Havisham: A Novel (11 page)

‘The jungle cat’s face –’

‘That’s Sheba.’

‘Who?’

‘Isabella.’

‘I wondered why she was always prowling about.’

‘She means well, I expect.’

‘Yes?’

‘She’s protecting me.’

‘From what? Or from whom?’

‘I – don’t know. I didn’t ask her to –’

‘Better to be safe.’

‘I don’t feel I’m in danger.’

‘Big cats could do you more harm than anything.’

‘Not Sheba.’

‘You could trust your life to her?’

‘I think I’m wanted. You’ll have to excuse –’

‘Fifteen minutes?’

‘Let’s say twenty.’

‘The lady decides. Twenty it is.’

The rooms echoed with laughter, with shrieks and exclamations, with the sounds of frivolity. Yet eyes looking out from behind the gouged sockets might seem strangely old and tired, while the faces bore no blemishes and were infallible symbols of youth.

And always there was the plague doctor, with his long snout hanging down in front. He had the knack of materialising a few feet away from me, even fleeter than Sheba, and brazenly coasting past. He left a chill behind him; stirred in with the funereal perfume of the luxuriant white lilies forced for months under hothouse glass to offer just moments of diversion during the hours of this long night.

By the time the masks came off – there would unfailingly be an unmasking at some point in any evening – I couldn’t find him. My eyes roamed around the rooms. I slipped away from the others, having shed my own disguise, but feeling that somehow the music that continued to serenade us would be a discreet cover.

Was he hiding from me? I was quite determined to find him. I knew that he couldn’t escape me if he was still here.

Why leave without telling me?

Was it to save me embarrassment?

Or – or because he knew better the hold he had over me, and he meant to keep me in thrall? I went looking for Sally. Our maids and servants, milling about the back quarters, spoilt the illusion for us, not being in Venetian dress.

I discovered Sally by herself in a requisitioned laundry room, head down, sewing the hem of her dress. She jumped when she saw me.

‘Oh, it’s
you
!’

‘Don’t tell me you forgot about me?’

She forced a smile.

‘I had a mishap, I caught my foot in the hem –’

I wanted to tell her who was here, but I didn’t dare risk a disclosure at the moment, not even to Sally. She looked tired. Her eyes were a little puffy. Venice had had its back rooms of servants too, serving the formal ceremony – the pomp and circumstance – of the salons.

‘Have you seen it, Sally?’

‘A little.’

‘You’ve been outside, at the fireworks? You have mud on your shoes.’

She looked down at her feet.

‘Aren’t you glad you came?’ I asked her. ‘Imagine having missed this!’

We left the house at three in the morning, in a drizzle. The candles in the outdoor lanterns fizzed and sputtered. Sally had my cape ready. I sat in the Chadwycks’ carriage watching the departing guests. One with his silver face back in place proffered his three-cornered hat and bowed deep as we rolled past. My heart thumped in my chest.

He remained bowed, and I hoped Sally would see from the carriage behind.

I forgot all the other masks of the evening, remembered that peerless silver one, the smooth and featureless visage. Later, starting to doze a little, I opened my eyes and saw, here and there on the burgundy wool of my cape, tiny flecks of … silver leaf. I stared at them.

Astonished, I picked them up on the tip of my finger. I was puzzling on the silver motes when I noticed some mud trails on the front outside of the cape, at hem level along the bottom. Not quite fresh mud, but not dried either: a few hours old.

I reminded myself, I should check Sally about wearing my clothes without asking me. Politely, almost casually, because she was my friend. But the speckles of silver leaf were what fascinated me. As if I must have started to dream about him already, and there – in a light scattering – amazingly was the actual evidence of my mind’s fancy.

F
IFTEEN

As soon as I walked into Satis House I knew something had changed. No riding cloak, no boots, no crop, none of Arthur’s discarded effects. No stink of tobacco, or snuff. Arthur was living out.

‘There’s been a parting of the ways,’ my father said.

The lawyer Mr Snee was involved, because my father had decided he must change his will.

‘He’s not disinherited outright. There’s something for him. But only a minding.’

There had been terrible tantrums from Arthur, and those had put my father into a rage.

‘I had no alternative. “You’ll drain us dry,” I said. His spending was much worse than I thought.’

‘Is he coming back?’

‘I have no way of telling.’

‘It’ll be like old times.’

Not really, I realised, a moment after I’d said it. In times past, I hadn’t known my father was remarried, nor that I had a half-brother.

‘He knows where to go to receive his keep.’

My father picked up items of correspondence which awaited his reply. He coughed his chest clear. Then he fixed his spectacles on his nose to read with, and reached out for his pen. Back to business.

*   *   *

Along the Backs. The willows drooped down to the water and skimmed the surface. Dragonflies hovered in the blue air. The grazing cattle lowed in King’s meadow. Laughter, a woman’s and a man’s, trailed down from Clare Bridge. The bridge was beautiful but slightly askew, which made me think – as we drifted beneath it, through the small but suddenly dank tunnel of arch – that Moses had been right: beauty does always leave itself something short of perfection.

But my brief sobriety lifted as we re-emerged into sunshine. I felt I wanted to do no more than glance, dance, along the placid surface of this present time.

*   *   *

When we sat down to the play, on benches set out on duckboards in the college lea, the evening sun was still shining.

‘Built for your Ease and Pleasure, Sirs, behold,

This Night, our little Stage its Scenes unfold.

Here, to the Muse, your fav’ring Smiles afford:

Bid Genius flourish, and on Fancy’s wing

Mounted aloft, hear sweetest SHAKESPEAR sing!’

Time flew past. A wood near Athens. Another part of the Wood. Theseus’s Palace. A room in Quince’s House. I liked the Immortals best – Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the fairies – wearing their elfin green. I laughed as the love potion was sprinkled on sleeping eyelids, a juice to ‘make man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature that it sees’.

Later, a chill started to seep up from the pasture-grass. A shiver passed through the trees. Act V. The conclusion was in sight, but all would not be resolved to every character’s satisfaction.

Some of the players had to clear their throats, cough out croaks. Dampness must have got into the scenery, because corrugations were appearing on the painted backdrop of Theseus’s Palace. After the last lines one of the actors – Bottom unmasked – came forward to speak, to send us on our way.

‘Precepts from hence with ten-fold Vigour dart,

And seize thro’ Eyes, and Ears, the captive Heart.

Be VICE abash’d then, and be VIRTUE bold;

Be honour ever free, and never sold!

Protect the Stage on this determin’d Plan,

And prove that Reason is the Test of Man.’

*   *   *

We started to make our way back to W’m’s rooms, across the lawns. My feet felt wet through my shoes. A bright moon shone. The air was filled with our banter, our laughter, someone’s philosophical exegesis. At one point I was walking beside W’m, but he seemed oblivious. Now I felt nothing either, and I wondered at that person I had been. He was busy talking to someone, not about Plato or Tibullus, but about one of his Surrey neighbours, Lucinda Osborne, teasing out information as adeptly as if he were playing a fish.

We followed the river. On the opposite bank, boldly illuminated by moonlight, I noticed a young woman stand listening to us. She twisted her head on one side to hear. Then she started walking. Down the embankment, to a small sliver of strand.

She continued to walk, and I kept looking, wondering why she didn’t stop.

Into the river.

The water rose to her knees, then to her waist.

She kept on taking steps. A stumble on the stones at the bottom, but she stayed upright.

Now the water came up to the level of her chest.

(And the oddest thing, the detail I noted in these moments that seemed so slowed out of true, suspended from the rules of ordinary time: the young woman was wearing a hat.)

Moses was shouting down at her, then the others. Mouse screamed at her to stop, stop. Moses was first to go running down the bank, followed by two or three of the men. W’m held Sheba and Mouse close beside him. The woman had water up to her neck. Her face had a curiously seraphic and peaceful expression, she seemed to be smiling – smiling quite inconsequentially – over at us.

I was still supposing she was playing some queer game when her face disappeared beneath the water. (The hat on her head became detached: it was left floating while her face blurred palely beneath the surface. A straw hat with a scarlet ribbon and a white wax flower, adrift by moonlight.)

Moses had thrown off his coat and waistcoat and dived in. A hole exploded in the river. He swam out.

It was at the widest part of the river. By the time he reached the spot, the woman had disappeared from view. Moses reached down, tried grabbing, wrestled with the woman’s limbs, which were becoming caught in weed.

From the bank it was all quite clear and candid to us. Huge events occupied only a very few seconds. Time stuttered.

Another two had gone swimming out, arms thrashing. They helped Moses haul the woman back ashore. The shore watchers were afraid to touch her. Her eyes were open, staring up at the moon in the sky. She still wore the expression of beatific certainty.

But the person she’d been was now a corpse. The skin seemed to be turning blue, like rich ripe cheese.

Moses, in sodden clothes, was praying for her soul. Something about the gesture, Moses’s fervent bravery in the face of a terrible fact – or maybe the passion being wrung from a hopeless situation – moved me deeply. I was crying before I realised it. Sheba stared, transferring some of her horror at the night’s tragedy on to me.

Next day we discussed it endlessly among ourselves.

While the others talked, I watched from the window. Suddenly Cambridge appeared very small to me. A collection of beautiful tended gardens, enclosed by high excluding walls. Beneath a high, vaulting, indifferent fenland sky.

But yet the more we search, the less we know,

Because we find our work doth endless grow.

For who doth know, but stars we see by night

Are suns which to some other worlds give light?

Moses was saying even less than I was. It was as if a part of him were temporarily absent, attending the dead woman’s spirit.

I looked up at one point. He was staring across at me. Curiously, after his athletic heroism of the day before, his face now showed fear.

We avoided each other for the rest of that day and evening. By the
next
day he was coughing and sneezing, speaking through a blocked nose. I fetched him handkerchiefs and concocted a hot toddy for him to drink.

‘Why d’you think she did it?’

I told him I had no idea. He seemed disappointed that I shouldn’t know.

‘A broken heart,’ I suggested.

‘Do people suffer so much?’

‘For love? Oh, I imagine so.’

‘To drown herself?’

‘Why does that astonish you? Dido threw herself on the flames.’

‘In legend.’

‘And real life’s different?’ I asked.

‘Cursed creature.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Bedlam Bess.’

‘Aren’t you meant to pity her?’

He was staring at me again, how he had done earlier.

More sneezes.

A knock at the door. Another friend’s younger sister, asking if she could be of any help.

All this uncritical devotion to Moses. Even the memory of his vain dash to try to save the woman couldn’t temper my impatience.

I thought of that seraphic face, prepared for death, and I made mine the opposite. I pursed my lips drily, crinkled my nose.

Moses was watching me, deeply confused.

I felt it must be magnetic repulsion, this failure of mine – which shamed me a little – to wreathe him with honour as his devotees did.

S
IXTEEN

‘
And
again!’

Sheba pointed.

‘Your Mr Compeyson. Well, well!’

When it was time for us to pass each other, he was ready with a smile. He nodded at my fan.

‘Hold on to that.’

Mouse whisked me away, with a vigour that surprised me.

‘You haven’t met all W’m’s friends, have you, Catherine? Here’re some more…’

*   *   *

There was an opportunity for a dance. I couldn’t locate my partner on my card, and he came up to me shortly after the music started, telling me he had been let down by his, would I please do him the honour?

It was a fast gavotte. We managed to keep up. I was out of breath by the end, though; I felt that normally I wouldn’t have been.

It was Moses’s turn next, for a more sedate old-fashioned minuet, and I wished it wasn’t. He tried too earnestly hard, treating it as another abstruse subject he should master. But dancing takes a certain lightness, a spring in the step, an elasticity in the calves; a kind of
joie de vivre
, or alternatively a leavening element of self-proclaiming stupidity in one’s make-up. It wasn’t Moses’s forte.

‘
You
show me,’ he mouthed at me.

I simulated incomprehension. He was trying to uncover my true talents, the few there might be, and buoyed up by the music and by my previous dance I didn’t intend to be patronised. I made my steps so deft and elegant, so sylph-like, but so deceptively simple, that I knew he would appear all the more of a clod.