Havisham: A Novel (24 page)

‘I’m thinking of buying a little land,’ I said.

‘Across the way?’

‘I’ve seen a young woman. One of the Calloway children, I suppose?’

She had been a little older than I. Well dressed, with rather severe features, as if she had undergone some strain of late in her life.

‘But I’ve not seen any
Mr
Calloway,’ I said.

‘He’s dead, Mr Calloway is.’

‘Oh. Just one? It’s in other hands now?’

‘Her you’ve seen, that’s Miss Jane.
She’s
the Calloway now.’

‘She has charge of the firm?’

‘Does not a bad job of it neither, by all accounts.’

I enquired of a few customers about Miss Calloway. ‘Plain Jane’, one called her. Another said she must be worth a good deal. ‘Drives a hard bargain’ was another verdict.

‘Doesn’t put the men off, though. Not short of suitors, that one. I’d like to see him that gets anywhere, mind.’

One, I heard, had persevered and got further than the others. A couple of years back, after her father died, there had been talk of a secret engagement. But a pair of her friends had got to hear, and managed to talk her out of it, just in the nick of time.

‘Those clever types, like she is, clever at her job anyhow – don’t seem to see the danger – anyone could’ve told her
he
wasn’t the one for her.’

A smooth talker, bit of a popinjay to look at. Father had been a doctor at sea, mother kept ill … He’d hung about racecourses apparently, made a bit of money for himself that way. Back he would come, though, to the Calloway house out on the King’s Lynn road. At the last minute she saw sense, and sent the fellow packing.

Name like ‘Cumberstone’, ‘Compston’. She had kept him from everyone except those two friends who got to find out. Maybe she’d guessed for herself it was just a forlorn fancy. One of those crazy notions that threatens to get the better of us. She wriggled free of him, though. And now look at her, running the business as well as her father ever did.

*   *   *

The church lay low in the fields. Fields of ripe corn, swaying voluptuously.

A parish of rich spinsters. It was ideal territory for him; it might not serve his ambition so well (although, on second thoughts, spinsters’ word-of-mouth could work a wonder or two), but he would certainly be well fed and dined.

He had a voice to fill the space. It would dip and then theatrically rise.

‘“Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.”’

The dowagers, warming themselves with their pugs and tiny terriers, lapped it up.

‘“And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.”’

If they could have applauded him, they would have.

‘“And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”’

Anything he might have asked of them …

He raised both arms aloft, in inspired supplication.

God helps those who help themselves.

*   *   *

‘Cold heaven, I’ve heard it called. Is the chill of your church a taste of it?’

‘I beg your…’

‘Good morning, Mr Chadwyck. Or it’s just turned afternoon, if I’m to believe your bells.’

‘It
is
Catherine? Catherine Havisham?’

‘A little blue in the face. But it is.’

What was I doing here? Talking to Moses Chadwyck. (I still couldn’t think of him as ‘Frederick’.) Eating lunch with him, or trying to.

‘We’re delighted you’ve come. Thought to visit us. Aren’t we, Aurelia?’

His sister glanced up from her plate, and when she couldn’t catch his eye she smiled across the table at me. They had heard months ago that I wasn’t to be ‘Mrs Compeyson’; it wasn’t being spoken of by any of us, but I sensed that at the time the news had come as a relief to him.

I dropped my knife, it clattered to the floor, and the maid darted over to pick it up. The housekeeper had been hovering outside, and she walked in, making straight for the canteen of cutlery to fetch a replacement.

They all doted on him, his women. What was his gift? Not physical attractiveness.

Those large hands, his big square cleft jaw, his premature stoop, his balding dome with its fringe of sandy baby-hair. An unbuttoned cuff; his necktie unravelling.

But his eyes, behind their rimless close-to lenses, were gentle, sympathetic, confidential: with a vision that saw beyond windows and pretty vistas, beyond self and immediacies.

‘You were in the vicinity?’

‘No. No, I wasn’t.’

‘You searched us out?’

‘I was thinking back. To Durley Chase.’

‘Well … My sister and I are very honoured.’ It was said quite unironically.

I nodded an acknowledgement.

‘You’ve changed, Catherine.’

‘We all have.’

‘Some fruit, Miss Havisham?’ his sister asked. ‘These are our own peaches.’

‘No. No, thank you. I’ve had – an ample sufficiency.’

Petals shivered from an arrangement, falling to the table beneath.

‘How have I changed exactly?’

‘You seem – to live a little more inside yourself.’

‘I don’t see how – I’m running a brewery, aren’t I?’

Aurelia looked with alarm between the two of us.

‘
You’ve
changed too,’ I said to him.

‘How so?’

‘You seem – to live
not
so much inside yourself.’

‘Is that a good thing?’

‘You’re settled, I can see. Your sermons. The ladies and their lapdogs.’

‘Oh, those dogs!’

‘Do you still read your books?’

‘Yes. But not so much perhaps.’

‘And is
that
a good thing?’

‘Maybe it isn’t.’

‘How well set up you are here. How comfortable.’

I felt unable to stop myself. I didn’t know why I was repaying their hospitality so badly. I had drunk too much gooseberry cordial. But something about the house oppressed me: the regular mealtimes – no stranger to be turned away – when worthy tomes (if not as worthy as they once were; they had gaudier bindings) were laid aside with the bookmarks in place, and could be picked up again after a hearty feed and a doze in the high-backed armchair, positioned within reach of its footstool.

He played his role well, turning in a sterling performance in church and then retiring here to the semi-privacy of home. And yet … and yet the Cambridge books were still within his arm’s reach, and the piles of papers,
those
weren’t merely stage props, were they? His signet ring was engraved with a squared cross,
+
.

God, I felt, had managed to creep into the details. The white arum lilies. The demure chastity of Aurelia. The fruit remaining in the compotiers, strawberries for righteousness and pomegranates for resurrection. How the sun hit a green-and-blue glass bowl, spilling a holy potage of chapel-light on the rug.

We stood at the gate, he and I.

‘What about the others?’ I asked.

‘I hear less of them now. The girls are married.’

‘And their brother? With the tin lady.’

‘Not yet. The engagement lasts and lasts.’

‘None of you’, I said, ‘accepted my invitation to see
me
wed.’

‘That is so. I do regret that.’

‘Was it a conspiracy?’

‘Not as such.’

‘“Not as such”. You’re a Jesuit now!’

‘I believe Lady Charlotte may have exerted a little influence.’

‘Ah.’

‘They’re obedient children.’

‘Adults, surely. Competent to think for themselves.’

‘You were obedient to your father’s wishes, weren’t you? Aren’t you obedient now to his memory?’

He surmised correctly. I nodded. The Chadwycks had been both wrong and right.

I heard skittering flints, and then the spinsters’ voices as they approached. A lapdog yapped, sniffing a stranger. He looked away from them, directly at me. His eyes were filled with something more intense than tenderness. At the same moment I realised what it was I had never seen in another’s eyes over all that time, up to my engagement and beyond. The vital absence: love.

‘Catherine, I want to say what a pleasure, what a joy it’s been –’

‘Yahoo! Your reverendship!’ a spinster called across to him. ‘What a fugitive fellow you are! No more hiding from us
now
!’

I looked down at the dried mud surface of the lane, the flints’ sharpness. God in the details.

*   *   *

At last I located my copy of the
Aeneid
on my shelves. I searched through the tracery of tiny ink cribs I’d marked in the margins. One passage was annotated in another hand. It must have been Moses’s doing.

The fated pile they rear,

Within the secret court, expos’d in air.

The cloven holms and pines are heap’d on high,

And garlands on the hollow spaces lie.

Sad cypress, vervain, yew, compose the wreath,

And ev’ry baleful green denoting death.

I couldn’t bear to read any further. I closed the book.

I was alone; there was no one else to hear. But I could only ask Moses for his forgiveness under my breath, confessing my misjudgements of the past in a penitent’s whisper.

*   *   *

Then, later, came talk of having to contribute workers to the defence forces, if the French should invade. Mr Ambrose informed me that now some other big brewery-owners wanted to move in. They knew all about the state of morale here, or the lack of it. They smelt my blood.

An offer was put forward, to take over Havisham’s, which was increased before I could respond. Then a second offer came from another source. I didn’t want to hear what worth they put on the firm. I was indignant. I was ashamed of myself, that I had somehow permitted this dire state of affairs to come about. The brewhouse men sent in yet another delegation to argue their points, to try to harry me.

I’d had more than enough of it, too much, much too much. I was exhausted. I was at the end of my fraying tether. It simply
couldn’t
be allowed to happen, that frail rope snapping for a second time.

*   *   *

I’d had an address – the one in Blackheath – where I could write to him in London. When I went there and asked, one of the tenants told me he was gone. The man gave me another address, at the Lewisham end. At that second house, the new occupants of the rooms made clear their distaste for the previous tenant, Mr Compeyson.

‘We’d no idea the fellow
had
any friends. How his wife put up with him, God only knows.’

‘His wife?’

‘
She
seemed better. But all the more fool for choosing
him
.’

‘You don’t know where he is?’

‘Nor care, frankly.’

I got out at the costume hirers in Covent Garden, and looked in through the windows.

There was a wall of masks, and a selection of period garments on hangers. A customer was leafing through a catalogue of items while an assistant on a stepladder was checking among drawers to see which were available. That life of pretence – that dream life – carried on just as before.

I went back to the second house, where the tenants of the apartment had been so candid. This was the closest I had come to him. But it still wasn’t close enough.

I walked the pavement on the other side of the street. It was drizzling lightly. A woman with a child approached, keeping a careful watch on me. They stopped a few feet away. I ventured a smile, as much as to apologise for my presence.

Our umbrellas, it occurred to me, were going to collide. I stepped to one side.

‘I was hoping it would hold off,’ the woman said.

‘No such luck.’

‘It could be worse.’

‘It might,’ I concurred.

Now the woman was studying my umbrella.

‘I knew someone with a blue umbrella just like yours,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘Quite envious I was.’

He
had bought it for me, when I once expressed a fancy.

‘Is it so unusual?’ I asked.

‘I’d never seen one. Not that shade. What would you call it, a greeny blue?’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘She had one just the same. The lady across the way, I mean.’

I looked across to where the hand was pointing, the very house I’d had in my sights.

‘Who used to be there, I should say. Mrs Compeyson.’

‘You knew her?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes. We were neighbours.’

‘D’you know where they’ve gone?’

‘The Compeysons? Yes. Only, I wasn’t to tell anyone.’

‘You can tell me,’ I said.

‘I can?’

‘We – we were well acquainted, he and I.’

‘Not from Kent?’

‘Yes.’ I was startled. ‘Why d’you ask?’

‘His wife was from there. And he had something to do with a brewery in those parts. Only it didn’t work out for him.’

‘No. No, it didn’t.’

‘You know something about it?’

‘I’m just – an observer. Now. But I would like to find out.’

The little girl was pulling on her mother’s arm.

‘I would like to find out very much,’ I repeated, not certain whether I did or not. I thought the woman’s eyes were kindly, for this cold and uncompassionate city.

‘How to get hold of him,’ I said. ‘Can you help me? Please.’

They live in a tall house of flaking stucco, in a not insalubrious or inelegant quarter. Milborne Street in Wandsworth is hanging on to the coat-tails of genteel respectability that graces Putney to the west. The Compeysons are trying to move on and up in the world.

I stand beneath a dripping ash tree to watch, with my blue umbrella raised.

Drops of rain run down the back of my neck. I can feel dampness through the soles of my boots. My bones ache with exposure.

It’s all for just a sight of him. He knows the quick ways home, and – I can guess how it is – he’s able to make an exit from the house so furtively that he seems to be no more than some temporary readjustment of the light falling on a wall, or the momentary disturbance of vegetation at the side of the path.

She
doesn’t appear, either. Maids come and go, but not their mistress. Meanwhile I’m Lot’s wife, a pillar of bitter salt. The cold brings tears to my eyes; my eyes sting with them. The house blurs, as our watercolour sketches for Signor Scarpelli used to do when a drizzle came on.