Havisham: A Novel (12 page)

*   *   *

After that ‘my Mr Compeyson’ was at the majority of the Assemblies and house-parties I went to with the Chadwycks. I could see the pleasure he took from my companions’ irritation, to find, hell and damnation, here was somewhere else
he
’d managed to get himself invited to. It was an entertainment for him, to see if the Chadwycks could ignore his presence for an entire evening. It was a divertissement for me, and literally, to continue acknowledging his presence, so that only he should be aware – furtive glances, and holding myself side on, and allowing a smile for someone else to become (over their shoulders) a smile intended really for him.

*   *   *

He wasn’t au fait with Virgil, or
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, or Clementi’s keyboard sonatas. But he had an incomparable mastery of racecourse runners and their riders. He had an infallible recall of their past showings, and on that he based his predictions of future form.

John Pond’s daughter, Miss Pond. Captain Shafto. Hugo Meynell, ‘Hunting Jupiter’. Lord Clermont in scarlet, Mr Panton in buff. Bunbury, pink and white stripes, the Dundas white with scarlet spots. Brown Queensberry, crimson Grafton, straw silk for Devonshire.

‘I’m the memory man.’

I couldn’t judge his tone of voice. I was a little flustered.

‘Of course,’ I said, obeying no logic, ‘Dido,
she
couldn’t forget.’

He smiled blankly.

‘The queen,’ I said. ‘Of Carthage.’

‘Poor old biddy. What couldn’t she forget?’

‘Oh…’ I shrugged, embarrassed. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s just a myth.’

‘Best left to the artists, then. Painters, sculptors, that sort.’

‘Purcell.’

The name so revered at Durley Chase became entangled with nearby laughter. He was saved from having to reply, and I thought I caught a flicker of relief pass across his smoothly, evenly handsome face.

*   *   *

‘Coincidences happen,’ Sheba said. ‘But not
that
often.’

‘Sometimes,’ Moses began, ‘we’re too close to something, it’s really out of focus, it gets distorted –’

‘Nothing’s distorted,’ I snapped back.

‘It’s all right, Catherine,’ Mouse put in.

‘
Something
’s got under your skin,’ Sheba said.

W’m laughed.

‘That’s what friends are for,’ Sheba said.

‘I don’t know
what
they’re for,’ I told her.

‘So that we don’t get out of our depth,’ Mouse said.

‘So they’ll let us know –’ Sheba leaned closer, ‘– if we’re likely to make a tiny little fool of ourselves. Warn us if it looks as though we might be heading for a fall.’

I wouldn’t have tolerated a remark of that kind from anyone except Sheba: and even then, scarcely from her. I was furious with them all. I could either let them see that, or convince them of the opposite.

I knew what they were thinking. ‘My Mr Compeyson’ wasn’t
our
sort of person. Too forward, too familiar, and who had ever heard of a tribe with
that
name? I found myself smiling at them, but it was done with a cold heart.

Mouse slipped her arm under mine, then Sheba. W’m raised one eyebrow (as eyebrows always are raised) quizzically. Moses looked as unhappy as I felt; he was still thinking of the drowned girl.

*   *   *

But they couldn’t stop me; they wouldn’t keep me from him. There were always opportunities in an evening, and I was as adept as him at seeking them out.

A father who’d been a doctor at sea. A mother who didn’t keep well. Several siblings.

A harsh school somewhere in the West, attended by sons of mainly naval and military families.

An anticipated inheritance from a Scottish relative reneged upon.

Introductions from old school friends. Other people’s parties, in all the fashionable towns: Exeter, Salisbury, Nottingham, Chester, York, Tunbridge.

‘I’m obliged to do a little work too, I’m afraid. Norfolk way. To earn a living for myself.’

‘You shouldn’t apologise. Work is honest and true.’

‘That’s your father’s philosophy?’

‘No. It’s my own experience. I now realise that it is.’

And – before I could think to stop – I found myself telling him how it would give me no little pleasure at Durley Chase, but a private satisfaction I didn’t declare to
them
, to consider how back home I saw wealth make itself: how I smelt it in the rooms of Satis House when the windows were open on the yard side and I could hear the men at their unremitting labour.

When I was physically close to him – as I used to be with W’m, only more so now – I was aware of an energy that was transmitted from him.

I felt like adamant, impelled by a magnet; the hardness of my substance no longer signified, against the power of that attraction.

*   *   *

He remembered whatever I told him. He had complete recall. It was uncanny. The memory man. He could anticipate what I was going to say next. He seemed to have read the libretto of my thoughts beforehand.

He knew things, as if I must have told him but had forgotten that I’d told him. Only Sally previously had been granted such a degree of intimacy as I realised – without quite intending it –
he
enjoyed now, with the most elusive details of my life: my most personal past, my feelings, my dreams.

No Latin, no Dido and Aeneas.

(‘Why learn to speak like people who’ve been dead for a thousand years?’

‘Nearly two,’ I said.)

No Purcell.

(He whistled tunes he heard at the theatre, or which he heard the travellers at the racecourses playing on their fiddles and squeezeboxes.)

Again it was a reprieve for me, from too much sheer mental drudgery – not to have to come up with bons mots, or to weave the maxims of great men into my conversation.

*   *   *

‘On the 20th, you see, Escape was at two to one. Field of four, over two miles. Coriander, Skylark, Pipator, they all beat him. On the 21st, field of six, over six miles. Escape was four to one and five to one. Chifney had twenty guineas on the second race, not the first. Both were his rides. Escape raced past the favourite, Chanticleer, came home well to the front.’

Now – and I was to tell him honestly – what did I think of
that
?

*   *   *

‘But if he has all these friends…’ I objected.

‘Well, it’s an art,’ Mouse said, ‘I grant you.’

‘What is?’

‘Collecting friends. Only, I should say, they’re not.’

‘Not what, Mouse?’

‘Not friends, not properly. He drops their names, and they’re too well-mannered – most of them – to show Charles Compeyson the door. They suffer him –’

‘No, Mouse. That can’t be –’

‘– suffer him, because it seems everyone else does too, and we all
hate
to be different.’

‘Don’t they like him?’

‘He just isn’t one of them. He doesn’t belong to the past.’

‘
You
don’t like him either.’

‘I prefer to trust people.’

‘And you don’t trust him?’

‘I need to
know
people to do that.’

‘You know
me
?’ I asked her.

‘You’re a friend.’

‘But I’ve come too late. Remember – real friendships go back into the past. You said so yourself.’

‘You’re an exception, Catherine.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh…’

‘Because I’m so foolish? Because I need your protection?’

‘“No” to the first. But “yes” to the second.’

‘Let’s stop,’ I said, ‘please.’

‘Only if you’ll promise not to desert us. Your friends.’

‘Nor you me.’

*   *   *

He didn’t always tell me where he went between these re-encounters.

In a racing phaeton, I heard it said, a young fellow could put himself about over a weekend, travelling anywhere within a hundred-mile radius drawn from the capital.

He didn’t have anything so fast at his disposal, that I was aware of. But he did have the healthy colour of a man who might well cover a lot of distance; and he certainly had the charm to assure himself of transportation, whether offering to drive a party or being given the use of a carriage for one or two days with an agreed time and place for its return.

He’d had his own life before I met him. Why should I expect him to account for the time when he was required to earn his own keep and was out of my ken?

*   *   *

I convinced myself that I
enjoyed
knowing as little about him as I did. I felt I was freer to fill in details from my imagination, when the picture was so sketchy; it gave me a bigger, not lesser, stake in his life, because I had to think myself into it more. And it occurred to me that he must be fully aware of this.

*   *   *

I told Sally things which, as soon as they had tumbled out of me, I realised I shouldn’t have said.

(
Ah! how sweet it is to love.
)

About the jolts of excitement my body received from him; about waking up thinking of him.

(
Ah! how gay is young desire.
)

About dressing to please
him
, first and foremost. About finding him waiting for me in my dreams.

It was Sally who would remind me of what I’d said before, quoting my discrepancies back at me.

I laughed them all away.

(
And what pleasing pain we prove,/ When first we feel a lover’s fire.
)

All the while Sally would be sewing or winding wool, even setting to some item of silverware she’d noticed hadn’t been polished well enough.

(
Pains of love are sweeter far,/ Than all other pleasures are.
)

She was never still now, which made me wonder if she was losing interest a little – or was at the very least guilty, about the time I took up with my stories of Durley and elsewhere, my running narrative about a man I hadn’t even mentioned to my father. But busy as she was, she must have been paying me very close attention, to be able to remember so much the next time about the Chadwycks and – especially – the fugitive figure of ‘my’ Charles Compeyson.

S
EVENTEEN

The Osbornes had the neighbouring estate, Thurston Park. Lady Chadwyck and the second Lady Osborne weren’t on the best terms, but their children were of an age and quite content with one another’s company. The Osbornes had the loftier pedigree, but were never tempted to condescend.

There was an amount of come and go.

But we hadn’t set eyes on
him
before …

A hooded figure was just visible under the trees. A man with a collection of books tucked beneath one arm. As soon as he saw
us
, he immediately turned his back and hurried away.

‘Who’s that?’ we asked.

‘Our new hermit.’

He called himself Nemo, ‘No One’, because he wanted to shed the manner of life he’d had.

He lived in a grotto, beyond the ha-ha’s sunken fence. It was built like a two-thirds-scale gate-tower to a castle. The slit windows had been glazed, and a flue and fireplace put in, but apart from those the man lived with few creature comforts.

‘Candles. A cooking pot. He draws water from the well; a well we dowsed to find for him. It’s terribly quaint, don’t you think?’

We concurred.

‘My father has him write down what he wants – well, what he needs, since he tells us he doesn’t have “wants” any more. And also there’s a resume of his activities for the past twelve months he has to supply in return for his keep. Which takes about ten lines.’

So, this was what wealth allowed: the luxury of supporting other people’s eccentricities?

We stood watching for a glimpse of him, taking care not to snag our finery in the cultivated wilderness of rough grass and nettles. When we spotted him, on the other side of the ha-ha, where the deer came to crop,
he
was watching us from the cover of the arboretum. Probably he was wondering at our own quirks: this show of sartorial vanity, and the herding impulse, our uniform fascination as we stared back stupidly with the white faces of showground sheep.

*   *   *

Charles told me that, following the report I’d given him, he’d come to an arrangement with Nemo.

‘You’ve what? “An arrangement”?’

‘That he’ll make himself scarce every so often, and we can avail ourselves of his hospitality. He’s quite well set up, you know. I thought it would be all sackcloth and ashes.’

‘You’ve seen where he lives?’

‘And so will you, very shortly.’

I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, at the sheer effrontery. That eclipsed, for the moment, the question of propriety. He’d thought of that too.

‘I’ve got the loan of a lad. He can serve us tea. If he’s ever made the stuff.’

‘Why shouldn’t he know how to make tea?’

‘Just wait and see.’

Boodle was a Negro, fourteen or fifteen years old, dressed in blue velveteen and gold buttons. (A snug fit, and the velveteen was worn, and the buttons tarnished, but the effect was all.) He had a smile of sharp white teeth, and wanted to show willing.

The lad’s tea was inexpert, but I’d had a thirsty walk over and any refreshment was welcome.

The folly’s interior was a little cramped, to be sure, with low ceilings. But it was decently furnished, with a fireplace where pine cones sparked in the grate; the fragrance of pine helped smother the underlying whiff of damp.

‘Well, it’s better than nothing, I thought.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Yes indeed.’

The shelves on the walls sagged with books. Some framed prints showed the grassy ruins of Rome.

From the (glazed) window I could see Nemo pacing about reading.

(‘I think he gets a bit lost if he strays too far. Don’t let the house out of your sight, I told him.’

Was this another attempt not to offend the delicacies of
bienséance
, I wondered.)

*   *   *

And there we would go, to the hermitage, once every ten days or so over half a year, whenever he could get away and I could make the excuse of a long walk
sola
from Durley Chase. We were waited upon by the black boy while, outside, Nemo strode back and forth in view of us.