Pinkerton's Sister (29 page)

The face of Tenniel’s Alice, seemingly on the point of drowning – her left hand raised, water up to her chin, her mouth beginning to open as if for a scream, her long blonde hair trailing Ophelia-like behind her (she saw Ophelia in a painting, like The Lady of Shalott, like Mariana) – became the face of Maggie Tulliver struggling in the water, calling out for her brother Tom. She saw Maggie at Mr. Stelling’s, trying to help Tom with his Latin and being scorned.

The Maggie Tulliver period lasted for far longer than the Jo March. It probably never really went away.

She copied Maggie – what a splendid idea it was – in taking out her anger on a wooden doll, entering into the actual text of the novel. In the absence of Papa or Allegra or Edith or Mrs. Albert Comstock or Dr. Vaniah Odom or Sobriety Goodchild or Euterpe Dibbo or any one of twenty others (she was going to need more dolls: hers would never last out) she hammered nails into its head with tremendous enthusiasm, like a small boy keen on carpentry. She was the sort of girl who was very firm with her dolls, and insisted that they behaved themselves. She held them by their feet and dashed them against beams, battered and punished them, and – most satisfyingly of all – hammered in those nails.

Hammer!

She had barely finished reading Chapter IV of
The Mill on the Floss
before she was sprinting around the house in search of a hammer and a good supply of nails in order to follow Maggie’s lead. It had been a
Eureka!
moment. Mrs. Albert Comstock opted for “
Earache!
”, but Alice – something of a traditionalist – favored “
Eureka!
” Maggie was clearly a girl who felt things the way that Alice felt things, and she embraced the phrase
that luxury of vengeance
– used to describe the hammering – as a proof of fellow-feeling, humming along in unison with Maggie and Jael as the hammer rose and fell. She was definitely Mrs. Chip, the Carpenter’s Wife, and not
Miss
Chip. Miss Chip – daintily dressed, her hair neatly enclosed in a mediæval-looking net – simperingly held a measly little lightweight hammer, flourishing it by its slim little handle as if she was pretending to be a fairy and using it as her magic wand. She was Marie Antoinette playing at being a carpenter. She’d have handmade gold nails, and gilded wood with pre-drilled holes for hammering into – with a prettily assumed expression of creative endeavor – as her big-wigged courtiers politely applauded. Mrs. Chip – leaning back at an angle for maximum whack – looked as if she really meant business, about to explode a bloated bluebottle with a rolled-up newspaper, a messy splat to coat the entire surface of a window with sticky entrails, and block out the view. Nothing would survive when she let rip.
She’d
sort the sods out. She was probably in the middle of constructing a home made guillotine. “
Après nous le déluge!
” That’s what she’d be saying with a note of triumph, a Madame de Pompadour – Mrs. Chip didn’t have
quite
the right hairstyle – who’d switched sides and was keen to start decapitating. Marie Antoinette would not be Happy for much longer. Her feeble little hammer, her jeweled shepherdess’s crook, was for ornament, not for use, and would not protect her from what was to come.

Hammer!

She derived far more pleasure from it than Jael – who’d approached it with the air of someone undertaking a distasteful task; what a waste of an opportunity! – when she drove the tent peg into Sisera’s temple.

Hammer!

It ought to have encouraged a lifelong love of camping in her, an eagerness to be the first to put up all tents, the bigger the better, billowing white marquees spreading in all directions like a military encampment. You could always rely on the Old Testament to elevate your mind to thoughts of higher things. (You could always – for that matter – rely on the Old Testament for gruesome detail.)
That luxury of vengeance.
Luxury
was the perfect word to describe how she felt.

Hammer!

She
luxuriated
in what she did. Miss Hayergaal had just praised her for learning “The Village Blacksmith” by heart, and here was the ideal opportunity to bring to vivid life the very scene she had described to her less-than-riveted audience. (A groan from the rest of the class at another word-perfect display from Alice Pinkerton, Euterpe Dibbo positively seething. What greater motivation could there be than this for encouraging her to shine?)

Hammer!

Hammer!

– he was clearly local, an artisan from this very street –

Her right arm rose and fell.

Hammer!

Longfellow had described her perfectly. A mighty girl was she, with large and sinewy hands, and the muscles of her brawny arms were strong as iron bands. Her hair was crisp, and black, and long; her face was like the tan; her brow was wet with honest sweat …

Hmm.

You couldn’t help feeling – on second thoughts – that Longfellow had perhaps been a little
too
keen on the realistic detail.

Hammer!

You’d better be careful, Euterpe Dibbo and Sobriety Goodchild! Be on the alert, Dr. Vaniah Odom and Mrs. Albert Comstock! Flee into the hills, Papa and Allegra and Edith! She had
plenty
more nails for hammering, and Mrs. Chip was not feeling chipper. She had a row of them all lined up neatly in her mouth, her mouth puckered primly like Miss Iandoli’s around a line of pins as she cut out a dress pattern. She’d unleash herself upon them as she sought vengeance, and bring her army with her. Like Curdie at the end of
The Princess and Curdie
, she’d attack with an army of Uglies – what more appropriate person than she could there be to lead such an assemblage? – and with her nine-and-forty grotesque and abnormal creatures (yes, she
certainly
qualified) she’d scratch, she’d nip, she’d crush, she’d bite, she’d hammer.

Hammer!

Hammer

Hammer!

The nails may have been bent over at clumsy angles, but all their points penetrated the brain. (The Bible was such a suitable, improving read for a quiet Sabbath afternoon. “Too terrible to speak of here,” Charles Kingsley would have said coyly of the story of Jael, as he had said when he avoided describing Medeia’s revenge – Medea was Medeia to Charles Kingsley, and Dædalus was Daidalos; he was clearly an awful speller, Ida Brook with a beard – unless, being such a muscular Christian, he thought it was different for the Bible, a necessary toughness, my dear little man made all the manlier by a little deep-voiced sinew-stiffening.)

There actually were two pillars in the schoolroom (she had only just begun to call it this) exactly as in Maggie’s attic refuge – here was a sign – and against them (when not hammering) she ground and beat the doll’s wooden head in the approved Maggie fashion. When she was not doing this she was binding Allegra and Edith (squirming, wriggling, vociferously objecting) to them with jump-ropes, perusing the windows at All Saints’ to discover new methods of martyring them at the stake. She may have been firm with her dolls (well, perhaps rather more than firm: one was disemboweled; one had a head heavy with clumped nails, splintered as a storm-ravaged tree), but she tried to be even firmer with her resolutely unco-operative sisters. One day she would demolish the pillars with the fury of her attack, and the whole house would collapse with an apocalyptic roar, preferably when all her enemies were gathered together within it, drinking tea and nibbling fruitcake.

“Yea, yea, mine enemies hath …” –
was
“hath” a plural form of the verb? “They hath” sounded wrong, somehow – “… perished!” she would chant, planning a victory dance, something involving triumphant stomping, and much swaying to and fro with uplifted arms. She might essay the occasional “Whoop!”, the rise and fall ululations as she patted the flattened palm of her hand against her open mouth. She had vague thoughts of Red Indians whooping around a blazing, crackling fire, flying sparks, long thin shadows across night-darkened plains, paint-slashed faces fiercely illuminated. Terpsichore Dibbo – despite her ambitious name – was utterly useless at this sort of thing, and no help whatsoever.

“First position!” Terps would chant, attempting to emulate Mary Benedict’s ballet demonstrations, and fall flat on her face with an always-surprised squawk.

Even better than “perished” was “perishèd,” the grave accent adding an emphatic finality to the destruction of those whom she detested.

(She remembered Romeo being banishèd from Verona, and the actress playing Juliet loudly lamenting.

(“Banny-
shed
! Banny-
shed
!” she howled to the Nurse.

(It was a word that slew ten thousand Tybalts.

(It was a pronunciation that had taken Alice by surprise.

(The actress had thumped her bosom, helpfully emphasizing the anguish for the benefit of the dimmer members of the audience, wincing slightly at an off-target thump.)

“Perry-
shed
! Perry-
shed
!”

Alice was not lamenting.

Anything but.

No anguish, and no bosom-thumping for her. It was her feet – in the absence of the necessary bosom – that thumped, and her arms and hair swung like storm-lashed tree branches, whilst – to the sound of her breathless, eager incantations – her enemies perry-
shed
in terrified howling heaps. The unexpected power of an extra syllable. Something perry-
shed
sounded far more satisfactorily obliterated than something merely “perished.” One last brief glimpse of the rose-patterned china, the shape of the teethmarks in the half-chewed slice of fruitcake (the last thing they ever saw a
glacé
cherry, two sultanas, a few crumbs) and then darkness, dust, oblivion.

“Nutty as a fruitcake, am I?” she’d shout challengingly to the fruitcake nibblers. It would be the last thing they ever heard, putting them quite off their nuts.

It would be just like Samson obliterating the Philistines. (The
perfect
choice of noun, this last.)

It would be extremely entertaining.

She couldn’t wait.

Now the trees had all gone, and she looked down on building lots, and half-finished houses, outside work stopped in the severe weather, the ground too solid to dig. Carpenters and plasterers were working inside the houses where work was far enough advanced, and on weekdays – above the gusting of the wind – she could hear whistling, singing, hammering, and see the prints of heavy boots in the snow. Out there Frankenstein’s creature would be staggering, lost in the Arctic wastes, searching for Mr. Hyde, searching for a mirror, the picture of Dorian Gray, and here was the madwoman gazing down on him from her high window.

At least – she tried to comfort herself – she didn’t have to look out from her window across to the park and the statue of Albert Comstock, as Kate did.

Kate and her parents lived on Park Place, a few doors away from Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. How that statue must haunt her dreams, and bring restlessness to quiet evenings. It had been there for nearly fifteen years, and was covered in enough bird droppings to fertilize every cornfield from Ohio to Nebraska. The crops would be gargantuan and strange tasting, the ears curiously shaped. Exports would plummet. The birds seemed to seek out this particular statue, as if Mrs. Albert Comstock – who displayed a surprising grasp of Symbolism – had trained them especially. It might well be, of course, that Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s doves had a hidden purpose, and were not reared solely to inspire poetry.

Carlo Fiorelli had made the unfortunate change in the style of his sculpture at about the time of this statue – brought on, possibly, by his becoming enamored of
Ben-Hur
(“Is wonderful, wonderful book!”) several years after its publication – and decided that boots and buttonholes were inimical to marble, and promptly outlawed modern dress from all his work. As a result, the minor worthies of Longfellow Park were depicted dressed in the way he imagined Ancient Romans would have been dressed. In carefully arranged togas or athletes’ tunics, barefooted or sandaled, and most of them wearing laurel wreaths – they were, after all, the cream of local society – the men (they were all men: The Bearded Ones were out in cool, white force) stood around The Forum, just inside the ornamental gates on Park Parade facing out toward the lake, like victors in some great battle surveying a conquered kingdom.

The statue of Albert Comstock –
Albert Comstock: The Spirit of Commerce
– was designed to illustrate, and encourage, the entrepreneurial spirit of the growing community. He was sitting down, a portly figure, hands pressed against the sides of his thighs, and leaning forward at an odd angle. There was a sensation of strain about the pose, an expression of extreme concentration on the face. It was known locally among the young – with their distressing lack of respect for their elders – as
Albert Comstock: The Curse of Constipation
.

Carlo Fiorelli had rather misjudged the length of Albert Comstock’s tunic. He had aimed for a dignified simplicity, the innocence of earlier times; what he had produced was a very fat man showing his bottom. This was what Kate saw every day from her bedroom window: the bottom facing toward her, peeping provocatively through the trees like a harvest moon.

“How’s Bertie’s bottom?” was one of Alice’s regular greetings when Kate came to see her.

(Pyramus, sensing his cue, sprang into action, striding on stage in his manliest manner just after Thisby had sprinted away from the lion.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
was nearing its end.

The statue consumed enough marble for a small cathedral, and on sunny days its vast shadow blighted several acres beyond it, inhibiting all thoughts of picnics, suppressing all possibilities of
déjeuner sur
this particular
herbe
in that direction. Manet’s paintbrush would have dropped from his nerveless hand. Who could face nibbling on a chicken leg with those gigantic dimpled buttocks twinkling close by?