Havisham: A Novel (26 page)

Window sashes have to be kept lowered. Sunshine, another destroyer, comes falsely smiling; and so the curtains and shutters should be drawn at all times in those apartments I mean to use.

(‘The sun was now Inned at the Goat –’

‘Miss –?’)

For light, candles will be lit in the candle sconces.

Fires might be kindled, but not allowed to roar, which would agitate the stillness of the air. The servants stared at me. But it was only sound common sense.

Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems.

I also had the clocks stopped. At twenty minutes to nine, when it was the fatal blow had been delivered. Those metal hearts would never beat again. A mausoleum demanded the solemnity of silence.

I was merely the one who tended the altar. I would perform the rituals of devotion, in order to disprove devotion. I wore my ostentatious wedding dress in order to become a shadow; I was nothing more.

T
HIRTY
-
SIX

Day for night. Night for day. In this sepulchre there were to be no distinctions.

I did as was done on that morning. I powdered myself, applied colour to my cheeks, highlighted my eyes, teased a stubborn hair from the plucked arcs of my brows.

On the dressing table I had two candelabras, one on either side of the triptych of mirrors, with five candles apiece. By the bright light they cast I saw what I saw.

Not the woman sitting here, but the young woman who sat here one morning long ago, a bright May morning, making the final preparations before exchanging her old life for the new.

*   *   *

I had described him to Sally with so much awe and admiration in my voice, she must have doubted the reality of the man. The only recourse I’d given her was to see him for herself, to discover just how much of what I’d said could be true.

*   *   *

In the colder months – the
mois noirs
– water was stored in a lead sarcophagus, so that it didn’t ice over. In winter and early spring my hair acquired a greenish-yellow tinge, and the shock of white was less shocking.

I still had my hair, the flyaway sort and only fair for half the year, a reckless aureole around my head. It unwound from the back like a plaited rope; then I hoisted it back up again, pinned it haphazardly into place with old silver and diamond clips.

The dress had needed to be taken in. Even with that, the seamstress had been too optimistic, and the dress ended up hanging. The silk better suited curves, and that fleshiness which used to be considered a sign of good breeding. But that woman was no more. Now the bones of my rib cage showed through.

The girl banked the fire high.

‘Sawn ilex?’

‘Please, miss –?’

‘It’s of no consequence…’

She built a fire to last me a couple of hours, which would allow her to slip off to meet her young man. She would pretend that she hadn’t heard me when I rang for her, or (her usual alibi) that she’d looked round the corner of the door, but I was napping.

When the coal heated and the flames deepened, I sat looking at the golden palaces of the moon. Soaring domes and minarets, invincible ramparts. Shining seas running beneath them.

*   *   *

Out there, beyond the closed shutters, everything changed and nothing changed. Sacristy Gate, Prior’s Gate, Chertsey’s Gate. Pilgrims’ Passage, Minor Canon Row.

The Corn Exchange, the Butchers’ Market.

The Theatre Royal, at the foot of Star Hill.

Chalk Church.

And the publics. The Leather Bottle, Crispin & Crispianus.

The shoals by the bridge.

*   *   *

Day for night. Night for day. There were to be no distinctions.

I wore the dress – except when I bathed (I did bathe) or when the dress required freshening (I still recalled the delicacies of that pampered child who used to live here).

When the powder thinned, I made my face up again: I ringed my eyes, rubbed rouge on to my cheeks and coloured my lips.

I should always look the same.

I couldn’t go back; to be the woman I had been before the letter reached me, on the morning of what should have been my wedding. Now I lived in the present, where an event happens repeatedly and eternally. I couldn’t get any younger: why should I need to grow any older?

T
HIRTY
-
SEVEN

Town rowdies had thrown mud at the name on the brewhouse wall, and pockmarked the ‘V’ and the second ‘H’ and the final ‘M’. (The same youths who once climbed on to the house roof and tried to block up a smoking chimney, until Mr Jaggers – by good chance, he was visiting – kicked away their ladder and gave them a verbal thrashing they’d clearly never forgotten.) Lazy swallows picked at the mud to help make their nests, and so time and nature did their work, and life went on, and on.

And, I didn’t know why, I failed to die.

*   *   *

Just as before, I told the modiste, it will be very fine work. A second dress. An identical dress. Silk from the same source, and the style copied exactly. Sprigged and trimmed with Bath lace, as it was; and embroidery of gold foil on the back. Repairs to the twelve feet of train. Another Honiton veil. A headband of entwined silk roses. Two new pairs of ivory slippers, with silver lacing, ten eyelets on each.

*   *   *

I was still inhabiting those places, the ones where my feelings were keenest. It was as if my feelings had imprinted themselves on the air there.

For animals, everything happens in the present.

Again and again I replayed my life, on a long continuum of time, where my future was nothing other than the past. I was living through events once more, with the same intensity they’d had for me then: it was the first time, and it always would be, over and over again.

*   *   *

Nine faces, which seemed to have materialised through the fabric of the wall. My dressing-room wall. Carnaval masks from Venice, which I’d had bought for me in London. Several were pensive, one (shaped out of a sickle moon) smiled enigmatically. Some wept, so that the black kohl ran from their eyes, streaking the white faces. My wailing wall.

   exiled from light, To live a life

half-dead, a living death, And buried; but O

         yet more miserable!

Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave;

Buried, yet not exempt,

By privilege of death and burial,

From worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs.

*   *   *

They were living in accommodation which
my
money, Havisham money, had provided them with. He had married on an income donated by me, and what he scavenged. I had set them up, and in no little style.

How droll it must have seemed to him. Was
she
now sharing his laughter? No, I preferred to believe he’d kept her in the dark: that Sally still believed he was a man of business who had earned the wherewithal by his honest toil.

The way he had of pressing back on his heels before he walked forward. A habit of stretching his neck and straightening his head before he said anything meant to be of greater consequence.

How he smelt. The oil of bergamot on his hair, and the tar soap he was diligent about washing his hands with. The spicy tobacco in his snuffbox. The saddle-soap rubbed into his boots.

T’was dead of night …

Unhappy Dido was alone awake.

Nor sleep nor ease the furious queen can find;

Sleep fled her eyes, as quiet fled her mind.

Despair, and rage, and love divide her heart;

Despair and rage had some, but love the greater part.

*   *   *

After Gold and Silver, I had continued to keep a pair of cats, pedigrees, about the house. Now I was told that the tom, Mace, a replacement for Gold’s successor, had been found nailed by his paws to a tree. Thankfully he died a few days after he was taken down. I kept the tabby indoors after that. She seemed quite lost not to have her companion, and grew thin.

But later in the year there was a very curious development. The tabby, Saffron, spayed – or supposedly spayed – at an early age, gave birth to a litter of kittens. She was too weak to provide the survivors with the milk they needed, and I told one of the girls to look after them.

Saffron regained some weight. Her spirits revived. She took a critical interest in the four kittens left, and was gentle or sharp with them just as they deserved.

Had you deferred, at least, your hasty flight,

And

And left behind some pledge of

Our delight,

Some babe to bless the mother’s mournful sight,

Some young Aeneas,

To supply your place,

Whose features might express his father’s face,

I should not then

Complain to live bereft

I found the image of Mace crucified on the cherry tree with rusty nails was starting to fade. Instead I was distracted by the rivalry of the kittens for their mother’s attention, scrapping with one another and rolling themselves into a large amorphous fur ball with at least a dozen legs.

I understood that, mysteriously, life will assert itself even out of despondency and despair.

*   *   *

‘In my end,’ Mary Stuart said of herself, lying on the executioner’s block, ‘in my end is my beginning.’

V

E
STELLA

T
HIRTY
-
EIGHT

The little girl stared at me.

She would always remember this occasion.

Seeing me for the first time, she was also entering what was to become her normality.

The rooms where it was neither day nor night. My attire, in celebration of an event that hadn’t happened. The mouldering breakfast feast spread out on the table, and the high-backed chairs standing to attention, as if at any moment … The flames licking at the grate, the slivers of white light balanced on the candle wicks suddenly jumping in a draught, shadows flaring up the walls.

‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘Don’t cry, please.’

I stretched out my arm, but the child turned away quickly, raised one shoulder to protect herself.

*   *   *

Her mother was a Romany, a felon defended by Mr Jaggers on a murder charge; it was claimed she’d strangled a rival for a man’s affections. The father was native-born, with a misapplied intelligence, fallen into bad ways and transported.

‘Not the most auspicious start, Miss Havisham.’

‘The child cannot be responsible for their sins.’

‘But she is their child.’

‘She will be
my
child, Mr Jaggers.’

‘And you can be sure to set her to rights? When the rest of the world would condemn her?’

‘She and I will live apart from the world.’

*   *   *

She was to have come the next day, a Tuesday. Then she would have been ‘full of grace’. By default she was a Monday child. ‘Fair of face’. That was enough for me.

I chose her name.

   
Estelle. Estella.

Or sometimes Estelle for Esther.

Esther, Hester
fem.
, poss. Persian ‘star’;

or
der
. Babylonian, Ishtar, the goddess Astarte

Dims.
Essie, Hetty.

Estella she would be.

*   *   *

I tried again to touch her, but I fared little better. She was astonished that I should want to, and she would shy away. It was as if any contact at all caused her physical pain.

If I then smiled, I did so out of embarrassment; not because I felt any pleasure at her confusion – but she may not have understood this. A wild look would flicker in her eyes; she seemed to be searching for an escape.

And it was because I was afraid of losing her that I had Mrs Mallows take her – resisting, crying at the woman to let go – to her room and lock her there for the next hour or two hours. I always unlocked it myself, and brought her in a little treat, either something sweet to eat or some coloured paper scraps for her to paste into her album. Usually this brought her round, because she liked sugary flavours and the gaudy colours of the paper angels and grandees.

*   *   *

I watched how she would grab at things, and hoard them. That was the gypsy in her.

‘No one is going to take them from you, child. Now put them back. You will have much more given to you than you ever dreamed.’

She would keep a fierce hold on the object until I could prise her fingers apart.

‘Who is going to deny you, you little fool?’

She still recoiled from me, afraid I was going to strike her. She would drop whatever it was, on to the floor, at my feet.

‘No.
You
pick it up. Estella, do as I say.’

On the third or fourth time of asking she would pick it up and hand it back to me.

‘
Now
we trust one another. Thank you.’

She would run off and hide; she was the one embarrassed now, and ashamed. That was good – it meant she was starting to see that the deepest feelings are the ones we do our learning from.

I had her taken out into the open air. I instructed her to run about. She must grow healthy and strong.

I supervised her diet. I arranged the buying of clothes, extra warm for winter and light and cool for summer.

I ensured that
her
rooms were daylit and ventilated well, that it shouldn’t ever grow too hot and her skin dry out, or the temperature drop too low and slow the blood. I wanted her to have a perfect second start in life.

I required that she play in front of me.

‘Play, child. Amuse yourself. Go on!’

She brought me flowers from the garden. And, later, chatter overheard from downstairs but not comprehended.

‘Show me how you play. Let me see, Estella. Play away,
now
…’

*   *   *

There were always petitioners. My cousins and second cousins. Every Wednesday afternoon. They sat in the hall until I was ready to receive them. If I wasn’t in the mood for an audience, they went away even more disappointed than if – as was normal – I’d refused their request, but they would return with the same promptitude the following Wednesday, ready for more of the humiliating ritual.