Havisham: A Novel (2 page)

But those occasions would be followed by shows of kindness, by the purchase of another expensive plaything for me. This, the gift of the toy would be announcing, is how we attempt to put the sad parts of the past out of our minds.

I wondered if he really had recovered from the loss, or wasn’t still privately nursing his grief, battening it down inside himself.

*   *   *

I would hear the cathedral bells every morning and evening. On Sundays and High Days the air crumpled with the pealing of so many other bells, from our Saints, Gundulph and Margaret and Zachary and Jude. All that eloquent and silver-toned pressure to be devout, or at least to appear so.

*   *   *

On Sunday mornings we worshipped at ten.

We would walk to the cathedral. Across the brewery yard into Crow Lane. Across the open sward of the Vines, into the Precincts, past the end of Minor Canon Row, with the Old Palace on our left.

I would always keep two or three steps behind my father.

Along the approach of worn flagstones to the Great Porch. The archdeacon would bend low, his urgent hand pushing into the gloved palm of mine, because a brewer comes next to county stock, his is the aristocrat of trades. Even the lawyers and doctors stood back, and their eyepainted wives and petticoated daughters too, because they knew their place.

Into the gloom, into the reek of leather-bound hymnals and candlewax and withering tomb-flowers, that dry stale odour of old time oozing out of the stone. Heads would turn while I kept my gaze fixed straight ahead.

My sight adjusted to the little light. On the floor, pools of ruby and indigo from the stained window glass. The furious shimmer of candles stuck on spikes.

The pew creaked, it always creaked, as if the planed wood were sounding a complaint, a lament for the forest where it had grown.

In winter Ruth – or Eliza, who replaced her – provided me with a rug, a wrap, a muff, a coal foot-brazier, a water bottle. I imagined I was in a troika, speeding across a snowfield, the drowned Iven Meadow iced over. The ice sparked beneath the metal runners. Rime stiffened the horse’s mane, tail, my eyelashes. My breath streaked past me like thin blue smoke.

*   *   *

The noble families were customarily represented at the services, but individual members came and went, and seemed more often away, up in London or at a watering-place or visiting their circle at their grand homes, worshipping – if they did – in private chapels.

By comparison we Havishams were rooted to the spot. People expected to see us there, and I took their expectation as a kind of right, due acknowledgement of our importance in the local order.

*   *   *

I would sit looking at the painted stone effigies on their tombs. I fixed on this or that figure, kneeling or recumbent: on the ruff or cuffs, on the still folds of a dress or the smooth line of a hosed calf. I stared so hard that I passed into a kind of trance. I forced myself to keep staring, scarcely blinking my eyes, not moving a muscle, as if I was turned to stone myself. After three or four minutes of intense concentration I achieved my purpose, supposing I could catch faint signs of life: the twitch of a slipper, the flutter of an eyelid, the trembling of a finger where the hands were closed in zealous prayer.

The grand figures, dignitaries in their time, might be able to deceive the rest of the congregation, but they couldn’t fool
me
.

My father had to cough sometimes, or even reach across and shake my arm, to rouse me. I came back, but not quite willingly. In some ways I preferred my fear, the fright of discovering what I wasn’t meant to know, where the truth of a situation was turned inside out.

I breathed in, breathed out. I smelt the melting candlewax, the calf bindings of our hymn books, the stuffy air which was the same uncirculated air as last week’s.

When I looked again, the figures on their tombs were utterly still. Petrified. Incontrovertibly dead. Sharp-chinned, razor-nosed, prim-lipped, hands ardently clasped in supplication, that their souls should be received into Heaven.

*   *   *

We returned through the park opposite Satis House, known as The Vines. Originally it was the Monks’ Vineyard, when St Andrew’s Priory stood close by.

The rooks cawed in their high scrappy nests.

‘Come on, Catherine. Keep up.’

My father didn’t care for the monkish spirits of the place. We attended the cathedral because he wouldn’t have been treated with full seriousness in the town if we hadn’t, but his devotion was restricted to eighty minutes once a week. That was quite enough.

I never did get to the bottom of his reluctance, but I sensed that it had something to do with my mother’s shockingly sudden end: a death that had made no sense to him, then or now, for which nothing and no one – not even I – could console him.

But he didn’t talk about that; and in the house of (opportune, always dependable) silences we shared, neither did I.

T
HREE

I continued to be taken out for my constitutional every day, a walk lasting an hour or so.

Two hours of lessons in the morning, luncheon, and then some exercise.

Exercise for the body and – once I’d won the confidence of the looser-tongued maids – for my mind also.

*   *   *

I heard about the old man who sold death in bottles.

About Nurse Rooley, who took away the little unwanteds before the mother grew too swollen: a premature borning.

Florry Tonkin, who sold her affections by the hour.

Mr Yarker, who would model your enemies in wax, and puncture the spirit out of them.

Captain Breen – not really a captain at all – importer of oblivion from Shanghai, via Rotherhithe.

The Misses Ginger, who communed with the dead departed, and spoke in voices.

The Siamese twins in Love Lane, genies let out of the pickling jar, walking with three shoes and two hats; one happy and laughing, the other downcast and glowering.

Miss Greville, who fasted keenly, and scourged herself with a twig switch, and who walked to the cathedral at Easter in bare feet and at other times with pebbles in her shoes.

Another spinster, Miss Maxfield in dirty canary yellow, who stood on street corners fretting about crossing the road for half an hour at a stretch, stamping on the spot, pointing at imaginary obstacles with the Malacca cane of her yellow parasol.

Canon Arbuthnot, who would tell neighbours that a Frenchman or a German friend would shortly be calling; but those callers were never glimpsed, and it was said they too came out of a bottle, a French visitor from Burgundy country and a German from somewhere about the Rhône or Moselle.

The Ali Baba house, whose owner farmed sugar plantations abroad, where four gigantic vases stood in vaulted niches high on the street facade, exposed to everything the elements could throw at them.

Our venerable town.

*   *   *

Children, hand-picked, continued to come to Satis House.

No more than one or two at a time. And my father arranged to have us continuously supervised.

Thinking ourselves too old for playing, we behaved (as we thought) like young adults. I showed them my sewing, my drawings; we attempted a little rudimentary music-making; we walked in the garden. And, in short, we were thoroughly bored. We didn’t say anything that couldn’t be overheard.

I wondered what on earth was the point of it, unless my father liked to have reported back to him their envy for how I lived, wanting for nothing.

No one pitied me – or dared to mock me – for not having a mother.

The effect was to isolate me further, and to make me feel prouder still of my position.

*   *   *

I used my mother’s silver-backed hand mirror, given to her by my father. On the back was engraved a Gothic ‘H’.

It was large and heavy to hold. Its weight conferred solemnity. I would look into the oval of glass long and hard, hoping to find some trace of my mother in my own reflection. But I only ever saw a girl with a brow furrowed in concentration, a too straight line for a mouth, a nose which threatened towards the aquiline, and a look in her eyes which was articulating a fear of solitude.

*   *   *

My father ensured that I should lack for nothing material.

Clothes and shoes. Books, dolls. A wooden barrow for the garden, and a set of nurseryman’s tools. A leather horse on which to ride side-saddle. A box dulcimer, a recorder. A brush and comb of tortoiseshell inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Two oriental cats, which I called Silver and Gold.

I forget everything, because there was so much.

My father must have supposed that no other child could have had a happier time of it than I did. He showered me with gifts, which he didn’t consider treats but things I had a perfect right to enjoy. But even amplitude and generosity pall. When I was by myself, I had a finite amount of imagination to help me play; when another child was brought along, I became possessive, only because I was afraid of having to reveal my embarrassment at owning so much.

*   *   *

Mrs Bundy was our cook. She had come to us when I was very small. Her repertoire was limited, but my father preferred it to the more rarefied fare my mother had favoured.

To look at, she was striking rather than attractive. Wide eyes, a small tilted nose, and a large mouth that reached up into her cheeks when my father made her smile about something. A mane of thick brown hair which she wore rolled up and pinned behind, and was forever re-pinning. Large breasts, so that her apron usually carried a dusting of flour or whatever her chest came into contact with. She also had the curious habit of stepping out of her shoes when the kitchen grew too hot for her and walking about in bare feet, as if she considered herself mistress of this domain.

*   *   *

Mrs Bundy spoke about me. She told my father things he couldn’t have known otherwise: about my talking to the workers’ children, about disposing of my lunch vegetables in the fire or out of the window.

It was none of her business. Angry with her, I told my father I knew who was telling him.

‘It’s
her
.’

‘Catherine –’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘I don’t want to discuss –’

‘She’s just our cook.’

‘Don’t speak of Mrs Bundy so dismissively.’

‘But she has no right –’

‘D’you
hear
me, Catherine?’

He was taking her side – yet again.

Sometimes on my constitutional I passed where she lived.

*   *   *

She came from the other end of Crow Lane to ourselves, but not from the most deprived part of it as I might have expected. Being a cook in a rich man’s house, she must have managed to feed herself at her employer’s expense, certainly to look as wholesomely nourished as she did.

There was a boy too, a year or so younger than myself. I had glimpses of him, grown a little taller every time, but just as pale – he lacked his mother’s robustness – and just as nosy as I went on my way, accompanied by my maid for that afternoon. On one occasion I made a face at him, and the boy pretended to be affronted; but I realised too late that my mistake was to acknowledge him and to show him what he made me feel, and so I’d handed
him
the advantage of that moment.

I always had lunch on Sunday with my father, following our return from the cathedral.

Mrs Bundy would linger in the dining room, after we’d been served, after my father had been asked if everything was to his satisfaction. It seemed to me that it wasn’t her place. Several times I would notice my father’s eyes moving off her, and Mrs Bundy’s eyes narrowing as she looked at me, as if he was seeking a second opinion from her about me. And just as much as on the other account, it seemed to me that the woman exceeded herself.

*   *   *

Mrs Bundy had the task of supervising my other meals in my mother’s old sewing room.

‘My food’s not to your liking, miss?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

The fish stared up at me, its eye glazed with stupidity.

‘You will be by suppertime.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘I’ll take it away, shall I? My hard work.’

‘Take it away.’

‘Magic word, miss?’

‘Take it away –
please
.’

Later, when she was having some shut-eye wherever it was she went to take it, I would return to the kitchen and raid the storage jars, making the girls swear to secrecy. But – I see now – she must have known about that too, because how else was it that the jars were always kept topped up with currants, dried fruit, peel, nuts?

*   *   *

Mrs Bundy stands in the steam while pans simmer on the range. Bread is baking in the old oven, chestnuts – placed on the oven floor – are bursting their skins among the cinders.

She wipes perspiration from her jaw with the back of her hand. Her cuffs are undone and the sleeves rolled back. Her forearms are fleshy and white. Last summer they were fleshy but tanned, from her work in the kitchen garden; another summer on, she is pale, as a proper lady is pale, as her son is pale.

Cooling in a bowl are a rabbit’s guts, which she earlier pulled out whole and hot. All in the day’s work.

She doesn’t see me looking as she rests. Briefly she forgets herself, she stands stroking one arm slowly with the fingers of the other. Moments pass, she is rapt in her fancies.

*   *   *

‘How proud you are!’

Why shouldn’t I be?

‘Little Miss High and Mighty.’

‘I’ll tell my father. What you’ve just said.’

‘Tell him what? That you’re proud?’

Tell him that she’d dared to criticise me. (In that accent which wavers between flat backwoods Kent and something better.) But I felt that if I said what I was thinking, that gave her act of criticism some sort of validity.

Better instead that I should ignore her.

I snatched up my petit point, and attacked the canvas with such violence that I missed my aim. I cried out.

‘Thumb for a pincushion?’ she said. She had a laugh in her voice that incensed me.

‘Not pin! Needle, needle! Don’t you even know
that
?’