The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  ‘Crikey. Did he ask about Eve?’

  ‘Not much. She didn’t really interest him.’

  ‘Helen Winlock? Minnie Burton? The other Metropolitan wives?’

  ‘Below his radar. Bystanders, and female ones at that. Supernumeraries.’

  ‘Written out – and written off. That has a familiar ring. I hope you corrected him?’

  ‘No. Life’s too short. Besides, he wasn’t altogether wrong: the men did make the running, it was 1922 – what else would you expect?’

  ‘You have an argumentative nature, so I’d expect you to argue. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because I felt old and ill. This bloody arthritis was half killing me.’

  ‘What a liar you are, Lucy,’ she said comfortably. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to cross-question you. In the first place, I don’t need to because I know the answer anyway. In the second, you’ll only get grumpy and clam up. And in the third – look,’ she gestured at the motorway signs. ‘That’s us. Exit thirteen. It’s only twenty minutes from here. I’ve brought lilies – horribly florist, but I panicked – they’re in the boot. What did you bring?’

  ‘Spring flowers. Masses of them. Jonquils and narcissus. I picked them in my garden.’

  ‘Oh, how clever! Her favourites. She’ll love that.’

  Rose’s face lit. For a second, the lines on her face vanished, the grandmother and widow vanished, and I saw her as the indomitable child I’d known. The effect was weakening; it brought tears to my eyes. This happens occasionally now and very tiresome it is; I assume it’s a symptom of age. I brushed them away quickly, but not before Rose had noticed them. Her face softened.

  ‘Ah, Lucy,’ she said, resting her hand on mine. ‘I know. How many decades has it been?’

  ‘A great many. We’ve been friends now for —’

  ‘Most of our lives. Let’s just say that. Good friends. And long lives too… though, of course, I’m just a stripling compared to you,’ she added, as the small country church that was our destination came into view. This was a familiar tease: Rose’s landmark birthday was still some distance away; she had not yet passed ninety; I had. She liked to remind me of my greater decrepitude.

  ‘Well, we’re not likely to make this trip again, so we’d better get a move on,’ she remarked, on a firmer note. She opened the glass partition. ‘Wheelie, park over there, would you? Get as close to the lych-gate as you can, then it’s less far for us to hobble. No, no, don’t fuss, we can manage the flowers perfectly well. You just stay here and smoke a cigarette. We shan’t be long. Then we’ll trot on home and have lunch.’

  Wheeler, who was the great-nephew of the original Wheeler, had been driving Rose since he was eighteen. After some thirty years, he was used to her vagaries; he assisted us gallantly from the car, opened the lych-gate and obediently retired. Removing his cap, he leaned against the vintage Bentley’s gleaming bonnet, and lifted his face to the sun. ‘Wheelie claims to have given up,’ Rose hissed, as we began to negotiate the churchyard path. ‘But I know differently. He’s cut down, that’s all. The second we’re out of sight, he’ll light up a Silk Cut. I like him to know I know – keeps him on his toes. Now, where are we? Is it left or right, Lucy? It all looks different. I’m not sure.’

  It was ten years since our last visit, so I wasn’t too sure either. The warm weather had brought the grass on, and with it a thick spring burgeoning of weeds and wild flowers. Leaning on my stick, I peered about the graveyard short-sightedly: the small church was fifteenth century, and many of the tombs were almost as old; we were in this ancient sector now, where lichens and the weathering of stone made the inscriptions virtually unreadable. Who wants to lie in some mouldering old churchyard? Frances’s voice enquired from a long-distant past. This might convert her, I thought: it was a serene and lovely place, isolated, quiet, with a matchless view across the north Hampshire downs.

  ‘We need the modern bit, Rose,’ I said. ‘I think it’s over there. No – not that way. You should never walk around a church anticlockwise. It’s widdershins. It’s unlucky.’

  ‘The hell with that, it’s quicker, and there’s a path. I’m not risking that long grass,’ Rose replied. Ignoring superstition, she set off to the left; I turned to the right. The hip started complaining immediately, so it took me an age to negotiate the bumpy surface and limp my way between the stones. I passed into the shadows to the north of the church, and emerged into sunlight the far side; the hawthorn hedges bordering the churchyard were coming into flower and I could smell their heavy, peculiar, vixen scent; from their depths, a thrush burst into song. I found Rose standing by Poppy d’Erlanger’s overgrown grave, clutching her florist’s flowers.

  Jacob d’Erlanger, who had selected this burial place and commissioned this ornate and magnificent headstone, was buried next to his wife; he had shot himself on the anniversary of her death, three years later to the day. Rose, who had turned to his grave, gave a sudden moan of distress. ‘Got it wrong,’ she said. ‘All wrong. We should have brought him flowers too. How crass I am. He was always really good to me… Now what are we going to do? I know – we’ll give Poppy your lovely jonquils, and I’ll give him my lilies. They’re absolutely Jaco’s style.’

  We laid the huge swath of pink-throated lilies on d’Erlanger’s grave and the loose bunch of spring flowers on Poppy’s. Neither of us was sure what to do next: I felt I couldn’t utter an agnostic platitude, and Rose, who went to church regularly in the same devout spirit as, when younger, she’d ridden to hounds or opened her gardens to charitable causes, seemed moved, but reluctant to risk a prayer. ‘Well, God bless you both,’ she muttered, crossed herself with a practised gesture, and turned away.

  ‘He chose well, Jaco,’ she remarked as, arm in arm, we made our halting way back towards the car. ‘He chose the right wife – and, when she died, the right place to bury her. People thought all Poppy cared about was parties, and rushing about and being fashionable – but really she hated that life. It made her hectic and miserable. Jaco understood that. They used to live near here, you know, Lucy, in this absurd mansion he bought for her – it was sold eventually, after he killed himself. It’s one of those spiffy country-house hotels now, Poppy would rock with laughter if she could see it.’

  Rose came to a halt, shivered and drew her fur coat more tightly around her. She peered across the graveyard towards the church, as if she expected someone to emerge from its entrance porch – her mother, perhaps.

  ‘That night at Shepheard’s,’ I said, finally voicing a question that had perplexed me for decades: ask it never, I thought, or ask it now: ‘When Poppy set off from the hotel – was she on her way to meet Jacob?’

  I wasn’t sure how Rose would react, but she seemed unperturbed. ‘Oh, I think so, don’t you?’ she replied. ‘That’s why she was making such a fuss about what to wear that night. That’s why she wore those rubies Jaco gave her, and put her wedding ring back on. I knew they’d never divorce. They’d quarrelled, but that meant nothing. Those weeks in Cairo, she was just fretting about Jaco, waiting for him to turn up and tell her not to be so damn stupid. The second he did, we’d have been on the next boat home.’ She paused. ‘I couldn’t say that then, Lucy. No one could. Wheeler was brilliant, so careful what she divulged, but that policeman, the Egyptian – can’t remember his name––’

  ‘El-Deeb. It means “the wolf” – Herbert Winlock told me afterwards.’

  ‘Does it really? Well, the wolf prowled around, as you know, and eventually he found out which rings Poppy had been wearing, and their significance. Who the fool was that gave him that information, I can’t imagine – Wheeler and Eve certainly never let on.’

  Rose gave a puzzled frown. I said nothing – Frances’s involvement was safe with me.

  ‘That detail was fatal. It convinced him my mother met Jaco that night, and planned to do so; by then he’d heard all about Poppy’s flirtations and the fight at Shepheard’s with that ghastly Carew man, of course. So he put two an
d two together, made eighty-eight and decided the solution was obvious: it was Jaco who killed her, in a fit of jealous rage.’

  ‘He wasn’t the only one who came up with that solution, Rose,’ I said. The d’Erlanger case, a cause célèbre resurrected to this day, had attracted the attention of numerous writers over the years, and new solutions were regularly propounded. Five books had been published – the two that came out in the 1930s being especially virulent.

  ‘Indeed. But then Jaco was a Jew, Lucy. His family might have been Church of England for three generations, but he was Jewish by descent. So certain factions couldn’t wait to point the finger. After he died they really let rip – but even before that they made his life hell. Cut him, ostracised him, blackballed him from their stinking clubs – and some of them were so-called friends, people who’d sponged off him, sucked up to Poppy, stayed at their house. Christ, it was vile. I learned a lot from that.’

  Her hand, resting on my arm, had begun to shake. ‘Don’t get upset, Rose,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have raised it. Let it rest. Let them rest. Come back to the car.’

  ‘Very well. Just as long as you know – Jaco didn’t do it, Lucy. He adored Poppy. He was a kind, gentle man and he wouldn’t have harmed a hair on her head.’

  We turned and continued down the path to the lych-gate. I wondered if Rose had heard about the latest book on the d’Erlanger case; my publisher, knowing my interest in Egypt, had sent me a proof copy some months before. Its thesis was new: Poppy had been killed by her lover Carew, a British officer then notorious throughout Cairo; obsessed with Poppy, he had intercepted her when she left Shepheard’s and persuaded her into his car, where they had quarrelled violently. Known for his drinking, his womanising, his brutal temper and his prowess on those shoots in the marshlands where Poppy’s body had been found, Carew had strangled her, the writer claimed – citing medical evidence not revealed at the inquest. In an effort to suggest robbery as a motive, he had then slashed her throat and taken her jewellery. His brother officers provided alibis, and the British authorities connived in the cover-up.

  The writer made out a strong case; she’d pursued a lengthy paper trail, helped by government papers released under the thirty-year rule but long ignored. Carew had been swiftly posted to India, she’d discovered, where he’d conveniently drunk himself to death – and it was there, a year later, she claimed, that Poppy’s missing rubies had surfaced. Following this lead in an attempt to clinch her case, she found that in 1924 they’d been purchased from a Delhi dealer by a Milwaukee millionaire untroubled as to their provenance. A footnote claimed that, recut and reset, they’d been sent to auction by the millionaire’s widow in the 1960s as ‘The Property of a Lady’ at Sotheby Parke Bernet.

  Should I tell Rose this? The past is an unruly place. Rose was no reader; with luck, the book would pass her by. There was no cause for me to bring it to her attention, I decided, especially now. Let it be. Rose was frailer than she’d been when we last met, as I was.

  ‘How beautiful it is here,’ I said, as we reached the end of the path and glanced back one last time across the quietness of green hills. Beech hangers, blossoming hedgerows, England in spring’s bridal array. ‘Look at those fields, those woods. Such light! I’d forgotten there were still views like this. I thought they’d all been built over. Destroyed.’

  ‘I know.’ Rose followed my gaze. Her hand was steady now. ‘The image of England all those men in the trenches fought for. I always think heaven must look like this – English fields, on a spring day. But then I would: I have England in my bones.’ She sighed and shook herself. ‘So peaceful – and unspoiled,’ she continued, in a stronger tone, ‘and that’s astonishing when you think how close we are to roads and towns and urban sprawl. But there’s a reason for that. Ancestral acres, Lucy.’

  ‘Really? Whose?’

  ‘Carnarvon’s of course. I thought you’d know. His land. As far as the eye can see from here. Passed on now – to his son and grandson, et cetera. I’ve lost count of those earls, but the estate’s still huge. That’s Beacon Hill over there, where Carnarvon was buried when they brought his body back from Egypt – where he asked to be buried. All alone. Overlooking his domain.’ She turned and pointed. ‘Highclere Castle is north of here, beyond those beech woods. And that house Ma left me, where Petey and I spent the summer after we left Egypt, such a heavenly place – you must remember that, Lucy?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Well, that’s not far either. We could visit it, if you like, on the way to my house.’ She glanced at me, and seeing my expression, changed her mind. ‘No. Enough memories for now. Time for lunch! I’m starving. Graveyards always have that effect on me.’ We had reached the Bentley, and with Wheeler’s assistance, climbed back into it.

  ‘Put your foot down, Wheelie,’ Rose commanded. Wheeler obeyed.

  We reached Rose’s house with admirable speed. Here, Rose had spent her long married life and her long widowhood; here she had given birth to and raised four sons; a fifth, born disabled, had died in infancy. In the distant kitchen regions, Wheeler’s wife was cooking lunch. Rose led me into a graceful drawing room with a view of the gardens that she and her late husband had created, a room that, in all the years I’d known it, had never changed. Apart from the new eco-efficient radiators it appeared unaltered: it was thick with belongings – no trace here of the ‘massive clear-out’. Her three springer spaniels came bounding to greet us, and with the sense of pleasure this welcoming house always brought, I allowed myself to be settled on a huge sagging chesterfield, close to a log fire. Rose made me a dry Martini; she took a childish delight in all cocktails, and made them unapologetically strong. I sipped it cautiously.

  ‘I’ve got a present for you,’ she announced, to my surprise, turning to a tall walnut bureau and opening one of its many drawers. ‘Something I found during my clearance activities. It will interest you, I think. I was feeling a bit seedy this winter,’ she continued, rummaging around, ‘down in the dumps. Nothing to worry about, the doc said, but I am getting on. That’s really why I embarked on the clear-out. I don’t want my poor boys to have to cope with a whole heap of rubbish once I go.’

  Rose’s eldest son was in his sixties; the youngest was at least fifty: I said mildly: ‘I’m sure they’ll manage, Rose.’

  ‘Even so… had to be done! I was dreading it – this house is stuffed to the gills. But actually, I enjoyed it, Lucy. I dug up all sorts of glorious treasures – darling Bill’s love letters to me in the war and mine to him – very racy they were, I was shocked. Lots of sweet pictures the boys drew for me when they were little. Souvenirs from Egypt, things I’d squirrelled away, I even found that bead Howard Carter gave me once… that brought the past back! D’you remember how rude Carter was to us that day? Such a bully. He intimidated people, even Carnarvon, I used to think, and definitely poor Eve…

  ‘Bother, it’s not here, where did I put it?’ She shut the first drawer and began to rummage in a second. ‘Of course, my Bill always said Carter’s belligerence cost him his gong,’ she continued. ‘And Bill was in a position to know, being friends with those fusspots at court who fix these things. He said Carter put too many backs up, not just in Egypt, in London too. So when it came to the crunch, there was no one to lobby for him, which you need, of course. Result: not so much as a piddling decoration, let alone a K. No knighthood, Lucy, despite making the archaeological find of all time.’

  Rose abandoned the second drawer and opened a third. I was listening with only half an ear, always an error in her case. Rose had worked as a volunteer prison visitor for decades, and had been a ruthless committee woman, fighting long campaigns for penal reform. She had served on the local bench as a magistrate for thirty years: anyone deceived by her twinsets and pearls, her unaltered upper-class accent or her manner of speech; anyone who assumed she was a pushover, a privileged relic of a lost era, or a fool, soon learned their mistake. ‘Once you’ve disarmed them,’ she’d say, ‘you g
o straight for the jugular.’ Rose’s favourite disarmament technique, as I should have remembered, was the inconsequential chatter I called Rose’s riffs, and she called ‘rattling on’.

  ‘Also, the King was fearfully sniffy about Carter, I gather,’ she was saying now. ‘And the courtier contingent considered him a bounder, of course. They didn’t care for him at all. When Carter did that lecture tour of America, you know, he was given an honorary degree from Yale, and he was invited to the White House twice. Eve was so thrilled for him. She said President Coolidge was really fired up about the whole Tutankhamun thing, simply had to hear all about it from the great discoverer himself… But in England? Fobbed off with one invitation to a Buck House garden party! Poor Carter. I never liked him much, but even I think that’s a pretty damn poor show.

  ‘A grotesque injustice, actually,’ she went on, bending over, rummaging, keeping her back to me, and sounding cross. ‘I don’t like injustice, Lucy, as you know. And in Carter’s case, the reason was just plain old snobbery. Carter wasn’t a gentleman, and it didn’t help that he pretended he was – but who cares? Does that alter what he achieved? If he’d been Eton and Oxford, they’d have given him a knighthood like a shot. Mind you, my darling Bill didn’t agree. He maintained it was all that dealing Carter did: people thought it bad form. Well, that’s a joke, Lucy, as you know. Bill was such an innocent! I told him: eliminate dealers, and you can kiss goodbye to half the contents of the British Museum, and the Met and the Louvre, because where d’you think they came from?’

  I made no comment. I too thought Carter had been treated shabbily by the British powers-that-be; in view of the historic nature of his find, he’d expected, and deserved, some honour. Several archaeologists contemporary to him were knighted, including Flinders Petrie, Evans of Knossos, and Woolley of Ur: for Carter, nothing, not so much as an OBE. I found it hard to care. Rose attached importance to the honours system; I did not. But then Rose and I differed in many key respects: she was a staunch monarchist, a lifelong Tory activist, a churchgoer, a faithful wife; I was none of those things.