The Visitors by Catherine Burns
Dedicated to the memory of my parents, Cath and Bob, for teaching me to love books.
IN THE NIGHT — 1
Like a white bird, the scream flew up from the depths of the cellar, then became trapped inside Marion’s head. As it flapped its wings against the inside of her skull, she wondered how had it got through three floors of the big strong house to her dusty little room in the attic? If the scream managed to reach her, surely it could find a way to someone else: Judith next door or old Mr. Weinberg opposite, who liked to walk his little Pomeranian dog along Grange Road in the small hours. Lying on her side made her hip bone ache, so she turned onto her back, but this position strained her knees. The sheets had wriggled to the bottom of the bed, so the woolen blankets scratched her skin, but when she pushed the blankets off, she was freezing cold. She tried to stop herself from wondering what had caused the person to scream and what it might be like down in the cellar in the middle of the night. Don’t think about it, she warned herself, or you’ll go mad, just like Great-aunt Phyllis. They’ll send you to one of those places with bars on the windows, and you’ll have to eat your dinner with a plastic spoon.
Then she heard Mother’s voice: John is doing what is best for them; you have to trust him—he is your brother and a very clever person, an Oxford graduate, no less. If you can’t trust John, your only living family, then who can you trust?
But what if Judith or Mr. Weinberg did hear the scream? What if someone called the police and they came to the house in the night? Would they bang on the door and wait for someone to answer, or just knock it down and come right in? Would they be dragged from their beds? You heard people say that sometimes: “They dragged them from their beds in the middle of the night.” But surely the police allowed a person time to get up and get dressed, didn’t they?
Perhaps you ought to have something decent ready just in case, suggested Mother. Those baggy black trousers with the jam stain on the knee and that scruffy brown jumper you dropped on the floor before getting into bed would hardly do.
While she and her brother were taken off to the police cells, the home she had lived in all her life would be ripped apart in search of evidence. The thought of strangers running around the house horrified her. What would they think of all the mess? The mold on the bathroom wall, all those broken appliances that John refused to let her throw away, yet never got round to repairing, the tins of food piled in the kitchen, and years and years of newspapers blocking the hall? And that Tupperware container on the top shelf of the fridge, the one full of black slime and greeny-blue fur; she wasn’t even sure what it had in it to begin with, and now she was too frightened to open it. If I weren’t already dead, I would die from shame that you let things get into such a state, added Mother.
She saw herself on the front page of a newspaper (Marion had never taken a good photo; even in her eighteenth-birthday portrait she looked like a matron of forty), that frizzy brown hair sticking out in all directions like a madwoman’s, all the world judging her. What would Judith say? That she had always thought Marion and her brother were odd? And Lydia? The shame of Lydia finding out about all of this would be too much to bear.
“It won’t happen, Marion. Nobody heard the scream. Nobody’s coming. Who’d be looking for them anyway?” said Neil, holding her in his arms and stroking the hysterical hair.
“But they will, if not tonight, then another night,” replied Marion. “And no one will understand that John only wants to help them.”
Marion Zetland was eight years old when she first discovered she was plain. If she’d had friends, someone might have pointed this out sooner, but Mother’s nerves, delicate as a glass cobweb, couldn’t stand the strain of other people’s “snotty-nosed scamps” cavorting around the Grange Road house, dirty feet clattering down the oak staircases, squeals bouncing around the large wood-paneled rooms, the possibility of someone breaking or even stealing one of the many “heirlooms,” so aside from her brother, John, Marion rarely saw other children outside of school.
Sarah Moss’s mother was young and pretty. She dressed in clothes bright as sweetie wrappers and her shiny blond hair bounced as she bent over to talk to Marion outside the gates of Saint Winifred’s Primary School one Friday afternoon. Marion’s own mother’s hair was set into a mass of interlocking iron and steel curls at Pierre Micheline’s once a week and could withstand Northport’s sharpest seafront breeze without shifting.
“Would you like to come over to our house tomorrow?” she asked with her smiling voice.
Marion saw Sarah over her mother’s shoulder. She was standing by a yellow car, her new grown-up teeth bared at Marion in a way that said, “I’d prefer you to drop dead than come to play.”
It was as if Sarah had grabbed her by one arm and the nice lady by the other, and they were trying to split her into two halves.
? ? ?
“THEY PROBABLY KNOW my family owned Northport Grand until the war,” Mother said loftily. “They’re using her to get in with us.”
But Dad insisted that Marion should go. “She spends too much time locked away in her own little world. She needs to get out and about, start making some real friends.”
Dad drove her to Sarah’s house on Saturday afternoon, smoking a cigarette with one hand and steering the Bentley with the other. The car was hot and leathery like the inside of a shoe, and with each jolting stop and start of the fifteen-minute journey, Marion felt as though she was about to be sick. They pulled up outside a new, boxlike house with huge stone snails crawling across a hump-shaped lawn.
“I’m popping over to the office now. I’ll pick you up seven-ish,” said Dad, biting on his black mustache. On weekends he often spent long periods of time at his office above the huge warehouse of Zetland’s Fine Fabrics.
“But, Dad . . . I don’t know if they want me to stay that long.”
“Well, just ask if they can let you wait until then.” He crushed his dying cigarette, alongside the bodies of several others, into a little metal container attached to the car door and clicked it shut.
“It’ll be all right, Chuckles, don’t you worry,” he said, pinching her cheek with ashy fingers.
The Bentley had already driven away before she reached the end of the gravel path. She rang the bell, and a shape appeared behind the bubbly glass door panels. When the door opened, a suntanned man with a brown sideswept fringe and blue jeans was standing there smiling at her. He crouched down so their heads were the same level.