The Night Visitor

by Lucy Atkins

  Perhaps this is, in part, why the mimicking capacity of beetles fascinates me so. I first learned about this natural phenomenon as an undergraduate, how cleverly one species will imitate another. This can have a defensive purpose: the mimicking beetle wants to look more dangerous or impressive than it really is. Or it can be aggressive: a predatory species will pretend to be a harmless one in order to lure its prey.

  My father, I think, was the former. But Olivia, I feel, falls into the latter category.

  Sometimes she doesn’t even realize she’s pretending. Take the first time she showed me the first few chapters of Annabel. It was a year ago now, September, six months before Bertie vanished. We were walking up Lewes High Street on an Indian summer’s day. Olivia, I remember, was wearing Greek sandals and a grey linen dress, the sort of garment that looks faded and thin but probably cost a fortune in Selfridges. I was sweating in my cardigan but I did not want to remove it for fear of revealing underarm sweat stains.

  She asked what I thought of the chapters. I told her that while I was impressed by her prose style, I was troubled by everything she had made up. I suppose this is ironic, coming from me, but I couldn’t help myself.

  She looked at me in surprise. ‘What have I made up?’

  ‘Well, her thoughts, her hand gestures, her outfits and all those decorative descriptions of flowers and table ornaments. They aren’t in any of the data I provided. You couldn’t know that there was “a look of admiration” from Mrs Beacham because of the “spotless damask tablecloth”, or that the hall table had a gold centrepiece with “sprays of Virginia creeper”.’

  ‘Well, no – no – those are just sort of imaginative touches, you know, just to bring the book alive. The reader understands what I’m doing – it’s a sort of imaginative agreement.’

  ‘But it’s not the truth.’

  Olivia thought about this for a moment. ‘People always think historians are telling some kind of objective truth, Vivian, but at the end of the day history is debate, discussion, conversation; we’re storytellers, really, we’re always reaching for the truth, but we have to invent the stories that get us there.’

  ‘So trickery and lies are OK?’

  ‘Nobody’s tricking anyone, or lying! Look, a famous history professor once said historians “make no greater or lesser truth claims than poets or painters”. If you think about it like that it’s not possible to be a historian and a liar.’

  ‘Well, I think the reader wants and deserves simple facts.’ My position was somewhat ludicrous, even to me.

  ‘But there’s no such thing as simple facts. Readers know that. What matters is integrity.’

  ‘And there’s a difference between integrity and telling the truth?’

  ‘Yes, of course there is.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Truth’s what you say and integrity’s the intention behind your words. It’s perfectly possible to lie with integrity. Think about people who lied to the Nazis when they were hiding a Jewish family in their attic.’

  I waited for Bertie to pee on a lamppost. ‘But your readers aren’t Nazis, Olivia, they’re normal decent people who want to learn something.’

  ‘They will learn something! OK, Vivian, look.’ She gave a strained smile and tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘How about we agree to disagree on this one? I’m happy to take the rap for my own inventive touches, none of this is ever coming back to you. After all, at the end of the day it’s my name on the cover, not yours.’

  I laughed. ‘It certainly is.’

  She looked at me for a moment too long, as if trying to gauge my tone of voice, and then gave up and walked off up the hill. She is not keen on conflict but I could see she was annoyed. Bertie and I followed.

  All her talk of integrity was rubbish of course. When Olivia wants something she is prepared to occupy very shaky moral ground indeed. This was clear from the outset when it came to securing Lady Burley’s permission to use the diary and Burley family archives.

  Olivia wrote the initial letter and emailed it to me as she sat in the bakery that first day. It was polite and professional. She reassured Lady Burley that I was fully on board and that she would treat her subject with the utmost respect.

  She never followed up with Lady Burley herself. She asked, in another email a few days later, whether I’d passed on the letter and whether Lady Burley had given the go-ahead. I replied in the affirmative and she chose to take my word for it. She never checked that Lady Burley was capable of reading and understanding her letter. She never asked for consent in writing from Lady Burley herself.

  I suppose she was afraid that if she pushed for it then permission might be denied. She took my affirmation at face value because it was convenient for her to do so, not because she believed me. I’m not sure where the integrity is in that.

  I assume she also decided that an email from me confirming Lady Burley’s consent would be legally binding. Whether or not that would stand up in a court of law, of course, is anyone’s guess.

  I do know that when it comes to integrity I myself am hardly blameless, but for most of my life I was an honest person in intention and deed. This did not serve me well. The truth can alienate people. In fact, I have noticed that in a professional setting nobody actually wants to hear it. Groups rely on flattery and charm, tact and encouragement, compromise and grey areas. Ultimately, I am sure that my tendency to see things in black and white and to be blunt about what I see contributed to my downfall as much as my final treacherous act.

  That, incidentally, was entirely out of character. A few people even said so at the time. One or two, whom I had known for many years, actually stuck their necks out and said that I had always been a loyal person, though I was – and I use their words – ‘socially awkward’. The word ‘breakdown’ was bandied around by one influential (male) colleague. It made no difference whatsoever to the outcome. I needed to be shot down, publicly. They just wanted me out. I do regret my actions, bitterly, but what is done cannot be undone.

  All my life I have found people complicated and baffling, and that now includes myself. When my inner moral compass snapped, I lost a grip on who I was. I did not recognize or understand the person I had become. Perhaps I still don’t.

  Since I came back to Sussex I have spent a lot of time studying my old friend, the hollow oak. Her red-rotten heartwood teems with invertebrates and I have counted, identified and classified a great many of them: spiders and centipedes, millipedes, woodlice, weevils and ants, earwigs and beetles – oh, so many beautiful beetles. I have identified, among others, the click and false click, the cobweb, longhorn, rove, minotaur, cardinal, stag, darkling and deathwatch. Sometimes I feel that I am a bit like that tree: on the outside I appear static and empty, I am certainly rotten and gnarled in places, but deep inside I am crawling with complicated life that few people notice or understand and even fewer care for or value.

  For a short while I thought Olivia might be the exception to this. It turns out that I was wrong.

  She can send me copies of the book, she can visit and beg, but she will never erase what she did to Bertie and the lies she told. I will finish my experiment. I must bring it to a close. The question is, how? Will I bring her down in public, at the Hunterian Museum? Or is there a different way?

  Olivia

  The Farmhouse and Ileford Manor

  Olivia felt bleary and deranged as she drove down the M23.

  The previous night she’d been forced to drive around west London at one in the morning searching for Dom. Eventually she’d found him, hoodie up, smoking on a bench by the river like a homeless boy. She got out and demanded that he come home. He did get into the car, but then he started shouting: ‘You can’t fucking tell me what to do any more! I’m not a kid!’

  She tried to stay reasonable. ‘You’re only fifteen. It’s a school night, Dom. You told me you’d be home by nine.’

  ‘Yeah, well you tell me all sorts of things that turn out to be bullshit.’ His voice wavered.

  �
�What do you mean?’

  ‘You and Dad! You’re both full of shit.’

  She wondered if he was drunk or stoned. But his enunciation was clear. He was, she thought, just upset. ‘Why are you so angry?’ she said. ‘What have we done? I need you to talk to me, Doms. I really do.’

  He jiggled his leg up and down. ‘You haven’t done anything.’

  ‘OK, Dad? What has Dad done to you? What’s this about?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, ask him!’ His face went puce, his eyes wide.

  ‘Dad and I are going to talk, OK?’ she said. ‘I know you’ve been picking up on some … tensions between us. Things haven’t been easy, we’ve had some money issues, but we’re going to sort it all out, OK? You don’t have to worry. Everything’s going to be just fine.’

  He grunted and stared out the window. ‘Yeah, right.’

  Unable to sleep, she’d eventually given up, got out of bed at six, dragged on jeans, a jumper and boots, fuelled herself with espresso and got into the car. She had left a note for Marta to try to get Dominic out of bed and to school.

  She felt drained and tremulous as she turned off the motorway. She didn’t know how to handle Dom. She needed to know what he knew, or thought he knew, about David, but it was wrong to press him on it, it wasn’t fair to put him in the middle of this mess. She also didn’t want to explain to her angry fifteen-year-old that deep down she was suspicious of his father too.

  Soon she turned onto the narrower country road. It was just beginning to get light, but mist blotted the windscreen, and as she followed the winding hawthorn tunnels along the foot of the Downs she had to keep stamping on the brakes so as not to hit the pheasants that intermittently clattered out in front of the car. She wondered whether Dom might have sensed the tension between David and Chloe in France, but of course it couldn’t be that because this anger had rooted in him well before France.

  She felt some of her jitteriness ease as she turned into the Farmhouse gateway. As she slammed the car door, rooks launched themselves from the top of a tree somewhere in the semi-dark mist behind the house, cawing madly. She took a breath and the damp sweetness of the autumn air released a bit of the tension inside her. She carried her bag from the car, treading carefully along the slippery terracotta bricks that led along the house front. The path was scattered with fallen leaves and the browning hydrangeas in the overgrown borders balanced droplets of mist in their fading petals. The sight of the Farmhouse door, fringed by wisteria that needed cutting back, and the bare, thorny climbing rose, made her feel a little more stable, as if she’d been out of her depth but had just found the mud with her toes. She felt, again, the hope that she might not have to sell. Selling this place would have broken something inside her.

  She’d always imagined that one day, when the children were grown, she’d leave UCL, sell up and come to live down here, writing books, doing her research, walking on the Downs. This was where she belonged, not in London surrounded by noise and people. She realized that now, when she imagined this future for herself, she was alone.

  She unlocked the front door and stepped inside. It was very cold and dim and smelled slightly of mildew. She dumped her bag on the tiled floor, turned on the lights, then went straight to the cupboard under the stairs to turn on the heating and hot water. She’d grab some coffee and toast and then go and see Vivian. Vivian always ate breakfast at seven thirty. It was almost eight now. She’d go over to Ileford at eight thirty.

  But it took her longer to get out of the house than she’d intended and it was nine by the time she passed through the tall stone gateway of Ileford. The mist-draped manor loomed ahead and the elms threw up tangled limbs as she passed beneath them. She remembered being told that you should never sit beneath an elm tree because they might drop a heavy branch on you; people had been killed that way.

  The mist still hung over the fields and woods and blurred the edges of the house, blotting out its tall chimneys. She drove right past the imposing arched front door to park in the back courtyard. Vivian’s car wasn’t here. She would wait then, she was in no rush. She had the whole day to wait if necessary. She had a bunch of paperwork on the back seat to keep her occupied. Her heart was skittish and her stomach clenched as she got out of the car and walked towards the scullery door. She couldn’t look at the well as she passed it, but she felt it sitting behind her like a big eye, watching.

  She thumped on the scullery door and shouted, ‘Vivian? Vivian? It’s me!’

  There was no response. So Vivian had ignored her message. Presumably she’d gone out deliberately. This was disappointing. She had been so sure that this time Vivian would be here.

  There was nothing left to do for the launch party, the publicists had it all under control. She would wear the saffron-coloured silk dress she had been given after the magazine shoot, which was glamorous enough, even though she wouldn’t have chosen the colour herself. She was determined to see Vivian today. She wasn’t going to go back to London without looking her in the eye and finding out what she was up to.

  It was beginning to drizzle now. The trees swayed and whispered behind the outhouses. She looked up at the windows, then got out her phone and called Vivian’s mobile. It went to voicemail, as it had done for weeks. Vivian really was a dangerously stubborn person. She left a message, a little terse. ‘Vivian, it’s me. It’s nine o’clock. I’m at Ileford, as I said I would be. I’m waiting for you here. I’m going to wait till you get back. I need to see you today. I’m not leaving till I’ve seen you.’

  She hung up and walked along the house and banged on the gunroom door with a fist. ‘Vivian?’ She didn’t know why she was shouting, as clearly Vivian wasn’t in. Suddenly, a kind of rebellion overtook her. She’d had enough of being shut out, of being controlled by Vivian.

  She marched down to the gunroom window. The pane was smooth, the putty fresh. Of course Vivian would have had it fixed. She was efficient. She noticed the details. That was her job. She looked in at the window catch. It was not shut.

  It really was that easy.

  She climbed through, then closed the window behind her and trod rapidly down the corridor, past the scullery, which still smelled of Vivian’s washing powder, past the silent kitchen, past the door to the cellars with the hatch that Uncle Quentin had installed to feed his Indian dancing bear. She wondered what it must have been like to be a bear trapped in the cellar with servants shoving raw steaks through that hatch. They had never discovered what happened to Quentin’s bear. Maybe it died of loneliness. Or maybe they shot it after it savaged its master.

  She was standing in the great hall beneath the imposing staircase, the oak-panelled ceiling and the minstrel’s gallery, when her phone buzzed. She grabbed it from her jeans pocket. It was Vivian.

  She stepped quickly over to the front window and peered out. ‘Vivian?’ The driveway was empty.

  ‘I got your message.’ Vivian’s voice was emotionless.

  ‘Good! Well, I’m glad you called me back. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages. Didn’t you get my messages – my emails – saying I’d be down here first thing today to see you?’ There was an echo on the line. She stepped closer to the window.

  ‘Yes. I’m calling to say that you’ll be waiting a very long time as I have to work today.’

  ‘Oh no. Oh. Right. Where? Are you at the museum? Could I come and meet you there?’

  ‘That’s out of the question, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Please, Vivian. We have to talk about this, we really do. I know you’re upset with me but—’

  ‘Upset?’

  ‘Well. OK. Hurt? Angry?’ Olivia stepped back from the window. She hugged herself. ‘I don’t know what you are! You have to tell me. Can’t we talk about this?’

  But Vivian said nothing.

  ‘Are you coming to the launch tomorrow? I hope you are.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Vivian, please. I’m so sorry you’re upset. I just want us to be friends.’

&nbs
p; Vivian hung up.

  Olivia stuffed her phone back into her pocket. This was too much. She was behaving like a petulant child now. She looked up the staircase. It was her one chance.

  Her boots did not make a sound on the worn runner.

  She’d always pictured the upstairs as similar to the ground-floor rooms, but the carpet along the corridor was threadbare beige, the walls a grubby magnolia. The musty smell was more pronounced up here and it was very cold indeed, and draughty, too, as if somewhere – perhaps in the servants’ floor above – a window was hanging open.

  The door to the first room was ajar and she saw faded floral wallpaper. She pushed it open. A huge bay window looked over the front of the house and driveway. The air smelled very faintly of Yardley’s lavender, but the room was obviously unused. It must have been Lady Burley’s. The double bed had a rather shabby pink eiderdown and old Laura Ashley cushions that matched the curtains. There were almost no possessions here, just a pile of Georgette Heyer paperbacks on the coffee table, a crocheted doily, dried flowers in a Wedgwood vase. It felt like the room of a dead old lady.

  She crossed to the window and looked across the front lawns parted by the long drive. She remembered Lady Burley’s story of seeing Violet’s ghost walking her wolfhound between the elms in the October mist. She stepped away and walked quickly out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her.

  The next room was almost unfurnished, just a double bed with an un-sheeted mattress and oxblood walls, flock curtains, a balding brown carpet. The air had the same forgotten smell. She went back out. It was a shame to see a stunning house like this so shockingly neglected and empty.

  As she crossed the corridor to the room opposite, her toe caught on a ridge in the carpet and she stumbled, almost careening into the wall, grabbing the door handle just in time to stop her head smashing into the plaster. She imagined Vivian finding her unconscious in the corridor. That would take some explaining.