Pinkerton's Sister (21 page)

It wouldn’t be long before the
arabesques
were unleashed. You had to stand well back for these. Once she’d assumed the
pointe
position there was no controlling her, and the air fairly whistled around her scraggy contours. If she and Charlotte were feeling bored, or – a common occurrence, this – in a sadistic mood, they’d develop a sudden fascination with Mary Benedict’s ballet positions.

“Show us the first position, Mary!” they’d cry, as if to see it demonstrated would be to have a long-cherished dream come true.

Mary obliged, seizing her opportunity, the daunting simper at full power.

“First position!”

“Now the second position.”

“Second position!”

Mary obliged once more.

“Now some
arabesques
.”

“
Arabesque
!”

(You could hear the italics distinctly when Mary Benedict said it. The word sounded suitably Scheherazadian for the story-teller Alice was about to become.)

Mary
arabesque
d.

(Alice should
arabesque
, also, draw a veil mysteriously across her features, and assume the rapt tone of voice of a Scheherazade possessed by the power of storytelling. “New lamps for old,” she should be saying. “New lamps for old.” “What happens next?” King Shahryar would be begging her. “What happens next?
Tell me what happens next!
”)

“Now ten
pirouettes
.”

“
Pirouette
!”

The lurch to the right was quite pronounced at times.

“Now ten more.”

“
Pirouette
!” (Slightly breathless by now, the italics unraveling at the edges.)

Beginning to pant a little, Mary did ten more, the simper losing some of its intensity.

They could keep going like this for ages.

On their more successful days, Mary Benedict would end up racked with cramps, heaving for breath and writhing on the floor, as spasms overwhelmed her. She was incapable of curtsies, incapable of simpers, incapable of speech, utterly overwhelmed, lying there as if she’d just crashed down from heaven.

This was their favorite ballet position.

Just you wait, Mary Benedict.

“Give me a number between one and thirty-seven,” Alice would say, once, twice, three times a week, when the ritual had become established.

Macbeth
was number one, and they numbered the panels counterclockwise around the castle, until they reached
Hamlet
, number thirty-seven. The chosen number would be the starting point for the story, and they would walk around the building as Alice told a story – a different interpretation each time – as she included the scene on each panel in turn, ending her story at the panel immediately before the one with which she had started. A clockwise walk was a normal sort of story; a counterclockwise walk was a ghost or horror story. There were more of these as the fall and the winter approached, and the days darkened earlier. She beset them round with dismal stories.

Alice began to feel that all of the permutations of literature were contained in those thirty-seven panels, just as all of the permutations of fate were contained in a pack of tarot cards. She had heard of tarot cards from Mrs. Alexander Diddecott, and there were more of these than there were Shakespeare plays, seventy-eight of them. They had the simple gaudy fairground colors of cutout paper theatre figures, or the grotesquely caricatured characters on the cards in a pack of Happy Families, with its monstrous, murderous families of four. There’d be no happy futures if fortunes were read from these families. (Mr. Spade, the Gardener and his family; Mr. Chip, the Carpenter and his family; Mr. Dip, the Dyer and his family; Mr. Soot, the Sweep … How many could she remember of the thirteen families?) She’d seen the tarot cards only once, and would have been hard put to name more than half a dozen of them (Mrs. Alexander Diddecott kept some of the cards away from her, as if they were unsuitable books, the very touch of which would contaminate), though she knew that those with names were named – you might have
guessed
, she could hear Mrs. Albert Comstock snorting (
Typical!
), sensing the nearness of the Black Arts – in
French
. There was
La Maison de Dieu
(The Tower Struck by Lightning); there was
La Force
(Fortitude, a beefy woman who appeared to be on the point of forcing back the jaws of a resisting dog, Mrs. Albert Comstock at last losing patience with Chinky-Winky and attempting –
Harder, Mrs. Comstock, pull harder! –
to rip off the dog’s head); there were
Le Soleil
,
La Lune
, and
L’Etoile
(The Sun, The Moon, and The Star). She rather suspected that the illustration of the scandalously naked woman in
L’Etoile –
she’d clearly escaped Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s vigilance, and flaunted her breasts like St. Agatha in the stained glass window in All Saints’ – was a representation of Madame Etoile. She certainly shed light on the tenebrous in that position. So that was why no gentlemen were admitted. Kneeling down beneath a star-crowded sky, pouring out water from a pitcher in each hand, her disordered hair falling loosely down over her shoulders – though not far enough down to cover those perkily pointy breasts – she undoubtedly possessed the smugly self-satisfied look of a woman who had never been known to fail. There was
L’Amoureux
(The Lovers); there was
Le Bateleur
(The Magician) …

Tarot cards and ballet movements. You couldn’t deny that the French led a richly vocabulary-packed life.

La Lune
was card number XVIII, and she knew what this card meant. On the card, two battlemented towers seemed to stand guard over the horizon like giant chess pieces, and two dogs howled up at the moon, as a parasitic-looking creature crawled up toward them out of a deep, dark pool. It was not a good card. It meant that a secret would be brought to light. It meant that the imagination was dangerous if it were not controlled. It was a card, Alice felt, to which she would be drawn repeatedly.
Choose a card, any card
. This was what the fortune-teller would order, and this would be the card that she always chose. She wouldn’t be able to stop herself. It would be like having a secret never to be told, and being unable to stop yourself from talking about it. “Choose a card, any card,” the cardsharp – his eyes obscured by his pulled-down green eye-shade – would urge, fanning out the pack seductively, the identically patterned backs of the cards held out for her to select one, and – every time – the card that she selected would be
La Lune
, just like Carmen always finding death in the cards she drew.

“Any card.”

La Lune
.

“Any card.”

La Lune
.

La Lune
.
La Lune
. Seventy-eight moons would blaze down their light from directly overhead with noontime radiance, and seventy-eight creatures would crawl out of seventy-eight pools. This would be no place for shadows. The tenebrous would not survive here. (“
La Loon! La Loon!
” She heard the voices chanting, felt the sharp-nailed fingers as they pointed knowingly in her direction.)

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
…

All of literature was in the thirty-seven panels, just as the whole of Shakespeare’s plays was contained in
Hamlet
. This was her theory. It had occurred to her when Polonius had told Hamlet that he had once played the part of Julius Cæsar at university, and she had the dizzying thought of a character in a Shakespeare play acting another part in a different play. It was just like the moment in “The Eve of St. Agnes” when Porphyro seemed aware of another Keats poem and played “La belle dame sans mercy” (why “mercy” and not “
merci
,” the thankless cold-hearted woman without manners who never said “Thank you”?), or the moment in
Don Giovanni –
just before the statue of the murdered Commendatore entered to drag him down to hell – when Don Giovanni listened to music from
The Marriage of Figaro
. If he’d heard the words that should have accompanied the music, he’d have heard the warning that was in them. It was time to say goodbye to pleasure.

Everything around her had gone away for a while, and then come back. She had read the play to see if she was right. Part of the power of
Hamlet
lay in not fully understanding it. That’s what she thought. It was like the interior of a vast echoing building, where the details of the architecture could not be seen or understood, the outlines lost in misty vagueness. You stood within it, dimly aware of the surroundings, sensing vast vaulting arches, distant corridors, hidden levels piled up like a city built on ruins. There was a sense of some great secret, just out of reach, about to be revealed, the tip-of-the-tongue sensation of a forgotten memory on the point of being recalled, that not-quite-remembering the name of a piece of music feeling. The lack of a name for this felt-once-before feeling – she hadn’t been able to find one, though she’d searched – made it seem all the more mysterious, something beyond the reach of language. It was like experiencing recollections of a life already lived, seeing things for the first time, but knowing that you’d seen them before. Christina Rossetti’s brother had written a poem about this feeling – “Sudden Light” – though it wasn’t really
light
that you felt. It was more a
dimming
of the light, a high humming sound in the ears, as you sank beneath deep water, your arms helplessly flailing.
I have been here before
. That was how it began.
/But when or how I cannot tell:/I know the grass beyond the door,/The sweet keen smell,/The sighing sound
(he was absolutely right about the sighing sound),
the lights around the shore
…

Alice had written this description down, and
The Grass Beyond the Door
had gone onto her list of titles. She had been keeping a writing journal for three years. She was going to be a writer.

The three little girls walked up to the Shakespeare Castle in the late afternoon of a day in the fall. Alice Pinkerton walked in front. Behind her, Charlotte Finch was holding on to Mary Benedict. She might have been dragging her unwillingly along, or she might have been clutching her for comfort.

“Gonorrhea!” Mary Benedict said, attempting an air of saucy insouciance, looking closely at Charlotte to see if she turned pink. Charlotte – as ever – did, one of her darker shades, blending quite nicely with her red muffler.

For a moment Alice toyed with the idea of snapping “Don’t be so bosomptious!” at Mary Benedict, and seeing what effect that would have on her. She wouldn’t lower herself to ask what the word meant, and this might nag away at her for hours, with any luck. Then, more cunningly, she thought of asking Mary Benedict to spell “gonorrhea,” but then decided against that also. She had something else in mind.

Mary Benedict had been to her ballet class the previous day, and was attempting to assume the third position, but her heart wasn’t in it. She hadn’t even remembered to announce what it was she was doing.

“Number one,” Charlotte said, and they took up their positions in front of
Macbeth
, looking at the backs of the three figures in the flowing robes facing a single, similarly attired figure. It was the first time they had started with the very first panel they had seen.

“Counterclockwise,” Alice decided, and – gratifyingly – Mary Benedict whimpered. Alice always decided the direction the story was going to take. They had been talking of ghosts for most of the afternoon, as the shadows lengthened, and Mary was already in a receptive mood. This was why Alice had chosen counterclockwise. With luck, she might be able to make Mary Benedict scream and run home again. She had managed to do this in a counterclockwise story the previous week when they had reached the final panel of the day’s story, the panel for
Measure For Measure
. She had been on good form. At the end of the story, she was explaining what was
really
happening in front of them, the man reaching across a table toward a woman. Alice had leaned toward Mary Benedict – like the man toward the woman – to hiss the final words of the story and Mary had screamed, and fled. That story had gone into her writing journal.

Tried.

Tested.

Succeeded.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The scream had been pleasingly loud, a three-tick, three-star scream.

This afternoon’s story would be even better.

There would be more stars than an entire pack of
L’Etoile
s. There would be more stars than all the tourist guidebooks for Rome combined. The Colosseum, the Vatican, the Pantheon: all would echo ringingly to the screams as Mary Benedict abandoned herself to total hysteria. She was a girl who knew how to enjoy herself. Flakes of paint would gust like a blizzard from
The Last Judgment
, and tourists would be lost from sight in a storm of leaf-like fall colorings. They would become the fallen angels, thick as autumnal leaves strewing the brooks in Vallombrosa. Several of the damned would permanently disappear from sight, and enter Mary Benedict like an infection of the blood. With this Scheherazade, Alice had firmly decided, any life at risk would be the life of the listener, not the storyteller. Danger was in words. That was what Doctor Faustus had told the Scholars just before Mephostophilis brought in Helen of Troy. You had to remain silent when spirits were about.

“Francesca did not know why her father hated her and her two sisters,” Alice started. “They did all they could to please him, but he hated them. Their mother had died when they were babies, and they could not remember her at all. They had a sense of being held, being loved, being sung to – none of these things happened now – but they could not picture her face. Sometimes the words of one of the songs would come to them, and they could hear a voice, the voice of their lost mother …”

It was almost forty-five minutes later when they reappeared at the front of the castle, and almost an hour before they stood in front of what was to be the last panel for that particular story, the panel depicting Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull. Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor –
favour
? – she must come; make her laugh at that. It had become so dark that they had been unable to see the details of the panels after a while. A little while later, and they had been unable to see the panels at all, but – by now – they knew the order of the panels, and what was depicted on them. Sometimes Alice made them feel the outlines of the figures as she continued her story, as if they were handling the words she spoke, caressing the characters she had created. All were within reach, except for the
Hamlet
panel. Sometimes they had to wait a little, while Alice thought of the next words she was to speak, as if she was straining to hear words being whispered to her, just beyond the sense of hearing. Alice herself did not appear to know what was going to happen next, she – also – hearing the words for the first time as she spoke them, words she had not seen written down.