered in their beds and we’d still get a good night’s sleep.’

  She wanted to accept this lame attempt at humour, lean across the awful gap and take the offering, lie down next to him, rest her head on his chest, but she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t ready to laugh. She wasn’t ready to forgive him – though she wished that she were. She didn’t want to feel like this, she didn’t even like herself like this. She got up and walked into the marble en suite, which smelled of bleach, bolted the door and went over to the window. She could see the roof of the car and, behind it, the priest’s tower, surrounded by scratchy-looking olive trees.

  It wasn’t far across the courtyard. The three older boys could sleep there. This place was perfectly safe – they were in the middle of nowhere. Buried in shadows, the tower’s slit eye watched her back.

  As she cranked on the shower and peeled off her clothes she felt a small but insistent voice calling from the folds of her subconscious, warning her about something in a whisper so faint that she couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t just exhaustion or anger at David; it wasn’t the gravestone at the front door, which had set the mood all wrong. It was deeper than that, more fundamental. Something inside her was off-kilter and fearful. As she stepped under the jets of water she had the feeling that the spinning disc of her life was dipping on each turn and she could neither correct it nor anticipate its crash.

  Vivian

  Ileford Manor, August

  A wind has sprung up and violent gusts of rain spray the kitchen windowpanes as I eat my lunch: four slightly slimy slices of ham, a hard-boiled egg and lettuce that is definitely past its best. Yesterday, I cleaned the upper floors and my shoulders ache from reaching up to do all the spiders’ webs, but I cannot rest. There is still so much to do to secure the house before I leave tomorrow morning. There are nineteen items unchecked on my list, including tackling the fridge. It does not feel right to leave the house anything other than shipshape. If something were to happen to me, I would not want people to think I neglected the place now that Lady Burley is no longer here.

  Since I came to Ileford five years ago I have not left the house for more than the occasional night. It is a relief to be going away for a whole week but also a great responsibility. So many things could get out of control – roof tiles falling, leaks springing, intruders slicing through glass – without me here, watching.

  When I first arrived at Ileford, the place was in great disrepair. There was so much to do and, of course, I had to look after Lady Burley, so I could not have gone away even if I had wanted to. She was frailer than she had led me to believe but I did not mind that. In fact, it helped to know that I was so useful. I had accepted her job offer because I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. I had lost my home, my job, my future – everything I cared about in the world. It is no exaggeration to say that my early retirement felt like a death sentence. The routines of more than thirty years were taken from me; everything I had worked for – my security, my identity – was wiped out, more or less overnight. They simply erased me.

  Lady Burley offered me a lifeline, though she did not know it. But even that was not enough for me. I was in a very dark place indeed. The repetitive tasks of sorting out Ileford and looking after Lady Burley kept me going, though internally I was in disarray. I really do not know where I would be now, had it not been for Olivia and Annabel.

  I never believed that I could possibly be interested and engaged by anything again. But Annabel did that for me. Indeed, towards the end of the project I almost felt that I had been reborn. This is not to say that working with Olivia for eighteen months was an unmitigated joy – far from it. Olivia can be extremely frustrating to work with. She is always so distracted. Her life is so full, overfull: she constantly juggles people and projects, she is overstretched, preoccupied and can occasionally be narcissistic, high-handed and thoughtless. But she can be kind, too, and her intellectual energy – the sheer joy she finds in her subject – is infectious. We are not so different, really. We both have obsessive natures and a deep thirst for facts. Her mind is also very sharp. Of course, her ability to present herself to the world is far superior to mine. And, unlike me, she is a natural teacher. She has the ability to communicate not just information but her intensity and zeal to the public. It is no wonder the TV cameras love her; when she talks about history her photogenic face comes alive and her eyes gleam. It is impossible not to get swept up in that enthusiasm.

  Perhaps this is what happened to me. As the months went by, Olivia’s passion for her subject – the hopes and dreams she has for Annabel – became mine. Soon, the book was all I could think about and I did not want to stop. I do not want to stop now.

  But of course, there is another side to this. The more I came to know, then admire, and then even to like Olivia, the more I wished I had never met her. The scale of the project changed, radically. It never occurred to me that she would want to write a book about the diary or that I would become involved in the process. At times, the reality of what we were doing would hit me and I would feel quite panicky.

  At several points I even made the decision that I
could not go on with it. Once, I got as far as sending Olivia an email telling her that I was pulling out, that it was over.

  Olivia treated this as a crisis. It was not long after Bertie went, so I imagine she assumed my behaviour was a result of a generally overwrought state of mind.

  She left her children and husband with the au pair and drove immediately down to Sussex where, breaking all her own rules, she invited me to the Farmhouse.

  Over a lasagna she’d bought en route – and was possibly trying to pass off as her own – she focused on getting me back on side. She needed me, of course, as much as I needed her.

  She made me feel that she was genuinely concerned about my state of mind. We talked about Bertie for most of the evening, in fact, and not about the book at all.

  Only at the end, very late, did she move on to the question of our collaboration. ‘I hope you won’t pull out, Vivian, I really do. I think we both believe Annabel’s story should be told, don’t we? That’s why we’re doing this, really, isn’t it? It’s not about money or me writing a bestseller. It’s about telling this amazing story. It’s so important to tell it. She really was a pioneer – think of all the disapproval and obstacles she faced. She smashed a massive barrier, she – and women like her – changed the world. These women should have plinths in Trafalgar Square. It’s almost our moral duty to tell her story, do you know what I mean? I always feel like, as a historian, it’s my job to fill in gaps. Women have been written out of history, Vivian, and it’s our duty to write them back in. Did you know that only about 0.5 per cent of recorded history is about women?’

  I was not sure about the accuracy of this last statistic, but she was so persuasive, so earnest and passionate, that I let it go.

  ‘And the thing is, I couldn’t do this book without you, Vivian,’ she said. ‘You’re completely indispensable. You’re the equivalent of about ten graduate students, you know that, don’t you?’

  She was right about that. I was far more efficient and productive than the majority of graduate students, though ten might be overstating it.

  ‘Your eye for detail, your doggedness, you’re just remarkable,’ she said, looking into my eyes. Hers really are a striking colour. At that moment they reminded me of a beetle called Necrophila formosa, whose iridescent carapace is somewhere between violet and royal blue and which feeds on beautiful flowers that reek powerfully of rotting fish.

  ‘I know I can rely on you completely, Vivian,’ she was saying. ‘The truth is I just couldn’t write this book without you.’

  I did not point out that this was literally true. Without my approval she could not use the diary. And without the diary there was no biography. She knew that too, of course. That was the subtext of the whole conversation. That, in fact, was almost certainly why I was sitting in her Farmhouse at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night.

  I thought, with longing, of the work we had done together. Our work was the reason I got out of bed every morning. It was the one thing that could temporarily distract me from the distress of losing Bertie. But increasingly it was a torment. I dreaded stopping; I feared to continue.

  ‘You should have been a historian,’ she said, generously. ‘And you know, the thing is, I’d really miss you, Vivian, if we stopped working together.’

  I was being charmed, flattered, but it worked. I did not have the strength to walk away. I could not face going back to long empty days spent dealing with Ileford’s leaks and problems with nothing else to occupy me, nothing look forward to, and no Bertie by my side.

  She invited me over to the Farmhouse more frequently after that. Perhaps she felt that in order to keep me on side, she had to befriend me. She never invited me when she had London friends there, of course, nor when she had her family down. I had no desire to join her lofty social circle but I might have been interested in her family life.

  Other than bringing Jessica that first day to the museum, Olivia only introduced me to her children on one other occasion. It was the night she left me alone in the Farmhouse with Jessica and Paul, just after Christmas, a few months before Bertie went. It was unavoidable and not her fault at all. David was away and she had left her eldest boy at home in London with the au pair. I have no idea where the au pair was that night – if I were Olivia I would have sacked her for it – but the boy, Dominic, decided to throw a party.

  After the police rang her at almost midnight, she woke me up to ask if I could possibly drive over and sleep at the Farmhouse with the two younger children while she went back to London. She sounded very upset, very shaken. She did not want to wake them up or, I suppose, expose them to the chaos of police stations or drunken teenagers. She told me the next day, when she reappeared with her sheepish son, that there had been about two hundred gatecrashers. He had apparently advertised the party on the Internet.

  That was an interesting night. I found it impossible to sleep, of course, and so I paced the house. At one point I found myself at her desk. It was quite chaotic with stacks of papers, manuscripts, files and books, pen pots and trinkets. I had to restrain myself from tidying it up. The wall above it was covered in pictures of her children as fresh-faced innocents on beaches and swings. Her laptop was still switched on and buzzing.

  It was a fascinating night.

  Otherwise, I only ever saw the Farmhouse empty. There was a sense of calm, just the two of us together at her oak table. It might have been a deliberate tactic but she let down her guard on those evenings. She talked about her personal life.

  The conversation that really stands out for me, of course, took place last November, almost nine months after our first meeting in the museum. The wind was thumping against the Farmhouse chimney, sucking at it, making the woodstove roar. Olivia had consumed three large glasses of cheap Cabernet. It was getting late. All I had to do was nod and listen.

  Her father, she told me, bought the Farmhouse as a gift for her when she was born. It was a wreck, she said, he got it for £500 and she loved it more than any place in the world. I found this revelation staggering – not the price, but the idea of a father buying a house for his newborn. It seemed like a theatrical and rather controlling thing to do. Perhaps this should not have come as a surprise.

  I could think of nothing to say so I pretended to cough. Bertie was curled on my lap. I put him on the floor and got up to fetch a glass of water. He followed me, anxiously, his claws tapping on the flagstones. When I had recovered myself, I returned to the table, picked him up and settled him back on my lap.

  ‘My father wasn’t rich, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘He was an academic too, a coleopterist. He bought the house with some money his own father left him.’

  My face, I hope, remained blank.

  ‘A coleopterist is a beetle expert?’ she said. ‘He was a bit of a legend in the world of beetles actually.’

  Fortunately, an impassive expression comes naturally to me.

  ‘He was a member of the Royal Society – that’s second only to winning a Nobel Prize.’ She looked at me, sideways, with a smile, aware perhaps that she was being something of a schoolgirl, boasting about her father. ‘But, hang on – you’re a scientist, aren’t you? Perhaps you’ve heard of him? Professor Ron Sweetman? Sussex University?’ I spotted a silvery challenge in her eye then and realized she was playing with me. She did not, for a moment, believe I had ever been a professor. I maintained the blank look.

  ‘What was your field again, Vivian, at Oxford?’

  I cleared my throat. ‘Biology.’

  ‘Ah, biology.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Did you know that only seven per cent of Royal Society Fellows are women?’ I offered up this fact in order to save us both the embarrassment of her continuing to tease me. ‘It’s worse than the Royal College of Surgeons.’

  She drained her glass. ‘You were never given the nod then?’

  I imagined her going back to London and telling her husband and smart friends about my ‘big lie’ about being a
professor. She can use Google and her instinct is, in a way, correct, but I decided that it was the wine talking rather than any true mean-spiritedness on her part. Her voice, I thought, might be teasing rather than mocking. People might not guess this from her somewhat intimidating public persona but Olivia is actually a rather kind and sensitive person. She is much less confident than her public image might suggest. In fact, at times she can be positively insecure.

  I eased the subject back to her family. ‘You followed your father into academia then?’

  ‘God, I know.’ She refilled her wine. ‘I’m a bit of a cliché, aren’t I? I’m the Daddy’s girl, always trying to please him. Sadly, I had zero interest in beetles though.’

  ‘I’m sure he was proud of you anyway.’

  ‘Well, I hope he was, though when I decided to do history he told me arts subjects were useless. He used to say ‘You’ll be cleaning toilets with that degree’. Still, he came round to it eventually. And he’d have loved to see me on TV. It’s such a shame he didn’t live to see that. He was a bit of a performer himself actually – students used to say his lectures were like theatre. He was quite magnetic. But most of all I wish he’d met his grandchildren …’ She picked at the crisped edge of the lasagna dish, peeling off some crusted cheese with a fingernail and popping it into her mouth. ‘He’d have loved them so much.’

  I had no desire to enter into a dull conversation about parenthood so I eased her back to her father again. ‘What did he do to get his Royal Society fellowship?’

  ‘He made this massive discovery about dung beetles – don’t laugh.’

  I wasn’t going to.

  ‘He found this amber fossil in Poland that contained a dung beetle with its own tiny ball of dung. This probably sounds arcane to you, but that fossil turned out to have vast implications. Not to get too technical but there are basically two main types of dung beetle – ‘rollers’ and ‘tunnellers’. They split into these two types millions of years ago, scientists call it “divergence”. My father’s discovery gave rise to a whole new evolutionary theory about divergence. Basically, he proved that dung-rolling beetles were around millions of years earlier than people previously thought. He named it after me, Archaeocopris olivia. I have the photograph of it on my bedroom wall in London.’