Havisham: A Novel (31 page)

They were hardly older than boys, the first ones, wet behind the ears.

Then, as they aged by a couple of years, they learned more seriously what it was to be hurt: expecting more from someone – my precious Estella – than they were due, and watching her reject them, humiliate them.

Names, I always wanted names. Parents or guardians, grandparents, great-aunts and uncles. I liked to know with whom we were dealing.

‘And…?’

‘And he looks at me with his big doleful eyes!’

‘What is that like, tell me –’

‘Like being trailed by a spaniel!’

Or, ‘He is so arrogant and superior.’

‘Isn’t Estella Havisham his match? Then give him the proof. He is only a fondling, a cosset who has never known what it’s like not to get his own way.’

‘What proof? How do I…?’

‘That is the amusing part. Answer him back. Question what he means, everything he says to you. Laugh at
him
and not at his jokes.’

‘What if I scare him?’

‘Arrogance never runs away. It stays, it’ll put up a fight.’

‘And if he wins?’

‘He thinks he wins if he has your approval.
Almost
give it to him, and then trump him – beggar him – when you snatch it away.’

Estella would take her hostages – I trusted her to do it – and, by some instinct, by the contriving genius of my laboratory, she would know how to treat them quite unmercifully.

*   *   *

A Mr Pirrip was waiting in the hall.

‘Who did you say, girl?’

‘Mr Pirrip, miss.’

‘The boy from the forge,’ Estella called over. ‘Who had the good fortune.’

‘And now – and now he threatens it.’

‘Threatens it how?’

‘Send him up,’ I said to the maid. ‘Send him up to us.’

*   *   *

A couple of raps upon the door.

‘Come in, Pip.’

Enter – a young gentleman. Most presentable, and prosperous-looking.

I told him at once, before he would mention it, that I was aware of his altered circumstances.

He kissed my hand.

‘I’m a queen, am I?’

(He still considered
me
the unnamed person responsible, did he?)

Estella was seated on a stool at my feet. He stared at her, almost as if he was having difficulty recognising who she was.

Estella at last held out her hand. He bowed low to kiss that too.

‘Do you find her much changed, Pip?’

His mouth fell open.

‘She hurt you with her pride,’ I said. ‘She insulted you.’

‘That was long ago.’

‘Do you see much change in Pip?’ I asked Estella.

‘A good deal of it.’

‘Not the blacksmith’s boy any more?’

Estella laughed.

*   *   *

I sent them both outside, to take a turn about the garden.

When they came back in, I had Pip to myself for a few minutes.

I thought he looked hot, and agitated.

I asked him to please push my mobile chair.

‘Now explain about yourself –’

He told me he was being educated, an education to set him up for life, and he was
most
grateful for the opportunity. Whoever his benefactor – or benefact
ress
– might be, craving anonymity …

Anonymous benefactions, blah-blah, gift horses be damned.

‘Enough!’

‘I do beg your pardon. I’ve been at fault, I apolog—’

‘Well, is she not beautiful, Pip?’

He comprehended straight away.

‘Miss Estella? She is indeed, Miss Havish—’

‘Do you not admire her?’

‘I do.’

‘Tell me, how does she use you?’

He didn’t reply. I repeated my question.

‘How does she use you? How?’

Before he could speak, I had another question for him.

‘Could you love her? Whatever she does to try you and test you – are you the man to love her?’

He nodded at me.

‘Tell me, Pip. Say it.’

‘Yes. Yes, I would.’ How dry his voice sounded. ‘I do.’

‘Would
what
? You do
what
?’

‘Love her.’

‘And you know what love is?’

‘I
think
so.’

‘I shall enlighten you. It’s devotion. It’s submission. It’s giving up your whole heart. It’s sacrifice.’

‘You – you know this, Miss Havisham?’

‘It was so with me once. And to what purpose –?’

My voice broke. Pip, pushing my chair, stopped quite still, drew sharply on his breath, as if he’d heard a banshee cry.

I listened to a falling echo of Estella’s voice in my own. And then I realised she was speaking to us from the doorway.

‘What’s this, what’s this…?’

She was smiling brightly: too brightly, as if she also was on edge.

‘… Is this how we welcome back Sir Hotspur?’

*   *   *

‘One day, he told me, he wants to write a novel.’

Estella paused to laugh.

‘Imagine – once a blacksmith’s boy!’

But she was giving him her time. If he were just a blacksmith’s boy, what would be the sense of that? It was because he could talk of such things, of writing a book, that she was exercised by the possibilities: just what he might make of himself in the future.

‘A novel, you say?’

‘
He
says. Yes.’

‘He’s got all that going on inside his head?’

‘Well, I expect he would base it on something.’

‘Such as?’

‘Something real. A place. The people he encounters. That academy he attends. If he ends up at university, or becomes a lawyer.
Us
.’

And so Estella helped me put my finger on it: why at another level I had instinctively distrusted Philip Pirrip. He had the ready charm of one who would betray you.

I’d been able to tell straight away that the forge was no more than an accident of birth. He was clever, he was one of that sort who can think themselves out of their initial lot in life, he learned quickly from watching others.

Our lives are fictions. How others interpret us. What we allow others to do with us. What we make of ourselves. What we fancy, make believe, we
might
do.

*   *   *

Now Estella wouldn’t automatically launch into an account of her travels. I was required to ask her questions, and she would reply. Some answers were quite full; others came slowly and were incomplete, I had to try wheedling them out of her.

She made me wait, playing on my curiosity, baiting me. She did it with a semblance of inattention she had been cultivating in the Assembly Rooms of southern England and northern France, all the while smoothing out the travel creases on her dress and twisting the ringlets of her hair round one finger.

In France she’d come of age, and the party had gone on long into the night; I was dealing now with someone, a bona fide adult, who considered me – not warmly – across a metaphorical channel, from the other far shore.

*   *   *

Why did she wound me like this?

All that I had given her, and the little that I looked to her to give me in return …

Where was the justice?

But who ought to have known better than I the uselessness of such reasoning? There was no fairness, there never is, so I shouldn’t seek to find it.

*   *   *

She mentioned a name I recognised. ‘Drummle’. It jarred with me. A few sentences further on, I took her back to that earlier point in the conversation.

‘Drummle?’ she repeated. ‘Yes, that’s right. Why?’

‘The Somersetshire Drummles?’

‘I’ve no idea. He didn’t mention anything about –’

‘You didn’t enquire? Afterwards?’

‘No. Should I have?’

‘Not if it wasn’t important to you.’

‘It’s important to
you
?’

‘Whatever concerns yourself, Estella…’

‘You know of him?’

‘It’s only the name.’

‘Am I to pay him attention in the future? Is that what you mean?’

‘I didn’t mean anything –’

‘I dropped my fan, and he picked it up for me. There.’

Fans, gloves. Oh Estella, don’t you realise, that’s the very oldest trick in the book.

*   *   *

‘He once came here,’ I said at dinner.

‘Who did?’

‘The Drummle boy.’

‘Are we still on about
him
?’

‘I merely point it out to you.’

I watched her push the food around on her plate. Doubtless we didn’t provide fine enough fare now.

‘He came with his great-aunts, the Wilcoxes.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why did he come?’

‘He was brought here. To play with you.’

‘I can’t remember it.’

‘You were very young at the time.’

‘He didn’t say.’

She turned away.

‘Didn’t he?’ I asked her.

‘No.’

‘I wonder why.’

‘Because he must’ve forgotten.’

‘Surely not. Surely not.’

‘I don’t see why –’

‘How would that be possible?’ I said.

‘What be possible?’

‘That he could ever have forgotten meeting
you
? Not Estella Havisham.’

*   *   *

Pip assisted me to my feet. I could feel the vigour of youth in him, it passed along his arm. He smelled of soap. He scrubbed his skin, until it shone. He washed his hair before he came. Brushed under his fingernails.

He was a picture of cleanliness and good health. I watched him, smelt him, felt his vitality. He was no taller than average, carried no excess weight, but he was robust, foursquare. If I leaned more heavily against him, he didn’t waver. He volunteered every time, proffering me his arm, and we would set off, around the dining room. Round and round.

The table was a tempest sea of cobwebs, rising like waves over crystal jugs and plate-stands, all breaking around that great lopsided scar, the centrepiece, the cake which would have been kept until last at the feast.

The cobwebs tugged over skerries, layers of cobwebs, tides and riptides. I clung on to my pilot, and he steered me. We would discuss Estella. He thought she was ridiculing him, pillorying him. But he was taking her abuse manfully, or he pretended he was. I could tell that he had already forgotten what his existence had been like without Estella. She was an exquisite addiction, one that was slowly poisoning him.

*   *   *

I said the name to Estella. ‘Drummle’. But she immediately started talking about something else, a family quite unconnected, as if she hadn’t heard me.

When I repeated the name, she couldn’t ignore me.

‘Have you encountered the Drummle fellow again?’

She hesitated, and looked away.

‘Which fellow is that?’

‘His name was Drummle, you told me.’

‘Did I?’

‘You haven’t crossed paths with him again?’

‘I can’t have.’

She was looking past me, at the tubs and phials on my dressing table. Everything was in its customary place. She knew that the powder was replenished, and the fragrances in the bottles replaced. The presentation on my dressing table was a
symbol
. It would be twenty minutes to nine for ever, but – in order to be symbolic – the moment had to be reconstructed, and that meant replenishing and replacing but taking care that the containers weren’t moved, that the unworn slipper remained where it always was. It wasn’t a lie, what she saw: it was an artful illusion.

She had learned from my example. Her insouciance was what she intended me to see at this juncture, but she was having to work hard to maintain it. Perhaps she
did
resort to blatant untruths, but youth will always lack the subtlety which experience can bring to its cunning.

*   *   *

‘It’s Mr Pirrip again, miss, downstairs. Says he begs your indulgence.’

He came because he adored her. His eyes followed her everywhere, they didn’t let her alone for a moment: unless I knocked my cane on the floor, and spoke so loudly that he couldn’t fail to hear.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Havisham –?’

You will be, sir, you will be.

A navy was launched for the sake of one woman’s face. So why shouldn’t a facsimile gent risen from a blacksmith’s forge be turned head over heels?

I sometimes thought that I disappointed him. He would have liked me to be more of a ‘Miss Havisham’ than I was. Had he been directing me in a play, he would have heightened the effects. I should have laid the whole house waste, and not just the dining room. There wouldn’t have been any retainers coming and going. He would have had chains on the front doors. Every room in the building would have been shuttered. I would have treated Estella as my prisoner, had her permanently under lock and key.

*   *   *

Not all was left to the imagination, though. A sapling protruded from a window in the old brewhouse. Birds flew in and out of the building. The debris of smashed rooftiles from many storms lay in the yard.

The lettering on the wall had worn away; the green had washed out. The name was on the point of disappearing; it seemed to be doubting its own existence, or its ever
having
existed.

*   *   *

At first I hinted, but Estella was clearly being obtuse, and then I had to address the issue more directly. The Drummle men had never been known for considerateness to their women. They didn’t look after their money. They had hearty appetites.

‘Appetites?’ she repeated.

‘For life,’ I said.

She looked at me for a few seconds, puzzled. Something occurred to her, and her brow corrugated in folds. Then, just as suddenly, the folds vanished as she sent those moody thoughts packing; her face lightened because she had already – so soon – forgotten the need of my minding.

*   *   *

To Pip,
I
was his benefactress. Who else could it have been? I was the only wealthy person of his acquaintance, and he supposed he must
know
whoever had chosen to fund the lush mode of living he enjoyed.

He came back, to be humiliated again and again at Estella’s hands. Did he think this was the penance to be paid for his progress in the world?

*   *   *

I was on the street side of the house, by a shuttered window, when I heard the high-stepping trot of a brace of harness horses. For several moments I was returned to the brewery days, when I would stand by an open window waiting to hear the first footfalls of
his
sleek horses, and the singing springs of the phaeton’s suspension. My heart would be wound tight like clockwork, so tight that it hurt.