The Visitors (71 page)

‘And I’ll need a studio,’ Clare interrupted. ‘Don’t forget that, Nicola. Doesn’t have to be big. But I must have large windows. North light.’

Along the length of the table, in the flicker of the fire- and candlelight, Nicola’s eyes met mine and held them. We had had our quarrels over the years, but none of the sometimes bitter words that had passed between us had broken the strong thread that bound us: she could still read my mind, as she always had. Rising from her chair, as my father and Clair began to elaborate on their respective needs, she came quietly to my side and, taking me by the hand, drew me into the silence of the sitting room. Closing the door, she leaned against it. I could see she’d begun to tremble – that disability she had never conquered and could never entirely hide. She was very pale and still very dear to me.

‘And you?’ she said, with a half-smile. ‘Do you also have a list of requirements, Lucy? Did you think I’d forgotten you? Well, I haven’t.
They
don’t know yet,’ she gave a dismissive gesture towards the dining room, ‘but I’ve already found the perfect place for us. I went straight to the agents, when I came off the train from Dover. It was only the third property I viewed, but I knew it was for us as soon as I saw it. In Bloomsbury, a large flat, and it has the perfect room for you. It’s next to my own, Lucy, with a view over the square. The instant I walked in, I knew you’d love it…

‘It’s on the first floor, Lucy
.
’ Faint colour had risen in her cheeks and the trembling in her hands was increasing.
‘Four bedrooms, three wonderful reception rooms.
High ceilings, abundant light –
calm
light, like a Vermeer painting. And in
your
room, the one that will be yours, space for your books… and your mother’s paintings. You could unpack some of her things if you wish.
I know you will like it. You’ll be able to work there in peace, Lucy – take off on your travels if you must, though I hope your strange need to travel may pass once we’re settled. Clair wouldn’t bother us – there’s a studio for her, in the mews at the end of the garden. You know how she works! We’d scarcely see her. You and I would be together again, Lucy. We could explore London together, the way we did Paris – do you remember that? I know you remember
that.
’ She faltered briefly. I think my expression made her falter. ‘It’s close to the Museum, Lucy – a stone’s throw. We could visit it together, talk about Egypt and Greece as we used to do… ’

She left the sentence unfinished. I think that she did believe in this future she was conjuring up for me – that it was one she’d imagined, dwelled on and planned minutely. I could feel the force of her will, as always, pliant and python-strong, patient and relentless. It would have been so easy to give in to that will, to be embraced by its coils as I’d been before. Yes, I remembered Paris. I remembered coming under Nicola’s spell there, and how that spell had held me in thrall throughout the remainder of my childhood. I had escaped once. If I went to Bloomsbury, if I returned to her now, I would not escape a second time.

‘Is it Clair?’ Nicola said, with sudden sharpness. She took a step towards me. ‘If it is, just say. I’ll tell her to leave – she can find somewhere else to live. I know you dislike her. Lucy, dear, please tell me if it’s that.’

She laid her long-fingered hand on my arm. I gently released it.

‘No, it’s not that,’ I said, turning away from her.

I knew it would be useless to raise that objection, or any other; useless to prevaricate or argue. Sooner or later, by stealth, guile and loving persistence, she would wear down my resistance. Putting distance between us was the only way I knew of evading the insistent need she had to have me near her and under her sway. I hesitated and then, seizing on the one reason even she could not overcome, I said: ‘Nicola, I can’t. It’s not possible. I’m getting married.’

I thought I’d kept no photographs of my first husband – the marriage itself and its subsequent dissolution were not as painless as people assumed; at some point, around the decree nisi
,
I think, I went through the albums and destroyed them. But I must have missed one picture – and I examined it the other morning, sitting in my chair overlooking Highgate’s square. It had been taken by a
safragi
at the Winter Palace Hotel where, as I’ve mentioned, I spent my honeymoon. Egypt was my suggestion, quickly endorsed.

‘I’d like to show you the places I love,’ I said. ‘But if you’d rather go somewhere else, Eddie, just say. Wherever you’d like. Truly. You choose.’

Eddie was low on funds, a bit short of the readies. I was paying, and so made the suggestion timidly. I didn’t want him to feel coerced or – worse – obligated. The low state of his finances was, he said, a bagatelle, a purely temporary embarrassment.

‘Darling girl. Egypt it shall be. I had thought, maybe Capri… But I’ve been there so often and it’s perhaps a little–– No. The Orient it shall be. Don’t let’s dwell
too
long at the pyramids perhaps, I feel they could pall. But Luxor does tempt me. Flaubert went there, you know, and a wild time he had of it, a wicked
surfeit
of prostitutes. Can we really Ritz it up, darling? Can we afford the Winter Palace?’

I couldn’t – not really. But Eddie liked luxury and I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I flogged one of my mother’s pieces of jewellery – that stock was diminishing – and off we went. The photograph I was inspecting had been taken halfway through our stay at the Winter Palace, at the end of our first week there. February 1936: it was three months since Frances had died.

We are standing on the terrace, above the Nile. I am twenty-five, wearing sunglasses and a hat with a wide brim, which protect me from the sun and completely hide my face: this thin stranger could be me, could be anyone. This person has averted her gaze. She is looking away from the camera, across the river. Her dark glasses are fixed upon the Theban hills in the distance.
And the word for horizon is? Akhet.

Eddie, thirty-five, hatless, in shirtsleeves, his thick hair tossed back, one arm carelessly thrown around my shoulders and the other around the shoulders of the Arab boy he’d hired as our guide, is smiling straight at the lens, as if daring it to take a bad picture of him. No camera ever did. Eddie was, from every angle, handsome and startlingly so. He embodied that era’s masculine ideal of beauty: tall, athletic, golden-haired, blue-eyed, frank-faced; a Grecian nose, a witty mouth:
sui generis –
bohemian in his dress, but no doubt as to caste: unmistakably an English gentleman.

I inspected the photograph minutely.
Read, Lucy, learn to read
: an injunction that applies to images as well as words. By the time this picture was taken, even I was beginning to understand that, less than a month in, this marriage had problems. I couldn’t understand why. Yet there the evidence is, in front of my eyes, in a snapshot.

How slow can you be? I tore it into tiny scraps, into confetti.

36

On our return from our Egyptian honeymoon, Eddie and I had to live somewhere; this necessity was one he had overlooked. His inclination was to continue overlooking it for as long as possible. He’d been of No Fixed Abode prior to our marriage, he liked to say – this meant that he stayed with a succession of rich friends until such a time as they chucked him out. He intended to continue this mode of life for the foreseeable future; why should marriage alter anything?

We spent March in his parents’ chilly and monstrous house in Shropshire. We spent April at a friend’s mansion in Kensington, and May in a palatial villa his cousin owned in the South of France. In June, his luck ran out: a writer he knew grudgingly lent us the keys to a grim little cottage in the middle of Bodmin Moor. It had no running water, but we only discovered that on arrival.

‘
Moors
,’ Eddie said, our first night. His tone was reflective; glass in hand, he was staring out at the blackened wilderness that surrounded us. ‘Moors. There’s your next book, darling girl. You must start it the
instant
you finish
Islands
.’

A week later I took the train to London and began house-hunting.

The cottage I subsequently bought was off the King’s Road, in what was then a poor part of Chelsea. I was staying with Rose and Peter while I made the search and, as it happened, it was Peter who heard of the place, and he who first took me there. It belonged to one of his fellow activists – Peter was caught up in left-wing politics, in anti-fascist demonstrations at that point. I never discovered if the owner was a Communist or an Anarchist – indeed, I never
met
the owner, a comrade of Peter’s who had had to leave England hurriedly.

‘It’s going cheap,’ Peter said.

‘It has definite
potential
, Lucy,’ said Rose, in a faint tone, when called upon to inspect it.

Rose, who had escaped unscathed from the marriage market of her debutante years, was now a top-flight secretary, working at the Ministry of Defence, much loved by visiting generals, who remembered her mother Poppy with great fondness. As she’d said to me all those years before, she was a
whizz
at organising; she organised field marshals on a daily basis, so organising a house move was nothing. ‘Yes, definite
possibilities
,’ she went on, marching from room to room, inspecting the dry rot assiduously. ‘It will need
work
, of course.’

‘It suits you, Lulu,’ Peter pronounced, having persuaded the doors to unstick, the windows to open and the taps to work. He leaned back against the cottage’s distempered walls and surveyed me narrowly.

‘But will it suit Eddie?’ Rose asked – at that point, neither she nor her brother had met my husband.

‘Only Lucy can judge that,’ Peter said. ‘How would we know? She’s hiding the husband away. Full fathom five her husband lies… She’s gone to extreme lengths to prevent our meeting him.’

I ignored that. I considered the cottage. I could afford it – an important point, for marriage seemed to have dented my funds severely. It was pretty, if primitive. Its brick façade was whitewashed; a rose had been trained around its front door; to the rear, beyond a damp scullery, there was a small yard, occupied by a tortoiseshell tom-cat. I felt plants could be persuaded to grow in that yard – I imagined it swathed in honeysuckle, as the courtyard had been at Nuthanger… I dislike indecision. I bought it.

Verdicts on this purchase varied. Nicola, driving over from Bloomsbury, where she and Clair were by then magnificently installed in the flat she’d described to me, said the cottage was a slum. I’d been expecting that; I knew she’d be determined to find fault. I was still not forgiven for my marriage, nor for refusing to join her in Bloomsbury. Showing me around that apartment of hers, she’d thrown back the dividing doors that separated her room from Clair’s. ‘This could have been yours, Lucy,’ she’d said to me.

She inspected the cottage minutely. I knew one of her black moods was upon her before she was in the door; by the time her inspection was complete, her hands had begun trembling. She proclaimed it a nasty artisan’s house, in an unfashionable area. My neighbours would be plumbers and bricklayers. And it was so
small
, so confining, so tomb-like… Why, you couldn’t swing a cat in it.

Clair gave her a reproachful push when she made that remark. Had I not known her as I did, I might have thought she felt sorry for me. ‘Don’t be such a fucking snob, Nicola,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with you today?’

She made a face behind Nicola’s back and told me the cottage had atmosphere – and the area was fun; half her Slade friends lived around the corner. Eddie was finally persuaded to inspect it that September; it was the day before we were due to move in. By then, I’d worked on the place, worked on it for weeks, cleaned it from top to bottom, painted it, even furnished it. I’d made curtains, found chairs and bookshelves. I rescued some of my mother’s paintings from store and hung them. I placed the
shabti
Frances had given me in pride of place on the mantelpiece. Peter had found me an old scrubbed pine table in a clever junk shop he knew, and I’d laid it in readiness for our first dinner with plates and wineglasses and napkins and flowers.

‘Darling girl, you
have
been busy,’ Eddie said, having roamed from room to room, and come to a halt in the kitchen by the table.

He could see I was keyed up, and he liked to tease; he finally confessed he was a
little
disappointed. What he’d really been hoping for, he said, was something more, well, Pooter-ish. ‘A red-brick villa,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘A nice squat villa, with “Mon Repos” in stained glass over the front door…
that
’s what I expect from a marital home, Lucy.’ Eddie found such phrases amusing, so ‘marital home’ became the cottage’s title. It was the ‘marital nest’ when he really got going.

A few weeks later, Eddie, restless and unsettled, said the cottage didn’t feel
right
: he needed to set his seal on it, he needed to baptise it, and the way to effect this baptism was simple: we must give a party. I vetoed that suggestion; I knew Eddie’s parties by then, and I didn’t intend the cottage to get wrecked this early. I proposed a dinner instead – a small one, an intimate one, where people could actually
talk
to each other. My friends Rose and Peter still had not met my husband, I pointed out; and it was they who had helped find the cottage.

‘If it wasn’t for them,’ I said, ‘we wouldn’t be here.’

‘How very true,’ said Eddie.

The dinner was organised for the first week of October. Rose attended, but Peter did not: he had been arrested the previous day at the ‘They Shall Not Pass’ demonstration in Cable Street, fighting a pitched battle against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, and was now in jail.

Rose and I bailed him on that occasion – and a second dinner was arranged. Again, Peter did not attend. It was December by then; our first Christmas in the cottage was approaching. ‘Where’s Peter?’ I said to Rose, opening the door to her.