Pinkerton's Sister (3 page)

“And another.”

“Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow!”

She preferred to
feel
the doomed weeds in the palms of her hands as she plucked — quailing, wilting, vainly resisting — though sometimes she employed a hoe, becoming more like Miss Spade than ever, a Lady Macbeth bringing the daggers down with considerable force (she’d have had one in each hand), the impact jarring all the way up to her shoulders. This Lady Macbeth would have elbowed Macbeth aside, trampled over him, eager to have the pleasure of killing all to herself. “Give
me
the daggers!” she’d have bawled, before he’d ever set foot in the bedchamber. This Lady Macbeth would not have been shaken from her purpose by the resemblance of the sleeping Duncan to her father. It would have spurred her on to enthusiastic excesses. She’d have stabbed away, hacking his beard off and stuffing it in his mouth if she’d felt like it. And she’d have felt like it. The whole sinister-faced Spade family massed together — Miss Spade with her hoe, Mr. Spade and Master Spade with their differently shaped sharp-edged spades, and Mrs. Spade with her devilish three-pronged fork — looked like a peasants’ revolt (rarely had the peasants appeared so revolting) bursting through the palace gates and thirsting for blood, agitating their agricultural implements with threatening intent. The Royal Family would not be a Happy one for much longer. When she held a hoe she’d say, “Hoe, hoe, hoe, hoe,” as she dug out the weeds, the lugubrious laugh of the unamused murderer. This would be after an afternoon listening to Mrs. Albert Comstock’s humorless ha-ha-ha-ha-ing, when she was still feeling furious.

“Hoe …”

Stab!

— the thin silvery blade of the hoe would shoot into the earth like the thrust of an assassin’s dagger —

“… Hoe …”

Stab!

“… Hoe! …”

Stab!

“… Hoe!”

Stab!

(
STAB ES.

(She had seen the sign, this emblazoned summons to slaughter —
STAB!
STAB!
— with its huge painted Belshazzarian writing on the outside wall above the entrance to Carlo Fiorelli’s studio. Who
was
this
ES
she was bidden to stab by the writing on the wall? There was only one possible
ES
, although there would soon be many others.

(
ENORMOUS SIBYL.

(That was who it was.

(
STAB ENORMOUS SIBYL!

(That was what was implacably demanded.

(
STAB ENORMOUS SIBYL!
That was what was meant.

(That was what she
wanted
it to mean.

(The only difference between “slaughter” and “laughter” was the letter “s”, and “s” was for Sibyl.

(It was so clearly, so unmistakably, a
portent —
she was all in favor of
portents
— that it would have been impolite not to obey it. Apart from the pleasure in the naughtiness of stabbing Mrs. Albert Comstock, there was the pleasure in the naughtiness of calling her Sibyl.)

Stab!

The hoe-hoe-hoe-hoeing and the stabbing were enormously satisfying, as if she’d achieved some hard-won victory against great odds, an Horatius of the kitchen garden.

The gardener — who spent his afternoons working in Mrs. Albert Comstock’s garden (she was an exacting employer, quick to find fault, never praising) — enjoyed the hoe-hoe-hoe-hoe, and would encourage her stabbing, with shrewd advice on the best technique, like a coach inspiring his team. She’d hear muffled snortings and gigglings behind her (more authentically amused than Mrs. Albert Comstock’s hectoring ha-ha-ha-ha) and when she turned round — suspicious and accusing, the hoe held at a threatening angle — he’d always try to look serious, clutching his trowel with an earnest and professional technique, though his bright eyes betrayed him. He would eagerly produce the hoe unasked at every opportunity, an enthusiastic challenger in a duel — “Go on,” he would say, alluringly. “You can scarcely miss when you’re this close!” (his literary proclivities had left him with a keen eye for Symbolism) — but Alice preferred “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow!” It was a more impressive demonstration of her Shakespearean expertise.

“Another.”

“Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow!”

“Another.”

There was almost always another.

In those days it had seemed so easy to minister to a mind diseas’d.

“Another.”

It had been utterly painless to raze out the written troubles of the brain.

“Another.”

To find some sweet oblivious antidote.

“… thirteen, fourteen, fifteen …”

Tug!

She pulled hard at her hair.

Tug! Tug!

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow.

Tug! Tug!

The roots grew deep within her, coiled around her mind like sleeping serpents.

To make something grow, you buried it deep.

She often mused over this. It was something the young gardener had told her, imparting tips to improve her horticultural skills, as if attempting to convert her into a nurturer, discreetly displacing her destroying self.

For some reason — she’d no recollection of ever having been told to do this, but it had become a necessary ritual — she brushed each section of her hair one hundred times each morning and night. It did nothing to improve its look, but she kept on doing it, becoming anxious if she failed to complete the necessary number. Perhaps she should increase her number of brushings, until the air crackled blue with static electricity, buzzing like a dentist’s illuminated electric sign, and her hair trebled in volume, rising up from her head as if in horror at some appalling sight. One look in the mirror should have the same effect — it would beat any sight seen by Dr. Jekyll — and save a lot of effort.

Looking-glass, looking-glass, on the wall.

She always thought of “looking-glass” as being written with a hyphen, in the English style, because of
Through the Looking-Glass
, and because — to her — all things she saw were looking-glassed, or so she felt, transformed into things that were unfamiliar, a reversal of what they ought to be.

(Alice, the other Alice — the Alice Through the Looking-Glass Alice — was talking to the black kitten.

(“…
and if you’re not good directly, I’ll put you through in to Looking-glass House. How would you like
that?
Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House
…
Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way. I know
that,
because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room. How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty?…Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it!
”)

She had this sensation of reversal most of all when she gazed into her own reflection.

What she saw was not who she was.

Other people did not seem to have this feeling. Allegra — laughing Allegra — seemed perfectly happy with what she saw in the mirror, reassured by the confirmation of her prettiness. She preened. She posed. She pouted.

But not Alice. Alice had Dr. Jekyll’s mirror, not Dorian Gray’s, and the looking-glass was not her face. There were no beautiful things in Looking-glass House when she saw into it.

You’d pull away the tapestry —
Tug! Tug! —
and there would be the reflection.

Behind just such a tapestry Mrs. Rochester was hidden away, like Dorian Gray’s portrait behind its coverlet, like Mr. Hyde. Beside just such a tapestry Dorian Gray stood with a mirror in front of the portrait on the wall, comparing the face in the painting with the face in the polished glass, just as the emperor Domitian had looked at the reflections in the polished marble-lined underground corridors, looking for the face of his assassin creeping closer to kill him, the glint of a knife. This, to her, was an image of the novel: it was all polished surfaces, the mirror in the locked schoolroom as important as the portrait, like the mirror in Dr. Jekyll’s cabinet, in which he sought for the moment of change.

“… sixteen, seventeen, eighteen …”

She paused, becoming very still.

Gently, she laid the hairbrush down on the windowsill, the handle precisely aligned with the edge. She did this even when she placed things down — as now — only briefly, wishing objects to be carefully positioned within a space.

She had recognized that familiar feeling again, like the gradual build-up to an uncontrollable sneeze. It was not, however, a pocket-handkerchief that she required. She walked across to her bed and once more took up her fountain pen and her writing journal from where she had left them. There were the three sentences she had been studying before she had begun brushing her hair, something she had written late last night. It was the beginning of a story, or perhaps something longer. She knew that.

I saw another ghost last night. They come at twilight, the in-between time, not in full darkness, gathering like starlings in a public square as the light falls. They live in the mirrors.

She crossed out
falls
and substituted
fails
. She was not conscious of thinking about this.
Falls
was clearly the wrong word to use here. She must have been thinking of
fails
when she wrote it, or of darkness falling. She changed the period after
falls
into a comma, wrote in an insertion arrow, and added
but in silence, with none of the gregarious noise of the birds.
She wrote in another insertion arrow before
noise
— the page was covered in little symbols and crossings-out, like a wordy mathematical problem — and added
groupings &
.

She paused for a moment, and then wrote again, as fluently as if taking dictation.

Sometimes — & always one at a time — they emerge from the mirrors, & walk into the room.

She waited.

She waited a little longer.

Then she screwed the cap back on the fountain pen — tightly, like someone fearful that the black ink would leak out and stain the sheets — and replaced the pen and the journal exactly where they had been. She returned to the window, picking up the hairbrush again.

“… nineteen, twenty, twenty-one …”

It was as if she had been briefly called away to deal with something.

To dream of seeing yourself in a mirror, denotes that you will meet many discouraging issues, and sickness will cause you distress and loss in fortune.

The drapes brushed against her.

She felt the rough, dusty underside of the Thornfield tapestry against her face, like the underside of the imperially colored gold-embroidered purple coverlet under which Dorian Gray had hidden the picture. Here she was in the schoolroom: the picture of Dorian Gray.

If she were the picture, was her real self out in the world somewhere, living a life that she had never lived, someone young, someone bright and beautiful, someone popular, someone dazzling in society, with the irresistible allure of an illuminated mirror in a darkened room, a Blanche Ingram to her Bertha Rochester? The self she knew — unlike Dorian Gray — had not remained young and beautiful. Unlike Dorian Gray she had never
been
beautiful, and she could not remember ever feeling that she was young.
The princess was a sweet little creature, and at the time my story begins was about eight years old, I think, but she got older very fast.
That was how the second paragraph of
The Princess and the Goblin
— one of the books Alice remembered best from childhood — started, and, though certainly never a sweet little creature (
sweet
!), Alice felt she was as one with Princess Irene when it came to getting older very fast. She was — she felt on the bad days — the cowering soul locked in a darkened room, a soul rotting from within, a withered thing.

When Miss Ericsson had called her The Woman in White, that was all she had been thinking about: the figure of a woman dressed in white. It was just a phrase she knew: she hadn’t thought of Anne Catherick when she said it. It would never have occurred to her — she was a woman without guile or unkindness — that she had mentioned a character in a novel who had been imprisoned in a lunatic asylum.

So many of the novels owned by Alice’s mother contained scenes of madness and the asylum. Lady Audley’s secret: madness, and the fear of madness. Those final scenes at the private lunatic asylum in Belgium: the windows shrouded by a scanty curtain, the dark shadow of a woman with a fantastic head-dress, a restless creature who paced perpetually backward and forward before the window. Perhaps that was why she was drawn to them, as she was drawn to Jacobean tragedies, those plays of ghosts, madness, and revenge. She had never seen one of them performed — just as she had never seen an Ibsen play performed — but she read them, those she could find, as she read Ibsen, acting out the events within her head, hearing the voices, seeing the richly clad figures hurtling to their appalling fates, seeing it happen within the rooms around her, these the places in which they lived and died. The Jacobean plays seemed to have been totally forgotten. The reprinted texts themselves, on crinkled, brown-spotted paper, appeared to be hundreds of years old, with old-fashioned spellings, words — she had the feeling — that had not been spoken for centuries. With their elongated letter esses, with their unutterably ancient smell of old books, it was as if they had been lost in some long-ago library, never opened, never read, never acted, but they lived as she read them, setting the events in motion, as if she had spoken the words with which to open a hidden and long-locked door. They were, she felt — as she sometimes felt about some of Shakespeare’s plays (
King Lear
,
The Tempest
) — plays that lived best within the mind, where everything could become internalized and intense.

Another of the novels, the Charles Reade novel —
Hard Cash
, the one that had always frightened her — in which flames consumed the asylum as the lunatics shrieked with laughter, often came into her mind. Most people seemed to know
The Cloister and the Hearth —
she’d confused the title with
The Cricket on the Hearth —
when it came to Charles Reade novels, but for her it had always been
Hard Cash
. Some people read certain books over and over to comfort themselves, as if hearing the words of a story read at bedtime long ago, the voice of a lost mother or father, the time when everything was safe, and someone was there to look after you. She read
Hard Cash
to discomfort herself, to feel a fear that had somehow become necessary.