by Lucy Atkins
It never occurred to me, when I began this, that I might end up working with Olivia, or even that there would be a book. My plan was simply to allow her to write an academic paper on the diary.
I had a strategy worked out for piquing her interest. I knew she was likely to come to the Farmhouse at half-term, so I managed to persuade Maureen to visit her sister in Jersey while I filled in for her at the museum. I knew it would be better if Olivia came to me rather than the other way around.
If that hadn’t worked – if she hadn’t responded to the flyer – then the next step would have been to write to her explaining that I had a sensational and unseen Victorian source, and offering to bring it to her Bloomsbury office. I would have said I had seen her BBC documentary about insane Victorian women and felt sure that Annabel’s diary would be of interest to her. She would not have been able to resist a document that Annabel called ‘my sole confidant’ and which contained a startling confession – what historian would? Fortunately, I did not have to go to her because the flyer brought her to me. I don’t think I really believed it would until she burst through the museum door with her wet child that February day. I was very shocked. I froze behind the desk, unable to look at her, braced, as if for a blow. For a few moments I could not even speak.
And now here I am eighteen months later waiting for Olivia again, albeit in a very different frame of mind this time. This time I am full of such hope, impatience and agitation that I almost cannot bear it.
That’s why, late last night, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I decided to take a holiday. To the south of France.
I leave the day after tomorrow, which will give me time to clean and shut up the house. I have booked the ferry and a modest bed & breakfast – they call it a chambres d’hôte – and I plan to spend a week walking in the low altitude Provençal hills looking for harlequin ladybirds. The harlequin is a worrying, devious, mimicking species, a most destructive invader and so charismatic. I have always had a soft spot for ladybirds.
The library shutters are open today but layers of rain blot out the view and I can barely see as far as the wych elms at the edge of the lawn. Rain is a brutal jailer, it cuts one off from the world, seals all the edges. It is probably not healthy to be alone so much, even if you are by nature a solitary person, as I am. When Lady Burley and Bertie were here the rain did not bother me at all. Bertie and I would bring the coffee and biscuits into the library on a tray every morning and the three of us would sit together and discuss whatever needed to be done that day. It felt reassuring and calming to hear rain lashing at the windows. When Lady Burley went to the care home it was just Bertie and me, but we did not lose the elevenses habit. Rain rarely troubled us. I would just put on my Barbour and get on with it. Now it is only me, though, I find myself preoccupied by weather. There is no cosiness any more, just the aching damp and the leaks.
I still miss Bertie, intensely, daily. Every day as I pass beneath the minstrel’s gallery with my tray I feel as if he is by my side. It can be a jolt to settle into the wing-backed chair, reach for my coffee and find that I’m alone. Perhaps writing things down is also a form of companionship. If so, it is a poor one, because when I lay down my pen I often feel more alone than ever.
The problem, of course, is that I have allowed myself to become tied up in another person’s life. Other people are messy; they have a tendency to let you down. It is my great hope that Olivia will turn out to be different. We share a passion, after all, and we are a team now – she said it herself – so she surely will not disappoint me.
But as I put away my notebook each day, I ask myself the same question: What on earth will I do if she does?
Olivia
South of France, Day One
The front doorstep of Mas Saint Pierre was an actual tombstone. Olivia dropped her bags and crouched to look at the faded lettering. The word ‘sacré’ was etched into the stone beneath her plimsolls but the rest of the inscription – a life packaged between two dates – had been erased by generations of feet crossing the threshold. The pocked stone made her think how insignificant it all was, really, their stresses and worries, hopes and fears, how quickly erased and forgotten all this would be. She must keep things in perspective. She could fix this. She had to. Nobody had died.
She heard David stomping across the gravel courtyard below and she straightened, sucking in the hot, herb-scented air.
It had been an interminable drive down through France, but of course the ferry was cheaper than five of them flying. They were three hours later than planned. There was no sign of the others so they were probably lost too. The sat nav didn’t work and the sign at the property gate was so decrepit, so snugly cradled in rock, that they’d had to circle back several times before they spotted it. By then Paul and Jess had been fighting, savagely, over a packet of dry French biscuits that neither of them liked while Dominic, plugged into headphones, had let out intermittent snarls and thrown an occasional slap.
When she’d eventually noticed the sign, Olivia had wrenched the steering wheel so hard that they’d almost slammed into the rock face. The children yelled, the car bumped up onto the roadside, wheels hurling up gravel and dust. ‘Jesus Christ!’ David had clutched at the dashboard, theatrically. She’d said nothing, but when he’d got out to open the tall iron gates she’d put her foot down and driven up and around the corner, leaving him to follow on foot.
She’d pulled up in the shady courtyard beneath the house and next to a crumbling limestone tower. The tower was just a couple of storeys tall with a single slit window. It was in the shade of the hillside, surrounded by silvery olive trees. She had a feeling the owners had mentioned it – a connection to a priest, perhaps – or maybe the ecclesiastical house name had implanted this idea in her mind. She wasn’t sure. She had, in fact, only a very hazy memory of booking the place back in January. Work had been so intense at the time.
The house was up some stairs. It was pale, low and wreathed in vines, with lavender bushes lined up along the front like patient purple hedgehogs. It looked beautiful, and expensive. She’d never have booked it if she’d known then what she knew now but she had to put that out of her head – they were here, it had all been paid for months ago. She had to try to push everything aside and enjoy what she could of this holiday.
The August heat was intense even this late in the day, the heavy air busy with the high, tinnitus whirr of cicadas. She knew that she should go back down and help David to bring up the remaining bags, but she didn’t want to help him. Jess and Paul were out of the car and over by the tower now, shoving at its peeling front door. Dom was still in the back seat, as if the long drive had softened his fifteen-year-old bones. If they brought him regular food and water he’d probably choose to spend the entire fortnight right there.
David had the boot open and she watched him lift out the bags. His shoulders were solid from his daily swims, his linen shirt crumpled, hair dishevelled, his jaw shadowed by stubble and his skin, always olive-hued, now lightly tanned from a recent week in the States. He looked a little tired, admittedly, but also robust, as if he was stubbornly oblivious to the chaos he’d created. It was unreasonable to resent him for his good health and his optimistic, handsome face, but at that moment she just couldn’t help herself.
The tower behind him seemed to tilt slightly, as if wearied by all the comings and goings, all the petty family dramas it had seen. She remembered then that the owners had called it a ‘cabanon’. They’d said something about an unsafe upper floor.
‘The tower’s locked,’ Jess yelled over the courtyard. Paul had flopped onto its front step, his pale and gangly legs spread out. The poor boy looked so limp and dejected, like an unwatered plant. He needed feeding. He always needed feeding. At thirteen, he was growing about an inch a day.
‘Come on,’ she called down. ‘Help Dad with the bags. And tell your brother to get out of the car!’
The Parisian owners had extended the place but it didn’t look as if it
could accommodate three couples and six children. She must have checked this at some point, but she’d been so stressed when she was booking that she couldn’t remember the details. She’d just transferred the vast sum of euros and forgotten about it. David was coming up the stairs now but Jess and Paul had vanished behind the tower. She heard Jess scream, ‘Lizard!’
‘Christ,’ David dropped the bags and pointed at the doorstep. ‘Is that a gravestone?’
She shrugged and tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘The door’s locked.’
He held up an old-fashioned key with an ornate handle. ‘It was in an open box at the gate,’ he said. ‘I assume it’s for the front door.’
She took it from him.
‘Didn’t they leave you any instructions?’ he said, as if it was all her responsibility.
She looked back at him, blinked, and then she replied, quite slowly, ‘They said they’d leave the key in the box.’
The entrance hall was dim and cool. They dumped the bags by an armoire that smelled of beeswax. Jess shot past them. Her long golden hair undulated and her new sandals slapped on the flagstones as she vanished down the hall and through a doorway.
They followed her into a cool living room. Olivia felt a wash of relief as she took in the open-plan kitchen, a pale-hued living area and a wall of French windows through which she could make out a vine-shaded terrace, wooden sun loungers, a long trestle table, a generous swimming pool and a view of dusky hills. Jess started wrestling with the locks.
‘Well, not bad.’ David went into the kitchen. ‘Not bad at all.’ If he felt that they shouldn’t be here then he wasn’t going to let it show.
He was obviously planning to behave as if nothing had changed. Perhaps he was right to take this approach. Nothing would be gained by ruining the next two weeks with recriminations, guilt and apologies. And yet the effort of maintaining this pretence already felt immense to Olivia. She felt as if they were balancing an unexploded bomb between them and if one of them dropped their end it would detonate, taking out the whole family.
Dom slouched past her into the kitchen and straight to the fridge. ‘The doorstep to this house is a gravestone,’ he growled as he passed her. ‘Is it just me, or is that fucking creepy?’
Paul opened the French windows and he and Jess burst onto the terrace. Behind her, she heard David say to Dominic, ‘There’s nothing in the fridge, buddy, we need to unpack the food first.’ Dom did not reply. He walked past his father without looking at him, onto the terrace. How much, she wondered, did Dom know about his father’s recent actions? Was that what this was about?
But Dom’s refusal to speak to David predated all this. She’d read about the teenage boy’s need to separate from his father in order to define his own personality, but Dom seemed particularly vehement about this, particularly incensed, as if David had committed a heinous and unforgivable crime.
He was standing, feet apart, looking at the view. He was almost as tall as David and good-looking, like him – even-featured with intense dark eyes and a dimple on his square chin. His shoulders were broad, too. From behind he looked more like a man than a boy, a stranger discovered on this foreign terrace. He felt like a stranger these days. She wished that she could find a way to talk to him, but every time she tried he shut her down.
‘Can I go in the pool?’ Jess was by her side, tugging at her T-shirt. ‘I want to go swimming.’
‘Do you want to look round the house first? You could help me sort out who sleeps where?’ Olivia held out a hand.
‘OK.’ Jess ignored the outstretched hand and ran off down the hall.
Jess had firm opinions on where they should all sleep. At eight, she was relentlessly forceful and independent. Olivia wanted to kick off her shoes and lie in a darkened room but she followed her daughter through the house, agreeing with everything she said.
She was fundamentally shattered. She had been up till two or three every morning for weeks now, finishing the Annabel proofs, trying to clear her desk, writing student references, ploughing through submitted papers for September’s interdisciplinary Language of Insanity conference. She would weep from exhaustion as she brushed her teeth, then she’d fall into bed, before getting up at seven again to have breakfast with the children and to walk Jess to school.
On top of the academic work there had been a last-minute article for the Telegraph, an overdue History Today piece and a BBC History blog about corsets. In the past week alone she’d made an early morning visit to Sky News to review the papers and had been into the Today studio to talk about anachronisms in the latest ITV Edwardian drama series. Somehow, on top of all that, she’d also spent several hours going through the script for a new Channel 4 series. It had been to the producers, executive producers and the channel and had now come back to her riddled with factual errors.
There had been a mid-week lunch, too, with Carol, to talk about TV offers. She’d committed to an appearance on Pointless Celebrities – though she’d never watched it and didn’t understand the rules – but she still had to decide about the BBC prime-time offer. Carol was trying not to put the pressure on, but it was obvious that she desperately wanted this to happen. ‘It’s a big commitment but just think of the exposure,’ she had said. ‘Think how many more books you’ll sell and how many more offers you’ll get if you do this. It’ll open up so much to you.’ The thought of dancing on prime-time TV – the degree of exposure and possible humiliation – filled Olivia with dread, but the one thing Carol hadn’t said, and of course meant, was ‘Think of the money’.
What Carol didn’t understand was that, apart from anything else, she’d lose all academic credibility if she accepted the BBC offer. She’d probably have to take a sabbatical to do it but it was more than that, she was already battling with other people’s misconceptions. Some historians were openly condescending about her now. David dismissed all this as envy but it could be upsetting nonetheless. At a recent conference she’d overheard an Oxford history professor, an older woman who she’d always looked up to, saying, ‘Oh, Olivia Sweetman, the telly-don? I’ve got no time for eye-candy TV academics. She isn’t a serious historian.’ She’d wanted to take this woman aside and remind her that she’d spent twenty-five years in serious academia, that she’d published two well-regarded, complex and highly academic books and that there was nothing wrong with inspiring the general public. She wanted to point out that she was still a professor at a leading university and that there were academic advantages to making TV shows too: she got to pick up and touch precious documents she’d normally only be allowed to see in microfilm; she had access to experts, manuscripts and places that she would never normally encounter.
There was also an undercurrent of misogyny in some of the academic sniffiness. One influential male historian, on hearing of her book deal, wrote in a column that she was ‘the latest photogenic historian to secure a lucrative deal for yet another historical Mills & Boon’. She’d submitted a furious piece in response but it still astonished her that such knee-jerk reactions were given airtime. Others felt as if they were free to discuss her appearance and judge her on it. It was true that she’d worked with stylists for one or two of the shows; she now knew how to dress better and her appearance had changed because of it. She knew she was more attractive in her forties, and better dressed, than she ever had been. But this didn’t mean she wanted people judging her on her clothes and hair, feeling that they could comment freely on them, or dismissing her mind because of how she looked. Recently, at a photo-shoot for an American magazine, she’d actually been asked to put on a tutu. She’d asked herself, ‘Would Simon Schama put on a tutu?’ When she refused to do it, she overheard the journalist on the phone, presumably to his editor, saying ‘She’s a difficult woman’. If she put on sequined dresses and started dancing on prime-time TV she’d destroy what credibility she still had among her colleagues. Worse than that, she’d lose respect for herself. She just couldn’t do it, no matter how much they paid her.
So
metimes, juggling these identities felt exhausting. She was driving herself insane trying to do it all, something had to give, but she loved her work, all of it. She belonged in the lecture hall and the archives, but she’d found a freedom in front of the camera; there was a genuine joy in bringing history to a wider audience. She also loved being part of a team, the glass of wine in the pub with the production crew at the end of a long day’s filming, the feeling of collaboration. The idea that her TV shows could ignite an interest in someone who might never have picked up a book also made her feel that it was worthwhile.
But writing Annabel to such a tight deadline, and dealing with Vivian, had almost pushed her over the edge. She badly needed a break. Her thoughts were scattered, her stomach felt perpetually clenched. But with the Annabel launch less than two months away, there was a huge list of publicity tasks to do. Her suitcase was full of work.
The only consolation – and this was a colossal relief – was that she no longer had to manage Vivian. Every time she remembered this she felt a weight lifting from her chest. She could put Vivian behind her now. They could both move on.
She had responded in the vaguest possible terms to Vivian’s first three emails, in which she’d outlined an idea for a new book. Eventually, after the sixth message, she had replied, rather more firmly, that she would get to it when she got back from holiday. At some point she was going to have to sit down and break it to Vivian that they would not be writing another book together. But she didn’t need to think about that now. Vivian, at least, could wait.
*
The upstairs rooms smelled musty, corridors twisted off corridors like the branches of an old tree and she saw that, although the layout was more complex than it seemed from the outside, there weren’t enough bedrooms. Some of the children were going to have to sleep in the old priest’s tower.