The Visitors (33 page)

‘Impossible. Out of the question. Responsible for Lucy for the whole of September? Delightful as that prospect might be, I’ll have work to do. My sabbatical is coming up.’

‘Precisely my own view,’ she said, in unruffled tones. ‘Which is why I suggest I accept this invitation. For those four weeks, Lucy would then be safely in Hampshire. That seems convenient for everyone, Dr Payne. It kills several birds with one stone. Shall I write this evening and accept? I dislike arrangements to remain unsettled, if you recall.’

‘I don’t
recall
any of this,’ my father burst out, suddenly enraged.
Now we’re in for it
, I thought, inching backwards from his wrath while Miss Dunsire coolly held her ground. ‘Reading party? What damned reading party? Who’s attending this reading party? That so-called poet you invited to lunch today, I suppose? Dear God, imagine it, listening to
him
prosing on for an entire month. I never met such a blasted poseur in my life, preposterous hair, affected manners, opinions about everything under the sun, a damned insinuating manner too – who in hell does that young man think he is?’

‘Rupert Brooke?’ Miss Dunsire sighed. ‘There
is
a Brookeian epidemic
in Cambridge, and the disease is very infectious; that iconoclastic tone could well be a symptom. I so agree with you, Dr Payne, he’s a pest – and a bore. I invited him today at the last minute to make up the numbers and regretted it the second he arrived. And he won’t be in France, I can assure you of that! It’s
strictly
a women-only reading party. Which I much prefer.’

She paused, and then in an altered tone went on: ‘Ah, this is all my fault! I blame myself. I should have reminded you again – you have so much on your mind! But I did inform you, Dr Payne – shall I fetch your desk diary? I can show you the entry I made.’

‘No, no – no need for that.’ My father hesitated, looking down at Miss Dunsire’s face. Her expression was now penitent; his temper seemed on the mend. ‘I know how efficient you are, Miss Dunsire. And I didn’t mean to suggest – of course you are entitled to your holiday. A reading party in the Loire… delightful! A very beautiful part of France, too. A “crowd” of you going, I think you said? Your friends from Girton, I expect?’

‘Indeed. We remain very close. What’s the collective term for us bluestockings? A covey of bluestockings… a chattering, a charm, a cabal?’ She smiled demurely, and my father, who liked wordplay, smiled in return. ‘My friend Dorothy whom you met today will be there and her sister Edith. Evadne and Winifred, Meta of course – and my very dear friend Clair, who shared supervisions with me. There will be twelve of us, I think, perhaps thirteen… I’m looking forward to it
immensely.
’ She lowered her eyes.

‘Excellent, excellent.’ My father seemed to find this chaste roll-call reassuring. ‘You will be missed here, I hardly need say. I shall be looking forward to your return, as will Lucy. Very good. Fine. The whole of September… that’s settled then. Oh, and accept that invitation from Lady Evelyn, if you’d be so good. Now I really must go.’ With that, he set off across the garden, humming to himself, his spirits restored.

Miss Dunsire and I watched him depart. The heat of the day was diminishing now, and in the cooling air the scents of the flowers intensified. Silence fell. I kept my eyes on the garden; I gazed at the roses pinned to wires on its high walls:
Edith Cavell, Lady Hillingdon, Grace Darling
,
Mrs Herbert Stevens
. My mother had planted them; I’d never noticed that all our roses were named for women. I examined them studiously. Well trained and tied in, branches expertly crucified to maximise flowering: displaying an abundance of blooms.

‘Are you going to thank me, Lucy?’ Miss Dunsire spoke so suddenly she made me start. ‘You don’t like me,’ she went on. ‘You make that abundantly clear. But be honest and admit it: it was
I
who won you a month with your friends. Shall I tell you why I did that? Please do not imagine I was motivated by compassion or sympathy. No – I did it
because I could.
’

This was true, I realised. I didn’t doubt it for one second. After a pause, I said in an obstinate way: ‘That was the main reason, perhaps. It wasn’t the only one, though.’

‘Well, well, well.
Not
such a simpleton, after all. But then I never made the mistake of thinking you were.’ She gave me a long glittering look. ‘Sharp. Quick. A subtle child. You repay teaching, I see. Come with me.’

Catching me by the hand, she began to walk back to the house at a swift pace, coming to a halt in the cool shadows of the hall. ‘One of my migraines is coming on,’ she said. ‘I shall go and lie down. But there’s something I need to do first – come in here.’

She threw back the door to my father’s study – the Holy of Holies; infrequently used, since he preferred to work in college, it remained sacrosanct. It was a place I revered, feared and rarely entered. I hesitated, then with reluctance followed her inside. I saw to my surprise that the
shabti
figure I’d given him, a present he’d rejected as more loathsome than a scarab, had been retrieved and reinstated; it now stood on his desk.

‘
I
rescued it, Lucy.’ Miss Dunsire followed my gaze. ‘I persuaded him of its virtues. It isn’t genuine, I’d say, though I have no expertise in such matters. Ah, I’m right, I can see it in your eyes.’ She looked at me curiously. ‘How can you tell it’s a fake?’

‘You need to look at lots of them, and you have to know
how
to look,’ I replied. I couldn’t understand why she had brought me in here, especially now. She was leaning across the desk and had picked up the
shabti
figure. ‘Go on, Lucy,’ she said. ‘I want to know.’

‘Mr Carter, that archaeologist I met,’ I began, cautiously, ‘he said the best way to tell if an object was genuine was to look at it every single day. By the end of a week or a month, the quality of the genuine object would become obvious. It would – sing out. Whereas the coarseness of the fake would gradually reveal itself. Its flaws would become evident… That’s what
he
said, anyway.’

‘A useful technique. I’d always thought I could spot a fake at forty yards. Maybe I have something to learn.’ She frowned. ‘I read up on these
shabti
figures. Their name – it means
answerer
, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. That’s what they are – answerers. In the afterlife, when a king needs them, he only has to call out, and there they are, ready to do his bidding, answering all his needs.’

‘Every man’s dream. The perfect present for your father. Now – where’s that diary of his?’

She began to move the books on my father’s desk back and forth. Having found the diary, she flicked through the pages, plucked up my father’s fountain pen and unscrewed its cap: ‘September. You’ll observe those pages are blank. Astonishing! I could have sworn
I entered my holiday dates. I must have dreamed it. Still, that’s easily rectified.’

In her neat italic script, she made the requisite entries, blotted them, closed the book, replaced the pen, and turned to face me. She leaned against the desk and gave me a challenging stare. Her hands were trembling. ‘Tell him if you like,’ she said. ‘I really don’t care.’

‘So you lied,’ I said, after a pause. ‘Were you lying about the reading party as well?’

‘Maybe. It’s happening. I may go. I may not. It depends on my mood.’

‘Why did you lie?’

‘Who knows? You were being bullied and tricked. I disliked that.’ She shrugged. ‘If I could have spited him and pulled Maine out of the hat for you, I would have done. But he’d already written, and besides, think of the expense! He could afford it – just as he can afford to travel to Greece and Italy this summer for his all-important
work.
But his tendencies are economical.
Tight
, as we say in Scotland – does your father have any Scottish blood in his veins, Lucy? No, no, he may have the Scotsman’s reluctance to part with money, he fits that stereotype – but his blood is of the thin, blue, English sort.’

Her voice had risen, and the taunt in it was obvious. For the first time – how slow I’d been – I realised her dislike of my father was intense. I could see contempt, even loathing in her eyes. ‘You shouldn’t say that,’ I began haltingly. ‘Not about Daddy. Not to me. Not ever. It’s not right.’

‘No, it isn’t. You’re correct. Disrespectful. Disloyal. I apologise. I told you, I have a migraine. The light hurts my eyes. When that happens, I’m not myself. I say things I later regret.’

At that, she gave a curious gasp and pressed her hand against her face. I couldn’t tell if she was in sudden pain, or strangely excited, or both. Her breath was coming fast, and the dark pupils of her eyes were dilated; her hands were now trembling violently – and, as I stared at her, this infirmity seemed to increase, passing up her arms and into her body until she was visibly shaking. For a moment I feared she might be about to collapse, perhaps suffer some fit.

I was unsure what to do. Into my head rushed a comment Dr Gerhardt had made some weeks before, when I went for my last lesson with him: ‘I shall miss you, my dear – but Miss Dunsire is more than competent. Her German is good and her French is very pure. My sister Helga taught her at Girton, you know – she was sorry to hear of her illness, as I was. Most distressing. We’re delighted to learn she’s made a full recovery.’

No mention of this illness had been made by anyone else. I’d assumed it was minor; now I felt less sure. I took a step forwards, but before I could reach her Miss Dunsire regained physical control. She had been gripping the edge of the desk so tightly that her knuckles stood out white; now, she pushed herself free of it and stood upright.

‘I shall go and lie down,’ she said. ‘But I must be sure of one thing first. I taught you a lesson this afternoon, Lucy – do you know what that lesson was?’ Snatching at me, she grasped my wrist painfully tight and said in a low, angry, voice: ‘I taught you power, Lucy. I taught you
how to get what you want
. If you prefer not to go through this life getting trampled underfoot; if you wish to avoid being thwarted at every turn; if you wish to prevent your deepest desires being ridiculed or dismissed – then
learn
from it.’

She walked out. I lingered, then followed her. As I reached the hall, she was already on the stairs; she had come to a halt five steps up and was leaning against the banister, head bent. Looking up at her, fearful she might faint, I realised there was a spreading stain – scarlet bloodstains on the back of her white skirt. They had not been there earlier. I stared at her, dismayed and shocked. Could she have somehow cut herself, and wiped her hand? The stain seemed too large for that… So she
is
ill, I thought. Could she be bleeding? Could she be
haemorrhaging
? I knew the word for this condition, but not its causes nor its cure. I knew it could be fatal; it had once happened to Mrs Grimshaw, and she had given a vivid, vague, and horrible account of it. It had mysteriously prevented her from increasing her family of six children, and she had ‘bled like a stuck pig’. Miss Mack, deep in the subject of nursing and Gallipoli wounds, had also described the phenomenon, so I knew it could affect men as well as women. But surely Miss Dunsire couldn’t be wounded? And if she wasn’t injured, why would she bleed?

‘Miss Dunsire, are you ill? May I help you?’ I called.

She had begun to climb the stairs again. She did not look back or reply. I heard her steps pass along the landing to her room on the first floor; its door slammed behind her, and its key turned in the lock.

I mooned about the house for a while after that, anxious and at a loose end. I tidied away the party things and washed them up. Several wasps had drowned in the sweet leftover strawberry mush; I tipped it and their stripy corpses into a flower bed. I thought of the cruel expertise with which Miss Dunsire had boxed me in: if I told my father the truth, I’d not only be telling tales, a despicable act, I’d also be ensuring my visit to Rose and Peter was cancelled forthwith. Was there a way out of this moral maze she’d constructed? I couldn’t see one: damned either way; guilty if I spoke out, guilty if I did not. But nothing would make me sacrifice the visit to Rose and Peter, so there was no point in agonising; I’d keep my mouth shut.

I tried to untangle the many mysteries of the day, the lunch party, the ill assemblage of guests, the fact that three of the dons invited had refused, and the two married dons who
did
honour us with their presence had turned up without their wives, each of whom sent a curt, last-minute and inadequate excuse. I thought of Dr Gerhardt, who had loyally attended and brought his sister Helga with him; of the way in which Helga had praised the food; of how they’d both tried to prevent the flickering antagonisms at the table from flaring up into confrontation – peace-making overtures that met with little success.

I couldn’t understand why Nicola Dunsire, clever in so many ways, could also be reckless and obtuse. Why propose the party, when my father detested such gatherings? Why, knowing my father’s dislike of women in general and opinionated women in particular, had she invited no less than three of her Girtonian friends? It was bound to cause trouble and duly did. Dorothy Lascelles –
Just call me Dotty, Dr Payne, everyone does –
was now training to be a doctor at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital in London. A cheerful forthright woman who described dissections across the lunch table, she had bristled when my father, seconded by the two dons, insisted that medicine was not, never could be, a woman’s profession. ‘That’s just guff,’ she’d said. ‘I’m sick of that refrain, Dr Payne. Tell that to the women I treat, the women from the King’s Cross slums, in labour with their tenth child. Frankly, they’d laugh in your face.’

My father expected to be spared contradictions at his own table, as he was swift to point out. The warning went unheeded; the second of Miss Dunsire’s friends, a scornful classicist called Meta, now reading for her doctorate, dared to dispute his translation of some Homeric epithet. She did so between the iced soup and the
chaud-froid
; over the salmon in aspic, she moved on smartly to the sacred ground of Euripides. ‘I can’t agree with you there, Dr Payne,’ she said in her sharp voice. ‘You’re entirely missing the point. In his
Hippolytus
, the warring forces central to the play – a woman’s violent sexual desire versus a man’s prudish chastity – are present on stage throughout in the persons of Aphrodite and Artemis. Do you
understand
the effect of that device?’