The Visitors (67 page)

‘Hush, Frances. You mustn’t talk too much. I promised Helen.’

‘Oh – that’s the doctors speaking! Such a fuss about nothing. I long to talk. I’ve been longing to talk to
you
. Well, I
have
talked to you, of course – such conversations we’ve had! But I imagined them – and that’s not the same, is it? It’s hard, Lucy – lying here in silence day after day. All sorts of silly gloomy thoughts creep in, and I can’t seem to drive them away. But now they’ve all gone – they’ve fled! I’m so happy I could dance.’ She turned her face away. Her breath caught. She fell silent.

I bowed my head and stroked her wrist. Her skin felt hot and dry; under my fingers I could feel the rapidity of her pulse. Helen had already told me about the spell at the Erkanders’ house – and the circumstances that had led to Frances’s admission to Saranac. It had happened
fast
: Frances had been nineteen, fit and well. She had left school, had come out, had rushed from one debutante party to another… had boyfriends, was planning to enrol on art courses in New York, or study in Europe, perhaps at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, or the Slade in London – but, that winter, she kept getting colds and developed a thin, obstinate cough. Within weeks of our meeting in Manhattan, and that visit we’d made to the Met, she had begun to lose weight; Helen had suspected she was secretly dieting. Their doctor prescribed cough linctus, said there was no cause for concern – but that May, when the fevers and night sweats first developed, he suggested seeing a specialist. This man confirmed the disease, and advised treatment at Saranac Lake; its reputation in America was unrivalled.

‘January to June,’ Helen said. ‘Six months, from the first little cold to the day she was admitted here. That was almost two and a half years ago. The doctors say that if it had been caught sooner, it would have made no difference. TB makes its own rules, Lucy. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes slow, sometimes latent.’

I thought:
so she was already ill that day in the Museum
. I said: ‘Do they know how Frances caught it, Helen – or where?’

‘No.’ She turned her face aside. ‘They call it the white plague. It’s everywhere. The doctors say you need prolonged exposure – but what does that mean? A day? A week? Ten minutes? When you ask them that, they don’t answer. She could have caught it in a restaurant. A movie theatre. At the opera. On the uptown bus. On the subway.’

I looked down at Frances’s flushed face. Her eyes were still closed and her breathing had become gentle. I thought she might be sleeping, I thought I should perhaps steal away, but as soon as I moved, Frances stirred and clutched at my hand.

‘Don’t go – not yet,’ she said. ‘If you go now, I’ll think I dreamed you. What was I saying? I’ve lost track – ah, I know. Our walk by the river. You will do that, Lucy? You’ll stay for that? Promise me you won’t leave until we’ve done that?’

‘I promise. I’ll stay as long as you want. I won’t walk by the river until I can walk there with you.’

At that, she grew calmer again. She remained calm when I gave her the small present I’d brought, purchased in a Fifth Avenue store, on my way to the station. The assistant had gift-wrapped it. I could hear the nurse talking to Helen in the hall below as I helped Frances undo its pretty ribbons, its shiny white paper. Inside was a lipstick in a gilded case. It was a clear true scarlet, the closest match I could find to the one of Mrs d’Erlanger’s that Frances had chosen, and sacrificed.

Frances gave a little cry of surprise and turned her brilliant gaze to mine. ‘You remembered,’ she said, turning it in her thin hands. ‘You remembered.’

‘That and everything.’ This was true: the curse of a good memory. ‘When you were grown up, you were going to wear scarlet lipstick all the time – even at breakfast.’

‘So I was. And Rose said I’d never dare.’ She laughed, which made her cough again.

‘Well, I’m a grown woman now – and red lipstick isn’t as wicked as it used to be, but even so –
I
’
ll
show Rose. Give me that looking glass, Lucy.’

I handed her the small glass and, with concentration, Frances applied the lipstick, smudged her lips together and examined her reflection. She put out a pink tongue and licked her red lips, making the paint even brighter, more glossy. ‘It’s glorious. I feel as vain as a peacock. It suits me. I knew it would. It’s the colour of rubies, Lucy. It’s the colour of blood. It’s the colour of heartbeats.’

The lipstick proved controversial: when Herbert Winlock visited, he was amused, but Frances’s doctors frowned, her mother tut-tutted, and the nurses were annoyed – this disapproval, which Frances had predicted, delighted her. She had been obedient to the cure regime for so long, that this gesture of rebellion seemed to give her strength. It was like hoisting a defiant banner
in the face of the enemy – and we all knew who that enemy was: you could sense him, prowling around the house, stalking up the drive, peering in at the windows. I knew him of old: I could remember how he’d hung out in my room at Shepheard’s Hotel on my first visit to Egypt; how he’d hidden himself in its fearsome catafalque of a wardrobe.
Go away
, I used to mutter then.
Find some other prey
, I’d think here, closing the curtains as night fell. Frances wore that red lipstick every single one of the days that I spent with her in Saranac.

There were thirty of them. Most were spent at the house, as the weather remained cloudy and inclement. In the mornings, the visiting nurses would give Frances a sponge-bath in the cold water the regime stipulated; they’d remake her bed and supervise her breathing exercises. In the afternoons, once her meal and obligatory rest period were past, I would sit with her and talk or, at her request, read to her. She made out a list of books and I fetched them from the Free Library on Main. Frances would tire quickly and grow restless, so I read as she bid: a fragment here, a favourite passage there. We read
Little Women
and
The Secret Garden
and
Huckleberry Finn.
‘Ah, I love that,’ she’d say. ‘Read me that again, Lucy.’ So I’d return to the same paragraph until her restlessness was quieted, and her eyelids began drooping.

She had a passion for news too, and when allowed would listen avidly to the wireless set. ‘I have to know what’s going
on
, Lucy,’ she’d say. ‘When I get back to the big bad world I must know what’s been happening – people will think me a fool otherwise.’

And so I’d fetch the local papers, or bring up
The New York Times
and
The New Yorker
, to which Helen subscribed, and read out selected columns: the society pages, the lead news stories, reviews. In a careful, uninflected tone, I’d recount details of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, the continuing suffering of Oklahoma sharecroppers, the latest logging prices, the dinner and dance Mrs Edgar P. Van der Luyden had given for her daughter Lavinia at the Pierre Hotel. Coming once upon an obituary of that legendary prima ballerina we’d known as Madame Masha, I turned that page quickly. I read accounts of Nuremberg rallies, and who had attended some dazzling first night at the Metropolitan Opera. Frances would lie back against her pillows, her bright eyes fixed on the open windows, her lips parted and her expression rapt – as if she were watching some marvellous film, the windows a cinema screen. All events, tiny, trivial or tumultuous, held an equal fascination.

Sometimes she liked to hear about people she’d known but had not seen for years such as Rose, or Peter – and I would read out the letters from them that Nicola Dunsire had forwarded from Cambridge. Rose was now living in a flat in London, bought with the inheritance from her mother Poppy that had come to her on her twenty-first birthday. Wheeler lived with her; the set-up was much as Rose had described to me that day on the ferry to Dover, returning from Egypt. Her brother Peter had recently joined them there, having contrived to get expelled from Eton and having severed all contact with his father. ‘Expelled?’ Frances gave me a doubting look. ‘Peter? He was such a sweet obedient little boy. Timid. He wouldn’t have said boo to a goose.’

‘That was then. Now he’s grown up. He’s nearly seventeen, tall and strong and a hell-raiser. He’s been working on expulsion for years. I knew he’d pull it off. He’s determined.’

‘Does he still have Poppy’s eyes? Does he still look like her?’

‘Yes. The same eyes – but fiercer.’

I examined the two letters: Rose’s was long and communicative. Peter’s was short, witty and on the whole uninformative:
Dear Lulu, I’ve escaped. I’m a free man! When you next see me, you won’t recognise me…
I replaced the letters in their envelopes.

‘How strange. Sometimes I feel I know them – and other times, I think I dreamed them.’

Frances turned her brilliant gaze to mine. ‘I think I dreamed it
all
,’ she said sadly, plucking at the bedclothes. ‘Madame’s ballet classes, your Miss Mack, Eve and Mr Carter, Daddy’s excavations, even the Valley and the tombs – did we ever really go there, Lucy?’

‘You know we did, Frances… It’s time for your rest now.’

I was learning the danger signals by then. So I’d say: it’s time for your rest – or the doctor, the nurse, the massage, the regulation milk. I was often afraid when I soothed her in this way, for the setbacks could happen without warning. One second Frances would be calm, the next in feverishly high spirits, or afflicted with a sudden swoop of anxiety; then she would begin gasping for breath, be convulsed by a coughing attack. Once she had needed oxygen; once she had coughed up bright blood and tried to hide the red square of gauze from me; once her skin had gone white and her lips blue, and the doctors came racing.

They carried paraphernalia into her room: large bottles, gauges, rubber tubes, a long rubber tube connected to a needle. Helen and I were banished to the landing so I did not witness this procedure, which was called artificial pneumothorax. Standing outside Frances’s door, gripping her mother’s hands, I heard it. One long high scream, then a prolonged hissing and bubbling. A man’s voice said,
Hold steady, Frances
. I said, ‘Ah, dear God, what are they doing?’

Helen stared at the wall. They were collapsing Frances’s left lung, she said, by injecting oxygen through the chest wall into the pleural cavity. Both lungs were infected, but the condition of the left was worse. The needle inserted had to be wielded with absolute precision. It was an ancient technique, first mentioned by Hippocrates. The doctors at Saranac Lake, performing this therapy on numerous patients on a daily basis, were expert. Once collapsed, the afflicted lung could rest and healing was promoted.

‘How many times, Helen?’

‘This is the seventh time this year.’

‘What will happen?’

‘We’ll go back to the beginning again. Longer rest periods. Longer exposure to fresh air. Less stimulation. More frequent meals, more milk – maximum nutrition. Gradually, the breaches in the lung should heal a little and the adhesions may weaken.’ She reached up to straighten a picture on the wall – one of her own watercolours, the view from the veranda at the American House, sand and rose rock, desert. She dropped her hand and left the picture crooked. She said, ‘Perseverance, Lucy.’

That event came early in my stay – at the end of the first week I was at Saranac Lake. After that, as Helen had warned, the regime became stricter still. The periods of enforced rest became more protracted, the doctors, tweed-suited, moustached, swept in, emanating professional confidence. They visited more frequently; their conferences with Helen lasted longer than they formerly had.

At first, I’d ply Helen with eager questions when they’d left: what was their advice, what further treatments did they recommend? There
were
no other treatments, she said in a hopeless way. Seeing that such questioning was painful to her, I avoided it religiously after that. Instead, Helen and I entered a conspiracy in which we were always, at all times, optimistic; at the end of each day, and often during the course of it, we’d remind one another of the advances, the tiny but noticeable improvements: the hour of peaceful sleep Frances had enjoyed, the animation she’d shown and the determination. She had managed to eat this, she’d expressed a wish to do that, her temperature had remained normal for three days in succession, her pulse rate had slowed and was now steady. We counted these events like beads on a rosary.

Helen believed in time, rest, quiet, dry cold air, nutrition – or said that she did. I embraced these faiths too: you have to have a creed in such circumstances. We’d cook and shop for the right provisions with shared zeal. Helen would send me into town with lengthy shopping lists. ‘Go to Gibneys’ Market,’ she’d say. ‘Tell William and Mellie I sent you. They might have squabs by now… Oh, and then go to Barr’s, Lucy, and see if they have the Providence River oysters – Dr Brown says he can’t recommend oysters too highly, very nutritious and easily digested – and perhaps some fish, and tell them the eggs must be new-laid – see if they have the Malaga grapes, they’re Frances’s favourites.’

The recommended diet had to be high in protein and vitamins, and high in calories too, for the portions Frances ate were tiny. So I’d consult with the solicitous shopkeepers, and come back with laden baskets: yes, they did have the Malaga grapes and the eggs were laid that morning, and look how plump and tender the squabs were… And then Helen and I would retreat to the kitchen while the nurses did their work upstairs, and we’d chop and slice and roast and poach: we’d make fresh, light vegetable soups and beef tea; we’d contrive tasty casseroles and nutritious puddings. Helen had never cooked and my own experience was limited, but I bought a recipe book and, fiercely evangelical, we improved. ‘Oh, that was delicious,’ Frances would say, sinking back on her pillows.

She might have eaten one square inch of chicken, a spear of carrot, half a potato, three grapes. Sometimes, if I was quick enough, I’d contrive to hide the leftovers from Helen, run downstairs and scrape them into the kitchen bin before she saw them – and then I realised that she was performing the same pantomime for my benefit. After that we were more honest.