Havisham: A Novel (9 page)

‘Paint what is
there
,’ Signor Scarpelli had instructed me. ‘Only what you see.’

What I saw, was that what was present? How similar was it to what Sheba saw, or Mouse?

Signor Scarpelli had demonstrated the grid; the boxes; he had told us about meet proportions, about ‘pair-spect-eev’. But it didn’t make the job of representing, of turning a presence into its image, any easier.

T
WELVE

I pulled my skirts in as I passed Arthur. I could smell the drink on his breath again.

‘What? I offend you, do I?’

I didn’t reply.

‘You’re too grand now to speak? And I’m not worth an answer?’

He grabbed my arm.

‘Sister Catherine –’

‘Let go of me!’

He was tall, nearly six feet already, but he didn’t have the strength of mind to resist me. I shook him off.

A sum of money was missing from my father’s quarters. He summoned the staff, one by one. They left the room looking more shocked by the questioning than indignant, as I felt they had a right to be.

‘It was bound to happen,’ I told my father.

‘Why so?’

‘It’s not something that’s ever happened before.’

‘Exactly. What’s changed, then?’

Then we didn’t have Arthur living under the same roof as ourselves. I didn’t need to say it. My father’s eyelids dropped with the realisation, he made a little funnel for air with his mouth.

Arthur seemed to have no compunction about helping himself. He ordered clothes without telling my father, but expected him to pay for them. He took my father’s horse one evening when we had guests to dine in the house. At three o’clock one morning he was found feeding his friends from the larder. He was revenging himself for the obscurity he’d had to suffer while living with his mother.

Other thefts were taking place, from coffers and sideboard drawers and the backs of presses, and we only discovered because a colleague of my father came across for sale in Canterbury a small silver dish engraved with a style of ‘H’ he recognised. I didn’t know how many addictions he was having to finance: tobacco (his fingers were yellowing at the tips), snuff (his nostrils had a raw red look), wine (he only drank vintage Bordeaux). A pokerwork box containing ivory dice and several decks of playing cards was missing, a minor loss, but I thought it significant. He goaded the guard dogs, and I wondered if that was because he watched dogs turned against each other for amusement.

A curfew was set.

‘In my own home?’ Arthur objected. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘You’ve got an answer for everything,’ my father said.

‘And if I forget?’

‘I shall regard forgetfulness as disobedience.’

Arthur’s response was to emit through his teeth a long, dying whistle.

Bolts were attached to the doors, to enforce the rules. Arthur tried climbing in through the windows, until the shutters were fastened by bars. He attempted to bribe the more gullible of the housemaids to let him in, but on the second occasion he was sick in the hall before falling heavily on the staircase; he was too drunk to get up, and my father found him there in the morning, in a sot’s thick sleep.

‘Say something to him, sister.’

‘Say what to whom?’

‘“Oh father of ours, forgive Arthur. It’s just high spirits. Don’t keep him short.”’

‘I’ll do no such thing.’

‘No, I didn’t think you would. Selfish bitch.’

‘You disgust me.’

‘Always taking his side. What else should I expect?’

‘Don’t blame
me
.’

‘Dead against me, aren’t you?’

‘You’re an enemy to yourself. No one could do it better.’

‘
You
told him. “No more cash.” It was
you
.’

‘My father can make his own mind up.’

‘Whisper-whisper in his ear.’

‘You’re revolting.’

‘You’ve put him up to this.’

‘I don’t know what you’re –’

‘“Make Arthur a pauper.” As if I don’t deserve the ready. Every bloody farthing.’

‘You’re a savage.’

‘And you’re a liar. A creeping Judas.’

‘I’m a Havisham.’

‘But so am I.’

‘How do I know that?’

His face darkened. His features set to the hardness of mica.

‘Well, I don’t, do I?’ I looked away. ‘Your father could be any Tom, Dick or –’

I didn’t see until it was too late, his hand taking aim, then swinging out at me.

Where did that strength come from?

He caught me full across the face. I felt – I distinctly felt – the sharp edge of his signet ring, tearing my skin. The stinging pain.

I doubled over with the hurt. A gash on my cheek was oozing sticky blood.

White flares dropped in front of my eyes; the floor ran away from me. I thought I was on the point of passing out. I closed my eyes and concentrated on not fainting, not fainting.

I was left slumped over the banister. I had a presentiment he was gone, and wouldn’t be back for a while.

When I’d found a mirror I saw my face burning red, I had a cut on my cheek, and the first bruises were already spreading.

*   *   *

My father had the brutal evidence in front of him.

‘This is your brother’s doing?’

‘Not my brother,’ I told him.

My mouth was swollen. I had to slowly shape words to come out, woolly approximations to words.

But I didn’t need to tell him, anyway, that a real brother would not have done such a thing.

*   *   *

I had to wait until my face started to heal before I could leave.

My father had collected an inventory of complaints. I anticipated the trouble there would be once I was safely away.

Sally comforted me. She listened to my tales about Arthur, and didn’t defend him; she was careful about criticising him directly, out of her own mouth, as if she felt she might be speaking out of turn. She sat with me in the garden. I described goings-on at Durley Chase, and I regaled her with it all. The tableaux, the masques. The sights of Bath and Cheltenham. W’m’s mysterious preoccupations. My encounters with the stranger, Mr Compeyson.

‘He sounds quite a familiar stranger.’

‘It’s a small world,’ I said.

‘Of course it is!’

I laughed with her, and even though it hurt my face, I couldn’t stop laughing.

*   *   *

My carriage bowled out of Durley Tye. When we’d swung round the last corner, the water-meads came into view. I was never so relieved to see them.

The thirsty willows, the cattle wading to their knees in the flood-grass, the sheep idly grazing on the drier pasture beyond.

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

*   *   *

Another theatrical evening.

We were rehearsing our contribution, a
tableau vivant
of ‘The Flight of the Duke of Northumberland, on the Entrance in Triumph of Queen Mary to London’.

The house was called Wix Grange. The owners were called Merriweather.

In an interlude I walked off to clear my head. I found myself in a walled garden, then in a second.

Suddenly – urgent footsteps, scattering gravel. Rounding a corner, W’m appeared. His face lit up when he saw me.

‘The very person!’

He accompanied me, at a more seemly pace, to a temple standing by a pool. Or so I thought it was, until we came closer, and I realised it was only a windowless facade. On a pediment, in freshly gilded lettering, the name THESPIS. Twilight was falling on us.

We seated ourselves in the little temple, on a scroll-ended stone bench. As we sat there, bats we had disturbed flitted in and out above our heads, scratching about in the rafters. Swifts came darting low to drink at the pool, taking up water as they dipped, setting off tiny ripples on the dark surface of water, a hypnotic pattern of circles.

And all the air a solemn stillness holds.

The air itself smelt of lilac and magnolia, thickly sweet, and of sharper-tanged rosemary from the walkways where an occasional rabbit frisked along the brickwork. Rosemary for rue.

The temple was a folly. Somehow I forgot that it wasn’t genuine, and it was a fact easily overlooked in the welter of other sensations.

We are led to Believe a Lie

When we see not Thro’ the Eye,

Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night.

What did we talk about, sitting there? Trivia maybe. I only remember that I was trying to read a different meaning into everything W’m said, which became the primary meaning.

How long did we talk for? A quarter-hour? Or was it half an hour?

I recall a man’s figure twice, three times appearing in the outer garden, visible through an archway. He stopped to watch us. The third time he was there W’m drew closer to me, pointed to the closing eyes of the water lilies in the pool, and I thought it must be to distract me from the silver-haired observer in the dusk, to exclude him from this intimate ambience – scented by the shrubs, with its inaudible serenading of bats, written to the frantic crotchet runs of the swifts flashing past in the inky air.

I was chattering. I asked him, did he agree with Aaron Hill? In his book.

Agree about what?

Well, about there being – how many was it? – ten emotions to play out on the stage. Ten humours. I tried to remember what they were.

Joy. Sorrow. Anger. Envy. Love. Hate.

W’m didn’t make any suggestions for the list. Four remained. I thought at first that he couldn’t have been listening. But surely not. He came close enough for me to feel the heat of his breath. And then to catch traces of his perspiration: a dark musky fragrance, which had the effect of deliciously knotting my stomach.

We were still being watched. The man was dressed as David Garrick, after Gainsborough. I had seen him earlier, with a young woman in the guise of one of the painter’s feathered and pearl-draped sitters; they had been laughing together in the comfortable way of people who haven’t just newly met, who weren’t aware that W’m was anxiously scrutinising them. (Could it have been to her that W’m had directed his letter, at the afternoon’s end? I’d noticed him slip a sealed item of correspondence to a footman and tip the fellow a generous minding.)

I watched our watcher walking off. Diverted for those moments, I failed to register that W’m had lost whatever interest he’d had in talking to me. He jumped to his feet and told me, he must be off now. He didn’t offer to walk me back to the house.

‘Remember, half past eight.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m remembering.’

He didn’t go out by the archway, which I supposed was the only egress. I heard a crackle of undergrowth, disappearing footsteps.

Making my own way back to the house, I felt a chill through my costume. From nowhere I had gained a companion. Moses. That absurd, juvenile name.

‘Frederick –’

‘Nobody calls me that, you know.’

‘You frightened me. Why won’t you announce yourself?’

I hadn’t asked any such thing of W’m, but I wasn’t comparing like with like.

‘Are you feeling quite well?’

‘Of course I am,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘You look … downcast.’

‘What?’

‘Melancholic.’

‘Why on earth –’

‘A little pale. Don’t be nervous.’

‘What about?’

‘The tableau.’

He offered me his arm, crooking it so that I might insert my own. I drew back.

His long face and outsized jaw. The large eyes, the bulbous nose. The hesitant and eternally patient smile.

‘I can walk, thank you. I’m not as weak and vapid as you like to think I am.’

‘I would never presume such a thing.’

‘Someone else might require your propping up instead of me.’

He was mumbling, and I didn’t catch all that he said. ‘Moral support,’ I heard. And ‘… no more than…’

He followed a few steps behind me, trailing me, a shadow to my shadow. The faster I walked, the faster he did. I dashed up the side steps, but somehow he reached the door before me, and was able to hold it open. I walked indoors, and felt the searing reprimand of my conscience – a necklace of hot coals round my neck – as I declined to offer him any thanks. I had tears in my eyes, and I didn’t want him to see. Tears of frustration and disappointment, which blurred the interior of the green marble hall and transformed the staircase to a water cascade.

In the carriage at our departure Sheba was on the look-out for someone among the throng on the main steps of the house. She spotted the young woman who had earlier been the Gainsborough imitation, and she clasped Mouse’s arm to have her look too. The sisters exchanged words out of the corners of their mouths.

Suddenly the woman turned to observe our carriage, as if she had known all along we were there, in the queue of transport waiting to leave. Her eyes had drawn me earlier as we passed in a corridor. They were half-closed, and yet I could have believed they were more alert than all the others, so wide and shiny and artificially sparkling, in the throng around us.

W’m was mounted immediately behind us. I couldn’t see him, but I did notice a smile pass for the briefest instant across the woman’s face as she turned away. The silver-haired man from the garden was descending the steps; clearly he considered himself the woman’s proprietor as he alighted on her – as keenly, I felt sure, as any bird of prey on its quarry.

*   *   *

The look of love alarms

Because ’tis fill’d with fire;

But the look of soft deceit

Shall win the lover’s hire.

*   *   *

I mentioned to W’m the Temple of Thespis three or four days later.

‘Eh?’ He gave me a charming, unremembering smile.

‘By the pool,’ I said. ‘With the swifts.’

‘Oh yes. Of course. The Temple. Of Thespis. Very good!’ He laughed.

I couldn’t break his spell, even if I were to try. His fall of fine hair. The firm, straight nose. The high cheekbones. The elegant, baroque mouth. Golden eyes. Couldn’t those eyes see the truth in front of him – that I had been smitten from the moment of first seeing him? Nothing had changed. Yes, W’m played his little games, and he would carry on playing them. But I forgave him, as we all did. He allowed us no choice about that. Charmed by him, we could do nothing else.