Pinkerton's Sister (68 page)

She stood there in the ruins amidst the broken figures, the shattered glass, with the burned pieces of paper falling upon her. She was filled with an urge to rescue something, but there seemed to be too much to do, and she did not know where to start. What was still there would not be there for much longer. Her imperious mien would have to be at its mienest. The workmen would soon return, and she wanted no witnesses to what she was going to do.

She went back out through the gates and set out for the Finches’ house, further along the Heights, running, still clutching the lily and the sheet music, her hair and shoulders confettied with blackened paper, a guest fleeing a sad wedding. She tried to hold her lily in the style adopted by the angel hoisting Little Nell in the final illustration in
The Old Curiosity Shop
. The tiny, nervous-looking waist-high angel in
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin
stood alongside a lily that was as tall as he was. It was placed in a vase on top of a stack of huge books, rigidly upright. Dante Gabriel Rossetti seemed to have a supply of sturdy specimens. Lilies, too often – especially in warm rooms (though there was hardly this excuse here and now) – drooped sloppily over, dragged down by the weight of their heads, like ill-postured pale consumptives, like – indeed – pale-faced, thin-limbed angels. Those haloes could be heavy. Perhaps they were singing the song she was singing now. She visualized the stiff-stemmed lily being utilized as a baton, keeping strict time in the heavenly choir. They were carrying Little Nell back to Old Virginny, to the cotton and the corn and the taters. What a surprise that would be for her. “Taters!” she would exclaim, as her eyes fluttered open to glimpse her first view of heaven. “The very things of which I dreamed!” (
Dreaming of potatoes, brings incidents often of good.
)

There were no birds singing now. The sedge had wither’d from the lake, and no birds sang. (
To dream of rotting potatoes, denotes vanished pleasure and a darkening future.
) Here – near the ruins of a castle – was where she would meet a knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering, dreaming of pale kings and princes, pale warriors. She could be a
Belle Dame sans Merci
if the need arose – well, perhaps not very
Belle
, but most decidedly
sans Merci –
holding her lily with emblematic coolness, like a drawn weapon.

“Have at thee, varlet!”

She made merciless thrusts with the flapping white-fleshed flower.

Verily.

She and Charlotte were singing the same song as they emerged from Delft Place ten minutes later, side by side, pushing Linnaeus’s baby carriage with no Linnaeus inside, running back toward the ruins of the Shakespeare Castle. Any witnesses would have feared for the imperiled speeding infant they supposed was inside. When Mama produced her baby brother or baby sister, she and Charlotte could have races with the baby carriages. It must have been then that she first had the idea of reenacting a scene from the Reverend Goodchild’s awful (but Alice-free) novel
The Curse of the Colosseum
(1876), the two chariots hurtling round in front of the baying crowds of Ancient Romans. The only things worse than Ancient Romans – in the poison-soaked, stab-mutilated world of the Reverend Goodchild’s novels – were modern Romans.

“Hasten unto the castle!” Alice cried, still thinking of her conversation with Annie.

“Pray heaven we come not too late!” Charlotte could pick up a cue quickly.

“Verily!” She’d reversed her previous opinion that Annie overdid the verilys. There could never be too many verilys.

Alice wasn’t too keen on that double negative in the last line. She had her grammatical standards.

When they arrived they moved with speed, rescuing possessions from a sinking ship or a burning house. They would not have much time. Charlotte had seen the workmen walking away about half an hour earlier, and they would soon be back. They immediately realized that there was to be no choice about the panels. They would be able to carry only one away in the baby carriage, and the only one that was loose and undamaged – apart from its name being broken away from the bottom edge and one decapitated Sister – was the one for
Macbeth
, lying propped up against the front wall like a target in the butts.

Alice had run along the front of the building, and down the nearest side, but all the others were fixed firmly in place. They had all been mutilated, by the look of it, the broken figures lying on the ground beneath. It was like an illustration of Ancient Rome after the carnage of an invasion. She thought of her stories, destroyed, trodden into the earth. She had faint memories of grim-faced Roundheads despoiling statues in churches, shooting up at inaccessible angels and virgins, broken figures falling down to earth, shattering. Rocks burst through hallelujahing hosts, saints exploded, and cold bright light illuminated the dimness. The Roundheads would have liked this demolition of the Shakespeare Castle, competitively jostling to become involved in the destruction. They didn’t like the theatre. They’d closed all the theatres in England, and silenced all those voices of grief and joy.

Panting, staggering, Alice and Charlotte lowered
Macbeth
into the baby carriage, which dipped noticeably under the weight.

“You’ve been overfeeding this child,” Alice complained.

“Quadruplets,” Charlotte corrected, maternally patting Macbeth and the Three Weird Sisters.

“I hope Mama doesn’t have quadruplets.” Alice visualized her mother with her arms vastly extended out at each side, two infants under each arm, all scowling like miniature sour-faced Mrs. Twemlows, or a surfeit of Chinky-Winkies. (Was that the plural for Chinky-Winky?) Nursing them didn’t bear thinking about. Whole teams of wet-through wet nurses – bosoms alertly poised for instant access – would work tirelessly night and day.

Charlotte tickled Macbeth under the chin.

“Coochi, coochi, coo! What an adorable child!”

Her last two sentences – if the former had been a sentence – were Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s verdict on Linnaeus. They were still awaiting Mrs. Albert Comstock’s verdict. The suspense of not knowing whether the child would be allowed to live.

Alice had heard Mrs. Albert Comstock described as being “of the Jonathan Swift school of child management.” She hadn’t known what this meant, but it had not sounded good. She thought it was something to do with Mrs. Albert Comstock’s size, a reference to the Brobdingnagians.

A vastly magnified illustration from
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
came into her head, the same one that she had recalled yesterday afternoon: a gargantuan Duchess with a gargantuan baby on her knee, the pose Mrs. Albert Comstock adopted with her succession of sulky-faced Pekineses. Myrtle Comstock – slightly older than she and Charlotte were – was, there was no doubt about it, verging on the Brobdingnagian.

“Coochi, coochi, coo! What an enormous child!”

She must try that the next time she saw her, rail at her, spurn her, curse her, drive her mad. Alice believed in using her time usefully. Come to think of it, Myrtle displayed an unmistakable facial likeness to the Pekinese: this, surely, must awaken maternal feelings deep within the Comstock Bosom. Oliver, her baby brother, looked nothing like the rest of the family, and was a pretty child whom Alice could quite enthusiastically have coochi-coochi-cooed in the absence of his mother. Mrs. Albert Comstock regarded him with distinct distaste: perhaps this was Jonathan Swift’s sub-Herodian attitude to male infants.
Speak roughly to your little boy,/And beat him when he sneezes
…

All the girls she knew were being presented with baby brothers. Perhaps Mama might have a boy this time, and Papa would love him more than he loved her and her sisters. She would like to have a brother.

Macbeth
was safely stowed in the baby carriage. They scurried about, rather hopelessly scooping up whatever came to hand, figures broken from the panels, larger pieces of stained glass. The hall tiles were beautiful, and undamaged, but so firmly fixed that it was impossible to remove them. She kneeled down, and pulled at the edges, trying to insert her fingernails, but she could not loosen them. They had words written upon them, illustrations.
And by and by a cloud takes all away
. She did not recognize these words.
You and I are past our dancing days.
These she recognized, and felt wise.
I know thee not, old man.
All the words were sad. They stretched all around, beneath her feet – she walked across the speeches – strewn with dirt and debris, and would soon be shattered by sledgehammers. There was no time to read anymore, and she ran back down the steps into what had once been outside. Now there was no longer any distinction between what was inside and what was outside. She scrabbled about in the broken fragments of terra-cotta, with a particular purpose in mind, wishing that there had been passing idlers to pause and ask what she was doing. “What the deuce is she doing?” That’s what they would ask each other. (They would be men.) “I’m looking for a witch’s head, of course!” was what she would have replied, a sentence she was rarely given the opportunity to employ. She found one head, the size of a broken chess piece, but it was not the head of a witch. It wore a crown, and looked like a king. There had been a small execution a short while earlier, the death of a deposed monarch in the ruins of his overthrown castle.
Reenter MACDUFF, with MACBETH’S head.

“For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground/And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” she said, showing the head to Charlotte, picking at the crown to remove the mud. (“For God’s sake!” tended to be Allegra’s response – if Mama was not in the room – when she quoted Shakespeare, but Charlotte was ever ready to look impressed.) She’d just read
Richard II
. Richard hadn’t been executed with pomp and formality on a high-raised stage; he’d been stabbed to death in the dungeon where he had been imprisoned at Pomfret Castle. She’d looked for Pomfret on a map of England, so that she could see where Richard had been killed, but she had been unable to find it. It wasn’t in the index. She knew that it was somewhere in Yorkshire. Perhaps it was near Thornfield Hall. “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” That’s what Richard said. He’d been listening to music and crying as he said this, because the music was a sign that someone loved him, and soon afterwards Exton had come in with the other murderers and killed him.

“We can’t take anything else,” Charlotte said, as Alice added the head to what they had salvaged. She sounded out of breath, and looked – as Alice must herself – dusty and crumpled.

It was not just a matter of time. The baby carriage was packed to capacity, and weighed down. It looked bowlegged – if wheels could be so described – an unfortunate camel conveying Sphinx-like Mrs. Albert Comstock in the direction of the Pyramids during her Egyptian holiday.

Alice made a gesture to embrace the building in front of her.

“Goodbye,” she said, not feeling in the least foolish. She felt – part of her surveyed what her feelings were – obscurely tearful.

“Goodbye,” Charlotte said, equally solemnly.

She remembered the
Hamlet
panel, and looked up above the entrance. She would have wanted to rescue this, if she could have reached it – it was on a higher level, it might not have been damaged – but it was no longer there. It was larger than the other panels, and there was a deep space where it had once been. It seemed to have been neatly and properly removed: there were no broken fragments of terra-cotta left in the stone. She ran back inside, looking at the bottom of the wall, searching for an angled pink piece of statuary. Nothing. She ran back down to the front, looking in places where she had looked already. She didn’t know why she was searching for it; it would have been too large, too heavy, for them to move, but she knew she wanted to see it again. She knew that there would be nothing left to save the next time they came there.

“We couldn’t take it, in any case,” Charlotte said, knowing what Alice was doing. She was arranging a little blue blanket on top of what they had rescued, making comfortable a sleeping overweight infant. “It’s time we went.” It was one of the few occasions on which Charlotte had been the one taking the initiative.

As they pushed the baby carriage through the gates – one of them, they saw, was detached from its moorings, and leaning back against the wall – Alice was looking backward all the time, like Mary Benedict in reverse. She was looking at the shadowed space above the entrance, as though she could read the shape of the missing figure in the recess, straining her eyes to see, straining her ears to hear the vanished cries of the peacocks.

Ten years later, at the funeral of Albert Comstock in Woodlawn Cemetery, she wandered away from her father and mother and sisters, her little brother, the other relatives, in search of Reynolds Templeton Seabright’s grave. She had been disappointed by Albert Comstock’s elaborate tomb, completed for him months before his demise. (Mrs. Albert Comstock – energized and full of enthusiastic ideas – had overseen the construction, like an ambitious houseowner constructing a costly summer house.) Despite persistent rumors, it had not possessed a space for advertising the latest bargains at Comstock’s Comestibles, a useful service for economically minded mourners. Like Green Wood Cemetery, Woodlawn had been designed for Marvellian green thoughts in green shades, the serene contemplation of the pattern of life and death, the transience and the persistence of being. Philosophically inclined picnickers could pack a skull in their hamper, neatly positioned next to the thinly cut sandwiches and well-polished apples, and could contemplate it in some rural glade amidst the tree-shaded gravestones, lost in deep musings on all that had gone before. And this was all that had come into her mind: day-old pies handsomely reduced in price for the shrewd and observant purchaser.