by Lucy Atkins
As she paid for the ticket, she noticed the sticker: ‘My name is Vivian Tester. Ask me anything.’ Vivian did not look like a person who could be asked anything. Her square face was blank, framed by coarse, cropped, iron-flecked hair. She looked dense and forbidding. As she handed over the tickets, her small eyes cast down, a low growl rose from behind the desk.
‘Bertie, stop it, you fool.’ Her voice – loud, quite deep, almost a bark itself – made both Olivia and Jess jump.
‘Is that a dog?’ Jess peered round the counter edge, her hair curtaining to the floor. She had been campaigning for a dog for years. ‘Oh! He’s sooo cuuute. What’s his name?’ She vanished behind the counter before Olivia could stop her.
‘Don’t touch him!’ Vivian’s head whipped around. ‘He’s nervous with strangers.’
Jess backed off and returned to Olivia’s side. It seemed a bit irresponsible to keep an animal that was afraid of strangers at the front desk. Vivian fixed her bright eyes on Olivia, as if challenging her to object. ‘He only growls if he feels threatened.’
Olivia did not ask where the diary was, then, she just wanted to get Jess away from the disturbed dog.
The museum was only the front few rooms of a seventeenth-century house. Jess gazed glumly at a Victorian wedding dress and a bust of Milton. Not surprisingly, given the weather and the limited scope of the place, not to mention its gatekeeper, they were the only visitors. Olivia felt Vivian’s eyes on her.
Jess spotted an exhibit that was constructed to look like a hole in a wooden floor. They went and peered into it together, counting eleven separate, very small, adult shoes, none of them a pair, a leather hat, a child’s frothy lace dress and a dismembered doll’s arm. It was an early twentieth-century cache.
Jess was curious. ‘Why’s all this stuff in a hole?’
‘People used to hide things under the floorboards to distract the evil spirits, so they wouldn’t hurt the family. A sort of decoy.’
‘What’s a decoy?’
‘A standin, a trap.’ They both jumped. Vivian was right behind them. Neither of them had even heard her cross the room. ‘Childhood mortality rates were very high, they were anxious that evil spirits would come for their children.’
‘My mum knows all about this, she’s a historian,’ Jess said. ‘She’s on the TV. She’s famous.’
‘Oh. I’m really not.’ Olivia shook her head and laughed. ‘Don’t listen to her.’
‘You’re not on TV?’
‘No, I mean, I am on TV. A bit.’
‘What have you done?’
‘Oh, well, the most recent thing was a BBC 2 series called The Incurables, about Victorian women and asylums?’
‘I don’t watch much television.’
Olivia felt uncomfortable, as if she had been caught boasting. Perhaps she had.
‘She was on Would I Lie to You?’ Jess said. ‘And the news and breakfast telly. And she’s on the radio all the time.’
‘Would I Lie to You?’ Vivian raised her eyebrows. Her button eyes gleamed.
‘It’s a gameshow where people have to decide whether you’re lying or telling the truth. My mum’s a brilliant liar. They all believed her.’
‘Did they?’ Vivian smiled, with her lips tight shut.
‘She’s going to be on Pointless Celebrities too.’
Olivia put a hand on Jess’s head. ‘Vivian’s got more interesting things to think about than TV shows, love, she’s a museum curator.’
‘Actually, I’m not,’ Vivian corrected her. ‘I’m filling in for the curator, who’s visiting her sister in Jersey.’
‘Oh, are you? Well, maybe you can help us? We got a flyer – we came to see the Victorian diary?’
There was a pause as if Vivian was struggling to decide whether to show it to them. Then she said, ‘Yes. I suppose with your Victorian interests, you’d want to see that, wouldn’t you?’
She turned and beetled across the room on crepe-soled shoes.
Olivia and Jess looked at each other, wide-eyed with the urge to laugh. Olivia took Jess by the hand, squeezed it hard, and they followed.
Vivian was standing by a glass cabinet. It contained a notebook, hardbound in black cloth and leather. It was closed, as if the contents were secret. Olivia felt the light, bright thrill of a potential find. In her deepest heart she loved nothing more than to touch an amazing manuscript, to smell an old book. The feeling she got when she held something that had been written a hundred years ago was like nothing else. It was the reason she had become a historian.
‘There’s a little damage from age, fading and such, and some pages have been torn out, but it’s perfectly legible,’ Vivian said.
Olivia dropped Jess’s hand and bent to look at the book more closely. The lights were bouncing off the glass but Vivian still didn’t open the cabinet. ‘There are only eight entries in the diary,’ she was saying. ‘They were all written in 1898 by Lady Annabel Burley, the second wife of Lord Charles Burley. He built Ileford Manor, not far from here. It’s very interesting. It’s actually a murder confession.’
‘A murder confession? My God. Really? Who did she murder?’
‘Her husband, Lord Burley.’
Olivia stepped closer to the cabinet. ‘That’s incredible – seriously? She writes about killing him in this diary? How did she do it?’
‘She pushed him over the minstrel’s gallery at Ileford Manor.’
‘Did she go to prison for it?’
‘Nobody ever knew she did it. His death was recorded as accidental. He was drunk.’
‘So this diary’s a secret confession?’
Vivian nodded. ‘She concealed it till she died, then left it to her stepson.’
Olivia physically needed to get the diary out, now. She needed to touch it, sniff it, stroke the old leather, prise it open to see the handwriting, read Annabel’s thoughts. But Vivian still did not budge. She looked tense and excitable, if contained. She tapped her fingers against her navy slacks.
‘Are you a local historian?’ Olivia decided that she needed to put Vivian at ease a bit, before she asked outright to pick up the diary.
‘No. I’m not a historian at all. I’m a scientist. Retired.’
‘Oh, a school teacher?’ She didn’t know why she said this. Perhaps it was because Vivian had the bossy, clipped air of the teacher that everyone obeyed but nobody liked.
‘I was an Oxford professor!’ Vivian’s face had turned scarlet.
‘Oh, were you? I …’
Vivian straightened her cardigan by tugging on its hem and stared hard at the diary with clenched teeth. Olivia had the impression that she had just been subjected to an outrageous and impulsive lie, but the subject was clearly closed.
She had Googled Vivian afterwards, of course, and her instinct had turned out to be right. There were no Professor Testers in any science department of Oxford University. There never had been. Presumably Vivian had lied because she wanted to be taken seriously. She did not want some professor, some London TV presenter, dismissing her as a country school teacher. It was quite spirited of her, in a way, to react with such an extravagant lie.
Vivian took a key from her cardigan pocket, then bent down and unlocked the case. She stood back with a brief, permissive hand gesture.
The book was quite heavy, with quarter binding and seven bands of gold foil across its spine, more of a notebook than a lady’s diary, with the faintest scent of birch bark. Well preserved. Olivia turned it over, catching a whiff of aged paper. The leather felt stiff. It creaked as she eased the spine open. She had seen and held similar late nineteenth-century notebooks. This one certainly felt authentic.
Inside there were knotty edges close to the spine where pages, quite a few by the look of it, had been torn out. The first page was stiffened with age, crammed with fine-nibbed handwriting. It was tight and controlled, not particularly feminine or elegant. People always assumed Victorian penmanship meant a neat copperplate but it could just as well be untidy and
idiosyncratic, like this, and surprisingly modern.
The ink was a faded brown but perfectly legible. Olivia’s heart quickened as she began to read the words that had been set down by this woman over a century before.
9th day of June, 1898
I have only two companions in this world – my pen and Thoby, who snores at my feet as I write. They are my only solace in this cold, damp house, where I live in solitude, in a world of my own that scarcely anybody ever enters.
She looked up. The room swayed. She must have been holding her breath. The voice was so recognizable, so modern. She longed to sit down and read the whole thing, right now, but she knew Jess would lose patience. She had wandered off somewhere already. Vivian’s eyes were fixed on her.
‘This is wonderful, Vivian,’ she half-whispered.
Vivian smiled, then, showing small, blunt teeth. She looked like a child who had been praised, unexpectedly.
‘Who owns this diary? Who do I have to ask for permission to examine this properly?’
‘Well, me, actually.’
‘You?’
Vivian cleared her throat. ‘I work at Ileford. I look after everything for the current Lady Burley. I’m not planning to leave the diary here. I’ve been talking to people at Southampton University—’
‘Mum!’ Jess called, from across the room. ‘Can we go now?’
Olivia closed the book. ‘Look, I don’t know who you’ve been in touch with at Southampton, but I know people at the British Museum and at the British Library, experts in Victorian documents. They’d really want to see this. They could verify it for you, you know, confirm that it’s definitely Victorian.’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ Vivian looked at it, anxiously. ‘Annabel left it to her stepson, Quentin, who left it to his second cousin, the current Lady Burley.’
‘Great. That’s a really solid provenance.’ Olivia felt her own excitement swell. ‘Look, Vivian, is there any chance I could examine this, properly, before you take it anywhere? The fact that it contains a murder confession makes it exceedingly intriguing and probably quite valuable.’
A vicious snarling came across the museum followed by a high-pitched scream.
‘Stop that!’ Vivian bellowed.
‘Jess!’ Olivia looked at the book in her hands and bundled it back into the cabinet.
Jess ran through, face alight. ‘That dog tried to bite me!’
Vivian vanished into the lobby.
Jess was trembling, but more from excitement than fear. She was otherwise unhurt.
Vivian reappeared a moment later, her face dark. ‘I told you he was nervous,’ she said to Jess. ‘I specifically told you not to touch him.’
‘I didn’t touch him!’
‘You are a silly girl.’
Olivia began to object, but then she stopped herself. She could not afford to alienate Vivian. This was suddenly all going in the wrong direction. ‘Look – sorry, I’m sorry about this, I should probably take Jess home, but could I possibly come back this week? Could I have a closer look at it?’
Vivian’s brass buttons caught the overhead lights.
‘Or should I ask permission from Lady Burley?’
‘No!’ Vivian folded her arms across her cardigan. ‘Lady Burley’s terminally ill. She’s in a care home. She can’t be approached. It would worry and upset her.’
‘Of course, I wouldn’t want that. Is there another family member who might give permission?’
‘There’s just me.’
‘So it’s up to you to make decisions on Lady Burley’s behalf?’ Olivia felt as if she had just chased a slippery dog round in a circle.
‘Yes.’
‘And would you consider it?’
The corners of Vivian’s mouth twitched. ‘I suppose I would.’
*
‘Nura, sweetie, have you got enough sunscreen on?’ Emma called. ‘Your shoulder looks a little bit pink.’
Olivia shaded her eyes and sat up. Her thighs were sticking to the chair and she was boiling hot. She had to stop thinking about Vivian. Thinking about Vivian always made her feel tense and guilty. But she had treated Vivian well. She had paid her generously, offered her more money several times. She had really been very patient with her. But it was the dog, of course. Every time she thought about Vivian’s dog, even now, she felt panicky.
Perhaps it was a wider discomfort, too. She had never really grown to understand Vivian, though she had had glimpses of the private, awkward, nervy person behind the static mask. In a way, that professor lie said a lot about Vivian’s personality. She was far too clever for a life as a housekeeper, or whatever she was at Ileford, and she did not like to be made to feel inferior. She had a rigorous academic mind but there was something flamboyant about her imagination, too. Pretending to have been an Oxford professor was unhinged, but also faintly plausible.
Of course, to lie like that suggested a certain abnormality. Vivian was almost certainly on some spectrum somewhere. She should have set more limits on Vivian’s involvement. But, without realizing it, she had come to rely on her for almost all the research. Vivian had an apparently unlimited capacity to obsess over details and facts. It did not take long before she was as fascinated by the subject as Olivia was. And as the months went by Vivian’s confidence as a researcher grew. She was certainly demanding and unstable, opinionated and touchy, very difficult to manage, but the work she produced was magnificent. Whatever Olivia asked for would appear in full and on time: ordered, digestible and always verifiable. Soon, she was following leads on her own, producing new areas for research that Olivia might never have thought to pursue. Without Vivian, Annabel would have taken years to pull together and would have been an inferior book. Vivian had made herself irreplaceable.
Not that Olivia could have replaced her even if she had wanted to because Vivian controlled the diary. Without Vivian there was no Annabel.
But what a relief that this association could finally end.
Well, almost. She still had to deal with Vivian’s hopes for the future, this new book idea. She had never suggested that they could continue to work together after Annabel. She had no idea where Vivian had got that idea. The last thing on earth she wanted was to keep Vivian on. It was far too exhausting.
But a complicated to-and-fro email exchange about this was a bad idea. She didn’t want any misunderstandings and she didn’t want to be unkind. Vivian was on her own in the world. She had so little in her life and Olivia had the feeling that she had received harsh blows in the past. She deserved to be let down gently and tactfully. That would have to wait until she got back.
‘I feel like you’re very distracted right now,’ said Emma in a prickly voice. Her freckled face was pink beneath the sunscreen and she was standing up now, her hands bunching her linen dress on her hips.
‘Oh God, Em, I’m sorry, you’re right, I am. I totally am, I’m being awful. I just … I’ve got a few things on my mind, work and …’
Emma nodded but turned away and fixed her gaze on their girls in the pool. From behind she looked as small and stiff as a huffy child.
Olivia took a deep breath. She really did have to stop thinking about Vivian all the time. Except for that one awful thing – and she could not bear to think about that, even now – she had not done anything bad. In fact, she’d been extraordinarily tolerant, most of the time. Vivian really wasn’t her responsibility any more. It was time to let go of the guilt, slough off the discomfort it had left on her and move on.
She turned to Emma. ‘I can’t sit and stare at this water any more – let’s have a swim!’
Vivian
South of France
It is unreasonably hot, sweltering already, down in the village.
The thermometer outside the hôtel de ville says thirty degrees and it is only ten in the morning. I had forgotten what real heat actually means and I am not comfortable, not at all. My thighs rub, the waistband of my shorts digs, sweat prickles beneath my hat and I feel light-headed as I
walk through the village, carrying all my equipment and my daypack. I look carefully at the tables outside the cafe as I pass it, and pause at the boulangerie door. Just in case.
I somehow managed to sleep in this morning, though I never usually do that. I am cursing myself for it now. It is the time difference, of course, and also tiredness from the interminable journey down through France. Mercifully, my visitor did not come in the night and I woke feeling quite rested – and famished. I could not resist the chambre d’hôte breakfast that had been laid out in a fussy dining room: slices of ham, glutinous cheeses, hunks of baguette with jam and salty butter and milky coffee, served, somewhat pretentiously, in a bowl. I restrained myself from asking for a cup even though I was sure that the owner herself takes her coffee in a cup. She is steel-haired, goat-faced and does not look particularly amenable to suggestions or requests.
As I pass the fountain at the centre of the village a pigeon defecates from above. Its paintball of excrement splatters just centimetres from my foot. I am reminded of the incident, a few weeks ago now, when I was walking from my car to the scullery door and a roof slate hurtled down. It missed my skull by millimetres and exploded into shards by my foot. For the first time I was genuinely glad that Bertie is not here because the slate hit the exact spot, by my side, where he used to trot.
The roofers have diagnosed ‘nail sickness’, which is no trivial matter. The repairs to Ileford’s corroded roof nails will apparently cost thousands. I tried to discuss this with Lady Burley but she became confused by the notion that nails could become sick. I am thankful that she offered me power of attorney as there is still a considerable sum in the Jersey investment account, and some in a Panamanian fund, too, which she had completely forgotten. She really would not cope without me, her mind is no longer reliable.
I glance at the map and turn into a slightly cooler, narrow street that inclines steeply from the village towards the hill path. I think about roof tiles and pigeon shit. Life can be very circular. A fortune started over a hundred years ago from the import of bird excrement is now paying for the roof it constructed.