Pinkerton's Sister (82 page)

She was like something stored away in a cupboard – slightly larger (though not much) than most – like another item of equipment, a sewing machine (she was partly this), or a carpet sweeper (and also partly this). She had placed her candle behind the piece of colored glass from the Shakespeare Castle that Alice had given her, a figure that Alice thought might have been Marina, partly because she was in an attitude of singing, her hands held out before her. She had told Annie the story of
Pericles
, how at the end Marina had sung to her lost father on board his ship – he not knowing her, she not knowing him – and drawn him back from grief and silence. Music had brought him back to life, as it had brought back to life Pericles’ lost wife, Thaisa, Marina’s lost mother, brought back Hermione in
The Winter’s Tale
, brought back Lear from madness.

“What song did she sing?” Annie had asked.

“It doesn’t give the words. It just says
Marina sings
.” (“I am a maid/My lord, that ne’er before invited eyes,/But have been gaz’d on like a comet.”)

“It’s a lovely story, but it’s sad,” Annie had said. “All those lost years.”

“Fourteen years.”

“Fourteen.”

When his daughter was restored to him, Pericles had heard the music of the spheres – the music that Lorenzo and Jessica had been unable to hear, as they sat in the moonlit garden at Belmont – like a man who had been granted immortality, and the muddy vesture of decay had slipped from his mortal body. Soft stillness and the night became the touches of sweet harmony. He had fallen asleep, and seen a vision that had led him to the lost wife, the lost
mother.

A band of blueness was cast across Annie’s narrow bed and partly onto the wall through the glass of Marina’s gown. The color made the air seem colder. The white-painted wooden walls were bare, blue-tinged, and they were inside a room cut into ice, a little square-edged space of shelter contrived inside a glacier. There were no pictures from magazines pinned neatly to the walls, as Alice had once imagined, pictures of faces, faces that were not looking at Annie, but turned away from her, reading books that they held up before them, with a consciousness that they knew things that were unknown to her. She had forgotten her spectacles, and couldn’t see clearly. Everything was hazy. Perhaps it was like this when you couldn’t read. She didn’t know whether she ought to look on Annie’s one private place, but she looked around, memorizing, recognizing the clothes hanging on hooks beside the door. There was the dress Annie had worn when she had gone to see her brother the previous week. Her working clothes hung above the head of the bed, swaying slightly like a lonely suicide. They were both shivering, and Alice started to cough again, doubling up with her hand to her mouth. It
really
hurt.

“Come on.”

She climbed into bed beside Annie. There was not much room in it for the two of them. They were like Lizzie and Laura, the two sisters in “Goblin Market.”

(“No,” said Lizzie: “No, no, no …”)

“I was looking at Diamond,” Annie said, opening the copy of
At the Back of the North Wind
that Alice had loaned her. The book had been lying on top of the blue-tinted bedspread. They had to turn almost onto their sides to be able to face each other to talk. “This is the picture I like best.”

She opened the book at Chapter XVI, the picture of Diamond sitting in an upright wooden chair – the back of his head just reached the top of it – with his baby brother on his knee, singing to him. His arms were wrapped tightly right around the baby as the
infant faced him, and he was leaning forward toward him, almost touching foreheads. Behind them was a white-clothed breakfast table, set with a teapot and crockery, and there was a teakettle on the hearth in front of them. It was an image of domestic peace.

“It’s the only picture in the whole book where he’s smiling,” Annie said. “Had you noticed?”

This wasn’t true, but she knew what Annie meant. There was a picture of Diamond – still weak after his illness – being carried by his uncle to a pony-cart so that he could be taken down to the seashore for a few hours. The next picture after this one was of Diamond resting his head in his mother’s lap as she read a book on the sand beside the sea. He might have been smiling in both these pictures, also, but they were sad smiles, absent smiles; he was smiling at something else that only he could see, something that was not there, a memory of long ago. In the picture with his brother he was smiling into the baby’s face to make him smile, and there was no one in the world but the two of them. In this picture it was a real smile. In this picture Diamond was not being protected, he was protecting someone else. He sang like someone singing a lullaby.

She wondered if Annie would want her to read part of the story to her, as she sometimes did. She hoped she would.

“
Diamond, just hold the baby one minute. I have something to say to your father
.”

Those were the first words she could see, if she peered closely, her nose pressed against the page of the book. The words of the song he was singing – “Baby’s a-sleeping …” – came shortly after this. When there were songs in the novel – especially “I know a river” – the words ran down the middle of the page, and there were big areas of unprinted whiteness on either side, like those beside the illustrations, and at the beginnings and ends of
chapters. It was soothing, quieter, when there were no words there.

Alice touched the picture of Diamond.
“I have something to say to your father,”
she practiced inside herself, ready for reading.
“I have something to say to your father
,
”
but, this time, Annie did not ask her to read. Sometimes she asked Alice to tell her stories, in the way she had told stories to Charlotte, and Mary Benedict as they walked around and around the Shakespeare Castle. Annie would ask for certain features to be included in the stories: a long straight road, empty fields, trees in the fall. Things like that. This time, she didn’t ask her to tell a story, either.

There was a newspaper, neatly folded, open at the personals, on a shelf at the side of the bed. The printing was blurred – Alice thought that it was the printing, rather than her eyesight – and it was as if Annie had been touching the paper, attempting to read by touch like a blind person, searching for someone who could predict her future for her, as she was always doing. There may have been words she recognized, words that she wished to touch, and bring closer, words she wanted to know by feel as much as by sight, like Macbeth with the dagger he saw before him. Next to it, wrapped in the silk scarf, was her Dream Book, alongside a neatly stacked pile of Reuben’s letters. They were propped against Annie’s Dancing Bear Bank like a solitary support at the end of a row of books. She ought to have appeared in Annie’s room with her nightgown pocket filled with enough chinking cents for a nighttime of listening, someone weighing herself down prior to drowning. They could lie there side by side, watching the organ-grinder’s arm turning, and the bear dancing, listening to the Duke of Mantua’s song from
Rigoletto
. “
La donna è mobile, qual piuma al vento
…” Women were fickle, like feathers flying in a wind, always changeable, never constant, like stars falling from the sky. It was the opera in which the hunchback caused the death of his daughter, Gilda. He opened the sack he was about to throw into the river, and found her,
stabbed and dying.

The Dream Book, so conveniently to hand, was there for a purpose, awaiting her arrival in the room, to read, to interpret what had been dreamed. She wondered if Annie would say, “I had a dream last night.” Perhaps she had stopped dreaming.

The songs in
At the Back of the North Wind
were words without music. There probably had been music written for them, but she did not know it. All she knew was the words.

That was how “I know a river” began.

There were feathers again, feathers falling from the sky instead of stars.

The newspaper and the feathers (the feathers in the song, and the feathers that had fallen through the air) made her think of Annie in the kitchen, carefully renovating black gloves with an eggcup full of black ink and olive oil, and feathers as brushes. She had lined up feathers across the newspaper with which she had covered the kitchen table, and was breathing shallowly, so that they wouldn’t blow away, laboriously dipping a feather in the eggcup, and dabbing at the seams of the gloves, one by one. The gloves were spread in pairs across the table, spaced out with the tips of their thumbs touching, fingers outstretched, like the wrong-colored gloves fluttering in the air during the chorus of a minstrel
song. Doo-dah. Doo-dah. The song Annie had been humming would not have been a minstrel song – minstrel songs were for white people, white people with their faces painted black – but one of the songs she had learned from Reuben, a song Alice hadn’t recognized. Perhaps he had sung it to her when she had seen him. It was hearing this through the schoolroom fireplace that had drawn Alice down into the kitchen.

Alice had watched Annie from the doorway, wondering what the words to the song would be. When you knew that there were words to accompany a piece of music, when you knew these words, it was quite different to hearing music that was nothing but music. The words seemed to get in the way, interposing themselves between you and the music.

Annie hadn’t known that she was there. Alice had watched her in the way that she had watched her when she had been practicing her curtsies.

“Gracious. What a lot of teeth!”

Annie had not smiled anymore when she curtsied, after Mrs. Albert Comstock had said this, not even when she was making a mock curtsy for Alice. She curtsied with eyes lowered, her face serious, making a nervous obeisance to an uncertain-tempered queen.

“Off with her head!” screamed the Queen of Hearts, her left arm rigidly horizontal in front of her, her index finger pointing accusingly.

“Off with her head!” screamed Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild in chorus.

“Off with her head!” screamed Alice.

They pointed at Annie like the Three Weird Sisters facing Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, the Thane of Cawdor, the King hereafter.

The severed heads danced in the air, foretelling Macbeth’s fate, further apparitions rising up from the cauldron.

To dream of a head severed from its trunk, and bloody, denotes
that you will meet sickening disappointments, and the overthrow of your dearest hopes and anticipations.

She blew the red feather high into the air above the bed.

When she had seen Annie dabbing black ink onto gloves with feathers, she had been seized with the desire to emulate her, and had gone upstairs to copy what she was doing in every particular, taking her oldest pair of winter gloves out of the drawer. They were going to Mrs. Albert Comstock’s that afternoon, and she would look impressively smart. She had taken the previous week’s newspaper up to the schoolroom, teased some extra-large feathers out between the stitches in her pillow – she’d been Jane Eyre often enough; she might as well try
Wuthering Heights
and be Catherine Linton in a delirium for a while (though she would not have been able to identify the different feathers, as Catherine had) – and settled down with a bottle of Sanford’s ink, unwisely choosing the indelible ink that was used to mark the laundry. She didn’t have any olive oil, and used ink entirely. It would not make any difference.

Catherine Linton had said that you couldn’t die if there were pigeons’ feathers in a pillow. Were any of her feathers pigeons’ feathers? She had dabbed away happily along the seams, in the way that she had seen Annie doing, in the places where the leather was rough and abraded. She paused occasionally to add black eyes and augment beards on the faces (all were bearded) on the front page. The one flaw in her enjoyment was that Mrs. Albert Comstock was not pictured Looking Delighted that week; otherwise she could have given her an extra-generous outgrowth of whiskers to balance The Bosom. This required advanced mathematical capabilities. It would have helped her through the afternoon, to gaze at Mrs. Albert Comstock’s face, and remember how much it had been improved by the addition of a gigantic beard. Perhaps she might suggest it to her, as a Beauty Hint, though she was the sort of woman for whom hints – even when capital-lettered – were too subtle to have much effect.

At Mrs. Albert Comstock’s – impatient to flaunt her gentility – she had removed her renovated gloves with ostentatious elegance, to reveal hands that were striped like a zebra’s bottom with indelible ink, where the undried ink had seeped through.

“Gracious.”

As with zebras’ bottoms, so with teeth, as Mrs. Albert Comstock conveyed her amused disapproval by revealing –
click! –
her size sixteen smile. Ha, ha, ha, ha could not be far behind. Alice tried to explain what had happened, and ha, ha, ha, ha had – she had been correct in her assumption – made its tee-hee-heeingly infuriating snorting sound.

Later, she’d heard them – Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild – making sniggering remarks to each other about Annie, and feathers, and black ink. Alice had learned to cultivate the art of looking in a different direction as she listened in to their conversations. Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild appeared to be under the erroneous impression that ears were like eyes, and needed to be focused on what they were noting to be able to work. Between their sniggers, Alice had picked up certain phrases, not fully understanding what they meant, as she stared across at the painting of Albert Comstock, lost in the contemplation of its enormous loveliness.

“A
large
bowl of black ink.”

Snigger
.