The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  There was the newt, in a jam jar, to be admired for a short while and then returned to the pond: a fine creature he was, with pads on his hands and a dinosaur crest – watery first cousin to the lizards I’d seen in Egypt.

  ‘And I done this. For you. All by my own,’ Peter said, scarlet with pride, handing me the rainbow drawing Rose had mentioned.

  I have that drawing still. At the top, in careering purple crayon, it said weLcOm lUcY. At the bottom, in red, it said, LOvE froMm PeTeY. The rainbow, an elaborate one, with many kinks in it, made a jagged arch over a house. This house, bright orange, with a green roof, a path to it like a ladder, and next to it something that might have been a tree or possibly a chicken, was extremely small; it had one window and no discernible door; a flock of tick-marks flew over its roof, and below it flowed a powerful navy-blue squiggle. It was blessed by the protective rainbow; also by a red sun, a blue moon, and two bright stars, made of gold foil. ‘It’s our house, Lucy,’ Peter explained anxiously.

  I could read the drawing’s marvellous perspective, and hadn’t doubted it for one second, so I said: ‘Peter, I can see that. I knew it at once.’

  His face lit up; he gave me a bear-hug, and I kissed him.

  We spent my first week at the farm outside – at least, in my remembrance we did; but then in my remembrance, the sun shone every day, rain and clouds were banished and I was inhabiting a place without shadows. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when I was alone, a hint of a shadow might fall, and I’d start to fret at the fact that Miss Dunsire had failed to write from her Loire chateau. Or I’d dwell on Rose’s birthday and the necessity of a gift. But Wheeler had developed a sixth sense for these anxieties – and always had a cure for them. Sometimes she’d take them on directly and say, ‘Do you know how long a letter from France takes? Those Frenchies don’t hurry themselves – I’ve heard it can take weeks – more! And that’s if they don’t lose it this end,’ she’d add darkly.

  Sometimes she’d divert me – at which she was expert: and that was an easy enough task, in this place where, every day, there was somewhere or something new to discover. Sometimes Eve’s maid Marcelle would come over to see Wheeler and bring us news of events at Castle Carnarvon. Sometimes we’d be dispatched to the farmer along the valley for freshly churned butter and cream, or sent to find field mushrooms, or pick apples and blackberries for a pie – or, since Wheeler had discovered Miss Dunsire’s lessons left yawning gaps in my education, I’d be whisked off to the kitchen with Rose and Peter and taught to cook: cakes, and gingerbread men, and tarts with home-made jam in them. When the anxiety as to Rose’s birthday present was noted, I was taught to sew. ‘Something you’ve made yourself,’ Wheeler said. ‘That always makes a suitable present.’

  I doubted this. The sewing did not go well: I hadn’t inherited my mother’s needle skills. ‘Maybe we’ll try knitting,’ Wheeler announced, showing rare signs of uncertainty. ‘We’ll have a practice run first.’

  The practice session could take place in public, she felt, so an old jumper was found; Rose, Peter and I unpicked and then rewound it. ‘No point in wasting new wool, not for the first attempt,’ Wheeler said thriftily, producing fat knitting needles for all three of us. She cast on the stitches, showed us how to do plain and purl, and then sat back and watched. Peter couldn’t master it at all and ran out in search of a hen’s nest. Rose got into a tangle two rows down, tossed it aside as the most annoying thing ever and ran out to join him. I laboured on, frowning and fretting, dropping stitches, picking them up: first the tension was too tight, then too loose: I had ambitions for it, but it grew very slowly. It started life as a scarf, then shrank to a pot-holder; after a week of intermittent toil Wheeler inspected it and said she thought it might make an egg cosy.

  Fortunately, I was able to abandon it the very next day, when the two last problems afflicting me were resolved, by the arrival of the post, and by the advent of Eve, who had been away in London with friends, but had now returned to Highclere Castle. It was Eve who arrived first, at the wheel of her own car, a dashing open-topped marvel in British racing green, with a leather belt around its bonnet. It was a Lagonda 11.9 coupé, she explained airily, and her favourite little runabout. ‘Rosebud, my best beloved – how brown you are!’ she cried, stooping to kiss her. ‘And who are these two little savages?’ she enquired, as Peter and I ran out to greet her.

  ‘We’re pirates,’ Peter corrected, and Eve said: ‘Darlings, of course you are. What an idiot I am – I hadn’t noticed the cutlasses.’

  She was looking very pretty, I thought, in her floating dress, with her nut-brown hair and nut-brown eyes; at first I was shy of her, but that wore off as she stayed all morning and chattered away. Wheeler had tipped her the wink, I suspect, because when she was readying herself to leave, she drew me apart from the others, and taking my hand in a solemn way, said: ‘Lucy, shall you mind if I ask you a huge favour? I need to trot over to the shops one day and find a gift for Rose’s birthday – and I need help choosing it. I’m so bad at making up my mind, and bound to pick the wrong thing. I get frantic with indecision… You wouldn’t be an absolute angel, and come with me and advise me?’

  I said I would like that very much, and asked if I might buy a present for Rose at the same time. ‘Daddy gave me pocket money for the month before I left,’ I explained. ‘Sixpence a week, so I have a florin. Do you think that will be enough, Eve?’

  ‘Enough? Lucy, it’s munificent! What fun! We’ll make a day of it, shall we? We have so much to catch up on – I want to hear all about Frances and her island. You must tell me about Cambridge… I’ll fix it all with Wheeler – maybe next week? I know, I’ll pick you up in the morning, and we’ll buzz off in my little car to Alresford, and shop like mad things, and have a slap-up lunch. Then I’ll take you over to see Highclere, and our Egyptian treasures – the others can meet us there and we’ll have tea. Howard Carter will have arrived by then, and he’ll love to see you all. Right, that’s our secret plan, Lucy.’

  I was still reeling at this prospect hours later, when the young boy who delivered our letters arrived with the second post of the day. I watched him come toiling down the steep hill with his leather satchel, and while he was being tended to by Wheeler, given lemonade and cake, fuel to propel him back up the hot hill and on the further two hot miles to the next farm, Rose, Peter and I sorted the offerings he’d brought with him. They included items for me, the first mail I’d received since arriving. There was a postcard from my father in Cambridge, the flowing copperplate informing me that the weather was changeable there and Euripides was progressing. And there was a letter – a fat letter – from Nicola Dunsire.

  I inspected its envelope closely: French postage stamps and – no doubt about it, no possible ambiguities – a legible French postmark. The last lingering shadows that had threatened disappeared in a mirror-flash. Now I had the envelope in my hand, I found I wasn’t that eager to read its contents; I went fishing with Rose and Peter instead. But when I went to bed that night, the letter reproached me – it was kind of her to write, after all; so I opened it and read it by the flicker of candlelight.

  Description of Loire and chateau; address of said chateau, which she’d clean forgotten to give me… account of trains, drains, weather, local beauty spots. Books being read by their party: Nicola Dunsire discovering the world of someone called Marcel Proust. Dorothy doing this, Meta saying that, Evadne in charge of meals, Edith deep in Hume, Clair bicycling off to paint landscapes… Thirteen earnest, industrious, high-minded and, I felt, rather boring bluestockings… I yawned and skimmed to the last page; the poet from our Cambridge lunch party had turned up – out of the blue apparently: Eddie-something double-barrelled, surname unreadable in candlelight. Eddie sent on his way… The most beautiful evening, such a view from my room. Back to Monsieur Swann’s tomorrow, she wrote, and with that the letter ended abruptly.

  Amusing in places but a plod through predictable territory, I thought. She had signed off: Vo
ila! Ecrivez-moi, ma chère Lucy. Je vous embrace, Nicola. There was a postscript: How are your Egyptologists? Have you worn my dress yet?

  I tried on her dress the next morning: I was reminded of it by that postscript, and I wanted to be sure it would fit me for Rose’s birthday. At the end of July, it had fitted perfectly; only six weeks ago, but since coming to the farm I felt as if I’d grown – my body felt different. I blamed Wheeler’s excellent cooking, the sharpened appetite that came from running about all day; those cakes and pies and biscuits we consumed, the eggs and bacon breakfasts, the pints of milk we drank. I locked the door, removed my nightdress, and peered down at my own nakedness. I was taller, but my legs and arms were still thin, my hip and collarbones stuck out; you could count my ribs. Wheeler said both Peter and I were too skinny, and I was built like a boy – since I’d have liked to be a boy, I took that as a compliment. No change, no change, I thought with relief, and eased the silk over my head. The twenty tiny buttons ran up the side of the dress; the ten lower ones fastened easily; the ten above did not.

  What had happened? I had grown; I’d put on weight, but only in one small area of my body. What was wrong with my chest? I tried breathing in and out; when I was gasping for air, I could manage six more buttons. The final four simply would not do up. I ran weeping to Wheeler. ‘What’s happened? Oh, what’s happened, Wheeler?’ I cried. ‘If I starve myself for the next two weeks, will it fit again?’

  Wheeler might have explained: looking back now, I can see she considered that possibility and rejected it; perhaps she saw that the issue might lead on to other biological inevitabilities, and such difficult topics were best avoided. I saw something – a wariness – flash across her face, but it quickly returned to Easter Island impassivity. ‘What a great fuss about nothing,’ she said. ‘You see those darts in the bodice? Let them out and it’ll fit again right as rain. No problem there!’ She made the adjustments and returned the dress to me that night. I tried it on. It fitted.

  I didn’t mention these difficulties to Nicola Dunsire when I answered her letter. I told her I’d be wearing her dress for Rose’s birthday. I told her how lovingly it had been inspected by an expert in the field: Wheeler approves! I thought that would please her. I told her Mr Carter was arriving soon, that I had seen Lady Evelyn and might visit Highclere, that Peter and I had caught two trout, that I’d seen a sparrowhawk, was doing my homework, and – as instructed – had been learning some poems by heart.

  Rose and I had chosen Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott: we both loved its rhythms, its rhymes, its tale of enchantment and love’s appalling fatalities. It was long, but we mastered it all, and used to chant it as we climbed the high blue hills beyond the farm. Even Peter learned some lines, and would join in at key points: She left the WEB, she left the LOOM/ She made three paces through the ROOM/ She looked down to CAMELOT. Looking down at the distant towers of Highclere Castle, we’d shout these lines from the hilltops. We also liked, Out flew the web and floated wide/ The mirror CRACK’D from side to side/ ‘The CURSE is come upon me,’ cried/ The Lady of Shalott…

  Tennyson’s best line, we agreed, and the proof of his sublime genius, was our favourite: The CURSE is come upon MEEE. We yelled that, and sometimes wailed it, banshee-manner, clutching our sides, rolling on the ground; once, we howled it, all three of us in unison, so loudly that Lord Carnarvon must have heard us in his castle three miles away.

  We overdid it that time, and Peter, who didn’t understand curses, began to tremble. ‘But what is it? What did it do?’ he asked in a little voice. ‘Oh, Lucy – does it dead you?’

  Had Frances been there, she’d have told him curses were terrible things: inescapable, irreversible and eternal. Six months later – by which time Carter, Lord Carnarvon and tales of Egyptian curses would be on the front pages of newspapers worldwide; by which time my own life would be changed in ways I’d never foreseen – I might have felt Frances had a point; I was certainly considering the nature and origin of curses, and I still do. But that day Rose and I were anxious to prevent nightmares, afraid Peter might begin asking about his mother again; and so, improvising fast, we explained curses were nothing to fear. They were a passing affliction. They were quickly cured – like chickenpox. And anyway, they didn’t happen, they belonged to fairy tales, they were the stuff of fiction.

  ‘I don’t expect your poet friend Eddie would approve our taste in verse!’ I wrote to Nicola Dunsire, describing this episode. ‘Given his views on the immortal Alfred!’ I did try to be sophisticated when I wrote; I thought this was a passable witticism. Miss Dunsire could not have agreed; nor did my other news seem to engage her, for she never commented on anything I told her, and she never answered any questions I asked. I received many letters from her over the next weeks, they flew in with astonishing regularity, on the dot, one every three days. She kept me up to date with her own activities and those of her bluestocking friends. She kept me posted as to her deepening fascination with M. Swann… and what a disappointment there! I’d finally realised that Swann was not a real man, as I’d half hoped, half feared – he was merely a character in a novel.

  But not once, not once, did Nicola Dunsire respond to anything I wrote in my letters. Maybe she just tossed them aside unread? Maybe Rose, Peter, Wheeler and I were of no interest to her. I was wounded by this deafening silence. I confessed that.

  ‘Miss Manners could teach her a thing or two. Self-centred,’ pronounced Wheeler.

  23

  ‘Eve, may I ask you a question – what does SA mean?’ I asked as Eve and I were having our ‘slap-up’ lunch.

  It was market day at the small Austenish town of Alresford, and as we could not, of course, enter a public house, Eve had made other arrangements. We were eating a Highclere Castle picnic, sitting by the river below the town, overlooking the watercress beds for which it was famous. We’d had foie gras sandwiches and slices of partridge pie. We were munching apples and sipping cold lemonade. Eve had been staring dreamily at the river for some while – in a Lady of Shalott manner, I thought: Tirra lirra, by the river/ Sang Sir Lancelot. Now she roused herself.

  ‘SA stands for sex appeal, Lucy,’ she replied – the great thing about Eve was that if you asked her a question, she answered it. ‘It means you’re madly alluring to the opposite sex. A man can have SA, or a woman. And it doesn’t mean that they’re handsome or pretty – not necessarily. It just means they have this irresistible, magical power to attract. Poor darling Poppy had it, for instance… ’ A shadow passed across her face. ‘I don’t have it – and I used to mind and wish I did. But now I think I’m safer without it.’ She stuffed the last things back in the picnic basket. ‘Right, one final try for these presents. We’re not getting on very well, are we? Before we head for home, shall we try the market?’

  We did so. The shops at Alresford had proved a disappointment: had we wanted to buy Rose some ironmongery, a teapot or a whalebone corset, they might have helped, but not otherwise. The market looked more promising. We wandered between the stalls, admiring the bowls of eggs, the hand-made cheeses, the wooden toys whittled on farms as a sideline industry, the hand-knitted baby clothes being sold by farmers’ wives for pin money. I was considering the nature of SA, the fact that Miss Dunsire (according to Rose) had it, and Eve (according to her) did not. Eve, wearing a pale pink frock, pretty, smiling and courteous, recognised and greeted on all sides with doffed caps and curtseys, was as charming that day as I could imagine any woman’s being. The differing appeal of Mrs d’Erlanger and Miss Dunsire remained mysterious. When I was a grown woman, would I ever resemble Poppy or Nicola? I couldn’t imagine that. I’d have to settle for safety, I decided.

  Clutching my money, I inspected the stalls. It did seem that Eve had been right and my florin was enough: it would easily have bought a wooden train or a knitted doll or a crocheted shawl – objects someone must have laboured over for days; but none of these things would appeal to Rose. We walked on, past the gypsy women selling lucky heather,
the gypsy fortune-teller reading palms – Eve scurried past him, and I remembered Howard Carter’s story of Carnarvon’s seances and how much they had frightened her. Eve bought some little things – a rose-pink sash, a corn dolly. I couldn’t find anything suitable, until, as we reached the outskirts of the market, I saw a man with two large mewling baskets; one contained puppies, the other kittens. Rose loved animals.

  I drew Eve aside and we debated: cats versus dogs, possible prices. Eve recognised the man, who’d once been a ditch-digger on the Carnarvon estate and a beater on shoots; he had been dismissed, she said, and was now famous in the district as a drinker, poacher and general ne’er-do-well. We returned to the stall. Eve asked about price. ‘Kittens, a tanner apiece. Dogs ditto. As it’s your ladyship… Got to get rid of ’em.’ The man heaved a sigh. ‘Otherwise it’s into a sack, and into the water-butt with ’em.’

  ‘What nonsense, Fletcher,’ Eve replied coldly. ‘We both know you’ll be taking them on to Winchester market in two days’ time, and if you don’t sell them here you’ll certainly sell them there. What do you think, Lucy?’

  I was inclining to the dogs; I asked what kind they were.

  ‘Kind?’ He scratched his head. ‘Well, that’s ’ard to say, miss. My bitch got out, and I couldn’t rightly say as to the father. There’s terrier in there, good blood, a fine ratter their ma was – but as to their pa… Foxhound? Collie? Bulldog? Got a foreign look to ’em, a lapdog look. Bit of French poodle maybe? They look kind of woolly, see?’

  He plucked a puppy from the basket and held it up by the scruff of its neck; it squealed. It had dirty matted black and white fur and terrified milky-blue eyes. ‘For goodness’ sake, Fletcher,’ Eve said, ‘those puppies are virtually newborn – a few days at most. They should be with their mother for weeks yet.’