Pinkerton's Sister (97 page)

She’d enter the handsome hall.

They’d be there, smiling professionally – “Such a pleasure to see you again, Miss Pinkerton!” – as they angled the visitors’ book toward her, a regular guest checking into a sun-filled summer hotel, one to which she returned year after year to relive the memories of happier times, her luggage positioned on the floor at her side, at precisely the same angle as the visitors’ book on the desk.

She’d be directed up the left-hand staircase, and through an open door into what appeared to be a drawing room. A servant would lead the way – though she knew the way – carrying her bags for her.

The servant would lead her across the drawing room and open a concealed door that was disguised as a looking-glass, and they would walk through the looking-glass into the cold bare room beyond, dirty and cobwebbed, its nearer wall lined with the fake books.

The matron of the asylum would walk toward her, flanked by Allegra and Edith.

“Calm yourself,” her sisters would say, linking their arms in hers. “There is no wonder nor mystery in the matter:
you were expected
.”

The matron would pull at a gold chain that was hanging around her neck, and draw out an ivory whistle. She would blow upon it until she achieved the right key, the cue for the three of them to begin singing.

– At this point they would begin to chuckle –

– The chuckling would become louder, more discordant –

The chuckling would become loud laughter, uncontrolled, high-pitched, echoing around in the emptiness.

“Calm yourself,” the matron would say, laying a hand on her arm. There’d be no sign of Allegra and Edith – Allegra and Edith would never have been there – and Alice would continue singing all by herself.

The matron would pull at the gold chain again, and draw out the ivory whistle. When she blew upon it, two men would come quietly into the room.

One of the men began to speak to Alice.

“Be calm, my dear young lady; don’t agitate yourself. You have been sent here for your good; and that you may be cured …”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean?” Alice cried. “Are you mad?”

“No,” one of the men answered. “
We
are not …”

They and the matron drew closer toward her, reaching out.

It was for her own good.

To bed, to bed.

And not to read.

The books would not be real books.

And not to write.

There would be no pens, no paper.

To bed, to bed, to bed.

And not to think.

The mind would be emptied of all thought.

And not to talk.

The tongue, like the writing-hand, would be stilled.

To bed, to bed, to bed.

And not to sew.

No stitch-stitch-stitch.

No sharp-edged pens or needles.

Safest not to have them around.

Just sleeping.

Just dreaming.

She wouldn’t escape the dreams.

Drifting listlessly away.

Drifting.

Nothing else.

Because nothing else mattered.

Sometimes, when a full moon took her by surprise – looking up, seeing it through the skylight – she felt someone had climbed up on to the roof and was watching her.

What did she think about, looking up at the full moon?

“Dot. Dot. Dot,” she said.

The text was moving into silence. Out in the North Pole wastes of whiteness, where there were no more words, the characters struggled and died in those margins beyond the text, stifled by that silence.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

Sometimes – on rainy afternoons, on winter evenings – she had been tempted to read
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
for the first time, the Dickens novel she had been saving as – this was how she sometimes felt it – the last book she would read. She had had
Our Mutual Friend
saved as well, but – with a sensation of luxurious abandon – she had read it when she returned from her first visit to the Webster Nervine Asylum. (Only one unread Dickens novel left!)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
was the one she had chosen to save until last because, of course, it was the last one Dickens had written, the one he had left incomplete when he died. She had hovered around the book several times. There were only 155 pages in her edition.

It wouldn’t take long to read …

It wasn’t one of his better books …

She’d looked at Luke Fildes’s illustrations – twelve of them – telling herself that this wasn’t cheating, it didn’t count as reading, trying to decide what she could deduce about the novel from them. It was a place of darkness and deep shadows, figures lying dead or unconscious on beds in squalid rooms, fashionable young men leaning upon pianos or mantel-shelves, a girl cowering away from a man in an overgrown garden, a girl – the same girl? – nervously sitting in a boat with three men in the middle of a river. This last reminded her, though the girl was not doing the rowing, of Lizzie Hexam in
Our Mutual Friend
unwillingly guiding the boat for her father as he sought for corpses in the Thames.

Charlotte had bought her an edition of Charles Dickens – complete, except for
A Tale of Two Cities –
from a secondhand bookstore the previous year, and inside every book, on the first blank page, was written
Edward Gwynne Lawrence. From his loving brothers Frank & Jack on his
21
st Birthday. March
28
th
1900
. Charlotte had remembered her saying that she would have liked to own a uniform edition, instead of the oddly assorted volumes she had accumulated over the years. The pages had not been cut in any of the volumes, and she had spent a stormy day working through them with a letter-knife, sometimes pausing to study the illustrations or read passages as the wind beat at the windows. It was then that she’d looked at
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
. She had been going to leave the pages of this novel uncut, to keep her out, to leave the cutting until the reading, but she hadn’t been able to stop. After she’d looked at the illustrations, she’d looked at some of the headings at the top of right-hand pages –
Mad Love
,
Rosa flees for Protection
,
A Preux Chevalier
,
The Thorn of Anxiety
(it sounded quite promising) – and then she’d turned to the final page,
The Last Addition to the Score
, to see the final words that Dickens had written. She imagined him at his desk, thinking, writing a few words, pausing, writing a few words more, and then the pen falling from his fingers and rolling across the floor. Most of page 155 was blank, but – above the whiteness – there were a few lines of type.

“Know him! Better far than all the Reverend Parsons put together know him.”

Mrs. Tope’s care has spread a very neat, clean breakfast ready for her lodger. Before sitting down to it, he opens his corner-cupboard door; takes his bit of chalk from its shelf; adds one thick line to the score, extending from the top of the cupboard door to the bottom; and then falls to with an appetite.

It was disappointing that the last sentence was complete. She’d hoped that it might have ended in mid-sentence, or part-way through a word, though the use of the present tense added an intriguing tension to those final words.

Appetite.

The last word written.

When she’d read
The Last Addition to the Score
she’d imagined something to do with music, the last few notes added to something appropriately Schubertian and Unfinished, but now saw that all it meant was “twenty.” This was not as promising, though still intriguing: twenty-one lines drawn in chalk. Perhaps she didn’t want to read the incomplete novel after all. (“I’m brooding on Drood,” she thought to herself.) The explanation for those chalk lines could never be as interesting as the puzzled speculation, the not knowing. The stained glass windows were wiped clean as she wielded the magic wand of Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent; the Shakespeare Castle was utterly destroyed; the tapestries were unthreaded like a wiped-clean blackboard with all the chalked words gone.

The thing was …

The thing was that when blackboards
were
wiped clean – the waving goodbye motion of the hand with the cloth – the words being erased were already committed –
ha! –
to memory, and could not be forgotten, learned by heart, written troubles of the brain.

There was no dot-dot-dot after the point at which
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
had come to a premature stop, but there was a row of nine stars below the last line. Then there were no more words, and silence began in blank white paper.

Japan, the country to which Ben was traveling, was a country without shadows, even on days of sunshine, a country without clouds, even when it rained.

She had studied the prints in Grandpapa and Grandmama Brouwer’s house, the ones Grandpapa had brought back with him from the time when he had been in Japan. The artists ignored clouds and shadows (and perspective), and this was how she had found herself – as a girl – imagining the country. She didn’t know whether all artists followed the same conventions, but, in those she knew, far and near seemed to exist – like past and present – in the same place, at the same moment, and that which was far away assumed as large a shape as that which was near, as in a child’s drawing.

Ben, blinking in the bright light, held his hand up above his eyes as he looked up into a cloudless sky, shapes forming within his eyes as the sun dazzled. Around him were the people without shadows, the Japanese, their parasols hiding their faces. They were ladies of Japan: on many a vase and jar, on many a screen and fan, they figured in lively paint, their attitude queer and quaint.

They did not appear to see Ben.

It was as if he – also – were a cloud, or a shadow.

She had the feeling again, as she saw her pale reflection in front of her, and – she had been back at the window for no more than a few minutes – went to her writing journal where it lay on the bed, her pen lying within the hollow between the opened pages.

She read again what she had written most recently. She always dated what she wrote, so that she knew the day on which she had written it. This was her nearest approach to a diary.

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 fails, but in silence, with none of the gregarious groupings and noise of the birds. They live in the mirrors. Sometimes – & always one at a time – they emerge from the mirror, & walk into the room.

Her head slightly on one side, concentrating to hear that distant dictating, she unscrewed the top of her pen, and began to write in the blackest of black ink.

As if restless, they never stay long in one place, wandering about as if searching for something, something they’d lost & were anxious to find again. They make a sound like moths’ wings
…

She paused, listening more carefully, and then added two insertion arrows in the incomplete final sentence. After
They
she wrote
never speak, but they
, and before
sound
she wrote
rustling
. Without any further pause, she completed the sentence she had started.

…
fluttering against glass, as if drawn in toward illumination as daylight fades. It makes them seem insubstantial & brittle, as if they were made out of thin paper, rising up out of the pages as the words were read
…

She inserted
of a book
after
pages
, and added
as the pages were turned
at the end of the sentence.

One particular ghost comes again & again, never losing that intensity of searching, the eyes fixed intently upon the floor in front of her, as if what she sought might be there. She leans right down, as if that which she seeks is small, and precious to her. She never sees me. None of them ever sees me. It’s as if I’m not there, as if I’m the one faded & half effaced.

A pause.

Something not quite right.

She changed the period after
None of them ever sees me
into a comma, added an insertion arrow, and wrote
just as they never seem to see each other. They swarm, they gather, but they are always alone, not seeing their surroundings, but seeing only something within themselves.

Without pausing, she altered the period after
half effaced
into a comma, and added
& as if they exist alone, without me, though I feel that it is my presence that gives them shape, as if they were the reflection I make in the mirror –
she was writing more and more rapidly, the unseen dictator speaking with increasing urgency and speed –
a self I cannot recognize & have never seen before, something hidden emerging from an inner room, the Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass room beyond the one visible in the mirror, & never seen.

After a short pause, she crossed through
& never seen.

She paused.

She paused.

In the space above the first line – it was the top of the left-hand side of a double-page spread – she wrote
The Shape of the Clouds
.

Scribble, scribble, scribble,
she thought.

She paused.

She paused.

She knew she hadn’t written five hundred words yet for that day. Five hundred words would fill two pages of the journal, and her handwriting was just starting to reach down the right-hand side. She sometimes wrote a great deal more than five hundred words; she never wrote fewer.