Pinkerton's Sister (65 page)

It was night. It was windy.

Here he came again.

Her fire was not out. Rosobell had newly laid it, to give her warmth and flickering light in the darkness.

Now in the falling of the gloom,/The red fire paints the empty room …

If you tell anybody, the wind will get you.

All night long, he would be there.

Ben had thought that a child had written the verses, just as she had thought that a girl had painted herself standing at an unseen window, totally absorbed in reading a letter. They were words spoken with the voice of a child, not of an adult.

Down in Chestnut Street a grotesque little figure, wearing clothes too big for it, was bringing darkness to the street, doing things the wrong way round, his feet crunching through the snow. Gradually, one by one, the lights were being extinguished, the darkness coming closer and closer toward her, the street darker and darker, until the ladder clunked against the lamppost outside their house. The misshapen figure scuttled spider-like up the ladder, and put out the light. Put out the light, and then put out the light. She did not want it to look up and see her at the window. She did not want to see Leerie’s leering face, staring up at her, illuminated in moonlight.

That was from “A Good Boy.” It was like a prayer written for children.

Behind his back, the good boy had his fingers crossed. “I’ve been
good
,” he said aloud, repeatedly, as if it was his task to convince someone. “I’ve been
good
. I
know
that I shall see the sun arise. I
know
. I
shall
see the sun. No ugly dream shall fright
my
mind, no ugly sight
my
eyes. I
know
.”

“I
know
,” Macbeth repeated. “I
know
.”

She had – more or less (rather less than more) – kept darkness at bay throughout the day. Not for much longer. The darkness she had tried to escape was now around her, inside her, and the silence made it darker. It was time for the ugly dreams, the ugly sights.

(“No more
sights
!” Macbeth had begged.)

The wicked shadows would be coming, tramp, tramp, tramp.

Halitotic Herbert had been the first person she had actually heard calling her the madwoman in the attic. He was, in fact, the
only
person she had heard call her the madwoman, but he had said it several times, often in gatherings where he smiled at her in the most obsequious manner. His enormous artificial grin was too large for his mouth, as if he had swallowed a smile that was trying to escape from the hostile vessel of his body: he shared his wife’s delicious sense of fun. How their house must rock with laughter!

As he grinned his gigantic fawning grin, his teeth were misaligned, so that his smile was facing to one side, like a squint in the teeth. It was oddly disconcerting, and she tended to lean to one side, to balance things out a little, when she found herself being talked to by him. With the Reverend Goodchild, one did not experience a conversation: one was talked to, talked
at
.

His filthy teeth – it had never occurred to him to clean them since he had purchased them; they were as furred and thickened as limestone rock formations in a damply dripping cavern – were the exact same dirty yellow as the Goodchilds’ toilet bowl. Long yellow-brown streaks ran down and through
Edwardson, Boyd & Sons, Sanitary Appliances
, and she half expected to read these words printed across his grin whenever it expanded hugely before her. The blue lettering – a little washed away and faded – looked like veins just discernible beneath the skin, old tattoos on the point of vanishing. G. G. Schiffendecken clearly failed to provide long-term care for his products in the obsessively possessive manner of Samuel Cummerford, the owner of the first automobile showroom in the area. Samuel Cummerford sold his products sulkily and reluctantly, giving the impression that he parted with them against his better judgment, and under great duress, to those who were unworthy of possessing them. He was like the parent of a spendthrift son, brokenheartedly compelled to auction cherished family heirlooms after years of his increasingly uncontrollable profligacy. Even after he’d sold an automobile, he’d still maintain a jealously proprietorial interest in it. He carried a large soft cloth and a tin of polish around with him in an inner pocket, and always stopped to inspect his automobiles – they remained “his” automobiles, even after being sold at handsome prices – whenever he came across them, to ensure that they were being maintained in a manner that met with his approval. They never measured up to his strict requirements. Out would come the cloth, out would come the polish, and the owner would emerge from the shop, or the church, or – indeed – his own home, to discover his automobile gleaming, the polished brass dazzling in the sunshine, and a little gold-lettered card –
Samuel Cummerford, for the Aristocrats of Automobilists –
prominently displayed upon the windshield. (
I trusted you, and you let me down!
was the unspoken accusation.)

If only G. G. Schiffendecken could be persuaded to emulate these praiseworthy standards of care! He would not be able to resist stopping the Reverend Goodchild in the street whenever he came across him, and – without saying a word – peeling back the lips from the grubby grin, breathing heavily upon the teeth thus exposed, and polishing away with a soft cloth in a vigorously circular clockwise motion, whistling tunelessly all the while. When he’d completed the job that clearly needed to be done – a final, head-on-one-side, critical appraisal, to ensure that the correct intensity of gleaminess had been achieved – he’d let the lips snap back with a reverberating elastic twang, and continue on his way with a spring in his step, and the satisfied air of a man at peace with himself, a man never known to let his high standards slip. The Reverend Goodchild, his beard vibrating with the aftershocks, would be left clutching a card that had mysteriously appeared in his hand.
G. G. Schiffendecken. Purveyor of Grins to the Gentry.

The smell of the Reverend Goodchild’s breath – a (
Teuch!
) potent combination of cabbage and tobacco (Great heaven! Had she stumbled across the secret ingredients of Griswold’s Discovery?) – reinforced the lavatorial image in a repellent multi-sensory experience, to which might be added the sense of touch. He tended to touch the back of her hand caressingly as he talked, and his fingers had – the image of the toilet bowl seemed to lead her irresistibly to this image – the faintly disturbing clammy warmth of a recently vacated toilet seat.

She was not destined to be a genteel lady, or an Ideal Mother, when such thoughts came unbidden into her mind. She would banish such vulgarity, simper at her clergyman, yield flutteringly to his flattering blandishments.

“Tee-hee, your reverence!” she should snicker shyly at his effortful flirtatiousness, holding out her mama’s best china teapot to offer him a refill for his cup, coyly averting her eyes. That’s what spinsters were supposed to do, wasn’t it, launch themselves into blushful vicar-snickering? “Tee-hee!”

Ha!

She most certainly would
not
!

She did
not
revere this Reverend.

The madwoman in the attic.

That was who she was.

That was
what
she was.

She heard the phrase, in the accents of the Reverend Goodchild – she had been at Mrs. Albert Comstock’s – as clearly as if it had been the only thing said in a silent room, the way you could hear your name spoken in a room crowded with speakers, and she knew that it was describing her. She had instantly seen the creature in the inner room, the hidden door behind the tapestry, and it was like facing the wrong side of a painting or a mirror, like (she had that feeling again) the underside of the gold-embroidered purple coverlet that concealed the portrait of Dorian Gray.

She was in the room without windows, she was the thing that scrabbled and bit, the sound on the rising gale of a dog howling at a distance. She was the figure in the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, the thing that ran backward and forward, that groveled on all fours, that snatched and growled like some strange wild animal covered with clothing, that had its head and face hidden, the clothed hyena that she knew had her face: dark-skinned, pocked with smallpox scars, hairy. Words once spoken were spoken forever, and she listened for it again all the time, straining to catch her own name, her own description. As a minister with a high opinion of his own preaching he was unused to speaking in lowered tones.

For a while she had suddenly seen herself through the eyes of someone else, and had faltered. Then pedantry had taken over.

Not the attic: the schoolroom.

Not the attic: the schoolroom.

That had been her foremost thought, as if he were more wrong about the room than about the madness. Grace Poole had given Rochester a cord, and he had pinioned the arms of the madwoman behind her, and bound her to a chair with more rope.

“Now that I have your
full
attention, Miss Pinkerton, we may begin …”

Would it be hypnotism?

Would it be clouds?

Would it be pictures?

Would it be dreams?

Would it be …

Would it be …

Would it be time for her to be taken away?

… Grace Poole.

She remembered the name of the other novel that contained a character named Poole, the one she had been trying to call to mind early that morning. It was a novel she’d been thinking about – on and off – for much of the day, as though teasing herself with the nearness of the knowledge that she had possessed all the time without realizing.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Poole was the name of Dr. Jekyll’s butler, the elderly man who had seen the dwarf, and heard the pacing up and down within the locked room. With the corpse of Mr. Hyde lying on the floor of Dr. Jekyll’s cabinet, Poole and Utterson had searched the chamber, looking into the depth of the cheval glass with an involuntary horror. It was so turned that it showed them nothing but the rosy glow playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a hundred repetitions along the glazed front of the presses, and their own pale and fearful countenances stooping to look in.

It was a room that looked rather as her room was looking at that moment.

Come in, or the fog will get into the house.

She heard the words as clearly as if they had been spoken, as clearly as if they had been “the madwoman in the attic.” For a moment they sounded like something she herself might have uttered, seized by a rebellious impulse – “Come in, or the frogs will get into the house” – as she locked all doors and barred all windows against the entrance of the Goodchilds and Griswolds. An incautious peer through the green glass at their massed approach had pushed her over the edge (
Aaaaghhhh!
), and driven her to acts of desperation.

“Come in, or the fog will get into the house.”

For a while she thought that they must have been words spoken by Poole to Utterson, as he admitted the lawyer to Dr. Jekyll’s house, the house in the fog-shrouded square of ancient, handsome houses decayed from their high estate, and let in flats and chambers to map engravers, architects, shady lawyers, and the agents of obscure enterprises. The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds. Then she remembered that the words were spoken in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, and were not spoken by a butler. Dorian Gray had a valet – Victor – rather than a butler, but the words were spoken not by Victor, but by Dorian Gray himself to Basil Hallward as he let him into his house in that same fog on the night he murdered him.

Victor was probably an incognito Victor Frankenstein, wandering between two more novels in order to observe Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll and pick up a few tips. No wonder people seemed to confuse Frankenstein’s creature with Mr. Hyde, seeing Mr. Hyde as something huge and monstrous, when he was something far more frightening than that. The name “Hyde” was so well chosen, hidden away as Hyde was, hidden away like Bertha Rochester and Dorian Gray’s portrait, but hidden in a far better place, hidden not within a locked inner room, but inside another person like something trapped within the brain, impossible to find unless the brain itself were entered.

If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek.

Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster demonstrated his celebrated sense of fun.

The blindfold went around her eyes, and the teasing voice called out to her from some far corner of the room.

“Tell me what you can see, Miss Pinkerton.”

She was led in like the frightened figure-model, naked and blind in front of the room full of staring men.

It was birthday party game time. The candles had been blown out to make it even darker, and there was the lingering church interior smell of just-snuffed candlewicks, the air hazy, stinging the eyes. She could smell it, she could feel it. The one wish had been made.

“Miss Pinkerton!”