Havisham: A Novel (6 page)

‘I shall tell you all about it, Sally. I’ll write.’

‘You’ll have too much else on your mind.’

‘Not be able to find time for
you
?’

I knew my own resolve.

‘Never,’ I said. ‘Never.’

*   *   *

I twitch my mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new
.

*   *   *

A dome showed over the tops of the trees.

The view cleared along the driveway.

The house appeared. Slab-sided, octagonal. Raised on a knoll. Red creeper on the walls. French doors stood open.

*   *   *

They were waiting for me. Lady Chadwyck, well preserved and dressed at least fifteen years younger than the age I guessed her to be, and smiling sweetly.

She had two daughters and a son, lined up in the portico to meet me.

Isabella, the eldest at nineteen, was the more attractive girl, with a commanding manner. Her brother William, home from Cambridge, had heroic good looks. Marianna was darker, and smaller, and more reticent. A plain-featured and soberly dressed cousin from Northumberland, Frederick, was at the same Cambridge college as William, and lived with them at Durley Chase in the vacations.

The memory of Arthur that had accompanied me on the journey fell away as I succumbed to the warm words of welcome, their easy smiles and their fine manners. After only a few minutes I felt I was giving myself to them: like some flower that’s had a dark time growing, opening at last to the sun.

*   *   *

They had retained their childhood nicknames. Isabella was Sheba, as in ‘Arrival of the Queen of ’, with a talent for making dramatic entrances. Marianna was Mouse, because that was her way. William was contracted to an amiable mumble, W’m (I was less sure why; he spoke quite clearly, and had an open, confident manner).

Frederick wasn’t called that, but instead Moses, after Moses Primrose in
The Vicar of Wakefield
. Goldsmith’s Moses was the second son, not very bright, and yet a pedant; sent to the fair to buy a horse, he was talked into spending the money on a gross of green spectacles. Cousin Frederick (a third son) was the cleverest of our group, by their say-so, and even if he was inclined to be pedantic, the name didn’t seem to fit at all.

‘That’s the point,’ Isabella said. ‘Moses Primrose wouldn’t have complained. And neither does Frederick, ever. So, that’s the connection, you see.’

Quite frankly, I didn’t see. I could tell why modest, restrained Marianna was Mouse; Moses in the Bible was a figure of some passion and vehemence, while
this
Moses in clerical black seemed forbiddingly introverted, certainly compared to either Sheba or W’m.

But I felt I wasn’t entitled yet to question the Chadwyck family lore.

*   *   *

I would wake in a golden glow, early sunshine through the new yellow damask of my bedroom curtains. I felt the soft dense mass of duck feathers in the pillow beneath my head and inside the new coverlet.

Comfort and refinement. (This one room had been refurbished for my coming, Sheba told me. I couldn’t fail to notice the signs of hard usage elsewhere in the house, but that was as charming to me as the freshness of my bedroom.)

A housemaid came in to stir the fire and bank it up, and then – when I’d given my consent – to open the curtains. She returned with bubbling hot water for my ablutions, and a service of tea presented on a tray.

Might she lay out my clothes?

Yes, of course.

She worked very quietly, but it wasn’t a petulant silence as Biddy’s sometimes was at home. It was as if she were trying to shade into my surroundings, and often I did forget she was there, and was startled when she took her leave of me, as if one of the pieces of furniture had mysteriously come to life.

Once she’d gone I sat for a while by the window.

There was dew on the grass, and fox trails. Swifts swooped low, criss-crossing. The trees gathered serenity into themselves.

At home I would already have been hearing the first bustle out in the yard. There I could never be quite alone with my thoughts. Here stillness reigned, with only the rustle of coals in the grate and the tiny scrabbling of a mouse behind the wainscot to momentarily interfere, and hardly even that.

*   *   *

Out of term time Moses helped me with my Virgil translation.

We were tackling Book IV. Dido, Queen of Carthage, is consumed with love for the adventurer Aeneas, but he rejects her.

I didn’t look for assistance, but Moses was always ready with it.

How simple
he
could make it seem.

‘Dido, fetter’d in the chains of love,

Hot with the venom which her veins inflam’d,

And by no sense of shame to be restrain’d…’

He had me read aloud the original first, before I construed. Then he would demonstrate how.

‘Dido shall come in a black sulph’ry flame,

When death has once dissolv’d her mortal frame.’

He put me right about my pronunciation, and the stress I placed on words, and helped me correct my errors; then we moved on.

I didn’t know why he gave up his time to me. Sometimes I thought I caught a smile on his lips, especially when the back of his hand was raised to his mouth, as if to conceal it.

‘Are you mocking me?’

His face was all shock.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘weren’t you smiling?’

‘Was I?’

‘I’m amusing to you? Or my inability is?’

‘Not at all. If I was smiling, then it was involuntary.’

‘So you may have been smiling after all?’

‘At your achievement,’ he said. ‘To hear you conquer the text.’

‘Oh, Dido! I wish we could be done with her.’

‘She fascinates me, though.’

His craggy face, which put me in mind of his Northumberland provenance, lightened. His I found a stilted, rather saturnine kind of levity – as if the features of his face were a little too stiff for ready smiles, even at
my
expense.

‘Because she’s weak?’ I said.

‘Not at all. Quite the reverse. All that guilt she has.’

‘Doesn’t a clergyman-to-be regard guilt as a failing?’

‘It can be an inspiration too.’

‘Isn’t Dido mad? “
I rave, I rave!
”’

‘She sees that everything will be a falling away, inevitably. So she consecrates herself to a greater cause – the happiness she knew with Aeneas – she refuses to let
that
die.’

‘But she has to die herself.’

‘A minor detail.’

‘Throwing herself on to a pyre?’

He was smiling again.

‘You care for empresses and queens?’ I asked him.

‘No. For tragic heroines.’

‘Why them?’

‘Suffering and courageous women who deserve their own immortality.’

*   *   *

We were all talking about the beauty of music. Mozart, Bach. And Purcell, who was their favourite.

Moses said, ‘It’s
almost
perfect.’

‘You could write better?’ W’m ribbed him.

‘I mean … It intimates the perfect, the ideal. It takes us to just a hair’s breadth away.’

At that Sheba groaned and W’m winked at Mouse. But I found myself listening more attentively.

‘It’s never absolutely perfect,’ Moses continued. ‘Because then we would have heard everything. The apotheosis.’

‘Heaven on earth?’ Sheba said.

‘That’s impossible.’

‘“
The music of the morning stars
–”’ Mouse sang the words softly. ‘“–
Here in their hearts did sound
.”’

‘The utterly sublime is impossible,’ Moses said. ‘Until we reach the Godhead. Only God, and our absorption, is immaculately perfect.’

General hilarity. Moses caught me sober-faced, and because I didn’t want him beholden to me I smiled quickly, then widened the smile unapologetically.

*   *   *

I had a way with the reels, particularly when I was dancing with W’m.

He would often choose me in preference to the other candidates in a crowded room. I guessed they were just as worthy, and I sensed his mother’s impatience sometimes, that he ignored the choice she was making with a discreetly indicating closed fan.

Handsome, lively W’m – how could he not inspire me to my best?

My feet would turn the nimblest little skip-step of them all.

In the dance I felt impossibly light. Cotillion or quadrille or double-time galop. I had air beneath my feet.

*   *   *

The Chadwycks had friends who had ballrooms in their homes. And public spaces that linked together, a succession of galleries allowing you to admire the company and price it. Outside, there might be a knot-garden or a temple.

Those friends would have a farm to supply them with milk and whey and cheese; they reared and killed and cured their own meat. Provisions would be sent up to London, to their residence there.

Those
friends had friends who had a ballroom in each or all of their homes, who could make a party last across several counties, when a moon was clear to journey by. Their farms vied with one another to supply the best foods; every farm was separated from the next by a forest. So vast were the estates, I heard, that they contained space to erect alternative fantasy worlds: a jousting field, a galleon (or two) on a lake, a private version of old Rome, or St Petersburg, or Nile Egypt, to whatever scale the owners’ ingenuity and means could take it.

*   *   *

The thoughtless day, the easy night,

The spirits pure, the slumbers light,

That fly th’ approach of morn.

*   *   *

I accompany them across the fields to the chapel. The mist is still lifting. Further off it hangs like tattered banners, like dreams of glory fading. The cattle are like the ghosts of cattle. The grass is silvered with dew.

We follow a path of dried, hard mud. Sheba walks, as always, with an exquisite grace I cannot match; she is an example to us all.

The church bells carry, a soft peal. I hear them inviting us, not admonishing us.

*   *   *

‘I think’, Moses said one Sunday, walking closer beside me on our return, ‘everyone is two individuals.’

‘Ah.’

‘There’s the person here and now, the local person. And there’s the self that watches, from outside, looking down. The transcendental person.’

Why was he telling me this? Was Moses quite right in the head?

‘The local person works towards the other.’

‘“The other”?’

‘Towards conscience, I believe.’

I smiled, vaguely. Was there anything else I could do?

‘We’re lagging behind,’ I said, nodding to the others ahead.

‘Are we?’

I moved away from him, and without looking round I started running to catch up.

I realised it had been a ruse of sorts. The beasts of the field –
that
field – didn’t appreciate it was a Sunday, and Moses had wanted me not to notice they were at their rutting. A transcendental topic, and all to preserve my maidenly modesty.

N
INE

Five miles away from home, I could start to smell the marshes. Mud, weed, iodine, salt. Sour and nippy. Watery, then vegetal. I was being sucked back to the place.

The mudbanks. The drowned fields of spargrass. The fast secret tides running beneath the old slow river-water on top. The calls of the godwits and plovers, ‘tu-li’, ‘wicka-wicka’, the different cries, of the birds flying free and those caught in snares.

Chimes blown from church towers further down the estuary. The hellish shudder of a frigate being unmasted at the dockyards. The sombre boom of cannon fire from the hulks sited downstream.

Was I returning to the spot? Or was it reaching out its tentacles on the salty breezes to envelop me?

*   *   *

‘So, the reek of hops is not to your fancy, Miss Havisham?’

My father said it with a smile. But the smile, lopsided, was pulled back over a top incisor, so I knew to be careful.

‘It is a strong odour,’ I told him.

‘Hops are a serious business.’

‘But the smell gets everywhere.’

‘Surely that is a small inconvenience to you. Given the benefits they bring this residence of ours.’

He waved his hand to indicate the many silent rooms of Satis House. The volume and shadowy grandeur of our surroundings, as he believed.

Even with the temporary absence of Arthur, Satis House wasn’t Durley Chase, though. My father seemed to see what I was thinking.

‘Hops have fed and clothed you these seventeen years.’

I turned my head, glanced away into a corner, fixed on a little framed view of a people-less street in some trim unvisited town.

I could hear my father catch his breath.

‘The Havisham name isn’t good enough for you, is that it?’

Why was he so irritable, unless he was also trying to justify his life to himself? Had I touched a bared nerve?

‘What would you be known as?’

‘The Havisham name suits me very well,’ I heard myself telling him.

I was acquiring the honed vowels and clipped delivery which he did not have; I could be brittle and sharp and speak as if the remark was only an aside. It kept the colour from rising to my face. I was a little in awe of my own composure.

And so, I realised, was my father. But he had cause for satisfaction too, of an ambivalent sort, because this was what he was paying good money for, to raise me from hops, in elegant company.

*   *   *

The carriage bowled out of Durley village, and when we’d swung round the last corner the water-meads came into view. The purple haze of the wych elms; the blue flash of a kingfisher’s wings; the statuesque
rightness
of the milch cows in that green place chomping on the rich flood-grass.

‘
Un gentilhomme
,’ Lady Chadwyck said of my father, after enquiring of his health.

She fluttered some pastry crumbs from her fingers. The tea party was in my honour, to welcome me back.

I smiled politely, but sat straighter in my chair, bearing my grandmother in mind, not wanting to let any of them suppose I was a complete ingenue.

Lady Chadwyck had had me sit beside her. She had invited neighbours, in the men’s absence, and was in a mood for gaiety. Her face shone. She had that girlish, slightly simpering sort of prettiness which has a degree of pathos to it, because it comes dangerously close to being comic.