Havisham: A Novel (3 page)

‘Don’t take on, it’s nothing –’

‘There’s blood.’

‘A very little. Suck it and –’

‘How common!’

She came closer, but I snatched my hand away and turned my back on her. I didn’t know why I was so vexed and angry.

‘It’s your temper I’d be bothered about, if I were you.’

‘But you’re
not
me. How on earth
could
you be?’

I was aware, through my anger, that I was being goaded. I closed my eyes.

Her voice moved in front of me again.

‘Close your eyes, that’s right, and count to ten.’

I opened them again and ran, screaming inside my head, from the room.

*   *   *

For as long as I could remember a woman with an emperor’s nose had paid occasional visits to Satis House. She wore layers of black, and spoke English in a strangely accented way.

My grandmother: my mother’s mother.

My father had the servants address her as ‘Madame’, as the French do.

She would sit very straight-backed in her high chair, and imposed her powdery presence on us all. I was required to stand in front of her reciting, or playing a tune on my dulcimer. Invariably something in my performance touched her, because I would be summoned forward to have my hair and cheek stroked; her rings were cold, and hard, but not sharp.

*   *   *

Her visits became more infrequent.

And then she stopped coming at all.

On what was to prove her final visit she was very critical of the food she was served, speaking in front of Mrs Bundy. My father started defending our cook. My grandmother sent the woman from the room, and then – while I sat between them – she berated my father for showing his partiality. She did
not
expect to be shown up in front of some kitchen cook.

‘Not just any kitchen cook,’ my father said.

‘Certainly, I agree. A very poor cook.’

‘You have no reason for saying so.’

‘I have just tried to eat the food you put before me.’

‘You think I can’t choose a good cook, Madame?’

‘Never mind “good”. Simply a decent one would suffice.’

‘What gives you the right, I should like to know, to –’

‘In my daughter’s place I –’

‘We don’t know what Antoinette would have thought –’

‘She would
not
have given her approval to
that
woman’s being in this house.’

They both turned and looked at me. My grandmother’s face was now as sour as a cut lemon. My father, spinning the stem of his wine glass with his fingers, seemed anxious on my account.

Later, before our visitor left, I heard my father saying that he would appreciate it if she didn’t speak to the servants without his approval. She denied knowing what he meant.

‘You’ve not been asking the maids questions?’

‘Whatever has put that idea into –’

‘I’m cognisant of what goes on in my own house.’

‘As the maids are.’

‘You
have
been asking them –’

‘Antoinette would never have stood for it.’

‘Stood for what?’

‘You know very well what. Don’t taint young Catherine, do you hear me?’

‘I should tell you, I do not appreciate being advised how –’

‘I am not advising, Mr Havisham. I am
demanding
.’

*   *   *

She didn’t ever return to Satis House.

Every now and then I would receive a note from her. I would reply, but my father insisted on seeing what I wrote to her, and having me rewrite – more concisely – if he judged so.

I heard one of the girls say Mrs Bundy was relieved anyhow, to see the back of her, no more fancy French stuff to dish up
there
. And another girl laughing back, Oh Mrs Bundy’s got her own ideas what she’ll do to this place, what’s going to go into folk’s bellies.

I knew that my grandmother wouldn’t be back, even though I wasn’t told so. Mrs Bundy walked about more amply; she had the girls running everywhere on errands – I even saw her passing through our hall with flour on her arms or a whisk in her hand. My father wouldn’t have risked offending her with another visit from my imperatorial grandmother, even if he was denying the mother of the woman he’d married and lost, and was depriving
me
of an acquaintanceship with my one surviving female blood relative.

*   *   *

I had chased my cats down to the orchard. I happened to look up and jumped when I saw someone, a boy, crouching splay-legged in the fork of a tree.

‘What are
you
doing here?’

Then I recognised him. Mrs Bundy’s son, in new finery.

He raised himself nonchalantly on one elbow and considered me.

‘I could ask
you
the same,’ he replied languidly. He spoke as boys do who have begun to receive an expensive education.

‘I asked
you
first.’

He smiled.

‘Oh, Catherine Havisham has first say in everything, doesn’t she?’

I glared back at him.

‘It’s not
your
garden,’ I said.

‘It’s not yours either.’

‘More mine than yours.’

‘
Is
it?’

‘It’s my father’s.’

‘“It’s my father’s”,’ he repeated, exactly imitating my tone of voice.

‘Who else?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Come down from there.’

He did eventually – taking a long time about it, and making it seem that he only pleased himself.

He was tall, lanky, pallid, not filled-out like his mother. He still had his thin foxy face. I had never cared for the look of him, this craven interloper.

‘Well…?’ I said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘I just wanted to get a good look at you.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘So you’ll give me sweet dreams. When I dream of this place.’

‘The garden? It’s private, I told you. It’s got nothing to do with you.’

‘Says who?’

‘
I
say.’

He laughed.

‘So, you’re the boss, are you?’

I snapped at him. ‘Don’t be insolent!’

‘Or else what –?’

He reached up his arm, and might have been going to swing from a low branch, but he either didn’t trust his strength or didn’t care to soil his white hands and clean cuffs.

‘I’ll call my father.’

‘Very well, I’m going. Don’t you mention this to him.’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Tut-tut! Speaking to town lads? In
his
garden? Whatever would the old boy think?’

*   *   *

And then, quite suddenly, Mrs Bundy left us.

Oh, joy and jubilation!

She was said to be living now outside the town.

I had a sighting one day. She was dressed like a respectable tradesman’s wife, with a fur collar and a fur muff and a hat replete with a quiver of feathers. She had her son in tow, still lanky and still sallow-faced and attired like last time in the garb of a young gentleman. Both mother and son shared something I couldn’t account for: an air of self-confidence, eyes not ashamed to meet anyone else’s on that busy main street of our town.

*   *   *

I mentioned to my father that I had seen Mrs Bundy.

‘Indeed?’

How grand she was trying to make herself look, I said.

‘That isn’t her way.’

‘She seemed so to me.’

‘To
you
, Catherine. But you never approved of Mrs Bundy.’

‘No.’

‘You too question the wisdom of my having employed her? I can’t pick my own staff well, is that it?’

I had bothered him, I could tell that. A tic was pulling in his cheek, throbbing away.

‘I didn’t mean…’

‘I don’t wish us to discuss Mrs Bundy. Not ever again.’

*   *   *

Whenever I saw her son I would look away quickly. He was always watching me, with an expression I found confusing. He was disapproving, and superior, but also frankly curious. He had no compunction about staring at me, which I found presumptuous. Of what concern should I, a Havisham, be to the son of our erstwhile kitchen cook?

F
OUR

My father’s office was in the house. Next to it, entered either from that room or through an outside door in the yard but otherwise quarantined from the domestic premises, was the Compting House, where two rows of clerks sat at high desks keeping their tallies.

*   *   *

Luckily for Havisham’s purposes, our proximity to Chatham ensured a large ready market for our brews. A marines’ barracks had been built twenty-five years after the army one, and the town was thronged with sailors and troops and their dependents. The dockyards employed thousands. Their thirst was insatiable, and – as did one or two of our competitors – we obliged …

Along the Medway the Havisham net was cast – so to speak – by my father, with clever aim. To Gravesend upstream, and to Sittingbourne, Sheerness and Queensborough in an easterly direction.

*   *   *

I knew in which inns, and where, the Havisham brew and porter were sold. My father would point them out to me one by one as we came upon them on our travels. He’d have me memorise the names, and each time I would recite an ever-lengthening litany, as completely as I could. He would listen to me, nodding with satisfaction, and then supply the names I had missed from the list.

The Tun & Lute, Shovel & Boot; Turkey Slave, Cock & Pye.

(I would proceed by an eccentric system of associated images.)

Leather Bottle, Hundred House, Parson & Clerk.

The Rose of Denmark, Goat & Compasses, Q in a Corner.

Trip to Jerusalem.

‘And Good King Lud.’

‘Good King Lud,’ I would repeat.

‘It’s the one you always forget. But the only one.’

We didn’t own all the inns, but we were suppliers to each of them, several dozen in total. This was the Havisham inheritance, and my father liked to hear it retold over and over by my young voice.

*   *   *

I saw them at the cathedral on Sunday mornings, those spinsters who had dried on the vine. Some had cared too long for parents, and now housekept for siblings. Two or three had been in love perhaps, but hadn’t been decisive enough, and so they had lost the opportunity.

The carers, worn thin, seemed to have surrendered some of their own personality. Those who had failed in love were left with a kind of purposeless animation: restless hands fidgeting with gloves and prayerbooks, tremulous mouths and little lambs’ tongues, eyes that flitted about the congregation – as if vaguely searching out someone who was never present.

I tried not to walk too close to them. They were ubiquitous, though, pervasive presences. I held in my skirts, as if I might be in dread of some contagion. The skinny ones had nimble ankles, the plump ones stood sturdily where they impeded free passage to the porch.

*   *   *

Instead of a governess I now had instructors. They came to Satis House, and – when he was a man – a maid sat in the room with us, about her sewing or penning letters home.

If they’d listened, the girls could have acquired an education as I was doing. Latin, poetry, French, arithmetic, drawing, music on the keyboard, elocution.

I knew that my father listened at the door when he could. He replaced a couple of my tutors (one, Miss Boutflower, favoured poetry of a deep religious hue), and he had suspicions about an athletic-looking young man who tried to kindle in me an enthusiasm for the history of our Dark Ages.

My father took advice where he could, but it wasn’t as straightforward as he might have envisaged, educating a daughter above her station.

*   *   *

I wasn’t beautiful. My mouth was too straight, while my nose showed increasingly imperial tendencies. My eyes were hooded, and looked heavy. I saw what I owed to my doughty grandmother.

I didn’t give an impression, so said one of the tutors (subsequently dismissed), of being a country brewer’s daughter.

‘That’s because you’re not,’ my father told me. ‘Your mother had fine features. And you’ve been brought up with nothing but the best.’

I had thick fair hair with a natural kink in it, and even though the colour darkened a little with time I didn’t lose that air of impractical glamour which fairness gives. My complexion was clear and untroubled. I was reckoned to have ‘good bone structure’.

My appearance was picked over by the girls in the house, by my instructors when I overheard them gossiping, by the women who made my clothes, by the effeminate old man who fitted me for shoes.

I had this, I didn’t have that. I was more than averagely one thing, less than averagely something else.

It was me they were discussing. But it also wasn’t me.

I had a claim on this person, but so did others.

And what went on
inside
me seemed to be a different matter entirely: what the others couldn’t see, but which they presumed to comment on. There, I believed, lay all the clues to being myself – a truer and more real Catherine Havisham.

F
IVE

I was in the house working at Latin gerunds one afternoon when I heard a crashing sound outside. It was immediately followed by a terrible cry to freeze the blood – and then a clamour of voices, men’s and women’s, shouting and screaming.

I ran to the side door of the house. A crowd had gathered beneath one of the brewhouse hoists. I looked up and saw a length of rope swinging loose. The rope must have snapped and sent its load hurling to the ground.

I smelt the spilt beer before I hurried across. I saw the pieces of smashed barrel. Someone lay writhing on the wet cobbles, roaring with the pain of his injuries. I was going to try to push my way through when a hand on my shoulder roughly pulled me back.

‘Don’t look, Catherine!’

My father turned me aside, then himself hastened through.

The barrel, I heard the house-girls say, had dropped straight on to the loader waiting beneath.

*   *   *

I couldn’t sleep that night.

On succeeding nights I slept fitfully, never far from waking.

In the daylight my eyes were drawn back, time after time, to the hoist. The ropes had been replaced, and sacks and barrels were being passed up and down as before, as if nothing had happened.