The Visitors (12 page)

As we reach the seafront, we mingle with the thronging promenaders, an ocean of parasols and hats bobbing like sea spray, the white puffs of pipe and cigar smoke punctuating the air above them. A well-dressed woman carries a lapdog resting on her fur muff. We pass a puppet show taking place on a wooden stage. Lottie translates the puppets’ speeches for me, but I ask her to stop. I am too old for such childish things these days. We turn to an ice-cream stall and I buy us each a penny lick. I have never tasted ice cream so good, rum and raisin with nuggets of ice in it. I work my tongue into every crevice of the little glass cup, handing it back with a broad grin to the Italian ice-cream man who has glinting dark eyes and makes me blush. He smiles with yellow teeth and gives the cup a quick wipe out with his apron, before replacing it on the counter.

‘The boys would love this,’ I say to Lottie.

The ice-cream man watches us sign, interested.

‘They were born here, remember,’ says Lottie. ‘It’s all new to you. Old news to them.’

I glance at my Italian, but he has new customers now, pretty young women. I have ceased to exist.

I ask Lottie, ‘How old are the boys?’

‘The twins are seven and Christopher is five.’

‘There must have been a big gap, before Clarence and Claude came.’

‘Yes. I was seven when Constance was born, thirteen when she died. Your age now. Then Ma went deep into mourning. She wore black clothes for three years straight. Slowly, she started to come out of it. Then she fell with the boys and they were born, five years on. They have given her much joy. And Christopher, who looks so like Constance, it is remarkable.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘Very like her.’

Lottie frowns at me. ‘How do you know?’

‘What?’

‘How do you know Christopher looks like Constance?’

‘I meant, he looks like you.’

‘You signed
her
.
Like her
. Not me. And you’ve never seen a photograph of her.’

She is suspicious. Almost angry. Yet there is a kind of hope in her eyes. Is now the time to tell her? I am too afraid. I cannot. I look away, a coward, pretending to find great interest in the view.

‘Come on,’ she says when I look back at her, as I must. Her hands sign grumpily, her eyes elsewhere. ‘No time for paddling now. The men will be here soon.’

We walk down the beach to the place where we must wait and squeeze on to wooden benches beside others who watch the sea and chat merrily. I want to tell her about Constance, I do. But it is too black an idea for this blue day at the beach. I must wait for the right moment. I will know it when it comes.

We are never awkward with each other for long. We cannot bear it. Lottie breaks our miserable spell by pointing to a patch of sea beyond the beach where the men will come in. She says they will be in the oyster yawls, from which they will disembark to the smaller boats to come into shore. We stare out at the restless sea for a while, comfortably wordless. I think of Charlotte Crowe sitting beside me, that this is her home, the province of her childhood and family. She gave it up to live with me. I want to ask her something, but I am loath to interrupt this peaceful seascape gazing. The trouble with visual sign language is that one cannot stare at the view and keep talking. I feel for her hand and finger spell in our old way, so we can converse and still keep watch for the Crowe men.

‘You must miss your family terribly, living with me,’ I say.

‘I love my life,’ she says.

‘I never really asked you. How you came to live with us. What happened?’

Lottie lets go of my hand, turns to me and begins to sign. She has a story to tell.

‘I was hopping with my family, as we did every summer. The oyster season goes to sleep in late spring, early summer. The oysters just need cleaning regularly and moving from one bed to another. It is a good time to earn money elsewhere. Our family has been hopping on Golding’s farm for three generations. We had heard of the deaf-blind girl up at the big house. We talked about Constance and it made us sad. It was not long since she died. We never guessed that the daughter of such a rich family would not have been educated. But I suppose the finger spelling was quite a new thing in those days. We were very lucky that our local vicar was an educated man, a well-travelled man who had worked in schools overseas and studied at a college they have in America called Perkins. It’s where they teach the finger spelling and he taught it to us, as you know.

‘When I saw you running through the hop garden, I took your hand because everyone was shouting and coming at you. I thought they would corner you and give you a dreadful fright. You were like a wild animal trapped and I feared you would hurt yourself. I took your hand and I said, “Hush now. Calm down.” Those four words, over and over. And I knew that you had never been taught. Your father came. We all had a lot of respect for him. He had always treated us hoppers fairly and paid well. The huts were clean and he did his best to provide facilities. I was glad to help. When we left you in your room and you went crazy, I wanted to go back in. But he would not let me. He thought you would hurt me. But I knew you wouldn’t. I told him that you would change when you got words, that it was frustration making you angry. I told him our story, of Constance and the vicar. He listened with great interest but would not allow me back in to see you. He really was worried you would lash out. He sent me back to the hops. I think too he was a bit uncertain about having a girl like me around you. No, no. It’s not what you think. He’s no snob, not really. Just aware of his own station in life and what’s right for his only daughter. The big house would never usually mix with the likes of us. But come back he did, a couple of hours later, to find me. And I’d already discussed it with Ma and she said I should offer to teach you daily for as long as we were hopping. Then your father might be able to secure a proper governess for you, who could be taught the finger spelling and bring you on.

‘But your father had done his own thinking and came back with a wage, room and board. He liked me, he said, and believed I was the only one that you would trust. I told him I’d had a pretty decent education from the vicar, better than a lot of the other Whitstable children from the local school. But I could be no governess to a girl from a big house. And he just smiled kindly and said we should wait and see. So I talked with Ma and she said it was a great step up for me and I should do it. Only that month we had been talking about me going into service, as there was never enough money at home, and the thought of being a housemaid filled me with dread. This was a much better position. I knew I would miss my family – the boys were only tiny then and I loved to see them grow. But this was something I would never have thought could happen to a girl like me and I was thrilled to do it. To leave my life planned out for the rest of my days, and move to the big house, with all its possibilities.

‘I was happy to come. And when I met you properly, and spent my days with you, I had not been so happy since the times I had spent with our darling Constance. I loved you soon and suddenly and I have never lost that love. It has grown over time so that you are family to me, Liza. I have watched you grow from that wild girl into a person, a beautiful young lady who found her eyes and now has the world spread out before her and can do anything she desires. I think of the time not so many years from now when you will find a man who deserves you and who will love you and be beside you, your equal and helpmeet as he should be. Then you won’t need me any more, which is as it should be. But it will break my heart to leave you.’

To think, all these years, apprehension has grown in me of Lottie being the one who would tire of me and find a man, move away and leave me bereft. To discover she has the same fear is so aching to me in my heart, my blood runs quick and I quiver with the life of it. And we hug and hug, and cry like fools and laugh too at our foolishness.

‘But I will never leave you,’ I say. ‘I love you much more than anyone else in the earth. What man would have me anyway?’

‘Are you mad? Have you any idea how lovely you are?’

‘But would it not be very inconvenient for him to sign to me?’

‘He can learn.’

‘But it will be years before I am old enough. You. You are the one who will go first. Have you never had a beau, Lottie? You are the beautiful one.’

Lottie dries her eyes and composes herself.

‘There was a man once, when I was much younger. He was a fisherman, a good man. His name was Tom Winstanley.’

‘Did you love him?’

‘I liked him. Very much. I was interested in him. He was a thinker. He used to write long poems about the sea. I liked that.’

‘What happened?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. There was something about him. Something sad. He’d come from the workhouse, and he used to steal books to teach himself to read. He apprenticed as a fisherboy. He went to live in a fisherboys’ home, with rougher boys. It was a hard upbringing for a soft bookish boy like him. And he never got over it. He made me sad. I didn’t want my life to be like that, trying to take his sadness away. Something told me it would never end, as deep as the deep sea. I would be doomed to sink with him. I ended it.’

‘Did he repine for you?’

‘I believe so. He used to come around and ask me to change my mind. He wrote to me when I first came to live with you, long letters full of hope and coaxing. But I never changed my mind.’

‘Does he still live here?’

‘Round about. He fishes for plaice and brill at Ramsgate. He lives up there. Done very well, owns his own boat now. I’ve seen him around Whitstable sometimes. He always looks away. He never married.’

‘Has there been no one else for you?’

‘Not yet.’

‘There will be, Lottie. I just know it. There will be a kind and good man out there for you some day,’ and I gesture beyond us, as if we might see him coming towards us beyond the shore.

She shakes her head, then looks up abruptly. A sound has come from the sea. Here come the yawls, four of them fairly whizzing in with the brisk April breeze filling their sails, each towing a rowing boat behind it. We can see them drop anchor a way out. Three men climb down from each yawl into their rowing boat, pulling into shore, the man at the back pulling at two oars, the front two with one oar each. From this distance, they are so alike in dress as to be almost indistinguishable: chunky Guernsey sweaters up top, thigh-high leather boots below, drooping moustaches like Father’s on every top lip and a cheesecutter cap on some heads, on others oilskin sou’westers.

Lottie on tiptoe waves her arm to and fro. In one boat, two of the men wave back. As they approach, their broad oar-pulls briskly bringing them home to the stony beach, I can see that, beneath their caps, these two men have terracotta hair, lustrous in the setting sun, large eyes turned towards us I know already are blue. The older man leaps out first, in a hurry to see his only daughter. He casts down his oar and rushes up the beach, his stride long and loping, grinning from ear to ear. The son, slower, more deliberate, smiling to himself, tidies the oars into the rowing boat and heaves a sack over his shoulder, resting on his back. He saunters up behind, in no particular hurry, not surly or rude, but a man unto himself. Caleb.

Mr Crowe greets Lottie in just the way her mother did. He lifts her off the floor and whirls her round. A tall man, he does it easily. Lottie is laughing and smoothing her hair. Caleb comes after and puts down his sack. There is an odd moment when Lottie and Caleb regard each other, a sizing up, that they are who they were, that all is well. A swift kiss on the cheek from Lottie and Caleb squeezes her arm, holding on while their foreheads briefly touch and Lottie steps back. Nothing is said. I think of how they dwelt in the womb curled into each other, companions betimes.

Mr Crowe greets me most generously, shaking my hand and trying to say ‘Hello’ in finger spelling. Lottie instructs them both on my new skills, heads nod and we are easy together. Caleb picks up his sack and we all move off towards home, Caleb and Lottie behind, murmuring of I know not what. Mr Crowe tells me things slowly with clear lip movements, a little laboured, but I appreciate his efforts. His protraction does not affect the amount he says, he is very loquacious.

‘Do you like our yawls? Pretty boats, eh? And they can put up with some weather, they can. You know, it’s a good job you’ve come in April. Only eat oysters in a month with an “r” in its name, you know that? ’Cause in May and June and July and August, they are not fit to eat. They’re spatting soon, you see, and the sea’ll be filled with spawn, just like confetti it is.’

I turn to Lottie. ‘Spatting?’ I spell out to her.

‘Producing young,’ she signs back.

Mr Crowe watches us. He adds, ‘They’re making their babies, if you know what I mean. Not like we do, as they have both parts and do it themselves.’ He glances at Lottie. ‘I’m not being impolite, am I? It’s only oysters we’re speaking of, eh?’ And his face creases up in mirth and we are all laughing; even Caleb smiles and looks down, shaking his head. I do like Mr Crowe.

When we reach home, we are greeted by the aroma of baked bread. Three large loaves rest on the kitchen table, beside a pat of golden butter. Plates jostle with tea-cakes, scones and a huge fruit tart. There is no sign of Constance, as yet. We find Mrs Crowe in the yard, emerging from the ash closet. Piles of washing have been through the mangle and are now pegged, heavy and clingy, on the line stretched across the yard, propped up by a sawn-off branch for the line to reach the glancing wind. One last item is being squeezed out of the mangle by Clarence, a beige shirt with linen buttons which will not get broken by the crushing cylinders, while Claude holds it straight as he can as it comes through. Christopher is assisting by patting rhythms on the turning wheels, almost getting his delicate fingers trapped and crushed by the contraption, which makes me gasp. Claude swills out a wooden tub of grey water over the fence into the alleyway, wiping his brow with the back of his hand and yawning.

Mrs Crowe calls to Claude, ‘Hurry up! Don’t you have any gumption?’