The Visitors (72 page)

He’d left for Spain the previous day, she said, shivering, pushing past me and making for the fire. ‘You know what he’s like, Lucy. Once Peter decides something, you can’t stop him. He’s joined the International Brigade.’ She drew her fur coat more tightly around her. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it. If we do, I’ll start blubbing. Where’s Eddie?’

Eddie was at the pub on the corner of our street, the Jolly Hangman. He was fetching a jug of Guinness. When he returned, he mixed this with champagne – on tick – and, disappearing to the kitchen, then added a secret ingredient, possibly brandy, possibly curaçao, possibly both. Eddie loved cocktails as much as Rose did.

‘Is it Black Velvet?’ Rose asked, as Eddie passed us a foaming coal-black substance.

‘Certainly not,’ he replied, with indignation. ‘I’ve named it in Lucy’s honour. You know how she is about Egypt. This, Rose, is an
Anubis
.’

‘Well, it certainly has
teeth
,’ Rose said, having sipped experimentally. ‘I like it.’

She and Eddie settled themselves by the fire and began talking nineteen to the dozen; Rose had succumbed to Eddie’s charm at that first dinner, within minutes of meeting him. She’d never stopped singing his praises since, to me – to her brother, to everyone.

Anubis, guardian of graveyards. Undrinkable. Blasphemous. Ill-timed. Unwise. I left them to it, retreated to the kitchen and tipped the cocktail down the sink.

‘How’s your
Islands
book going, Lucy?’ Clair asked me. ‘It’s been a whole year now – you must have finished it surely?’

Clair’s instincts for mixing it had never deserted her, I thought. This was a question she asked me whenever I saw her. Occasionally she’d vary it in a helpful way, saying, ‘Do you think you could possibly have writer’s block?’ or ‘Maybe islands was the wrong subject? Why don’t you switch to mountains? Or valleys?’ On this occasion – it was three days before Christmas; I was at the Bloomsbury flat to deliver presents for her and Nicola – she added a corollary: ‘Here’s a tip, sweetheart. Marriage doesn’t suit you. That was only too predictable. If you want to finish that bloody book, get yourself some
space.
’

Something in her tone alerted me: for once, she wasn’t setting out to annoy me, I realised – Clair herself was on edge. We were in the elegant drawing room of Nicola’s flat; Clair was prowling around, in search of a corkscrew, and I was alone with her. Nicola was out, late returning from a shopping expedition – and this was unusual. Nicola liked to control her friends’ meetings; she preferred them to take place when she herself was present.

I wandered around the room, as Clair began to open a bottle of red wine. Nicola had made the space beautiful, bringing most its furniture from France and claiming it had belonged to her mother. She had brought elegance and understatement, Clair had brought colour: a cadmium-orange shawl, tossed across a pale-grey chair; a citron-yellow cushion against dark-blue silk upholstery. Her portrait of Nicola in our Newnham garden hung above a side table. On the table’s polished surface stood the blue stolen
shabti
figure I’d given Nicola in Paris all those years before.
For Nicola, from Lucy, with love. The real thing!
Clair’s recent paintings pulsed from the walls.

This room, Nicola’s creation, bore no resemblance to our house in Newnham, to the rooms there she had transformed. But in Bloomsbury her ménage continued much as before; its habits had become ingrained within weeks of the move to London. My father visited once a week, arriving on a Sunday morning, staying for lunch, departing soon after for college; occasionally he would come down on a weekday and spend it at work in the Reading Room at the museum. Clair spent her days painting. Nicola… I was never sure how Nicola spent her days, weeks, months. She always insisted she never had a minute to herself, but sometimes I wondered if she missed her contacts, her university scheming, missed Cambridge.

Clair had just come inside from her day’s work in her garden studio. Paint-scarred as usual, in filthy dungarees, pouring the wine, chain-smoking, she prowled around Nicola’s large drawing room as if it were a cage. Clair’s habits never varied: she worked from nine in the morning until six at night, every day, including weekends. Recently, hitting a productive patch, these hours had increased – and on my last visit Nicola had complained of that fact, amusingly at first, and then in a querulous way, at length.
Get yourself some
space
.

‘Is everything
all right, Clair?’ I asked, with hesitation.

‘Fine and dandy.’ She sloshed red wine into two glasses. She was fiercely loyal to Nicola; I had never doubted that. ‘Top hole. Spiffing. Pick your superlative.’

‘Nicola
is
happy here still? She’s not – she isn’t regretting the move to London?’

‘She says not. But she frets. She doesn’t like to be alone.’

‘She never did.’

‘It’ll settle.’ Clair handed me a glass, sprawled on the sofa, lit another cigarette. ‘But I’ve had to make some rules. Nicola should understand that –
she
’s made a few rules in her time, God knows… ’ She laughed. ‘So I’ve told her: no interruptions when I’m painting. It fucks up my concentration. If there’s some crisis, real or imagined, Nicola has to cope. No knocking on my studio door. There’s been quite a lot of door-knocking, recently.’

‘She’s lonely, I expect. Sometimes she needs company.’

‘She
has
company. Mine. Every evening, from six o’clock onwards. Then, my time is hers. That’s the deal, and it always has been. Meanwhile,’ Clair’s small sharp face puckered in amusement, ‘meanwhile, I’ve had bolts fitted to the inside of the studio door. Two. Nice and stout. I took Nicola to inspect them yesterday.’

‘That went down well?’

‘Yes it did. Nicola laughed. She said I’d made a very neat little hidey-hole. She said it was a fine and private place.’

‘The grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a quote, Clair. One of her favourite poets.’

‘It is? Oh, Nicola and her bloody
quotes.
’ She shrugged, then stiffened and sat up; she had heard something, something that was inaudible to me. ‘That’s her key – at the front door downstairs… Silence is golden – is that a
quote
too? Keep your mouth shut. Don’t mention bolts. Change of subject.’

She threw herself back on the sofa, put her fur-booted feet on a cushion. As Nicola came quietly and gracefully into the room, flushed from the cold air outside, carrying little parcels, trophies of her Christmas shopping, Clair was saying in a loud tone: ‘– and so we’re planning a party here to celebrate my birthday, and you might as well come, Lucy. Bring Eddie if you must, come alone, as the mood takes you. It’s coming up fast. On 12 February 1937, I’ll be three hundred years old, and I don’t feel a day over twenty.’

We went to Clair’s three-hundred-years-old birthday party, my husband and I. We went to the three-hundred-and-one party held the following year. On both occasions, we took a taxi and trundled all across London from our Chelsea cottage to the flat in Bloomsbury.

In the taxicab to the first of those birthday parties, married a year, Eddie and I sat side by side. I said, taking his hand: ‘
Please
try, Eddie. It means a lot to Nicola… We needn’t stay long, darling.’

On the way to the second, 1938 and a year on (the same cab, I could swear to it), I sat on the rear seat while Eddie perched, scowling, on the jump seat. I’d returned from my flight to Egypt, that visit when I’d encountered Howard Carter for the last time, the previous December. On my return, my husband had said he couldn’t manage without me, that he needed me, that I’d been mad to bolt: what was I running away from? The new year saw us reunited: back together in the marital home, in the marital
nest
.

Somewhere around Marble Arch, I said: ‘We mustn’t stay late. And stay off the hard stuff, Eddie. No brandy.’

‘No brandy. No cocktails. I swear on my dear old mother’s grave.’

‘Your mother’s alive and well. Flourishing.’

‘What a stickler you are! On my grandmother’s then.’

‘Just don’t
start
anything, Eddie. It’s humiliating.’

‘
Teeniest
bit bourgeois, darling one. You want to watch that.’

Parties were Eddie’s natural element: he plunged into them head-first, at high speed, like a hungry gannet diving into a shoal of herring; he swam through them with the grace of a seal underwater. Entering them with eagerness, he was scarcely through the door before women were clustering around him, locking their arms about his neck, murmuring endearments, like mermaids luring a sailor. I never minded
that
: they could sing till doomsday – my husband was immune to their charms and cajolings, and some of the women present knew that, though not all. I provided cover, as I’d come to realise, and when sober, Eddie
did
disguise it very well. Most women were charmed as effortlessly as Rose had been; my husband always remembered their names and histories; he complimented their dresses, he’d send them flowers, write them a sonnet, tell them what old Eliot had said to him last week, and young Wystan the week before; he’d listen to women’s stories, indulge their foibles, tease them and amuse – and all the while his eyes would be surveying the room, on the lookout for what he called ‘talent’ and sometimes ‘adventure’ and occasionally, when very drunk, ‘perdition’.

One of the reasons he disliked Nicola and Clair’s parties was that ‘talent’ tended to be thin on the ground; knowing his weaknesses for certain types, they weeded them out when planning their guest lists. But those parties were unpredictable affairs; sometimes invited guests brought friends with them, so I never felt entirely safe… But by that time I didn’t feel safe anywhere with Eddie; so nothing new there, then.

At that three-hundred-and-one birthday party, the rooms were very crowded. I pitched up here and there: I was talked at by the vicar of the church across the square, High Church, smelling faintly of incense; he explained his understanding of the Eucharist. I was talked at by a Marxist whom Clair had known at the Slade; he kindly explained Joseph Stalin’s reforms and how beneficial they were to Mother Russia. I surfaced by a woman who’d been my contemporary at Girton, who said: ‘You haven’t seen
Snow White
yet? Oh, but you must, Lucy! My children adored it.’ She sang a few bars of Snow White’s ‘My Prince Will Come’ for me, then eddied away on the party’s mysterious currents. They carried me into the adjacent room and then back again.

I was looking for Rose and Peter, both invited at my request. Rose was now engaged to be married; Peter had returned from the civil war in Spain that week; he had been wounded, but not seriously, Rose had said. I couldn’t see either of them anywhere; but, as the room’s currents floated me past Nicola, she said: ‘Oh they’re definitely coming, Rose telephoned and confirmed that. She can’t stay long… she’s going on to dinner at Lady Evelyn’s. Howard Carter’s one of the guests, she told me. Lucy, dear, where’s your glass, aren’t you drinking? I wanted you to meet––’

Some sudden wave of new arrivals separated us before I could discover who this was, and I ended up adrift somewhere, talking to a young army officer. He explained why war with Herr Hitler was now inevitable. ‘First it will be Austria, but he won’t stop there – rearmament, Mrs Vyne-Chance! Time is running out on us. If we don’t rearm faster, then frankly we’re sunk.’

Next, I washed up by an American diplomat, who said how much he always enjoyed Mrs Foxe-Payne’s parties. He turned out to know the Winlocks, and he informed me that Herbert Winlock had recently had a stroke: ‘At the Museum. He was just coming down the stairs there, poor guy. Yes – a full recovery. Not too sure how long he’ll stay on as director, of course. Pretty demanding, the Met, big ship to steer… Is that your glass, Mrs Chance? Let me freshen your drink.’

I floated away to the edge of the crowd, until I washed ashore by the table on which the blue
shabti
figure I’d given Nicola had pride of place. Twin to the one Frances had given me: I was looking at him, the little answerer, I had just picked him up, I was holding him to the light and examining him closely, tracing with one finger his spells from
The Book of the Dead
, powerful spells those, when Clair sought me out. She placed one unusually clean hand on my arm and said with a grimace, ‘Over there – north-north-west from where you’re standing. Nicola hasn’t noticed yet. I don’t know who they are. You won’t extricate Eddie, he’s well away, but we could shift
them
out of harm’s way. If you corral one, I’ll waylay the other.’

I looked across the smoky eddying room: the crowded backs parted, made a narrow channel, and there was my husband, in full flow, attacking
The Wasteland.
To one side of him was a young man with long Shelleyan locks, wearing a velvet jacket; to the other was an older man of stockier build, with a pugilistic look, who was smoking a pipe. Both were Eddie’s idea of ‘talent’, a category that was catholic. ‘Adventure’ usually implied a Guardsman. ‘Perdition’ meant a married man who, until he met Eddie, had believed, or pretended, that he was heterosexual.

How many times had I done this? Gone across, politely intervened, tried to save face?

Too many times. The laws were what they were, so I didn’t blame Eddie, but I was sick of deceit. I replaced the
shabti
figure on the table with great care. Then I crossed to Eddie, whom I liked – and of whom I remained fond to his dying day. He would live to a great age and remain incorrigible to the last, I’m glad to say. I kissed his cheek.

‘You off, darling girl?’

‘I am, actually. Yes.’

I left the party. I returned to Chelsea and, having packed the only belongings I wanted, typewriter, notebooks, the
shabti
Frances gave me, I left the marital home an hour later.

‘Where
were
you, Lucy?’ Rose cried, when I next telephoned her. ‘We only went to that wretched party for your sake. Peter says he saw you leaving, getting into a taxi just as we arrived. He just caught a glimpse – you might have stayed, you know.’