The Night Visitor

by Lucy Atkins

  Vivian pressed her lips together and stared back down at her dog. Her face was scarlet. The dog looked a bit panicky too. He was sitting up, panting, his eyes bulging. Olivia knew then that this was it: she had to lock Vivian in now or she’d lose her. Vivian had obviously done a lot of the legwork and she could surely be carefully managed.

  She had taken a leap of faith.

  Olivia swatted another mosquito on her arm and scratched the spot. A bat swooped overhead, a shadowy shape half-glimpsed. She wondered whether, had she known then what she knew now, she’d have done the same thing. She would always have been fascinated by the diary and Annabel’s life, but she’d definitely have been more wary. She’d have set clear limits on Vivian’s involvement, from the start. Then again, Vivian would never have taken a back seat, it wasn’t in her nature. Vivian would always have been fixated on the details.

  She hadn’t planned any of this. It had been an impulse to say, ‘Listen, I’m going to need an RA – a research assistant. I can get a graduate student for the more complicated areas, but you’ve obviously done such a lot of research already on the Burley family, Vivian. What’s your time like? Do you have any capacity to help me with this?’

  Vivian’s reply was strangled. ‘You want me to help you write a book?’

  ‘I’m not sure I could do it without you, to be honest.’

  Vivian clutched the dog. ‘I’ll have to get Lady Burley’s consent.’

  ‘But you said …’

  ‘I said she couldn’t be interviewed, but you can’t write a book about her family without her consent. That would be morally wrong.’

  ‘No. Of course it would. Yes. Would it help if I wrote to her? I could write a letter right now for you to give to her – would that work?’

  ‘It’s four o’clock!’

  ‘I’ll email you a letter, right now, to give to her.’

  Olivia got up, but Vivian was already moving away. ‘Goodbye then.’ She squeezed past the other customers, pressing the dog’s head against her bosom and turning her back on the man with the beard. But then, as she reached the counter, she stopped. ‘Elizabeth Garrett Anderson wasn’t the first British woman to get a medical degree you know.’ Her voice was slightly too loud.

  Olivia felt the room grow quiet, heads turned.

  ‘Margaret Ann Bulkley masqueraded as a man to graduate in medicine from Edinburgh University in 1812. She became an army surgeon, served in the Crimean War, feuded with Florence Nightingale, performed one of the first Caesarean sections …’

  ‘God! Of course!’ Olivia laughed. ‘James Barry!’

  ‘They only discovered her … female anatomy when she died of dysentery in 1865 and the nurses laid out her corpse.’

  Olivia nodded, vigorously.

  ‘Bulkley lived as James Barry for forty-six years to get the career she wanted. Now that’ – Vivian gave a nod – ‘is determination.’

  Olivia gazed out at the twinkling lights of the French village in the valley below. James Barry – Margaret Ann Bulkley – must have lived in constant terror of discovery, of public shame and ridicule, of the end of the career that she’d sacrificed everything to have.

  Another mosquito whined past her ear and she swiped it away. She should light a citronella candle. She yawned and rubbed her face. She had to stop thinking about Vivian all the time like this, going back over things again and again. She had to let go of the lingering discomfort, this mixture of irritation and guilt and, on some level, trepidation, that she felt every time she thought about Vivian.

  She pulled the American manuscript towards her and leafed through the pages until she found the place where she had stopped proofreading that morning. It was the most sensational, but also the most troubling point in the diary. It was the one aspect of Annabel that she still felt she didn’t fully understand.

  Why would anyone choose to write down something so incriminating? In the book, of course, she’d produced a whole section on the psychology of written confessions. David had helped her with this part. He’d put her in touch with a Stanford University professor who was an expert on the subject. She’d produced a coherent argument about the psychology of self-expression, the therapeutic benefits of writing things down.

  But still, intuitively, Annabel’s actions didn’t make sense. If you’d murdered your husband the last thing you would do, surely, is confess to it, in writing, at the time.

  She re-read Annabel’s description of that terrible night.

  It is several hours since it happened and I am quite calm now. I am in my bed. The house is silent at last, paralysed by shock. Thoby is lying on my feet. He alone knows what I have done.

  It started as a simple dispute. We encountered one another at the top of the great staircase and Burley insisted, again, that I come to the Dalrymples. I objected, most forcefully and he came at me and shoved me against the banister, thumping both fists on my chest. The metal knob of his stick pressed into my collarbone and I smelled fish on his breath, and spirits too. His eyes had the deadened look with which I am now familiar: it is the look that precedes violence. His cheeks had turned a patchy fuchsia colour. As he lifted his stick, I heard a snarling and he let out a bellow of pain. Thoby had him by the ankle.

  When he raised his stick to bring it down onto Thoby’s spine, I acted without thought. I ducked behind him and shoved his back. He pitched forwards, his chest against the railings. Thoby released his ankle and I saw him sway – his hand slipped. Without thought or hesitation, I bent and seized his lower legs. It was so quick. His body made a loud, slack thud as it landed on the floor of the great hall.

  I swept Thoby up and ran to my bedroom. As I closed my door I heard Milly’s fearful screams …

  She pushed the pages aside and finished the brandy. There was a hint of relish in that one word, ‘slack’. It didn’t quite fit with the heroic, almost saintly, portrait she’d painted of Dr Annabel Burley.

  Annabel would, presumably, have kept this confession hidden in her Bloomsbury house until her death over twenty years later. But even that was a huge risk. If a servant, or Uncle Quentin, had found it, she’d have been hanged.

  She did understand why Annabel should want to pass the confession to Quentin after her death. It was clear from several sources that Annabel and her stepson had loathed each other; they fought consistently over money and property. Annabel had wanted him to know that she’d pushed his violent father to his death. She had wanted the last word. This, of course, was another thing she’d rather skirted over in the book. Such a spiteful act didn’t make Annabel look particularly sympathetic so she’d downplayed their conflict a bit.

  It was a shame there was no mention, by Quentin himself, of the diary, of how he felt when he read about his father. Most of Quentin’s surviving papers were financial, documenting his many irresponsible extravagances – Gatsby-esque parties, trips to Algeria, dancing bears.

  She felt a light shiver across the back of her neck, as if a hand had trailed over her bare skin. She glanced over her shoulder, into the velvet darkness beyond the terrace, then she pulled the shawl off her legs and wrapped it around her shoulders. Goosebumps had risen on her arms, even though she wasn’t cold. Then she heard something rustle in the undergrowth, over on the other side of the pool, somewhere behind the vine canopy and the sun loungers.

  Suddenly she knew that she was being watched. Someone was standing in the darkness just behind the vines, she was sure of it. She felt their presence with complete certainty.

  She stared over, but it was too dark to see a shape or movement. ‘Who’s there?’ she called. She rose to her feet, spooked by the high sound of her own voice. Her skin felt prickly. She didn’t hesitate – she left the brandy glass, scooped up her papers and ran towards the open French windows.

  Her hands fumbled as she slammed and locked them behind her. She couldn’t look through the glass because she felt sure that, if she did, she would see a starlit figure staring at her across the terrace. She imagined her old frie
nd, the stalker, in his overcoat. She felt dizzy. There was a sweet smell coming from the kitchen, old honeydew melon and the ooze of dark grapes at the bottom of the fruit bowl. The house was silent except for a ticking clock and the sound of her rapid breathing.

  She walked across the room, past the line of windows, keeping her eyes fixed forwards, certain that if she looked out, even for a second, she would see a face pressed against the glass.

  Vivian

  South of France, Day Five

  I am rather tired after another sweltering day in the dry hills, examining the leaves of limes and sycamores. Today I found both larvae and a total of forty-eight adult harlequin ladybirds. My back is aching from the weight of my beating tray and the heavy backpack; my nose is beginning to peel and my knee is becoming very sore. Ill-advisedly, I crouched in an olive grove for a while, distracted by the view, and when I got up the joint would not take my weight. I made it back to the village, slowly, and I am now keeping it stretched in the hope that it will recover itself.

  It is still intensely hot, though it is five in the afternoon. I am sweating at the cafe table, despite the dappled shade of the plane trees. The air is hot and soft, and there is a whiff of cigar smoke from a table nearby. Small French girls in white dresses are playing round the fountain, puffed up and floaty, like dandelion clocks. I have uploaded all of today’s harlequin photos and data onto the European ladybird app, I have planned tomorrow’s route and written down my findings in my notebook. But I have not yet bumped into Olivia.

  The defiantly named Café de Paris is quite busy but it is the best place to sit because it affords a clear view of the village square. I can see the bandstand and the fountain bounded by plane trees and behind that the main village car park.

  That dreary February day, eighteen months ago, when I took Olivia to the cabinet and showed her the diary, I could not possibly have anticipated that I would end up sitting in a French cafe with keen eyes, a sunburned nose and hope inflating my heart.

  I was probably not a well person, then. I do remember how grim I felt as I sat behind Maureen’s desk, unreasonably infuriated by her ‘Smile! It’s gin o’clock!’ sticker on the till and her ‘Keep Calm, It’s Only a Royal Baby’ coaster. I was fighting the urge to rip both objects up and put them in the bin. I have known Maureen since childhood; we were in the same class at primary school and she has always irritated me. She is intrusive, bossy and rather dim. She also now pities me, which is probably why she allowed me to persuade her to visit her sister and let me fill in that week. She imagines I’m lonely and bored at Ileford, without enough to do. When I first returned to Sussex, Maureen tried to get me to go to wine bars with her Zumba friends. I was probably less than tactful in my refusals. She has stopped trying to involve me, but she pities me even more now.

  That day in the museum, my whole body felt heavy, weighed down by its onerous contents – my dismal self. I was convinced that this week sitting behind Maureen’s desk would be fruitless, and I couldn’t even speak to Bertie, who lay, very tense, in his basket at my feet.

  And then the shock of arrival: the bedraggled child entered first like a Victorian urchin with her long hair flying around, a blast of freezing air and raindrops and then – Olivia!

  They shook rainwater onto the floor like dogs, trod mud through the entranceway and looked around, as most visitors do, with a mixture of hope and disappointment. I felt the startle of recognition turn to paralysis. Olivia is even more striking close up than she is at a distance, or on TV. Her features are more delicate, her face more expressive, the fine lines around her eyes and mouth more pronounced. She also looks taller on screen, and less scruffy. Her hair was held in a simple black elastic and she wore jeans, motorcycle style boots and a grey cardigan, bobbled cashmere, buttoned over a white T-shirt.

  As I handed her the tickets our fingers touched and I felt a physical jolt as both our lives switched to this unexplored path.

  I am ashamed of the person I was then, that gloomy rotten experimenter, sitting behind someone else’s desk.

  The child, Jessica, was sullen and not pretty beneath all that ridiculously long and tangled hair. She looks nothing like her mother. She was pushy, too; she would not leave Bertie alone, even though I told her very nicely that he was not reliable with strangers.

  The waiter arrives at my little table with a raised eyebrow. I am hungry and think I will eat, even though I had previously decided that I should eat an evening meal at 6 p.m., which would be five in England so I should not be hungry at all. My routines are shot to pieces, I am hungry at odd times, but I have decided that these are special circumstances. It will take a few days to establish my routines here and then it will be time to leave. This is why I hate foreign travel. I order a demi carafe of red wine and steak frites and the waiter melts away between the tables.

  I made her wait to hold the diary that day, even though I knew she wanted it, desperately. I enjoyed seeing her eyes flicker between the glass case and me, like an eager dog, as I went on about the Burley family. But she took me off guard when she asked about my background and the words hurtled from my mouth like daemons before I could stop them. I was furious with myself afterwards. Fortunately, she was so fixated on the diary that she seemed to hardly notice my stupid statement about being a professor.

  Her comment about sending Annabel’s diary to the British Library was not unexpected. I knew that she would need to be certain of its authenticity and I knew that she had a contact who specialized in Victorian manuscripts. I told her I’d have to get Lady Burley’s permission to do this, but that was not, of course, strictly true. I was just keen not to appear too submissive.

  She came back to the museum on Wednesday that week and spent two hours poring over the diary. After she left – excited by her find, late for her children, in a rush as always – I went and sat in the back room in the chair where she had been. Her coffee cup was still on the desk, with the imprint of her lipstick on the rim. Her perfume, a musky, assertive scent, not at all floral, hung in the air. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I knew, then, that Annabel’s diary would be immortalized in print. I was still envisaging an academic paper, but even so I was more excited than I had been in years.

  From the very beginning, I enjoyed learning a new discipline. Even before I encountered Olivia in the museum, I’d been discovering that I had an aptitude for history. With the forensic process of going through the Burley family archives, and the complexity of the new skills I was learning, I could feel my mind struggling out of its dark chrysalis, coming back to life.

  Perhaps it should not be a surprise that, as a scientist, I have a creative side. People assume that science is all about facts but almost all scientific breakthroughs would never have happened without a great dose of imagination. Science relies on interpretative leaps and sideways moves, acts of faith and inspired guesswork as much as it does hard data.

  I survey the village square. A group of old men is playing pétanque by the bandstand. I scan a group of tourists in the car park; none have black hair.

  I wonder how Ileford is getting on in my absence. I have trepidations about leaving it empty since it has a habit of punishing me when I go away. Bertie and I spent a night in Taunton Holiday Inn Express last spring, after a fruitless meeting with one of Annabel’s grandnieces, and upon our return, as we entered the scullery, late in the evening, we heard a faint banging sound, high up in the house. We rushed up the back staircase. The noise was coming from the servants’ quarters.

  A jackdaw was trapped in the red room. The poor creature had been beating herself against the windowpane and was weakened and disorientated, her glossy black wings heaving in intermittent, frantic attempts at escape. I opened the window but she flew back to the chimney. I leaped at her and seized her with both hands, pinning her wings to her pulsing body. She fixed her unsettling silvery eye on me and clacked her bill, aggressively, and I felt her heart pulsing beneath my fingertips as I crossed the room and shoved her out the ca
sement window. I can only think she’d been nesting in the chimneystack. Jackdaws are bold and inquisitive birds, the narcissists of myth and folklore, capable of devious plotting and devoted to thievery. Their collective noun is a ‘clattering’. I have always enjoyed that, and their mimicry, too; it is perfectly possible to teach a jackdaw to mimic the human voice, though I have never tried.

  Bertie was unsettled after that. He would not stop yapping so I carried him downstairs and soothed him with bread and warm milk. I, too, was disturbed by the ominous message of the bird, and that night, for the first time since I got Bertie, my night visitor came. As I stared into her foggy eyes I saw reproach and I knew that her visit had something to do with that trapped bird. I felt she had sent it to me. A jackdaw coming down the chimney has long been an omen of death.

  The waiter appears at my shoulder; he takes away the empty pastis glass and puts down the wine and a plastic basket containing sliced baguette. I take a piece and bite into its crust. When all this began, I was a desperate beast. I have done unforgivable things. I wish I could turn back the clock but it is too late now – honesty would only cause havoc and chaos. It is much better to put it all behind me and to look forward now. Nobody need ever know what I have done.

  I think about Olivia up there on the hillside, in the beautiful rented house, with her family and friends, eating jolly, shared meals on the terrace. She needn’t have been so short with me before she left, but I can see now that it was not a good time to discuss future projects.

  An element of tension is to be expected with any collaboration. Overall, though, we make an excellent team. She said that to me, herself, more than once. She even had the Christmas Tiffany pen engraved with the words, ‘To Vivian, my partner in crime’. Since Lady Burley only ever gives me vouchers, I rather relished unwrapping an actual Christmas present. Nobody has ever engraved anything for me before.