Havisham: A Novel (29 page)

‘Oh, her husband’s become someone terribly important, and I expect she’d look down her nose at us now. I always thought she did that anyway.’

(I didn’t remark.)

Lucinda Osborne shared Thurston Park with a fearsome female companion, and gave generously of her time to the church.

And what of Moses? He was where I’d left him, eleven or twelve years ago, only busier than ever now.

‘He’s kept his faith?’

‘I think so. Why do you –’

‘It must’ve been truer to him than his inheritance.’

‘His inheritance?’

‘Not that there is,’ I said. ‘For the youngest son.’

‘Oh no, Moses isn’t the youngest. He’ll get a title from a favourite uncle. And what comes with it, lucky man.’

‘This is a recent development?’

‘No, no. He’s known since he was a boy.’

‘But I thought…’

It had always been there in my mind: the notion of his (comparative) poverty. I’d thought that God’s ministry had to be worn like a badge, signifying one’s humbler status.

‘Oh no, Catherine. You have that quite wrong.’

And so, on the flimsiest of social pretexts, I had been content to judge him. I avoided Mouse’s eyes for a little while.

‘I used to feel you didn’t believe me,’ she said. ‘But Moses is a fine man. I have no doubts about that at all.’

‘I see so now. Only, it’s taken me too long.’

‘Better late than never.’

I smiled, but not as confidently as I wanted to.

We didn’t speak about my father’s payments to Lady Charlotte, and Snee’s malversation. I knew that she knew. At another mention of Mr Jaggers’s name she took my hands in hers.

‘Has it been very hard for you, Catherine?’

‘Round about here, they used to think I was a girl who had everything. That has been the hard part: realising that I didn’t.’

‘I thought you might have left. Taken yourself off somewhere new.’

‘Twitch’d my mantle blue?’

‘I’m sorry –?’

‘I felt I could hold on to more by staying here. If I’d gone off … I’m not sure I would have known who I was. I would have come apart perhaps.’

How reasoned I made my behaviour sound, when I couldn’t remember it having been so. I had surely depended on something much closer to raw instinct.

‘Perhaps,’ Mouse said.

‘But I made my choice.’

Or did I really mean the opposite – that events had chosen for me? And because I’d needed to be practical, what had been more necessary for me than to try to save as much sanity as I could?

We parted. I promised Mouse that I would keep in touch.

‘For Estella’s sake, Catherine.’

‘For Estella’s sake, yes. She has become my life now.’

*   *   *

By coincidence, shortly after Mouse’s visit, past matters came to be spoken of again. I’d had no word of the subsequent life and career of Charles Compeyson, following my visit to Blackheath. When I was finally enlightened, my source was Mr Jaggers.

As ever, he was circumspect, enquiring merely as to whether or not I wished to be apprised of certain reports on ‘not incontiguous matters’ that had come his way.

I indicated that he should go ahead for the nonce.

‘You will understand to whom I refer but shan’t name?’

I nodded. Mr Jaggers paused only to ease the tightness of straining shirt collar round his wide neck.

‘To be brief…’

Following three ‘iniquitous offences’ (forgery of documents, falsely claiming on a charity, passing of stolen banknotes), where the wronged parties had elected not to prosecute, the (nameless) man’s luck had run out. He was charged and found guilty of a fourth – a sustained programme of embezzlement – and sentenced to a couple of years in jail. Or rather, on board a prison ship.

‘Moored not so far from a shore you will be familiar with.’

(Why did I feel
that
was Mr Jaggers’s true condemnation of the man: the fact that he’d been fool enough to get caught.)

‘I can supply a few more salient details, should you wish.’

‘I would rather
not
hear, thank you.’

I didn’t feel it was either a release or a vindication to me to know this, the man now touched me so little. Along the way he had become abstracted, as he fully deserved to be. I hadn’t forgotten a single one of my own humiliations; but I had turned my ire since then on men – all of the genus who conceitedly, smugly supposed that they were indispensable to a woman’s personal completeness, her felicity.

Mr Jaggers’s news – as scant as I wished it to be – confirmed my own thoughts, but also consolidated,
hardened
them in the following few nights of insomnia.

A woman can only satisfy and fulfil herself, I understood, when she establishes her own authority, and sees beyond equality, realising how terrible and damaging her own power – if unleashed – might be.

But there was more. Something to do with Arthur, I gathered.

I was confused. All these pronouns, ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘his’. I begged that we revert to names. I needed to get this sorted out in my head.

‘It seems that they’ve all been living together,’ Mr Jaggers told me. ‘Arthur. And the…’

‘Let names be named.’

‘Arthur and the Compeysons.’

‘“Living together”, you say?’

‘Off and on.’

‘No!’

‘Indeed.’

‘Arthur couldn’t stand the man.’

Pause.

‘So your half-brother claimed.’

Mr Jaggers stood holding his unfolded handkerchief, but he didn’t apply it to his nose.

‘Arthur got bought out, though,’ I said.

Pause.

‘Exactly.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t…’

‘Would Compeyson – would it have occurred to him to buy Arthur out if he hadn’t known that was what Arthur wanted too?’

‘What?’ I found myself thinking aloud. ‘They – they’d discussed it first?’

‘In quite a detailed way, I should think.’

‘Before it was suggested to
me
?’

‘It was important that you should be the last to know.’

‘A plot, you mean? Between the two of them?’

I stared between the unused handkerchief in Mr Jaggers’s hand and the unblown nose.

‘I think you’ll find it makes a kind of sense, Miss Havisham. Criminally speaking.’

*   *   *

A name, ‘Charles Compeyson’, and so little else. The years had rubbed away at the physical features. If the facial details had surrendered themselves so easily, it must have been that they had lacked some definiteness to begin with.

If the set of a face can give clues to the firmness of a personality, I had to doubt that I’d read him properly.

It had been enough that he was a man who attended upon me, and who lightened the mental load I was carrying at that time.
Who
he was had mattered less to me than the fact that he was there, and so often.

I renewed my concentration, and then details did return to me.

The exact hue of his eyes, their cerulean blueness. The precise degree of brownness of his hair, the evenness (too much evenness?) of that brown, and how it had curled around his head. How one eyebrow would rise and arch higher than the other. His chin had shown a small cleft, almost apologetically small; that had saved it from being a wholly anonymous chin.

But his nose, his mouth, those eluded me. Likewise his teeth.

His hands had a sweep of brown hairs on the backs, and neat clusters on his knuckles, but I couldn’t bring to mind the shape of his fingers.

He evaded me now because, I realised, he always had. I had been in love with someone I had half imagined to life, half invented for myself.

F
ORTY
-
ONE

Mrs Mallows sketched in what had happened. Blood stains on the rug in Estella’s room. On her sheets. On her nightdress.

Estella looked pale and strained; she was getting through the small actions of the day by rote, without thinking. Her replies to my questions, which were harmless enough, were all delayed, and sounded irritable. I stopped saying what was unnecessary; Estella relaxed in the longer silences; she even allowed herself to smile faintly, as if aware that she wasn’t any more the child who’d been brought to this house.

*   *   *

Because Estella was filling out, and my old clothes didn’t seem so oversized, I had a seamstress tack a few items with pins and take them in.

Estella asked if I wouldn’t be wanting them again.

‘I have nowhere to go in them,’ I said.

‘And where shall
I
go?’

‘You will have your own toilette made when we send you out into society. As it calls itself. Polite or otherwise.’

‘When will that be?’

‘Oh. Soon enough. Once we’re ready.’

‘Are you coming with me?’

‘In spirit,’ I said. ‘In spirit.’

*   *   *

She could read and write well, and count less well, but ably. Her history was only so-so. She could point to no more than half the countries I asked her to find on the turning globe. She muddled poems she had to memorise, splicing lines from one into another, and then forgot them quickly. Academically she was
not
going to prove exceptional.

It occurred to me to have her speech worked upon, to remove the local giveaways she had picked up from the servants. An elocution teacher was hired. Mr Jaggers helped find me a good instructor in French, also fluent in other languages, who came to the house three times a week.

Pianoforte.

Singing.

Sketching.

Needlework.

Deportment.

Dancing.

All that she might need.

*   *   *

Before too long I was observing new aspects of behaviour in my Estella in the presence of visitors. A way she had of being coquettish without ever forgetting herself. A facility for listening to an interlocutor, so that all her attention appeared to be given to that one person, out of all the persons whose opinions she might have been receiving in that room. Taking leave with one long backward glance, which spoke eloquently (or appeared to) of caring and loss, and so imprinting her image on the person’s recollections. The trick of rounding off a conversation with a concluding
trait d’esprit
so that all the previous wit in the repartee seemed to accumulate to her, like gamblers’ money. She was learning how to sparkle and how to cast an allure, and how to make the business look nothing at all like the machination it really was. I wish I had known such tricks when I was young.

*   *   *

She was also a creature of moods, especially with her peers. I could spot the dangers, for them but perhaps for her also.

She teased Pip shamelessly. If he was discouraged, he struggled not to betray it. I admired his pluck. I forgave him his folly. How entertaining it was.

‘What do you think, Pip? Does she grow prettier and prettier?’

‘Yes. Oh yes.’

Estella devoured his praise, but she was a mistress of disguise. Such adeptness at subterfuge! Obscurantist supreme! She would have her rewards.

‘Does she suit diamonds better, Pip? Or rubies?’

I would hold the stones against her.

‘Or fire opals?’

Estella’s eyes would catch the gleam of my jewels.

I watched them play cards. She still beggared him. He was learning, but he wasn’t fast enough yet. He imagined that it was only a matter of time, and so he supposed he could be more beneficent in defeat.

(And he thought, did he, he was going to get away with his precious heart intact?)

*   *   *

I lamented now my fine hands. They had never been
delicate
hands. Strong hands, which I also used to communicate with. I would see how approvingly Lady Chadwyck watched them ply knife and fork and, in the saloon, shape the air to help express the meaning of some remark I was making.

I had stopped the clocks of Satis House, but I hadn’t stopped time, and this was its handiwork: these thickened (sometimes bloated) fingers that were starting to point in different directions. Here and there on the back, a first trace of the marks that will grow to become those same brown flowers of death that danced across my father’s hands.

I’d had the rings widened; the rich deep lustre from the stones distracted the eye a little, their radiance reminded whoever saw them of the Havisham money that had bought them, and the respect formerly owing to us.

*   *   *

Estella continued her Sunday morning appearances in the cathedral. On her return she had difficulty telling me which anthems and psalms had been sung, or which Books the readings were taken from. It wasn’t because she was devout that she carried on going, I knew that.

When I asked her about the gathering there, she was better able to answer. But I judged that there were evasions too, and she wasn’t disclosing all that she might. Her colour some Sundays was a little high, as much before she left Satis House to walk there as afterwards. (She always took care that it should be the dullest girl in the house who accompanied her, both as a screen and against whom she was seen to even more startling effect.)

My Estella, I realised, was acquiring depths: shadowy places where I was not allowed to follow. But I also understood how it had come about, because a similar need used to occur to me, and I’d had to stake those secret corners just as she was doing.

*   *   *

Pip had a sixth sense as to just where Estella was in the house at any moment. He sensed her presence, above us or below us, or out in the garden.

Even if she was about the town somewhere, and she kept us waiting, he was with her there – wherever she might be – in his thoughts.

If Estella was cognisant of the hold she had over him, she didn’t acknowledge it. That was her craft.

Pip looked pained: still a youth, but somehow understanding more, and at his wit’s end wondering how he was ever going to win her approval.

*   *   *

I pitied him standing there. I suffered to watch him, because I was remembering … But it also filled me with anger, to see someone – this lad, or myself as I used to be – so unprepared, so unprotected.

Equip yourself! Get sword and shield and helmet! Or you will have no means of defence.