Pinkerton's Sister (8 page)

More young men were waiting high above them on the top floor, leaning out into the central space, clutching brooms commandeered from the janitor or (they looked pale and pristine) from elsewhere in the store, all ready to maneuver their chosen angel into position with the bristled heads. She had to bend right back in order to see them, as if she were looking up at Dr. Vaniah Odom in his pulpit.

“My angel! My angel!” they were shouting encouragingly, their voices echoing, fervent suitors glimpsing the girl of their dreams.

With the combination of brooms and flying angels it was like an incongruous mixture of Halloween (she dithered on the verge of thinking of the word as Hallowe’en: it was a word that seemed to demand an apostrophe) and Christmas, midway between the two dates. The wings of two of the angels became locked, and the more the young men tugged, the more the angels began to tip upside down. If they plummeted earthward, would the store’s employees be insured against death from falling angels? If anything qualified as an Act of God, this was surely it. Alice had tried to walk challengingly beneath the nearest angel — an impulse for a glamorous death had suddenly seized her — but Mama had clutched her hand tightly, and dug her heels in. She was not taking any chances.

Two of the young men on the top floor had become bored after waiting too long for their log-jammed angel, and had reversed their brooms and started a sword-fight, prodding challengingly at each other’s chests with the blunt wooden handles, like a safety-conscious d’Artagnan and Lord de Winter.

“
Touché!
” they shouted. “
Touché!
”

Others began to join in. If this had been a few years later, some of the young men would not have been able to resist utilizing their brooms as crutches in Long John Silver impersonations, wincing slightly as the stiff bristles dug painfully into their armpits, and mutineers uttering frightful imprecations would have swung across that central space on hastily improvised rigging. Skewered musketeers and pistol-shattered buccaneers would have hurtled to earth from between the creakily swaying angels. A morning in a department store rarely produced such heady excitement.

When she was a small girl — anxious to improve her literary credibility — she had been drawn to the name Pharaildis: Alice Pharaildis Pinkerton had an undoubted poetic ring to it, and would certainly have improved her syllable count. She wasn’t sure whether St. Pharaildis was a man or a woman: with their penchant for long, flowing garments, it was difficult to distinguish the sexes of saints. This was an occasion on which beards might have served a useful purpose — making allowances for the unhelpful blurring of the boundaries from the likes of St. Wilgefortis — but, as with clothing, so with names: if you were a saint your name could be used for either sex. Half the nuns at The House of the Magdalenes had men’s names. The Reverend Goodchild had his own theories about this, and enjoyed many a good snigger about it with Mrs. Albert Comstock.

St. Pharaildis was pictured with an enormous hen on either side of her, if she
was
a her. Elphinstone Dalhousie Barton — like some of the illustrators in the Lindstrom & Larsson catalogue — had no conception of perspective (grouped rather incongruously in a free-for-all freemasonry with Japanese and mediæval artists), so it was difficult to make out whether the hens were meant to be in the foreground, or whether they really were — as they appeared to be — bigger than she was. Alice, knowing nothing about the saint, was puzzled by the hens, but decided that they must be the instruments of her martyrdom. Here she was, being pecked to death by giant hens unleashed by some evil despot, because … because she … she defied his cruel edicts and his imperious mien by distributing eggs — from a willow-woven basket — to the starving poor within his evil domain. She pictured just two hens — as there were two in the window — outlandishly large, advancing menacingly, towering over Pharaildis.

Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O!

Their heads — like the pistons of the Coketown steam engines in
Hard Times
— worked monotonously up and down, the heads of elephants in a state of melancholy madness.

And on that farm he had some hens, E-I-E-I-O!

Peck. Peck. Peck.

With a peck-peck here, and a peck-peck there.

Pharaildis (not yet martyred, not yet pecked into sainthood) staggered back a little each time, a girl being pushed in the shoulder by a schoolyard bully, her basket held before her — base forward — like a fragile protective shield, a Basque (a Basque with a basket) playing jai alai. Mabel Peartree had just such a big basket, square with a central handle, and carried it looped over her arm on her way to the shops. It was exactly the sort of basket you imagined being carried by Little Red Riding-Hood, with a piece of cake, a bottle of wine, and a bunch of flowers tucked neatly into one side of it.

“Oh, Miss Peartree! What big teeth you have!”

Miss Peartree opened her mouth to reveal — gigantic and glinting — the mighty fruits of G. G. Schiffendecken’s labors. He was a dentist who created on the epic scale of a Michael Angelo sculpture. (This could very well be the only known occasion on which startled comment had been made about the size of her teeth, rather than the size of her —
Ye gods! —
enormous nose.)

“All the better to eat you with!”

Munch. Munch. Munch.

Pharaildis’s feet crunched on the hens’ eggs, incensing them further. After the
crunch, crunch, crunch
came the
peck, peck, peck
and after the pecking came the
munch, munch, munch.

Alice had really liked the name Pharaildis — there was nothing exotic about
Alice
— but the hens had put her off.

Had St. Wilgefortis specified the sort of beard she had in mind, or had she to make do with the one she was offered? Alice rather pictured her in front of a mirror, browsing through a selection (ready-to-wear rather than custom-made) offered by a diffident angel, deciding which beard suited her best, trying them on, a fashion-conscious client choosing a bonnet, turning sideways to view herself from different angles, fluffing them up becomingly, judging the effect of threading them artistically through her necklace.

Here was a useful Beauty Hint: she should make a feature of her moustache, thread it with beads, bedeck it with little silken bows, make the most of what she had until the beard came along, bedazzle Mrs. Albert Comstock with her frivolous femininity.

Her hand was aching. She had been clutching the bar too tightly, and lines were impressed across the center of her palm, glowing red above the accumulated buds of cotton. The clouds were massing above the Hudson, level upon level, heavy with more snow. She watched them for a while.

It was like the ending of
Villette
(Charlotte Brontë was certainly pushing her way forward this morning):
The skies hang full and dark — a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms — arches and broad radiations
. She saw figures unfurling slowly above her, moving with large, stately gestures, and reached up toward them, straining for a direction in which she might begin to move. Sometimes she would watch them for hours at a time from the window, or lying on her bed gazing up through the skylight, languid and irresolute, like a Victorian lady, an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, suffering from the vapors or consumption. She was, after all, born a Victorian (surely, even the most patriotic of Americans born during the presidency of Andrew Johnson would not think of herself as a Johnsonian?): her childhood, her young womanhood, had been
last century
. Though it was now more than three years into the twentieth century, difficult though this was to believe — 1900 1901, 1902 — she still found herself — when she wasn’t concentrating — beginning to write the year with an
18
instead of a
19
. She left a trail of scribbles and crossings-out on checks and bills, and disliked the untidiness. Harry Hollander had written a song about the beginning of the new century: “Let’s All Be Naughty in the Naughts (Do All the Things We Really Shouldn’t Oughts)”. Grammar sometimes took second place to rhyme in Harry’s songs.

The clouds — it was oddly soothing — formed and re-formed, and the wind was howling round the house as it had been howling all night. This was not soothing.

She concentrated her thoughts back onto the clouds, as if she were at 11 Park Place, trying to read shapes in the clouds, with Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster scribble-scribble-scribbling behind her.

Tell me what you can see in those clouds, Miss Pinkerton.

There was his voice again, telling her what it was she had to do.

He was in the room, voyeuristically loitering in this Eve-of-St.-Agnes weather, hiding away and waiting to see her, like Porphyro spying on Madeline in her chamber, tantalizingly spreading out his seductive feast of candied apple, quince, plum, jellies, manna, dates, as she slept, as she dreamed…

In the subterranean caverns of the mountain upon which the palace was built, the goblins lived. They were dwarfed and misshapen, they had strength equal to their cunning, and they planned to dig their way up into the palace and carry Princess Irene away to be a mate for their grotesque prince.

Alice watched the shapes, shifting and changing, never at rest.

The Shape of the Clouds.

It could be the title of a novel.

She tried to hide this away in a corner of her mind, to remember it, and moved Annie’s ring — she always thought of it as Annie’s ring, as if it were something she had borrowed in perpetuity, not something she had been given — from her middle finger to what she thought of as her wedding finger, to nudge her memory. Sometimes, if an idea came to her in the night, she would do this, or drop her handkerchief onto the floor, so that she would know — when she awoke — that there was something to remember. Annie’s ring, the little mirror, reminded her of what she ought not to forget. She collected titles, names for characters, ideas for her writing.

Below her, in the early-morning darkness at the back of the house, lines of gas-lamps stretched away through the snow, marking out the lines of the streets that had not yet been built, the new developments where the fields and orchards had once been. It was strange to see the gas-lamps there before the houses had been built. They seemed to stretch away in a long perspective to infinite distances, and — because they were lit — they made the empty streets that were not yet streets emptier and lonelier than ever. The great emptiness outside the window was not as great as the emptiness she felt inside herself. Here — in the outer emptiness, in the inner emptiness — was an unformed place of desolation and shadows, a place to populate with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray, and Sherlock Holmes. There they hid, there they scuttled and squatted, just out of sight of the corners of the eyes. It was as if it was night, and not morning.

A Child’s Garden of Verses
had been published the year before
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
and she had bought a copy for her little brother. She must have been about seventeen or eighteen, and yet — when she had read it — there were lines that were as deep and as dark as anything in the later adult novel. It was a book
about
children, rather than a book
for
children: this was how she had tried to explain away the painful effect it had had upon her. It had awoken memories that she had wanted to remain undisturbed, memories in which she had partly been herself gazing at the little girl she had once been, and she had partly been the little girl, aware of being gazed at by someone older.

She had opened the book at random. “The Lamplighter” was the first poem she had read, and this — like so many of the other poems in the book — had awoken very powerful memories.

The opening lines of the last verse had proven what she had already known, that the poem was about 7 Chestnut Street. There she was in the front parlor, sitting in the darkness, waiting for the lamplighter to bring light. Gradually, one by one, the lights would be lit, coming closer and closer toward her, the street brighter and brighter, until the ladder clunked against the lamppost — she heard it distinctly — outside their house. A glow sent the pattern of the windowpanes across the floor, and light crept a little way into the darkness of the room.

— Or her. Or her —

If he saw her face at the window, the lamplighter never showed that he had noticed, as if she wasn’t really there.

The second poem had been “Windy Nights”.

The book had not been illustrated. Why hadn’t the publishers commissioned Arthur Hughes to illustrate it? After his illustrations for the Christina Rossetti books
Sing Song
and
Speaking Likenesses
, the George MacDonald novels she remembered so well,
The Princess and the Goblin
and
At the Back of the North Wind
(why hadn’t he, another puzzle, illustrated
The Princess and Curdie
?), and
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
, he would have been the perfect choice. There had, however, been no lack of illustrations in her mind as she read the poems; they had been drawn up from within her. She saw the scenes in front of her like pictures on a page.