Havisham: A Novel (7 page)

I had previously observed a girlish enthusiasm also; she would decide on a course of action in a moment, rising quite suddenly from her chair, dragooning us into a party to go off to … The obverse was – something she preferred us not to see – an equally impromptu retreat from high spirits, which her children were used to; this torpor confined her to her own quarters and left her merely watching us from a window.

All was well today, however.

‘And now we have you back with us, Catherine!’

There was a new mint silver service, reflecting us where we sat in our chairs. The silver gleamed, and all the more so against the fine but sun-faded furniture, the once expensive but threadbare rugs.

‘I am very glad to
be
back,’ I told her, in all honesty.

Glad and relieved.

*   *   *

I had brought my box of books back with me, and my sketching pads which I’d been working on in the Cherry Garden at home, and my dancing pumps, in which I’d been practising in my bedroom above my father’s office, and half a dozen new dresses. And two hatboxes.

They were the tools, the
emblems
, of an education, although I couldn’t yet judge for what end – other than a veneer of accomplishment – I was being prepared.

*   *   *

We dressed three times a day. For morning; for riding; and for dinner.

In the mornings, where I used to have cotton or linen for my gowns, my negligees now were tabby, dimity, Canterbury muslin. Away from Durley, our promenades called for pattens and parasols, a new Camperdown bonnet.

For riding, to match the others, a habit of pompadour broadcloth (a shameless guinea per yard); white dimity waistcoat (with lapels, like the habit); a habit skirt of long lawn; habit gloves; a hat with a trailing feather. I acquired a vast greatcoat, and knotted a white handkerchief round my throat. We resembled strolling Gypsies.

In the evenings, after most of an hour’s dishbill (Sheba’s favourite neologism from
Fanny Burney
), we emerged like butterflies from our chrysalides. A clouded French satin gown, or rich-toned taffety. An otter-fur tippet for walking out, and a brown silk pelisse, which was the newest thing in greatcoats.

*   *   *

Is it me, that person?

My father dutifully settled all accounts. (£7 4s 0d for a riding habit? Very well.) He didn’t demur whenever I felt I had to be in a smarter fashion, because we would be bound to meet even more exalted types soon: that black beaver hat with purple cockade and band. And I had been given the name of a simply divine mantua-maker, a Miss Williams of Tonbridge; everyone – absolutely everyone – swore by her.

*   *   *

I’m not beautiful, not by a long chalk.

I’m not plain either.

My appearance is … distinctive. People suppose they can read my character from it.

My eyelids are the heavy Arab sort, and that makes my hazel eyes seem secretive, and possibly supercilious.

My mouth is straight, and is judged to indicate personal severity.

My nose is Roman, but that is
not
a hook.

I have clear facial bones, and a tidy oval chin.

My face is narrow; so is my forehead, but I also have a high brow, so I’m said to have more intelligence than I care to admit to. (I don’t quibble with that, although I wish it were true.)

But I’m not just a face, or a body. I’m a Havisham. My appearance is wrapped around with an aura of wealth (provincial, not metropolitan; but money is money) and high living (vulgar rather than sophisticated; but time, between one generation and the next, is the best civiliser).

I don’t
need
to be a beauty. Yet no one, except some person ignorant of my name, would consider me less than handsome.

*   *   *

W’m and Moses returned at the term’s end.

Other than my father, I had never been as close physically to a man as I found I now was to W’m.

At his own instigation, I felt sure.

Sharing the table in the small study where I did my preparations and he his. Seated next to him at the dining table. Passing him in the corridors. Having my hand taken by him on the inclines of lawn, or at a stile. Letting him place my walking cloak around my shoulders.

Whenever Moses stepped in to do any of these things, it wasn’t the same. He was self-conscious where W’m seemed natural and unaffected. I felt that Moses was looking at me every time so that I would register my approval of the deed; which was the reason for my feigning inadvertence.

*   *   *

I asked W’m questions about my schoolroom work. I asked him to explain, several times, Plato’s theory of the ‘idea’ of things: a reality that doesn’t alter despite the changing appearance, which – beyond mere sensations’ reach – reason alone proves.

All the while I feasted my eyes on him: his sweep of fair hair, and white teeth, and golden eyes, and Greek profile.

I remembered to nod my head, as if I were really capable of understanding.

Moses would tell W’m to slow down a bit, to explain more clearly, and I was irritated. It was as if he assumed I was too stupid. But he had also seen that I truly made very little sense of it all. What right did he think he had to expose me like this?

I ignored Moses as much as I could, and gave my attention – I made a show of giving my attention – to W’m. But W’m wasn’t always aware of it, and that was my true vexation.

*   *   *

They had two passions: performing
tableaux vivants
and attending masquerades. They read up about masques in the newspapers. Sheba kept illustrations: the Duchess of Bolton in a man’s domino, and then wearing the costume she’d had on underneath, ‘the most brilliant Sultana that ever was seen, covered with pearls and diamonds’.

Lady Chadwyck had opened an account at Jackson’s Habit-Warehouse in Covent Garden, so I knew that it was a serious pursuit. For the first masque we went as ‘Bohemians & Tziganes’, in brown stuff jackets and blue stuff petticoats, with straw hats fastened beneath the chin; and red cloaks, in silk instead of rustic wool. Sheba had equipped herself with a crook and live lambs. Our hostess was in peasant wear, as she understood it; a fine pink-and-white dress in her wardrobe had been cut down, but it was judged a sacrifice worth making.

The theme of the second
bal masqué
was ‘Van Dyck’. We didn’t have time to seek novel inspiration in the paintings, but had to take what was left in stock that was ruffed and lacy. Once we were decked out, as Charles I or Henrietta Maria or Stuart notables, we had to try to appear – aided or hindered by a hired monkey or spaniel or greyhound – as if we had just walked out of our frames.

Dressing up and acting out was one aspect of my Durley life – the theatrical one. The other was the academic: studying my text books, completing exercises, memorising high-minded and high-flown verse. Somewhere between was the business of singing, playing the keyboard, and drawing and painting: all of which, it seemed to me, involved not just
doing
the task in hand but taking up such a pose and attitude that it was incontrovertibly clear that that was what you were about – delivering a Purcell song with an Amazonian bearing, using the arms like pistons while playing my keyboard preludes and sonatas, musing with crayon or camelhair brush held hovering over the drawing pad or easel.

*   *   *

We learned to be nymphs and goddesses, Gothic abbesses and devout pilgrims, Persian empresses and desert potentates. We plundered the legends of Greece and Rome.

When we went to
bals masqués
, we also had to unmask, at one certain point in the proceedings. Then we were ourselves again: but not entirely so. It was stranger than the masks, seeing familiar faces in unfamiliar guises, aspiring to be somehow larger than life, with grander emotions to dispose of.

*   *   *

I was still being paired with W’m: on walks or at meals, over cards or playing music or at the dance. I wasn’t sure how to deal with him.

There was the matter of our proximity; he was taller than my father or Arthur, taller than Moses, with an actor’s archetypal good looks, and an actor’s way of both positioning himself in profile and – in company – declaiming rather than speaking, yet doing neither with any hint of awkwardness.

More than this physical closeness, though, I felt uncertain about his way of thinking. He didn’t seem aware of things like the weather, or atmospherics, as I and his sisters were, which made me think
our
concerns must be trivial in comparison. His had a broader sweep – classical history, his colleagues’ reputations (or lack thereof), politics, the cost of property, philosophy, ketching, the price of a Smollett translation of
Don Quixote
he’d seen for sale in Cambridge market.

He never put me down. He assumed that my learning would cease once I was married, but in the meantime he knew not to discourage me. He wasn’t adversely critical, as I felt Moses was, and he left me to get on with my own studies; it didn’t occur to him that I might need the sort of help which Moses, in his clumsy way, offered me.

*   *   *

The trick was to shift my eyes away before he could catch me looking at him, which was difficult.

If we danced together, I held a fan or handkerchief to my chest, so that he shouldn’t see the colour he brought to the surface.

I hadn’t come across anyone who comported himself
de profil
like that, and who simultaneously scanned a room so exhaustively. I thought that it must be done for effect – until I discovered, firstly that he was quite short-sighted but wouldn’t consider spectacles or a lens, and subsequently that it galled him if he failed to acknowledge someone whom his mother had warned him deserved to be recognised.

*   *   *

If we were ever
alone
together, I immediately sensed his unease.

It was a simple matter of etiquette, of course. But without others around us, it was as if he started to lose his nerve.

At breakfast. In the book-lined passageway that constituted the house’s library. Or in the summerhouse.

‘Oh, Miss Havisham…’ (No conversable, free-and-easy ‘Catherine’ now.) ‘… have I disturbed you? If I’m disturbing you…’

‘Not at all,’ I would say.

In extremis he made an immediate getaway. ‘Actually, I’ve just remembered … you must excuse me if I…’

And then he was gone.

*   *   *

Sheba and Mouse were loyal admirers. ‘You
do
like him, Catherine?’ they were eager to know.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Not as much as
we
do, of course!’

‘But almost,’ I said.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘We’ve noticed, naturally. We’ve been watching.’

‘Oh.’

‘And he likes
you
.’

‘Yes?’

‘Very much. We’re both quite sure of that.’

*   *   *

I could tell my father was impressed by my progress. I had snatches of Italian and (less confidently) German to complement my French. I could quote lines from Horace and Sallust. Even when he couldn’t understand, he was very taken by the sounds, by the false conviction of my delivery. He could already put a value on returns from his investment.

‘Another six months and you’ll be up to the best hereabouts. The best, and no mistaking.’

Satis House smelt old and stale to me, as if history had been stacked up in the rooms behind the closed doors. At Durley Chase sunlight swilled about the rooms, and they sweetly smelt of beeswax polish and the scented bulbs and flowers distributed in bowls. My home oppressed me with its sombre fumed-oak panelling and the shadows of the glass-leading on the windows which barred and squared the dark uneven floors.

*   *   *

Arthur would brush against me, shoulder against shoulder, and push ahead of me leaving a room. It exasperated me.

‘What do they teach you at that school of yours?’

‘Not to go about with our noses stuck up in the air.’

‘Not good manners, anyhow.’

‘
You
know all about those, do you? Living with that rout.’

‘Don’t call them that.’

‘I don’t know why you bother yourself with them.’

Because I have a brother like you. Because he says things like that. Because he’s not able to work it out for himself.

‘Well…?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters, or you wouldn’t go chasing after them like you do.’

‘It doesn’t matter, about having to explain anything to
you
.’

‘Because you can’t.’

‘Because I’m tired of listening to you.’

‘Can’t you move all your stuff there?’

‘And leave you with the run of this place? That’s what you want, of course.’

‘What do
you
know about what I want?’

‘Precious little. Or care to.’

*   *   *

I gave Sally some of the clothes I no longer wore. They had to be lengthened a little; but since she was thinner in proportion to her height than I was, they didn’t need taking out. The fashions had dated slightly, but Sally wore them with such panache that it didn’t matter.

‘They might have been made for you.’

‘I suppose they were. Now that I’m wearing them!’

She had a natural grace, which I envied, because I’d had to concentrate on choreographing my movements with the Chadwycks’; I worked hard to look so languorous. Sally was unaffected and simple, and never gauche. How was it done? I could have taken her into, say, an Assembly Room and passed her off as my cousin – my red-haired cousin – and no one would have suspected. I suggested it once or twice, but Sally declined, politely but quite firmly.

‘Then what use will the dresses be?’ I asked her.

‘I do wear them. I promise you.’

‘
When?
Tell me.’

She didn’t say.

‘You
don’t
wear them,’ I teased her.

‘I do.’

‘Promise me.’

‘I promise.’

‘When, then?’

‘When I wish to do my passable imitation of Miss Catherine Havisham.’

‘I haven’t seen that.’