The Night Visitor

by Lucy Atkins

  ‘Archaeocopris olivia.’ The words rolled across my tongue like two boiled sweets. ‘Well. Isn’t that something?’

  Bertie looked up and gave a plaintive whine. Olivia glanced at him. ‘Is he OK? Does he need to pee?’

  I pressed the top of his wiry black head back down. ‘He’s fine.’ He was so tense on my lap that I felt he might explode if I moved.

  She laughed, then, and tucked her hair behind her ear. ‘Sorry, I’m going on and on.’ Her mascara had smudged a bit and she looked slightly dishevelled. She always looked so polished on TV, so it was nice to see her this way, without vanity or artifice. ‘I used to be mortified by it actually.’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘By olivia, the fossil.’

  ‘But not many people can say they have a beetle named after them.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but a dung beetle!’ she said, in mock exasperation. ‘I mean, I was fine with it as a child. I was nine when he discovered it and I thought it was incredibly cool, but as a teenager I was so embarrassed. I mean, no fifteen-year-old girl wants a dung beetle named after her, does she? My father used to take great delight in telling my boyfriends all about it, getting out the photo, pointing out her little fossilised dung ball, you know, just winding me up. But, of course, it means the world to me now. That fossil is really precious to me now he’s gone.’

  I said nothing. She must have thought that I was uncomfortable about the death of her father because she started to reassure me. ‘Oh, it’s OK. He died a long time ago – I was an undergraduate, in my final year at Cambridge. That’s why his fossil is so important to me, I suppose. It isn’t just his academic legacy, I’ve always felt that fossil is a sort of talisman, you know, a piece of my dad that’ll always be with me even though he isn’t here.’ Her voice wavered. ‘God, sorry.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Too much wine, I’m getting all emotional now.’

  ‘Do you have it?’

  ‘The fossil itself? No, no, it’s in the Museum of Natural History in Oxford, where it’s safe – now, anyway.’

  I tilted my head.

  ‘Oh God, that’s a whole other story …’ She twirled the stem of her glass. ‘Don’t even get me started.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Well, there was this thing, a few years ago. It was awful, actually. Someone wrote a paper in Nature arguing that my father had made a colossal mistake, that olivia was wrongly identified. What he thought was a dung ball was just a contaminant and his evolutionary theory was therefore all wrong. His legacy was almost destroyed. It’s too complicated to get into, it turned out the whole paper was a fraud and thankfully his theory was totally reinstated in the end but it was a horrible business at the time. It’s quite painful to think about actually …’ Her eyes glistened. ‘Even now.’

  Bertie lifted his head again and watched me, nervously. His bushy eyebrows twitched and he let out a small, nervy whine.

  ‘Crikey,’ Olivia said. ‘I haven’t talked about all that in ages and it still gets to me. Let’s talk about something else, OK?’

  I decided that it would probably be normal, at this point, to offer up reciprocal personal information. ‘My father died when I was an undergraduate too,’ I said. ‘Though unlike yours he went very slowly. Dementia – it took six years.’

  Her eyes widened.

  ‘He was an alcoholic.’

  ‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry.’

  We sat in silence for a moment or two.

  ‘You grew up around here, didn’t you, Vivian?’

  I stroked Bertie’s ears. ‘My father was an estate manager.’ I named the place, but she didn’t know it, even though it is not far away.

  ‘And your mother?’

  I definitely wasn’t prepared for this question. I whisked Bertie to the floor and stood up. Pain jolted through my knee. ‘My mother died when I was a child.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Vivian. I didn’t mean to – that’s really tough, losing a parent when you’re little …’

  ‘I’m going up to the lavatory now.’

  ‘Right. OK. Yes. Sorry. I’ll get us some pudding.’ Olivia reached to clear our plates. ‘I got you a sticky toffee from M&S, your favourite!’

  As I climbed the stairs I thought about why she would say such a thing. M&S treacle tart is my favourite pudding. I am not a fan of a sticky toffee and I have no idea where she got the idea that I was. Sticky toffee pudding always makes me think of cow dung, with its warm, viscous interior. I almost expect dung beetles to scramble out as I dig in the spoon.

  In the bathroom Bertie sniffed hysterically at the airing cupboard, perhaps catching the scent of a rodent, while I looked out the window and took some deep breaths. My legs felt shaky and my knee pulsed. I am really not good on stairs these days.

  I did not need the lavatory so I stayed where I was. The hefty moon hung above the fields. Grey streaks of cloud travelled over her face and below her the flank of the Downs hunched like a smooth-haired hound. I could almost see it breathing. I was reminded how isolated the Farmhouse is, set all alone down a hobbling track, the nearest house well out of sight and sound. With the moon staring in and all the cows chewing and watching with their big, opaque eyes, even I felt exposed.

  I snapped the curtains shut and washed my hands. I have often wondered why Olivia would feel safe in a place like this when she claims she once had a stalker. But she says she feels safer here than she does in London. ‘Sometimes,’ she said to me once, ‘this is the only place I do feel safe.’

  She says that she only ever saw her stalker in London, usually Bloomsbury, outside her office or at the end of the street near the cafe where she goes each afternoon for a cappuccino. There were also a few times when she thought she saw him on tube platforms or disappearing round the stacks at the British Library. She told the police – it was over a year ago now – but they could do nothing since she has never been approached or threatened and has never even seen her stalker’s face. She admits that it might have all been in her imagination. The stalker tended to ‘appear’ when she was overwrought. But even that, she says, does not stop her from being afraid. I should like to reassure her that this is not unreasonable. One’s imagination is often more fearsome than reality. My night visitor is the product of my mind, but she is more real to me than most people, and certainly more frightening.

  The stairs are uncarpeted and slippery and while Bertie waddled back down ahead of me, his white-tipped tail swinging, I had to grip the banister tightly for fear that my unreliable knee would give out, plunging me head first onto the flagstones.

  Olivia had cleared the table and was heating the sticky toffee pudding in a microwave. I sat back down and Bertie hopped onto my lap. There was a bunch of pale pink peonies in a tin jug on the table. Peonies are her favourite flower. They stand for ‘shame’ in the Victorian language of flowers and I am surprised that she does not know this since it is her period. Bertie sniffed at the table and found a morsel of lasagna. I pushed his nose away. Olivia would not like him eating off the table. She is not a dog person, though she pretends, for my sake, to find him endearing.

  She came back over to the table. ‘Is that your mother?’ I pointed to a photo frame on the shelf above the fireplace in order to take the focus off Bertie, who was licking his lips rather ostentatiously.

  ‘That? Yes, it is.’

  The woman did not have Olivia’s almost black hair, but she had a similar bone structure and the same intense, bright, half-moon shaped eyes. The photo was black and white so I could not tell whether they were the same deep blue as Olivia’s.

  ‘She was very beautiful,’ she said. ‘She was Danish. She met my father on a scholarship to London. She was a brilliant child psychiatrist.’

  People always say their mothers were beautiful, I have noticed. Often brilliant too. It is a form of stealth vanity. My mother was not beautiful and even if she was a genius, nobody would have known, as she spent her days washing and cooking and cleaning other peoples’ messes. She was, I believ
e, a kind and warm person. I have a clear memory of her patting my back and singing a lullaby to me when I was feverish in bed. I must have been very small.

  Olivia got two bowls down off the open shelves. ‘You know,’ she turned to me with one in each hand, ‘my mother and I had a tricky relationship but now I’m an orphan I really miss her. I think that’s why I wanted a Danish au pair.’

  It always irritates when adults call themselves ‘orphans’. ‘Well, you have your own family now,’ I said, perhaps a little brusquely.

  She glanced at me and set down the pudding bowls, ‘Oh, yes, I know, I’m very lucky, I know that, so lucky.’

  I understood, then, that Olivia is quite a lonely person, despite her full and apparently perfect life, with her three children, her handsome husband and all those friends and fans. I wanted to let her know that I recognized that loneliness in her but unfortunately I could not think how to convey this in words.

  As she showed me to the door that night I noticed that the flagstones in the hall were damp. She said it happened every winter and when I asked why she didn’t damp-proof or lay a nice warm carpet, she grimaced. ‘They’re so much part of the integrity of the house, I felt I couldn’t cover them up. It’s daft really, they’re probably a health hazard.’

  Bertie and I drove back to Ileford very late and as we slid between tight hawthorn hedgerows under the platinum moonlight I thought about that word: ‘integrity’. She meant it in the less common sense, of something being whole and undivided from its true self.

  Perhaps she’s right that some authentic spirit still lurks in the dampness beneath her cowhide rugs. Perhaps our essential nature never really changes, even when we dress it up as something else. I thought, then, of the harlequin ladybird, which can mimic a harmless ladybird so closely that it sometimes even fools the experts.

  Still, she should damp-proof that hall. It’s not as if she can’t afford it. They must be awash with money. David presumably made a fortune from his Intuition book, which was on the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic for months on end, thanks to appearances on American TV programmes. Even I had heard of it, though I would never have chosen to read a work of popular psychology or watch an Oprah Winfrey show. And Olivia herself must earn a very comfortable salary, with her media career on top of that. This, presumably, is how they afford two houses.

  But I have little interest in Olivia’s finances. I do not want or need her money. Even my weekly researcher’s fee wasn’t necessary, I only accepted it because it would have looked bizarre to refuse. She kept offering me more money as the project went on. She wanted to give me a cut of royalties too. She was obviously uncomfortable about how much I was doing but I insisted that I would not take a penny more.

  My knee is aching from sitting too long in the library. When I try to straighten it a white pain zaps up my leg. But I must get up, I really must get on. There is so much to do before I leave for France. I have decided not to tell Lady Burley that I am going. It would only distress her to know that Ileford is standing empty for a week and of course I cannot explain my reasons. That would involve telling her that that Annabel is finished, which would confuse and probably panic her.

  When all this began I had no idea that she could possibly live for another eighteen months. The doctors said she only had a few months left. I assumed that I would never have to deal with the issue of Annabel’s actual publication and so had decided not to worry her with the details.

  Though it makes me uncomfortable, I still think it is better for her not to know that the book is done, even if she is still with us in October when it is launched. She sleeps a lot these days and is losing her grip on time so maybe she will not notice that I am away for a week.

  ‘Back so soon?’ she asked yesterday when I appeared by her chair.

  ‘It’s been two days,’ I said, reaching for a Tunnock’s as she finds the foil wrapping hard to peel away. ‘I always come on alternate days. I haven’t ever missed a visit in fact.’

  ‘Why are you always so formal with me, Vivi?’ Her tiny, rheumy eyes filled up with tears. ‘Is it because you still can’t forgive me for what happened to your mother? Is that it? I can’t die unforgiven, Vivi, please …’

  I don’t know why she keeps saying such things. I forgave her a long time ago for what she did to my mother and she knows it. Why else would I have moved to Ileford to care for her?

  I like to think that I have been a comfort to her. Before I came back, Lady Burley was a lost soul. She couldn’t find reliable help and would write me distraught letters about Polish housekeepers drinking the contents of the wine cellar, or her fears that the driveway trees had contracted Dutch elm disease.

  She is right to worry about that, actually. The elm bark beetle is a vicious beast that feasts on the inner bark of the tree, introducing fungal spores that swell and block its water vessels, causing total devastation. Vigilance is the only weapon against Scolytus multistriatus and Lady Burley was far too old to be peering at leaves and twigs.

  She was pitifully relieved when I accepted her offer. She had no idea, of course, that she was rescuing me, too. ‘I just need someone I can trust,’ she said. ‘You’d be doing me such a favour, Vivi, you can’t imagine. I can’t bear the thought of strangers in Ileford.’

  Like me, Lady Burley is quite alone in the world. Almost all of her friends are dead, dying, incapacitated or abroad. Her only brother was killed in murky circumstances in Kenya in the sixties and she never had children. Her infertility, she believes, somewhat irrationally, was ‘karma’. When this cancer finally takes her there will be nobody left who knows who I really am.

  But I must not feel guilty for leaving Ileford. Everyone needs a holiday once in a while. I wish I were a better traveller but I will try to focus on the more pleasant things that lie at the end of the journey: a warm, dry room, no housework, days spent looking for harlequins.

  And, of course, Olivia.

  I hope we bump into each other by chance. I do not want to have to go to her – to intrude on her holiday. She will be surprised to see me, but also, I hope, pleased. She can never resist talking about work. We will go somewhere together, a little cafe perhaps, just the two of us, and in those warm and relaxed surroundings, I will put my new idea to her. This awful waiting will be over. I will pin her down at last.

  Olivia

  South of France, Day One

  Olivia emerged from the bathroom in one of the soft bath sheets. David was still on the bed. There was something tense about the way he was lying, with a tanned forearm thrown across his face. His breathing was slightly too shallow and she knew he wasn’t asleep. She turned away and dug for her phone in her jeans on the back of the chair.

  ‘There’s no mobile signal.’ His voice rose from the bed. ‘Does this place have Wifi?’

  ‘It’d better. I’m going to need it, I’ve got a load of publicity stuff to do for the book.’

  ‘Can’t you just take a break, Liv?’ he said. ‘Just for these two weeks? Just stop?’

  She looked over her shoulder. He’d taken his hand away and the muscles of his jaw were tight, his eyes combative.

  ‘How,’ she said, as calmly as possible, ‘can you even ask me that?’

  He lurched up, swung his feet off the bed and turned his back on her.

  This was a spectacular act of compartmentalization, even for him. Was he really was going to behave as if it didn’t matter whether Annabel was a success or not? Even if he had somehow managed to dissociate himself from the reality of the situation, he still owed it to her to care about her book. Ten years ago, when he was writing Intuition, they’d discussed every chapter, debated the most minuscule points. Without her, Intuition would have been a far less readable and significantly less comprehensible work. It was she who had suggested a more conversational writing style, urged him to put aside jargon, the legacy of his abandoned psychology PhD, and write as if to a friend. She’d never said this to him directly but she was convinced that without
her input, Intuition would never have been the international bestseller it was.

  She began to pull on clothes from her suitcase: a clean T-shirt, a pair of linen trousers. Of course, when David was writing Intuition their lives had been a lot simpler. They only had the boys, for a start, Jess wasn’t even born then. And they were still in their thirties, motivated by a huge mortgage, swimming energetically and confidently, side by side, towards their golden future of professorships, book deals and newspaper columns.

  She sat on the chair by the desk, put her head upside down and rubbed her hair with the towel. The irony was that she fell in love with his intellect and charm, his good heart, but perhaps above all with his refusal to worry. He had great ambition and drive but he never took anything too seriously. His favourite phrase was ‘It’ll all work out’. She had a tendency to be earnest and solemn, and to agonize about everything, but David just seized opportunities as they arose and didn’t fret about the future. He never looked back, like she did; he never worried about choices he could have made but hadn’t.

  His confidence and optimism had helped her to take herself less seriously too. Without David, she probably never would have responded to the TV company’s email asking if she’d be interested in screen testing for a documentary about historic houses. David had made her feel there were no limits. But now the opposite felt true. She felt increasingly imprisoned and curtailed by him, more free alone. And of course it was his refusal to worry, his ludicrous overconfidence, that had led to this appalling mess.

  She dragged a comb through her damp hair, tugging aggressively at the tangles. What bothered her most was that he had hidden this from her. They were both overworked and distracted but they must have become profoundly distanced for him to lie like this. Things had become difficult between them, she knew, when she’d started Annabel. She was just too busy and stressed all the time and he was consumed by his writer’s block, his stalling career. Perhaps he also felt threatened that suddenly she was the one writing. Perhaps, deep down, David was afraid that her book might be as successful as his once was. Whatever silent threat or resentment or rivalry was beneath all this, it had certainly stopped them from communicating.