Havisham: A Novel (32 page)

The horses this day stopped outside the gates. The bell on the wall was rung, impatiently, three, four times. A pair of feet in outdoor clogs hurried across the yard to open the gate.

I heard Estella’s voice, clipped and peremptory, before she turned to whoever had delivered her to me in their fast carriage. Perhaps she was explaining that I was a recluse, or was ill, and apologising for me, and all the time hoping her driver wouldn’t persist in wanting to meet me. She must have been persuasive on this occasion, and in my mind’s eye I saw her enter the yard alone behind her luggage, snapping her orders.

The carriage was being turned in the street. The horses whinnied on their close reins. A blasphemous cry, ‘Jesus wept!’, not in any coachman’s accent. Then the man made off, at the same brisk trot and, past the first narrow corner, whip-cracked the horses into a young blood’s madcap canter.

Her charioteer had brought her all this way.

Could his name be Drummle, by any chance?

She must have made an impression on him. With anyone else I would have been glad; in this case I was more troubled, to dwell on the risks I ran in sending out such an accomplished and desirable young woman to do my old witch’s sorcery for me.

*   *   *

In Estella my love lived on. But I imagined it as a love grown wise in its own dark way.

She knew not to make the mistakes that I’d made. She knew now to keep her love pure and – because no man was deserving of it – her own secret.

She would play at love, like the actress she was. She would convince her admirers, but it would only be a performance, a charade.

Take them as far as you can, Estella – and then, beautifully, abandon them.

Use your will to, finally, deny them.

Make them endure agonies.

Rule their hearts, and savour your sovereign victory.

You will only ever know your own strength through the spectacle of others’ weakness.

*   *   *

I was greedy for whatever news she might give me. I snatched at it, I wolfed it down.

My ambassadress, with her irrefutable credentials. Furred and bejewelled, and on her face an expression of the most professional inscrutability.

The cruel warrior that she also was laid out her scalps before me.

The names were all recognisable to me from Durley talk. She had no compunction about who they were, her admirers, how high she reached: no family was ineligible by their lofty rank.

But who, in all honesty, could have resisted her?

*   *   *

This was what the Havisham fortune was
for
. Estella was its creation. Every penny clawed in from each of those drinking-holes stinking of beer-slop and the huddle of poor folk, their piss runs on the alley walls. All of it was done in
your
name, Estella Havisham, so that you will never have to know a future like my past.

*   *   *

Pip’s voice was thick and croaky; his throat sounded parched. His eyes burned with the sight of her, but he couldn’t tear them away.

He stood stock still while Estella serenely catpawed around him. She aimed her laughter at his face, and he didn’t think to turn away, or to stop her. A certain blue vein appeared again on his temple, resembling a submerged forked twiglet; it throbbed, alarmingly, and I had no doubt that he was hers body and soul.

Whatever she did to him, he would accept his punishment, only to prove his undying fealty to her.

*   *   *

I asked Estella about him.

‘You’ve asked me before.’

‘You didn’t reply.’

‘What on earth have I got to tell you about Pip Pirrip? Nothing.’

‘Well, think.’

‘He hasn’t mentioned writing his novel again, anyhow.’

‘He may have changed his mind.’

‘He doesn’t want to work in some dingy chambers, pen-scratching, I’m sure.’

‘You sound’, I said, ‘as if you approve. Of his literary ambitions.’

‘I’m quite indifferent to what he chooses to do.’

‘Unless what he chooses to do – or plans to do – unless that involves
you
.’

‘How could it?’

‘He’s beneath your regard, I see.’

‘With the start
he
had in life?’

‘He’s quite the young milord now, isn’t he? With prospects.’

‘There are hundreds of those.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘We shan’t invite him any more.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Give me one good reason why we should.’

‘He makes me laugh.’

‘Not because he means to,’ I said.

‘Don’t
you
find him entertaining?’

‘What about the hundred others?’ I asked.

‘We’ve trained him up to be our jester. Even if
he
doesn’t know that.’

‘Are you sure that’s the only reason, Estella?’

She picked up her needlework.

‘Well –’ She spoke without raising her head, and more curtly than before, ‘– what other reason could there possibly be?’

F
ORTY
-
FOUR

Mr Jaggers always carried the weather on his clothes. He wore a gold repeater watch on a heavy gold chain; it chimed the quarter-hours in his breast pocket, by which means he calculated the cost to his clients of his time.

‘What news do you bring me of the world?’ I asked him.

‘That’s a very wide field, I fear.’

‘There are few fields in London, Mr Jaggers.’

He put his head on one side.

‘So we narrow the news to London news? Let me think.’

I knew that he took a deep interest in the more disreputable sorts of crime, and their perpetrators. He was often about his business in Newgate. He was greatly respected but also greatly feared: no one read the criminal psyche better, and he was famous for his ruthlessness in court. But a good few felons who ought to have been convicted – including the low-born; he was no respecter of degree – owed their freedom to his slippery reasoning and silver tongue.

This wasn’t the news I had in mind to hear. But his house in Gerrard Street wasn’t on the social calling lists, even though so many knew his name. His view of life – from the offices in Little Britain – had a very particular bias.

Which was why the conversation took its strange turn merely by my making that simple, incidental first enquiry.

‘You appreciate my mind’s bent, Miss Havisham?’

‘Certainly,’ I answered.

He continued to favour the pause in our exchanges: as if to load what he said with some tangential significance, with an ironic allusion.

‘Certain matters, Miss Havisham, we have preferred to deal with in circumlocutory fashion.’

‘That is so.’

Pause.

‘In order for us to deal with them at all.’

‘Names’, I said, ‘don’t always need to be named.’

‘And it might be unwise to alter our tactics now.’

‘I trust your judgement on that, Mr Jaggers.’

Pause.

‘Our lives take us all in different directions. Even though we might presume a sympathy with particular individuals, to be disproved by later events.’

He was wanting
not
to tell me something. And yet he felt that he should put me on my guard.

‘Subsequent elucidation,’ he said, ‘however illuminating it is, might not prove to tell the whole story, though.’

There was more to know about that man than we had allowed for?

‘The disposition of a misdemeanant –’ He studied the tip of his index finger, polishing the nail with his handkerchief. ‘– It seldom improves. A fascination develops, to discover the excesses of which he – or she – might be capable.’

‘Even’, I asked, playing this elaborate verbal game along with him, ‘if he – or she – is under legal restraint?’

‘Impoundment limits company to one sort. And a thoroughly unsentimental education it generally turns out to be.’

Mr Jaggers stood fingering the exaggeratedly thick gold chain of his repeater, which straddled his broad barrel chest.

‘Once that period of detention is at an end, the same company may be unwilling to permit this one of their number to sever his – or her – ties. And if he – or she – should suggest that these ties
are
dispensable, then the prior company may conclude that certain constraints should continue to be exerted.’

I was losing track.

‘“Constraints”?’

‘Theirs is a violent society. Conscience and pity have no part. Rather, those qualities are despised. Life itself is valued at very little.’

I shuddered, and felt myself blench beneath the coating of white powder on my face.

Mr Jaggers looked troubled, as much by my reaction as by what he knew but was unwilling to tell me. But I didn’t want him to misunderstand.

‘I have lived in seclusion all this time,’ I said. ‘The old life is long ago and far away.’

Pause.

‘Doesn’t the mind continue to dwell on the past, though?’ he asked me.

‘Less and less on the details. Not on who and what and when and where.’

I remembered what I’d felt, but not
who
had made me feel those things. I remembered what the experience of knowing Charles Compeyson had done to the young woman called ‘Catherine Havisham’, so much less worldly than she’d liked to think she was.

Now I couldn’t even bring the face of her betrayer to mind. Over years it had faded away, into the furniture, into the walls.

‘I can see the desirability of that,’ my informant said.

His watch started to chime the second quarter. An imposed mechanical pause, while we both listened.

Just what was I being warned about? Firstly, that Mr Jaggers had underestimated this one criminal’s degeneration, his viciousness? And secondly, what the man might do to wrest himself free of the ‘constraints’ which that erstwhile prison company intended to put on him?

‘The human mind, Miss Havisham!’

His final words. To remind me of what my seclusion had needed to save me from.

‘How low it can reach! And sunk at the very bottom of human nature – take my word – is a terrible, lightless lair of wickedness.’

*   *   *

One night a storm blew up. Estella couldn’t sleep through it. She came to find me, folding her dressing gown decorously about her. We listened to the wind howling through the empty brewhouse.

A branch torn from one of the venerable cherry trees smashed through the roof of the old ice-room behind the kitchen.

Estella perched on the fireside fender. Her eyes widened as Satis House with its two centuries of history quaked around us. Fresh blasts of wind buffeted the walls and rattled the glass in the window frames. Unearthly moans issued from the brewhouse.

The flames leaped in the grate, then cowered. There was a mess of soot on the floor.

Out of doors – as we were to discover – birds’ nests and uprooted shrubs from the garden flew past. A thunder roll was a dislodged rain barrel being tossed across the cobbles in the yard.

Estella kept close to me, but closer still to the fire. Every new squall had her retying the sash of her dressing gown tighter and glancing over at me for comfort.

‘It will pass,’ I told her.

‘When?’

‘Once it’s done with. Blown itself out.’

My reply disappointed her. Shouldn’t I have known ‘when’? Formerly perhaps I might have done; or she would have believed whatever I might have told her, and taken it for a likely fact.

She turned back to the sputtering fire. I saw she was shaking, and that she retied the sash so often to try to disguise how afraid she was.

If I had just leaned across then, stretched out my arm at that moment to touch hers … if I’d only … if …

*   *   *

The next time he came, Pip seemed out of sorts. He was almost off-hand with me, which he had never been before. And then I realised he was being off-hand to himself. His smiles were somehow bitter, but they weren’t intended for me. They were being directed back at himself, I felt: at the person he used to be, who had once put his trust in what had turned out subsequently to be false.

He looked around, and shook his head, not meaning me to notice. He caught sight of himself in a mirror, and stopped. In the mirror he belonged to this room. Step out of the frame, and he didn’t.

Since he’d last attended us, he had learned something about himself: perhaps the true source of his material prosperity. And he’d been sorely vexed at the discovery.

I had never enquired on the subject. I wouldn’t ever do so.

‘Estella will be coming,’ I told him. ‘Look about the garden, if you like. It’s wrack and ruin, I know –’

‘I never saw a better.’

‘A better garden?’ I smiled at that. ‘Whatever d’you mean?’

‘It’s just as I imagined it would be,’ he said.

‘Thistles and cabbages?’

‘I can see what it must have been like.’

‘You will have Estella to show you.’

What was I setting him up for? The garden had run to riot, run to rot, and –

‘
When
she comes,’ he said.

‘Just be patient.’

*   *   *

Estella sighed.

‘But
one
day I must marry.’

‘Where does that remark come from?’

‘What?’

‘About…’

‘About marrying?’

I stared at her.

She stared back at me. At my yellowing wedding dress. At the two ragged slippers on my feet.

‘I meant all this to be an example to you,’ I said. ‘A caveat.’

‘Telling me what?’

‘Not to believe what
I
was foolish enough – gullible enough – to believe.’

‘But not that I shouldn’t ever get married?’

‘I – I don’t know. I didn’t…’

Estella as a wife?

I had planned, of course, that she should be supremely eligible. As her provider I had given her everything which I judged from my own experience she might want. Now she asked for the very thing I hadn’t had myself. A wedding.

A gold band on her finger, next to an engagement ring. A honeymoon. A married woman’s establishment.

She would be Mrs This. Or, even, Lady That.

How was it possible I had failed to anticipate her question?

I had required my Estella to sparkle and entice. Men would fall for her. She should promise much, and be promised more in return. She should lead them to think she was a prize, their booty, for the simple taking. And then – majestically, devastatingly – she should disappoint them.