Havisham: A Novel (30 page)

Quick – go arm yourself, boy!

*   *   *

Gradually my bones had grown stiffer and stiffer. It hurt me to move about. Some days I felt I had hot wires pulling inside my legs, my ankles, my feet. I was off-balance. I had to be assisted in and out of bed.

My money bought me labour, whenever in the day or night – it was all one to me – I required it. The maids took no pleasure in their work, but they were paid well enough to show willing.

I tried not to be a burden to Estella. I wanted her to remember who I’d been, when I could stretch straight and stand tall and move freely. This wasn’t who I wanted to be, so I made sure that at least she stayed out of my bedroom and didn’t have to witness me at my very worst. She had the tact – or was it only distaste? – not to look at me when she might have done, sneaking covert glances instead. When we were together, talking and eating, I hoped she was seeing me in the plural, a synthesis of her recollections, someone I preferred should be half a fiction of her past to this sorry extant fact.

F
ORTY
-
TWO

Have I o’ercome all real foes,

And shall this phantom me oppose?

*   *   *

Estella didn’t care for Purcell. Too morbid. Give her Lockwood’s or Renshaw’s jolly tunes. She sang those prettily enough, but their music was too sweet and too flowery for my ear.

‘I sing to enjoy myself,’ she said. ‘Not to have gloomy thoughts.’

‘Purcell can be joyful too. When I was your age we –’

‘Oh, he’s just a curmudgeon. I can’t think he ever wasn’t old.’

*   *   *

Attached to a piece of correspondence on another matter, Mr Jaggers begged to inform me that a youthful acquaintance of ours – he named names this time; it was none other than young Pip Pirrip (estranged, as my correspondent would have it, between the states of ‘Master’ and ‘Esquire’) – had recently come into a sizeable and unforeseen legacy. Mr Jaggers was representing the benefactor, who wished to remain anonymous. The fortunate but still callow recipient was to be educated rigorously to the standards of a gentleman.

‘
I see myself playing the role of a physician, engaged in a surgical experiment on a living being that cannot be undone
.’

Mr Jaggers had been requested, by the aforementioned (name-naming lapsed for the interim), to communicate his sense of honour and gratitude …

The boy’s feelings on his situation were of no concern to me. Or – or did he suppose
I
was the one responsible, and so Mr Jaggers was only fulfilling an instruction he knew to be quite mistaken?

At least Pip’s recent absence from Satis House was now accounted for. Yet the nuisance was twofold. He had been a gauge to me of the changes affecting Estella; and I should want for exercise, without him to lead me round the dining table. Once he was educated – Mr Jaggers mentioned that the benefactor (‘the fountainhead’) was in favour of Pip’s ‘prolonged sequestration’ – he would judge he was above and beyond us.

I should need to make alternative arrangements.

*   *   *

I showed Estella a necklace, a heavy gold chain with an opal pendant. It had been one of my father’s gifts to me. Her eyes lit up with interest.

‘Put it on.’

She did so. The necklace complemented her beauty, perfectly served it.

I passed her a hand mirror, so that she could see.

It was hers to keep, I told her.

She took my hand and grazed my wrist with her lips, an awkward gesture which embarrassed us both.

‘But we must give you places to visit,’ I said. ‘So that you can wear it and be seen.’

‘In the town?’

‘No, not in the town.’

*   *   *

I had been musing on Pip’s rise to good fortune, which didn’t so much cast the seed of an idea in my mind as affirm other thoughts already germinating there.

I wrote to Mouse. I told her, ‘in confidence’, that I meant to give Estella some extra polish, and then to introduce her about.

Mouse replied at once. She was shortly sending her own daughters to an establishment on the coast, by Eastbourne. Might Estella, she asked, benefit from the same?

*   *   *

Estella wasn’t effusive at first, that was not her way. But I could tell from the manner in which she returned to the topic, and the frequency of her enquiries, that she was very curious, and that she would eventually agree.

‘My friend writes that you will receive invitations,’ I explained to her. ‘You must take advantage of those. It is a responsibility now. To let others “in refined circles” – which is her term – to let
them
see Estella Havisham.’

I organised a new wardrobe for her, to her taste rather than my own. I had the carriage refurbished, so that she might arrive in some style and not be ashamed.

And so … Away!

One nervous wave of her gloved hand as the carriage lurched forward, then – for myself – ne’er a backward look.

*   *   *

Without her there in the house, I sat in a great deep well of silence.

I sat and I thought.

I schemed. I plotted. I manufactured the future.

*   *   *

Each time she came back home, she was somehow
more
Estella-ish.

Hands closer to her sides, she walked taller and straighter. Yet she was even more feline, with a cat’s ability not to make contact with any object she was passing, to leave the stale air undisturbed.

What if Pip were to see her now? But he’d been taken off, by altered circumstances, and was only a memory – if that – to his persecutor. She had discovered the world since then, and the world could count itself very fortunate to have discovered
her
, a paragon, my darling Estella, the Havisham girl.

We would sit by the fire, she and I, long into what she told me was her night.

I asked her to describe the people and places she’d just seen. I built pictures in my mind.

(I knew who the families were she spoke of, with whom she mixed now on equal terms. I had their recent genealogies mapped out in my head, from the talk at Durley Chase or on the Chadwycks’ circuit. A mention to Mr Jaggers, or to Mrs Bradley in Richmond – a sister of one of my father’s early colleagues in trade, and a devotee of Debrett’s
New Peerage
– and I received confirmation by return.)

Sometimes it seemed to me that those mental scenes remained clearer for me than for her. Because I had to put them together for myself, the effort ensured that they stayed fixed, whereas Estella gave her characteristic indications of casualness, forgetting from one telling a few days back to the current one.

Every little chip was fitted into the mosaic, and maybe she thought I was too fastidious about it, but this was my method, to repeat her words – to turn them over, scrutinise, test them – and then to refashion them into the images I saw with my mind’s eye.

When she’d retired to bed at last and I was left alone, to sit on until the dawn chorus sounded outside, I worked on the scenes, to put a glaze – a lacquer – of familiarity on them, so that they would stay vivid to me and not dim. I transformed them into my memories, and the process left my brain hurting, as if I’d literally embedded them there.

My life was bound up in Estella’s. When she was at home with me, I planned where she should go next, and whom she should meet there. If she showed any signs of resisting, I threatened to cancel her next dress fitting or postpone the next purchase of shoes, since she didn’t have the same need of them. That always brought her round.

When she’d gone off, I spent the time envisaging what she was doing now, and now, writing notes to her and awaiting her replies, reading her scratchy despatches.

She fleshed out her accounts on her returns.

Details, details: I needed to hear the minutiae. About their clothes, of course, and their equipage. But also about how many dances she managed with A or B, and how many people B or C had introduced her to, and to which events C or D had invited her, and meanwhile what was happening to A and B.

‘I forget, I forget,’ she would claim sometimes. ‘Does it matter?’

Oh yes, it did. Indeed it did.

I would sit up long after she’d left me for bed, and I would have to remind myself – when a coal fell in the fire and the other coals shifted – that she’d been gone for an hour, or perhaps two hours, and that the last expression I’d seen on her face, turned on me from the door, was petulance or boredom or grudging pity: or, on good nights, the wry humour – that puckish and conniving air of irony – which convinced me she was reading my mind very well.

*   *   *

I received a letter one day.

The handwriting of my name and address was familiar to me:
a
s and
d
s and
m
s as I wrote them myself.

I had a baleful premonition before I picked up a fruit knife and split the seal on the back.

Dear Catherine,

It is a cause of regret to me that I must be the bear of Sad Tidings.

YOUR BROTHER ARTHUR HAS PASSED AWAY.

Relations between you were never quite favourable, and I have to confess that I often found the demands he made on my Patience very great. But he fell a victim of his own Weaknesses, and latterly he was able to see this for himself. He was an impressionable fellow, susceptible to Persuasion, and frankly unable to resist Strong Temptations. The opiates he took were the worst of it, and an Infernal Sentence.

I should offer my Condolences, if I felt they were appropriate. But, as you used to tell me, Arthur had forfeited the Right to your Respect. He had his Virtues also – he might be cheerful company when unbefuddled, and his Prodigality hinted at a Generous Spirit unfortunately gone awry.

Arthur, I shall merely say, was well cared for during his Final Days, and his Dying Pains eased as much as we could dispose.

It is my Earnest Hope that this should, notwithstanding, find you in Good Health and Settled Spirits.

Obediently,

Sally C.

I sent no reply. What could I have said?

Oh Sally, Sally, why did you do it?

You don’t speak of the other man, of
him
. How often has he betrayed you? Have you received any joy at all?

Was marrying him worth the loss of my friendship?

Like the ‘I’ of the name once painted in green on the brewhouse wall, it’s I who have been the sentinel, the one who kept my senses (whatever they’ve put out about me to the contrary), to sound the dire warning.

– Give a man your love, and he’ll abuse you for it.

– Promise him everything, and he’ll leave you with nothing.

– Sleepwalk into marriage, and you’ll wake in purgatory. Then he’ll steal your heart, and let you rot in hell.

*   *   *

The house leaked, but no puddles on the landing floors yet. Loose drainpipes banged against outside walls. Indoors, dampness was a louring presence on several walls, and had warped some of the woodwork. But more than the substance of the house was damaged.

Pain collected at my joints, then shot into my hands or along my arms and legs. My fingers were knobbly and twisted, like vegetable roots.

I moved in response to my pain, jerkily, like a doll, like a puppet on ravelled strings. I was like a woman who couldn’t make up her mind. So I broke my own rule in trying to lessen the pain: shouting at the servants to remind them who was their mistress. Sometimes I talked too briskly to Estella, and she took (silent) umbrage, removing herself to another room.

If I couldn’t walk, I perambulated in a moving chair with wheels, rather than sit grounded to the spot.

My head was like a bulb of intelligence, pure mentality, trying to float free of the rest of me: this soon-to-be cadaver, with its misshapen joints, a knee that was swollen to twice its size, the unremitting and grubbing pain.

*   *   *

‘Well, the place is no dustier than it was.’

Estella’s voice had the pure pristine chime of the best crystal.

‘Is
that
how you’ve remembered it?’

‘Satis House is many things in my mind.’

‘Yes? Sit by me, Estella.’

I indicated which chair she should take, but she took another, beyond it and four or five feet further from the fire.

‘Aren’t you cold –?’

I couldn’t call her ‘child’ now, a young woman gifted with such graces.

‘A little.’

‘Draw closer, then.’

‘A fire is no friend to the complexion.’

‘Ah.’

The Greenwoods and the Welbys were off to France, Estella told me another day. They were to be ‘finished’.

‘“Finished”?’

She let out a long sigh. I was meant to hear it as an exclamation of her envy.

She came over and lowered herself on to a stool beside me. She even allowed me to trace the outline of her cheek with the tip of a tuberous finger.

‘And would
you
like to see France, my darling?’

She replied without a moment’s hesitation.

‘More than anything in the world.’

F
ORTY
-
THREE

‘And now,’ I said, when France had ‘finished’ her, ‘you are to be my ambassadress.’

‘What must I do?’

‘You will represent the Havisham name.’

‘But what must I do?’

‘Impress them with your beauty, your
savoir faire
.’

‘How?’

‘Captivate them however you can. Talking with them, dancing with them, laughing, staring into their eyes.’

‘Who are “they”?’

‘Those you meet. But the ones who will appreciate your talents best.’

‘Who, though?’

‘The young men, of course.’

‘Which young men?’

‘Haven’t I said? The ones you see eager to respond.’

‘And what is the point of it all?’

‘The point?’

‘Of being an ambassadress? Representing the Havisham name?’

‘To win their hearts, my darling. To make them unable to forget you.’