The Visitors (28 page)
‘Only seeing him at weekends? No. My mother and I were used to that.’
‘Of course you were,’ she said quietly.
I think she was considering a more intimate approach, another clasping of the hands, but seeing me shrink back in my chair, she changed her mind. To my surprise, she reached for a small box, and took a cigarette from it. She lit it with a match, inhaled, and blew the match out. I caught the faint scent of brimstone.
‘I was on five cigarettes a day in the lead-up to Finals, Lucy,’ she announced, in a wry confessional way. ‘I gave up after the last exam, just like that.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘When I came here, I hadn’t touched them for two years. But your father smokes on occasion; he offered me one the other week – and here I am, addicted again.’
Some comment seemed required, so I said: ‘In Egypt, everyone smoked, women as well as men. Well, practically everyone,’ I added, as the ghost of Poppy d’Erlanger briefly entered the room. ‘Oh,
hellishness
,’ the ghost remarked, and disappeared. Silence fell.
‘You’d noticed the alterations here, hadn’t you, Lucy?’ Nicola Dunsire ventured, after a pause. ‘They must upset you, I think? May I explain? At our interview, when your father hired me, I could see he was in a pitiful state, worried about your return, unsure what would be best for you, and he was still – lacerated by grief. I do not use the word “lacerated” idly. I never use words in an idle way. It was becoming an ordeal for him, returning to this house, with its many reminders of your late mother’s presence…
‘You don’t know me, Lucy, so I’ll come clean!’ She tossed the cigarette into the fire. ‘I detest secrets. All those prudish Victorian evasions – no one ever daring to say what he thinks or she feels! This is the 1920s, it’s a new era, and I believe in bringing things into the open –
dragging
them into the open if need be. So, when I saw the effect this house was having on your father, I came right out with it, Lucy, and I told him frankly that he needed to make a break with the past. No one can live in a
museum
– nor should they. I told him: stay in college for two weeks, don’t set foot in this house for that time, and leave everything in my hands.
I
will make the necessary changes. They will be radical. They may shock you at first. They may pain you initially: I’m prepared for that. Leave it to me, I said – and dismiss me if I’m wrong.’
‘And he agreed?’
‘Of course. Your father is a scholar; men like him, with busy professional lives, have a horror of domestic detail. Why should they concern themselves with cooking and curtain materials, with laundry lists, with deciding where pictures should hang? Things like that bore them to distraction – and, I may as well admit it, they bore
me
to distraction too. I much prefer to study. I’m a bluestocking, Lucy.’ She gave me a mocking half-smile. ‘On the other hand, I like to live in a place that looks pleasant and runs efficiently, and I’m a well-organised person – I’m a fiend for order, always have been. So I could effect the practical, simple changes that were needed here very easily and quickly. I knew that in your father’s case they’d be
therapeutic.
And so they have proved.’
‘He likes it? He approves?’
‘Lucy, I’ll be frank: he scarcely notices!
That
’s how well I’ve performed my task.’ She laughed. ‘Before, it was a little – how shall I put this – overcrowded? Its effect on your father was oppressive; not everything here was to his taste, you know.’ She paused; the flicker of amusement vanished and her face became grave. ‘However, I’m not a fool, Lucy, as you’ll realise when you know me better. So please understand: when I made these little changes, moved a few things here and there – I wasn’t thinking only of your father, I was thinking of
you
. A young girl, whom I’d never met – a girl who’d been subjected to sudden, tragic change. A child who was far away, experiencing the excitements and uncertainties of a foreign country. A traveller from an antique land.’
She waited to see if I’d pick up the Shelley quotation, made in a testing tone; when she saw that I did, she continued in a warm, confiding way: ‘I knew that this girl would be expecting to return to a familiar place. And I was torn, yes,
torn
, Lucy, between your father’s needs and yours. So in the end, I decided to take the middle way: I made changes, yes – but I also
preserved.
Everything belonging to your late mother, all her bits and bobs, her paintings and books and little trinkets: I’ve packed them up with the greatest care, Lucy, and I’ve kept them for you.’
I think she was expecting thanks. I think she actually was expecting thanks. If so, she was not as clever as she imagined herself. At that moment, I’d sooner have thrust my hand into the fire than utter one syllable of gratitude.
There was a long, lethal silence. Less than a year since my mother died: I was imagining Frances’s reaction, the outburst that these actions and this explanation would have provoked from her. A part of me longed to speak out as Frances would have done, but there were other ways of dealing with a woman like Nicola Dunsire, more indirect ways, as Frances had also shown me. Besides, old habits die hard.
So I rose and merely told her that I was tired from the long journey, and thought I’d go to bed now. The flatness of my voice, maybe some mutiny in my eyes, disconcerted her momentarily. She was a woman who was rarely flustered, as I’d learn – but she was flustered then. She rose, fiddled with the cushions on her chair, began suggesting that I should have something to eat: she’d prepared a light supper. I took the opportunity to glance at the book she’d put down when my father and I entered the room; both title and author were unfamiliar to me: Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
.
‘I’m not hungry, but I am tired. I’d really prefer to go straight to bed. If you don’t mind.’
‘Of course. You must be exhausted – all those ferryboats, all those trains. May I bring something up for you? Warm milk? Hot chocolate? I make the
best
hot chocolate.’ She gave me a conspiratorial smile. ‘It was our great treat at Girton. The food in women’s colleges is vile, Lucy – not like the men’s. We undergraduates were always starving, we used to meet up in one another’s rooms in the evening, and make cocoa and chocolate on a little gas-ring. Then talk about books until the wee hours!’
The sudden girlishness was unconvincing. ‘No, thank you,’ I replied. ‘I don’t really like hot chocolate. Or cocoa. Where have you put my mother’s things, by the way?’
‘
By the way
, I have put them in a spare room,’ she answered, with emphasis, and after a fractional pause. Her gaze met mine. With three small words, a gauntlet had been thrown down – and instantly picked up. When she could see from my face that I understood this as well as she did, Nicola Dunsire turned away.
‘In the spare room next to your own bedroom,’ she continued, her tone hardening. ‘The overspill is in the loft. It can be brought down for you, should you wish it. Breakfast will be at eight o’clock sharp – I should warn you, I’m a fiend for punctuality, Lucy. We’ll begin our lessons, and I’ll show you the curriculum I’ve drawn up for you, the day after tomorrow. You’ll need twenty-four hours to rest and adjust, and I’ve allowed for that. Meanwhile, is there anything else you need?’
Not that you can provide
, I thought.
‘No, thank you,’ I replied and, resisting her attempts to help me with my overnight case, went upstairs to the top floor.
My attic room was unchanged. There were the same sprigged curtains at the dormer window, the same brass bedstead and rosebud-patterned eiderdown; the wallpaper, blowsy with faded poppies, the pattern that I’d pleaded for and my mother had smilingly allowed, was unmolested. When I’d last seen this room, I’d been ill; now I was cured. I lit the small gas fire and, shivering, unpacked and undressed in front of it; but I had become used to the heat of Egypt by then, and the room remained breath-catchingly cold.
I huddled under the blankets and at once fell asleep. When I woke, it was three in the morning. I wrapped myself in my woollen dressing gown, and stood at the window for a while. There was a full high moon and a sharp frost outside, and my breath kept misting up the window-panes. I rubbed the mist away, then pushed up the sash – and there Cambridge was, bright and bone-white from this high vantage-point, its glittering spires, towers, turrets and pinnacles: that palace of knowledge to which I’d returned.
I made a vow then – and all these long decades later I can claim that I kept it religiously. Then I padded next door to examine my mother’s archaeological remains. They filled the spare room from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall: box upon box of them, all painstakingly sealed, stacked and labelled in the italic script that I would come to recognise as Nicola Dunsire’s hand. Here my mother’s diaries, there her dresses; here her hats, there her paintings and jewellery.
China ornaments, assorted
, said one label;
Emerson family letters
, read another;
Photographs: USA and England,
read a third. There was a box for official documents, passports, visas, birth and marriage certificates. There was a box labelled
Final illness and death of
; there was a box labelled
Stockings and undergarments
,
and another for
Condolence letters: family and friends.
No archivist could have taken greater pains. The room itself deserved a label:
The Museum of Marianne
Emerson Payne
. It felt as if my mother had died a second time.
I returned to bed, fell asleep and entered a nightmare – a nightmare that recurred for years. I was back in the Egyptian Museum, compelled to walk past that fearsome line of mummies again. Rose and Frances were with me, all three of us clasping hands. Alongside the dead kings lay my mother and Poppy d’Erlanger and a small shape that Frances recognised as her little brother, lost in the waters off Maine. All the mummies were in a state of distress, protesting at the labels describing them and their lives, insisting the Museum officials were mistaken: it hadn’t been like that,
they
hadn’t been like that; their identities were confused, or distorted; subverted, or just plain wrong.
Their anguish cut us to the heart, but in our dream state we were impotent to help. We glided silently past them – and then, at the end of the row, in a special case of their own, we came to a new exhibit: three mummified women, who were regarding us cunningly, who whispered to each other and moaned. When we tried to creep past them, they became very agitated; they began to rip the bandages from their faces, they shook out the snaky locks of their dust-encrusted hair and, to our horror, they called out our names:
Don’t you recognise us?
they cried.
Don’t you see who we are?
Mesmerised and afraid, I bent to read the labels that recorded their names and lives. In a shaky voice, Frances said: ‘Don’t,
don’t
. I know who they are. That’s you, Lucy, with the fountain pen. That’s Rose, in the hat. And the one with scarlet lipstick is me.’
‘That can’t be! We’re alive – and they’re dead. That’s not possible!’ I cried.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Rose, beginning to weep. ‘That horrid old hag? Look at that hideous hat of hers! I wouldn’t be seen dead in it. How can that possibly be me?’
Sick with fear, I bent to the labels again. They informed me that the dark-haired woman on the left was indeed Frances; the fair-haired woman on the right was Rose; the pallid cipher of a woman between them bore my own name. Pen in hand, she’d begun to scribble frantic words on her bandages. I stared at them: I could see no resemblance to Frances, Rose or me – yet the Museum labels, which were printed, authoritative, as readable as the clean pages of a new book, made their identities only too clear.
‘Wait, wait, wait. Let me
read
! Let me see what the labels say,’ I cried, as Rose and Frances tried to drag me away. ‘There must be some mistake. Let me check the dates when they died. Then we’ll know for sure––’
‘
That information is classified. Access denied
,’ boomed a terrible voice from the dark recesses of the Museum – and I woke, shaking with fear, to an attic bedroom and a new Cambridge day.
‘What’s happened to that Wong fellow, the one who was interrogating you?’ Rose asked, adjusting her new hat. She closed the glass division between us and her chauffeur. We had been inching our way west out of London and had now reached the motorway; before us stretched the M4.
‘
Fong
,’ I corrected, absently. ‘
Dr
Fong.’
It was April; there had been a fortnight of fine weather, and spring might, or might not, have arrived. I was on my way to stay at Rose’s house in the country, as I did every year once winter was past. We were installed in Rose’s car, a vintage Bentley originally bought by Rose’s husband; it had been cherished by him until his death thirty years later, and by Rose ever since. This was its last ceremonial outing. It was soon to be sacrificed. Rose, who had always liked causes, had recently embraced a new one, sustainability; she was newborn, reinvigorated; she had become, she’d informed me,
eco-aware
.
It was months since I’d seen Rose and we had a lot of catching up to do, I thought, gazing out of the window as the Bentley, its great engine soundless, picked up speed. I had spent a cold winter looking back at the past; Rose had passed those months looking forward. She had been overhauling the large, draughty, seventeenth-century manor house in which she’d lived for sixty years. It was to become
carbon-neutral
– or so she claimed. The massive upheaval necessary had been seized upon with zeal. Once the floors were up, once her house was crawling with ‘legions of plumbers and electricians’, Rose had embarked on a ‘massive clear-out’. She’d spent the entire winter on this archaeological task, as she’d explained to me in numerous phone calls. Attics had been raided, cupboards gutted, cellars cleared: the accumulated possessions, all the records of Rose and her large family, had been examined, saved, discarded, consigned to Oxfam, passed down, sold off, burned or conserved. For various reasons, these activities had caused me alarm.