The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  I turned to look at the silver-framed family photographs clustered on the table next to me, and they led me back to a past where Rose’s chatter became inaudible. Rose as a debutante; Rose in uniform, arm in arm with the young officer who would become her husband. Her brother Peter as a small boy, then as a thin, beautiful, ferocious young man. An older Peter, in wartime uniform. Rose’s husband again, in his later incarnation as Lieutenant Colonel Sir William Hicks, MC, DSO, CVO, equerry to some royal. A kind man, I was thinking, and a good husband: why had Rose chosen well and I so badly; why had her life been tranquil, mine otherwise?

  Rose abandoned the drawer she’d been searching, and slammed it shut. ‘Dammit, where did I put your present?’ she said. ‘And where was I? What set me off on that rant about Carter? Oh yes, archaeology, that’s the link: my massive clear-out, my very own dig! I can’t tell you, Lucy, how much stuff I unearthed. Tons of it. Treasures and trinkets and trash. Ration books. Medals. Baby clothes. Boxes and boxes of letters… mine, Petey’s. Blurry old photographs of you and Petey and me in Egypt – and later of course.’

  She bent down to the lowest of the bureau’s drawers and gave a small cry of triumph: ‘Ah, here you are at last!’ Turning to face me, her face flushed from her efforts, she tossed a bundle into my lap. It was a bulky thing, tied up with scarlet ribbon. I looked at it in silence, alert too late. ‘I got shot of almost all the letters I found,’ she went on, avoiding my eyes. ‘I had a huge bonfire. I don’t want my boys discovering my secrets – or anyone else’s for that matter. But those I kept.’

  My hands had begun to tremble. I put on my spectacles, and the contents of the bundle swam into focus: a clutch of fat treacherous envelopes. KV, KV… Then I saw the name and address, saw they were written with a schoolroom dipping pen, in blue-black ink, saw the looped handwriting was neat and pinched. I felt a flood of relief: nothing revealing here, surely? Just early letters, schoolgirl letters: written in an attic bedroom, at an old desk, with a drawer that locked. There was only one key that had fitted that drawer. I used to wear it on a chain around my neck.

  ‘Your Cambridge letters.’ Rose hesitated. ‘They were a lifeline to me then, Lucy. I found them at the back of a cupboard. I read them again last week. So many things I’d forgotten – your father, that bloody governess.’

  ‘I have your letters too. And Frances’s. All of them. I was reading them last night.’

  ‘I’m glad. Then we’re quits.’ Rose crossed to her drinks tray, and waved the cocktail shaker about. ‘Still a smidgen left. Have a top-up – we can’t waste it. Ages since I’ve seen you. I’ve missed you badly, Lucy. Let’s celebrate.’

  She replenished my glass and her own. She sat down next to me on the sofa and turned to face me. I’d picked up the hints by then, and knew what was coming, so I said: ‘I know where this is leading. Are you trying to get me drunk, Rose?’

  ‘Might be. Anything to loosen your obstinate tongue.’ With great gentleness, she laid her hand on mine. ‘You can talk about it, Lucy,’ she said, her eyes searching mine, her expression troubled. ‘You shouldn’t store things up the way you do. I knew some of it anyway – and what I didn’t know I’d guessed. Years ago. Long before I found those boxes of letters… and those, I promise you, have now gone up in smoke.’

  She leaned closer towards me. ‘Please, Lucy. Why hide things from me, of all people? I know you loved him – and where’s the shame in that? Why do you lock things away like this? I know it hurts – but if you’d only share it, it might hurt less.’

  ‘It isn’t a question of shame. And it doesn’t hurt. Nothing does any more. You know that.’

  ‘I know nothing of the sort. Why must you pretend to be invulnerable? I know you, Lucy. I know you inside and out. Dear God, you’re obstinate. Right, one last time, and remember: given your age, and mine, there might not be another opportunity.’

  ‘A low blow. Stop it, Rose. Back off.’

  ‘Last chance. Yes or no. If you want to talk, we can. If you don’t, more fool you.’

  There was a silence. The fire sputtered and hissed. I love Rose and the temptation was strong, but there are some things I never have, and never will, discuss. Eventually, I said ‘Pass,’ and, knowing Rose’s skills, I said it firmly. She sighed and then smiled in resignation. ‘Very well. Have it your way for now. But I’m warning you – I shan’t give up.’ Giving me her hand, she helped me to my feet.

  ‘Watch your step, Lucy,’ she continued, drawing me towards the door, making sure the dogs and the rugs did not trip me. ‘Time to eat. Mrs W has made us a feast… Rereading those Cambridge letters has made me think, you know – there are lots of questions I want to ask you. So, no forbidden topics, I swear, but let’s be wicked, let’s talk about Cambridge and that Dunsire woman instead. I want the full story over lunch. None of your endless evasions and artistic nips and tucks. You may slide things past your editor when you write your books, and I’ll bet you danced rings round that Fong fellow, but that won’t wash with me. I want the truth.’

  ‘If you like.’ I shrugged. We began to inch our way slowly towards Rose’s dining room. ‘But where’s the point? You never liked Nicola Dunsire. You never understood her.’

  ‘Yes, I did. I’ve met scores of bitches in my time: she was in a class of her own. When I think what that woman did to you – Dunsire was an arch-bitch, an arch-demon actually.’

  ‘Oh, really? Demons are fallen angels. Anything else you’d like to accuse her of?’

  ‘Plenty. I’m just getting started. I’m hardly revved up yet. Wheeler couldn’t stand her, and Wheeler was always right. She thought Dunsire was a vampire. One of the undead.’

  ‘And you believe in vampires, do you? Stop this nonsense,’ I said, as Rose grasped my arm and led me the last few steps. The delicious scent of roast lamb drifted along the corridor. My hip was aching badly. I felt sick and dizzy with fatigue. That route I’d taken through the churchyard, the graves, that long grass, all that undergrowth… unwise: now I was paying for it.

  ‘Believe in vampires? Once I’d met her, I did. I’m telling you, Nicola Dunsire was an unholy influence. Dazzling, I grant you, but a fiend incarnate.’

  ‘Make your mind up,’ I said crossly. ‘Demon or vampire? Even Nicola can’t be both.’

  ‘Can’t she?’ Rose gave me a glance of triumph. ‘She still has a hold on you, even now. Dead these sixty years – and you still use the present tense whenever you mention her. Case proven, I think.’

  20

  ‘Two letters,’ my father said. ‘Two invitations, no less.’ He slipped his hand into his inside jacket pocket, and in a fastidious way, as if they might be contaminated, drew out two white envelopes. He was not in a good temper. ‘My daughter is much in demand, Miss Dunsire – were you aware of that?’

  He laid the pair of envelopes on the garden table in front of him; one bore American stamps, the other a dark blue coronet on its ivory flap. ‘I assume not,’ he continued, when Miss Dunsire made no reply. ‘I doubt Lucy takes you into her confidence any more than she does me. My late wife had identical tendencies: evasive, tight-lipped––’

  ‘Reticent. That might be le mot juste.’ Miss Dunsire cut across him, her tone cool. She was leaning back in her wicker chair, her eyes resting on the rose arch at the end of our Cambridge garden. The branches of our birch trees shaded her from the hot sun, and their leaves imparted a greenish pallor to her face. Earlier, before our luncheon guests had arrived, she’d complained of a headache; after a difficult, antagonistic meal, they had departed some ten minutes ago. Now she might have been tired – or bored or irritated.

  ‘Secretive,’ my father corrected her, giving Miss Dunsire a savage glance that she ignored. ‘Secretive is the apposite term. And that is merely a variant on deceitfulness.’

  ‘Secrecy. Deceit. How very astute, Dr Payne.’ With a restless movement, Miss Dunsire rose and stood for a moment, still pondering the rose arch. ‘I’d always seen those two qualities as distinct,’ she
continued in a pensive voice. ‘I’d felt someone could guard secrets, while scrupulously avoiding deceit. But now I see – you’re right: why, they’re as close as sisters, virtually twins. How dangerous! How lucky I am not to have skeletons in my closets. How fortunate I have this odd obsession with the truth. Will you excuse me for a moment, Lucy? I must take some aspirin. My headache is worse. I’ll be back in – two ticks.’

  She turned and drifted towards the house, leaving me to wonder how she contrived to say one thing and imply its opposite – she was a mistress of that art. There had been no trace of satire in her face, yet I sensed she’d been mocking my father while appearing to agree with him. I’d sensed irony and insolence too; he might also have suspected this – certainly her comments did not improve his mood, which had been worsening since our lunch guests had first arrived. I could calibrate his temper with precision: repressed while they were there, it was now approaching explosion point. Am I afraid? I asked myself, staring at the two envelopes.

  My father ignored me, staring after Miss Dunsire’s slender figure, as, taking her time, she meandered her way down the garden, pausing to smell a rose here, pausing to pluck some lavender there. She was wearing a white dress of pleated linen; the sun beat down on her brazen hair, her bare white throat. In those days, knowing nothing, nothing, I did not understand that this dress and her languid unhurried movements could be erotic in their effect. I didn’t perceive that Miss Dunsire’s equivocal tone and the uncertainty it engendered could be sexually provocative. I thought of her, quite simply, as my enemy. I resented her for looking so enviably cool, in this hot town garden, in her white dress.

  My father seemed unwilling to continue the conversation he’d instigated. He sat there, scowling into the middle distance, tapping his fingers. ‘Dear God, it must be eighty degrees. This heat is insufferable. Did that blasted poet leave any wine, or did he wolf the lot? Ah, a drop left.’

  He poured himself a glass from the bottle of hock that had remained on the table after lunch, glowered at a bowl of leftover strawberries, moved his chair into the shade and, tilting his head back, closed his eyes. Valley of the Kings heat. I was trying not to move or breathe. We endeavour to be invisible, said Frances’s voice from that other world, a few months back. Not so easy now, I thought. Five minutes ticked past. I began to wish my enemy would return; it was Miss Dunsire who was responsible for the lunch party, I couldn’t be blamed for that, surely? Given this transgression, perhaps she’d draw some of my father’s fire – though I doubted it.

  It was now 1 June, three months since my return from Egypt, and almost the end of the Cambridge Easter term; in a few days the long vacation would begin. Examinations were over, the university was en fête, and Nicola Dunsire, influenced by the heatwave, had persuaded my father to hold a lunch party in the garden. She’d thrown herself into this scheme with a strange nervy zeal, planning it for weeks: whom to invite, what to serve? Should it be poached salmon, or a chicken chaud-froid; a cold apple tart, peach Melba, or Cambridge burnt creams? How should we – it was ‘we’, for she insisted on my involvement – how should we decorate the table, what should we wear, what should we do if it rained that day, God forbid?

  I thought her chief worries should have been the guests – my father had few friends and many enemies in Cambridge; and the expense, since he hated to spend money. I said so.

  ‘Stop cavilling.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘I run the household budget – and very clever I am at it too. If it can cover those ballet lessons you pleaded for, Lucy – which it does, so they’re our secret, never breathe a word to your father – it can cover one lunch. Besides, Mrs Grimshaw and I have been plotting. We’re in cahoots! She’s had a word with her husband, and the college kitchens will help out. I may have learned to bake a damned cake, Lucy, but concoct a chaud-froid? Beyond even my powers.’

  By then both Mrs Grimshaw and her husband were Dunsire converts: little gifts, confidences in the kitchen, visits to their home, pleas for help, reliance on their superior wisdom etc., etc. – these charms worked their effect. Besides, Mrs Grimshaw loved excitement, and Miss Dunsire certainly generated that. In anticipation of one small lunch party, the entire house had to be spring-cleaned, the garden pruned and groomed, the silver cleaned, all the table linen inspected…

  Mrs Grimshaw was in her element. ‘She’s like a whirlwind, is our Miss Dunsire,’ she’d said to me admiringly, as she bent over the ironing board. ‘Three days of this blessed ironing I’ve done – and there’s more. My Albert’s been round, done the windows, done the lawns, tied in the roses – well, he’d do anything for her. Got him eating out of her hand, she has. A lovely job he made of it too – and still she’s fussing. She’s worked herself up into a right tizzy about this lunch: I told her, you want to take a rest, dearie. Put your feet up for five minutes. Who’s going to notice a smear on the window, or a crease in the tablecloth? But will she listen? I thought I was thorough, Lucy, because I like a nice house and I have my standards. But I’ve got nothing on her. One of God’s perfectionists. That’s what she is.’

  This was true – Nicola Dunsire was a perfectionist; or, to be more accurate, she had fits of perfectionism, weeks when she would drive herself, and me, at breakneck speed, cramming our days with projects. Then, as suddenly as these periods had begun, they would cease. They would be followed by a week, sometimes ten days, of moodiness and irritability, during which time and for no apparent reason she would lose interest in all the tasks she’d set herself. Our long walks, our visits to libraries or the Fitzwilliam Museum would cease. Her appetite would dwindle, then fail; she’d complain of headaches and fatigue; she’d retire for long periods, setting me a mountain of tasks and leaving me to negotiate them alone. There I’d sit, as the days grew longer and the spring evenings stretched, working, working, at my algebra, at my maps, my Shakespeare sonnets, my Tudor kings, my translations, my Jane Eyre, my Middlemarch, my arithmetic.

  At such times, I grew to fear her temper: ‘How can you be so backward, so slow, so stupid?’ she would cry – and then she might slap my hand in vexation, or tear up some exercise. ‘Read, Lucy, learn to read,’ she’d said once, white with anger, as I halted my way through the long periods of George Eliot, toiled through Dorothea and Casaubon. ‘You read like a fool. Can’t you see inside the sentences? Under them? Behind them? Beyond them? Christ in heaven – I’m wasting my time on you.’

  At such times, nothing I could do was right: my map drawing was clumsy, my handwriting was unreadable, my failure to grasp the simplest mathematical principle was infantile. I especially feared French: within weeks of my return from Egypt, Dr Gerhardt’s services were dispensed with – it would save money if Miss Dunsire taught me languages as well as everything else, and Dr Gerhardt, though a fine scholar, was too lazy and good-natured to teach such an obstinate, unresponsive child. Besides, he needed more time to work on his book: this masterwork, on his fellow countrymen Zwingli and Calvin, had been in preparation some fifteen years. In Cambridge, this was scarcely unusual: on the same staircase in Nevile’s Court as my father lived a don who, in 1872, had written the definitive and ground-breaking study of shellfish and their digestive systems; he had published nothing in the fifty years since – and no one thought the less of him. Miss Dunsire had no sympathy with such attitudes: swift in all things, she detested procrastination. My father, once given to delaying tactics, now agreed with her. His book on Euripides was progressing well, he’d report, eyeing her; he expected to finish it within eighteen months, to be helped by his forthcoming twelve months’ sabbatical.

  ‘I shall take over from Dr Gerhardt,’ Miss Dunsire had announced, and, since she could twist my father around her little finger when she chose to do so, he’d quickly concurred. Out went the vocabulary lists and the irregular verbs Dr Gerhardt and I had laboured over: in came magnificent floods of Goethe, Racine and Baudelaire, not a word of which I understood. During her gentler periods, Nicola Dunsire could make these passages speak, so I beg
an to grasp their meaning, thrill to their use of words; but during those black spells when her mood altered and she became so unpredictable, anything might happen – she might smack me around the ears, throw the book across the room, or pull my hair. ‘Listen,’ she would cry. ‘Respond. I won’t let you inch your way through this like some blind worm, do you hear me? I’ll make you run before you can walk – I’ll make you dance, damn you, you stupid girl, if it kills me. Again, like this, listen: C’est Venus toute entière à sa proie attachée – no, no, no. Get rid of that hideous accent. You’re not English, you’re French. Read this speech of Phèdre’s and remember – you’re not some plain little schoolgirl, you’re a queen.’

  How could I have seen her as serene that first day I met her, I thought, as – having remained in the house for twenty minutes (twenty minutes? to take an aspirin?) – Nicola Dunsire emerged at last, and began to make her way slowly down the garden with an air of queenly unconcern. I fingered the key to my desk: I’d taken to wearing it around my neck on a chain. My letters and my diaries were in that locked desk – if Nicola Dunsire had used her aspirin absence to spy among my things, as I was certain she did, she’d have been thwarted this time.

  My father, who might or might not have been dozing, opened his eyes, looked up and watched her approach. She took her time, delaying by the lavender again, lingering by a rose, her slim white dilatory figure the only cool thing in the crucible our garden became in this weather, the heat enclosed, reflected, intensified by its high brick walls. The slowness of her advance did not improve my father’s temper: the longer he gazed at her, the deeper his scowl became. Miss Dunsire, having reached us at last, sat down without a word, confident in the knowledge that however much my father might want to ask why it took twenty minutes to swallow a pill, such a remark was immodest, impossible. Even in this brave new post-war world, a lady’s disappearances could not be enquired upon.