Havisham: A Novel (27 page)

If I mocked them, they said nothing by way of complaint. I might be as rude as I liked, and they wouldn’t raise a single objection. So, there was no pleasure to be had from them. It was no more than a tedious necessity: a rich woman being supplicated to.

They were dismissed, and even if I had been agreeably disposed that afternoon no one ever believed that I’d been as generous as I might have been. (‘Her belfry’s chock-full of bats, that one.’) I thought they would actually
despise
me if I didn’t offer them, so infinitely remote as it was, the hope of seeing me throw gold at their feet.

*   *   *

Estella knew that I was not her mother. I told her that I didn’t want her to call me her mother. If she must call me anything, then why not … why not ‘Nana’?

She should look on me as her provider in all things else.

‘But I had a mother?’

‘She gave you birth.’

‘Do you know about her?’

‘What I know is that I shall take care of you.
This
is your home.’

‘But you’re not my – the thing I mustn’t call you –?’

‘I’m better than a mother. Mothers can vanish. You’re here in this house because I wish you to be. I mean no harm to come to you so long as we’re living under this one roof together.’

I ensured that my growing Estella should want for nothing.

Clothes and shoes. Books. Dolls. A wooden barrow for the garden, and a set of tools. A leather horse on which to perch side-saddle.

I would have bought her a model theatre, or looked out the one I used to play with so long ago, but she expressed no interest in that idea. Instead I gave her some jointed shadow puppets on sticks, which she articulated – indifferently – against a lighted wall. She didn’t much like the little carriage for her dolls, but she asked me (coyly, prettily) if she might have a parasol for herself – and some cups and saucers, such as adults use for entertaining, so that she could play host to those invisible friends she preferred to the flesh-and-blood young companions I now and then asked to Satis House.

She was oddly casual with her possessions. She would leave the barrow out in the rain, or her dolls. She didn’t fold the parasol as I showed her, and the china cups and saucers acquired cracks and chips. Sometimes she eyed the things quite hostilely: resenting the demands they made on her, to play dutifully.

I didn’t chide her about her negligence, her indifference. I had a fear of provoking her. In time I came to see that I was wrong, and guilty of neglecting my duty to
her
by not remonstrating. But by then we were settled into our routines, in the perpetually shuttered and candlelit reception rooms, and it seemed too late to jeopardise this slender harmony.

*   *   *

She had been sitting at my dressing table, hadn’t she?

There was a trace of powder under her jaw line, and by her left ear. She smelt sweet.

Even though she’d had the guile to be careful, I knew from looking at the dressing table – shifting the candelabra about to see better – which items had tempted her. There was a place for everything, and the tiny disturbances to the dust told me just how she had proceeded.

‘Well, Mr Jaggers…?’

I’d had a single shutter inched back in his honour. I stood close to him, shading my eyes, as he watched Estella through the grimy window glass.

‘… what do you say?’

He liked a little silence to expand after any question I asked him. Perhaps it was a courtroom trick, compromising a witness into thinking she had to speak and letting her say too much.

I wasn’t going to be put on trial in my own drawing room, though. I waited for his reply.

‘Coming on. Coming on.’

‘Is she recognisable?’

Pause. He put his head on one side.

‘To ourselves.’

‘And not to anyone else?’

Pause. He considered the flattened tip of his index finger.

‘Surely not.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

Pause.

‘You’ve quite remade her.’

As he chewed at the fingernail his eyes didn’t move off Estella; they grew smaller in their sockets with the keenness of his concentration.

‘It’s a beginning –’ I had started to say when he interrupted me.

‘That woman would have killed her. She wanted to. With her bare hands.’

I shuddered involuntarily at the thought of it. But Mr Jaggers was smiling as he unrolled his white handkerchief.

‘What would she have deprived us of?’ he said. ‘Thanks be to God.’

I corrected him. ‘Thanks be to Havisham money.’

*   *   *

The children I invited to Satis House had to come singly. I selected those with parents or guardians who would regard it as an honour of sorts to be asked, who wouldn’t dare to refuse me. The idiots delivered their offspring, blinking, all of them, at the candlelight and shadows. I left the rest to Estella.

‘Speak, Estella – why don’t you?’

Estella would be sitting with whichever child I had chosen for her. In the drawing room like this her manner became quite stately.

‘Say something, Estella. Tell me, is our visitor today your favourite of the ones who’ve come to see us?’

It was hard for me to keep the laughter out of my voice.

‘Tell me, visitor,’ she asked, ‘do you play at dominoes?’

The answer was invariably ‘No’.

‘Then I must show you.’

At which point she would rise.

‘Come along –’

Already her voice had a ring of majestic impatience.

‘– what are you waiting for? Follow me.’

To your doom, you poor noodle born of nincompoops.

*   *   *

The Misses Wilcox had their great-nephew staying with them: Master Drummle, a lumbering boy a little older than Estella.

With the two women he was charm personified, keeping a couple of paces behind them except when he jumped forward to open a door or a gate. But once his great-aunts took up talking – gabbling – again, his face would fall, and two deep and prematurely adult lines fixed on either side of his mouth, advertising his discontent and boredom.

I said to the Wilcoxes that they might take a turn about the garden: I would sit with the children for a while. It was spoken as a directive, not as a suggestion. The two women didn’t want to risk offending me, and went waddling off, into daylight.

I sat down to spectate.

‘Tell me, visitor –’ Estella emptied the box, ‘– do you play at dominoes?’

‘Dominoes? Why on earth should
I
play at dominoes?’ Even if he had a lagging gait, the boy’s wits were quick enough. Estella stared at him.

‘“
Why
”?’ she repeated, and sounded mystified.

‘That’s a game for publics. Not for well-born types.’

Quite flummoxed, Estella swept the pieces back into the box, scarcely looking at what she did.

‘If
you’ve
got a better idea…’

‘It’s too stuffy in here.’

I had a timely hunch I should pretend to be asleep. Eyes closed, I let my head tilt to one side.

‘It’s a rum place, this.’

The boy had dropped his voice, but Estella was shushing him.

‘Why does she wear her wedding clothes?’

Estella whispered, ‘That’s just what she wears.’

‘Is something wrong with her?’

‘“Wrong”?’

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.’

‘Noticed what?’

‘C’mon. I’m going outside.’

‘Outside?’

‘D’you have to repeat
everything
I say?’

‘Why on earth –?’

‘Look, are you coming or not?’

‘Where to?’

‘Anywhere’ll do.’

*   *   *

Estella told me afterwards how he had teased and baited whatever he could find out of doors. Two of the cats, a dog, a squirrel, a horse standing in its harness.

There was no tone of disapproval in her voice as she told me. At nine years old she merely stated matters of fact. One visit from young Drummle, I felt, had been quite sufficient.

*   *   *

She was looking at me queerly.

‘What is it, Estella? Why the big eyes?’

‘Didn’t you ever want to wear your old clothes again?’

‘Instead of…?’

‘Instead of your wedding clothes.’

(It was the end of something. Her naivety. Her uncritical acceptance. And what was I to say to her? Because – because everything is symbols and gestures. I knew that now. Because we only play and declare at life. Because true life is too awesome and terrifying to bear.)

‘Were you going to be married?’

‘I thought I was.’

‘But you didn’t
get
married?’

‘The man who was meant to be my husband … he decided…’

‘It was
his
fault?’

I started to nod. Then I stopped myself.

‘It wasn’t to be. That’s all.’

‘Were you sad?’

‘Oh, I was too angry to be sad.’

She continued to stare at me. At my wedding dress, at my greying hair shot through with white. She was staring in the same way I used to stare, myself, at the strange sights I saw when I was being walked about the town. The poor souls, people would say of them, they’d lost their minds.

*   *   *

I wouldn’t have anything changed, even though my dimensions were bound to have altered.

Just as before, I told the modiste’s niece, it will be very fine work.

A third wedding dress.

Silk, Lyons silk, in that same old-fashioned style. Sprigged and trimmed with Bath lace, as used to be favoured; and – on the back, as delicately done as gossamer – gold foil, which was the taste at that time too.

Repairs to repairs on the train. A Honiton veil. A headband of silk roses. Three more pairs of ivory slippers with silver lacing, ten eyelets apiece.

T
HIRTY
-
NINE

The blacksmith Joe Gargery had brought up his wife’s little brother, and I requested that he deliver the boy to Satis House.

Pip Pirrip kept apart from other children, I’d heard, which was to the good. The children from the better homes knew that Estella was my ward, and brought their parents’ prejudices with them.
This
boy had no such expectations.

‘Play,’ I told them. ‘Play together.’

Estella treated him roughly.

‘Why do you keep staring at me? Are you slow-brained?’

I laughed. Estella so trenchant, and the boy – dressed up in his starched best – so out of sorts. They played with marbles, and then Estella showed him her articulated wall puppets, but the boy tangled the limbs of his and Estella snatched the puppet from him and flung them all back in the box.

‘They’re ruined now.’

‘Take yourselves off into the yard,’ I said. ‘Or the garden.’

I heard them from my window.

‘
I
don’t know why she dresses like that. Why do you dress like
that
, boy?’

They returned, and played Beggar My Neighbour.

It’s called a game of chance, but I knew my Estella would win.

‘Hear him! He calls the knaves “jacks”, this boy.’

I watched him. How his face crumpled whenever she said something to hurt him. Then, between times, how he got a little of his confidence back, and tried to recommend himself to her. And how cleverly and instinctively my Estella would put him down again.

Even a blacksmith’s stepchild may have some little pride, and Estella was set on puncturing it. But a cat will kill its mouse, and so I had to ring the bell and summon Mrs Mallows, before my entertainment was ruined. I had to prolong the pleasure.

‘You will come to us another day, Master Pirrip,’ I said – I commanded.

At that he looked quite shocked. But I knew it was also exactly what he’d been hoping against hope to hear.

*   *   *

For a while Estella had been aware of her attractiveness.

It was precocious in a child, but her associations with other children had been of a kind – brief, and to the point – that enabled her to sum them up quickly. She could read their opinions of her from their faces.

She felt as isolated on that score, I guessed – because she carried the stigmata of beauty – as she did because I kept her to myself. Later she must want to let more people see her, a different sort from the ones who saw her performing her piety in the cathedral on Sunday mornings; that was bound to make my task easier when the time came. She might become haughtier than she currently was, but that would be her strength and her safeguard.

*   *   *

The Pirrip lad had returned to us, for more of the same.

Further visits – in response to my summonses – followed.

He was quite willing, and Estella didn’t object. And I was curious to see what would happen.

He had clever eyes. He’d been born, as some are, out of their proper locus in life. His manners were still crude, he had all a country boy’s gaucheness. He would
learn
manners, though, that was the easy part; natural intelligence will take anyone far.

‘So, Pip, what do they say about me?’

He told me, eventually, when I had worried at him and worn him down.

That I was crazed in the head. I didn’t ever bathe, ate as little as a sparrow, and drank only French champagne. I could sleep standing on my feet. My belfry bats were allowed to fly about the house.

The loud report thro’ Libyan cities goes.

Fame, the great ill, from small beginnings grows:

Swift from the first …

Soon grows the pigmy to gigantic size …

‘Well, Pip, you’ve certainly been keeping your ears open.’

‘I didn’t mean to hear.’

‘And you’ve got a good memory, I’m thinking too.’

‘Yes?’

Talk is her business, and her chief delight

To tell of prodigies and cause affright …

Things done relates, not done she feigns, and

Mingles truth with lies.

‘And what do they say about the fair Estella?’

They said that she was an angel for looks, but as conceited by nature as I was. She was inclined to society (‘Aa-
ha
!’), but not sociable. They wondered what she was doing in such a town as this one, when it was clearly her destiny to dazzle on a larger stage.