Havisham: A Novel (13 page)

We took tea. And we talked. I told him about life with the Chadwycks, and he discussed none too respectfully the august company they kept. I was a little bothered that we kept Nemo out of his house, but I was assured that he was being adequately recompensed for the inconvenience.

‘Some cash won’t go amiss, I dare say. Of course those hermits always come from decent families who can provide for their own. But who knows what the Osbornes have taken from
him
?’

‘Surely never,’ I said.

‘Never ones to miss out on a decent rental, the Osbornes.’

‘I thought a hermit was –’

‘A kind of decoration?’

‘– to prove their intellectual qualifications.’

‘Families like the Osbornes don’t profit by their intellectual qualifications.’

‘By what, then?’

‘Their mercenary instincts.’

‘No.’

‘Oh yes. Come on, Catherine, that’s the way of the world.’

The light playful tone of his voice puzzled me. If that was so, I said, then it was a harsh truth.

‘A brewer’s daughter like yourself too!’

‘I’m meant to know all about the world?’

‘
Don’t
you?’

‘This and that. But what it adds up to…’

‘Well, you can just sit tight. In your cosy nest.’

‘I can have aspirations, though.’

‘Oh, heiresses don’t need those!’

‘Whose side are you on?’

He laughed, and I smiled, not because I agreed or even understood, but so that I wouldn’t – if only for the sake of five brief seconds – be left behind and start to lose him.

*   *   *

The things he knew about me. Trivial, unimportant things. It seemed to me those must be the most difficult facts of all to discover. That I preferred fish to meat, and grayling to mackerel, and sole to grayling. That I slept with my window slightly ajar, and never on two pillows. That I wore away the left inside of my right heel before any other part of either shoe. That I carried a sachet of orange blossom in my portmanteau. That I wrote letters wearing a clip-on cotton frill over my cuff. That I gargled with salt water three – and always three – times a day. And let down my hair and brushed it with fifty strokes – or as near as – every night before bed. That my favourite poet used to be Gray, but now it was Cowper. That I had the knack of cracking a Brazil nut lengthwise, and splitting an apple with just my two thumbs. That I preferred damsons, even bruised windfall, to a handful of sweet cherries. That I woke around seven o’clock every morning, whatever the season, however dark my bedroom was. That I always ran cream over the back of my spoon.

As if he’d been prying on me through the windows of the Chase.

*   *   *

His discoveries about me occurred in several quite different conversations.

I made a fuss about not wanting to hear any more, although I was fascinated to learn how he knew what he did.

‘I can’t betray my source. Or sources.’

‘I’m under surveillance by someone? Who?’

He shook his head.

‘
You
can’t know by yourself,’ I said.

‘Whyever not?’

‘You’d need to be invisible.’

‘A ghost?’

‘No, ghosts are people who’re dead to us. Over and done with.’

‘Then I’m the spirit of curiosity. A locked door is no impediment.’

‘Well, if you won’t tell me…’

I was bemused, but not alarmed. He might have been guessing sometimes, he might have had good hearing for eavesdropping; the Durley staff were as liable to blab as any – and Satis House had employed several loose-tongued girls in recent years. I wasn’t bothered enough to think about it much, let alone worry. It might have been telepathy that was responsible, his kindred soul exactly in sympathy – in imaginative conjunction – with my own.

*   *   *

We were perfectly decorous together. It took the will of both of us to be so. I trusted him with me, and myself with him. The blackamoor shuffled about just outside the doorway, his ears tuned and the whites of his eyes shining in the darkness of the corridor, all his native skills of the hunt reapplied to protecting our staunch English etiquette.

Maybe, a little bit, I didn’t want to trust myself so implicitly. But then I would try that much harder, fastening down hard on myself, to drive mischief of that sort right out of my mind.

Dallying, once, while he was outside with the boy, I took down a copy of the
Aeneid
from the shelves.

I found a passage I already knew, from Book IV.

But anxious cares already seiz’d the queen;

She fed within her veins a flame unseen;

The hero’s valour, acts, and birth inspire

Her soul with love, and fan the secret fire.

At his approach I closed the book and quickly replaced it among the others before he should see. Virgil, I felt, didn’t fit in with this modus vivendi on our secret afternoons.

*   *   *

He seemed to sense the touch of damp or cold on my skin as soon as I did myself.

‘You’re a little chilly?’

‘A little.’

‘Here –’

‘No, I couldn’t possib—’

‘Come on.’

He would remove his coat and drape it round my shoulders.

‘I should wear warmer clothes,’ I said.

So, when I knew that I should, why didn’t I?

*   *   *

W’m’s engagement had been announced. Sheba and Mouse were still recovering from the shock.

‘We never thought…’

It wasn’t to the young woman I thought I’d lost him to, but to one of her circle. The eldest Osborne daughter, and the plainest.

‘Of course it’s a very
good
match…’

Even Mouse had shown impatience with slow-spoken, slow-thinking Lucinda in the past; Sheba had neglected her, in favour of the younger three by the second Lady Osborne.

‘I wish them well,’ I said, not really caring if I did or not.

So much for a Cambridge education. All those people and places who were doomed to become my past …

*   *   *

‘Catherine, meet my friend –’

‘“Your friend”?’

‘The Red Spaniard.’

I looked about me. He laughed, and clicked his fingers. Clicked them again. The black boy came into the room at a run, bearing a bottle.

‘Like Canon Arbuthnot,’ I said.

‘Who’s he?’

‘In our town. Entertaining his friend from Bordeaux.’

‘And glasses, Boodle. Glasses, please.’

So we spent that afternoon, untypically, drinking red wine. I wondered if he had some cause, either for celebration or on the contrary to cheer himself, but he wouldn’t say. I grew a little silly, imagining I was dispensing wit.

‘“In the shadow of the gods”,’ I heard myself saying, ‘“I approach opulent altars”.’

‘What’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

‘That nonsense you were speaking.’

‘You’re right. Quite right. You were never righter. It makes
no
sense at all.’

On my way home I stumbled into a puddle, but that was all part of the afternoon’s charm.

Mouse saw me first.

Was I all right?

Here – She helped me upstairs.

What on earth?

I’m all right, I’m fine, really.

Your breath.

It’s nothing, I stopped by a farm.

It’s cider?

Yes, yes.

Which farm?

It doesn’t matter, I forget.

Oh,
Catherine
!

*   *   *

I didn’t make the same mistake twice.

Mouse and I exchanged private looks, but they weren’t as knowing as
she
wanted them to be. Something was afoot, she realised. But I was too complacent, or too fearful perhaps, to take her into my confidence.

If I had – if I had explained to her where I went and who it was I met there, might the course of future events have been quite different?

*   *   *

Between my returns to Satis House I continued writing to Sally. Only she knew about the hermitage.

What I might have recorded in a diary, Sally received from me.

We play at cards! Stops mostly – Comet is v. fast – And Mariage. They’re games of bluff, he says – there’s a game inside the game, you have to get yr. opponent to declare – what you feel you never show, never.

Sally wrote back. There was still no news of Arthur. She saw my father about the town; he was improved, but he knew to work a little less and to conserve his energies. Her mother spoke of sending her somewhere further off, to London maybe. But it hadn’t happened yet.

Some matters, though, I didn’t confide even to Sally. I couldn’t have.

*   *   *

Whenever we accidentally touched at the gate-legged tea table or in the narrow doorway – fingers, back of the hand, wrist – it was like contact with sulphur. I felt that my skin was scorched for a minute or two afterwards. When he’d gone I would stare at the point of contact, as if there ought to have been a burn. Nothing worse resulted than some bright burnishing on my face, my neck.

I wanted to plunge into cooling water, immerse myself.

… and Joy shall overtake us as a flood
.

*   *   *

He only had to reach forward, from where he was sitting, or to pause a moment as we risked a stroll at dusk. And he set up those nervous tremors again, spasms of excitement connected to feelings I couldn’t fully articulate to myself.

It was cruelty: I should have seen it was that. But I was the very last person who would have.

He had me on a chain. No: on a silken halter.

E
IGHTEEN

‘And my mother thinks it will be good for me.’

‘Oh, Sally – How could it be good?’

‘The opportunity…’

‘You’ll have others.’

‘Not just a lady’s maid, though. I’m to have some housekeeping duties. The kitchen garden –’

‘In Hertfordshire? Why Hertfordshire?’

‘Why not Hertfordshire? It has to be somewhere.’

‘Only if you want to go.’

‘I have to think of the future.’

She didn’t sound convinced. I told her so. She sighed.

‘And what shall
I
do?’

‘Your life is so busy, it can’t matter to you –’

‘Oh,
Sally
!’

It must have had to do with her mother always wanting more and better for her. Did Satis House have too lowly a status now?

‘
You
must decide, Sally.’

‘I have.’

‘Won’t you think again?’

‘I’m sorry. Truly. But this is what I mean to do.’

I asked where I could write to her.

It would be best, she said, if I wrote to a female cousin of hers in London. She wasn’t sure that her employer would welcome correspondence.

‘How ridiculous. What right has your Miss Stackpole –’

‘Until I establish myself, that’s all. My cousin can send letters on –’

‘From London?’

‘Yes. When I know how I’m placed.’

‘I’m off to the Hot Wells at Llanirfon with the Chadwycks. I’ll want to tell you all about that.’

‘You will.’

‘And the important news.’

‘Yes?’

‘About when I next see Charles, of course!’

*   *   *

A primeval swamp. Sunlight sifting down through high, dense trees. The rush and swirl of hot water, clouds of steam.

A great water buffalo slowly submerges herself, covering her wrinkled hide. Heads without bodies float past me. The mineral vapour unpeels in curls off the surface of the bathing pool.

A crone stands beside a table of towels, to assist when you climb the old smoothed stone steps, green from the spa’s chemicals. For a small rendering at the end of the week, she wraps you in towels, in front of a small cabin she has prepared for you. You lie back and look up at the oblong of open Welsh sky above the colonnade.

*   *   *

The Wells’ was a strange geography to me, but not to the others.

In one of the steam rooms I lay on a cushioned chaise, anonymous in my brown linen petticoat and wrapped in towels apart from my face, which was probably too red to offer much clue to my identity.

I dozed off. Their voices somewhere behind me woke me: speaking not any louder than usual, but nudging me out of slumber simply because I recognised them.

‘She
is
a funny little thing,’ Mouse began. ‘Catherine.’

‘Well, hardly “little”,’ Sheba said.

‘That’s a term of speech. “Funny little” –’

‘It would have to be. She’s been filling out of late, have you noticed?’

‘Moses doesn’t agree, but she amuses
me
,’ Mouse said. ‘With those quaint country ways of hers.’

‘That’s what we’re supposed to be getting rid of. Grooming her for a husband.’

‘Every girl we know is being groomed –’

‘That’s
our
sort of girl, Mouse.’

‘Maybe we won’t be able to tell the difference, once she’s finished.’

*   *   *

I told Charles why I was now less comfortable with them than I used to be.

I thought halfway through my account of Llanirfon Wells that he might find it something to laugh about, and he’d say I was making too much of it, how terribly sensitive I must be.

He listened to me until I’d finished, and then he said
he
thought they hadn’t behaved like proper friends, and I had a right to be aggrieved. I should try to make my peace, certainly, but I wasn’t to build bridges and suppose it was worth
any
cost.

‘You have to think of yourself too. Your pride.’

‘Oh, my pride!’ I said.

‘Well, think of the friendship
you
’ve given. And the amount of returns from them.’

‘That all sounds very mercantile.’

‘It’s as much as I know about. Just like your father.’

*   *   *

I was treated at Durley exactly as I had been before.

But I knew now that there was less spontaneity in their actions. They had rehearsed their affability very well, which was why they were so good at it and why earlier I had been fooled.

The situation was also a test of my own powers of dissimulation: not to reveal any clues as to my degree of understanding. This was the other education, in expediency, which they were helping to equip me with.