The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  Somewhere around Marble Arch, I said: ‘We mustn’t stay late. And stay off the hard stuff, Eddie. No brandy.’

  ‘No brandy. No cocktails. I swear on my dear old mother’s grave.’

  ‘Your mother’s alive and well. Flourishing.’

  ‘What a stickler you are! On my grandmother’s then.’

  ‘Just don’t start anything, Eddie. It’s humiliating.’

  ‘Teeniest bit bourgeois, darling one. You want to watch that.’

  Parties were Eddie’s natural element: he plunged into them head-first, at high speed, like a hungry gannet diving into a shoal of herring; he swam through them with the grace of a seal underwater. Entering them with eagerness, he was scarcely through the door before women were clustering around him, locking their arms about his neck, murmuring endearments, like mermaids luring a sailor. I never minded that: they could sing till doomsday – my husband was immune to their charms and cajolings, and some of the women present knew that, though not all. I provided cover, as I’d come to realise, and when sober, Eddie did disguise it very well. Most women were charmed as effortlessly as Rose had been; my husband always remembered their names and histories; he complimented their dresses, he’d send them flowers, write them a sonnet, tell them what old Eliot had said to him last week, and young Wystan the week before; he’d listen to women’s stories, indulge their foibles, tease them and amuse – and all the while his eyes would be surveying the room, on the lookout for what he called ‘talent’ and sometimes ‘adventure’ and occasionally, when very drunk, ‘perdition’.

  One of the reasons he disliked Nicola and Clair’s parties was that ‘talent’ tended to be thin on the ground; knowing his weaknesses for certain types, they weeded them out when planning their guest lists. But those parties were unpredictable affairs; sometimes invited guests brought friends with them, so I never felt entirely safe… But by that time I didn’t feel safe anywhere with Eddie; so nothing new there, then.

  At that three-hundred-and-one birthday party, the rooms were very crowded. I pitched up here and there: I was talked at by the vicar of the church across the square, High Church, smelling faintly of incense; he explained his understanding of the Eucharist. I was talked at by a Marxist whom Clair had known at the Slade; he kindly explained Joseph Stalin’s reforms and how beneficial they were to Mother Russia. I surfaced by a woman who’d been my contemporary at Girton, who said: ‘You haven’t seen Snow White yet? Oh, but you must, Lucy! My children adored it.’ She sang a few bars of Snow White’s ‘My Prince Will Come’ for me, then eddied away on the party’s mysterious currents. They carried me into the adjacent room and then back again.

  I was looking for Rose and Peter, both invited at my request. Rose was now engaged to be married; Peter had returned from the civil war in Spain that week; he had been wounded, but not seriously, Rose had said. I couldn’t see either of them anywhere; but, as the room’s currents floated me past Nicola, she said: ‘Oh they’re definitely coming, Rose telephoned and confirmed that. She can’t stay long… she’s going on to dinner at Lady Evelyn’s. Howard Carter’s one of the guests, she told me. Lucy, dear, where’s your glass, aren’t you drinking? I wanted you to meet––’

  Some sudden wave of new arrivals separated us before I could discover who this was, and I ended up adrift somewhere, talking to a young army officer. He explained why war with Herr Hitler was now inevitable. ‘First it will be Austria, but he won’t stop there – rearmament, Mrs Vyne-Chance! Time is running out on us. If we don’t rearm faster, then frankly we’re sunk.’

  Next, I washed up by an American diplomat, who said how much he always enjoyed Mrs Foxe-Payne’s parties. He turned out to know the Winlocks, and he informed me that Herbert Winlock had recently had a stroke: ‘At the Museum. He was just coming down the stairs there, poor guy. Yes – a full recovery. Not too sure how long he’ll stay on as director, of course. Pretty demanding, the Met, big ship to steer… Is that your glass, Mrs Chance? Let me freshen your drink.’

  I floated away to the edge of the crowd, until I washed ashore by the table on which the blue shabti figure I’d given Nicola had pride of place. Twin to the one Frances had given me: I was looking at him, the little answerer, I had just picked him up, I was holding him to the light and examining him closely, tracing with one finger his spells from The Book of the Dead, powerful spells those, when Clair sought me out. She placed one unusually clean hand on my arm and said with a grimace, ‘Over there – north-north-west from where you’re standing. Nicola hasn’t noticed yet. I don’t know who they are. You won’t extricate Eddie, he’s well away, but we could shift them out of harm’s way. If you corral one, I’ll waylay the other.’

  I looked across the smoky eddying room: the crowded backs parted, made a narrow channel, and there was my husband, in full flow, attacking The Wasteland. To one side of him was a young man with long Shelleyan locks, wearing a velvet jacket; to the other was an older man of stockier build, with a pugilistic look, who was smoking a pipe. Both were Eddie’s idea of ‘talent’, a category that was catholic. ‘Adventure’ usually implied a Guardsman. ‘Perdition’ meant a married man who, until he met Eddie, had believed, or pretended, that he was heterosexual.

  How many times had I done this? Gone across, politely intervened, tried to save face?

  Too many times. The laws were what they were, so I didn’t blame Eddie, but I was sick of deceit. I replaced the shabti figure on the table with great care. Then I crossed to Eddie, whom I liked – and of whom I remained fond to his dying day. He would live to a great age and remain incorrigible to the last, I’m glad to say. I kissed his cheek.

  ‘You off, darling girl?’

  ‘I am, actually. Yes.’

  I left the party. I returned to Chelsea and, having packed the only belongings I wanted, typewriter, notebooks, the shabti Frances gave me, I left the marital home an hour later.

  ‘Where were you, Lucy?’ Rose cried, when I next telephoned her. ‘We only went to that wretched party for your sake. Peter says he saw you leaving, getting into a taxi just as we arrived. He just caught a glimpse – you might have stayed, you know.’

  ‘I might have,’ I answered. ‘But I didn’t.’

  My departure from the marital nest gave Nicola new hope. I saw it flash in her eyes when, after delaying for several months, I finally confessed it.

  ‘At last,’ she said. ‘I knew it was only a matter of time. You can move in here, Lucy.’ She was already rising; she had coloured and her hands had begun trembling. ‘I can get a room ready for you in an instant. The one at the back, with a view of the garden. If we move a desk in there, Lucy – I can have some bookshelves put up––’

  I knew I had to stop her and stop her fast, so I did. I told her that I already had somewhere to live – and this was true. A friend of a friend had sub-let me a room in World’s End, at the far, far end of the King’s Road. The district’s name had a certain ring. It wasn’t a bad room. I could write in it. I could finish Islands there. The place was cheap – and that was useful; as I was beginning to learn, it might be quick and easy to leave the marital home, but to unravel a marriage, to dissolve it, was in many ways expensive.

  ‘Something died in me when you refused,’ Nicola would claim. ‘Up until then – when I realised you’d choose some hideous little room in the back of beyond rather than come here, where you’d have everything you need, rent free, where I’d be there to help you – I could have typed your manuscripts for you, made sure you ate… Up until then, I hoped.

  ‘I did warn you,’ she’d say. ‘I warned you again and again. To my dying day, I shall never understand why you married that man. You never loved him. You knew he was profligate. You knew he drank.’

  And then Clair would interject, giving her gloss on this mysterious action. Weeks passed, during which time the topic was scrutinised with vigour when I was present and, I suspect, with venom when I was not, until finally Clair hit on her solution to this conundrum.‘Some women can’t resis
t pansies,’ she pronounced, one fine spring evening. Three months down the road to divorce, an inevitable war inching closer, lilacs in bloom in the square outside. I could hear children playing in its gardens; joyful cries and laughter drifted in through the open windows. ‘Some women are drawn to queers. Maybe Lucy thought she’d convert him. Is that what you thought? Didn’t you realise, once a queer always a queer? Trust me: I do know. It’s in the bones. It’s not some creed you pick up then cast aside, you know, sweetheart.’

  Across the room, Nicola swung around, white-faced. She said: ‘Clair. Stop this.’

  ‘Wrong on all counts,’ I said, moving towards the door. ‘Both of you. I’m going.’

  I always went back, though – I continued to visit Nicola, since she refused to visit me. I was drawn to her by a continuing need and anxiety. Attuned to her moods as I’d always been, I could see that her fretfulness and her restlessness were deepening. Part of me still yearned for the closeness that had once existed between us, the intensity of understanding we’d shared when I was still a child, and malleable. On the rare occasions when guardian Clair was absent, I would sometimes try to reach out to Nicola – to discover who she was now, what she felt and thought; but those attempts always met with failure, with cold glances and a change of subject. Thinking my own reticence was to blame, I’d sometimes try to tell her where I’d been and what I’d done – who I was. Nothing I said could ever hold her interest for long, and sometimes, as she frowned into the middle distance, I could see she was not even listening, but was brooding over some other matter she would not disclose, some unspoken grievance.

  Clair also observed this brooding abstraction, and when she joined us I’d watch her efforts to break through Nicola’s inward dreamings. Sometimes she’d try to divert her by bringing the realities of the outside world into this quiet drawing room. She’d speak of incipient war, rant about the blindness of politicians – with good reason at that date, of course. When such remarks drew no response, she would switch tack. She’d begin to hymn the praises of London. ‘Dear Christ – how did we put up with Cambridge all those years, Nicola?’ she’d say. ‘It was like being buried alive living there, stuck out in the Fens, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think. Those petty, fluting dons. Always so cold and damp. If we’d had to stay there one month longer, I swear I’d have topped myself. It was like being reborn when we came here.’

  That claim was true in her case, I thought, on one of the evenings when she made that or a very similar remark; conversations here, as I’d begun to see, took predictable routes. They went around and around, always returning to the same fixed points; sometimes I too ceased to listen. That evening, as Clair spoke of being ‘reborn’, I dragged my mind back to the room and looked at the two women, one silent and abstracted, one excited. Clair was in the midst of a ‘golden interval’, as she described it; she was working more intensely than ever and her painting had moved in a new, joyous direction.

  Nicola did not dissent from Clair’s claims to magical metropolitan rebirth, but as I met her eyes across her drawing room in the fading light that evening, her discontent was very evident. It was autumn by then, the autumn of 1938. Over the past spring and summer, her restlessness had increased; she’d taken up a series of projects and abandoned them one by one: piano lessons, singing lessons, even – briefly and painfully – painting lessons. She had tried her hand at a little journalism; she’d tried private coaching, French lessons – her French was very pure, she’d reminded us. She had given that up too – her pupils were dullards.

  ‘Oh, Cambridge,’ she said, ‘don’t remind me of that, Clair.’ Then she gave me the news: my father had telephoned that morning to inform her he had hired a new secretary – a role Nicola herself had clung to, then gradually relinquished after moving to London. His Aeschylus book, six years in gestation, was finally completed. It required typing.

  ‘Some dowdy graduate,’ Nicola said. ‘He claims he needs someone who’s at his immediate beck and call. Ridiculous! He could perfectly well have sent me the manuscript. Now he’s hired some child. I told him: this girl may be able to type and take dictation, Robert – any fool can do that. I did so much more – half the ideas in his Euripides book came from me, Lucy.’

  All that power and energy, I thought, as I sat in silence listening to her: all that intelligence, all that edgy, unpredictable sensitivity – it was still there, balled up inside her, tight as a clenched fist, yet she could not find a use for it. In mid-sentence, I met her gaze. For once, I was too quick for her; before she could assume the mask of her customary serenity, I looked into Nicola’s eyes and saw fury.

  At once, she attempted to disguise it. ‘Heavens, how dark it’s getting.’ She rose and lit one of the table lamps. She shivered. ‘And it’s getting cold too. Close the windows, Clair. It will be winter before we know it. This room is impossible, Lucy. Oh, why did I choose a flat with such huge windows? It’s always too hot or too cold. And the traffic noise is insufferable. It makes my head ache.’

  I rose to leave. Time to escape. Clair closed the windows, then slumped in her chair. We could both recognise the symptoms, we’d both heard the suppressed irritation, the angry lilt of familiar complaints. Another fifteen minutes and Clair would raise the subject of last resort, the one that never failed to revive Nicola: my marriage; my failure, nine months on, to push the divorce through. They could chew that over till doomsday.

  ‘What do the lawyers say?’ Nicola demanded, whenever the divorce came up. ‘I told you it was a major error to leave the marital home. To compound your idiocy, you’ve given him the house. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Surely the lawyers can retrieve something? Why is it dragging on in this interminable way? Cut the Gordian knot, Lucy.’

  I would make some evasive reply. The divorce had stalled. During the past summer, things had, for a while, looked promising: Eddie had agreed to take the then-customary, the approved, the gentlemanly route. He would hire a woman, take her to some seaside resort and there, by pre-arrangement, be discovered in compromising circumstances by private detectives. Umpteen firms offered this useful service. ‘That will give you the usual grounds, Mrs Vyne-Chance,’ my solicitor said. ‘Then we’ll wrap this up in no time.’

  Eddie had been keen on this ploy. He was fired up by it. ‘I shall hire a floozie,’ he said, when we discussed the details by telephone. ‘I’ll hire an absolute eye-popper. We might as well have some fun. Shall I do it next weekend? Brighton, I think. Maybe a suite at the Grand, a bottle of Bollinger. I see myself in silk pyjamas, a cravat and a Charvet dressing gown.’ His tone was hopeful.

  ‘No suite, no Bollinger and no Charvet,’ I said. I was paying for this: the hotel, the floozie, the obliging detectives. I was damned if I was going to throw in a new dressing gown. Eddie became lachrymose.

  ‘I love it when you’re stern,’ he said tenderly as the phone line crackled and hissed. I could tell he was tight as a tick. ‘When you cry, it’s even worse, Lucy. It undoes me. That’s why I proposed to you. There you were by the rails of that ship, staring down at the sea, and you looked so… I knew what I must do immediately. You have tragic eyes. Electra had eyes like yours. So did Iphigenia. Did I ever tell you that?’

  ‘Yes. Three brandies in, usually.’

  ‘So precise! I need you… A passing thought: you are sure you want to do this?’

  ‘Next weekend. That’s agreed?’ I rang off quickly.

  That was July. The promised trip to Brighton was postponed. Eddie rescheduled it for August, then September. By November it became clear he was digging his heels in. A payment from his publishers had not materialised; Eddie had not delivered the promised collection of poems on time – but he couldn’t write poems when miserable, lonely and badgered. ‘I can’t conjure pure gold from the air,’ he said peevishly, when I telephoned for the fifth time in December. ‘I have to dig deep for it. Right down into the bedrock.’

  My solicitor translated: he wanted more money. ‘He feels he’s e
ntitled to a larger settlement, Mrs Vyne-Chance,’ he said. ‘I fear he is being very recalcitrant. You do have grounds – grounds that any court in the land would recognise. As we both know there are other routes you could take. Unsavoury, of course. None of us wants a scandal, believe me. But if needs must.’ He gave me a delicate glance.

  ‘No. Just find out how much more he wants. If I can afford it, he can have it.’

  ‘And if you cannot afford it, Mrs Vyne-Chance – what then?’ That query was delicately put, too. I had no answer to it.

  By the March of 1939: stalemate. When I visited Bloomsbury, Nicola and Clair were quick to remind me of that fact.

  ‘Thirteen months, it’s been.’ Clair said. ‘So, Lucy, what’s the latest?’

  ‘There is no latest. We’re waiting to hear back from his solicitors.’

  ‘You look ghastly,’ she continued, in a robust tone, pouring red wine. ‘You’re thin and white and you look really peculiar. You look as if you haven’t slept in weeks. Do you have a cough? Been to a doctor? You should. TB can be latent for years. Nasty little tubercle bacilli, poised to go forth and multiply. You don’t think… ’

  ‘No. I don’t. I’ve been working. I’ve finished the islands book at last. I’m fine.’

  ‘Well, you don’t look fine.’

  ‘She should come here,’ Nicola interrupted. ‘Then we could look after her.’

  And they were off, bickering away as they often did when I visited. First my situation, then politics, imminent war, the price of coal, the latest books, the new must-see play, Nazis and power cuts, Evelyn Waugh and the new curtains they needed. Might as well be invisible, I’d sometimes think – but that was a familiar state, and preferable to being the focus of their attention.