Havisham: A Novel (28 page)

‘And she’s still only a child!’ I said.

Some folk, the boy added, foresaw an unhappy end for her.

‘Then we must prove them wrong, mustn’t we?’

‘Must we?’

I laughed.

The door opened, and Estella walked in. She didn’t look at our guest, but her question was directed at him.

‘I suppose you bring the local scandal about me.’

I looked at Pip, and he looked between me and Estella.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I haven’t.’

An inspired fibber, even if not one by forethought. I smiled at him. I’d been hoping to find some complications in him, some density, and now – thank God – I had. With some
esprit
, but also with some mental ballast in reserve, he might be able to put up a challenge to Estella, to test her as any weak reed would never do.

He expected to see my hands like claws. But my hands had always been judged one of my better features – a lady’s hands and not a brewer’s daughter’s, pale and etiolated (a word Moses taught me), elongated and tapering. They had a way of arranging themselves, hanging loosely over the end of a seat arm, like the gently winnowing fronds of some sea plant.

How he stared at the flashing stones of my rings.

‘Play, boy, will you? Play!’

I watched the two of them, the forgeman’s charge and my Estella. Her behaviour with him was natural at one moment and then artificial the next. She ran skidding on the gravel like a girl, threw her doll to him like a girl, but she spoke to him – proudly, dismissively – and flounced past him like someone twice her age.

The boy was losing his bearings with her. How he stood with his shoulders hunched and his arms gawkily loose and limp by his sides, and his eyes not so clever that they could disguise his dejection as he stared after her.

He could write his letters very neatly. He multiplied and divided quickly in his head.

‘Would you like to learn Latin?’

‘I don’t know if I should have need of it, Miss Havisham.’

‘That depends on what you want to do in life.’

‘I’m bound to be something in Mr Gargery’s line, I think.’

‘
He
is…’

The boy looked awkward, ashamed to admit it.

‘… the blacksmith, isn’t he? Out Lower Higham way?’

‘Yes, Miss Havisham.’

‘And what do you
want
to do?’

(Those good hands, not made for the anvil. His clear skin would coarsen in the forge-fire.)

‘I haven’t thought, Miss Havisham. Not really.’

‘A doctor? A lawyer?’

‘
Me
, Miss?’

‘Or a teacher? A scholar?’

‘I don’t know – Mr Pumblechook, in the High Street –’

‘A shopkeeper, you mean?’

‘No. He’s a corn factor, Miss Havisham.’

I nodded.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re quite right to correct me. I was wrong.’

He shifted from foot to foot, raising his eyes and then, whenever he caught mine, lowering them again.

In the dragon’s den!

He laid temptation before me, to give my leading-lady performance – to act Sarah Siddons off the stage and into the wings. He was my perfect audience.

He was remembering this, all of it. One day he would attempt to make sense of the experience, meaning to tell himself that Estella couldn’t have been as unbenign as she appeared – so implacably hard on him.

The boy with the absurd name and the clever eyes. Pip Pirrip.

*   *   *

Estella liked to search through the clothes presses in my dressing room.

‘And this?’

‘A
chemise de la reine
,’ I explained. ‘I wore it in the mornings. There’s a sash for it somewhere. Blue Persian, that was the fashion.’

A history lesson.

‘And my riding habit.’

‘I’ve seen that.’

‘My summer one. Nankeen.’

How important it had been to be
comme il faut
. It must be stone-coloured, lined with green, and matching green for the waistcoat.

‘“
Habillée en homme
”.
Jolie comme un cœur
.’

And hats. The wide brims had buckled and creased, but Estella tried to uncurl them. I fitted her with the little cane undress hat, and straightened the festoon of ribbons which hung down at the back. The pink had faded; some of the strands in the weave were quite colourless now.

I thought of another straw hat with scarlet ribbons and a white flower, afloat on the Cam. In my memory it floated forever on that surface of darkening water, like a wreath.

‘
You
wore this hat?’

‘There are always rules,’ I said. ‘And those were the rules in the ancient of days.’

*   *   *

I watched her sleeping. I stood back, in case my shadow falling across her should wake her. Seen like this in profile, her peerless features cried out to be touched, but very very gently. The merest contact of a finger skimming over them might wake her; better the most evanescent shiver of a feather.

I dreaded disturbance, causing her to open her eyes, having her stare up at me not able to comprehend for the first few moments. Oh, Estella! You don’t realise the reach of the power that lives in you. You mustn’t let it be squandered through ignorance.

*   *   *

I woke once more in my bed, in the night or the day, convinced a man was close to me, lying naked, ablaze on the sheets alongside me.

I stretched out my hand and touched only a very little warmth where I had been lying over on my flank. I was alone. Of course I was.

It didn’t happen again. I felt no shame, nor regret either. My life was now spared those fleshly embroilments. I rarely felt those surges between my legs which I used to, and the want was less urgent.

I lay back. The tide of desire was ebbing quickly, drying off to traces, and I was left safely stranded, among my reliable shadows and with the same tried and proven air I had been breathing in and breathing out for long months, for years.

*   *   *

‘Hand me my stick, young Pip. I have an ache today.’

He did as he was bid.

I pointed ahead, across the passage, to the circuit of the dining room we followed.

‘You know what comes next?’

‘Yes, Miss Havisham.’

I held on to his shoulder.

‘Very well. Walk me, walk me.’

*   *   *

We proceeded along both sides of the long table.

He stepped on a dead beetle. The husk crackled under the sole of his shoe.

Cobwebs covered everything, draped like spun sugar over the feast and the chairs. The disintegrating bottom layer of cake had started to subside, and the other three above leaned tipsily.

He stared at this rich woman’s indulgence. But he must have known that the worst disgrace to befall a woman was not to be abandoned before she was married, but to be jilted while she was wearing her wedding dress. My shame excused my capricious ways: my lunatic ways, if you will.

How he stared.

‘Come along! Walk me, walk me!’

*   *   *

We had bewitched him.

But he had fallen under our spell, I could believe, before he ever set eyes on us. Out at the forge he would have heard all about us, and been set wondering. I pictured him walking past the high walls and looking up at the shuttered windows. He had imagined the secret garden that must grow behind the house. He had envisaged the rooms ill-lit by candles, rooms as vast as sea caves.

And now – it was his original enchantment he was trying to recall. The reality, or what we offered him, couldn’t ever match the pictures of us he’d carried in his head. He used his politeness – his unctuousness – to try to conceal the disappointment, but I saw right through his cover.

‘This is my birthday, Pip.’

‘Happy –’

‘No, I don’t suffer it to be spoken of.’

I stared at the mouldering food which lay strewn with spider silk and dust.

‘And on this same day my wedding breakfast was set out. The mice have gnawed at it. And sharper teeth – fangs – have feasted on me too.’

His shoulder had stiffened under my hand as he concentrated harder.

‘Maybe my death day will be on this day also?’

I didn’t mean it as a question, but he answered me very earnestly.

‘Oh, I should hope
not
.’

I meant to smile at that, but for some reason my lips wouldn’t oblige. As he looked round at me in the gloom, he must have thought I was grimacing. I made out the expression of disquiet on his face.

‘But I have much to see achieved before then, Pip – you’ve no idea. I have my curses to lay first.’

‘“Curses”?’ he asked, right on cue.

*   *   *

It was always twenty minutes to nine in Satis House. The passage of the weeks was marked for me instead by the Wednesday afternoon arrival and departure of the cousins, on their petitioning business that was never satisfied.

I was annoyed by their myopic clock-watching regularity, even though I insisted on it: presenting themselves, I presumed, at the same minute of the same hour every week, staying not a moment longer than I had demanded of them. I was relieved that they were so compliant, but I felt the differences between us were exemplified by their servitude to time: time as it was measured out to the artificial dictates of a pendulum swinging (as is the clockmaker’s tradition) on a length of gut, the tube that carries semen from a bull’s testicles.

*   *   *

‘And now, madam –’

Estella jiggled forward in her chair with joy decipherable on her face. I heard it in the sudden breathlessness of her voice.

‘– for the first time –’

She threw down her last card, the Queen of Spades.

‘– I have beggared
you
!’

I sat back. I couldn’t withhold a smile.

She wasn’t expecting me to smile. Her own pleasure faded from her face. Those petulant furrows reappeared in the middle of her brow, drawing in her eyebrows. They were the only blemish she had, but they bothered me. (How was I going to eradicate them? Not by my smiling.) It seemed I had ruined her moment of victory: the ‘daughter’, as through the whole of human history, managing at last to trump the ‘mother’.

‘You’ve trounced me, Estella.’

She pushed her chair back.

‘It’s only a stupid game of cards!’

It was always when the game excited her that she took colour to her face. Now her anger was burning her, from the inside out. But that, poor child, only aided her beauty, like refiner’s fire.

F
ORTY

The passing years had done no favours to the fabric of the house. Thieves attempted to break in several times, at the back, and once they succeeded. I had bars put up at the windows.

I couldn’t take myself into my father’s office now, nor the Compting House. It pained me too much to remember … I had those windows bricked up. Inside I locked the doors, and placed the keys somewhere for safe keeping, and later I wasn’t able to recollect where. The maids occasionally spoke of hearing noises from behind the office door: surely not ledgers being opened and shut or papers sorted through, as they liked to frighten themselves by thinking, but whatever had happened to fall down the chimney, maybe a bird with a broken neck beating its wings on the hearth stone.

*   *   *

A carriage had stopped across the street, and its two passengers had stepped out.

They were watching the house closely.

The woman was dark and compact. My contemporary for age. The girl who accompanied her was dark also, and a little shorter than Estella.

The woman was speaking. The girl listened, following the direction of the other’s eyes.

Was it really her? Marianna Chadwyck? Mouse?

With – whom? – her daughter?

Mouse’s appearance was now of the sort (kindly) called quaint. She was wearing a melange of mismatched pelts and feathers, lacking Sheba’s ready advice.

We entwined our arms, and she failed to do the obvious, by
not
commenting on how I was living, by candlelight, in unaired rooms, and dressed as I was for a wedding.

I saw tears in her eyes, but I couldn’t tell if it was with pleasure or sorrow: with both perhaps. I was introduced to her daughter, who had to be prompted forward, and who offered me a hand tense with misapprehension.

I heard Mouse lightly gasp when Estella entered the drawing room. Her daughter, alarmed, drew closer to her side.

Estella was intrigued, I could see, because these were grander visitors than our usual, as the lit chandeliers announced. Only I would have been able to gauge her reaction, from my experience, because as ever her looks were triumphantly unmarred by the evidence of superfluous feeling.

Mouse and Eveline admired in silence. Estella had lost that original dusky tincture, but the passage of time had enhanced the colour of her eyes: violet eyes, which added to her strong presence in a room. Hers were the ideal proportions of my youth, the high narrow waist and long arms, with a deep bosom to come. For the last two or three years she’d been able to fix her own braid of hair, and to roll and pin it on top of her head in increasingly complex arrangements, as if the touch of others offended her for its clumsiness.

Estella and Eveline went off together, into the garden.

I didn’t ask Mouse why she’d come, but at one point she mentioned the name ‘Jaggers’, and I wondered if she had picked up something about the true circumstances concerning the payments to her mother.

Lady Charlotte had gout, and she had become short of memory.

‘Her forgetfulness was amusing, to begin with. Then a little irritating. Until now…’

Mouse expressed sympathy for my own past ‘predicament’, using a tactful choice of words which I pictured her rehearsing to herself on the journey over.

W’m was finally married, she said, although it had been touch and go. Sheba up in London never had an evening unaccounted for in her social diary; and few mornings or afternoons were left spare either. Mouse herself had another three children, and sometimes took in Sheba’s two, when she felt particular pity for them.

I mentioned the name of Mrs Calvert (last seen by me on the floor of the hermitage).