Havisham: A Novel (22 page)

That was all I had. The letter. A sheet of paper. A message I couldn’t comprehend.

Could he have thought that
my
love had dimmed?

Had he misunderstood something I’d said, or not said?

Had he allowed himself to be misled by what another person had told him?

*   *   *

‘Lock the doors of the dining room, d’you hear me? Don’t let them disturb the feast. The feast must be left, just as it is.’

She last remains, when ev’ry guest is gone,

Sit on the bed he press’d, and sighs alone;

Absent, her absent hero sees and hears.

*   *   *

They tried to undress me, but I resisted them.

I felt … What?

I felt that if I was still wearing my dress, then the wedding would still take place. If I removed it, I would be denying myself the hope of a happy ending.

‘I have to be ready, you see.’

They tried to persuade me, but I wasn’t listening. I shook off their hands.

‘When, miss?’

‘Not yet, not yet.’

And shouldn’t it have been ‘Mrs Compeyson’ by now? We ought to have set off on our travels, soon we would be enjoying each other’s company in a strange foreign city, en route to the strangest of all, he and I intimately marooned together by its lagoon.

‘Leave me as I am, will you? Just let me be.’

Frightened glances. Hands turned palms upwards, gesturing helplessness.

‘Go now, go now!’

*   *   *

He needed more time, only more time, to prepare himself.

‘He’s taken cold feet, that’s all. He’s heard something, and it’s quite untrue. There’s been a dreadful misunderstanding. It’s not serious.’

Wilt thou have this man … obey and serve him … and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live.

The woman shall answer,

I will.

The next day I wore the wedding dress, and the next again. I became used to having that woman with me, framed in the looking-glasses. I would stare at her, and it was like watching one of those (nearly) stock-still tableaux. When she was seated, she scarcely made any movement at all, except to draw and exhale breath.

I instinctively held out my hands to warm them at the fire, while my eyes passed over the Delft tiles on the hearth’s surround. There were canals there too. Windmills, barges, locks. Hump-backed bridges, skaters on an iced pond. A street of tall, narrow-shouldered houses. Tulips – no, chrysanthemums, growing in a garden pot.

… then the solemnisation must be deferred, until such time as the truth be tried

*   *   *

The canals grew colder and colder, and started to freeze; the ice islands sighed. A bird flew low, between the Dutchmen’s high gabled houses, on the spruce scrubbed streets of Leiden and Arnhem, while the chrysanthemums – no, the tulips – shrivelled and died.

*   *   *

‘Tea, miss? Won’t you try to drink some tea? Some toast? Here – You haven’t eaten at all, miss.’

The wretched queen, pursued by cruel fate,

Begins at length the light of heav’n to hate,

And loathes to live.

‘You need to eat, miss. Isn’t there something? Whatever you tell me you want to … Miss Havisham?’

*   *   *

Try to remember. When it was you felt most alive.

Try to remember who she was.

One morning, rising to a blue May sky. Pink blossom on the cherry trees. The small flames of a new fire rustling in the grate, whispering excitedly.

Now,

– brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,

And the night-raven sings.

The cards. Play the cards.

Ouvert. Pip. Renege. Sans prendre. Cut-throat. Widow.

*   *   *

‘She won’t speak to us. Well, nothing to make sense of. She only talks to herself. It sounds like gibberish. But it must mean something. Something to
her
.’

*   *   *

I’ll bark against the dog-star

I’ll crack the poles asunder

I’ll sail upon a millstone

And make the sea-gods wonder.

*   *   *

If …

If …

If …

If I’d …

If I’d …

If I’d only …

*   *   *

If I’d only left the letter unopened / he might have been able to change his mind / somehow intuiting that I hadn’t received his message / and returning to Satis House with me / he would have found a moment to remove the envelope / to slip it undetected into his pocket / and I should have been none the wiser / concerning those foolish, last-minute nerves / which is all they were.

*   *   *

’Tis folly

– where ignorance is bliss,

’Tis folly to be wise.

IV

C
ATHERINE
R
EGNANT

T
HIRTY
-
ONE

I felt I had a fire beneath me.

Poor Dido …

And that I was lying pinned, spread-eagled, on a pallet of live coals.

… with consuming love is fir’d …

Every pore of my body was dripping sweat. The coals hissed under me and grew hotter.

Sick with desire …

And seeking him – him she loves,

From street to street

The raving Dido roves …

I kept asking for my wedding dress.

‘I need to be dressed. It will soon be time.’

Time to leave for the church, to begin my new life, to claim my happiness.

So shall their loves be crown’d with due delights,

And Hymen shall be present at the rites.

No. No, that wasn’t how the verse ran, not now.

It ran quite differently, raving and roving.

– for still – for still the fatal dart

           Sticks

           – sticks in her side, and –

                               and rankles in her heart.

*   *   *

There were poultices and balms, steam and ice, all to try to bring my temperature down.

They seemed to realise now that I was back among them again, that I had good money to pay those doctors and nurses for their attention.

I was sleeping more regularly. Long deep sleeps, as if I hadn’t slept for weeks and weeks. Sometimes I would sleep through the whole of a day, and that day was then gone from my memory; nothing of it remained.

I got up from my bed, feeling like a paper person, the figure of a woman who’d been cut out of paper and unrolled. I felt I had no substance.

*   *   *

Just now and then everything is in its proper place. Objects fit their shapes, and are their exact colours.

And there are other times when everything will have been knocked out of kilter. Objects grow fuzzy around their edges, as if they’ve been dislodged: they can’t hold their colours, the colours percolate out. (Where – but no one ever tells me – where have they put the wedding gown?)

Some days dawn with the trees and the rooftops already in situ, settled. The cranes in the brewery yard are cranes, the furniture in my room is solid and neither warm nor cold when I touch it. Other days, I roll out of bed and I’m in a tilting room. The floor runs away from me, and yet somehow – what magic is this? – the furniture clings on. The trees are gowned and stooped dons, and the rooftops are the lecterns they lean against, and the cranes aren’t cranes but arcane hieroglyphics, devilish script like the positioning of the windows and doorways in the brewhouse.

*   *   *

A crack is growing in my bedroom wall. It eats the old green silk paper, and now the fissure is wide enough in places to push a finger into. Plaster pulverises and trickles down inside the wall, for an age. The crack is a river traversing some vast deep, dark forest. I call into the gap and the sounds are scattered for miles; they snag on the topmost branches of trees too tiny to see.

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

Stol’n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

My my …

A face rimous, crumbling, like the facade of an abandoned palace.

My hasting days fly on with full career,

But my late spring no bud or blossom showeth

*   *   *

Rain and wind have shaken the cherry trees to broken wire umbrellas.

*   *   *

And they haven’t washed the powder off me.

It hangs in my hair, like a nest for rats.

The powder has gathered about my body in folds of skin, drifting, solidifying between my toes.

Perfumed and sweet has turned musky and sour. I smell of unassuaged longing, and of accumulated bitterness.

‘If I’d worn green…’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch –’

‘Green. Like the Immortals. They wore green.’

‘Who?’

Ignorance darkens the world, clouds of unknowing.

‘Oberon. Titania. Puck. Living forever. If I’d worn green…’

‘Rest now, miss –’

‘Oh, there’ll be time to rest afterwards.’

Decades of time. Centuries. Millennia.

*   *   *

I sit in the sun. The old walls trap the heat. Butterflies flit and flutter about the garden, scribbles of colour on the gassy air.

I sit in the sun watching the butterflies, and picking at a loose thread on my dressing-gown sleeve. The grass grows beneath my feet, and the earth sings.

A slow fly lands on the toe of my right shoe. I turn my foot in every direction, I stamp my shoe on the ground to shake off the fly, I shout at the interloper until it’s finally dislodged.

A window sash is raised in the house. I angle my head to see. I can hear them talking about me, not what they’re saying but the sibilant voices: droning, buzzing, cleverly drifting past my ear on the currents of air.

A ring of cathedral bells, carried over the wall.

I close my eyes. I command the bells to stop.

And lo, they stop.

The air clears of that complication. I open my eyes.

Butterflies are flitting and fluttering about the garden, like pastel scribblings. The air trembles. A slow fly lands on the toe of my left shoe, I turn my shoe in every direction, I stamp my foot on the ground, I shout at the fly …

*   *   *

I didn’t want to think that the Chadwycks might have known better than I.

I didn’t want to think at all.

But of course I would wake and catch him slipping out of my mind, with a backward glance and what might have been a smile on his face.

*   *   *

I asked if there had been any word of him.

‘Of who, miss?’

‘“Of
whom
”,’ I corrected them. ‘Who else d’you suppose I’d be talking about?’

There was no message from him, no communication from any third party, no clue as to his whereabouts.

The trail had gone cold.

Nothing.

*   *   *

A man in a golden mask. He turns round. On the reverse of his head, which might be the back or the front, is another face, in silver.

‘Eat, Miss Havisham. Can’t I tempt you to a tasty morsel? No? Miss Havisham –?’

‘It’s been a beautiful day.’

‘I’m sorry –?’

‘Oh, so am I. My trap among the gigs. But now, gentlemen, I think I’ve had an ample sufficiency.’

‘Please sit still –’

‘I really have to go now.’

‘– Miss Havisham –’

‘They’ll be expecting me.’

‘Who will? Who is expecting you?’

‘I … I can’t…’

‘No one, Miss Havisham.’

‘But…’

*   *   *

Later.

They feed me
sorbet de crème
. Because it is considered strengthening for the digestive system. Eating cream ices will help me to live to a ripe old age. (Six egg yolks to two pints of double cream: can this be true?)

There’s one flavoured with orange blossoms, and another with cherry kernel, and a third type with greengage.

The Italians stay clear of contagion this way. It’s a delicious conceit, and almost worth getting better for. Almost.

Sitting in the cafes of Paris, which I’ve read about: the Dubuisson by the Comédie, or the Caveau in the Palais Royal, or its neighbour the Foy, where I perch on a chair in the palace gardens. Picking genteelly at my pyramid of ice while I wait, wait for someone who never comes.

*   *   *

‘But leave the breakfast. Leave the breakfast.’

I must have had such fury in my voice, they knew not to disobey me.

The wedding feast remained where it was, set out on the extended dining table. If I were to lose that, I would be abandoning all hope.

*   *   *

In those first twenty-four hours, half of my hair had turned white with shock. I was left with a thick streak of white, which raced through the fair like a wave, roared like a flame. I had turned middle-aged overnight.

Nobody would have wanted to marry me. It was as if time had speeded up without mercy, and shown me the person who’d been hidden inside all along. I would have caught up with her, but not for another twenty or thirty years.

She was so cruelly different from me. The white bolt in her hair gave her eyes a hunted, obsessive look, as if the visible mattered much less than the mind’s dark fancies. She terrified me, because I also knew (in a clearer part of my brain) that she had no separate existence behind the mirror’s plane of wintry glass.

T
HIRTY
-
TWO

I ambled about the house, for hours on end, wearing only a loose sack gown and shawls. I waited for night, until I saw the watchmen’s brazier lit, and then trod circuits of the brewery yard. From the garden I watched dawn come up over the rooftops of the town. I walked for many miles without leaving the policies. Ceaselessly I was turning matters over in my mind, the how and why and what to do next.

The news must have travelled far and wide by now.

About the Havisham girl down in Kent. Queerest thing. Left standing at the altar.

It would be talked about for weeks, months. Remembered from years away. A very rum to-do there was, once upon a time, a brewery heiress in a Medway town, jilted on her wedding day she was.

They wouldn’t know
exactly
, but somehow they would never have forgotten.