The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  There were thirty of them. Most were spent at the house, as the weather remained cloudy and inclement. In the mornings, the visiting nurses would give Frances a sponge-bath in the cold water the regime stipulated; they’d remake her bed and supervise her breathing exercises. In the afternoons, once her meal and obligatory rest period were past, I would sit with her and talk or, at her request, read to her. She made out a list of books and I fetched them from the Free Library on Main. Frances would tire quickly and grow restless, so I read as she bid: a fragment here, a favourite passage there. We read Little Women and The Secret Garden and Huckleberry Finn. ‘Ah, I love that,’ she’d say. ‘Read me that again, Lucy.’ So I’d return to the same paragraph until her restlessness was quieted, and her eyelids began drooping.

  She had a passion for news too, and when allowed would listen avidly to the wireless set. ‘I have to know what’s going on, Lucy,’ she’d say. ‘When I get back to the big bad world I must know what’s been happening – people will think me a fool otherwise.’

  And so I’d fetch the local papers, or bring up The New York Times and The New Yorker, to which Helen subscribed, and read out selected columns: the society pages, the lead news stories, reviews. In a careful, uninflected tone, I’d recount details of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, the continuing suffering of Oklahoma sharecroppers, the latest logging prices, the dinner and dance Mrs Edgar P. Van der Luyden had given for her daughter Lavinia at the Pierre Hotel. Coming once upon an obituary of that legendary prima ballerina we’d known as Madame Masha, I turned that page quickly. I read accounts of Nuremberg rallies, and who had attended some dazzling first night at the Metropolitan Opera. Frances would lie back against her pillows, her bright eyes fixed on the open windows, her lips parted and her expression rapt – as if she were watching some marvellous film, the windows a cinema screen. All events, tiny, trivial or tumultuous, held an equal fascination.

  Sometimes she liked to hear about people she’d known but had not seen for years such as Rose, or Peter – and I would read out the letters from them that Nicola Dunsire had forwarded from Cambridge. Rose was now living in a flat in London, bought with the inheritance from her mother Poppy that had come to her on her twenty-first birthday. Wheeler lived with her; the set-up was much as Rose had described to me that day on the ferry to Dover, returning from Egypt. Her brother Peter had recently joined them there, having contrived to get expelled from Eton and having severed all contact with his father. ‘Expelled?’ Frances gave me a doubting look. ‘Peter? He was such a sweet obedient little boy. Timid. He wouldn’t have said boo to a goose.’

  ‘That was then. Now he’s grown up. He’s nearly seventeen, tall and strong and a hell-raiser. He’s been working on expulsion for years. I knew he’d pull it off. He’s determined.’

  ‘Does he still have Poppy’s eyes? Does he still look like her?’

  ‘Yes. The same eyes – but fiercer.’

  I examined the two letters: Rose’s was long and communicative. Peter’s was short, witty and on the whole uninformative: Dear Lulu, I’ve escaped. I’m a free man! When you next see me, you won’t recognise me… I replaced the letters in their envelopes.

  ‘How strange. Sometimes I feel I know them – and other times, I think I dreamed them.’

  Frances turned her brilliant gaze to mine. ‘I think I dreamed it all,’ she said sadly, plucking at the bedclothes. ‘Madame’s ballet classes, your Miss Mack, Eve and Mr Carter, Daddy’s excavations, even the Valley and the tombs – did we ever really go there, Lucy?’

  ‘You know we did, Frances… It’s time for your rest now.’

  I was learning the danger signals by then. So I’d say: it’s time for your rest – or the doctor, the nurse, the massage, the regulation milk. I was often afraid when I soothed her in this way, for the setbacks could happen without warning. One second Frances would be calm, the next in feverishly high spirits, or afflicted with a sudden swoop of anxiety; then she would begin gasping for breath, be convulsed by a coughing attack. Once she had needed oxygen; once she had coughed up bright blood and tried to hide the red square of gauze from me; once her skin had gone white and her lips blue, and the doctors came racing.

  They carried paraphernalia into her room: large bottles, gauges, rubber tubes, a long rubber tube connected to a needle. Helen and I were banished to the landing so I did not witness this procedure, which was called artificial pneumothorax. Standing outside Frances’s door, gripping her mother’s hands, I heard it. One long high scream, then a prolonged hissing and bubbling. A man’s voice said, Hold steady, Frances. I said, ‘Ah, dear God, what are they doing?’

  Helen stared at the wall. They were collapsing Frances’s left lung, she said, by injecting oxygen through the chest wall into the pleural cavity. Both lungs were infected, but the condition of the left was worse. The needle inserted had to be wielded with absolute precision. It was an ancient technique, first mentioned by Hippocrates. The doctors at Saranac Lake, performing this therapy on numerous patients on a daily basis, were expert. Once collapsed, the afflicted lung could rest and healing was promoted.

  ‘How many times, Helen?’

  ‘This is the seventh time this year.’

  ‘What will happen?’

  ‘We’ll go back to the beginning again. Longer rest periods. Longer exposure to fresh air. Less stimulation. More frequent meals, more milk – maximum nutrition. Gradually, the breaches in the lung should heal a little and the adhesions may weaken.’ She reached up to straighten a picture on the wall – one of her own watercolours, the view from the veranda at the American House, sand and rose rock, desert. She dropped her hand and left the picture crooked. She said, ‘Perseverance, Lucy.’

  That event came early in my stay – at the end of the first week I was at Saranac Lake. After that, as Helen had warned, the regime became stricter still. The periods of enforced rest became more protracted, the doctors, tweed-suited, moustached, swept in, emanating professional confidence. They visited more frequently; their conferences with Helen lasted longer than they formerly had.

  At first, I’d ply Helen with eager questions when they’d left: what was their advice, what further treatments did they recommend? There were no other treatments, she said in a hopeless way. Seeing that such questioning was painful to her, I avoided it religiously after that. Instead, Helen and I entered a conspiracy in which we were always, at all times, optimistic; at the end of each day, and often during the course of it, we’d remind one another of the advances, the tiny but noticeable improvements: the hour of peaceful sleep Frances had enjoyed, the animation she’d shown and the determination. She had managed to eat this, she’d expressed a wish to do that, her temperature had remained normal for three days in succession, her pulse rate had slowed and was now steady. We counted these events like beads on a rosary.

  Helen believed in time, rest, quiet, dry cold air, nutrition – or said that she did. I embraced these faiths too: you have to have a creed in such circumstances. We’d cook and shop for the right provisions with shared zeal. Helen would send me into town with lengthy shopping lists. ‘Go to Gibneys’ Market,’ she’d say. ‘Tell William and Mellie I sent you. They might have squabs by now… Oh, and then go to Barr’s, Lucy, and see if they have the Providence River oysters – Dr Brown says he can’t recommend oysters too highly, very nutritious and easily digested – and perhaps some fish, and tell them the eggs must be new-laid – see if they have the Malaga grapes, they’re Frances’s favourites.’

  The recommended diet had to be high in protein and vitamins, and high in calories too, for the portions Frances ate were tiny. So I’d consult with the solicitous shopkeepers, and come back with laden baskets: yes, they did have the Malaga grapes and the eggs were laid that morning, and look how plump and tender the squabs were… And then Helen and I would retreat to the kitchen while the nurses did their work upstairs, and we’d chop and slice and roast and poach: we’d make fresh, light vegetable soups and beef tea; we’d contrive tasty
casseroles and nutritious puddings. Helen had never cooked and my own experience was limited, but I bought a recipe book and, fiercely evangelical, we improved. ‘Oh, that was delicious,’ Frances would say, sinking back on her pillows.

  She might have eaten one square inch of chicken, a spear of carrot, half a potato, three grapes. Sometimes, if I was quick enough, I’d contrive to hide the leftovers from Helen, run downstairs and scrape them into the kitchen bin before she saw them – and then I realised that she was performing the same pantomime for my benefit. After that we were more honest.

  ‘Only a quarter of the chicken breast,’ Helen would say, and we’d inspect what was left, and tell one another that it was better than yesterday.

  ‘She’s drunk all the milk,’ I’d remind her and Helen would sigh and say: ‘Milk’s so nutritious. You can live on milk, Lucy. I’m sure I read that somewhere… You remember Harold Jones, that archaeologist in the Valley, Herbert’s friend? He had TB, and all that milk he drank kept the disease at bay for years.’

  I looked away quickly: across a luncheon table in a tomb light years before, I heard Frances’s light childish voice: ‘What became of Mr Jones, Daddy?’

  When, ten days later, the doctors confirmed that the artificial pneumothorax procedure had been effective and there were signs of healing: we gained new hope. It was then early November. Helen began to make eager plans for Frances’s twenty-second birthday, which fell on 9 December – weeks away still, but it would be on us before we knew it, she said. Frances’s younger sister, Barbara, whom I had never met, would be coming up from New York with her father that day: her visits had to be rationed, for they disturbed both her and Frances. ‘She can’t go upstairs, you see, Lucy. It isn’t allowed. We daren’t risk that. So she stands outside, and we bring Frances to the porch windows, and they wave, and call to one another.’

  Reaching for an album, she showed me photographs of the two sisters: the resemblance between them was strong. This picture had been taken in New York, that one in Boston, and this at their holiday house in Maine, on the island of North Haven.

  ‘Oh, I wish you’d come there to stay with us, Lucy,’ Helen said. ‘Frances loves it so much – she always wanted to take you there.’

  I looked at the photograph she was indicating: it showed a place I recognised from Frances’s little shrine to her dead brother in her bedroom at the American House: a dangerous jetty, the turbulent waters of Penobscot Bay. Helen had already lost one child. I stared at the picture: an eternal summer’s day; at sea, two young girls in a sailing boat.

  Helen snapped the album shut. ‘Let’s not think about that,’ she said, suddenly restless. ‘Let’s plan Frances’s birthday, Lucy – should I order a cake?’

  ‘I’ll make one, Helen. I’m quite good at cakes. My governess taught me.’

  ‘Bless you, dear.’ Helen pressed my hand. ‘Bless you for everything. Will you make a chocolate one? That’s Frances’s favourite. Twenty-two candles.’

  The next day, a ridge of high pressure came in – and the weather changed. There had been day after day of mild weather, which had brought mist and rain and depressed Frances’s spirits. ‘Oh, all I can see is cloud,’ she’d say, propping herself on one elbow, straining to see the view from her porch windows. ‘The mountains have disappeared, I can’t even see the valley.’

  ‘The forecast is good, darling,’ Helen said, from one side of the bed.

  ‘Sun for days,’ I said, from the other.

  And the sun did come, transforming the valley and unveiling its beauty. The light sparkled, glittered on the snow-capped Adirondacks, turning Saranac Lake itself from black mirror to gleaming mercury. The blue sky was unclouded; there was scarcely a breath of wind, and when I walked into town to collect the latest batch of books, the air was everything the guidebooks affirmed: cold, dry, curative and exhilarating.

  Frances was allowed up that day for the first time in weeks. She walked from her cure porch to her bedroom, along the landing and back again. Two days later, Dr Lawrason Brown, the senior medic, said he was astonished by the progress she’d made. ‘I wouldn’t have predicted this,’ he said. ‘Significant improvements. The will-power is very strong, of course.’

  She could now attempt the stairs, he decreed, provided she took them slowly. Flushed with excitement and triumph, Frances did so: she made it down to the sitting room, even out onto the veranda. Wrapped in coats, she insisted we should sit there, watching while her mother painted a watercolour. I’d picked berries, grasses, a few last wild flowers on my walk back from the town. Helen, whose eye was unerring, placed them in a dark blue jar that set off the sealing-wax red of the rose-hips, and Frances, her lips and cheeks as red as the berries, helped her arrange them. It is that watercolour that hangs in my Highgate sitting room now. Helen gave it to me, afterwards.

  Two days after that, when the bright weather still held, we bundled Frances into coats, helped her into a taxi and took her for a drive – not far, just around the town, past the river and the skaters on Moody Pond; the ice sizzled and hissed under the speed of their blades as they shot past us. They bent into the corners, performed waltzing dizzying spins. ‘Oh, how good it is not to be cooped up, how I wish we could go skating,’ Frances cried – and Helen cautiously agreed that she could take a small walk around the garden when we returned home. With her mother supporting one arm and I the other, she did so, lifting her eager face to the blue sky, sniffing at the scents of dry grass and autumn leaves. ‘I can smell the sun,’ she said, and then, after a little silence, catching at Helen’s hand, ‘When’s Daddy coming?’

  ‘At the weekend, darling. You know that. And he’ll be here again for your birthday.’

  ‘I wish he were here now. Look how glorious it is. When he comes, I shall go for a walk with him. Meantime, I need some practice. I’m so stiff and unsteady, like some ancient old woman… ’ She glanced sidelong at her mother. ‘I promised to walk by the river with Lucy – may we do it tomorrow?’

  Helen demurred, the doctors were consulted. Frances nagged and fretted and finally, two days later, anxious to avoid the excitement dissent caused, Helen gave her permission. We would be driven to the start of the river walk in a taxicab, and it would wait for us. We could walk along the level path by the riverside for precisely fifteen minutes.

  ‘Five minutes each way. We have to be quick, Lucy,’ Frances said, clasping my arm tight as we walked away from the car, ‘there’s something I need to show you.’

  ‘We can’t be quick, and you’re not to get excited,’ I replied, in the firm dull tone that, imitating Helen, I’d adopted – Can you lie, Lucy? Yes: with the best of them. Can you hide heartbreak? Sure: when we need to, we all can.

  ‘I’m not excited. I’m as calm as can be. I was never calmer in my entire life. And look how slowly I walk – a snail would be faster.’

  She gave me one of her quicksilver glances, then turned her eyes to the path ahead: to one side of us, pines; to the other, the fierce smashing turbulence of the river. We walked on along the path at a slow pace: crystal-clear air, a heavenly blue sky, our breath coming out in small white puffs. Frances’s thinness was disguised by layers of woollens and a dark fur coat that Helen had insisted upon. She was wearing a flowered scarf over her dark shining hair, and I knew it must be one she had chosen herself, for it was brilliantly coloured, embroidered with red roses. Frances had never lost her love for objects that were gaudy, and she craved bright colours. The roses on the scarf matched the roses in her cheeks, Helen had said, kissing her. I knew the flushed cheeks were misleading, a symptom of her illness, but they gave her an air of radiant health. Her bright eyes, glancing at me, then fixing on the path ahead, were resolute; her expression was tight with concentration.

  ‘I’m sorry I lied to you, Lucy, in my letters,’ she said suddenly. ‘I wanted to tell you the truth – I’m pledged to tell you the truth always.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You told me as much of the truth as you could. There were reas
ons why you couldn’t tell me more. Anyway, I’m here now.’

  ‘Even before I was ill – I didn’t always tell you the entire truth.’ She hesitated. ‘When I wrote from school – I wasn’t always as happy as I made out.’

  ‘You weren’t?’

  I looked at her closely, thinking of the rapturous letters I’d received from the famous school she’d attended, Milton Academy near Boston. I could remember descriptions of the beauty of its campus, the schoolgirl fun in its dormitories; games, rivalry – and then, later, the graduation ball, the dress she’d made for it, the beau who would escort her. I had been jealous, I think. I envied her this school, envied such normalities; taught by Nicola Dunsire from the age of eleven onwards, I had never experienced them.

  ‘I expect I didn’t tell you the entire truth either,’ I said gently.

  ‘I got used to it eventually.’ Frances kept her eyes on the path ahead. ‘And it wasn’t their fault. It was a wonderful school, the teachers were excellent – it was altogether civilised. And I made friends there, in the end. But to begin with, I didn’t fit in and they found me strange, I think, Lucy – this earnest little girl, a bit of a misfit, obsessed with Egypt, and tombs and pyramids. I gave a talk once, about Hatshepsut and Daddy’s dig. I hadn’t been there long then, I was thirteen, I think. It wasn’t a complete failure, my talk. It had novelty factor, I guess… it was unusual. But that all wore off, and some of the girls would get impatient. They wanted to talk about lacrosse and basketball – and about boys, once we got older. I had to keep Egypt locked up inside my heart and my head. I learned not to speak of it. But I missed it so terribly. I used to dream of going back there. I’d lie in bed at night and plan secret voyages.’