Another spinster, Miss Maxfield in dirty canary yellow, who stood on street corners fretting about crossing the road for half an hour at a stretch, stamping on the spot, pointing at imaginary obstacles with the Malacca cane of her yellow parasol.

  Canon Arbuthnot, who would tell neighbours that a Frenchman or a German friend would shortly be calling; but those callers were never glimpsed, and it was said they too came out of a bottle, a French visitor from Burgundy country and a German from somewhere about the Rhône or Moselle.

  The Ali Baba house, whose owner farmed sugar plantations abroad, where four gigantic vases stood in vaulted niches high on the street facade, exposed to everything the elements could throw at them.

  Our venerable town.

  * * *

  Children, hand-picked, continued to come to Satis House.

  No more than one or two at a time. And my father arranged to have us continuously supervised.

  Thinking ourselves too old for playing, we behaved (as we thought) like young adults. I showed them my sewing, my drawings; we attempted a little rudimentary music-making; we walked in the garden. And, in short, we were thoroughly bored. We didn’t say anything that couldn’t be overheard.

  I wondered what on earth was the point of it, unless my father liked to have reported back to him their envy for how I lived, wanting for nothing.

  No one pitied me – or dared to mock me – for not having a mother.

  The effect was to isolate me further, and to make me feel prouder still of my position.

  * * *

  I used my mother’s silver-backed hand mirror, given to her by my father. On the back was engraved a Gothic ‘H’.

  It was large and heavy to hold. Its weight conferred solemnity. I would look into the oval of glass long and hard, hoping to find some trace of my mother in my own reflection. But I only ever saw a girl with a brow furrowed in concentration, a too straight line for a mouth, a nose which threatened towards the aquiline, and a look in her eyes which was articulating a fear of solitude.

  * * *

  My father ensured that I should lack for nothing material.

  Clothes and shoes. Books, dolls. A wooden barrow for the garden, and a set of nurseryman’s tools. A leather horse on which to ride side-saddle. A box dulcimer, a recorder. A brush and comb of tortoiseshell inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Two oriental cats, which I called Silver and Gold.

  I forget everything, because there was so much.

  My father must have supposed that no other child could have had a happier time of it than I did. He showered me with gifts, which he didn’t consider treats but things I had a perfect right to enjoy. But even amplitude and generosity pall. When I was by myself, I had a finite amount of imagination to help me play; when another child was brought along, I became possessive, only because I was afraid of having to reveal my embarrassment at owning so much.

  * * *

  Mrs Bundy was our cook. She had come to us when I was very small. Her repertoire was limited, but my father preferred it to the more rarefied fare my mother had favoured.

  To look at, she was striking rather than attractive. Wide eyes, a small tilted nose, and a large mouth that reached up into her cheeks when my father made her smile about something. A mane of thick brown hair which she wore rolled up and pinned behind, and was forever re-pinning. Large breasts, so that her apron usually carried a dusting of flour or whatever her chest came into contact with. She also had the curious habit of stepping out of her shoes when the kitchen grew too hot for her and walking about in bare feet, as if she considered herself mistress of this domain.

  * * *

  Mrs Bundy spoke about me. She told my father things he couldn’t have known otherwise: about my talking to the workers’ children, about disposing of my lunch vegetables in the fire or out of the window.

  It was none of her business. Angry with her, I told my father I knew who was telling him.

  ‘It’s her.’

  ‘Catherine –’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss –’

  ‘She’s just our cook.’

  ‘Don’t speak of Mrs Bundy so dismissively.’

  ‘But she has no right –’

  ‘D’you hear me, Catherine?’

  He was taking her side – yet again.

  Sometimes on my constitutional I passed where she lived.

  * * *

  She came from the other end of Crow Lane to ourselves, but not from the most deprived part of it as I might have expected. Being a cook in a rich man’s house, she must have managed to feed herself at her employer’s expense, certainly to look as wholesomely nourished as she did.

  There was a boy too, a year or so younger than myself. I had glimpses of him, grown a little taller every time, but just as pale – he lacked his mother’s robustness – and just as nosy as I went on my way, accompanied by my maid for that afternoon. On one occasion I made a face at him, and the boy pretended to be affronted; but I realised too late that my mistake was to acknowledge him and to show him what he made me feel, and so I’d handed him the advantage of that moment.

  I always had lunch on Sunday with my father, following our return from the cathedral.

  Mrs Bundy would linger in the dining room, after we’d been served, after my father had been asked if everything was to his satisfaction. It seemed to me that it wasn’t her place. Several times I would notice my father’s eyes moving off her, and Mrs Bundy’s eyes narrowing as she looked at me, as if he was seeking a second opinion from her about me. And just as much as on the other account, it seemed to me that the woman exceeded herself.

  * * *

  Mrs Bundy had the task of supervising my other meals in my mother’s old sewing room.

  ‘My food’s not to your liking, miss?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  The fish stared up at me, its eye glazed with stupidity.

  ‘You will be by suppertime.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘I’ll take it away, shall I? My hard work.’

  ‘Take it away.’

  ‘Magic word, miss?’

  ‘Take it away – please.’

  Later, when she was having some shut-eye wherever it was she went to take it, I would return to the kitchen and raid the storage jars, making the girls swear to secrecy. But – I see now – she must have known about that too, because how else was it that the jars were always kept topped up with currants, dried fruit, peel, nuts?

  * * *

  Mrs Bundy stands in the steam while pans simmer on the range. Bread is baking in the old oven, chestnuts – placed on the oven floor – are bursting their skins among the cinders.

  She wipes perspiration from her jaw with the back of her hand. Her cuffs are undone and the sleeves rolled back. Her forearms are fleshy and white. Last summer they were fleshy but tanned, from her work in the kitchen garden; another summer on, she is pale, as a proper lady is pale, as her son is pale.

  Cooling in a bowl are a rabbit’s guts, which she earlier pulled out whole and hot. All in the day’s work.

  She doesn’t see me looking as she rests. Briefly she forgets herself, she stands stroking one arm slowly with the fingers of the other. Moments pass, she is rapt in her fancies.

  * * *

  ‘How proud you are!’

  Why shouldn’t I be?

  ‘Little Miss High and Mighty.’

  ‘I’ll tell my father. What you’ve just said.’

  ‘Tell him what? That you’re proud?’

  Tell him that she’d dared to criticise me. (In that accent which wavers between flat backwoods Kent and something better.) But I felt that if I said what I was thinking, that gave her act of criticism some sort of validity.

  Better instead that I should ignore her.

  I snatched up my petit point, and attacked the canvas with such violence that I missed my aim. I cried out.

  ‘Thumb for a pincushion?’ she said. She had a laugh in her voice that incensed me.

  ‘Not pin! Needle, needle! Don’t you even know that?’

  ‘Don’t take on, it’s nothing –’

  ‘There’s blood.’

  ‘A very little. Suck it and –’

  ‘How common!’

  She came closer, but I snatched my hand away and turned my back on her. I didn’t know why I was so vexed and angry.

  ‘It’s your temper I’d be bothered about, if I were you.’

  ‘But you’re not me. How on earth could you be?’

  I was aware, through my anger, that I was being goaded. I closed my eyes.

  Her voice moved in front of me again.

  ‘Close your eyes, that’s right, and count to ten.’

  I opened them again and ran, screaming inside my head, from the room.

  * * *

  For as long as I could remember a woman with an emperor’s nose had paid occasional visits to Satis House. She wore layers of black, and spoke English in a strangely accented way.

  My grandmother: my mother’s mother.

  My father had the servants address her as ‘Madame’, as the French do.

  She would sit very straight-backed in her high chair, and imposed her powdery presence on us all. I was required to stand in front of her reciting, or playing a tune on my dulcimer. Invariably something in my performance touched her, because I would be summoned forward to have my hair and cheek stroked; her rings were cold, and hard, but not sharp.

  * * *

  Her visits became more infrequent.

  And then she stopped coming at all.

  On what was to prove her final visit she was very critical of the food she was served, speaking in front of Mrs Bundy. My father started defending our cook. My grandmother sent the woman from the room, and then – while I sat between them – she berated my father for showing his partiality. She did not expect to be shown up in front of some kitchen cook.

  ‘Not just any kitchen cook,’ my father said.

  ‘Certainly, I agree. A very poor cook.’

  ‘You have no reason for saying so.’

  ‘I have just tried to eat the food you put before me.’

  ‘You think I can’t choose a good cook, Madame?’

  ‘Never mind “good”. Simply a decent one would suffice.’

  ‘What gives you the right, I should like to know, to –’

  ‘In my daughter’s place I –’

  ‘We don’t know what Antoinette would have thought –’

  ‘She would not have given her approval to that woman’s being in this house.’

  They both turned and looked at me. My grandmother’s face was now as sour as a cut lemon. My father, spinning the stem of his wine glass with his fingers, seemed anxious on my account.

  Later, before our visitor left, I heard my father saying that he would appreciate it if she didn’t speak to the servants without his approval. She denied knowing what he meant.

  ‘You’ve not been asking the maids questions?’

  ‘Whatever has put that idea into –’

  ‘I’m cognisant of what goes on in my own house.’

  ‘As the maids are.’

  ‘You have been asking them –’

  ‘Antoinette would never have stood for it.’

  ‘Stood for what?’

  ‘You know very well what. Don’t taint young Catherine, do you hear me?’

  ‘I should tell you, I do not appreciate being advised how –’

  ‘I am not advising, Mr Havisham. I am demanding.’

  * * *

  She didn’t ever return to Satis House.

  Every now and then I would receive a note from her. I would reply, but my father insisted on seeing what I wrote to her, and having me rewrite – more concisely – if he judged so.

  I heard one of the girls say Mrs Bundy was relieved anyhow, to see the back of her, no more fancy French stuff to dish up there. And another girl laughing back, Oh Mrs Bundy’s got her own ideas what she’ll do to this place, what’s going to go into folk’s bellies.

  I knew that my grandmother wouldn’t be back, even though I wasn’t told so. Mrs Bundy walked about more amply; she had the girls running everywhere on errands – I even saw her passing through our hall with flour on her arms or a whisk in her hand. My father wouldn’t have risked offending her with another visit from my imperatorial grandmother, even if he was denying the mother of the woman he’d married and lost, and was depriving me of an acquaintanceship with my one surviving female blood relative.

  * * *

  I had chased my cats down to the orchard. I happened to look up and jumped when I saw someone, a boy, crouching splay-legged in the fork of a tree.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Then I recognised him. Mrs Bundy’s son, in new finery.

  He raised himself nonchalantly on one elbow and considered me.

  ‘I could ask you the same,’ he replied languidly. He spoke as boys do who have begun to receive an expensive education.

  ‘I asked you first.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Oh, Catherine Havisham has first say in everything, doesn’t she?’

  I glared back at him.

  ‘It’s not your garden,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not yours either.’

  ‘More mine than yours.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘It’s my father’s.’

  ‘“It’s my father’s”,’ he repeated, exactly imitating my tone of voice.

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Come down from there.’

  He did eventually – taking a long time about it, and making it seem that he only pleased himself.

  He was tall, lanky, pallid, not filled-out like his mother. He still had his thin foxy face. I had never cared for the look of him, this craven interloper.

  ‘Well…?’ I said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘I just wanted to get a good look at you.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘So you’ll give me sweet dreams. When I dream of this place.’

  ‘The garden? It’s private, I told you. It’s got nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘I say.’

  He laughed.

  ‘So, you’re the boss, are you?’

  I snapped at him. ‘Don’t be insolent!’

  ‘Or else what –?’

  He reached up his arm, and might have been going to swing from a low branch, but he either didn’t trust his strength or didn’t care to soil his white hands and clean cuffs.

  ‘I’ll call my father.’

  ‘Very well, I’m going. Don’t you mention this to him.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Tut-tut! Speaking to town lads? In his garden? Whatever would the old boy think?’

  * * *

  And then, quite suddenly, Mrs Bundy left us.

  Oh, joy and jubilation!

  She was said to be living now outside the town.

  I had a sighting one day. She was dressed like a respectable tradesman’s wife, with a fur collar and a fur muff and a hat replete with a quiver of feathers. She had her son in tow, still lanky and still sallow-faced and attired like last time in the garb of a young gentleman. Both mother and son shared something I couldn’t account for: an air of self-confidence, eyes not ashamed to meet anyone else’s on that busy main street of our town.

  * * *

  I mentioned to my father that I had seen Mrs Bundy.

  ‘Indeed?’

  How grand she was trying to make herself look, I said.

  ‘That isn’t her way.’

  ‘She seemed so to me.’

  ‘To you, Catherine. But you never approved of Mrs Bundy.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You too question the wisdom of my having employed her? I can’t pick my own staff well, is that it?’

  I had bothered him, I could tell that. A tic was pulling in his cheek, throbbing away.

  ‘I didn’t mean…’

  ‘I don’t wish us to discuss Mrs Bundy. Not ever again.’

  * * *

  Whenever I saw her son I would look away quickly. He was always watching me, with an expression I found confusing. He was disapproving, and superior, but also frankly curious. He had no compunction about staring at me, which I found presumptuous. Of what concern should I, a Havisham, be to the son of our erstwhile kitchen cook?

  FOUR

  My father’s office was in the house. Next to it, entered either from that room or through an outside door in the yard but otherwise quarantined from the domestic premises, was the Compting House, where two rows of clerks sat at high desks keeping their tallies.

  * * *

  Luckily for Havisham’s purposes, our proximity to Chatham ensured a large ready market for our brews. A marines’ barracks had been built twenty-five years after the army one, and the town was thronged with sailors and troops and their dependents. The dockyards employed thousands. Their thirst was insatiable, and – as did one or two of our competitors – we obliged …

  Along the Medway the Havisham net was cast – so to speak – by my father, with clever aim. To Gravesend upstream, and to Sittingbourne, Sheerness and Queensborough in an easterly direction.

  * * *

  I knew in which inns, and where, the Havisham brew and porter were sold. My father would point them out to me one by one as we came upon them on our travels. He’d have me memorise the names, and each time I would recite an ever-lengthening litany, as completely as I could. He would listen to me, nodding with satisfaction, and then supply the names I had missed from the list.

  The Tun & Lute, Shovel & Boot; Turkey Slave, Cock & Pye.

  (I would proceed by an eccentric system of associated images.)

  Leather Bottle, Hundred House, Parson & Clerk.

  The Rose of Denmark, Goat & Compasses, Q in a Corner.

  Trip to Jerusalem.

  ‘And Good King Lud.’

  ‘Good King Lud,’ I would repeat.

  ‘It’s the one you always forget. But the only one.’

  We didn’t own all the inns, but we were suppliers to each of them, several dozen in total. This was the Havisham inheritance, and my father liked to hear it retold over and over by my young voice.