The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  ‘Is it Clair?’ Nicola said, with sudden sharpness. She took a step towards me. ‘If it is, just say. I’ll tell her to leave – she can find somewhere else to live. I know you dislike her. Lucy, dear, please tell me if it’s that.’

  She laid her long-fingered hand on my arm. I gently released it.

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ I said, turning away from her.

  I knew it would be useless to raise that objection, or any other; useless to prevaricate or argue. Sooner or later, by stealth, guile and loving persistence, she would wear down my resistance. Putting distance between us was the only way I knew of evading the insistent need she had to have me near her and under her sway. I hesitated and then, seizing on the one reason even she could not overcome, I said: ‘Nicola, I can’t. It’s not possible. I’m getting married.’

  I thought I’d kept no photographs of my first husband – the marriage itself and its subsequent dissolution were not as painless as people assumed; at some point, around the decree nisi, I think, I went through the albums and destroyed them. But I must have missed one picture – and I examined it the other morning, sitting in my chair overlooking Highgate’s square. It had been taken by a safragi at the Winter Palace Hotel where, as I’ve mentioned, I spent my honeymoon. Egypt was my suggestion, quickly endorsed.

  ‘I’d like to show you the places I love,’ I said. ‘But if you’d rather go somewhere else, Eddie, just say. Wherever you’d like. Truly. You choose.’

  Eddie was low on funds, a bit short of the readies. I was paying, and so made the suggestion timidly. I didn’t want him to feel coerced or – worse – obligated. The low state of his finances was, he said, a bagatelle, a purely temporary embarrassment.

  ‘Darling girl. Egypt it shall be. I had thought, maybe Capri… But I’ve been there so often and it’s perhaps a little–– No. The Orient it shall be. Don’t let’s dwell too long at the pyramids perhaps, I feel they could pall. But Luxor does tempt me. Flaubert went there, you know, and a wild time he had of it, a wicked surfeit of prostitutes. Can we really Ritz it up, darling? Can we afford the Winter Palace?’

  I couldn’t – not really. But Eddie liked luxury and I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I flogged one of my mother’s pieces of jewellery – that stock was diminishing – and off we went. The photograph I was inspecting had been taken halfway through our stay at the Winter Palace, at the end of our first week there. February 1936: it was three months since Frances had died.

  We are standing on the terrace, above the Nile. I am twenty-five, wearing sunglasses and a hat with a wide brim, which protect me from the sun and completely hide my face: this thin stranger could be me, could be anyone. This person has averted her gaze. She is looking away from the camera, across the river. Her dark glasses are fixed upon the Theban hills in the distance. And the word for horizon is? Akhet.

  Eddie, thirty-five, hatless, in shirtsleeves, his thick hair tossed back, one arm carelessly thrown around my shoulders and the other around the shoulders of the Arab boy he’d hired as our guide, is smiling straight at the lens, as if daring it to take a bad picture of him. No camera ever did. Eddie was, from every angle, handsome and startlingly so. He embodied that era’s masculine ideal of beauty: tall, athletic, golden-haired, blue-eyed, frank-faced; a Grecian nose, a witty mouth: sui generis – bohemian in his dress, but no doubt as to caste: unmistakably an English gentleman.

  I inspected the photograph minutely. Read, Lucy, learn to read: an injunction that applies to images as well as words. By the time this picture was taken, even I was beginning to understand that, less than a month in, this marriage had problems. I couldn’t understand why. Yet there the evidence is, in front of my eyes, in a snapshot.

  How slow can you be? I tore it into tiny scraps, into confetti.

  36

  On our return from our Egyptian honeymoon, Eddie and I had to live somewhere; this necessity was one he had overlooked. His inclination was to continue overlooking it for as long as possible. He’d been of No Fixed Abode prior to our marriage, he liked to say – this meant that he stayed with a succession of rich friends until such a time as they chucked him out. He intended to continue this mode of life for the foreseeable future; why should marriage alter anything?

  We spent March in his parents’ chilly and monstrous house in Shropshire. We spent April at a friend’s mansion in Kensington, and May in a palatial villa his cousin owned in the South of France. In June, his luck ran out: a writer he knew grudgingly lent us the keys to a grim little cottage in the middle of Bodmin Moor. It had no running water, but we only discovered that on arrival.

  ‘Moors,’ Eddie said, our first night. His tone was reflective; glass in hand, he was staring out at the blackened wilderness that surrounded us. ‘Moors. There’s your next book, darling girl. You must start it the instant you finish Islands.’

  A week later I took the train to London and began house-hunting.

  The cottage I subsequently bought was off the King’s Road, in what was then a poor part of Chelsea. I was staying with Rose and Peter while I made the search and, as it happened, it was Peter who heard of the place, and he who first took me there. It belonged to one of his fellow activists – Peter was caught up in left-wing politics, in anti-fascist demonstrations at that point. I never discovered if the owner was a Communist or an Anarchist – indeed, I never met the owner, a comrade of Peter’s who had had to leave England hurriedly.

  ‘It’s going cheap,’ Peter said.

  ‘It has definite potential, Lucy,’ said Rose, in a faint tone, when called upon to inspect it.

  Rose, who had escaped unscathed from the marriage market of her debutante years, was now a top-flight secretary, working at the Ministry of Defence, much loved by visiting generals, who remembered her mother Poppy with great fondness. As she’d said to me all those years before, she was a whizz at organising; she organised field marshals on a daily basis, so organising a house move was nothing. ‘Yes, definite possibilities,’ she went on, marching from room to room, inspecting the dry rot assiduously. ‘It will need work, of course.’

  ‘It suits you, Lulu,’ Peter pronounced, having persuaded the doors to unstick, the windows to open and the taps to work. He leaned back against the cottage’s distempered walls and surveyed me narrowly.

  ‘But will it suit Eddie?’ Rose asked – at that point, neither she nor her brother had met my husband.

  ‘Only Lucy can judge that,’ Peter said. ‘How would we know? She’s hiding the husband away. Full fathom five her husband lies… She’s gone to extreme lengths to prevent our meeting him.’

  I ignored that. I considered the cottage. I could afford it – an important point, for marriage seemed to have dented my funds severely. It was pretty, if primitive. Its brick façade was whitewashed; a rose had been trained around its front door; to the rear, beyond a damp scullery, there was a small yard, occupied by a tortoiseshell tom-cat. I felt plants could be persuaded to grow in that yard – I imagined it swathed in honeysuckle, as the courtyard had been at Nuthanger… I dislike indecision. I bought it.

  Verdicts on this purchase varied. Nicola, driving over from Bloomsbury, where she and Clair were by then magnificently installed in the flat she’d described to me, said the cottage was a slum. I’d been expecting that; I knew she’d be determined to find fault. I was still not forgiven for my marriage, nor for refusing to join her in Bloomsbury. Showing me around that apartment of hers, she’d thrown back the dividing doors that separated her room from Clair’s. ‘This could have been yours, Lucy,’ she’d said to me.

  She inspected the cottage minutely. I knew one of her black moods was upon her before she was in the door; by the time her inspection was complete, her hands had begun trembling. She proclaimed it a nasty artisan’s house, in an unfashionable area. My neighbours would be plumbers and bricklayers. And it was so small, so confining, so tomb-like… Why, you couldn’t swing a cat in it.

  Clair gave her a reproachful push when she made that remark. Had I
not known her as I did, I might have thought she felt sorry for me. ‘Don’t be such a fucking snob, Nicola,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with you today?’

  She made a face behind Nicola’s back and told me the cottage had atmosphere – and the area was fun; half her Slade friends lived around the corner. Eddie was finally persuaded to inspect it that September; it was the day before we were due to move in. By then, I’d worked on the place, worked on it for weeks, cleaned it from top to bottom, painted it, even furnished it. I’d made curtains, found chairs and bookshelves. I rescued some of my mother’s paintings from store and hung them. I placed the shabti Frances had given me in pride of place on the mantelpiece. Peter had found me an old scrubbed pine table in a clever junk shop he knew, and I’d laid it in readiness for our first dinner with plates and wineglasses and napkins and flowers.

  ‘Darling girl, you have been busy,’ Eddie said, having roamed from room to room, and come to a halt in the kitchen by the table.

  He could see I was keyed up, and he liked to tease; he finally confessed he was a little disappointed. What he’d really been hoping for, he said, was something more, well, Pooter-ish. ‘A red-brick villa,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘A nice squat villa, with “Mon Repos” in stained glass over the front door… that’s what I expect from a marital home, Lucy.’ Eddie found such phrases amusing, so ‘marital home’ became the cottage’s title. It was the ‘marital nest’ when he really got going.

  A few weeks later, Eddie, restless and unsettled, said the cottage didn’t feel right: he needed to set his seal on it, he needed to baptise it, and the way to effect this baptism was simple: we must give a party. I vetoed that suggestion; I knew Eddie’s parties by then, and I didn’t intend the cottage to get wrecked this early. I proposed a dinner instead – a small one, an intimate one, where people could actually talk to each other. My friends Rose and Peter still had not met my husband, I pointed out; and it was they who had helped find the cottage.

  ‘If it wasn’t for them,’ I said, ‘we wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘How very true,’ said Eddie.

  The dinner was organised for the first week of October. Rose attended, but Peter did not: he had been arrested the previous day at the ‘They Shall Not Pass’ demonstration in Cable Street, fighting a pitched battle against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, and was now in jail.

  Rose and I bailed him on that occasion – and a second dinner was arranged. Again, Peter did not attend. It was December by then; our first Christmas in the cottage was approaching. ‘Where’s Peter?’ I said to Rose, opening the door to her.

  He’d left for Spain the previous day, she said, shivering, pushing past me and making for the fire. ‘You know what he’s like, Lucy. Once Peter decides something, you can’t stop him. He’s joined the International Brigade.’ She drew her fur coat more tightly around her. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it. If we do, I’ll start blubbing. Where’s Eddie?’

  Eddie was at the pub on the corner of our street, the Jolly Hangman. He was fetching a jug of Guinness. When he returned, he mixed this with champagne – on tick – and, disappearing to the kitchen, then added a secret ingredient, possibly brandy, possibly curaçao, possibly both. Eddie loved cocktails as much as Rose did.

  ‘Is it Black Velvet?’ Rose asked, as Eddie passed us a foaming coal-black substance.

  ‘Certainly not,’ he replied, with indignation. ‘I’ve named it in Lucy’s honour. You know how she is about Egypt. This, Rose, is an Anubis.’

  ‘Well, it certainly has teeth,’ Rose said, having sipped experimentally. ‘I like it.’

  She and Eddie settled themselves by the fire and began talking nineteen to the dozen; Rose had succumbed to Eddie’s charm at that first dinner, within minutes of meeting him. She’d never stopped singing his praises since, to me – to her brother, to everyone.

  Anubis, guardian of graveyards. Undrinkable. Blasphemous. Ill-timed. Unwise. I left them to it, retreated to the kitchen and tipped the cocktail down the sink.

  ‘How’s your Islands book going, Lucy?’ Clair asked me. ‘It’s been a whole year now – you must have finished it surely?’

  Clair’s instincts for mixing it had never deserted her, I thought. This was a question she asked me whenever I saw her. Occasionally she’d vary it in a helpful way, saying, ‘Do you think you could possibly have writer’s block?’ or ‘Maybe islands was the wrong subject? Why don’t you switch to mountains? Or valleys?’ On this occasion – it was three days before Christmas; I was at the Bloomsbury flat to deliver presents for her and Nicola – she added a corollary: ‘Here’s a tip, sweetheart. Marriage doesn’t suit you. That was only too predictable. If you want to finish that bloody book, get yourself some space.’

  Something in her tone alerted me: for once, she wasn’t setting out to annoy me, I realised – Clair herself was on edge. We were in the elegant drawing room of Nicola’s flat; Clair was prowling around, in search of a corkscrew, and I was alone with her. Nicola was out, late returning from a shopping expedition – and this was unusual. Nicola liked to control her friends’ meetings; she preferred them to take place when she herself was present.

  I wandered around the room, as Clair began to open a bottle of red wine. Nicola had made the space beautiful, bringing most its furniture from France and claiming it had belonged to her mother. She had brought elegance and understatement, Clair had brought colour: a cadmium-orange shawl, tossed across a pale-grey chair; a citron-yellow cushion against dark-blue silk upholstery. Her portrait of Nicola in our Newnham garden hung above a side table. On the table’s polished surface stood the blue stolen shabti figure I’d given Nicola in Paris all those years before. For Nicola, from Lucy, with love. The real thing! Clair’s recent paintings pulsed from the walls.

  This room, Nicola’s creation, bore no resemblance to our house in Newnham, to the rooms there she had transformed. But in Bloomsbury her ménage continued much as before; its habits had become ingrained within weeks of the move to London. My father visited once a week, arriving on a Sunday morning, staying for lunch, departing soon after for college; occasionally he would come down on a weekday and spend it at work in the Reading Room at the museum. Clair spent her days painting. Nicola… I was never sure how Nicola spent her days, weeks, months. She always insisted she never had a minute to herself, but sometimes I wondered if she missed her contacts, her university scheming, missed Cambridge.

  Clair had just come inside from her day’s work in her garden studio. Paint-scarred as usual, in filthy dungarees, pouring the wine, chain-smoking, she prowled around Nicola’s large drawing room as if it were a cage. Clair’s habits never varied: she worked from nine in the morning until six at night, every day, including weekends. Recently, hitting a productive patch, these hours had increased – and on my last visit Nicola had complained of that fact, amusingly at first, and then in a querulous way, at length. Get yourself some space.

  ‘Is everything all right, Clair?’ I asked, with hesitation.

  ‘Fine and dandy.’ She sloshed red wine into two glasses. She was fiercely loyal to Nicola; I had never doubted that. ‘Top hole. Spiffing. Pick your superlative.’

  ‘Nicola is happy here still? She’s not – she isn’t regretting the move to London?’

  ‘She says not. But she frets. She doesn’t like to be alone.’

  ‘She never did.’

  ‘It’ll settle.’ Clair handed me a glass, sprawled on the sofa, lit another cigarette. ‘But I’ve had to make some rules. Nicola should understand that – she’s made a few rules in her time, God knows… ’ She laughed. ‘So I’ve told her: no interruptions when I’m painting. It fucks up my concentration. If there’s some crisis, real or imagined, Nicola has to cope. No knocking on my studio door. There’s been quite a lot of door-knocking, recently.’

  ‘She’s lonely, I expect. Sometimes she needs company.’

  ‘She has company. Mine. Every evening, from six o’clock onwards. Then, my time is hers. That’s the deal, and it al
ways has been. Meanwhile,’ Clair’s small sharp face puckered in amusement, ‘meanwhile, I’ve had bolts fitted to the inside of the studio door. Two. Nice and stout. I took Nicola to inspect them yesterday.’

  ‘That went down well?’

  ‘Yes it did. Nicola laughed. She said I’d made a very neat little hidey-hole. She said it was a fine and private place.’

  ‘The grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a quote, Clair. One of her favourite poets.’

  ‘It is? Oh, Nicola and her bloody quotes.’ She shrugged, then stiffened and sat up; she had heard something, something that was inaudible to me. ‘That’s her key – at the front door downstairs… Silence is golden – is that a quote too? Keep your mouth shut. Don’t mention bolts. Change of subject.’

  She threw herself back on the sofa, put her fur-booted feet on a cushion. As Nicola came quietly and gracefully into the room, flushed from the cold air outside, carrying little parcels, trophies of her Christmas shopping, Clair was saying in a loud tone: ‘– and so we’re planning a party here to celebrate my birthday, and you might as well come, Lucy. Bring Eddie if you must, come alone, as the mood takes you. It’s coming up fast. On 12 February 1937, I’ll be three hundred years old, and I don’t feel a day over twenty.’

  We went to Clair’s three-hundred-years-old birthday party, my husband and I. We went to the three-hundred-and-one party held the following year. On both occasions, we took a taxi and trundled all across London from our Chelsea cottage to the flat in Bloomsbury.

  In the taxicab to the first of those birthday parties, married a year, Eddie and I sat side by side. I said, taking his hand: ‘Please try, Eddie. It means a lot to Nicola… We needn’t stay long, darling.’

  On the way to the second, 1938 and a year on (the same cab, I could swear to it), I sat on the rear seat while Eddie perched, scowling, on the jump seat. I’d returned from my flight to Egypt, that visit when I’d encountered Howard Carter for the last time, the previous December. On my return, my husband had said he couldn’t manage without me, that he needed me, that I’d been mad to bolt: what was I running away from? The new year saw us reunited: back together in the marital home, in the marital nest.