Pinkerton's Sister (92 page)

Surely there’d be an excess of lovers whose names began with “I” or “O,” the most likely shapes for falling wax to form, eager jostling crowds of Ians and Osberts, Irwins and Orvilles, pushy lips confidently pursed for kissing? Were you allowed to move about a bit, attempting to write, like naughty, frostbite-defying small boys writing their names in the snow as they urinated (she sometimes saw rather more than she bargained for when she looked down from her high window), or was that cheating?

“Me! Me!
Me!
” chorused the crowds of Ians and Osberts, the bustling throngs of Irwins and Orvilles.

I
am the man of your dreams!

I
am the lover foretold in the mystic midnight ceremony!

In candlelight you leaned across the water, struggling to make out letters in the dimness, in Mr. Brczin’s consulting room on Indian Woods Road, in dire need of new spectacles.

“I think it might be a ‘C.’ No, a ‘Q.’ It
could
be a ‘Q.’ Unless it’s a ‘D,’ or an ‘O’ …”

The lenses grew thicker and thicker, the size and shape of portholes. You saw the dim reflection of yourself glinting on the surface of the water, a distant figure at the bottom of a well.

Bong!
the clock chimed hollowly, down in the hall.

Bong!

Twelve seconds, that was the only time you had in all the year to discover that name.

Bong!

Bong!

Did you attempt (another part of the All-Hallows’ Eve fun, self-consciously preserving old traditions like a participant in a mummers’ play, a bell-jingling English morris dancer, or the choir in
Under the Greenwood Tree
) to sink your teeth into apples floating in the same water, risking mouthfuls of wax –
Teuch!
– chewing death masks, cannibalistic teeth closing on the initials of one’s beloved?

Bong!

Bong!

Economically uniting two traditions in one, you could – in one continuous piece – cut the peel from the apple you’d retrieved from the water (removing it from your mouth first made this significantly easier), and throw it over your shoulder. It would fall – Madame Diddecott assured them – into the initial of the man who was the one for you, the Ian or Irwin or Isaac, the Osbert or (preferably not) Orville, the Ivor or (even worse) Oswald.

Brace yourself, Ivan!

Purse those lips, Oscar!

You bear names with a favored letter.

How likely was it that apple peel would form an “H” or an “E” or a “B”? Determined girls would peel and peel away if they’d set their hearts on Harold or Edward or (an interesting choice, this one, from a girl who liked a challenge) Brian – how many apples had Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster crunched his teeth into, like an Adam enthusiastically embracing sinfulness, waist-deep in browning, cidery-smelling peel? – and their families would be eating apple pies for months.

Bong!

Bong!

They should have sent in Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster when they were demolishing the apple orchards. He’d have chewed his way through them in no time, peel hurtling over his shoulders, a combine harvester at full throttle, wrecking the little lost pockets of Paradise as comprehensively as a whole galaxy of Mrs. Albert
Comstocks crashing cataclysmically to earth.

Bong!

Bong!

Madeline leaned over the bowl of water, searching for the face of the man who was going to murder her. It was so difficult to see clearly. Behind her, on the casement high and triple-arch’d, St. Agnes was depicted in the glass, three times over, with her threefold malformed lambs hugely leaping, their hooves sharpened for killing. In bed, supperless, lying upon her back, Madeline would look like the sculptur’d dead in the chapel, emprison’d in black, purgatorial rails: knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries, aching in icy hoods and mails.

There were only a couple of seconds left!

She peered closely, almost immersing her face in the water.

She could see something!

P!

P!

She could definitely see a “P.”

Bong!

Bong!

Just in time.

The man who would murder her had a name that began with a “P.”

In another room, a similar room, a room not far away, Dr. Jekyll gazed into a cheval glass, weeping like a lost soul, searching for changes in his face, for the hidden monster that came from within him. He had the intense focused stare of a Narcissus who loathed his reflection, yet could not look away, mesmerized by his own eyes.
Ker-plunk, ker-plunk, ker-plunkety plunky-plunk
… In a room beyond this one, through the wall from Dr. Jekyll, each seeing the other as his own reflection, Dorian Gray stood in front of his portrait with a mirror, also searching for changes, the signs of aging. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. Dr. Jekyll sobbed in front of his reflection,
seeing the dreadful thing he had become, and Dorian Gray smiled in front of his, seeing nothing but unchanging, ageless beauty. Order was reversed in his schoolroom, a place from within the Looking-glass House, and it had become a room in which a work of art aged, and a human being never altered. There should have been a portrait of himself in Dr. Jekyll’s cabinet alongside his cheval glass, a portrait that never changed in the way that Dorian Gray’s changed, an image of himself as he had once been. The reflection in the mirror would change, day by day it would change, altered by that which grew inside, even if the only change was that caused by time, and still he would sob, as the – this time – unchanging nature of art intensified the sense of his own fragile transience.

The Reverend Goodchild was not just wrong about Mrs. Rochester, and about Dorian Gray’s portrait. He was wrong about Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde was not something huge, Frankenstein creature-like, as she had heard him claim. He was ever made uneasy by that “stein” (she had heard some of his comments about wonderful, ardent, dark-eyed Miss Stein) and it was probably this that had led to his also being wrong about Frankenstein’s creature. He thought that the unnamed creature was itself called Frankenstein, having assumed the name of its creator, absorbed him within itself, as Mr. Hyde had absorbed Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Hyde, however, was something far more disturbing than this.

Mr. Hyde was not a shambling monster, lurching clumsily within the unfamiliar clothing of its body.

Mr. Hyde was the size of a child, a hunched and hideous
child
.

He was the size of a deformed child dressed in adult clothing enormously too large for it – the trousers hanging on the legs and rolled up, the waist of the coat below his haunches, the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders – like the ill-dressed lunatics in
Hard Cash
. It was as if – like Dorian Gray – he had had his childhood stolen from him, and this had turned him into something misshapen and revolting, horrible – most horrible – to look upon,
his stunted body reflecting the ugliness of his malnourished mind. There was no mention of Henry Jekyll’s childhood in
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, apart from the brief comment – just after he had thought himself saved – that he had thought of his life as a whole, following it up from the days of childhood, when he had walked with his father’s hand. That was the one memory of his childhood: himself as a child walking hand in hand with his father.

Walking where?

Walking to what?

The descriptions of Edward Hyde were the descriptions of a child – smaller, slighter, younger, than Henry Jekyll – in whom something had gone horribly wrong, and made him monstrous, a thing with a haunting sense of unexpressed deformity.

That child of Hell had nothing human.

That was what Henry Jekyll had said.

(Father Hell, the sinful priest come forth to acknowledge his sin-born child – this thing of darkness he acknowledged his – stepped out from the shadows with Franz Mesmer. He was holding steel implements in both hands, and they glinted slightly. They’d dazzle in full light, perfect for the application of mesmerism. Once you’d got them to take their clothes off, it wasn’t too difficult to get them to agree to having the steel applied to their naked bodies.
Turn around!
That was what they were whispering in unison.
Turn around!
They whispered so quietly that anyone hearing them would turn around, thinking that they were responding to promptings from within their own minds.)

Child.

“
Young
Hyde” was what Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, called him, as if his youth were the most horrible thing about him.

“
Master
Hyde” was what he called him.

The first time Mr. Hyde entered the novella, he calmly crushed a girl of eight or ten under his feet, and left her screaming on the ground, a man attempting to destroy what reminded him of childhood,
though – in truth – he scarcely seemed aware of what he had done, trampling through her as if she were not there at all, a childhood that had never been. Mr. Utterson had nightmares about him, and saw the little figure glide stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly, and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through the wider labyrinths of a lamp-lighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the figure had no face by which he might know it.

He did not have the mirror that Dr. Jekyll had, the mirror unstained by breath, in which he might see the reflection of that for which he sought, the thing that was pale and dwarfish, the thing that gave an impression of deformity without any namable malformation.

Mr. Hyde entered Dr. Jekyll’s house through the blistered and stained door that was on the dark, hidden side of the house, in a by-street, the door without bell or knocker, the door that led into the dissecting-room. That was how
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
began, with the section entitled “Story of the Door.” That was the
Knock And It Shall Be Opened Unto You
door, the door that she sometimes saw as the door of their house on Chestnut Street, the looking-glass door of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s house on Park Place, the door that was every door in Longfellow Park, with gleaming, grinning, G. G. Schiffendecken false-teeth door knockers.

She had knocked.

The door had been Opened Unto her.

It was a door that was opened in the way that the lid of Pandora’s box was lifted, driven open by the powers of what lay within.

She saw the small grotesque figure – Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray – bent over in the schoolroom, at the desk, its face hidden, very still, conscious of wrongdoing and not wishing to be seen, flooded in red light. When it moved, it would be a crab-like scuttling from shadow to shadow. It was writing and writing and writing, as
obsessively as a thing that could never stop, the one task that remained for it to do.

Scribble, scribble, scribble.

The only part of his original character that remained to Henry Jekyll, when he changed into Edward Hyde and was unable to change back again, was his handwriting. Perhaps he was writing his name over and over, to remind himself of who he really was, though the shriveled child he saw in the mirror was not that person. In this, wasn’t he like anyone else, looking into a mirror and seeing a strange reflection that was not the person inside, feeling this more and more powerfully as the years went by, as the reflection aged?

Henry Jekyll.

Henry Jekyll.

Henry Jekyll
…

“That’s me,” Henry Jekyll thought, lingering over the curve in the letter “J” and the “y”s, touching the loops of the “k” and the “l”s, as though the handwriting were more real than he was. He wrote slowly and carefully, lingering over each letter caressingly, like someone who had to think about the spelling, trying to write in his most beautiful handwriting, attempting to create an attractiveness about the name that had vanished forever from the person it had once defined.

Henry Jekyll.

Henry Jekyll.

Henry Jekyll
…

That’s
me
. That’s
me
.

(
Edward Hyde.

(That’s what he heard from the whispering inside himself.

(
Edward Hyde.

(
Edward Hyde
…

(That’s what he saw reflected in the mirror.)

Henry Jekyll.

Henry Jekyll.

Henry Jekyll
…

He wrote the same words over and over, like a badly behaved schoolboy set a copying task by a schoolmaster as a punishment, writing the same lines repeatedly for hour after hour. They were the words of a lesson he had failed to learn, or an admonition to be memorized and never forgotten, Hyde-bound by the malformed and terrifying child that he had become. He tried to write his name exactly the same each time he wrote it, the letters precisely the same size, the angles and whorls as identical as thumbprints or fingerprints repeatedly impressed from the same hand.

Henry Jekyll.

Henry Jekyll.

Henry Jekyll
…

(
I must NOT
…

(That’s what he should have been writing, carrying out the imposition he had been given to avoid further chastisement.

(
I must NOT
…

(
I must NOT
…

(That was the lesson that ought to have been learned by heart.

(As he wrote out the lines he became less and less conscious of what it was he was writing, seeing nothing but the unwritten whiteness between the words, rather than the words themselves.)

He existed in what he had written, not in who he was.

What he had written he would leave behind him, and what he was would cease to be.

As he wrote, he wept, and it was not the weeping of a child. It was the sound that Poole had heard through the locked door of his master’s cabinet, the sound that was like the weeping of a woman or a lost soul, the weeping that came away upon his heart, and made the butler himself wish to weep.