The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  In her neat italic script, she made the requisite entries, blotted them, closed the book, replaced the pen, and turned to face me. She leaned against the desk and gave me a challenging stare. Her hands were trembling. ‘Tell him if you like,’ she said. ‘I really don’t care.’

  ‘So you lied,’ I said, after a pause. ‘Were you lying about the reading party as well?’

  ‘Maybe. It’s happening. I may go. I may not. It depends on my mood.’

  ‘Why did you lie?’

  ‘Who knows? You were being bullied and tricked. I disliked that.’ She shrugged. ‘If I could have spited him and pulled Maine out of the hat for you, I would have done. But he’d already written, and besides, think of the expense! He could afford it – just as he can afford to travel to Greece and Italy this summer for his all-important work. But his tendencies are economical. Tight, as we say in Scotland – does your father have any Scottish blood in his veins, Lucy? No, no, he may have the Scotsman’s reluctance to part with money, he fits that stereotype – but his blood is of the thin, blue, English sort.’

  Her voice had risen, and the taunt in it was obvious. For the first time – how slow I’d been – I realised her dislike of my father was intense. I could see contempt, even loathing in her eyes. ‘You shouldn’t say that,’ I began haltingly. ‘Not about Daddy. Not to me. Not ever. It’s not right.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. You’re correct. Disrespectful. Disloyal. I apologise. I told you, I have a migraine. The light hurts my eyes. When that happens, I’m not myself. I say things I later regret.’

  At that, she gave a curious gasp and pressed her hand against her face. I couldn’t tell if she was in sudden pain, or strangely excited, or both. Her breath was coming fast, and the dark pupils of her eyes were dilated; her hands were now trembling violently – and, as I stared at her, this infirmity seemed to increase, passing up her arms and into her body until she was visibly shaking. For a moment I feared she might be about to collapse, perhaps suffer some fit.

  I was unsure what to do. Into my head rushed a comment Dr Gerhardt had made some weeks before, when I went for my last lesson with him: ‘I shall miss you, my dear – but Miss Dunsire is more than competent. Her German is good and her French is very pure. My sister Helga taught her at Girton, you know – she was sorry to hear of her illness, as I was. Most distressing. We’re delighted to learn she’s made a full recovery.’

  No mention of this illness had been made by anyone else. I’d assumed it was minor; now I felt less sure. I took a step forwards, but before I could reach her Miss Dunsire regained physical control. She had been gripping the edge of the desk so tightly that her knuckles stood out white; now, she pushed herself free of it and stood upright.

  ‘I shall go and lie down,’ she said. ‘But I must be sure of one thing first. I taught you a lesson this afternoon, Lucy – do you know what that lesson was?’ Snatching at me, she grasped my wrist painfully tight and said in a low, angry, voice: ‘I taught you power, Lucy. I taught you how to get what you want. If you prefer not to go through this life getting trampled underfoot; if you wish to avoid being thwarted at every turn; if you wish to prevent your deepest desires being ridiculed or dismissed – then learn from it.’

  She walked out. I lingered, then followed her. As I reached the hall, she was already on the stairs; she had come to a halt five steps up and was leaning against the banister, head bent. Looking up at her, fearful she might faint, I realised there was a spreading stain – scarlet bloodstains on the back of her white skirt. They had not been there earlier. I stared at her, dismayed and shocked. Could she have somehow cut herself, and wiped her hand? The stain seemed too large for that… So she is ill, I thought. Could she be bleeding? Could she be haemorrhaging? I knew the word for this condition, but not its causes nor its cure. I knew it could be fatal; it had once happened to Mrs Grimshaw, and she had given a vivid, vague, and horrible account of it. It had mysteriously prevented her from increasing her family of six children, and she had ‘bled like a stuck pig’. Miss Mack, deep in the subject of nursing and Gallipoli wounds, had also described the phenomenon, so I knew it could affect men as well as women. But surely Miss Dunsire couldn’t be wounded? And if she wasn’t injured, why would she bleed?

  ‘Miss Dunsire, are you ill? May I help you?’ I called.

  She had begun to climb the stairs again. She did not look back or reply. I heard her steps pass along the landing to her room on the first floor; its door slammed behind her, and its key turned in the lock.

  I mooned about the house for a while after that, anxious and at a loose end. I tidied away the party things and washed them up. Several wasps had drowned in the sweet leftover strawberry mush; I tipped it and their stripy corpses into a flower bed. I thought of the cruel expertise with which Miss Dunsire had boxed me in: if I told my father the truth, I’d not only be telling tales, a despicable act, I’d also be ensuring my visit to Rose and Peter was cancelled forthwith. Was there a way out of this moral maze she’d constructed? I couldn’t see one: damned either way; guilty if I spoke out, guilty if I did not. But nothing would make me sacrifice the visit to Rose and Peter, so there was no point in agonising; I’d keep my mouth shut.

  I tried to untangle the many mysteries of the day, the lunch party, the ill assemblage of guests, the fact that three of the dons invited had refused, and the two married dons who did honour us with their presence had turned up without their wives, each of whom sent a curt, last-minute and inadequate excuse. I thought of Dr Gerhardt, who had loyally attended and brought his sister Helga with him; of the way in which Helga had praised the food; of how they’d both tried to prevent the flickering antagonisms at the table from flaring up into confrontation – peace-making overtures that met with little success.

  I couldn’t understand why Nicola Dunsire, clever in so many ways, could also be reckless and obtuse. Why propose the party, when my father detested such gatherings? Why, knowing my father’s dislike of women in general and opinionated women in particular, had she invited no less than three of her Girtonian friends? It was bound to cause trouble and duly did. Dorothy Lascelles – Just call me Dotty, Dr Payne, everyone does – was now training to be a doctor at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital in London. A cheerful forthright woman who described dissections across the lunch table, she had bristled when my father, seconded by the two dons, insisted that medicine was not, never could be, a woman’s profession. ‘That’s just guff,’ she’d said. ‘I’m sick of that refrain, Dr Payne. Tell that to the women I treat, the women from the King’s Cross slums, in labour with their tenth child. Frankly, they’d laugh in your face.’

  My father expected to be spared contradictions at his own table, as he was swift to point out. The warning went unheeded; the second of Miss Dunsire’s friends, a scornful classicist called Meta, now reading for her doctorate, dared to dispute his translation of some Homeric epithet. She did so between the iced soup and the chaud-froid; over the salmon in aspic, she moved on smartly to the sacred ground of Euripides. ‘I can’t agree with you there, Dr Payne,’ she said in her sharp voice. ‘You’re entirely missing the point. In his Hippolytus, the warring forces central to the play – a woman’s violent sexual desire versus a man’s prudish chastity – are present on stage throughout in the persons of Aphrodite and Artemis. Do you understand the effect of that device?’

  The two dons bridled; the third Girtonian friend, the ‘Clair’ Miss Dunsire would mention later, found this exchange hilarious. She laughed so much at Meta’s analysis, and my father’s horrified expression on hearing it, that she almost choked. It was the only moment during the lunch that she showed the least animation – but then she was a strange, brooding, unresponsive creature, who sat next to Miss Dunsire, sometimes muttering to her in a low voice, but otherwise maintaining a sulky silence.

  One hour ticked by; too much wine was being consumed, and the conspicuously handsome poet Miss Dunsire had invited at the last moment appeared drunk. I had not caught his full name
– it was Eddie something double-barrelled; he was rumoured to be an Apostle, and therefore one of the Cambridge elect. The heat was intense; it was hard to keep track of the fizzing hostilities at the table, as I was pressed into service, hastening to and fro, ferrying plates.

  By the time I fetched the burnt creams, the atmosphere was curdling fast; everyone was arguing about Mount Everest, exactly how high it was, and whether Mallory’s expedition would succeed in conquering it… everyone except Eddie-the-poet, who had just dealt Tennyson’s reputation its death blow and was now intent on Wordsworth’s scalp. By the time I cleared the strawberry plates, it was babel: Irish Free State to my left, new divorce bill and its iniquities to my right; whether the Italian fascists would take Bologna and if so, where next… Meta and my father had locked horns again and were fiercely disputing the next eclipse of the moon, while poet Eddie, who’d mutilated Keats meanwhile, then diverted to the curious subject of tom-cats, was now launching a pincer attack on Coleridge.

  Returning with a laden tray – gleaming silver coffee pot, fragile cups – I found a violent squabble concerning Schopenhauer and his essay on womankind, Über die Weiber, had broken out. Dr Gerhardt, I knew, revered this philosopher, but Meta was dismissing his misogyny as infantile, while Dorothy declared Schopenhauer’s aversion to women was so extreme it suggested psychological abnormalities… At these two offensive words, the dons decided they’d had enough. Declining coffee, off they marched, gibbering to each other; a distressed Dr Gerhardt and his sister followed them soon afterwards.

  The poet watched them leave, his eyes narrowed; he downed another glass of wine in one gulp. Not sober when he arrived, he was now intoxicated – and the only person at the table enjoying himself. Having decimated the ranks of dead and buried greats, he scented a new quarry. Prompted by a mention of my travels, and perhaps by this lunch’s events, he began to tell us about Egypt – a country he had never visited. Within seconds he’d pounced on Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’, fourteen familiar lines I’d come to dread.

  ‘“I met a traveller from an antique land.” Poor mad Shelley! Hits the wrong note in his very first line.’ He sighed. ‘Does the word “antique” suggest desert monuments to anyone here? Not to me, it doesn’t. To me it irresistibly suggests furniture – nasty, wormy, outmoded, unnecessary bits of furniture: chiffoniers, escritoires and vile knick-knacks. In fact, now I think about it,’ he gave my father a waspish glance, ‘it suggests my spinster Aunt Agatha’s drawing room – or the Senior Common Room at Trinity. It suggests a damned great pile of pointless outdated belongings and similarly antiquated petty beliefs. I appeal to you, my beauteous Nicole.’ He winked at Miss Dunsire. ‘Does “antique land” evoke Egypt to you? Because I’d say it evokes somewhere much nearer to home.’

  My father did not give Miss Dunsire the chance to reply. In a loud unequivocal voice, he said, ‘Christ in heaven, will this ass ever shut up?’

  The three Girtonians could take a hint: Dorothy and Meta departed at once, dragging the offending Eddie with them. The odd, silent Clair was the last of them to leave. She had arrived by bicycle from the station, and went to fetch this bicycle now. She wheeled it across the lawns and came to a halt in front of us. ‘Thanks,’ she said, shaking hands all round.

  ‘Is that your bicycle, Clair?’ Nicola asked.

  ‘How could it be? I’ve just come up from London,’ she replied, in faintly irritated tones. She inspected the bicycle and I inspected her: very small, very thin, her black hair cut in a bob, and a straight fringe above her brows; tiny monkey hands, an urchin face, an unyielding dark-eyed gaze. She was wearing a peculiar dress of patchwork colours that gave her a harlequin air. Nicola had said she was a painter and a bohemian – I noticed she had paint ingrained beneath her bohemian nails. Her expression was hostile: she seemed to dislike us, the garden, the house, the town of Cambridge, possibly the world.

  ‘I stole it at the station,’ she went on, mounting the bicycle. ‘I suppose I’d better return it before it’s missed. Not that I care two hoots. Salmon in aspic! The most interesting lunch I’ve attended in a very long time. Goodbye, Dr Payne. Au revoir, Nicole.’

  She rode off along the garden path, ducked beneath the rose arch, exited the gate onto the lane to the Backs and, without a wave or backward glance, disappeared.

  I considered these happenings – and those that came after them. I felt there must be a thread that connected all these events. Why had my father accused me of deceit? What word had Nicola Dunsire whispered to him? But I couldn’t perceive the links; it was as if there were some key information I lacked. I gave up the attempt, made myself a sandwich, and took up a tray with toast and scrambled eggs for Miss Dunsire. She made no reply when I tapped at her door. I listened, and thought I could detect the sound of her breathing: she couldn’t have bled to death then, she was alive and probably asleep… I left the tray by her door. It would be there for her when – if – she awoke.

  I retreated to my attic and in the cool decline of the evening began on my letters. I assembled the writing paper, the blotter, my dipping pen. I filled the inkwell with blue-black ink. I’d wait until I was sure of our holiday before writing to Rose, so decided to reply first to Frances. But what to say? Where to begin? What to censor, what to express? I can’t come to Maine. No news from Cambridge, I scratched.

  The pen, as usual, was giving problems. I was sworn to tell Frances the truth at all times. I inserted a new nib. I wrote: I learned something today. I found the ink flowed after that.

  21

  Twelfth birthdays were momentous events for a girl – or so Nicola Dunsire said. She did not explain why; my own twelfth birthday at the end of July passed uneventfully. My father sent a postcard from Greece that arrived three days late. Miss Mack sent me a volume of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories, and my Aunt Foxe a manicure set containing many surgical tools, sharp and of obscure function. ‘Maybe that will persuade you to stop biting your nails, Lucy,’ Miss Dunsire remarked acidly, from the depths of another black mood. Later she seemed to repent, and took me out to Fitzbillies, her favourite of Cambridge’s many tea shops.

  ‘Why is a twelfth birthday momentous?’ I asked, munching one of their famous Chelsea buns. We were both sipping Gunpowder tea. ‘You’ll find out. In due course,’ she replied. ‘Have you finished? May we go? My head aches.’

  She led me along King’s Parade, complaining at my slow pace. ‘Why don’t you go ahead, Miss Dunsire?’ I suggested. ‘It’s such a lovely afternoon. I’d like to walk back the long way through the colleges. Look at some bookshops, perhaps.’

  ‘Oh, very well. As it’s your birthday.’ She shrugged impatiently and glanced at her watch. ‘I’ll expect you home in one hour. Don’t be late.’

  She set off at a swift pace towards the Silver Street bridge; I ducked into a side street where I was safe from sight. Miss Dunsire was an efficient watchdog, but over the summer she’d occasionally become careless. Perhaps she resented the fact that curtailing my freedom meant curtailing her own; perhaps she simply grew bored – and who could blame her – at yet another long day in my company; maybe, now my father was abroad, she felt less inclined to zealousness.

  Whatever the reason, I’d begun to steal an hour here, an hour there, and when there was no sign that these stolen hours resulted in any mishap, Miss Dunsire grew even more lax. I learned I was more likely to get my way when her black moods gripped her, or if she herself wished to be elsewhere. In June, she had left me in the care of Mrs Grimshaw for an entire day, while she went to London to see some art exhibition at the Tate. A few weeks later, she went to London again and stayed overnight; her friend Eddie, the poet my father had so disliked, was giving a reading that evening, and she wished to attend it. Again, Mrs Grimshaw was pressed into service – and she, an amiable gaoler, was easy to escape. Now I had one whole hour of freedom, just enough for my purposes.

  I hurried along, into the maze of Cambridge’s alleyways and backstreets, and, ignoring the book
shops for once, came to a halt outside Mr Szabó’s shop. Jewellery and Curios, it announced, in gilded curlicues above the bellying shop-front. I inspected its display window beadily: silver snuffboxes, pairs of candlesticks, a Russian icon so ancient – or so doctored – that one could scarcely discern its blackened saint; fat velvet pads displaying rings and bracelets, some rubbishy-looking, some good. Stirrup cups, a stuffed owl, drinking flasks, stock-pins, dress studs, cufflinks. The locket and chain had gone, I saw to my relief.

  I climbed the steps, jangled the bell, and, teacups already in hand, Mr Szabó, a Cambridge institution for decades, of late my friend, emerged from the dark recesses of his shop. ‘Dealing again?’ he said, in his richly accented voice. I could hear in it his native Hungary, but also hints of Vienna, Italy, France and London. Mr Szabó was much travelled; he described himself as a wandering Jew, an eternal émigré; I loved the foreignness, the layers, the history in his voice. He dropped one sugar lump into my cup and three into his. ‘And what are we peddling this time, Miss?’

  I’d learned from the souks of Cairo and Luxor, so I said, ‘You’ve sold the locket. I told you you would. Did you get a good price for it, Mr Szabó?’

  ‘Enough, just enough.’ He waggled his hand. ‘I have to make a leetle profit, you know. I have to subsist, meine liebe junge Dame. When a customer drives a cruel bargain, the way you do, I’m lucky if I make sixpence to spare. Look at me! Skin and grief!’

  I looked at him. Mr Szabó, sixtyish, white-haired and wily, was rotund; one might say fat. I suspected his margins were generous, but felt his dealings were fair; besides, I liked him. Delving into my pocket, I produced a handkerchief. Inside were two more objects purloined from the spare-room boxes, from the museum of Marianne Payne. Once my mother’s: left to me in her will and now mine to sell or keep. Her collection was large, much of it bought as gifts for her by her parents, given prior to her marriage and the severance that caused; so far Mr Szabó had taken five pieces off my hands. Today, I’d brought him a narrow bangle and a brooch set with glittering stones. I was pretty sure they were diamonds, good ones. Having a mother born an Emerson had its advantages.