Becoming Jane Eyre (5 page)

They talked of many things, speaking in French freely in a way she had done with her brother, but here with new words that had no childhood connotations. As then, so now, she felt free.
I cannot fall in love with him, an older and married man,
she had thought.

Their conversation was of the most innocent, she considers, even now, and yet compelling. They had discussed books, her writing, French literature. Her Master had talked at length of the three unities: place, time, and dramatic action. “The drama must take place offstage, you see. So much more can be suggested than shown, by mysterious sounds, cries from afar, a laugh in the obscurity of the night. The imagination of the reader can do the work.” He was very strict about imitating the classics.

She dared to argue with him. “But writing cannot be regulated. It is like the cry of the wind or—some sort of electricity.” He looked at her, smiled, and lifted his hand to her hair in a gesture of response, as though words were not enough. She took his hand and put it, in a gesture of admiration, to her lips.

They talked freely about history—the French Revolution, the English queen—about their own histories: his first wife and baby dying suddenly, tragically. Charlotte spoke of her dead older sisters and her brother’s dissolution.

“We have much that is similar in our past. For someone so young, you have suffered a lot. I have the impression we are going to be real friends,
amis pour toujours
,” he said.

She looked up at him and felt he knew her heart.

How his moods altered like the spring weather: the showers following fast on a sunny day, greeting her with his generous smile, speaking love with his dark eyes, pressing her hand, lauding her facility with words, often leaving little gifts in her desk: a small, dew-damp bouquet of wildflowers, a book blooming magically between a dull dictionary and a worn-out grammar, or some little sweet pastry nestled unexpectedly in the lap of a dull assignment.

She had never felt so well. She was full of energy, industry, and life. She enjoyed her French studies, her essays, and even her teaching, which she began to do for Madame H. with trepidation, taking over the role of the English teacher in the classroom with increasing authority, blossoming in the sun of Monsieur H.’s approbation. She realized she, too, could stand before students and hold their attention, share with them the things she knew. She, too, could teach.

One evening, as they stood at twilight under the acacia tree, the sky an orange-pink, as she looked up at him adoringly, all her throbbing heart in her gaze, he had bent down close, pressing his heavy, hard body against her, brushing her cheek with his damp lips, stealing a brief kiss, whispering in her ear. “Who,” he said. “Who is my best girl?”

“Your wife,” she had answered, but feebly, her voice shaking. How could he ask such a question? What did it mean?

“If only, if only. . . .” And she felt his body swelling with a promise she could only guess at, as he pressed himself against her.

Her existence was filling up in Belgium for a while, as it does now here in Manchester, sitting beside her father, writing this book, which comes to her so fast and clearly. Once again she feels that spring sultriness here, in the close rooms in Manchester, where she keeps the fire going for her father.

CHAPTER FIVE

W
hat a luxury to be able to sit here hour after hour in the muffled light and the silence of the city! She writes all through the day with little interruption except for her father’s few murmured requests and the light food the nurse brings him. She helps herself from his tray. She shares the strained breakfast porridge, the tapioca, familiar food from her childhood. She eats all her meals close beside him. She feeds him. He opens his lips on the spoon like a baby bird. She wipes his lips and chin, and then her own. She hands the tray back to the nurse, a coarse-faced woman who disturbs her work. Then she takes up her pencil again.

The writing is her way out of this room, this cell of solitude, darkness, and despair. Her mind is free to roam where it will. She dares to take up her humiliations and heartaches and to give them a structure. She thinks of the plot like Pilgrim’s voyage, a loosely linked chain of events, the battle with one danger leading to the next: causality.

As the story takes shape, it lifts her out of the gloom of her failures at life and love. “What do you want?” the ten-year-old girl asks the bully who finds her in her hideout and disturbs the reading of her favorite book.

Sitting beside her helpless father, she completes the scene. When the boy insults her and throws the precious book at her, she has Jane strike back. “Wicked and cruel boy!” she says. “You are like a murderer.” Blood seeping from her head wound, she compares him to the Roman emperors, to Caligula and Nero. She makes active what has been passive in life. Her Jane retaliates with violence, like a bad animal who claws and must be punished; she is carried off to the Red Room. There, despite her protests, she is cruelly abandoned. Her aunt shuts her up entirely alone in the room with its large bedstead, damask curtains, shrouded windows, and looking glass, where her husband, Jane’s uncle, breathed his last.

Like her Jane, who sits in the dark on her stool in the locked room, Charlotte has no need for bonds. She feels that if she left her father now he might disappear, as though it is her dim sight that holds him hovering in half life, as though she has invented him and not he her.

Charlotte rises and walks across the darkened room. A pale face she hardly recognizes glimmers back at her from the looking glass, like an illustration in a child’s book, a goblin half-emerging from behind a curtain. She sees a small, childlike, neckless, insignificant person with irregular features.
Who is here? What stranger is this?
Why is this person not more like the models she studied as a girl in the annuals? Where is the perfectly oval face, the long, aristocratic neck, the alabaster shoulders, and the swanlike carriage? Above all, she thinks, drawing back her upper lip, where are the even teeth?

So often she slips into a room in the shadows. She hugs the wall. She has the sort of face and figure people compliment, saying she has such expressive eyes, such lovely, light-brown hair, such dainty hands and feet. Or, she has been told, she has a smile that speaks of forbearance, courage, and loyalty.

A paralyzing fear only small children feel, a fear of ghosts and spirits, comes to her again. She thinks of her Methodist aunt’s terrible tales of sin and eternal damnation: “Say your prayers, child, for if you don’t repent, something bad might come and fetch you away.” She longs for her mother’s protection. At the same time she remembers her mother’s last words, which were for her children, and what she feared most was that her dead mother might come back to them in the night to make sure her last wishes were being carried out and her poor children in good hands.

Now the ghosts of all the departed are gathered here at her father’s bedside: her mother, her two older sisters, her dear friend, Martha, who died young and far from home. She hears a gust of dry air beating on the windows and a cry in the quiet street below. Candlelight flickers on the ceiling. How far into this underworld does she dare to go? Will she find her way back?

The ghost of the mother’s brother comes to the child, Jane, in the Red Room. The ghost terrifies both her and her creator. Jane cries out in desperation for help.

Charlotte leans over her exercise book now for solace and lifts it to her eyes, which, like her father’s, have never been good. She is accustomed to writing this way, but through the haze of tears she cannot read what she has written. She brushes her hand over the page and goes on. The early light, almost as blue as moonlight, filters through the curtains.

CHAPTER SIX

I
n the half dark her father imagines he is back in the parlor where he first saw his future wife. He hears the rustling of her skirts and her lively, booted steps as she trips into the room. She stands before him, the light behind her. Plain, erect, correct, in a pale dress, she hovers shyly at her aunt’s side. “How do you do?” she says demurely to him. She bobs a curtsy, and he takes her small, cool hand in his large, hot one. She moves from him, going over to the sideboard and politely offering him lemonade from a glass pitcher. After his long walk in the August heat, he is thirsty. “I’d appreciate that,” he says, though he would prefer something stronger. He stares at her as she pours, and she glances back. There is something frank and playful in her smile that moves him as she offers him the glass and her cold fingers touch his.

He thinks how his wife’s family would have scorned his poor parents, the Pruntys, from County Down, had he not entered their parlor caparisoned in the sable of the clergyman, with his degree from Cambridge and his altered name.

He remembers his wife’s easy wit, her irreverent sense of fun, her good sense, her strong Methodist faith, and what pleased her “saucy Pat,” as she called him, best of all: her fast-growing infatuation with him. He remembers her lively letters, in which she told him that he was replacing her God for her.

At twenty-nine, his wife was not much younger than this daughter at his side. She must almost have given up hope of marrying, despite her dowry of fifty pounds a year.

He remembers the joyous wedding, her frightened shyness on the wedding night. “Let us first get to know one another better,” she had said firmly, leaving him breathless beside her, filled with lust, the scent of her skin in the air, the soft sound of her breathing in the dark. The soft sweetness of her body against his, the night when she finally succumbed to him, comes back.

“Perhaps we could wait a few more days,” his wife had said, as he dared to reach for her waist, to draw her firmly to him. She had kept him waiting a long while.

“I have been waiting for years,” he had found the courage to say, half-playfully, half-exultantly, as she lay trembling beside him in her long white nightdress, her frilled nightcap. “What difference would a few more days make? I am your husband. I have been patient, and you have promised to obey.”

“Tell me what I must do,” she had whispered then. And, indeed, when he thinks about it now, it was a fearful thing to have done.

Then, young, impatient, and sure of his rights, he had told her. He has almost forgotten the feeling of her tender, shy touch, as he guided her small hand to the place where he throbbed and yearned.

“No, I can’t,” she said, drawing back as though he were made of fire. “Not that.”

“Help me. Then it will be quick,” he promised, and indeed, it was.

He has not forgotten those wild, brief plunges into her small, obedient body, nor the prayers she offered up to her God as he worked fast with quick, brutal thrusts; and the relief she brought him again and again, a relief he came to count on night after breathless night, and one she never denied him, despite the repeated pregnancies, one every year for six years, despite her soft pleas for respite.

“Not yet. I’m not well yet. In a while, please, dear. I am so tired. Another baby would kill me,” she would say.

“A wife’s duty,” he had only to remind her for her to open up her body to him. Somehow, strangely, it excited him to think of his wife performing her duty, muttering her prayers:
please God help me, please God help me, please,
while he took his rightful pleasure. He remembers how she would cross herself afterward and say, “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, amen.” He remembers the strong odor of her body after sex.

Perhaps, he thinks, if he could have found another wife who would have taken them on, been a real mother to them, they would all have prospered. They cannot say he did not try. But what woman in her right senses would take him and six small children in charge in that remote, cold place on a stipend of two hundred pounds a year?

He thinks of the irony of his solitary cohabitation for so many years with his wife’s spinster sister, her fifty pounds a year replacing his wife’s fifty. How she hoarded her store. He remembers her five-pound gift for the new church organ and how difficult it was to obtain. He was prohibited by the laws of his Church from taking her as his wife, should he have so desired.