The Night Visitor

by Lucy Atkins

  ‘Bertie!’ I left her, excuses buzzing around her like blowflies on a corpse.

  ‘Vivian!’ she called after me. ‘Don’t worry. He’ll come back.’

  She really said those words. I am certain of it.

  I heard her running to catch up. I felt her dread, juddering at my back.

  ‘Vivian, please. Please! Listen to me. Try to listen. OK? Can you take a breath? Vivian? Take a few breaths. It’s going to be OK.’

  I stopped and turned to look at her over my shoulder. At the sight of my face she recoiled, took a few steps back.

  I made off again, limping towards the woods, shouting his name. If he was in the woods, then something bad had happened to him, because he would never choose to go in there alone and would certainly never stay there at dusk. I heard her boots throwing up gravel behind me.

  We searched for an hour or more but it was too dark by then to see anything, let alone a small black dog. The wind rattled the branches. Night had infiltrated the woods, completely.

  ‘We need a better torch.’ Olivia was holding her mobile phone, from which a feeble light was emanating. Her teeth chattered and her hand shook. I ignored her. I imagined Bertie enervated by sickness, unable to lift himself to his feet even though he could hear my voice.

  He would not be able to understand why I didn’t come and save him.

  Beyond the woods were fields, streams, more woodland, the road and then the slope of the Downs. He would not have run away. But perhaps he’d set off looking for me. I’d never left him with anyone before.

  I was shaking too. But not from the cold.

  ‘Listen, Vivian, it’s freezing out here. I really don’t think he’s here, why don’t we go inside the house and warm up, have a cup of tea and decide what to do next? We’ll be no good to him if we freeze to death. Shall we do that? Vivian? Are you hungry? I could make us something to eat. He might come back if he sees the lights on?’

  Yes. She really said that, too.

  Her face was wan and moon-shaped. I wanted to reach across the space between us and push it away – I didn’t want to see it any more. I wanted her to shut her mouth, to leave me alone. Perhaps I had an instinct that she was guilty. But if I did then my conscious mind could not translate this message into anything more coherent than the need to push her face away.

  She seemed to sense the change of energy. Without another word she turned and stumbled off through the trees, heading back towards the house. I heard her feet crunching on sticks and leaves and I could tell that she was trying not to run. Darkness swallowed her up.

  After a while, I followed.

  I found her huddled on the gunroom steps. Her jumper was pulled up to her nose and she was hugging herself, quivering like a shamed puppy. I was surprised that she had stayed. Now I understand why. She couldn’t possibly leave. This was damage limitation.

  She got up. ‘There you are, Vivian. My God it’s freezing out here! Come on, let’s get you into the house.’ There was just a sliver of steel in her cottony tone. I realize now, of course, that she was determined to end this futile search.

  I stopped in front of her. ‘I know why you brought him here,’ I said. ‘You wanted to get into the house. You wanted to snoop while I was away. You wanted to poke around the upper floors, didn’t you? You didn’t care that Bertie was sick and weak, you didn’t care that he’d be confused and wouldn’t understand why I wasn’t here. You just wanted to snoop. That’s why you came. To snoop.’

  Her kind expression froze. I stepped closer. I stared at her mouth. Her lips were the delicate blue of a linnet’s egg and her throat seemed fragile and pale, a stalk growing from the black soil of her sweater. Tension ticked between us.

  Then a high-pitched screech rang out against the flints. We both jerked, turned, peered out into the darkness. But it was not a dog’s cry, I knew that. It was a vixen’s scream.

  ‘OK, look, Vivian, you’re worried about Bertie, of course you are.’ She sounded more desperate now. The scream had shaken her. ‘I’m so, so sorry. God, I’m so sorry.’ The tears in her eyes made my anger recede a little bit.

  Her remorse may even have been genuine.

  I told myself that I must not let panic get the better of me. I must regain control. I unlocked the gunroom. I let her in.

  In truth, I was as guilty as she was. I knew it even then. I should never have left Bertie with her at the Farmhouse when my instinct was to stay with him that day. I abandoned him when he needed me most.

  He’d vomited repeatedly the night before. He had probably eaten a rotting rabbit corpse in the woods. He was still weak from that, even though he was eating and drinking again in the morning.

  At first Olivia had tried to argue that he’d be OK on his own in Ileford. She could pop over at lunchtime and check on him, if I liked? When I said no, that wouldn’t do at all, she became quite bossy. ‘Listen, Vivian,’ she had said. ‘I know you’re worried about Bertie, but you said yourself, he’s OK now, and we’ve got to check out that photo, we really have. This is basically our only chance of including a photo of Annabel in the book. I’d go and get it myself but I have so much work, I can’t possibly take a day out to drive to Hounslow and back.’

  That was when she offered to have Bertie with her at the Farmhouse. ‘Just drop him over on your way to Hounslow. He can have his basket by the wood stove. He’ll be perfectly fine, I promise, I’ll take very good care of him. I’m a great nurse. I’ll treat him like he’s one of my own children.’

  I wasn’t sure that was much of a comfort but somehow I ended up driving to Hounslow for a non-existent photograph.

  Olivia said nothing as I led her out of the gunroom and along the corridor to the kitchen. When we were in there, though, she seemed to think she should take charge. ‘You sit down,’ she said. ‘Rest your sore leg, warm up. You’ll be no good to any of us if you’ve caught your death … I’ll make us some tea. How about an egg? A fried egg? Scrambled on toast? You must be hungry.’

  I was not. I could not possibly eat. She plainly had no idea what was going on inside me.

  *

  I went out again after she’d driven off. I walked and called for him until the drizzling dawn came through the branches. I called for him until I felt as if sharp stones were rattling around my gullet. I did the same thing the next day and the next, and day after day after that. I covered every inch of Ileford’s grounds, the outbuildings, the ornamental garden, the kitchen gardens, the woodland. I peered under hawthorn hedgerows and bushes, into hollow trees, down badger setts and rabbit warrens. I traced circles over the Weald for miles in all directions and went up along the ridge of the Downs. I reported him missing to the police. I put up posters in town. I never saw Bertie again.

  Of course I didn’t.

  The most agonizing thing of all is the knowledge that I let him down. I left him when he was sick and needed me. The guilt is cancerous. It multiplies and spreads. It has taken me over. I am sickened and disintegrating.

  The worst thing of all, you see, is that in his last moments Bertie would have accepted my abandonment. He would have understood that in the end I was no different from the others; I was prepared to let him drown alone in dark, stagnant water, scratching desperately at slimy walls, because I am human, and humans are treacherous creatures.

  Olivia

  Hammersmith, London

  Olivia sat in her study with a glass of red wine, reading through the Barry book proposal. Sleep, in the six weeks since France, had been difficult, and she had often found herself working on the proposal in the middle of the night. The irony was that she had Vivian to thank for the idea. James Barry – Margaret Ann Bulkley – the nineteenth-century army surgeon whose true sex was only revealed on her deathbed, was a superb subject. But of course she was not going to allow Vivian anywhere near it this time.

  It had been Carol’s suggestion to write up the Barry proposal. They’d had lunch soon after France to talk about the BBC offer. Olivia broke it to Carol that
she was going to turn the show down; she would not dance on TV, even though it meant she was going to have to put the Farmhouse on the market.

  Carol was crestfallen. Towards the end of the lunch she asked, in a somewhat forlorn voice, whether Olivia had any ideas for ‘the next book’ and Olivia found herself talking about James Barry. Carol perked up a bit as she heard about Barry, the brilliant military surgeon, a teetotaller, dog lover and duel-fighter who’d famously fallen out with Florence Nightingale. Carol insisted that if Olivia wrote up a book proposal now it would sell, potentially for a considerable sum.

  The publishing world was already buzzing about Annabel, now that the proof copies were out. Enthusiastic early reviews were rolling in and editors were already phoning to ask if Olivia was writing another book and whether she was tied into her current publisher. Barry would make the perfect follow-up.

  Olivia saved the proposal as ‘Barry: The Scandalous Double Life of Britain’s First Female Doctor’ then emailed it to Carol. This was her final hope. If Barry sold and Annabel did extremely well then she might not have to put the Farmhouse up for sale. If either of those things didn’t happen, then she’d have to contact the estate agent. The interest on the debt was now crippling, staved off temporarily by a belated payment from the TV company. But this could not go on.

  She sipped her wine and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. She knew she shouldn’t be drinking at midnight, but before she could go to bed she needed to compose a calm but assertive note to Vivian, and to do that, she needed the alcohol. She had chosen a card with a sketch of the South Downs in the hope that this would establish common ground. She would slip it into the finished copy of Annabel with another plea for a meeting. Nothing else had worked. Since they got back from France she had sent emails and left numerous voicemails asking if they could meet. Vivian had ignored them all. The silence felt more ominous than accusations or anger.

  The question of whether Vivian had attacked Jess still dangled, unanswered and unsettling. What happened in France felt almost more disturbing, rather than less, as the weeks went by. It seemed irresponsible to be getting on with their lives as if nothing had happened. But, as David kept saying, what else could they do?

  David had not even seen the finished copies of Annabel yet. He was in Edinburgh giving a couple of talks to business leaders and would be away another two days. Things between them had disintegrated further since France. A quiet antagonism played out beneath every interaction and it was cumulatively exhausting. David’s response to the tension was avoidance. He worked until two or three in the morning most nights and then slept on the pull-out bed in the study, not getting up before she left the house.

  But the night before he went to Edinburgh, they had encountered each other in the kitchen. It was very late and she was making chamomile tea, so she made him one too. As she handed it to him their eyes met and she saw his wariness of her, and his guilt.

  ‘We’re in trouble, aren’t we?’ she heard herself say.

  He leaned back against the kitchen counter. After a moment, he nodded.

  ‘We have to do something then,’ she said. ‘We can’t go on like this, can we, we have to move on.’ Out of nowhere, the words ‘Are you sleeping with someone?’ appeared in her mind. Then she saw that he was about to speak.

  She waited. But, after a long pause, he looked away, ran his hand through his hair and said, with a sigh, ‘OK, I know. We’ll talk. But not now – I really need to get some sleep. I’ll sleep in the study so I don’t wake you up tomorrow. I’ve got to get up at five for my train.’

  When he went upstairs she sat at the table for a long time, letting her tea get cold. The room was chilly, illuminated only by the lights over the sink behind her. The steadily aggressive sound of the ticking clock filled the room. The table was littered with exercise books and newspapers; the children’s schedules and letters from school were clumped in ghostly wreaths on the fridge door. She wondered where her unasked question had come from. She thought she’d let go of the fears about Chloe. She didn’t know whether David was capable of destroying their family; but after what he’d done with their money, she really could not be sure. The smell of the cooling chamomile tea was sickly. She got up and splashed it down the sink.

  Outside, an overgrown buddleia branch scratched at the French window, making her jump. She stared out at the black stain of their garden. Then she stepped back and turned away. This was the same feeling she’d had in France – the feeling that if she looked, she’d see a ghostly face pressed at the glass, staring in at her.

  After France, she’d got a locksmith to install new Banham locks on the front and back doors of the house and to check every window fastening. She’d even had the alarm tested. None of this had made her feel more secure. She remembered when she used to see her stalker’s long overcoat vanishing round the library stacks, or when she’d catch sight of him standing in the alley across the street from her office and just that glimpse of his coat, his bulky back, would terrify her. She would torment herself wondering what he was capable of, what he might to do her or the children, what he might be planning. And nobody could do anything because she never saw his face, and she never saw him when she was with anyone else. It was as if he had risen from her subconscious – a symptom, rather than a cause, of this insecurity. David had even, once or twice, gently suggested that he might, in fact, not exist at all.

  She knew that her mind was capable of playing tricks on her. Since France she’d felt as if Jess’s night visitor was with them all the time, breathing unseen behind the door, watching from the corner of the room.

  She had a recurring dream, now, where she’d open her eyes and see a shape in the bedroom doorway, a figure holding a silver pair of scissors. Though she never saw a face, she would know, somehow, that it was Vivian. Sometimes, in her sleep, she would manage to tell herself she was dreaming, she’d manage to wake herself up. But then she would get up and go through the house on trembling legs anyway, checking that every door and window was secure.

  She’d probably never find out whether Vivian did cut Jess’s hair, but one thing was certain: she couldn’t go into the hoopla of publication without understanding what this silence meant.

  The reality was that Vivian could seriously derail Annabel, if she decided to. She could attempt to retrospectively withdraw permission to use the diary and the Burley family archives and if she did this then everything would become very messy very quickly.

  Olivia would have to admit to Joy that there might be grey areas around permission. Publication would have to be delayed while they sorted it all out. There would be huge losses if Annabel were not released on schedule, complications over advertising, early reviews, extracts that had been scheduled in the Sunday papers. The magazine interviews and features that would already have gone to print would become meaningless; editors would be incensed. In the worst case scenario, which Olivia could barely bring herself to look at, Vivian could withdraw permission for the diary completely. There might have to be a legal battle. Publication could be cancelled. Annabel might have to be pulped.

  This would destroy her reputation and badly damage her career. Her integrity would be questioned, both as an academic and as a public figure. The gossip columnists would be feral, it would be appalling, they’d all delight in her downfall: Twitter would explode, the Mail would print pictures of her looking haggard and distraught, academic colleagues would make snide comments to one another about egotism and selling out. She might lose her professorship. It would be such a total, public shaming. The thought was vertiginous. The consequences were almost unthinkable.

  It was extraordinary quite how much power Vivian actually had over her life now. It was an unnerving feeling, both claustrophobic and terrifying, to know that Vivian could destroy her if she wanted to.

  So, she had to establish exactly what state Vivian was in and – whatever it was – neutralize it.

  She drained her wine and considered going downstairs to refill h
er glass. She had to calm down. She might be overreacting. This might be a combination of the financial stress, the troubles with David and pre-publication nerves. It was perfectly possible that Vivian had no intention of derailing the book; that she had nothing to do with Jess’s hair. It was possible that Vivian was simply, and understandably, upset about her dog.

  If so, she might soften when she saw the handsome hardback. It was quite an achievement. Olivia reached out and ran her fingertips over the glossy cover. The jacket designer had got it just right: it was eye-catching but not showy. Annabel and her own name were in deep yellow letters against the rich blues and blacks of the portrait. Perhaps when Vivian actually held the book she would be proud of what they had achieved together. Perhaps some of her fury and hurt about Bertie would recede a little, then.

  It occurred to Olivia that she should also go and see Lady Burley herself. If Lady Burley was demented and close to death – in no fit state to revoke permission – it would be reassuring. And if she was at all compos mentis, perhaps she could get her on side, once and for all.

  She opened her calendar. With term about to begin and publication just two weeks away, every day between now and the book launch party was packed with appointments and meetings. The only free time she had was the day before the party, which she’d kept free for last-minute preparations, maybe even for a manicure and to buy a dress. She would just have to shelve all that and go to Sussex.

  Olivia put her head in her hands and massaged her scalp. She’d done her best to treat Vivian fairly, she really had. She had supported her as much as she could over the dog. What Vivian needed was something to love, some companionship. Perhaps she could just get her a puppy. She could take it down as a gift. But of course, that would never work. Vivian would never allow someone else to make that choice for her.

  It was fair enough if Vivian was struggling to forgive her. She still felt dreadful whenever she thought about Bertie and the lies she’d told. The memory of that horrible afternoon was still very vivid. It had been really traumatic.