Wild Island (5 page)

Mrs Fairfax was pleased with me, he said tersely. Did I find the work onerous, troublesome? No, sir, I said. Was my patient in good health? Did Dr Carter visit her regularly? I answered yes to both of these. He did not speak of visiting her, and a week or two later he left again just as suddenly. He came and went at intervals after that, and during another of his absences, the child Adèle arrived in the care of a French nurserymaid, with a trunk, four bandboxes, and a brief note from Rochester.

‘Well, good gracious, she is Mr Edward's ward!' said Mrs Fairfax. ‘Seven years old. A pretty little creature. Foreign ways of course, but a breath of young life in the house. As for whose child exactly, I cannot . . . It's not so long since we were at war with the French . . . She and her nurse will have the old nursery, and I am to employ a governess . . .'

The new governess came to ‘Thornfield' in the early autumn of 1836. It was October and I was looking out of an upstairs window
on the day she arrived, but it was weeks later before she first saw me. It was a radiant, glowing autumn, which you could only see in the kitchen garden, where the old apple trees, pears and plums were dropping leaves, or in the lanes beyond ‘Thornfield' where the beeches were turning gold. The house itself was flanked by the two stands of tall pines always between us and the sun. On any but the clearest days of midsummer their violet shadows drowned the house.

When you first saw Miss Eyre, she looked small, thin, pale, plain. Grey bonnet, grey dress. The whole effect as colourless as a winter sky. As safely dull as porridge you'd have said, or like the hen-bird of some pair in which the male has all the colours. When I saw her face, however, I was not so sure. The constant drawing of faces gives you the habit of studying them, and there was something in Miss Eyre's expression that made you wonder about her history.

But I saw her very little, being now busier than before. Jane Eyre began to take my place as Mrs Fairfax's teatime companion, and it was not long before the servants' hall knew Miss Eyre had a quick, wild heart, a clever mind, a sharp tongue, and plenty of courage. The world has often found these qualities troublesome in women, and I wondered how she would fare when Mr Rochester returned.

By Christmas he was home, and within weeks she had fallen in love with him, and he with her, though neither seemed to recognise the other's feelings. The servants observed the two as they circled each other.

In the spring, Jane was called away to the deathbed of her aunt, a Mrs Reed, in a distant county. Jane, who had believed Mrs Reed was her only relative, now discovered the existence of her uncle, her father's brother, a bachelor living in Funchal, Madeira. Jane wrote to him and a correspondence began. All this came to me from letters Jane sent Mrs Fairfax. Rochester evidently heard it too, and perhaps he wondered whether Jane might go to Madeira—at any rate, as soon as she returned, he proposed to her.

This was nine months after she came to ‘Thornfield', Midsummer's Eve of 1837. That magic night when the world pauses and turns. Earlier
in the day, Leah, the housemaid, had brought the midsummer cushion into the kitchen—a square of meadow-turf set on a meat platter, with wildflowers stuck thickly into it. Unmarried women and girls would put a bloom from it under their pillow, in hope of seeing their future husband in a dream that night.

‘No, thank you, Leah,' said Jane, passing through, ‘If I ever come to want a husband, I'll trust in the Lord and look about for myself.'

Later, when Adèle was in bed, Jane went into the garden. It had been a day of heat and the air was balmy. Rochester joined her and they wandered in the scented twilight and on into the dark. There were accusations and tears, misunderstanding, explanations. As they embraced, the wind suddenly rose and the moon turned blood red. Rain began to pour down, and thunder and lightning rent the air, all heaven in a rage. As the lovers ran into the great hall the clock struck midnight and Rochester took Jane into his arms and pressed her wet face with kisses, murmuring, ‘Jane, my Jane.'

‘Let me go, sir,' she said smiling, struggling to escape. She had seen Mrs Fairfax holding her candle at the other end of the hall, astonished at the sight of the Master of ‘Thornfield' dripping wet, clasping the orphan governess in his possessive embrace.

On that same midsummer night in 1837, the King died at last in London: William the Fourth; the Sailor King; or Silly Billy, depending on your point of view. The Princess Victoria was eighteen, the same age as Jane Eyre, and just as intelligent, as uncompromising, as plain. And both were as eager for love—as I had been, at the same age. Many women are Jane Eyres at eighteen, ready to brave anything for the beloved, who is like no other; but we are sometimes forced to change as the years go by. The heart's hot beating continues invisibly, but we learn to disguise our feelings, to present a more cautious aspect to the world.

When I was seven, my father paid me a penny for a sketch of our dog, Rom. A whole penny for doing what I loved, what my deepest
nature cried out to do. I was too young to think of it in such terms, but the tremendous satisfaction of the bargain was a lesson in itself, the dawning of a thought about how to live one's life. Father took the sketch of Rom away to sea with him. He was a Post Captain in Nelson's fleet, away at the war with Boney for most of my childhood. My poor mother had died soon after I was born. I was her fourth child, the only one to survive; and as she was without family, I grew up with my father's mother.

Grandmama was the daughter of a clergyman and the widow of one too, and pale watercolours had been among her own accomplishments as a girl, but even so, she found my continual sketching excessive (and paper was precious during the war). While not exactly immoral, it amounted to a passion, and therefore could not be entirely blameless. It was ‘inordinate', a word she kept returning to; too much concerned with outward appearances, and it occupied hours better employed in other ways: sewing, good deeds, prayer. She encouraged my reading and playing the pianoforte in the hope that these would in time replace the drawing (both of these could at least be used in the service of the Lord) but they did not.

I was ten when Grandmama died and I was sent to my new stepmother, Nina, in London. This violent translation from a Hampshire village to the city was at first desperately unwelcome to me. My father was at sea; the sprawling paradise of garden and wooded lanes I was accustomed to had become dirty crowded streets; the windows in Nina's large, cluttered second-storey rooms revealed only dark roofs and chimneys. Later I thought them beautiful, but not at first. The only animals here seemed to be cats, mice, sooty pigeons and bony street horses. All these I liked well enough, especially the cats, but they could not compare with the village menagerie of dogs, hens, rabbits, cows, sheep, and more, now lost to me.

Nina had been the widow of an actor before she married my father, and an actress herself in her youth. Looking back I can only imagine they were one of those odd pairings war tends to bring about. My father was coolly rational, energetic, meticulously neat and self-disciplined.
Nina was sentimental, warm and famously untidy: her brown hair was always escaping from the bright turbans she wound carelessly about it. Her face reminded me of a gentle pony's. My father needed her gaiety as she needed his steadiness. Even so, their mutual happiness was no doubt aided by the war and his naval position, which kept them frequently apart. But they were happy, I believe.

Nowadays I think it could not have been easy for her to have a strange child thrust into her life. She managed by enlisting the help of her many friends—artists, actors, writers, musicians, both male and female: the demi-monde. At first I was shy of them, but soon became fascinated by their talk, their colourful ways. Under their good-natured, irregular care, I discovered a way of life entirely to my liking, which unfortunately lasted not much more than a year. Boney was captured and sent to Elba, and my father came home and noticed that the education I was deriving from this rackety company was rather too broad. He had earned a thousand pounds in prize money when his ship the
Resolute
captured the
Belle Isle
; it would pay for my schooling in Dublin.

‘Dublin!' cried Nina. ‘Are there no such establishments in London?' She was a Londoner through and through, and by then she had taught me to love the city. She had once toured the provinces playing Lady Wishfort in
The Way of the World
, and shuddered at the memory. Yet she could not dissuade my father. The widow of his best friend, a fellow Post Captain, was struggling to keep body and soul together by running a ladies' academy in Dublin, and there I must go.

The long journeys that followed four times a year for me, across England and the Irish Sea, seem in memory to have taken place mostly at night and in winter. But all through the rattling cold, the boredom and fear, I always felt a current of humming excitement: the promise of new sights and places.

Waterloo came when I was twelve, and the following years were lean ones. My father, like so many naval men, was stranded ashore on half-pay because the fleet was in tatters after the decades of fighting. By the time I was fifteen he could no longer afford the school, and
assuming I was sufficiently educated in any case, he called me back to London.

But I had fallen in love—like half the girls and teachers at the Academy—with Thomas Adair, our drawing master. An older girl nudged me and nodded at him in Church a few days before our lessons began. He was lean, wolfishly handsome, with Byronically hollowed cheeks, dark hair and a pointed chin. I believed at once the rumours she told me: he was half Irish, half Russian; he had escaped from the burning of Moscow by the skin of his teeth, and later fled a splendid career in London on account of a scandal involving the wife of some eminent person.

At our first lesson he loped into the room carrying a basket, set a white linen cloth in casual folds on a small table in the centre of the room while we watched and giggled, and laid out upon it lemons and grapes. It was January, in Dublin. They must have come from a hothouse. He half-peeled an orange so that the peel, still attached, curled out across white linen, dark wood. He carried the plaster cast of a beautiful veiled woman from a collection of such things on shelves in another corner, set this lady among the fruit, and bade us draw.

As he paced about the room, watching us begin, he intoned, ‘“She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies.” Do you know what that means, young ladies? It means she is dark and warm as the scented air of a summer evening in Italy. Put that into your drawing,
mesdemoiselles
—all the promise of summer, although we are in chilly Dublin, your young fingers are purple with chilblains, and she only a cold plaster bust.'

Later, when he came to look over my shoulder, he asked, ‘A new girl?'

‘Harriet Pym, sir.'

He used the pencil he was carrying to lift a long lock of my hair, and said, ‘Harriet the Red.' An exaggeration: my hair was reddish brown. ‘Are you fiery, Harriet? Aflame with the desire to draw?'

I looked at him. ‘Yes, I am,' I said.

There are many opportunities to lean close together to study drawings, many times when the eyes of student and teacher meet, when the hot cheek of one feels the warm breath of the other. I was twelve at that first meeting; Tom was thirty-three, though he could have passed for ten years younger. He taught me chiaroscuro, perspective, and to measure faces—and many things besides. He kissed me behind a tree in St Stephen's Green on a sketching expedition when I was fifteen, and I knew I would die if I had to live without him. I wrote to him for a year after we were separated, letters of misery and burning passion. We eloped when I was seventeen.

There followed great troubles, but my father was brought to accept the marriage at last, and Tom and I went to the continent on a six-month wedding journey. It was 1820 and I was young and full of joy. Nothing could touch me: no crowded stifling carriages, no bleak wet days in flea-ridden inns, no greasy dinners of horse meat and black bread. Tom knew the poetry of each place, the paintings to see, the churches, palaces, the hill towns and fêtes. He was my teacher and sage, lover and friend, and I was blissfully happy. I discovered Paris, Florence and Geneva with lean wolfish Tom, all my very own, on days when the sky was blue as heaven and the nights were warm and full of promise. We were in Aix-en-Provence when he told me, greatly amused, that he had not a particle of Russian in him. He was the son of an Irish woman and a Liverpool Army man, both long dead. He had been brought up among cousins in a carpenter's yard in Putney. I did not care; I was happy.

Portraits were Tom's forte in those days, and the first shadow came when we returned to London and discovered the demand for these greatly diminished. With the war over, Captains and Admirals no longer needed to leave their likenesses at home for their loved ones—and money was short. Tom began then to paint grand Biblical scenes, gradually becoming possessed by them, spending less and less time on portraits.