Havisham: A Novel (5 page)

*   *   *

With Sally, it was like old times; there might not have been that two-year hiatus.

I knew that she forgave my father, merely because she never rose to my bait and offered any criticisms of him.

She had cut that wilful plumery, her copper hair, and she showed fewer of those carefree sun-freckles on her face. Now she was under one of the redoubtable, granite-featured housekeepers who organised domestic life in Minor Canon Row, in this case in the residence of that oily archdeacon and his astringent mother and dry-as-dust wife. Sally was worked hard, because every penny spent in that household was required to offer its full value in time and labour.

But Sally kept cheerful. Her own mother was pleased for her, and so – I claimed – was I.

‘But now,’ I said, ‘you have to be my confidante as well. That’s two jobs of work, I reckon.’

‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘Whenever I can.’

‘I’ll be very disappointed if you’re ever not able.’

I wondered if it could be quite the same as it used to be. We each had rules and responsibilities that were becoming clearer to us. We had little say in those; but we could surely try to stake other claims for ourselves, obeying our instincts only, about whom we called our
consœurs
and best friends.

S
EVEN

For my thirteenth birthday and those following, my father gave me a painted porcelain Easter egg. Each egg was valuable in itself, but the surprise lay inside. There I would find, cushioned by a velvet lining, an item of jewellery: a fire-opal pendant, a bracelet of amethysts, a pearl halter, a gold rope necklace hung with rubies, white and pink diamond earrings, a rare yellow diamond on a ring.

In addition he passed over to me, item by item, my mother’s jewels. Those had older-fashioned settings than my birthday presents. He arranged to have a topaz necklace reset, because I had taken such a fancy to the blue markings of the stones, like tiger stripes. The rest showed good taste, and I was happy to wear them.

My mother had inherited some of the pieces, and I was aware of the quiet dignity of their age. They weighed me to my chair, they slowed me slightly when I walked – not because they were heavy, but because they came to me complicated by their history – and it wasn’t at all an oppressive sensation. I felt that I’d been granted an intimate contact with my mother. We were sharing this occasion of my wearing a necklace or a bracelet, and somehow my increased pleasure was being transmitted to her, through time and space. This experience was being recreated in another dimension; by wearing the necklace or bracelet, I was helping to close a circle.

*   *   *

My father grew sad and despondent for a while.

He had only just got back to regular work. His illness might have been to blame, still tiring him these eighteen or twenty months on, but I sensed – I had a premonition – that there was some other reason.

Several times he seemed to be on the point of telling me something.

Whenever he ventured beyond the brewery gates, he wore his darkest and most sombre outdoor clothes.

*   *   *

‘I married again, Catherine.’

I thought I had misheard.

‘Who married again?’

‘Me.
I
married again.’

Pause.

‘When?’

‘A few years after your mother died.’

‘Married whom?’

‘The woman I wished to marry.’

‘Who?’

‘The woman I wished to care for.’

Pause.

‘But she died. Just recently.’

‘Who – who was she? Do I know her?’

‘You know – you
knew
her, yes.’

‘One of our friends?’

‘It was Mrs Bundy. As she used to be.’

I stared at him. I felt I was falling through a hole in the floor. I was without mass; I’d left the sac of my stomach behind.

‘And then of course she became Mrs Havisham.’

‘No.’ I shook my head at him. ‘No, that’s
our
name.’

At that my father’s face sagged. His mouth hung slack.

‘And…’

He stopped. He stared at the surface of the table.

‘There’s – something else?’

My head was still spinning, like a top.

‘We had a son.’

‘A son?’

‘You have a half-brother.’

The boy I used to see her with, about the town, who was sent away to be educated.

As he briefly explained, my father wouldn’t look at me, however hard I stared and challenged him to raise his eyes.

‘I’m sorry I have to tell you like this –’

The boy’s age was close to mine. And yet my father had said he married a few years after my mother’s death. I knew what that meant.

‘I should like something, Catherine.’

I let a few seconds lapse.

‘What – what’s that?’

‘I should like Arthur – that is his name – I should like Arthur to come and stay here.’

‘
Here?
’

‘Yes.’

‘How long for?’

‘Satis House will be his home.’

‘What?’

‘It will call for one or two adjustments to our routine. But nothing we can’t –’

‘You want him to come and stay here with
us
?’

‘He
will
be coming. To be one of the family.’

I didn’t speak.

‘I’ve told him. We’ve discussed it.’

‘It’s been decided?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Why are you asking me, then?’

I fixed my eyes on that gulch of loose skin on his neck, his throat, which had only appeared since his accident.

‘I should appreciate – if you could help to make Arthur feel comfortable. In his new home.’

‘“Home”? Satis House?’

‘Yes. Home now for all of us.’

*   *   *

Arthur was still thin. The Havishams had always had padding, so he was already marked out as being something less than ourselves.

He had thin wrists, a thin neck, but it wasn’t the fine sort of inbred aristocratic leanness. I could see the sharp edge of his shoulder bones under his shirt. When he breathed out, or laughed – which meant rolling about at some small witticism from my father, or sneering at me – his ribs poked out of his chest. He had large thin grasping hands; obliged to shake hands with him, I was anticipating a stronger grip, as narrow wrists often produce – but his greedy fawning mitt was turned inside mine like some cornered, half-dead weasel.

*   *   *

Arthur didn’t discuss
then
with me.

‘That’s my business.’

He wouldn’t tell me where he and his mother had lived latterly, or how often they’d seen their provider.

It was information I couldn’t ask my father for, because asking – expressing an interest – might appear to condone the marriage. (Why keep it a secret as he had unless he was ashamed?)

*   *   *

‘Forthwith your brother will be known as Arthur Havisham.’

‘But that’s not his real name.’

‘It will be now.’

I was shocked. How could he be either my ‘brother’ or a Havisham?

‘In time Arthur will need to learn about the business. Receive a training.’

‘He will?’

‘Well, of course. That goes without saying, doesn’t it?’

*   *   *

He was attending a bona fide establishment for young gentlemen in the West of England, not that you would have deduced it from his conduct.

In the house he was late for meals. He dragged his heels on the floor. He entered rooms without knocking. If he took a book from a shelf he didn’t replace it; if he dropped something he waited for a servant to pick it up. When my father wasn’t there he spat fruit stones into the fireplace grate. One day some coins fell out of my father’s pocket on to his chair, unnoticed by him, and I saw Arthur surreptitiously scoop them up and put them into his own pocket. He received his horse saddled from the stable, and left it sweating in the yard once he had ridden it hard, and showed no interest in the animal’s well-being. Behind my father’s back (and sometimes only just) he silently mimicked me, or he cocked a snook at my father, or pretended to be hacking up food into his hands. He aimed pebbles at small birds, then (as his confidence grew) bigger stones at my Silver and Gold.

After only months he was cocky enough to let his dislike of me stay expressed on his face, not now bothering to hide it from my father.

*   *   *

Our
father, as he would have it.

‘That sounds like God,’ I reproved him.

‘Thinks he
is
God too.’

I gawped.

‘No one to tell him he isn’t, I s’pose.’

And he talked of Satis House, with a leery smile, as his ‘dear old chimney corner’.

‘You’re away at school,’ I said.

‘It’s still my home.’

‘I’ve always lived here.’

‘And now
I
do too. High time I got to fit in with you lot.’

‘What makes you think you ever will?’

‘Oh, I’m adaptable.’

‘Don’t
I
have to be adaptable as well?’ I asked him.

‘You’ve no choice, have you?’

‘No. No, I don’t.’

‘We’re agreed on that, then.’

‘That’s the only thing we
do
–’

‘Worry not, sister –’

‘Half-sister.’

‘– I’ll make sure we’re all quite cosy together.’

*   *   *

I was surprised by Sally’s continuing reluctance to condemn Arthur.

The son of the former and departed Mrs Bundy had forfeited the right to any sort of respect, I felt. I couldn’t understand why she should try to think her way into the spiteful workings of his mind. Why should
he
merit anyone’s special consideration?

‘It’s because I stand a little way back,’ she said.

No. No, I didn’t believe that.

And it wasn’t because I hadn’t strongly presented my case against Arthur. It might have been that she felt I argued
too
powerfully, but wasn’t that a true Havisham’s privilege?

*   *   *

Arthur had no genuine interest in the brewery.

Between school terms he pretended that he wanted to learn, since he thought saying so would please my father: and he needed to be in my father’s good books, to have a chance of his allowance being increased.

My father must have seen how things were; and heard, too. Whenever my father was absent, Arthur was curt and off-hand with the workers, thinking he was above having to deal with them directly; perhaps (I calculated for myself) because he understood that they were very suspicious of him, for having appeared from nowhere and displaying so little acumen for business.

It struck me that my father’s brow was more deeply rivelled than it used to be. I could appreciate better now that he had only meant to be open and above board by owning to Arthur as his blood son. He believed he had finally done the right thing: while circumstances seemed intent, rather, on loosening and undermining the soft ground beneath his feet.

*   *   *

Arthur, I thought, must have taught himself to be this person from books, or – more probably – from watching plays in the theatre.

He ought to have been seen in the light from candles along the front of a stage. His entrances and exits should have been accompanied by the din of shaken tin for thunder rolls. Why wasn’t he wearing make-up? (Or just conceivably he was?)

*   *   *

And I still thought that Sally too often failed to recognise what damned Arthur in my eyes.

He was uncouth, inconsiderate, a bully. Ignorant, and very smug about being so. Bitter, and possibly vengeful.

I read him like a book.

But Sally wouldn’t condemn him outright. She told me, hadn’t his position always been awkward, knowing he’d been born a Havisham (‘half a Havisham’, I corrected her), but unable to acknowledge his birth (his bastard birth, as I knew for myself)? Could we either of us, she asked, imagine how uncertain his future life must have seemed to him?

I nearly lost patience with her. I told her, we must agree to disagree; I was
not
to be converted to his cause.

‘I don’t mean to plead for him. I only tell you what I think.’

Sally was quite composed, and not fired or indignant. Perhaps one reason for my own discomposure was feeling that she could take a clearer and less partisan view, whereas I had the onus – the millstone – of Havisham dignity to defend.

II

D
URLEY
C
HASE

E
IGHT

The dining room one evening, suppertime.

My father on one side of the table, I on the other, and Arthur mercifully off at school.

‘I’ve arranged for you to have an education, Catherine.’

I thought he was referring to my lessons in the house. I nodded.

‘I mean, to share your studies. And to live with some grander types than you’re used to here.’

‘Who?’

‘The Chadwycks. Spelt with a “y”.’

‘“Live with” them?’

‘An acquaintance – Lady Charlotte and her children.’

Acquaintance?
I had never heard of the person, or her children.

‘In Surrey.’

Surrey?

‘Not so far from Redhill.’

Should the name ‘Redhill’ mean something to me? It didn’t.

‘I think it would be the best thing. You’ll see how that sort live. You’ll become one of them.’

‘Why, though?’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘Why me? Why the Chadwycks?’

‘Because I was talking to Lady Chadwyck about you. And we decided.’

‘When am I to go?’

‘Just as soon as you can get yourself ready and packed.’

‘I’ve really got to stay with them?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about my lessons here?’

‘Your tutors will find other employment. Tradesmen’s daughters round about.’

Already I had been elected to a different league.

*   *   *

I wanted to take Sally with me.

But how? As my maid?

I felt the matter most delicate. She had always treated me as the master’s daughter, but I had never – even at my most heedless – treated her as a servant.

I waited for my father to ask if I had anyone in mind, but he settled the matter without our discussing it. He selected one of the girls in the house.