The Visitors

  ‘Then Wheeler made herself indispensable,’ Rose giggled. ‘When she saw Papa, which wasn’t often, she began to boss him a bit: he adores that because it reminds him of his own sainted nanny – she looked like Wheeler and she used to spank him with a hairbrush. So Wheeler came cheap and suddenly he was five years old again, and if he didn’t behave Nanny would punish him: “No supper for you, young man!” and then whisk him upstairs to bed.’ She turned to look at me. ‘What on earth’s the matter? Are you listening, Lucy? You do look peculiar! Are you feeling car-sick?’

  I was listening all right. I said: ‘I’m fine. I’m – just admiring her methods. Go on.’

  ‘Well, that was six months ago – and now he’s hired her. It’s official. Now she wears a brown uniform instead of a black one, and she’s Nanny Wheeler and rules the roost.’

  Rose paused for breath. ‘Isn’t Wheeler brilliant? She manages my father so well, and he’s so conceited he never notices. Poor Mamma could never do that, she hadn’t the knack. There wasn’t a peep out of Pa when the idea of us staying in the country came up. He wanted to forget us and trot off to America for the summer, you see, so all Wheeler had to do was remind him how convenient our absence would be, and he agreed at once. Pa’s in Newport. Sailing, or so he said…

  ‘He’s thinking of marrying again, I expect.’ Rose sighed. ‘He’ll be chasing after some heiress, or one of his chorus girls – there’ll be a woman behind it anyway, there always is. Papa thinks all women are fools, he says his dogs are more intelligent, but,’ Rose lowered her voice, ‘but he can’t resist anything in a petticoat. One sniff and he’s after it. He’s always been that way, Lucy – as poor Mamma discovered inside six months.’

  How airless the car felt. The word ‘petticoat’ reverberated. I stared at Rose. ‘I don’t understand… six months? How did Poppy find out?’

  ‘Oh, women can always tell,’ Rose said in a small voice. ‘When he’s up to something, there’s a look he gets on his face. Furtive. Shifty and greedy at the same time. You know how dogs look when they smell something delicious in the kitchen and they’re working out how to slink in and steal it? Like that.’

  I’d never owned a dog. My father did not approve of pets. I tried to imagine this – how the dog, how the man might look.

  The car felt so stuffy and hot; it was making me light-headed. I wound down the window a crack and examined the flat passing landscape: how parched, how dry it was.

  ‘Anyway – let’s not talk about him,’ Rose went on, brightening. ‘The point is, our scheme worked. Wheeler really has got Pa right there in the palm of her hand – she can make him do almost anything if she sets her mind to it.’ She nudged me. ‘So, come on, stop daydreaming – tell me what you think. Weren’t we clever? Aren’t you impressed?’

  ‘Very.’

  The smooth swift passage of the Hispano-Suiza was affecting me, I decided. A few miles further on, and the car had to be halted. I just made it to the roadside, where I was violently sick.

  22

  The house where I was to stay was called Nuthanger: an old farmhouse, with some hundred acres, it had passed down the female line in Rose’s family. Poppy d’Erlanger had inherited it from her maternal grandmother and had often visited the farm as a child; she had always loved the place, Rose said, but never lived in it. After this grandmother’s death, it had been let for years on a farming tenancy. Now it belonged to Rose, who had been left it in Poppy’s will; it was being administered for her by her mother’s trustees, who were currently seeking a new tenant. Meanwhile the house was a place of romance to Rose who, from her earliest childhood, had grown up with her mother’s stories and memories of it. ‘Look, Lucy,’ she said, as at last, after our long, hot, giddying drive, the Hispano-Suiza turned into a narrow twisting lane descending into a hidden valley: ‘Look – you can just see the chimneys. Beyond the hedges, below the beechwood.’

  Rose wound down the window, and sweet fresh air filled the car. Craning my neck, narrowing my eyes against the sun’s dazzle, I saw the rising curves of the chalk downs on the far side of the valley, and, directly below us, clusters of chimneys, a trail of blue smoke drifting up, and a huddle of roofs, thick with mosses and lichens. I caught one tantalising glimpse before the high impenetrable hedges hid it from view again.

  We bumped on down the steep track, past banks with tangles of ripening blackberries, into a tunnel shaded by elms, and out again into sunlight. I couldn’t see the farm; I could see no other houses. Then the driver hauled on the wheel, we passed through an invisible gap in the hawthorns, a cluster of hens squawked and scattered and I found we were there, in a huge yard, protected on three sides by an old brick house and its attendant sheltering barns; to my left, green fields still thick with clover fell away to the valley and the distant windings of a small river… I would revisit that house again, much later in life; its lineaments remain sharp in my memory. I loved it, at first sight.

  At the door of the house, as if guarding the entrance, stood Wheeler, unchanged, impassive, suppressing a smile of welcome, wearing a new brown uniform; and next to her, clasping her hand, jumping up and down, jiggling from foot to foot in excitement, was a small boy, an unknown boy. Blond hair bleached almost white by months of summer sun, brown-skinned, bare-legged, clad in old shorts and a muddy shirt. It wasn’t until I’d climbed out of the car, and Wheeler released him, not until he came hurtling across the yard and, almost knocking me down, flung his arms around me, that I realised who he was. His dark blue eyes were unmistakable, as were those of the mother from whom he’d inherited them.

  I said Peter, it’s you, in the same second that he said Lulu.

  I was taken on what Rose called the tour, within minutes of arrival. My cases were dragged up to an attic room and unceremoniously dumped there; Wheeler disappeared to the kitchens to make tea and with Rose gripping one of my hands and Peter the other, I was propelled outside into the sunshine. ‘No servants. Just Wheeler and us. For weeks and weeks. Isn’t that glorious?’ Rose said. ‘What shall we show Lucy first, Petey?’

  They couldn’t agree: the orchard, or the barns? The pond or the river? The tree platform; the hen that had chicks, twelve of them; the hayloft where they’d made a den? And so I discovered the place in the turmoil of arrival, rushing in one direction, doubling back, pausing to pick apples, discovering some freshly laid eggs, mounting into a loft sweet with the scent of hay, and then out again, up the steep winding lane behind the house. The hay fields high above it had been newly cut by a neighbouring farmer, and there, finally, we halted. The air was filled with birdsong – but I could see no birds.

  ‘Larks,’ Rose said, ‘so high they’re invisible. Hundreds of them, Lucy. They’ll wake you in the morning… ’

  ‘… No clocks in this house,’ Peter carolled. ‘Not one… ’

  ‘… so the larks are our alarm clocks.’ Rose flung herself down on the grass.

  ‘And we know when it’s bedtime,’ Peter added, flinging himself down next to her, ‘because it’s dark and the owls hoot.’

  He put his small brown hands over his mouth and made a hooting sound that was startlingly convincing. I sat down next to them on the grass, inhaled its rich scent and lifted my face to the sky: an exultation of larks, I thought: I’d been learning collectives.

  Reaching across, Rose tapped my wristwatch. ‘Take that off,’ she said. ‘Leave it in your bedroom, and don’t wind it again until you leave.’

  I saw that my watch had stopped; its hands were stuck at ten-thirty, so it had wound down somewhere on the long drive from Cambridge. I still felt dazed from that journey, from my shaming episode of sickness by the roadside. ‘I’ve no idea what time it is anyway,’ I said, ‘it’s all happened too fast. I’m not even sure where I am.’

  ‘You’re in our house,’ Rose said. ‘And our valley,’ Peter added. ‘And now it’s yours too,’ they carolled in unison.

  Sitting up and pointing, Rose then explained the geography. The river below was a tri
butary of the Test, a clear chalk stream famous for its sweet-tasting brown trout; Peter had once seen something lurking in its shadows that he thought was a pike, but Rose thought was just river-weed. On the crest of the downs opposite, which could be reached by a footbridge, there were rides, and sometimes you’d see horses from the Carnarvon stud being exercised, or hear in the distance the thunder of their hooves as they galloped. On those downs you could walk for miles, walk all day, without seeing another person, and there were thousands of butterflies. ‘Millions,’ said Peter dreamily. There, back in July, high up on Beacon Hill, they had seen thirty-five Adonis Blues and, once, a Monarch, a great rarity.

  ‘And that? Is that a castle?’ I pointed across the valley to where, a long way away, in the far hazy distance, half-hidden by intervening woods, rising up from a declivity, I could just discern the fairytale pinnacles of a tower, a suggestion of fortifications, a glitter that might have been leads under sunlight and something that fluttered, a flag perhaps.

  ‘That?’ Rose followed my gaze and shrugged. ‘Oh, well, it’s a castle of sorts, I suppose. That’s Lord Carnarvon’s place, Lucy. That’s Highclere.’

  It wasn’t until after tea that day that I was alone and truly able to get my bearings. Peter was inside, being bathed by Wheeler and Rose, and so, in the cool of the evening, I set off to explore on my own. Wandering around the farm-yard, I began to understand the complex of buildings that at first had been so confusing. I found that Nuthanger was a long, low house, built of roseate brick; its oldest part, its core, dated back to the sixteenth century, or so I was informed by the stone above its entrance, which bore the Armada date, 1588. Cradled and protected by the chalk downs, it was a house of adjustments and accretions; over the centuries it had grown an arm here, a wing there, extra rooms to house children, another byre for animals, another barn to store the land’s riches.

  It had many gables, many hiding places, passageways that doubled back on themselves, and a bewildering number of winding, creaking elm staircases, some concealed behind doors, masquerading as cupboards. It had many windows; those in the oldest parts of the house were small and secretive casements; others, added later, were tall, wide sashes that filled their rooms with light. Attached to the house, grafted to its walls and roofs with joinery ties and linked by complex masonry umbilicals, was a massed range of barns, byres and stables, treasuries for hay and grain. They were piled to their rafters with the artefacts of farming, with an archaeology of ploughs, carts, harvesters: with enigmatic machines, devices for sowing and reaping, maybe; for winnowing and baling. Many looked long discarded, superseded by more recent inventions but still preserved, paying silent rusting testimony to the work of long-dead farmhands.

  I stood in the yard for a while, listening to the laughter from inside, and the sounds of bathtime splashing. I counted the swallows swooping above my head and, when I reached fifty, went inside again. I wandered through peaceful shabby rooms downstairs; there, on a capacious armchair, Wheeler’s knitting lay, spiked by its needles. I examined a jigsaw puzzle Rose and Peter had left unfinished, and inserted a missing section of sky. Not one clock, as Peter had said: no ticking, no hours chiming. I wandered through to the huge, flagstoned kitchen and explored the warren of pantries, larders and still rooms that led off from it. I found myself in a gunroom, its racks emptied of guns – and then in a dairy: white-tiled, cool, every surface scoured scrupulously clean, white muslin cloths still hanging on hooks, earthenware bowls, a butter churn, instruments for sieving and skimming. It was in perfect order, as if the dairymaids who’d once worked in it had been there that very day, and would return the next morning. Like the barns, this space and its implements told a story – and the same one: it was eloquent of past industry.

  When I’d explored downstairs, I knew this house spoke to me – and that it made me sad. A great melancholy washed over me, and the doubts and uncertainties, the alarms I’d felt on my journey, came rushing up on a tide. Choosing one of the many doors at random and discovering yet another staircase concealed behind it, I followed it up, and found to my surprise that it led into my own bedroom: that room had two approaches, one obvious, and one hidden. There my Cambridge suitcases were, packed with the aid of Miss Dunsire. They were reproaching me. I removed my stopped watch and slowly began to unpack them. I was halfway through this task when Wheeler tapped at my door, said, ‘Ah, there you are,’ and then – seeing my expression – came into the room, closed the door firmly and, making no comment, began to assist me.

  We opened the case of books, and put my Egypt ones, a little library that was growing, on the nightstand by my bed. ‘Extra candles in the drawer, and matches,’ Wheeler said. ‘If you want to read all night, that’s your lookout. It won’t worry me. Like this stuff, do you?’ She picked up Belzoni’s account of his exploits in the Valley of the Kings.

  ‘I do, Wheeler. You can learn a lot from it. And I find it takes me back there.’

  ‘That must be a comfort.’ She lifted out a stack of work and exercise books. ‘And whatever’s this lot?’ she enquired, dumping them on a table by the window.

  ‘It’s my homework, Wheeler. Miss Dunsire has set exercises for the whole month. I have to do some every day. She doesn’t want me to fall behind.’

  ‘You could do with a rest from all that. You’re looking peaky. It’s not for me to say, but I will: is she here, this Miss Dunsire of yours? Here to check up on you and your homework, is she? Turning up – this week, next week? Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘No, Wheeler. She’s going to France for a month. At least, that’s what she said. Only, when we were in the car coming here, just something Rose said… I thought maybe she wasn’t going there, and she might have lied. She does lie – sometimes.’

  Wheeler considered this information. I could tell her mind was working it over. ‘If she has told an untruth,’ she asked, ‘and she’s elsewhere, this Miss Dunsire of yours, where might that be?’

  ‘I don’t know. London… or I thought – it crossed my mind, she might stay in Cambridge.’

  Wheeler considered the paltry evidence I then gave. ‘What nonsense,’ she said eventually. ‘Stay in some stuffy old town in England, when she could be free as a bird in France with her friends? Doesn’t sound likely to me. You come up with some funny ideas, you do. As for that address – it’s obvious: she’ll write from France and send it…

  ‘Right, let’s get the rest of this unpacked,’ she went on, ‘then you can go and read Peter a bedtime story. Stick to treasure hunts or knights, avoid witches: I don’t want him having nightmares. You remember how he was, in Egypt? I’m not having that starting up again. He’s over the nightmares now, thanks to this house – it has curative powers, this place, as I expect you’ve seen because you’re quick that way.’ She gave me a sharp look. ‘He’s healing, and Rose too. He turned four back in April, and that makes a big difference. You can see how he’s come on. But I still have to stay on my guard, and so do you. Don’t mention his mother – not unless he does.’

  We unpacked the rest of my things. We hung up my cotton dresses and blouses; put jumpers and underwear into a chest of drawers. ‘Well, someone knows how to pack,’ Wheeler remarked, unfolding tissue paper. ‘Couldn’t have done it better myself. Suffering saints – what’s this?’

  ‘It’s my birthday present, from Miss Dunsire. She saw it in a window in Bond Street and she thought – I’d like it.’

  Wheeler shook the dress out and inspected it. I thought of those exquisite clothes of Mrs d’Erlanger’s that Wheeler had looked after, of the decades she’d spent as a lady’s maid, her deep knowledge of the mysteries of dresses. I wanted her to approve my own dress, wanted it passionately, with an eagerness and trepidation I couldn’t have explained. I suffered as, like a scholar inspecting a rare book or some precious artefact, she silently examined the hand-sewn seams, the construction of the lining, the set of the sleeves, the alignment of the bodice darts, the fall of the skirt and the pure geometry of the neckl
ine.

  ‘Now that is a treasure.’ She was trying to hide it, but I could see she was moved. ‘That is a lovely, lovely thing. Someone’s cared, when they made that – and they knew what they were doing too. Look at those stitches, all done by hand – see how tiny they are? And the material – there’s silk and then there’s silk, I always say. This is pure – you won’t find better than this, not even in China… Did you know, the secret of silk was so precious that anyone caught trying to smuggle the cocoons out of China was executed on the spot? Take a strand of steel, Miss Lucy, and a strand of silk the same thickness – and the silk is the stronger of the two: think of that! So when you write to your Miss Dunsire, which you’ll be doing in due course, you tell her from me: Wheeler approves! You can tell her this too: when a dress passes muster with me, that means something.’

  I blushed with delight. ‘I know it’s a party dress, Wheeler, so it probably won’t be needed here. But I couldn’t tell Miss Dunsire that. I didn’t want to disappoint her.’

  ‘There might be a call for it. There’s Rose’s birthday coming up, towards the end of the month, just before you leave.’

  This caused immediate consternation. Rose had never mentioned this birthday, I had no present for her… ’What a worrier you are!’ Wheeler interrupted. ‘If it’s not one thing, it’s another. I’ll manage something. I always do. Now run off and read that story.’

  I read Peter a story about Galahad, sundry other knights and the powers of Excalibur. There were enchantments in it – but no witches. Outside, darkness was falling, and an owl – ‘That’s a tawny, Lucy,’ he said sleepily – had begun to call from the beechwoods. Next morning, when the sun – or the larks – woke me, Peter came padding into my room with the presents he’d forgotten to give me in the rush of my arrival.