The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  I placed them on a velvet pad, then sat down and sipped my tea. Show no emotion. Make it clear you’re ready to walk away, Frances’s voice counselled, and her mother chimed in: Never, never take the first price they offer, Lucy – or the second, or the third. You absolutely must haggle – then honour’s satisfied all round and everyone enjoys it.

  Their advice had related to buying: when selling, the same rules applied. Dealing was universal the world over, and I felt the techniques that worked in a Luxor souk worked extremely well in Bene’t Street, Cambridge. Mr Szabó adjusted his jeweller’s spyglass and with intense concentration began scrutinising the stones in the brooch.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said at last, in a grudging way. ‘A nice little trinket. Before the war, I could have sold one of these the second it went in the window… but now? Tastes change, women are fickle. These flapper girls in their strange dresses – they want platinum and silver, not gold; they want clips, not brooches. Pretty stones, these – but the setting is dated. The bangle? Gold again, alas. Could I find a taker for them? Oh dearie me – I doubt it. I might just stretch to… ’ And he named a figure. ‘But that’s a special price for you, young lady! Ah, I’m a foolish old man. Too soft-hearted for the harsh world of business: my problem all along.’

  ‘Mr Szabó, the brooch is a Tiffany piece. From Fifth Avenue. My grandmother bought it, and Tiffany’s was her favourite place on earth. In Paris, she liked Van Cleef & Arpels… ’ I hesitated. Hearsay evidence, but true: sort of.

  ‘A woman of discernment.’ Mr Szabó made a snickering sound.

  ‘That bangle is Van Cleef: it’s twenty-two carat. Those are fine diamonds in the brooch – look, that one’s a whopper. But never mind, I was thinking of taking them to London to sell anyway. I’ll be sure to get the right price there.’

  We exchanged a combative glance. Mr Szabó said: ‘Not so fast, no need to be hasty, are you catching a train, young lady?’ And with these essential preliminaries over, we set to.

  It took three-quarters of an hour. Both Mr Szabó and I enjoyed every minute. Caveat venditor: I was rooked, as I later understood, but not as badly as I might have been, and not as much as I merited. Clutching the banknotes, I ran to the Post Office, entered this deposit in my secret savings’ account book, and handed it all in. Adding up the entries, I saw I’d almost reached the total I needed – and that I’d calculated carefully. One more piece of jewellery should do it. Frances and her parents would be returning to Egypt in December; Miss Mack planned on a return journey there in November; I intended to go too. There were still minor obstacles in the way of this escape plan – my father, for instance, and Miss Dunsire. I’d deal with them in due course. Money had been the chief of my problems – and that was almost solved. Money was power; it bought freedom.

  I ran home to Newnham and danced into the house only ten minutes late. Miss Dunsire was in the garden. She inspected my flushed face in her cool assessing way – and for one intoxicating moment I wanted to flourish my savings book under her nose: Remember that lesson you taught me? I’d say. I’ve learned it, and I’ve learned it well.

  I resisted the impulse: I didn’t trust her; I wasn’t a complete fool. I went upstairs, hid the savings book in my locked drawer. I examined my presents, counted the Kipling stories, puzzled over the surgical tools in the manicure set. I washed, tidied my hair and came down promptly for the evening prep.

  ‘What a very birthday face you have, Lucy,’ Miss Dunsire remarked – and for some reason this birthday face of mine seemed to unsettle or annoy her. She handed me a set of geometry problems and told me brusquely to get on with them. While I fiddled with protractor and compass, she moved restlessly about the room, then announced she was going out for a walk: she needed air. ‘Oh, and when you next go upstairs,’ she added, in an irritable way, ‘you’ll find something from me. A token. I’ll leave it on your bed.’

  I discovered the token hours later. It came in a large white box, exquisitely wrapped. Happy 12th Birthday, said the attached card, in neat italic script. Inside was a dress, exactly the right size, the most beautiful dress I’d ever possessed.

  ‘Is it silk?’ I asked Miss Dunsire in awe, next morning, when I was able to thank her.

  She shrugged and lit a cigarette. ‘Who knows? You tell me – real silk, or fake?’

  ‘It is silk.’ I stroked it reverently. ‘I can tell. I learned a lot about clothes in Egypt.’

  ‘I’m sure you did – rubbing shoulders with so many fashion plates. Well, put it on – let’s see how it looks.’ I turned to go upstairs to change, but Miss Dunsire shook her head impatiently. ‘For heaven’s sake, child – you can put it on here. There’s only the two of us. I shan’t be shocked by the sight of you in a petticoat.’

  I hesitated prudishly – we were in the sitting room; but in the end I complied. Miss Dunsire remained in her chair – my mother’s chair, with its faded cover of ‘Strawberry Thief’. She watched me as I drew the dress over my head, leaning back, her eyes half closed, the room aromatic with the scent of tobacco smoke, as I managed the tiny buttons, all twenty of them, smoothed down the skirt, and wriggled the bodice into place. ‘Does it fit – does it fit?’ I said, tense and excited. ‘Do I look all right in it?’

  ‘Oh, it fits,’ she replied in a slow, measured way, and I saw a shadow pass across her face. ‘But then it comes from Paris, where they understand such things. You are… ’ She hesitated. ‘You are a jeune fille en fleur, Lucy.’

  ‘Is that good?’ I asked uncertainly. I knew the meaning of the words, but her expression seemed to contradict it.

  ‘I believe so. It’s preferable to more predictable terms I could use. The colour suits you, and the cut. You remind me of someone I used to know.’

  ‘One of your friends? Someone I’ve met?’

  ‘No one you know. And she’s dead, in any case.’

  With a restless gesture, she extinguished her cigarette and rose to her feet. She stood for what seemed a long time, staring at me from across the room, then her face contracted. ‘Well, well, well – who would have thought it? I’m quite moved. No, don’t do that––’ she added sharply, as excitement took hold and I performed a sudden impromptu pirouette. ‘Save that for your dancing classes. I can’t bear to watch it.’

  She turned away, so I could not see her face, and a silence fell. I wanted to speak, but didn’t know the right words: they were there in my mind, but stuck in my throat. In the end, I said: ‘I’m sorry I remind you of your dead friend, Miss Dunsire. I can see that’s upset you. But I want you to know: it’s beautiful, this dress, and I’m very grateful. Thank you. It was awfully kind of you.’

  ‘Kind?’ She swung around. ‘Kind? I detest that trite anodyne word. I’m not a kind woman, Lucy – as you should know. And I didn’t buy that out of kindness either. I saw it that day I went down to London. There it was in a Bond Street window, and I thought: why not?’ She shrugged. ‘Besides, you need some new clothes for your visit to Hampshire. Your father may not care how shabby you look, but I do. Oddly enough.’

  I coloured: I did not know much about London, but I could add up the equation even so. Bond Street + real silk + ‘Made in Paris’ = expensive. I had no idea how much my father paid Miss Dunsire, but I doubted it was generous. Miss Dunsire read my mind – as she often did.

  ‘Housekeeping,’ she said briskly, ‘and don’t even think of enquiring further. Just be prepared to subsist on bread and cheese for the next month.’

  I thought that claim was untrue – I might not yet read her as well as she read me, but I was beginning to discern when Miss Dunsire told the truth and when she did not. I said nothing, but I was puzzled: on occasion, and always unpredictably, Miss Dunsire could be both kind and generous. This dress and my secret dancing lessons were evidence of that: she was similarly generous with her time, with her teaching, with her mind – why pretend she was not? Especially to me when it was I who reaped the benefit?

  I still disliked her, I still thought
of her as my enemy, I’d tell myself – but we’d been alone together in Cambridge for the past two months; I knew my hostility to her was lessening by the week, and that alarmed me. It felt disloyal to my mother, whose place she’d usurped – and feeble too. I had no intention of being manipulated and won over as Mrs Grimshaw and even my father had been; I was made of sterner stuff. She exerted a fascination, true, but that was for one reason only: it was because I could not understand her, because, dangerous, unpredictable, moody and mysteriously wounded as she was, she remained a puzzle I could not solve, one whose pieces would not fit.

  You’re not trying hard enough, Frances had written in her latest letter. Remember what Mr Carter said? You’re supposed to be good at observation, so watch her. What can you see? Ask her some really cunning questions – she’s bound to let something slip.

  I tried. I tried during the long hot month of August, when Cambridge, deserted en masse by dons and undergraduates, reverted to a villagey somnolence. And what did I learn, from these cunning interrogations? I learned Miss Dunsire was twenty-four, and would be twenty-five this coming November; that she was born under the sign of Scorpio; that she was an only child, like me. That her Scots barrister father was dead, and her widowed mother, whom she rarely saw and with whom she had little in common, was French: now living in Provence, she was a lifelong hypochondriac who’d elected to become an invalid. At her mother’s behest, I learned, she’d been christened ‘Nicole’, pronounced in the French way, but only a few old friends used this name; she’d changed it to ‘Nicola’ while at Girton, and preferred that. I learned Miss Dunsire’s two dearest friends were shrewish classicist Meta and bohemian bicycle-thief Clair, now living in Chelsea and studying art at the Slade. I learned that Miss Dunsire’s favourite colour was black (which didn’t even count as a colour) and her favourite composer was Bach.

  No progress. Or so I felt then. I made one last attempt, the day before I was to leave for my holiday with Rose and Peter. Nicola Dunsire and I were in my bedroom, packing my suitcases – a task she undertook with her customary perfectionism. New crisp tissue paper, muslin sachets for underwear, every garment washed, starched, ironed and irreproachable. Miss Dunsire was more amenable to questions when her hands were occupied, so I waited until we were packing the last item, my as yet unworn silk dress; then, proud of my casual tone, said: ‘By the way, that friend of yours, the one you mentioned to me, the one who’s dead… ’

  ‘Yes?’ Miss Dunsire arranged protective tissue paper in the folds of the dress.

  ‘I was just wondering when she died. Was it a long time ago?’

  ‘Two years ago. Maybe it’s three now. I forget the exact date. Long enough… How awkward this is to pack! The silk will slip.’

  ‘Was she young when she died?’

  ‘She was. She was my own age – we grew up together, went to the same dancing class. Help me fold this in half, Lucy.’

  ‘And why did she die? Was it an accident? Had she been ill?’

  ‘She killed herself.’ With an expert twist of the wrist, Miss Dunsire flipped the bodice over the skirt, smoothed it and placed it on top of the clothes in the suitcase. ‘All done,’ she said, on a note of triumph. ‘Will it close? Yes, it will! Excellent.’

  ‘Oh… how sad.’ I was taken aback. ‘Was she – why did she do such a terrible thing?’

  ‘She wanted to die, I believe. She’d threatened to kill herself, and finally she succeeded.’ She shrugged. ‘There’s nothing one can add to that: it’s over, it’s done, I’ve put it behind me. I mourned her deeply for a while, now I mourn her less and one of these days I shan’t mourn her at all. That’s the pattern to grief – as you should know, Lucy.’

  She gave me a venomous look as I recoiled from these words. How quick she was to retaliate! She knew that sting in the tail would silence my questions – and it did. She lined up the three leather suitcases we’d packed, fastened them securely and lifted them onto the floor. One smaller case, empty, remained on the bed.

  ‘Almost done,’ she said in her crisp way. ‘I’ll leave you to pack the little attaché case, Lucy. I thought you’d need that for your diaries and your letters. You’ll want to take them with you, I’m sure. And I can hardly help you there – not when they’re in a locked drawer and the key to that drawer is on a chain around your neck. I hope it won’t take you long: you have an early start tomorrow, so early supper and early bed tonight.’

  And then, having ensured that she was fully reinstated as my enemy, she left the room. Beware Scorpions, I thought. I watched her serene departure with fresh hate.

  At ten the next day, punctual to the minute, the astonishing car Eve had sent for me pulled up outside our house.

  ‘Well, well – a Hispano-Suiza, no less.’ Miss Dunsire examined the car’s glorious coachwork with a satiric eye. ‘And the driver in such a smart uniform. What a tragedy our neighbours are away and missing it: they’d disapprove so deeply; they could have dined out on this for weeks. And what a pity your father can’t see it, Lucy. He’d have forty fits. How high-minded they all are! I think it’s thrilling… Ah, your friend’s come to escort you. You must be Lady Rose? How do you do, my dear?’

  Rose bounced out of the car, and shortly afterwards bounced back into it. ‘Crikey,’ she said, when we were safely settled inside, ‘I’ve never had a governess who looked like that, Lucy. Mine have all been the most frightful old sticks. She doesn’t look like a bluestocking either, I’m sure they’re all plain as a pikestaff – and she’s stunning.’ She frowned. Rose, well schooled by her mother, was far more worldly than I and a merciless judge of female appearance. ‘That auburn hair and those eyes! And that frock of hers was fearfully clever. Masses of SA. I thought she was quite it, actually.’ She paused and gave me a narrow glance: ‘When is she off on that boring reading party?’

  ‘In a day or two – that’s what she said anyway.’

  ‘And when does your father get back from Greece?’

  ‘The end of this week, I think. Why? What difference does that make?’

  ‘Absolutely none, let’s forget them!’ Rose inserted her small gloved hand in mine. ‘Oh, Lucy – what fun we’re going to have! Petey’s missed you so much. He can’t wait to see you, he’s drawn you a picture of a rainbow and caught you a newt! Wheeler’s really looking forward to it too, she’s wild with excitement.’

  ‘I can’t imagine that.’ I was touched, especially by the newt – but I’d never known impassive, formidable Wheeler betray any emotion; her reticence was exemplary.

  ‘Well, you’re right, she hides it, of course, and stumps about being sensible – but even so, she is. And Eve’s coming over to see us, and we’ll have lots of wonderful picnics. If we’re good, Eve says she’ll take us over to Highclere, and her father will show us his Egyptian collection – Howard Carter’s going to be turning up at some point to work on it. There’s something brewing there, Lucy, some kind of row, I think… Oh, and Eve’s brother was married in July, did you see the photographs in the Tatler? Heir to the whole lot and he’s married some American who hasn’t a penny, they say – Eve wore the most divine dress… There’s tons to tell you, Lucy. Oh, I’m so glad to have you back!’

  She chattered on; I was only half listening. I was wondering what ‘SA’ could be; Rose’s questions had made me uneasy. If perfectionist Miss Dunsire was leaving for France in the next two days, how odd that she hadn’t begun to sort through her clothes and books, let alone pack. She’d given me no address for the Loire either, I realised – and that was odd too; in such matters she was always punctilious.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ Rose was saying, ‘I haven’t told you yet about the brilliant plot Wheeler and I hatched. I’ve been dying to tell you, but I had to wait until I was sure we’d succeeded. We’d worried and worried what to do, all the way home from Egypt. You see, as far as Papa was concerned, Wheeler was a lady’s maid – and Mamma’s maid at that. We knew he’d dismiss her the second we got home – and I’d have died, Lucy,
if he’d done that; she’s the only reliable thing in Petey’s life – and mine, come to that. We had to persuade him to let her stay and be our nanny – and the chances of him doing that were zero. Wheeler and I were in black despair; then I remembered what a skinflint he is, and it came to us!’

  On their arrival home, Rose explained, Wheeler had requested a brief interview with Lord Strathaven. At this interview, she informed him in her stolid way that she would like to be considered for the position of family nanny, that she could assume that role at once, on a trial basis, and was prepared to do so on half-wages for a period of six months. If, during that time, she failed to provide satisfaction, she would leave at once. If, on the other hand, she did provide satisfaction, perhaps Lord Strathaven would consider employing her as the children’s nanny on a formal basis, once those six months were up. Having made this proposal, Wheeler had simply stood there, large, plain, forty-something yet ageless, a Lancashire woman as impassive and immovable as an Easter Island statue.

  ‘Didn’t she explain how close she is to you and Peter?’ I asked. I was trying to concentrate on this ploy, but I was still worrying about the Loire, and the chateau for which I had no address. ‘How much you and Peter love her – did Wheeler emphasise that?’

  ‘Of course not, idiot!’ Rose gave me a look of scorn. ‘If he’d known it was what we wanted, she’d have been out the door in a blink. No, she said we were thoroughly spoiled children who’d played her up the whole way home from Egypt. She said we needed a strong hand and firm discipline, and she could provide it. Papa lapped that up: discipline is his favourite word – well, next to fillies and bitches it is…