The Visitors (76 page)
My baby stirred. I opened my eyes and found myself back in a room in Bloomsbury, a room that felt suddenly unsteady, freighted with the weight of the past, as unreliable as the deck of a ship in a storm. The Mozart had ceased and the gramophone needle was scratching back and forth, stuck in the black grooves at the end of the record. ‘What’s the matter with you, Lucy?’ Clair was saying. ‘You haven’t touched your wine. You’re white as a ghost.’
‘Is she going to faint? What’s wrong? Clair, quickly – fetch her some water.’
‘No, no. I’m fine.’ I stood up. ‘But I think I should go now.’
‘Oh, don’t go yet.’ Nicola rose and crossed to my side. ‘Sit down again – you don’t look well, truly. You’re safe for another half-hour at least. Stay a little, dear. Are you hungry? Let me find something for you to eat – eggs – Clair, do we have any eggs left? It’s only five o’clock, Lucy. Please don’t go. The planes never come over before six… ’
‘Even so.’
I managed to extricate myself. At the door to the flat, Nicola gently embraced me. Clair escorted me downstairs. I ducked out into the square’s gathering dark and walked home past blacked-out buildings. As I reached my own street, the wails of the sirens started up; shortly after, the planes began to come over. Wave after wave of them: one of the worst of the raids of the war, eight unbroken hours of bombs falling. I never saw Nicola or Clair again. Their Bloomsbury house received its direct hit during that raid, at around three that morning.
I went there as soon as I heard the news on the wireless. I found the remainder of their Bloomsbury terrace almost unscathed, but the house in which Nicola and Clair had lived had gone. I stood behind the barriers the wardens had erected, and there was nothing: no trace of lives lived, only singed air, lingering smoke, dying fires, smouldering rubble. The building had become vacancy. At attic height, a fireplace was still attached to a party wall; on the floor that had been hers, shreds of wallpaper remained, clinging obstinately; where the basement and cellars had been, there was a black hole, already filled with water from a burst main. I was standing in a litter of sharp glass, in pools of water from the firemen’s hoses.
Clair Lennox’s studio, in that mews building at the far end of the house’s long rear garden, escaped the blast. I was allowed to inspect it eventually; after prolonged frantic argument, the ARP warden in charge agreed to escort me there. I think I had some unreasonable hope that, after I’d left them, Clair and Nicola might have gone to the studio, and that I would find them there.
That was not so. The studio was unlocked and empty – or so I thought at first. Its windows had been taped, but had shattered. There were two shiny, well-oiled bolts on the inside of its door. I inspected a sink, a gas-ring, a wind-up gramophone, orderly brushes and stacked tubes of oil paint. The air smelled of turpentine and smoke. Broken glass was scattered everywhere, but the small building was otherwise undamaged. So too were Clair Lennox’s paintings. There they were, some packed, some unpacked, awaiting her new exhibition. I stared at one of them: Nicola Dunsire, in a white dress, standing next to a rose arch in a Newnham garden. Across the space between us her painted stare met mine and held it.
‘No, wait – one more minute,’ I said, when the warden tried to persuade me to leave. I went on staring at the past, at Nicola as seen by Clair Lennox, she whose vision differed from mine, whose artist’s vision was no doubt more acute than mine. I could not read that painted stare of Nicola’s, couldn’t decide whether Clair had made it searching or lost, challenging or defeated.
The warden finally took my arm and led me outside. ‘You’re in shock, miss,’ he said, closing the studio door firmly behind us. ‘I see it every day.’ He sighed in resignation. He was not young, and I could see how exhausted he was. Hanging on by a thread.
‘Far to go, love?’ he said. ‘Forgive me asking, but – are you expecting? I’m a family man myself. Three nippers, and one more on the way. You don’t want to be taking any risks – not in your condition. Nothing you can do here. On your way now.’
Some months later, in December, Clair’s gallery friend invited me to the exhibition planned before her death. Her paintings had been left to Nicola, with this gallery as backstop. It was a small place, behind the British Museum, and the show of Lennox’s work had been on view for several weeks before I went there. None of the paintings had sold; not one had a welcome red sticker.
‘Hopeless,’ said her friend. She lit a cigarette. ‘Look at them – marvels. No one’s interested. It’s this bloody war, of course, but it’s not just that. People can’t
see
it. Poor Clair. I’m glad she’s not around to witness it – knew her well, did you?’
‘No, not well,’ I replied – and that was true: inspecting her grouped paintings had made me understand that. I bought that portrait of Nicola, and in my will I’ve left it to the Tate Modern. The curators are delighted; they will hang it next to the three other Lennoxes now in their possession, they tell me, and they plan a major Lennox retrospective. Times change, of course, and what we value – the
way
we value, alters. How do we decide
this
is worthless, and
that
is a treasure? Unless the object concerned is of gold, of course, whose value never declines, whose glitter can never be resisted.
Clair’s painting has travelled with me down the years, down the decades, from house to house, from youth to age, until it finally came to rest here on the north wall of my sitting room in Highgate. I look at it often, must have looked at it a million times. I’ve been looking at it every day this winter, and still I can’t decide – is that painted stare resigned or rebellious?
What are you thinking?
I ask it sometimes, in those moments when I permit or cannot evade such weaknesses. What are you saying, Nicola?
And then I turn away from it. I examine Sargent’s version of my mother Marianne, or turn to the Degas ballet dancer who, fleetingly, from certain angles and depending on the light, resembles Frances. And I think of those who were never portrayed: I think of Peter, whose plane was shot down over the Channel that winter, and whose body was never recovered. I think of our daughter, born a month afterwards. The delivery went well, and the two midwives assisting me marvelled at the lucky speed with which I, a first-time mother, gave birth. But I knew there was something wrong almost immediately: I heard my daughter’s first cry – but from the midwives, silence.
A problem with the valves to her heart, they said. They operated. And I did hold her; I nursed her, for a week or so. I named her. Then, one evening, my child gave a small sigh, and her tiny face puckered in brief distress. Her eyes opened with that wide unfocused gaze of babies; she made a snuffling sound and waved her tiny starfish hand. The next second, between one breath and the next, she slipped away from me. I still think of her. I still think of her father – though many years lost, their sharp presence, and their terrible absence, remain with me.
For some reason – and I think I know exactly what that reason is – this concatenation of absence and presence has been particularly testing this past winter in Highgate. There have been days and nights when it came close to breaking me. I hadn’t expected or foreseen that. I’d believed that passing years, age and resignation had put a barrier between me and grieving. How wrong. Grief’s talons are never sheathed, and its patient capacity to wound is unremitting – but then, it has been a long harsh winter and so, by extension, solitary.
When the year turned and January came, the weather suddenly, capriciously, became gentler. I told myself that I’d endured these wintry siege conditions for long enough. So I telephoned Rose, and she arrived last night. I was inspecting the little blue answerer Frances gave me at Saranac Lake when I heard the baby-Mercedes draw up outside in the square. Carefully, I replaced my
shabti
on my desk and examined him.
Where I go, you go.
His smile has never seemed in the least enigmatic to me: the three thousand-year effect – a smile of absolute and unshakeable serenity, I’d say.
I went to the front door to greet Rose. ‘I come bearing gifts,’ she said.
For an instant I thought she was bringing me letters – my letters to Peter, the ones she had claimed she’d carefully fed to her ceremonial clearing-out bonfire. Then I realised my mistake: Rose was waving a pack of DVDs at me: Dr Fong’s documentary; a photograph of a world-famous gold face mask and large title letters –
Tutankhamun: The Untold Story.
‘I’d better get on home now,’ Rose said, this morning, rising from the battered sofa in my Highgate sitting room. ‘Wheelie will be here soon to collect me. Wasn’t that
marvellous
? I’m so glad we watched it together. I think your Dr Fang did a thoroughly good job. A truly excellent
meaty
documentary. Very sound on Carter, I thought – and Carnarvon. The Tutankhamun things were even more beautiful than I’d remembered – that gold face mask! The
politics
were a little muddling, but I expect that’s just me, I always find politics boring… And, goodness, the
mistakes
everyone made…
Why
couldn’t they see what was coming? The great thing was, one could hear every single word your Dr Fang said – I can’t stand those presenter people who mumble. He made it all so tremendously
clear
! Don’t you agree, Lucy?’
‘Crystal clear. Admirable.’
I switched off the television set. I had watched these programmes, alone, when they were first broadcast a few weeks before, so this had been my second viewing. Two DVDs yesterday, two more this morning; Rose and I, bingeing on Egyptology. KV62 – the history. Magnificent swooping helicopter shots of the Valley of the Kings and the Nile; a dizzying panorama, all the bells and whistles of the latest technology. Computer imaging, volumetric reconstructions, nifty intercutting, sly and judicious editing. The talking heads the producers had feared were, to a man, succinct and erudite. The lighting for the sequences in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was a marvel – for that place is murky. The past
spoke…
It’s a year now since Ben Fong first came here, I thought: full circle.
I turned to the window as Rose began to gather up her belongings. A fine day outside, deceptively springlike: a blue sky, a high sun, frostbitten roses in my garden, but signs of life even so, bulbs coming up, et cetera.
I went out into the hall with Rose, helped her on with her coat, helped her find her gloves, handbag, overnight case. It was chilly, and in the hall’s silvery wavering light I could sense my familiar ghosts; they love to cluster there, whispering as one departs and another enters. They seem drawn to stairs, and the recesses under them. I wondered if Rose ever noticed them, these companions of mine; she seemed not to sense them or, if she did, ignored them.
‘Of course,’ she was saying now, pulling on her gloves, ‘you and I could read between the lines, couldn’t we, Lucy? We
knew
those people. So when
we’re
watching your Dr Fang’s version, we can remember what it was
really
like. He had to concentrate on the main players – but we remember all those on the fringes – don’t we? They couldn’t matter to him, why should they – but they matter to us, and always will.’
She wrapped a red scarf about her throat and sighed. ‘It was so cleverly filmed, wasn’t it, Lucy? It reminded me of how utterly beautiful it was, the Nile then, the water, the palms, the astonishing green fertility of it – and then beyond that, bare desert… Peter and I used to stand on our balcony at the Winter Palace every evening, you know, watching the sailing boats. He loved the feluccas. He loved watching the ferry. And he’d ask if you’d be on the next one, or if the next boat would bring our mother back – and I used to say, Maybe not this one, but perhaps the next… Ah, Lucy. What lies one tells!’
‘Don’t, Rose.’
‘No, you’re right. I’ll only get upset.’ She paused and adjusted her scarf. Averting her eyes, she said: ‘Goodness, I almost forgot. I meant to ask you, before I go: you did see that doctor? The specialist I recommended?’
‘Yes, I saw him.’
‘What did he say? Did he run tests?’
‘Innumerable tests. The diagnosis was old age. As I could have told him.’
‘Nothing else? Still ticking over, then? Oh I’m so glad!’ She reached up and kissed my cheek. ‘I’d been worrying about you, Lucy, you know – all this winter. That’s a great relief. Now I want you to promise me something. When the spring comes––’
‘Yes, Rose?’
‘When spring is here, you
will
come and stay with me, won’t you? As you always do?’
‘Of course, Rose.’
I opened my front door for her and there, punctual to the minute as always, was the baby-Mercedes. Wheeler climbed out and came round to help Rose into the car. I watched her negotiate the path with care – she was frailer this year than last, as I was. As the car drew away, she lifted her hand. I lifted mine in a mirroring farewell, then closed the door, and leaned against it. I closed my eyes and waited for my pulse to slow to normal.
Too much past. So many lost people. I returned to my sitting room, where Nicola watched me from the corner of the room; where berries, flowers and ferns I’d once picked at Saranac Lake still bloomed in the blue jar in which Frances and her mother had arranged them; where a small dog still stretched out in the sleepy abandon of a lost past, an instant captured in pencil and charcoal.
Not long now,
I thought, later this afternoon… It will be spring before one knows it. I pulled on a coat and went outside, shuffling along the paths in my back garden. From three houses away, where a new family has just moved in, came the bright upraised voices of children, playing outside. I stood quietly, listening to their cries and laughter. I turned to the flower beds and inspected the bulbs, green and determined, blunt noses coming up from the hard black soil. Here crocuses, there daffodils, and over there snowdrops – these were well advanced, almost in flower, incipient white petals still shrouded in their green calyx.