The Visitors (73 page)

‘I might have,’ I answered. ‘But I didn’t.’

My departure from the marital nest gave Nicola new hope. I saw it flash in her eyes when, after delaying for several months, I finally confessed it.

‘At
last
,’ she said. ‘I knew it was only a matter of time. You can move in here, Lucy.’ She was already rising; she had coloured and her hands had begun trembling. ‘I can get a room ready for you in an instant. The one at the back, with a view of the garden. If we move a desk in there, Lucy – I can have some bookshelves put up––’

I knew I had to stop her and stop her fast, so I did. I told her that I already had somewhere to live – and this was true. A friend of a friend had sub-let me a room in World’s End, at the far, far end of the King’s Road. The district’s name had a certain ring. It wasn’t a bad room. I could write in it. I could finish
Islands
there. The place was cheap – and that was useful; as I was beginning to learn, it might be quick and easy to leave the marital home, but to unravel a marriage, to dissolve it, was in many ways expensive.

‘Something died in me when you refused,’ Nicola would claim. ‘Up until then – when I realised you’d choose some hideous little room in the back of beyond rather than come here, where you’d have everything you need, rent free, where I’d be there to help you – I could have typed your manuscripts for you, made sure you
ate…
Up until then, I hoped.

‘I did
warn you,’ she’d say. ‘I warned you again and again. To my dying day, I shall never understand why you married that man. You never loved him. You knew he was profligate. You knew he drank.’

And then Clair would interject, giving her gloss on this mysterious action. Weeks passed, during which time the topic was scrutinised with vigour when I was present and, I suspect, with venom when I was not, until finally Clair hit on her solution to this conundrum.‘Some women can’t resist pansies,’ she pronounced, one fine spring evening. Three months down the road to divorce, an inevitable war inching closer, lilacs in bloom in the square outside. I could hear children playing in its gardens; joyful cries and laughter drifted in through the open windows. ‘Some women are drawn to queers. Maybe Lucy thought she’d convert him.
Is
that what you thought? Didn’t you realise, once a queer always a queer? Trust me: I do
know
. It’s in the bones. It’s not some creed you pick up then cast aside, you know, sweetheart.’

Across the room, Nicola swung around, white-faced. She said: ‘Clair. Stop this.’

‘Wrong on all counts,’ I said, moving towards the door. ‘Both of you. I’m going.’

I always went back, though – I continued to visit Nicola, since she refused to visit me. I was drawn to her by a continuing need and anxiety. Attuned to her moods as I’d always been, I could see that her fretfulness and her restlessness were deepening. Part of me still yearned for the closeness that had once existed between us, the intensity of understanding we’d shared when I was still a child, and malleable. On the rare occasions when guardian Clair was absent, I would sometimes try to reach out to Nicola – to discover who she was now, what she felt and thought; but those attempts always met with failure, with cold glances and a change of subject. Thinking my own reticence was to blame, I’d sometimes try to tell her where I’d been and what I’d done – who I
was
. Nothing I said could ever hold her interest for long, and sometimes, as she frowned into the middle distance, I could see she was not even listening, but was brooding over some other matter she would not disclose, some unspoken grievance.

Clair also observed this brooding abstraction, and when she joined us I’d watch her efforts to break through Nicola’s inward dreamings. Sometimes she’d try to divert her by bringing the realities of the outside world into this quiet drawing room. She’d speak of incipient war, rant about the blindness of politicians – with good reason at that date, of course. When such remarks drew no response, she would switch tack. She’d begin to hymn the praises of London. ‘Dear Christ – how did we put up with Cambridge all those years, Nicola?’ she’d say. ‘It was like being buried alive living there, stuck out in the Fens, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think. Those petty, fluting dons. Always so cold and damp. If we’d had to stay there one month longer, I swear I’d have topped myself. It was like being
reborn
when we came here.’

That claim was true in her case, I thought, on one of the evenings when she made that or a very similar remark; conversations here, as I’d begun to see, took predictable routes. They went around and around, always returning to the same fixed points; sometimes I too ceased to listen. That evening, as Clair spoke of being ‘reborn’, I dragged my mind back to the room and looked at the two women, one silent and abstracted, one excited. Clair was in the midst of a ‘golden interval’, as she described it; she was working more intensely than ever and her painting had moved in a new, joyous direction.

Nicola did not dissent from Clair’s claims to magical metropolitan rebirth, but as I met her eyes across her drawing room in the fading light that evening, her discontent was very evident. It was autumn by then, the autumn of 1938. Over the past spring and summer, her restlessness had increased; she’d taken up a series of projects and abandoned them one by one: piano lessons, singing lessons, even – briefly and painfully – painting lessons. She had tried her hand at a little journalism; she’d tried private coaching, French lessons – her French was very pure, she’d reminded us. She had given that up too – her pupils were dullards.

‘Oh,
Cambridge
,’ she said, ‘don’t remind me of that, Clair.’ Then she gave me the news: my father had telephoned that morning to inform her he had hired a new secretary – a role Nicola herself had clung to, then gradually relinquished after moving to London. His Aeschylus book, six years in gestation, was finally completed. It required typing.

‘Some dowdy graduate,’ Nicola said. ‘He claims he needs someone who’s at his immediate beck and call. Ridiculous! He could perfectly well have sent
me
the manuscript. Now he’s hired some child. I told him: this girl may be able to type
and take dictation, Robert
–
any fool can do that.
I
did so much more – half the ideas in his Euripides book came from me, Lucy.’

All that power and energy, I thought, as I sat in silence listening to her: all that intelligence, all that edgy, unpredictable sensitivity – it was still there, balled up inside her, tight as a clenched fist, yet she could not find a use for it. In mid-sentence, I met her gaze. For once, I was too quick for her; before she could assume the mask of her customary serenity, I looked into Nicola’s eyes and saw fury.

At once, she attempted to disguise it. ‘Heavens, how dark it’s getting.’ She rose and lit one of the table lamps. She shivered. ‘And it’s getting cold too. Close the windows, Clair. It will be winter before we know it. This room is impossible, Lucy
.
Oh,
why
did
I choose a flat with such huge windows? It’s always too hot or too cold. And the traffic noise is insufferable. It makes my head ache.’

I rose to leave. Time to escape. Clair closed the windows, then slumped in her chair. We could both recognise the symptoms, we’d both heard the suppressed irritation, the angry lilt of familiar complaints. Another fifteen minutes and Clair would raise the subject of last resort, the one that never failed to revive Nicola: my marriage; my failure, nine months on, to push the divorce through. They could chew
that
over till doomsday.

‘What do the lawyers say?’ Nicola demanded, whenever the divorce came up. ‘I
told
you it was a major error to leave the marital home. To compound your idiocy, you’ve given him the house. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Surely the lawyers can retrieve something? Why is it dragging on in this interminable way? Cut the Gordian knot, Lucy.’

I would make some evasive reply. The divorce had stalled. During the past summer, things had, for a while, looked promising: Eddie had agreed to take the then-customary, the approved, the gentlemanly route. He would hire a woman, take her to some seaside resort and there, by pre-arrangement, be discovered in compromising circumstances by private detectives. Umpteen firms offered this useful service. ‘That will give you the usual grounds, Mrs Vyne-Chance,’ my solicitor said. ‘Then we’ll wrap this up in no time.’

Eddie had been keen on this ploy. He was fired up by it. ‘I shall hire a floozie,’ he said, when we discussed the details by telephone. ‘I’ll hire an absolute eye-popper. We might as well have some fun. Shall I do it next weekend? Brighton, I think. Maybe a suite at the Grand, a bottle of Bollinger. I see myself in silk pyjamas, a cravat and a Charvet dressing gown.’ His tone was hopeful.

‘No suite, no Bollinger and no Charvet,’ I said. I was paying for this: the hotel, the floozie, the obliging detectives. I was damned if I was going to throw in a new dressing gown. Eddie became lachrymose.

‘I love it when you’re stern,’ he said tenderly as the phone line crackled and hissed. I could tell he was tight as a tick. ‘When you cry, it’s even worse, Lucy. It undoes me. That’s why I proposed to you. There you were by the rails of that ship, staring down at the sea, and you looked so… I knew what I must do immediately. You have tragic eyes. Electra had eyes like yours. So did Iphigenia. Did I ever tell you that?’

‘Yes. Three brandies in, usually.’

‘So precise! I need you… A passing thought: you
are
sure you want to do this?’

‘Next weekend. That’s agreed?’ I rang off quickly.

That was July. The promised trip to Brighton was postponed. Eddie rescheduled it for August, then September. By November it became clear he was digging his heels in. A payment from his publishers had not materialised; Eddie had not delivered the promised collection of poems on time – but he couldn’t write poems when miserable, lonely and
badgered
. ‘I can’t conjure pure gold from the
air
,’ he said peevishly, when I telephoned for the fifth time in December. ‘I have to dig deep for it. Right down into the bedrock.’

My solicitor translated: he wanted more money. ‘He feels he’s entitled to a larger settlement, Mrs Vyne-Chance,’ he said. ‘I fear he is being
very
recalcitrant. You do have grounds – grounds that any court in the land would recognise. As we both know there
are
other routes you could take. Unsavoury, of course. None of us wants a scandal, believe me. But if needs must.’ He gave me a delicate glance.

‘No. Just find out how much more he wants. If I can afford it, he can have it.’

‘And if you
cannot
afford it, Mrs Vyne-Chance – what then?’ That query was delicately put, too. I had no answer to it.

By the March of 1939: stalemate. When I visited Bloomsbury, Nicola and Clair were quick to remind me of that fact.

‘Thirteen months, it’s been.’ Clair said. ‘So, Lucy, what’s the latest?’

‘There is no latest. We’re waiting to hear back from his solicitors.’

‘You look ghastly,’ she continued, in a robust tone, pouring red wine. ‘You’re thin and white and you look really peculiar. You look as if you haven’t slept in weeks. Do you have a cough? Been to a doctor? You should. TB can be latent for
years
. Nasty little tubercle bacilli, poised to go forth and multiply. You don’t think… ’

‘No. I don’t. I’ve been working. I’ve finished the islands book at last. I’m fine.’

‘Well, you don’t
look
fine.’

‘She should come
here
,’ Nicola interrupted. ‘Then we could look after her.’

And they were off, bickering away as they often did when I visited. First my situation, then politics, imminent war, the price of coal, the latest books, the new must-see play, Nazis and power cuts, Evelyn Waugh and the new curtains they needed. Might as well be invisible, I’d sometimes think – but that was a familiar state, and preferable to being the focus of their attention.

I frowned at the costume I was wearing, a suit that was a hand-me-down from Rose. Rose was about to marry; her father was banned from the ceremony and Peter was to give her away – if he could get leave. He’d joined the RAF the previous summer and had been posted to Scotland for pilot training. I inspected the suit dispassionately. It was grey. Even extensively altered, let down and taken in, it didn’t fit me; it was a misfit – as I was. So this is how it feels, I thought: three years of mourning, two years of marriage, one year alone, months of solicitors. I’m wrecked. Washed up on foreign shores.
That’s
the latest.

‘Oh, and that reminds me,’ Nicola exclaimed, turning to me. ‘Howard Carter has died. The announcement was in
The Times
yesterday
.
Did you see it, Lucy?’

‘Yes. I saw it.’

‘I’ve read the obituaries – well, what obituaries there were.
The Times
hasn’t done him yet, though no doubt it will. There was one in the
Telegraph…
I see he never published that so-called scholarly account of his work. But then that’s hardly surprising. Carter wasn’t a scholar. He was an adventurer.’

‘He was more than that, Nicola. Much more. You do him a disservice.’

‘Oh, very well. How should I know? I never met the man.’

She paused, and I could see she was trying to fight the petulance that often afflicted her now – fighting to curb the sharpness of her tongue too. She was forty-one; her beauty remained almost unchanged. A few lines had begun to show around her mouth, but she retained her slender grace; her thick bronze hair was ungreyed, the pale classical profile was unaltered. Time and age had been kind to her face, but they had not sweetened her volatile temper.

‘Well, Mr Carter always sounded a charlatan to me. Still, no doubt the great and the good will turn out for him – shall you go to his funeral, Lucy?’

‘I haven’t decided.’