Havisham: A Novel (33 page)

Which was as far as my design had reached. I hadn’t planned for anything beyond. That was the future lying ahead of the future, but Estella was already rattling at its door.

*   *   *

Pip told me he knew someone – a fellow tutee at Pocket’s seminary in Hammersmith – who talked of Estella.

‘And who might that be?’

‘His name’s Drummle.’

‘Ah.’

Later: ‘This Drummle specimen – is he a friend of yours, Pip?’

‘I can’t say he is.’

The world shrinks and shrinks, but nothing should have astonished me …

‘Aren’t you compatible?’

‘No. Not really.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know if I should say.’

‘Do.’

‘But seeing that he knows Estella –’

‘All the more reason.’

Reading between the lines, Drummle was a boor. Tactless, lazy, surly, prone to despondency. His irresponsible behaviour would have seemed refreshing to Estella, a release. When he wasn’t despondent, he was likely to be the obverse, the very life and soul, and in those circumstances, fifty miles away from Satis House might as well have been a thousand to Estella. She would return to me with his laughter ringing in her ears, seeing his eyes still smiling into the carriage at her:
my
carriage, which I insisted she travel in now. (Oh I know, Estella, I know just what it is you’re going through. I see far better than you, but there’s nothing I can do to stop you.)

‘Propel me round the room if you will, sir.’

‘Certainly, Miss Havisham.’

‘But this time we shan’t talk.’

‘Whatever you wish.’

‘Oh, wishes and dreams!’

It was when we set out to make those come true that they deceived us, they became the sure-fire means of our undoing.

*   *   *

Estella was tired of her life with me, just as
I
had grown weary of my life at home. She longed to make her escape, just as I had longed to make mine. I should have had perfect sympathy for her, therefore. But I didn’t.

Her mother was a murderess, her father a transported convict. Without me she would have grown up in an orphanage, then a poorhouse. I had taken her in, I’d fed her and warmed her, I’d given her a second chance at life. She had everything to thank me for, and yet I received back little or no gratitude.

When I told her she was heartless, all that she could reply was, well, who was it who’d made her like that?

*   *   *

Perhaps Bentley Drummle was the one man she couldn’t keep down. Was he presenting her with her greatest challenge? Did he even have the semblance of a heart for her to grind away at?

Why couldn’t I put him out of my mind?

The grandeur of the Drummles’ social habits, like their self-opinion, had always been in inverse proportion to their means. Other families kept their wealth or got richer (or, like the Chadwycks, entered into ‘arrangements’); while the Drummles, losing money by slothful inattention, insisted all the more on their dignity, elevating it to noblesse. (All those elderly spinster aunts and bachelor uncles were the problem. Never mind that they didn’t have proper blue blood, the Drummle blood simply wasn’t mixing enough: it was thickening instead; coagulating.)

This Drummle wanted Havisham money. He wasn’t too proud to come after us.

Estella was no greenhorn. She had the measure of him, but there was something about him which affected her differently. He resisted the worst she could deal him. Any other man would have succumbed and gone under by now.

Pip was hurting, and Estella saw that, and she had ceased to be interested. She played with Pip and had ruthless sport.

Drummle didn’t hurt. By dint of stupidity and insensitivity, he had held out. He filled her thoughts, because she couldn’t dispose of him. He wouldn’t honour her as the others did; she hadn’t worked out yet how he was to be broken, or even if he could be.

I could see it all in my mind’s eye. He was impertinent back to her, he showed his temper, he neglected her for a while, then he was generous in a belittling way. He covered his ears when she came after him – before he lurched, lunged at her, pinned her to the wall, pressed himself intimately against her, laughed at her until she started laughing too.

Estella Havisham had met her match.

*   *   *

Everything was confused. Water lapping against mossy Venetian steps. Dido,
ghastly she gazed … red were her rolling eyes
. Faded green lettering on a brick wall. A Negro boy wearing a blue velveteen coat with gilt buttons. A bald-headed doll in a window, who winks one eye. Windmill sails cracking in a stiff breeze, Dutch clouds as plump as eiderdowns. Along a Zealand canal a gondola nudging its way, beneath willows, passing a woman’s straw hat that floats on the cold dark water and trails scarlet ribbons. A straw woman, roped to a chair, crowning a bonfire, who explodes in sparks. The black boy announcing, a man is making love to a woman on the Bokhara rug. A perspective grid laid over a blank sheet of sketching paper.

I opened my eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was night or day, autumn or spring. I couldn’t be sure if I had woken up or if this was me falling back into a familiar dream.

*   *   *

Estella twisted her mouth at me, as if she had some bad taste in it. How had we got to this?

‘Have you ever thought of
me
? When I was bringing all this credit to you –’

‘What am I hearing? “Me”? “
Me
”?’

‘That I was a person. Not some – some marionette.’

‘Oh, spare me, Estella. Don’t weep for yourself.’

‘
Someone
has to.’

‘Why?’

‘The idiocy of it. The
tragedy
.’

‘It can’t be both,’ I said, ‘whatever you’re talking about.’

‘You know quite well.’

‘Do I?’

‘Deceitful too?’

‘I have never deceived you, Estella. Never.’

‘Well, when you haven’t allowed me a breathing life like other people –’

‘What nonsense you’re –’

‘– then truths and lies don’t matter, there’re no such things. Whether you’ve deceived me or not –’

‘Ha! You’re retracting –’

‘Certainly not. You’ve
used
me. To do your perverse will. But not so I’ll know why I’m doing it.’

She was in tears.

‘Marionettes don’t cry, Estella.’

I took two or three steps towards her. Then I stopped.

‘Hush, hush!’

She kept on crying. More tears than I thought were possible: unless they had been collecting for these weeks, months.

If I’d been able to stretch out my arms, to hold her … But I couldn’t bring myself to.

I couldn’t manage it. And everything which was to follow – from that one solemn and foreboding moment it had been determined.

*   *   *

He repeated the name. ‘Drummle, you say?’

‘The same, Pip.’

‘
Drummle?
He’s the very last – Tell me this is some joke, Miss Havisham.’

‘It isn’t. I wish it were. How I wish it were.’

‘Where’s Estella? Let me speak to her.’

‘She’s gone off for the aftern—’

‘Didn’t she know I was coming?’

‘Yes, Pip.’

‘Then she won’t get her play with me. Will she?’

He quietened. But he also grew gloomy. ‘You should see how the oaf drives.’

‘And how is that?’ I asked.

‘So fast round corners in the brougham, he scrapes the body on the lamp-posts.’

‘He sounds … high-spirited,’ I said, not concealing my own dejection.

‘Reckless. A hot-head. Hell-bent.’

My worst fears were being confirmed.

‘And the horses are all on edge. He’ll run someone down soon, I’ve no doubt about it. Only he’ll be going so fast, it won’t matter to him.’

‘Because he hasn’t seen?’

‘Because he cares not a damn.’

*   *   *

Estella was coming and going exactly as she pleased. She wouldn’t tell me what her arrangements were. She only dropped a word or two, of the barest necessity, in passing.

I could have disinherited her, as my father had done to Arthur.

But the Havisham money was the essential component in her allure. Without it she would have been much like any other of a multitude of girls. What else was to be done with her bounty anyway? The wealth was inseparable from the name. The name was inseparable from the fact of our wealth. It was the identity which we had in common, we two last Havisham women.

She was telling me nothing. Of where she went, whom she saw. She thought she could do without me. She was twenty-one, her own woman, with ample funds as it was. She thought she should be able to forget me.

But I was in the air. I was in the bloodstream, I was in the bone.

I was there in the mirror. I was there in front of your face, so you tried –
tried
, Estella – to wave me away.

I’m the tread on the staircase behind you. I’m that little gulp of air in your throat after you’ve taken a swallow of food or drink, whatever you need to nourish you. I’m the small plaintive scratching of a branch at the window, I’m also the cold north wind rumbling low in the belly of the chimney. I’m the heat of your bedroom in summer, I’m the frost which patterns those extravagant ice ferns on your window. I’m the dampness of autumn oozing out of the stonework, I’m the wearisome predictability of spring budding, which is only the continuance into another year, and into the next, of your neglect of me and your unhappiness for yourself.

But didn’t she deserve to forget me?

I had shrunk the love inside her to such a tiny thing, a thing that she realised could not sustain her.

I couldn’t condemn her for ingratitude to me, because she didn’t know – I hadn’t trained her – to have any warmer feelings.

F
ORTY
-
FIVE

Estella went off to Richmond, to stay with Mrs Bradley, by the Green. In the silence – the utter dearth of communication – that followed, I had to set the scene for myself.

She was being paid court to, as ever. She was behaving (I hoped) like an icy empress. But I suspected that covertly – in well-bred Richmond – an axe was being ground; Estella was making contingency plans, in order not to continue her life as a second ‘Miss Havisham’.

I told Pip she had gone to the opposite end of the country. He was ready to set off after her. I told him I needed him here.

But
he
was turning too.

‘I begin to see what you’ve done.’

‘“Done”? What have I –’

‘Will you now play the innocent, madam?’

‘What’s this?’

‘I was some kind of experiment, was I?’

He was indignant, and yet his voice didn’t quite lose its tone of urbane politeness.

‘What precisely was I intended to prove to you, Miss Havisham?’

I could have feigned not to understand. But I had my answer instantly ready.

‘When you praised Estella, that confirmed my success with her. And when I persuaded you to stand up to her, then – you were testing
Estella’s
resolve.’

‘An experiment. Anyone could have been in my place, it just happened to be me?’

‘You – you needed to be intelligent. Someone who – who didn’t quite fit, so to speak –’

‘But I was expendable?’

‘Then why should I have persisted with you – only you – if you were?’

‘You can’t soften me with your blandishments. You’re not answering my question. “Why
me
?”’

‘You’re too clever to let this –’

‘That’s just where you’re wrong. If you’ll excuse my directness.’

Mannerly to the last, even when his criticism of me was harshest.

He slumped down into a chair. It was as if the stiffening had been pulled out of him. He was bearing some immense loss he couldn’t confess to.

He saw me looking. ‘The other aspect of intelligence’, he said, ‘is susceptibility. Although it’s unmanly to admit as much.’

I watched him. I remembered what it had been like with the backbone filleted out of
me
. That terrible vast helplessness. The waste ranged behind, and the nothingness extending in front. A frantic lethargy. Despair lodged deep, deep in the gut.

I hauled myself out of the wheelchair and blundered past him, out of the room. I could feel my bladder about to burst.

I was caught halfway along the landing. My God, my God –

A warm trickle spurted down one leg, down both legs.

I slowed, tried to tighten loose and strained muscles, and then I continued towards my dressing room. The stockings, sodden on my thighs, rubbed together. The liquid warmth was cooling away by the second.

*   *   *

It must have been the middle of the night.
Their
night. I couldn’t bear to be seated, but I didn’t have the strength to walk either, so I went down on all fours and I crawled.

… as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed …

And then it came to me, as I was pushing myself forward, how the animals walk – slowly, slowly, and the pain of my motion quite excruciating – it came to me then with exemplary clarity, just what it was I had done.

I was no better than
he
had been, so long ago. This was the irony of my history: by trying to deny him subsequently, I had turned myself into an imitation of him. Our vices were the same.

‘Is it too late, Pip? Is it?’

He stared at me. Once I’d been a giantess to him, and now he had to adjust his eyes downwards.

‘Don’t say, don’t say!’

‘I have to go, Miss Havisham. I can’t come here any more –’

I held his arm tighter.

‘– I can’t stay. Please, let me go.’

I fastened myself to him, closer than ivy, around the strength and forcefulness of a living man.

‘Just once more, Pip.’

I had dispensed with the wheelchair. We started to walk, haltingly, round the room.

Firelight, candleshine.

We followed the same unvarying circuit. About the cobweb-festooned table and the chairs awaiting the wedding guests, past the fireplace on one side and the double doors on the other.