by Lucy Atkins
She drops her hands and then I see that her mouth has twisted into an ugly, queer shape. ‘You’re demented, Vivian.’
I feel as if she has reached out and slapped my face.
‘Jesus Christ! How could you do this to me?’
‘You did this to yourself, Olivia.’
‘How could you turn on me like this?’
I stiffen. ‘I’m not your disciple. I don’t owe you anything.’
‘I always knew you were unstable. Lady Burley told me about your mother’s accident, you being trapped in the car. I know you’re damaged by that, Vivian, I understand, but this! Jesus Christ. This is just deranged. It’s vindictive! Why would you do this to me?’
I was not prepared for her to mention my mother. That feels like a second blow. I turn away, lurch a few paces, but then my foot catches on the fallen branch and I topple sideways onto Bertie’s grave, going down on my bad knee. I feel my patella grind into the headstone; a vicious, sharp white sound travels up my leg. Everything goes black for a second.
I grasp my knee and cry out, but she has spun away from me; she is half running already, in too-big wellingtons, jumping over tree stumps, pushing through hazel branches, sticks snapping beneath her, fleeing from me like a startled animal. Her grey scarf floats and flutters behind her as the trees swallow her up.
I lean down and hold my knee in both hands. The pain is very great. I am not even sure that I can get up unaided. Perhaps it is broken. But she has gone.
After a bit, I’m not sure how long, I manage to roll slowly onto my hands and somehow haul my body off the ground, using the tree trunk for leverage. I brush myself down, then, and try to put some weight on the leg. It is very painful indeed, but I don’t think it is broken. I find a stout stick and begin to hop after her, leaning all my weight on the stick instead of on my leg. I am very slow, the pain is distracting; it makes me feel quite detached.
As I trace her footsteps back through the curious trees I wonder how long it will take Olivia to realize that she has nowhere to run to.
Olivia
Ileford Woods
It was the snapshot that did it, the instant when Vivian lurched to one side and stumbled a few paces towards the oak tree. It was suddenly clear. Vivian’s shape slotted perfectly into the other shape that, for four years now, had lived in the frightened part of her brain.
It was the way the overcoat hung off Vivian’s shoulders, seen from behind and slightly sideways; the way she held herself a little off kilter, her head lowered, the back of her cropped hair and the edge of an ear visible above the overcoat collar. It was the light too, perhaps, the shadows of the darkening wood. She knew then with complete certainty that Vivian was the person who’d followed her in London all those times. Vivian was her stalker. She hadn’t been hallucinating. She hadn’t invented it. It wasn’t stress-related paranoia or imaginings, it was Vivian. Vivian in her man’s overcoat.
It was Vivian she’d seen in the alley near her office as she went into the cafe each day for her cappuccino; Vivian in the archway at the end of a tube platform and in the street by her house. And then last night, standing at the back of the room by the Irish giant. It wasn’t a man; it wasn’t a stranger. Or maybe it had been, once. Because Vivian had been following her before she even knew who Vivian was.
This moment of realization made Olivia turn away, electric with fear. Instinct took over then, the overwhelming need to get out of the woods to a place of safety. But even as she ran, wildly, trying to find the path through the trees, weighed down by the wellingtons on the end of her legs, stumbling over roots and stumps, her knees weak, gasping for air, her heart straining and branches whipping at her body, she knew there was no path out of here, that nowhere would ever be safe now. She would never get away from Vivian.
Vivian
Ileford Manor
It is getting dark as I hobble through the gate into the courtyard. We are late for tea, now, it is past four o’clock and the sky has faded so that everything looks gloomy and monochrome. The kitchen and gunroom lights cast a yellowish stain on the gravel. The house looks down as I hobble past the well. I can feel its curiosity. What will I do now?
It has taken me a while to get back and I cannot see Olivia. I wonder if she has taken her car and returned to London. Even if she has, she will be back.
Then I see movement in the shadow by the gunroom door and I realize she is standing on the step, waiting for me. As I get closer, I see that the front of her jacket and her thighs are smeared with clay. She must have fallen whilst running away from me. There is a rub of dirt across her cheek. I see that she is smiling, weakly, pathetically. She holds out a hand to me. It is trembling.
‘Vivian,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry you fell. I’m sorry I ran. I panicked. We really need to talk about this, don’t we? Could we just talk? This is a huge muddle, but we can sort this out, I know we can.’
I ignore her outstretched hand. I pull out the key and unlock the gunroom door.
She levers off her muddy wellingtons on the boot scraper and carries them over the threshold. I hobble in and sit on the bench.
I hold up a foot and gesture at it. She bends like servant and pulls off my boot. The pain makes me wince. ‘Is it very bad? Do you need to see a doctor? Should I drive you to the doctor’s?’
I don’t reply. I look at the ceiling. I feel her looking at me. The patch where the leak was still needs plastering and painting. It has been on my list since the early summer.
‘Shall we warm up and see? We need to warm up, don’t we? I’m freezing. You must be too.’ She is desperately trying to work out how to behave, what she needs to say in order to make this go away. It is quite awkward.
I limp ahead of her down to the kitchen. She walks slowly, keeping her distance, a few paces behind. I fill the kettle and keep my weight on my left leg. She tries to get me to sit down, but I ignore her, so she makes small talk and hugs herself. She is remarkably good at this. Her voice sounds almost normal. She talks about the chilly weather and advises me to clear out Ileford’s drains as she, herself, has just had a terrible bill at the Farmhouse from a damp expert, in part because of a blocked drainpipe. Is she trying to win me round with banalities?
As I wait for the kettle to boil I try to distract myself from the pain by listing to myself the household beetles by their common names, which always rather delight me: the larder beetle, bacon beetle, cigarette beetle, drugstore beetle, biscuit beetle, furniture beetle, carpet beetle …
I give her the mugs of tea to carry to the kitchen table and we sit on opposite sides, facing one another. I try to stretch my leg out, but the knee does not want to straighten. I think it may be swelling badly now, pressing against my trouser. Olivia’s make-up has smudged beneath her eyes, her hair has come half loose and her lipstick has almost vanished. She no longer cares. She puts both hands around her mug. She has taken my pheasant mug. I reach for it and she flinches. I ignore this and prise it out of her hands, then push the one with flowers towards her.
‘Oh, sorry,’ she says. ‘Is that your pheasant mug? It’s pretty.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I like pheasants.’
‘Well …’ She offers a weak smile. ‘What a muddle, Vivian. What a muddle we’ve got ourselves into here.’ Perhaps she thinks that if she keeps using childish words, this problem will shrink and vanish. It is rather touching.
I take the knife that I left on the table and slice through a chunk of the Battenberg that I’d got out in preparation for her visit. The marzipan has gone a bit crusty but it can’t be helped. I put a piece on a plate and hand it to her, then cut one for myself. I look at the cake and for a second I forget about my knee as I admire the artifice of it, the garish colours, the pleasing geometry. I bite into it and feel the extravagant over-sweetness fill my mouth.
She looks at the Battenberg but doesn’t touch it. I am disappointed as I want to feed her. She looks so wan and fragile.
She lifts her tea and blows on it and her eyelids
close. I see that she is exhausted. Her eyes open again and behind the carefully crafted calm I see what must be panic. I finish the rest of my Battenberg in two bites and dust my hands off.
‘One thing that’s bothered me, Vivian …’ She puts the mug down, ‘… is that I feel like you’ve never really been properly paid for your work. I mean, I know I tried, I tried quite hard actually, to get you to agree to more money, a share of the royalties, but maybe I should have tried even harder? I know you didn’t want a share of the profits but that was before we got onto the bestseller lists, wasn’t it? We’ve sold the film rights now, too. I was going to tell you about that, but it’s been so … so … you’ve been … But look, Vivian, what I’m saying is I want you to accept more money. I want you to be paid properly for your work. You earned it.’
If money is the only way she can think of to get rid of me, then she really is floundering. Does she actually believe that she can pay me to go away? I sip my tea and feel it flush the sweet, sticky cake from my tooth enamel. I am not sure how low she has to go before she comes back up to meet me.
‘I don’t need any money,’ I say. ‘I have a place to live and plenty to live on. Lady Burley is leaving Ileford to me. I don’t want it, as it happens, but it would be cruel to refuse her, as I’m the closest thing she has to family. On the current property market Ileford is worth up to £3 million. Not that I’ll be able to sell it. It would be wrong to sell because she doesn’t want it inhabited by hedge fund managers. The point is, this is not about money, Olivia.’
‘Then what is it about?’ She presses her hands on the table, flat. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t know why you’ve done this to me.’ The dark clots of her nail polish have chipped, perhaps from where she fell in the woods. She is trying so hard to control her tone. She looks wispy and deranged now, but also cross. I can see the difficult old lady inside her filing a claim for that beautiful face. ‘What have I ever done to you?’
I drum my fingers next to her untouched square of cake. ‘Other than kill Bertie?’
‘Other than the horrible accident with Bertie, for which I am profoundly, profoundly, sorry and always will be. But this can’t be about Bertie, can it? I mean, you must have planned this long before Bertie died. It was you, wasn’t it, I saw you, near my office … and … other places?’ She definitely looks a little afraid.
‘You’re right. This was nothing to do with Bertie. It first occurred to me to do this about four and a half years ago. It took quite a while to master the relevant skills, I’m not a historian like you. It took me two years to create a diary to a sufficiently high standard to fool a Victorian documents expert, but I knew it could be done, hoaxes have been done before, and by people far less clever than me.’
‘But … Oh God, Vivian. Why?’
I sit back. My knee throbs demonically. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘You have to tell me. Tell me what this is about. Then maybe we can straighten this out?’
‘Right then!’ The force of my voice makes her jump and sit up straight. ‘I need you to go up to my office. My knee is painful and I don’t think I can manage the stairs. Can you do that?’
‘Your office?’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know where my office is.’ I smile at her. ‘I watched you climb in the gunroom window the day before yesterday. I heard you come upstairs.’
She blinks. ‘Jesus. You were here?’
‘I’ve actually been waiting for you to ask me about my office.’
‘Your beetles?’
Now it’s my turn to blink in disbelief. ‘Of course, my beetles. What else?’
‘I … You …’ She can’t formulate a coherent sentence so I give her directions on where to find the file on my desk. ‘Just bring it down.’
Obediently, she gets up and leaves the room. I hear her trot up the staircase and along the corridor above me. I try again to straighten my knee. The pain has subsided, just a little, and it is very numb and tight. I want it to be a bad bruise, but I know, deep down, that it’s more than that and I should probably be at the doctor’s. It is dark outside. She’s right, the kitchen is freezing. I reach out and touch the radiator. It is icy. The central heating must have misfired again. There is a faint, mournful wind coming down the chimneys. I do not want to have to go down to the cellars with my knee like this to deal with the boilers, but I will probably have to or we’ll freeze to death.
After a few moments I hear her coming back with the correct file. Her eyes are wide as she steps back into the kitchen so I know she’s looked at it. She hands it to me and slips back into her seat. I can see that she is confused and not a little disturbed as to what I am doing with copies of her correspondence with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Her brows are knotted. She is breathing fast.
I decide it’s best to read it out before I try to explain, so she’ll remember exactly what she wrote. I find the letter I want and begin to read.
Dear Darren,
I am writing to thank you for what you have done to protect my father’s precious legacy and for sending back his original Archeocopris olivia photographs.
I look up. She is really alarmed, now, very pale indeed. She opens her mouth, but I silence her with a shake of my head.
I am so glad they enabled you to expose this awful attempt to sabotage my father’s life’s work. I knew, when I read Ballard’s Nature paper, that my father would never have made a mistake of that magnitude. Of course, I didn’t have the skills to find out what was going on, but you did, and I will be forever grateful to you and your team at the Museum of Natural History for taking my objection seriously. By comparing Professor Ballard’s images of the faked fossil with the original photographs I sent, you have uncovered this terrible fraud and restored my father’s reputation.
I am of course concerned – and very shocked – that it was possible to steal the original specimen, switch it for a fake and dupe the scientific community in this way. However, I am glad that our original amber fossil has now been recovered and is safe again with you. It takes a particularly warped personality to do something like this, and I am glad to hear that Ballard’s career as a coleopterist is now over – forever.
I look up at her again. She is rigid and unblinking. I can’t help but smile as I read the next bit.
I’d like to reiterate that I have no desire for any further contact with the department or the university on this matter, and certainly not with Ballard. This has been very distressing for me and since I’m now being considered for a professorship myself I can’t allow any more distractions at this point.
As I read out the next sentences I barely need to look at the words. They wounded me so deeply in the past but, interestingly, they seem to have lost their power.
Integrity is everything in academia. Without it, we might as well not exist, so I am very glad that this unscrupulous individual has been publicly exposed.
‘You are righteous,’ I say, ‘when it comes to other peoples’ mistakes, aren’t you?’
For a while, she doesn’t reply. I am sure that her brain is working insanely hard to understand how I am connected to all this. Eventually, she says, ‘Were you a friend of Professor Ballard? Is that what this is? You weren’t … Were you his wife, Vivian?’
I make a tutting sound. ‘You assumed Professor Ballard was a man? You should know better than that, Olivia.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You still don’t know? Really?’ I do smile then. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! If you hadn’t interfered, my life would be entirely different. Science isn’t as rigorous as you’d think. Nobody checked my fake fossil or examined it against the original photographs until you made them. This isn’t the first time data has been fabricated or manipulated, or images falsified in a big scientific paper, and it won’t be the last.’
‘You’re … Are you saying …?’
‘Yes.’ I nod encouragingly. ‘That’s right, Olivia. I’m Professor Ballard. Or I was before you had
me erased.’
Olivia
Ileford Manor
The words Vivian had just spoken didn’t line up. She was having problems even thinking now. Her throat felt parched, her head hurt. Her limbs felt weak.
Vivian was plainly – frighteningly – mad.
She needed to calm down. She had to think about this rationally. But she hadn’t had enough sleep to think rationally; everything felt chaotic, as if she were living in a speeded up, out of control film. Everything was moving so fast that bits of her mind were coming loose and flying off.
And now, sitting at Vivian’s table, listening to this bizarre revelation, the pressure inside her skull felt immense. She felt as if her brow might explode and spray her exhausted brains across the table.
She looked at Vivian’s square, blank face, the little, alert eyes, fixed on something just to one side of her, that strange, encouraging smile.
She leaned on her elbows to steady herself, steepling her fingers against her temples. ‘What in God’s name,’ she said, ‘are you talking about?’
Vivian
Ileford Manor
She blinks rapidly and whispers it again. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about, Vivian?’
‘Well I did mention, the day we first met, that I was a retired Oxford professor. Sadly, you didn’t believe me. It does seem rather ironic that you, with your professional interest in women, should assume that D.V. P. Ballard was a man. The ‘D’ is for Dorothy, that’s my Christian name, after my mother, though I’ve always been called Vivian, which is my middle name. I’ve used initials professionally ever since I submitted an early paper as Dr Dorothy Ballard, had it rejected, then submitted the exact same paper two years later as D.V. P. Ballard and had it published.’ Olivia seems flabbergasted. ‘I know,’ I nod. ‘You wouldn’t believe what we had to put up with in those days. The ‘P’ is for Penelope, in case you wondered, dreadful name. But since D.V.P. Ballard is now synonymous with scientific misconduct and public disgrace, it seemed prudent not to call myself Ballard any more. Tester was my mother’s maiden name. I don’t like it much, but there you are. You erased D.V. P. Ballard five years ago.’
