The Visitors (13 page)

‘All right, all right,’ he says, nettled. ‘I’m doing it directly, Ma. Don’t keep all on at me.’

I cannot imagine speaking to Mother or Father in this manner. Mrs Crowe raises her eyebrows at a neighbour, who passes her a cup of steaming tea, engaged in her own washday in her own backyard beyond the low wall, on which hang two tin baths beside the meat safe.

There are smiles all round as the Crowe men are welcomed and Caleb hands the sack to the lady of the house.

She says, ‘Normal we’d have cold meat and bubble and squeak on washday, or whatever’s left from Sunday. But we have our special guest, so we are having an oyster feast tonight, Miss Liza.’

Once we are seated at the kitchen table, oysters are passed around several to a plate, the adults grabbing a shucking knife and opening up the stubborn beasts. Mine are done for me by Lottie and put on my plate. I am shown how to loosen them and pop them in my mouth.

Mr Crowe taps my arm and says, ‘Some say swallow it whole and others say savour it and chew. It’s up to you.’

The Crowes all swallow whole, so I try to knock it back like medicine and end up with it caught at the top of my throat and nearly gag. I cough and all eyes are on me. Lottie whacks my back and my first oyster lands on my plate. Everyone laughs, and though I am not wholly mortified I do feel embarrassed before Caleb and take a quick glance at him, to secure my shame. He is watching me.

‘Chew it,’ he says.

I try and find it much more accommodating. The texture is disagreeable, the flavour indifferent, but the experience is not altogether unpleasant, something of the wildness of the sea and the wash of saltwater and the embrace of the tides swilling in my mouth. I take a hunk of bread roughly sawn by Mrs Crowe and spread a large swathe of home-made butter across it. The bread is still slightly warm and the butter melts in my mouth and fills me with warmth and comfort. With that in my belly, I try another oyster and the new taste grows on me. I try another, and another.

Mr Crowe says, ‘Nothing better than an oyster, eh? They call it a kiss from the sea.’

I steal another glance at Caleb. He is dipping his bread in the juices on his plate and taking great bites. He picks up a shell and tips his head back, the grey cargo slipping into his mouth. I watch his Adam’s apple rise and fall as he swallows it down.

After dinner, we sit by the Crowe fire and Caleb plays his fiddle. Perhaps afraid that I would feel affronted at so aural an activity, he asks if I would like to place my hand on the body of the violin and feel its vibrations. I stand beside him and he shows me a place I can hold it, as I had done in times past when blind. Now I close my eyes again, to feel the rhythm of his playing travel up my arm and down into sinew and bone. He plays songs with curious titles that summon up stories of wayfarers’ lives, such as ‘Captain Ward’, ‘The Bold Fisherman’ and ‘Banish Misfortune’. The table and chairs are pushed back and I take to dancing with the others on the tiles before the fire and feel the stamp of their feet and glimpse the clap-clap-clap of Mrs Crowe’s hands to guide me. When I tire of dancing, I sit for a time by the fire and watch the Crowes.

Constance appears beside me. The Crowes dance and Caleb fiddles and they do not know their sister is here. I see her hand reach for mine. I spread out my palm along my thigh as if it aches and I uncurl it. I feel her tenuous fingers like a glimpse and watch her spelling.

When Charlotte comes, I like her best. She braids my hair and never pulls it. Ma is rough and pulls my hair, but she is always sorry after.

I look up and smile at the entertainment, so no Crowes suspect me.

I say,
What is your favourite thing to eat?

Satin pralines. You can suck and suck and then your teeth crash through and it is soft and sugary and like heaven inside.

Lottie is watching me, one of her frowns. I smile and nod my head to the pounding feet. She looks away. I have one more question for Constance.

Did you have a secret with Charlotte? Something only you and she knew?

Constance smiles and nods her head.
She had a secret name for me. She would spell it in my hand at bedtime, over and over. It was my lullaby.

What was your secret name?

That is my secret with Charlotte. No one else knows of it.

You can tell me.

I do not think so.

I am your friend. I am Charlotte’s friend. You can tell me.

It was Tanty. She used to spell it in my hand. I love Tanty, Tanty is my love.

Thank you
, I say.
Time to go now.

Constance turns and wanes.

I come back to Caleb and he nods to me, assenting to my holding the edge of the fiddle again and feeling its spell. Between tunes, he asks me, ‘What do you think of music?’

I motion for his hand and he places his palm out, lets me spell into it.

‘I love music.’

‘How do you love it?’

‘I feel the beat as I do my pulse. And the notes have different vibrations. I feel them all.’

‘Do you know a sad song from happy?’

‘Yes, by its rhythm, by the look on your face.’

‘What do you wish me to play?’

‘Your favourite.’

He closes his eyes a moment then sets to, my hand receiving it. It is slow, so slow, with graceful bows and shudders as if the bow itself is weeping. Oh, for sure, it is a sad, sad song. His chosen one, his favourite. He closes his eyes and raises his eyebrows, his chest fills as he breathes in the beautiful music. He has a sculpted face, calm eyes. All stop in the room and listen, their eyes mournful, their bodies sunken. It is the saddest song I ever heard.

When he is done, I tap his arm: ‘What was its name?’

He spells it out for me: ‘Twa Corbies.’

‘What is that?’

‘They are Scottish words. It means two crows. They watch a dead knight in a ditch, a soldier. No one knows he lies there. They will take his blue eyes for dinner and pluck his golden hair to warm their nest. And over his bare white bones, the wind shall blow for ever more.’

One of the boys pipes up something and I see Mr Crowe say, ‘Oh yes, Caleb, tell us one of your ghost stories. He is marvellous good at it, Miss Liza. You must sit here by me, where you can see him. He’ll give you shivers up and down your back, you mark me!’

We seat ourselves by the fire. Caleb has put his violin on the sideboard and takes his place leaning on the mantelpiece. The three boys sit at Caleb’s feet, eager faces upturned.

‘There was once a beautiful young lady with long golden hair and large brown eyes, name of Nell. She worked for a canon at the Cathedral of Canterbury back in fat old Henry VIII’s time. She loved the canon and was an excellent cook. One day another young woman came from the shires to live with the holy man, who said she was his niece. But Nell discovered the lady never slept in her own bed. She beleft they were lovers and fell with a fearful jealousy. Now there was no bounds to her. She spied on the couple every moment she could, listening to their laughter and torturing her soul with their twinkling eyes. She could bear it no longer and took a great crock from the shelf and in it baked the most sumptuous pie of her career. When the canon and the lady had eaten of the pie, they grasped at their stomachs, they tore at their insides, they bled from their noses and ears and eyes and all their other holes …’

At this, the three little brothers squirmed on the floor in gleeful horror.

‘They clutched each other one last time in agony, and fell … down … dead. The monks from the priory came the next morning to find the two stone dead on the floor, a look of hideous agony writ large across their tortured faces, the poisoned pie half eaten on the table and crumbs of it smeared around their blue lips. All called for Nell the cook, but she had run away, never to be seen alive again. They buried the canon and his lady in a secret ceremony, to avoid a sure scandal. Years later, three stonemasons were called to repair a loose flagstone in the Dark Entry, a spooky walkway of the cathedral. When they lifted the stone, what did they find? A skeleton huddled in the corner of a secret crypt, its flesh worn away by time and nibbled by worms and cheesy-bugs and all manner of creeping things. Beside the bones lay a rock-hard crust of … what else, but the poisoned pie. Was it Nelly’s bones they found? Within a year, all three unfortunate masons were dead. They say two murdered the other one, though nobody knows what drove them to such a grisly deed. The murdering masons were hanged, strung up by coarse rope, their necks broken, their feet kicking their poor lives away. And now whoever dares to walk the Dark Entry late on any night, if he sees the ghost of poor Nell a-wandering there, he will be cursed and not live a year! Would you dare? Would you, eh?’

Caleb points at the three rapt boys who jump up and vie to be the bravest before their big brother, ‘Oh, I will!’ says one, then another. ‘I would do it! I’m not afraid of ghosts!’

Mrs Crowe gestures to me. ‘What about you, Miss Liza? Do you have any ghost stories to tell us?’

And I want to tell them about the gypsy lady with the black eyes, the signalman who cannot find the lost sheep on the line, the navvy begging for soup. But I feel a heat from Lottie’s glare and know I cannot.

‘Oh, no. Not me,’ I sign and make my meaning clear with a shake of the head and shy eyes.

Caleb moves from the fire and wraps his violin and bow in a cloth. He walks to the kitchen door and lifts an arm.

‘Night all,’ he calls, eyes down, fiddle under one arm.

All raise a hand and Mrs Crowe embraces him before he goes. He has his own room, the eldest son’s privilege.

I am thinking of his eyes. They do not seem to me the eyes of a happy man.

‘Is Caleb content?’ I ask Lottie.

‘Tired, I think is all.’

‘Not only now. I mean, is he happy in his life?’

‘What a question! Mind your business!’

‘But is he?’

Lottie studies me a moment. ‘You are getting too good at observing. You see much, don’t you?’

I nod. She glances around, then realises of course that we can speak of whatever we wish, as no one here can read our signs.

‘He yearns for things beyond this life, this house. I know not what. He has had lady friends, but none is good enough. He is a fine oyster farmer and a quick hopper, but he takes little pleasure in either. I believe if he could, he would escape it all as an animal flees a trap. No, he is not happy.’

Mrs Crowe moves our feet to store toys beneath the couch. The Crowes have been tidying around us and we have forgotten ourselves. We rise to help and are shooed away as ever, Lottie and I treated as ladies here. When all is done, the boys are put in one large bed together and Lottie and I are given mugs of cocoa. We share a single bed in Lottie’s old bedroom, spread with a handsome quilt of Noah’s ark, faded and care-worn, clearly handmade a generation ago and used to warm many Crowe children’s beds through the years. We rest our heads on hop pillows mixed with lavender, the scent transporting me back home to late summer days sitting by my open window. We curl together in the darkness and finger spell memories of our day. We hug and kiss cheeks. Now is the time.

‘I saw Constance today.’

Lottie is still.

‘She stood in your hallway. Her eyes were shrunken.’

Lottie pushes my hand away and sits up. Through the thin curtains the eerie green flicker of the street gaslight seeps to illuminate her curled hair wild about her head. She reaches again for me and spells, ‘You are wicked,’ into my palm.

‘She looks just like Christopher, the same blue eyes and red hair.’

‘A wicked child, to make up cruel stories.’

‘Her favourite sweets were satin pralines. She liked it when you braided her hair, how you never pulled it but your mother did.’

‘Ma told you that, she must have done.’

‘You had a secret name for her. You’d spell it in her hand at night, before she slept. It was Tanty. “I love Tanty, Tanty is my love.”’

Now the tears roll down Lottie’s cheeks and she buries her head in my lap. I smooth her hair as she weeps. She looks up, looks past me, about the room.

‘Is she here now?’

She believes me.

Tuesday is ironing day. We have been slugabeds and wake late. When we come into the kitchen in dressing gowns and slippers, rubbing the sleep and dried tears from our eyes, the room is filled with steam and heat like a Turkish bath, deliciously cut through with the draught from the open scullery door. The table is spread with a folded blanket topped with a grey sheet, and Mrs Crowe is sprinkling water on a shirt to get the creases out. She ploughs through the stiff cotton with one flat iron, a cloth round its hot handle, while the other iron heats by the range fire. She holds the iron close to her cheek, shakes her head, dissatisfied, and swaps it for the other. After every few swishes of the new iron, she places it on a hunk of Sunlight soap to make it glide better. Outside hang the clothes already ironed since dawn that morning, the scent of clean cotton wafting in on the air.

Breakfast is porridge, keeping warm in a pot on the range. The younger boys have had theirs and are in the street playing. Mr Crowe has been out on the boat for hours. He will be home for his breakfast soon, kippers for the working man. Lottie tells me Caleb is still resting. He will work the yawl later. She serves our porridge, which we eat on our laps by the range, feet on the rag rug, the oilcloth beneath worn and cracked. We sprinkle brown sugar on top and pour on cold milk, creating a moat around the lovely gelatinous heap of coarse oats. I watch Lottie line up the husks around the rim of her bowl and do the same. Our oats at home are more refined. But I like these better. They have more gumption. I watch Mrs Crowe place the kippers straight on to the hot coals and the salty smell of hot fish fills the room. I think of our engraved fish knives at home and consider what is necessary in life.

When we have eaten, I lay down my spoon and ask, ‘What are we doing today?’

‘A boat trip.’

‘How exciting! Where are we going?’