Havisham: A Novel (14 page)

*   *   *

Charles told me he’d been turning over in his mind the account I’d given him.

‘And…?’

‘I think you should stick it out, Catherine.’

‘With people who don’t approve of me?’

‘They could be useful to you. And anyway, they’re good camouflage.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Mark my word.’

‘Very well, then.’

‘Trust me.’

‘Yes. I do.’

*   *   *

Moses was reading ‘Jean-Jacques’.

‘Rousseau,’ he explained. ‘His “Reveries”.’

‘And what are those about?’

‘To me, Rousseau is about sentience. Feeling.’

‘Like Goethe?’

‘That is about wallowing in feelings.’

‘I found
Young Werther
affecting.’

‘Because the wily old dog meant you to find it so.’

‘And Jean-Jacques wouldn’t do such a thing?’

‘I think not.’

Like two figures in a watercolour, we were seated on a fallen bole. Over in Thurston Park the hermit was back in his picturesque grotto, the chimney was smoking lavishly.

‘Isn’t it preferable’, I persisted, ‘to feel better for having read a book?’

‘What about thinking?’

‘But didn’t you say Jean-Jacques was about feeling?’

‘Feeling what it is like to be solitary.’

‘Like Young Werther?’

‘Solitude is natural. There’s no surer means of perceiving one’s humanity.’

‘With no one to compare oneself
to
?’

‘The brain has the company of all the books it’s ever read.’

‘Werther suffers too,’ I said.

‘And how he suffers. Delectably, exquisitely. It’s just another appetite for him.’

Our conversation on solitude and the two authors got no further. I wouldn’t allow any more.

He asked me, ‘You think I’m too solemn?’

I was in a charitable mood.

‘Too
young
perhaps. Don’t we have to live a little first? And read later?’

‘How are we to know to avoid the pitfalls?’

‘Only by realising later. That they
were
pitfalls.’

‘Don’t you mind the prospect of suffering?’

‘I don’t intend to suffer. My suffering will be – thinking that I held back from life.’

N
INETEEN

I would sit beside my father and, while I listened, he would address certain business matters, clearly enough for me to follow.

It had begun by my going to fetch the leather-bound records for him – tan or green or red – and finding the place he wanted.

I knew how beers were made, and something about the differences between them. But it was the arithmetic which he was quite ready and willing (to my surprise) to share with me, how the commodity purchases and the sales were calculated, how the profits and losses were worked out.

I attended, because I wished to, and more to the point because
he
wished me to.

There was a pleasing harmony to be found in the sums and subtractions, in ordering the balance of surpluses and deficits. I realised how intently my father was watching me, and I worried that I might have involved him in too much close work, in returning him too soon to what he ought to be taking a longer rest from. As it was, he was under doctor’s orders not to be at his desk for longer than two hours at a stretch.

‘No, no, Catherine –’

He put a hand to his mouth, before a sudden fit of coughing.

‘If you’re quite sure…’

‘I need to tell a Havisham.’

‘Then tell me, father, please.’

He took me into the brewhouse and led me through the stages of the brewing process. Grinding. Mashing. Boiling. Cooling. Fermenting. Racking. I listened carefully, I asked him questions about what I was seeing. Step by step, while he fought to curb his coughing.

Cleaning the malt, grinding it, diluting the grist with hot water in a mash tun, leaving the malt’s sugars to dissolve. Draining the liquid wort; extracting final sugars with more hot water (sparging), then boiling the wort in copper vats, adding hops to sour the sweetness. Draining the hopped wort over used hops, and cooling it, before channelling it into fermenting vats and adding yeast. Leaving fermentation for five or six days, so that the yeast will convert sugar to alcohol and carbonic acid gas; skimming the film of yeast from the wort, once the sediment has sunk. After fermentation, diverting the green beer into tanks for several more days, while the yeast left further mellows the beer’s taste. Conditioning: adding some caramel to darken the colour, adding finings (derived from sturgeon’s bladder) to thin the brew’s appearance. Storing the resulting beer in casks, introducing some extra sugar to aid supplementary fermentation, scattering dried hops for aromatic purposes.

After that I became interested to learn some of the tricks of the trade, and what might go wrong between one brew and the next.

Initially my father was uncertain: should he show me or not? But I wasn’t afraid to know how we Havishams justified ourselves; and I had lived all my life within sight and sound and smell of the beer’s manufacture, the source of our standing.

*   *   *

It seemed from her letters that Sally was also spending some time in London with her employer, and so she could simply pick up from her cousin any correspondence delivered for her.

I asked if there wasn’t another address in London where Miss Stackpole put up, where I could write to. But Sally replied that she thought the arrangement was working well enough as it was, and if I was still quite agreeable –

Her letters, I felt, were a little vague in content. It couldn’t be the case that they were being read by Miss Stackpole. But perhaps Sally didn’t like to dwell too much on her new duties, if she wasn’t finding them altogether congenial; and she might have thought it would be disloyal to say so.

I realised I must simply put up with the situation for the while.

*   *   *

In my father’s office one day I noticed an unsealed envelope on his desk. Even upside-down the handwriting was recognisable, and confirmed by the signature.

Charlotte Chadwyck
.

He saw me looking, and pushed the letter beneath some other items of correspondence. He frowned.

I thought he looked grey and careworn.

‘Some man will count himself lucky. When he first sets eyes on you.’

We had finished supper and taken ourselves through to the fire in the little sitting room. I was sewing; my father was sitting opposite, watching me.

‘Yes?’

‘Certainly,’ he said.

‘So … that is what my education’s for.’

‘It’s the prospect for every young woman. To be married. Her responsibility even.’

‘Or…?’

‘There
is
no “or”. In your case.’

‘Oh.’

He paused to cough some obstruction out of his chest.

‘With all your advantages. Those you have and those you
will
have.’

‘I see. I see.’

*   *   *

I consulted the racing news in the newspaper, and guessed where he would be. I walked to Durley Conquest Farm and asked, opting at the last minute for imperiousness instead of sweetness, to borrow their trap.

‘Lady Chadwyck knows,’ I lied.

‘In that case, miss…’

They couldn’t give me the mare. Solomon was properly too big for the task, and I’d heard he was grudging, but I only wanted to get away. I whispered in Solomon’s ear as the trap was being wheeled out.

‘We have to find him, we have to find him…’

*   *   *

I had heard reports about the place, its hazards. The horses racing pell-mell through the crowd, and the spectators galloping along behind. Cock-fighting, dog-matching. Thimble-rigging, crooked roulette.

But it was a quiet day. The dangers were largely out of sight. The sun was shining. I was dusty after my journey from Durley, a little light-headed on an empty stomach, but exhilarated just to be here.

An enchanted day, in my future memories of it, when no harm was meant to come to me.

The Epsom regulars pointed him out to me. I didn’t even have to go searching for him.

I hailed him from the trap. (A humble farm trap negotiating parked gigs, chaises, cabriolets.)

The 12.30 race was over. A table had been spread for half a dozen, with mismatching chairs fetched from wherever they could be found.

When I saw that Charles had seen me, his face made me think of a mask, another mask: features frozen in a smile, with only the eyes registering his perturbation. But his voice was remarkably steady and assured.

‘Another chair for our lady guest, Spencer.’

A space was made for me. One woman now among six men.

I surprised myself by saying thank you, I would, and then sitting down.

(An umbrella was opened and placed above me in the tree, to provide extra shade.)

A plate was handed to me; on it were several slices of rich red beef and a plump duck’s leg. The sturdy fare men enjoy. I didn’t send it back, and started to eat. I was hungry. And I was intensely relieved to have found him again, so grateful just to be sitting feet away from him.

The company was jovial, and increasingly raucous. I didn’t mind any of it, the loud abrupt laughter and the boozy imprecations to enjoy myself. (As a contrast and not a comparison I was thinking of Arthur and his roving gang of scapegraces, with whom I would
not
have been at my ease.)

‘You’re sure you’re all right, Catherine?’

‘I’m sure I’m sure, thank you.’

Charles would cover the tops of his wine glasses with his hand when the bottles were passed round. He was keeping himself sober. It might have been that he didn’t want to be shown up, or to forget himself.

Later.

‘I’ll accompany you back.’

‘Really, there’s no need.’

‘You
are
going back? You haven’t abandoned them?’

‘The Chadwycks? Not yet.’

‘You won’t, though?’

‘One day I shall have to.’

He didn’t come to Durley itself, or even to the farm. We parted on a back road.

‘I’ve ruined your day,’ I said.

‘You’ve
made
my day.’

I smiled uncontrollably. I thought I was going to cry with gratitude.

‘Every time I see you,’ he said, ‘it’s the same.’

‘I have to go now.’

He leaned across.

‘Catherine, please –’

What was he going to say, or do, next?

Flustered, I picked up my reins before I could find out.

‘Goodbye,’ I called back at him.

I hoped driving off that I’d dazzled him with my last quicksilver smile.
He
, I felt, had spun my head around.

At least that allowed me to handle the Chadwycks, because in my mind I wasn’t
with
them. I was only conscious of where I was at Durley when I fell behind at mealtimes, or dropped something, or had to be asked a question three times.

‘Catherine, please –’

He’d leaned across from his saddle and on an instinct I had picked up the reins. Remembering, I stared down at my hands in my lap, saw how clammy they were, and I buried them into the upholstery so no one else would notice.

A long accumulating knot of some pleasurable pain corkscrewed through my stomach. I was corseted, to maintain my poise, but my breath was coming in shorter and shorter and more difficult bird-like sips.

T
WENTY

I stopped hearing regularly from Sally.

I continued to write, supposing that there was only some delay in the delivery of
her
letters to me.

Finally one did arrive, but it was no more than a brief note. An acknowledgement of my last letters, and little else.

I wondered what reason there could be for her not being more forthcoming.

Was she dissatisfied in her post? Was she unwell?

Had my own letters sounded to her too much like exulting in my good fortune? To Sally of all people I’d thought I could confess these things. It might have been that distance and some little more experience had worked to change her.

I examined her note for signs of the former closeness, but there was too little in it to offer me any. Even her handwriting seemed more laboured, that script which she had – inevitably – had to base on mine; as if she had sat and written very slowly, very formally, only meaning to disguise what her true feelings were.

*   *   *

‘It was extraordinary,’ Mouse said as we went walking. ‘Just this morning I saw a black boy running across that field.’

I stared at her.

‘In a blue suit with gold buttons.’

She laughed.

I continued to stare. Boodle’s return to Thurston Park was news to me.

‘D’you think I’ve become too secluded from life, or something?’ she asked.

I guessed that she didn’t know who the boy was, or – more to the point – who hired him to chaperone at our snatched rendezvous.

*   *   *

She and I saw the hermit approaching in our direction, but this time he made no attempt to avoid us.

He waited for us at a stile. He held out his hand for Mouse’s as she negotiated the steps. While I was climbing over and having
my
hand held, he dropped the book he’d been carrying under his arm. I took pity, and bent down at the same time as he did. I saw Mouse smile, then turn away. The hermit retrieved the book first. From between the pages he extracted a small folded sheet of paper and – once he’d checked my companion wasn’t looking at me – he presented it to me.

*   *   *

The little hermitage had been got ready. There was tea, and a selection of small fancy cakes to eat. Boodle fussed with my cushions, unrolled a linen napkin.

‘I would light a candle,’ Charles said, ‘but we might be seen.’

I agreed that it might not be the best idea. And so we sat on while the light faded across the park, across that assiduous reconstruction of Arcady.

I asked him what was wrong.

‘Nothing, nothing.’

I asked again. And again. He wouldn’t tell me. I let a few minutes pass. His mood didn’t improve. For the fourth time I asked him if anything was wrong.

‘You don’t want to know that.’