Havisham: A Novel (4 page)

I’d learned that tendons had been severed in the loader’s left leg, leaving him lame. I couldn’t stop hearing the man’s eldritch wail, and the shouting and howling of the others. Over and over, I wasn’t able to drive the sounds from my mind.

*   *   *

My father kept the man on, and would always remember to speak to him, stooping a little as if he were harbouring some guilt.

I saw for myself that the injuries were worse than I had been told. The right arm had been crushed, and hung loose. He trailed one leg. He now helped out the ostlers, and did watch duty.

His daughter would bring him something to sup at in winter, a bowl wrapped in cloths. It must have been hard going, through the warren of muddy unlit lanes, seeing her way in the dark, and I felt very distant from her as I watched from one of the house windows, comfortably settled indoors for the night.

She was about my own age, a little taller than I; pretty, with thick copper hair, plaited. I could see her better in the mornings, when her father’s watch was over and she stopped by on her way to the Dame’s school, where she did housework in return for a little learning. Sally’s mother was ambitious for her, and had earned a bad name for it, but the town’s talk only toughened her resolve to give Sally a better start than other girls of her kind got. A tidy appearance was one lesson she had learned at home, how to show herself well.

I admired her, from my distance. Her quiet composure, her fearlessness in the face of those comments about her which people didn’t bother to disguise. Even her frizzy copper hair. I was intrigued by the way she had of keeping her eyes cast down, as if she must be rather sorrowful, and then in an instant raising them; those eyes would be shining with intelligence, I judged, and a ready sort of humour, even with things as they were.

Seeing her father, she would straighten up and smile a welcome. If she was concerned, she also needed to be hopeful. She knew not to take her father’s other, uninjured arm, since he needed to get his balance for himself. Her tactfulness seemed to me precocious, prodigious.

*   *   *

I had never been allowed to play with the brewery children, nor had I wanted to.

Sally turned out to be the exception.

My father was unsure. But he was still troubled by his conscience, about his liability for what had happened to his loader. So he raised no objection, although I later realised he had set a string of informers among the servants.

*   *   *

Because Sally wasn’t allowed beyond the laundry room, I took what I had to show her down there.

I set up my model theatre, and from either side we pushed the wooden characters on sticks and spoke in pretend grown-up voices. She played the servants and hoi polloi, in a local accent broader than her own, while I took the parts of the better townsfolk and the clergy.

*   *   *

I’d had difficulty talking with the other children who came to Satis House. I had none with Sally. I knew so from what my voice
didn’t
sound like – tense and squeaky and dried out.

She was less deferential than I had expected her to be, but never impolite. It was strange to me how often our opinions coincided; how, with our very different backgrounds, we regarded certain people or our town’s traditions in the same (sceptical) way – and how it was, for instance, that I could gauge her thoughts so well in advance of her saying them, and she mine, that we might finish off each other’s sentences and start the next.

*   *   *

I taught her some of what I knew.

Good table manners. How to hold herself. How to tone down the Kent in her vowels.

Simple French grammar, and then Latin declensions, which she didn’t get from the Dame. Dates in history, from the Dark Ages on. Some verses of poetry, and some prose passages.

She was a solid learner who forgot nothing. She might even have surpassed me if we had been equals, but thankfully we were not, and so I didn’t even have to regard the irony of that.

*   *   *

Once I took Sally into the tack room, so she could admire my father’s new saddle. My action was reported back to my father, and he told me quite bluntly that I wasn’t to take ‘company’ – as then and in the future he would refer to Sally – beyond the door at the end of the scullery passage.

*   *   *

She had a quick mind. Memory, I know now, is an asset of intelligence; though I also know that to live an easier life, one should have one’s full health and a short memory.

Sally, I felt, would always be like this, wanting to make things just a bit more difficult for herself. Needing to know what was in the next lesson before we got there; asking me how long it had taken me to memorise a poem and then learning it in half that time; asking me, how can they be sure of this, what proof is there of that? – King Harold losing an eye, five colours showing in a rainbow, the earth’s having a dark side, there being no final number to count to.

‘I’m only telling you what the books say, Sally.’

‘Don’t you want to know if it’s true?’

‘It wouldn’t be there in the books if it weren’t, would it?’ I answered in exasperation. Sally stared at me, with a pitying expression. Was I really as naive as that?

*   *   *

I had my arm hooked through Sally’s as we walked back along Hound Street. There was the sound of a horse being ridden slowly behind us on the cobbles. I turned round. It was my father: suddenly not looking at us, as if he hadn’t seen who we were.

He rode past. I held tighter to Sally’s arm.

*   *   *

For the next few days I felt he was paying me closer attention; but silently, furtively, between any remarks he had for me. Whenever I looked up my father would avert his eyes, either to hold on the view outside the window or examine some object in the room behind me. He would place candles where I might be clearer to him. He appeared to have some project in his mind.

*   *   *

For a while I saw a little less of Sally. It wasn’t by my choosing, but because her mother had been able to find a position for her, lowly and beneath stairs, but such impressive stairs, in the home of two elderly sisters on Bolley Hill. The ladies endlessly sparred, I’d heard, and fought over everything the other had, or might want, including the respect of each new member of their staff. Sister would struggle with sister to win and keep Sally.

*   *   *

‘I used to think you were proud,’ Sally told me. ‘People said you were proud.’

‘I’m not proud to
you
, am I?’

‘No. No, you’re not.’

‘And that surprises you?’

‘Just a little, yes.’

‘I used to think I was expected to be that way. Partly I was – and partly I became it.’

‘Not to disappoint them?’

‘I suppose so.’

*   *   *

And later.

‘I think you bring out someone better in me, Sally.’

I took her hand. She looked quite astonished. I smiled at that.

‘Why shouldn’t I take your hand if I want to?’

Sally managed to smile back, but in a puzzled way.

‘Give me one good reason why not,’ I said.

But she didn’t, because she couldn’t.

*   *   *

One winter’s night I had her stay with me in the house, all night, to sleep in my warm bed by my side. I was defying my father, of course, and no one else was allowed in on our secret.

In the morning, though, it couldn’t be a secret any longer. Sally’s mother had gone looking for her when she didn’t return home, accompanied by some of her neighbours. She had come to the brewery yard at dawn, and it chanced to be a day when my father was up early because indigestion was troubling him.

He was furious: but with Sally, not with me. I tried to explain it to him; I told him I was the one responsible.

He instructed our Mrs Venn to strip the sheets from the bed and – why on earth? – boil them. I couldn’t understand what all the pudder was about, and why the big vat had to be heated especially for the sake of my sheets. I watched the blankets being beaten and then hung up on a line to air.

We had lain telling each other stories, as if we were five years old instead of ten (me) and eleven (Sally). I didn’t even feel sleepy, not at first, because of my excitement at having her there. Later, however, I followed her example and dozed off, with my arm covering her waist. Whatever was the harm in that?

My father told me afterwards that he had ordered Sally not to come back.

Her first exile from Satis House was beginning.

*   *   *

I managed to meet her a few times, down by the river and away from prying eyes. We arranged that she should be in this or that location on a Sunday morning, so that we could have a sight of each other on my way to and from the cathedral service.

But it wasn’t the same as before: it couldn’t be, no matter how much I wished it.

*   *   *

‘It’s what my father says.’

‘What do
you
say, though?’

I stared at her, wrong-footed by her question.

‘Catherine Havisham sings her father’s song, I think.’

It sounded like a remark she must have overheard adults making.

‘I do no such thing,’ I told her.

‘But you have no time for me now.’

‘It’s different now.’

‘How is it different now?’

Because. Because, because, because.

I turned away.

‘Why –?’

‘We’re growing up,’ I answered. ‘That’s all.’

‘No. That’s not it.’

Then I felt impatient with her. Why couldn’t she just accept that these things are visited on us? We don’t have a choice, we truly don’t. I was a Havisham; she was Limping Johnnie’s daughter, never mind what airs her mother gave herself.

*   *   *

I felt watching eyes were following me down to the river. My flesh crept on the back of my neck.

It was Sally who said we should stop.
Must
stop.

I reluctantly, very sadly, agreed.

*   *   *

I saw how she grew after that. I saw how the coppery colour of her hair deepened, and the hair itself – with ribbons wound through – lost none of its thickness but was restrained still more tightly.

I saw small but significant things: the bruises on her ankles from the distances she walked every day, a red mark on her arm like a kitchen burn which her other arm tried to cover, a downward turn to her mouth on one side when she thought no one was looking.

But
I
saw.

S
IX

There’s blood on the rug where I’ve been standing. It has run down my legs from the place I know to keep hidden.

There’s blood on the sheets when I go back to examine the bed. And on my nightdress.

How have I wounded myself? I don’t feel
hurt
: just a little light-headed, a little muzzy.

A skivvy brings me what I call for from the scullery.

I get down on my knees, gingerly, and try washing the rug.

With water, cold and hot. Then with vinegar. Then with the juice of a lemon.

The stains won’t wash out of the wool; or from the sheets either, or my nightdress.

I rub frantically, but the stains are defiant – they seem to have settled there, where I’ve bled them.

*   *   *

Afterwards it was explained to me by Mrs Venn.

I didn’t doubt my father had been informed, if cryptically. He asked me how I was feeling: as if I should be indisposed, ailing.

‘This warm weather,’ he said, ‘very unseasonal; it’s best not to tax yourself.’

He didn’t let his eyes rest on me, as he normally did when he lent advice. He was embarrassed, as I was. We weren’t talking, he and I, about the same Catherine Havisham of two days ago.

*   *   *

Left in my room by myself I sat in front of the fire, preferring to watch the pictures in the flames to what I could see through my window, that view of the yard and rooftops and the drab riverland beyond.

When the flames died down and the pictures faded, I looked instead at the fireplace tiles – tiles from Delft, blue and white – and my imagination wandered among the scenes there.

By the banks of the canals, over the bridges, past the windmills, stopping as people always do at the locks until the barge has nudged its way through. On horseback, galloping bareback across a plain under high sea clouds. In pattens, picking a path over cobbles to reach a friend’s door, while the air of the town fills with pealing bells, and with a commotion of birds like a squall.

Until I remembered where I was – because embers were falling with a little rush into the grate, and rooks circled over the cherry trees outside, and the cathedral bells summoned for vespers, and because the room had grown colder around me.

*   *   *

I had been sent off for a few weeks over Christmastime, to a cousin of my father’s, who lived a good way off in Berkshire.

While I was away, and during that one quiet time in the year for the brewery when work almost stopped, my father took ill. Vessels burst in his heart. That same evening he’d eaten and drunk too much at a festive dinner, and it was thought that his untypical indulgence and similarly untypical walk home in the cold air must have caused the attack.

However it came about, he fell down in the frosty street. The first to see was Sally’s mother; she had my father taken into a cottage and best positioned to restore his circulation. She’d run off to fetch the doctor herself.

I wasn’t to be told, but Sally wrote to me nevertheless. I left Windsor at once, pretending on my return that I’d been on my way back anyway. I found Sally’s mother tending to the patient; and Sally running errands for my father, whatever he requested her to do.

Sally’s readmission to Satis House came about for all the wrong reasons. But I was glad: firstly that my father was mending, and secondly that I had my good friend to hand, to confide my worries to, and – after my shock and double relief – to let me cry, quite literally, on her steady shoulder.

*   *   *

My father was up on his feet a fortnight later. He was able to walk, if slowly for the moment, and to talk down what had taken place, telling everyone he would be back to work as usual before too long.