The Visitors (4 page)

But then Lottie begins to teach me more than language. I learn the laws of nature by exploring the gardens, picking flowers and berries, peeling bark or digging for worms, making a rain-catcher and bringing snowballs inside to feel them melt in my warm hands. I understand that animals cannot talk with their fingers. I am hugely disappointed in this and think they must be very feeble-minded. I learn biology by finding a dead bird and lifting its wings to understand flight. Physics by climbing trees and dropping apples. Geography through placing a stick in the beck so that I can feel the flowing of water and understand currents. I know that the water on Father’s land runs into a river downstream which feeds into the great wide sea where the Crowe family live. Beyond there are other lands where many live and others have travelled. Our planet is made of land and sea, mountains and valleys, stretching forth from my little life across the globe and back in time for millennia and forward beyond my short span for ever. I cannot encompass how large the earth is.

One day Lottie takes my hand and leads me to Father’s study. He has bought me something new. She lets me find it. It is half as tall as me, twice as fat. Round, curved, I am feeling over it, down it and below it. Upon its surface, peaks and troughs, rough terrain and smooth sea. I have guessed. It is the earth. It is a globe. We talk about countries, about our little England and the provinces beyond it, all encompassed in a sphere. She is astounded at how quickly my fingers move across it and how my mind knows it so completely so soon. By touch, I have a special knowledge of it which perhaps a sighted child would not gain from a flat map. In a morning I learn the continents and the oceans and some of the countries. Europe gives me trouble, so many little nations on one slab of land.

‘Do they not argue in Europe,’ I ask Lottie, ‘living so stuffily?’

I like mountains, as they ridge pleasantly beneath my fingernails. The first I learn are the Alps. They do not feel so very far away from England. I ask Lottie if we can visit the Alps tomorrow. She explains the globe is a scale replica, that I have to multiply the distances I feel by hundreds and thousands of times. That the miles from here to Australia are almost beyond imagining. My mind aches at this. But one day, I will be able to comprehend it. For now, the globe gives me a shape for our existence.

But what is beyond the globe? The sky. And beyond that? The stars. And beyond them?

Lottie says, ‘Your father wants to talk with you about that.’

‘Why not you?’

‘Your father does not want me to discuss such matters with you.’

‘About the sky?’

‘No, about God.’

‘What is God?’

‘Ask your father.’

So I ask him, ‘What is God?’

Father tells me God created the world and the universe and everything in it. He is all-powerful and all-knowing. God wants me to be a good girl, kind to others and always mind my parents and my teacher. God knows when I have been bad. He sees me always and knows my every thought.

‘Does he live in my house?’

‘No, our Lord resides in heaven.’

‘Is it by the sea?’

‘No, it is above the earth, way up above the sky itself.’

‘When you look up, can you see heaven with your eyes, Father?’

‘No. It is not in our sphere.’

‘How can God see me then?’

‘He has the all-seeing eye.’

‘How can he hear my thoughts?’

‘He can do anything He pleases. He can enter your mind and eavesdrop on you.’

‘Like the Visitors?’

‘Who?’

I stop there. I am not ready to tell Father about the Visitors. I do not want him to think I am a lunatic.

Now I know about the world and about God, and I can speak about them. I believe I know everything, that my education is complete. What else is there to learn?

Lottie brings me something new. Slips of paper with bumps on them. She lets me feel the bumps; they are made of lines and curves, like the carvings on my headboard. She puts a pot of glue beside me. She gives me a cup. She helps me to paste the paper to the cup. Then she spells C-U-P in my hand and directs me to feel the bumps on the paper. Now my mind is at work, it does not take me long to realise that the bumps are letters. Put them together and you can make words. Not in the hand, but on paper, where you can pass the paper to someone else and they can hear it by touching, even take away the paper to somewhere else and give it to another person, who can hear the word too, without even being in the room with you. I understand it is a kind of portable finger spelling. Lottie explains further that others can recognise these letter shapes with their eyes, while I use touch. Later I know this to be called reading and writing.

We paste many labels on to objects and I start to learn the sequences of shapes, relating them to my finger alphabet. Pointing to the tip of my thumb corresponds to the shape A on the paper, and so on. Then I am given the separate letters of the alphabet on paper and I organise them myself into words, arranging them side by side to spell cup, key, apple. I put the words together to make sentences: water in cup, apple on table, key in door. I use the letters to make more words, the ones that are not objects you can hold or actions you can show, the useful words that hold language together: the, is, as, it, her and all the rest. I make long sentences. Lottie and Father read them and pat me on my head to show their approval.

One morning I ask Lottie, ‘Is it only you and Father who can read?’

‘No. Many people can read.’

‘Can Mother read?’

‘Yes.’

I get straight to work. I arrange my letters with great care. They stretch across the table in the dining room, which has become our schoolroom. Lottie wants to help, but I tell her not to look. It is private.

‘Will Mother come down here?’ I ask Lottie.

‘I don’t think so.’

So she helps me paste it on a sheet of paper. We collect a selection of spare letters and put them in an envelope. We have to wait until lunchtime to see Mother. I go in and take her hand as always. I give her the paper and the envelope. I wait while she reads. It says: ‘Mother. Please talk to me. I love you.’

I wait. At first, there is no movement. I wonder if she is sleeping. Then I feel the bed shaking. I reach out and find her hand is wet. She raises mine to her cheeks and there are tears flowing down her face on to my hand. She takes my face in her hands and holds it there. She is looking at me. I smile and nod my head, to show her all is well. She takes me in her arms and holds me so tightly. I am nearly eight years old and it is my first hug with Mother. I cry also and we hold each other for a long time. When we have recovered ourselves, she takes the envelope and places letters on the bed. It is soft and bumpy, not ideal for messages, but I take each letter and feel it, reading slowly. She has written one word only: ‘Sorry.’

The next day I am allowed to see Mother for longer. We bring the envelope and a tea tray on her lap on which to place them. I begin. It is a question I have wanted to ask for a long time.

‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why not finger spell?’

‘Ill.’

‘Where are you ill?’

‘Body. Mind.’

‘When will you be well?’

‘Better today.’

‘Why?’

‘You.’

Our first conversation. It is laborious, finding the correct paper letters, placing them on the tray only to find they slip and slide; and for speed’s sake we are forced to form simplistic sentences which frustrate my meaning. After, I tell Lottie that the paper letters are driving me to distraction. They are flimsy and crumpled, getting greasy and dog-eared from constant use. She tells me a printer in Maidstone made them, an expert in embossed paper. But Father is working on something much better. I must be patient. Soon, it comes. Father has constructed metal types for the alphabet and a wooden board with holes, where the alphabet blocks are slotted and can be removed to rearrange and spell out words. I am delighted and spend hours a day making sentences. I have to be dragged away for exercise and other lessons.

Lottie brings me books. I open one and find the pages are full of raised letters. I can read whole sentences without having to make them myself. I remember in the Time Before trying to destroy Father’s books through ignorance and want. Now I can go away from Father and Lottie and sit on my bed; I have my own books, books I can read alone, without any help from another, without any explanation or filter from those who love me. I read of the alphabet, numbers and animals, picnics, jungles and the stars. I demand more and am given fairy tales, intrepid adventures, caves full of treasure, a child’s Bible. I dote on my books and hug them to me in bed, discarding dolls for a time. They are my new friends. I want more, yet I am told there are few books in raised letters and by now I have most of those from the catalogue. Yet still I yearn for more. Then I learn a new way of reading, no raised letters, instead bumps in patterns that stand for letters. Lottie and I learn the bumps and I spend hours applying them to new books Father has found for me. The patterns have a special name: Braille. Lottie explains that the blind use Braille to read quickly, that it was important for me to know the alphabet first, for I will use it in another way one day. Yet Braille will help my reading take off and there are far more books published in this way. Once learned, it is much swifter than reading the embossed alphabet and soon I am flying through longer and longer books.

One day Father brings me a special gift, a particular book he likes. I sit and begin the first sentence:
Marley was dead: to begin with.
I read
A Christmas Carol
by Mr Charles Dickens. I never knew there were voices like this. I never imagined life jostling with other minds and bodies, all going their own ways in their own lives with their own stories to enact till their own deaths take them and they are remembered in the minds of others always and for ever. The act of feeling the bumps on paper transports me from my confinement in a way not even a conversation can. Only now do I understand why Father sits so long with a book in his hand. He is a time-traveller. And now, so am I. There is one curious thing: as I read, I am not disturbed once by the Visitors. It is as if there is no room in my mind for them, as it is filled with the book. It is a relief. I love my Visitors and talk with them often. But their absence is a release. I read my book in a day.

I have many questions about the book. I ask Father first: ‘Are ghosts real?’

‘No, I believe not.’

‘But Mr Dickens writes of them.’

‘It is a story and one can write whatever one pleases in a story.’

‘Is this not a lie?’

‘Stories are not lies. They imagine a thing to be true, to entertain us.’

‘Can Mr Dickens see me?’

‘Of course not!’

‘But he talks to me as I read his book and I think he knows me. He can see me when I do wrong.’

‘No, Adeliza. That is God.’

I am not satisfied. I ask Lottie: ‘There are ghosts in this book. Father says they are not real.’

‘Some people believe they are.’

‘Do you?’

‘I do not know for sure. Perhaps.’

‘Did God make ghosts?’

‘I do not think so.’

‘But God made everything.’

‘Some people think that.’

‘And you?’

‘Your Father would not want me to talk to you about this.’

‘Father is not here.’

But Lottie will not explain further and I cannot persuade her. She says instead she has a present for me. I hold it and know it. It is a pen. The sighted use it for writing, as I use my metal type. Not for me. But she shows me how to hold it and places a piece of paper beneath my pen and tells me to make my mark. I scratch a wild stroke then touch it. I can feel the wet ink, quickly drying on my skin and the paper. Now I understand why I needed to know the letters of the alphabet, for now I will form them with my own hand.

‘But I cannot read it.’

‘No, but others can. And you will be able to write to them. Write letters and put them in the post. And your letters will be taken in coaches to other people who can read them hundreds of miles away. And they will read what you have written.’

‘But I do not know anyone who lives far away, except your family. And they do not know me.’

‘Learn to write then and you can write them a letter, introducing yourself.’

‘I cannot write to old people. I am shy of them.’

‘Write to my brother Caleb, then. He would like that.’

In winter, the smell of burning hop bines drifts through the air to my table as I labour over my writing. In the New Year I forgo my annual activity of helping make the first hole for the hop poles so that I can practise my letters. It takes months to write each letter of the alphabet distinctly and to separate words from each other. By March, the stilt walkers are stringing up the new coir twine to the overhead wires for the hop bines to grow up, and I am learning punctuation. In May, the farmhands thread the bines around the strings, training them to grow clockwise. They pinch out the pipey bines that promise long stems but no fruit. I can now write legibly enough for others to decipher. It is hard and long and daily work, doubly difficult as I cannot check my own writing and see my errors. But I persevere. I think about my finger spelling, my first language. Though we think of it as talking, I realise that I have been writing all this time, that my flat hand is the paper and my finger is the pen. Using ink is merely the next step, to make it conveyable. The growing season is well under way, my father’s workers busy protecting our cherished harvest. They place ladybirds on the leaves to eat the flies and stop the hop-blight. Later they trundle the crop washer down the alleys, spraying soft soap to kill pests. Meanwhile, I complete my first unaided letter, which reads thus:

It may not seem much, but it is a great leap for a ten-year-old deaf-blind girl whose first six years were lived in the land of the dead. My wooden board with the metal type becomes only a toy for filling a spare moment, gathers dust, then is put away. Mother has learned to finger spell. She comes downstairs and even takes short walks with me, my arm linked with hers, my hand stroking the material of her leg-of-mutton sleeves. As we walk, I say to her with my other hand, ‘What do you see?’ and she describes things to me. She has a particular way of speaking, a turn of phrase I like, a way of stating the heart of things. She still sleeps every afternoon. I am told she will always be weak. But I have my mother now. And Father and Lottie. I have my hands to talk, my books to read and my pen to write my thoughts. Now I am a person.