The Visitors (75 page)

‘The perfect day for a stroll. In that case, I’ll walk with you.’

He glanced up at the sky; the rain was now torrential. Taking my arm, he tucked it inside his own. I resisted and then stopped resisting. Looking down, he examined my hand – my bare and very cold hand. Madame Maladie had forgotten to bring her gloves as well as her umbrella.

‘You’ve removed your wedding ring, I see.’ He drew me along beside him at a fast pace, pausing only when we reached the cemetery gates. Leading me into the street, into the noise, the sudden clamour beyond, he came to a halt.

‘So – which way? Where are we going, Lucy?’

I can’t remember what reply I gave… The other side of the river, World’s End? Whatever I said, it’s immaterial. We both knew exactly where we were going:
that
knowledge had flashed between us the second we turned to face one another. It is always swift. No point in pretending otherwise.

We began walking northwards and, after various detours and on reaching a bridge, paused to look down at the Thames, sullen, dark, an incoming tide coursing through a transformed city. Peter leaned over the parapet to examine the water, and I did too. The rain was beginning to abate, but we were both drenched by then. My mind felt marvellously clear, rinsed of all impediments.

‘I’m glad you’ve told me all that,’ he said, after an interval.

‘I haven’t said very much.’

‘Then your silences must speak, Lucy.’

That was that. He took my hand and we continued walking. The route we took that day was no doubt erratic; it was a long wind through the city, and afterwards neither of us could recall its details. ‘I think we walked along
that
street,’ he’d say, ‘but why were we there?’ I couldn’t remember either – I don’t think there was any reason behind our route beyond the surprise and joy of being on it.

‘When did you know?’ Peter asked me, as we walked.

‘At the cemetery gates,’ I replied. I don’t think he believed me.

‘I
always
knew,’ he said. ‘I finally decided to stop waiting.’

We walked on. I can remember certain places where we paused, where we lingered, and I know where we were when he took me in his arms for the first time. Outside a museum – one of the many in Kensington. Outside a bastion of learning – in a courtyard, soundless traffic, invisible passers-by, a spring day suddenly, and the clouds racing.

‘You’re not to tell Rose,’ I said. ‘I don’t want us to tell anyone.’

Peter agreed: neither of us wanted this discussed, gossiped over, analysed, muddied.

‘I’m still not divorced.’

‘Unimportant.’

‘I’m older than you are.’

‘In certain respects. Not in others. You’re catching up fast. Come over here… You see? No age gap. No gaps of any kind between us. And never will be.’

We met in secret whenever Peter could get leave, sometimes in London and, when summer came, the last summer before the war, we’d go to Hampshire, to Nuthanger, which was empty of tenants and which Rose’s trustees were trying to sell: not many takers in 1939.

‘I expect they’ll requisition it when the war comes,’ Peter said. ‘Meanwhile, we will.’

We were careful to leave no traces of these visits. I never spoke of them to anyone and I will not write of them now. But I knew they could not continue for long, that even our meetings in London might cease, certainly become briefer and more snatched, once the war came. So it proved: Peter was posted to Yorkshire for further training that November. His squadron moved and was briefly based in East Anglia, then it regrouped and was posted to Sussex in the spring of 1940. We went to Nuthanger for the last time that May, just a month or so before the Battle of Britain began. Two days’ leave, the poignancy of stolen time, owls calling from the beech hangers, larks singing above the hayfields, the drone of planes at night. Our valley – and our house, which I always thought of as Peter had drawn it in childhood, protected eternally by a scribbled rainbow, by a red sun, a blue moon, two gold-foil stars:
weLcOm lUcY
.

Bare feet on old elm floorboards; a room striped with moonlight. I knew what would happen, and it did; how inward
that
experience makes you, how unstable and yet serene – I waited until I was sure. I told him, but apart from that, old habits die hard, I told no one.

I hugged the knowledge to me and took it back to London. I’d left the room in World’s End by then, and we’d taken the cheap tail-end of a lease on a small flat in Marylebone – fifth floor, a view over the doctor-land of Harley Street and its environs, roofs, chimneys, church steeples – and from late August, when the nightly German bombing raids began, a view of the fires at the docks and in the East End; fires they said you could see from ten miles away, the whole skyline red, London burning. When he had leave, Peter would join me there. When he did not have leave, we wrote letters. His commanding officer had my telephone number, in case of – emergencies.

It was a short walk from Marylebone to Nicola and Clair’s flat. I visited them often, hiding my fears, which were acute, and concealing the joy that possessed me. I’d walk to their apartment and try to get back before blackout. I’d look up at the silver barrage balloons, flying high over Regent’s Park. I’d walk past Warren Street tube, where mothers and children carrying cardboard suitcases and gas masks would emerge in the mornings, pale from sleepless nights underground. I’d pass them in the afternoons, as they began to queue again for another night’s shelter. I was superstitious – well, everyone was. I’d avoid cracks on the pavement, touch my
shabti
figure before I left the flat and on my return. I counted the barrage balloons and if their number altered, it was a bad omen; if it remained the same, a good one.

The timing of my visits to Bloomsbury was difficult: sometimes I’d be at Nicola’s flat, and the first wave of Luftwaffe bombers would come in earlier than expected. The sirens would begin wailing, and I’d be forced to remain there. Sometimes Clair would succeed in persuading Nicola to take refuge in the house cellars; sometimes Nicola – who hated being underground – would refuse and would pace her drawing room, listening to the crunch of bombs in the distance. As the days passed and the Blitz intensified, the crunch of bombs came closer, then closer still: proximity to railway stations, to King’s Cross, to Euston, to St Pancras was no advantage now; main-line stations were targets.

Once the ‘All Clear’ sounded, Nicola would cease her restless pacing and sink down in a chair, and sooner or later she and Clair would resume the bickering of the pre-war period. That was their routine, their preferred habit. Once the iniquities of war and food rationing had been exhausted as subjects, they’d return to the ever-dependable topic, the one that never failed them: my divorce – and my lamentable failure to secure it. I took no part in those conversations; Eddie had sailed for America the week before war was declared. He was not answering any letters, especially those from solicitors – and I no longer cared. In my mind and heart, I was not married to him, never had been; the formalities could wait. I had other, more pressing priorities.

I made what would be my last visit to Nicola’s flat that October. I know that the Blitz lasted from August 1940 to the following May, with fifty-seven consecutive nights of heavy bombing, but at the time it seemed much longer than that, a nightly bombardment that left me dazed and deafened in daylight, lost in areas once known well that had become, overnight, an unrecognisable wasteland. Where were the landmarks? I calculate that it must have been day forty-five of the Blitz when I made that visit to Nicola’s flat. I sat there hugging my secrets to me, shivering by a miserable fire – their coal supply was running out. It was still only four o’clock when I arrived, but the blackout blinds were already drawn. Only one table lamp had been switched on: money was tight, Clair and Nicola were economising.

I was sitting next to a table piled with Nicola’s current reading – light novels, borrowed from a lending library. The flat was looking neglected. Behind the books, relegated to a dusty corner, scarcely given space, was the blue
shabti
figure I’d given Nicola in Paris, all those years before.
For Nicola,
with love, the real thing!
I wondered when she had last held the little figure, or looked at him.

I was hoping for tea, but as usual Clair produced some foul vinegary red wine – it was all they could get their hands on, she said. Nicola fretted; there had been bomb damage to Mecklenburgh Square the other night, and that, she said, was too close for comfort. Clair dismissed this; the damage there was not that extensive, Mecklenburgh was much closer to main-line stations than their square was and therefore more vulnerable. Their part of London was still safe, and if it wasn’t, too bad… Nicola said the bombing frightened her: they should move out to the country.

‘We can’t. Do shut up about that, Nicola,’ Clair said. ‘We can’t afford it. You’ve burned your boats. We’re stuck in this mausoleum you insisted on buying. Who’s going to take on the lease now? Who’d even rent it?’

They continued this bickering as if I were not there, as they usually did. I was five months’ pregnant by then. My baby had begun to move in the fourth month, punctually, on schedule, as the books I’d anxiously consulted had assured me would happen. I’d felt stirrings, shiftings, a surreptitious assertion – new life, within me. Now, my baby, my he-or-she would often give me a fierce little kick, or perform some gymnastic manoeuvre in the womb, a gentle roll, a flexing, a somersault.

The alteration in my figure, not that evident anyway, had gone unremarked. Neither Nicola nor Clair noticed my hands laced across my stomach; no one noticed my dreaminess or abstraction, though I think they must have been very evident. The wine, which I shouldn’t have touched, was making me feel sick. I pushed the glass aside. I was nauseous much of the time, and it was worst in the afternoons and evenings. I had cravings too, which would come upon me without warning – at that moment, sitting there by the reluctant fire, I had a fierce desire for salt and sweetness. Sardines. Peaches.

I had been given a new ration book now, the special blue one that all pregnant women received. It entitled me to one pint of milk a day and first choice of the fruit at the greengrocer’s. I dreamed of peaches, the unobtainable tang of oranges, lemons, pineapples: first choice made little difference, since all they had on offer was apples… I closed my eyes. As my baby turned in the womb, lazily stretched, gave me a small punch, I slipped into a greedy reverie of salted almonds, of maple syrup and bacon, Egyptian honey cakes and the salted popcorn Frances and I had once shared in some movie-theatre long ago. Sardines. Peaches. No, sardines
and
peaches. Together.

Clair rose to put a record on the gramophone: Mozart,
The Marriage of Figaro –
and the last act of that opera. She had the volume turned down low, and as the sequence of intrigues and hidden identities of the opera’s final scenes began to play themselves out with sweet, sharp melancholy, I gazed dreamily around the room. I saw it had grown shabby, its fine cornice yellowed: the abode of two women who spent much of their life indoors, one of whom smoked heavily. The walls were stained with pale rectangles where Clair’s paintings had formerly hung; they’d been removed to her studio, where she was preparing them for a new exhibition at a small gallery. It was owned by a friend, who was giving her this show as a favour.

‘A complete waste of time,’ Nicola had said snappishly. ‘Who’s going to buy paintings in wartime? No one understands Clair’s work anyway.’

‘Give it a
rest
,’ Clair had replied. ‘One painting will buy two cases of this foul wine we’re drinking. That’s better than nothing. I’m
giving
them away. It breaks my bloody heart. Five guineas a canvas. A steal.’

Reaching across Nicola’s library books, as they talked on and the music wound its delicate phrases, I picked up the little
shabti
figure and brushed the dust from his head. I replaced him where he was visible, where the lamp shone its light on him.

‘Ah, how beautiful he is, such an
enigmatic
smile,’ Nicola had cried, when I’d given him to her on my arrival in Paris from Egypt. When I’d confessed his dubious history, she’d laughed in delight. ‘So he’s stolen goods? Who cares – who will know? He can be our secret,’ she’d said – and then, catching me by the hand, she’d rushed me outside: the moment had come to show me, for the first time, the beauty of Paris.

One fine day a million years ago. Weeks of fine, fine days: the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Right Bank, the Left Bank, the Seine sparkling; the Comédie Française, where I heard the true power of Racine’s alexandrines, understood for the first time how cold and remorseless was the advance of Corneille’s tragedies. Nicola took me to the Tuileries, out to Versailles, out to the wooded walks of the Bois de Vincennes and then back to the Jardin du Luxembourg – we’d stopped for a
café noir
here, a
vin rouge
there; shopped for a length of silk in the Rue Saint-Honoré one morning when she felt extravagant, and for little rustic cooking dishes in the Rue Mouffetard one morning when she felt poor. To that day, I could not revisit those places without remembering them as Nicola Dunsire showed them to me.

Afterwards, I had wondered if these explorations were an attempt to rid me of Egypt and replace my fascination for that country with a new one. Were they a deliberate assault on those old loyalties? It was possible. Nicola could be jealous of interests she did not share; she could regard them as a challenge to her hegemony. So perhaps that stay in Paris
was
a campaign of attack, a series of persuasions. Perhaps it was designed to cement our confederacy. French was her mother tongue, she’d remind me, laughing, as she introduced me to further proofs of French civilisation, to the refinements of French hedonism.

‘
Now
do you understand?’ she’d said once – when, after a day of such dazzlements, we’d returned to the apartment by the Seine that she’d persuaded my father to rent. He was elsewhere. ‘
Now
do you see, Lucy?’ she said, her eyes meeting mine across the glimmering river reflections of its salon, as the room’s many looking glasses reflected us back upon ourselves, as the traffic outside fell suddenly silent. A long, level, appraising look. She waited for my answer before she moved towards me… And I did
see, could Nicola not understand that? I could speak this silver tongue of hers. I’d abandoned resistance our first day here; the windings of the Seine had seduced me.