The Visitors (8 page)

I stand and stumble to the window. I am surrounded by green, greens everywhere. Later I know these for grass and bushes. It is November so the leaves are lost from many trees, and there are stark black lines of bare tree limbs against the white sky and the monochrome contrasts are so shocking that I almost turn from them, but I do not, I stare on fascinated at this cracked puzzle of sky and branches. Then I turn. I reach forward for Lottie’s hand. My, how her hair blazes. Father and Mother are holding on to my shoulders and the doctor is nodding. And Lottie holds her own hand up to me. But there are others behind her. Other faces. At first I think they are the servants, come to share our joy. But these faces are different. They are smiling and friendly like my family, yet they are not the same; they seem lit from within, a bluish-white glow as if a lamp shone from their eyes, their cheeks, their hair. And I realise all at once, they are not my family and they are not the servants. They are the Visitors. And they are real. I can see them.

One stands close behind Lottie – a woman with black hair and black eyes. Her skin glows violet-white, and she is in perfect focus, as if she were made from different stuff than the others. I realise from the way people are talking and looking at me and moving around that no one can see the Visitors but me.

Are you real?
I ask the dark woman. I think it, inside my head, as always. And she can hear me. When she answers, though she moves her mouth, I can still discern her words inside my mind.

I only came selling lavender. Now I cannot find my way home.

Her dark eyes are like holes in her head. I move towards her, and Lottie thinks I am coming to her and steps forward. But I stretch to touch the Visitor and my hand reaches her face. There is almost nothing there, but there is something: a wisp of matter, the caress of a cloud. The woman takes a step and the mist of her is cold on my hand. I withdraw it, chilled. Foreboding comes upon me, a ghastly idea of who the Visitors are and why they are here.

Go away
, I say.

And she does. She turns and the blue-white glow flares briefly, then she fades and is gone. I shudder, as if ice water has trickled down my neck.

Lottie takes my hand and finger spells to me. I realise for the first time that she looks at my hand as she spells, she does it by sight. I always thought she did it with eyes closed, to be like me.

‘Are you well?’ she asks.

‘Never better,’ I say and we smile and smile. How white are teeth!

‘What can you see?’ says Lottie.

I look up at her face. It is so beautiful, I cannot get enough of it. I drink it in.

‘Everything!’ I say. I see her turn her head towards Father, Mother and Dr Knapp and watch her lips move. So that is speaking. She is telling them what I said.

I turn to Father and touch his face again. His dear old face. It is wet with tears. I look at Mother too. Her eyes are dark brown and sad. Father’s are light green and sparkly. I sign into his palm, ‘Bring me a mirror.’

There is none in my room, as it has never been required in here. Lottie goes out and returns, a small round object held aloft. I reach to take it and miss completely. My hand grasps air. I have yet to connect seeing with movement. I almost want to close my eyes to reach for it, as this seems easier, but I do not. I never want to close my eyes again. Lottie places the mirror in my hand and I hold it up to my face. But the image is blurred close to, so I move the mirror to arm’s length until it comes right.

There I am. My hair is yellow, so yellow that I think it must be hot like fire. And my eyes are dark like Mother’s. I have her eyes precisely. They are the same. I never knew I was so like Mother. I touch my hair and toy with it, as I know ladies do in mirrors. I reveal an ear. It is ridiculous! Such a huge, flapping thing curled round in horrid knots and channels, extended for yards beyond my head, and I check to see if the other is so hideous and it is exactly the same. I look up horrified, that I am so ugly, but I see that everyone has these appendages thrusting out from the sides of their heads, and the men having short hair and the ladies wearing theirs up, I can see their ears, and they seem preposterously big to me. And the nose jutting out, a mountain splitting the face, and eyes, wide, impudent saucers, and the mouth a great maw opening and closing with speech. The proportions I knew with my fingers appear all wrong with my eyes. It will take some getting used to. Yet, despite its peculiarities, it is all more ravishing than anything I could have surmised. I conclude what poorly instruments my fingers were, when all along this actuality existed and I had no sense of it. I grieve for the blind. It seems a crime to me now that anyone cannot see this glorious world. I want Dr Knapp to cure them all.

He wants me to sit down now so that he can examine me. He holds up some curious objects and looks into my eyes. The shock of their closeness is strange and I quail, afraid he is going to poke me in the eye. But I realise that I am still a novice at judging distances, and trust him to examine me. He looks carefully in both eyes and Lottie says he is very pleased. They have healed perfectly and my vision is good, though I will need to come to London again to have spectacles made for close work. I wiggle the fingers of my other hand close to my eyes. There is a blur, like the moment I first opened them and was blinded by tears; I look up, terrified my eyes are failing me already, but soon realise that it is indeed in proximity that my eyes do not work so well. They are good at middle distance and best far away, beyond the room and the undulating treetops to the stately rainclouds. The closer something is, the less clearly I can see it. Except the Visitors. They are in perfect focus, wherever they stand in the room. I do not know what to do about them, so I tell them to leave. One by one, they fade and depart. I will deal with them tomorrow. For now, I have a world to know. I have opened my eyes and created light and colour. I have invented the world anew. I can see.

On this, my first day of sight, I begin by exploring the house. I am allowed to leave my parents and the doctor behind and walk across the hall and down the stairs. Lottie is with me all the time, to stop me tripping, to explain this and that. One of the strangest things is trying to reconcile my brand-new visual images with the knowledge I gained previously from touch or description. Some objects I know presently and others I cannot make sense of at all until I touch them. I see a painting on the landing of something green and frilly, with layers of shapes and a long thin line at its centre. I stare at it and cannot decipher what it might be. Is it something you wear?

I ask Lottie, ‘What is it?’

‘Hops. A painting of hop flowers, the leaves, the stalk.’

I am dismayed. I know this object intimately by touch but its visual image means nothing to me. The next painting I know immediately. I have never visited this place, yet I know that this grey mass bordered by a flat expanse of yellow under a louring sky is the sea. Somehow the linguistic description I had read so often in books or discussed with Lottie had painted an image in my mind more powerful than that of Father’s beloved hops, which I have handled countless times.

I go on through the house, astounded at how much there is to see. The wallpaper and painted walls are all different colours, and the upholstery is patterned with leaves and flowers and birds in every shade imaginable. Clothes, too, are covered with checks and dots and swirls and lines, on Mother and Lottie, and even Father’s waistcoats and his shiny shoes and buttons. I am bewitched by the myriad tints of colour within one object, such as Lottie’s eyes: the pupil is black, the aura deep blue while the iris is light fringed with green. It is how I picture the Mediterranean. Even my own eyes – not as bewitching as Lottie’s – have two tones, dark brown at the centre with a paler edge.

We move from room to room, our speed as always hampered by clutter. But once outside, my first instinct is to run, and I launch myself from the bottom step and hurtle across the gravel driveway to the grass. I stop short, panting, and move forward again, the vertical trees and the horizontal ground hurling themselves at me at a terrifying rate and bewildering my eyes. Lottie catches up with me and I drop to the grass. I look at her face and see her eyebrows lowered, her eyes intense, her mouth slightly pursed. I know these shapes with my fingers. Her expression is concern for me, she is worried. I will have to learn a whole new language of reading other people’s faces and bodies, applying my knowledge of touch and vibration to what I see and correlating the two.

‘Go slowly,’ she advises.

I have crossed the threshold to a new country, the land of the sighted, and it has its own laws of which I am ignorant. I stand again and move forward, with care this time. My surroundings move quite quickly, but I am becoming accustomed to it. It may be better to walk with my eyes closed, but I cannot bear to. I look to the sky and the clouds race across it. I see them reveal the sun, and stare into this white heat. I gasp and cover my eyes. It hurts to look straight at the sun – is this just me or everyone? Lottie tells me it is a flaming ball of fire, of course it will hurt to look at it, everyone is the same in this.

I see my first animals, little birds flitting from tree to tree or flapping across the white of the sky. The way birds move brings me to tears. I have felt a bird’s feather many times, found them in the grass or stuck to a twig. I have held a bird’s body and drawn out its miraculous wing and named the different types of feather along it. There are stuffed birds in glass cases in the parlour, and Lottie would take one out for me and let me touch it. I had a caged bird for a time. I would open the miniature door and put my hand in the cage, feel around for the vibrant fluttering and hold its little engine of a body, feel its heart beat furiously in its tiny chest. One day I found it inert, lying on its back at the gritty bottom of its cage. I cried for it then. But to see birds now, as they flutter from branch to branch and hop, hop, hop along the paving slabs and peck, peck, peck, almost too quick for the eye to comprehend; and then the miracle, as they lift up and fly, small black shapes against the brightness scoring the sky with their wings, the absolute liberty of it. I never knew what happy creatures birds are. I assume they are happy, though I cannot see them smile. To think, I once allowed that sovereign creature to be locked in a cage in my house. My defence is that I did not know, I could not know the joy of emancipation myself. We envy the birds theirs and lock them up. I wish to open every cage and free them, as I have been freed.

The elegance of water. Lottie takes me to the beck and I watch the water shimmer and slide over pebbles, sparkle and glint, endlessly mobile. It feels delightful, water, as it slips through your fingers and surrounds your skin and cools your throat. But who could know how purely it declares its life as it moves endlessly downstream? I realise that when I was blind and moved my hand through water, I had thought I cut it as a knife slices butter. I am amazed that it runs on, through and over my fingers. As I am splashed by the skittish brook, I think of raindrops and look up, willing those rainclouds yonder edged in thunder to loose their load and show me rain. And I want the sky to bring forth snow, hail, fog, lightning – and oh, a rainbow! – so that I can see all weather all at once.

Where is the wind? Can we not see it? I am astonished to discover that the wind is invisible. It was never, in all our lessons, something we had got round to discussing. The wind moves the trees and plays a thousand dances along every bend of leaf and lift of branch and blade of grass, and plays havoc with my hair and blows it playfully into my new eyes – but it is all invisible. One can see its effects, but not itself. What is wind made of? Air. What is air made of? Lottie tells me about microscopes and says Father must get me one. A telescope too. Then I will understand about the universe beyond our eyes, the realms of the very small and of the very large and far away, that even our wondrous eyes are limited. But our marvellous brains have invented tools for us to overcome our limitations. The utter complexity of the world. Only now, as my eyes drink in the intricacy of it, do I think of God. Is even His mind big enough to encompass this endless variety? I conclude this is impossible, that these limitless features could not have been contrived by one mind, that it is all too much.

We come back into the house through the scullery. Our cook and three maids are there to meet me. They are all smiling, and though they are servants and I am the young lady of the house, I do not care at this moment and I hug them.

I say to Lottie, ‘Please tell Martha, Edith, Florrie and Alice I want to know them, if they do not mind and would like it.’

‘You do not need to say this,’ spells Lottie, frowning.

‘I know I do not need to, but I wish to. I wish to know everyone alive, and I want to start here, with these kind ladies.’

I watch Lottie say my words. Edith speaks to Lottie, who tells me: ‘Edith says from this day on we are all friends.’

Edith holds her hand out to me and we shake on it. They all laugh and some speak words and there is more smiling. I comprehend how much I have missed, the constant flutter of communication that speech and sight afford, the asides and glances, a flick of the hand or a cocked head or the twitch of a nose, the raising of one eyebrow and the palm covering the mouth. All this has been occurring while I have been laboriously finger spelling my way through the last few years, thinking myself so grand in my intercourse with others and placing myself at the firm centre of the universe. How much else was going on around me of which I had no clue, and what an almighty fool I feel.

As they chatter, I watch their mouths and a new envy grips me.

‘Lottie, I know I cannot speak, that with no hearing and no memory of sound this would be very difficult. But can I learn to read what people say? Can I learn the movements people make with their mouths and perhaps see a word or two there?’

‘Yes, you can,’ says Lottie. ‘It is called lip-reading. You will learn this, starting tomorrow. I have been reading about it. And I have another surprise for you. While you were recovering, I spent my evenings learning about another kind of language for you, which will give you more freedom to speak and a greater range. It is a language of signs you make with both hands in the air in front of your body. They call it sign language and I will begin teaching you this afternoon.’