‘Why does she wear her wedding clothes?’

  Estella whispered, ‘That’s just what she wears.’

  ‘Is something wrong with her?’

  ‘“Wrong”?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘Noticed what?’

  ‘C’mon. I’m going outside.’

  ‘Outside?’

  ‘D’you have to repeat everything I say?’

  ‘Why on earth –?’

  ‘Look, are you coming or not?’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Anywhere’ll do.’

  * * *

  Estella told me afterwards how he had teased and baited whatever he could find out of doors. Two of the cats, a dog, a squirrel, a horse standing in its harness.

  There was no tone of disapproval in her voice as she told me. At nine years old she merely stated matters of fact. One visit from young Drummle, I felt, had been quite sufficient.

  * * *

  She was looking at me queerly.

  ‘What is it, Estella? Why the big eyes?’

  ‘Didn’t you ever want to wear your old clothes again?’

  ‘Instead of…?’

  ‘Instead of your wedding clothes.’

  (It was the end of something. Her naivety. Her uncritical acceptance. And what was I to say to her? Because – because everything is symbols and gestures. I knew that now. Because we only play and declare at life. Because true life is too awesome and terrifying to bear.)

  ‘Were you going to be married?’

  ‘I thought I was.’

  ‘But you didn’t get married?’

  ‘The man who was meant to be my husband … he decided…’

  ‘It was his fault?’

  I started to nod. Then I stopped myself.

  ‘It wasn’t to be. That’s all.’

  ‘Were you sad?’

  ‘Oh, I was too angry to be sad.’

  She continued to stare at me. At my wedding dress, at my greying hair shot through with white. She was staring in the same way I used to stare, myself, at the strange sights I saw when I was being walked about the town. The poor souls, people would say of them, they’d lost their minds.

  * * *

  I wouldn’t have anything changed, even though my dimensions were bound to have altered.

  Just as before, I told the modiste’s niece, it will be very fine work.

  A third wedding dress.

  Silk, Lyons silk, in that same old-fashioned style. Sprigged and trimmed with Bath lace, as used to be favoured; and – on the back, as delicately done as gossamer – gold foil, which was the taste at that time too.

  Repairs to repairs on the train. A Honiton veil. A headband of silk roses. Three more pairs of ivory slippers with silver lacing, ten eyelets apiece.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The blacksmith Joe Gargery had brought up his wife’s little brother, and I requested that he deliver the boy to Satis House.

  Pip Pirrip kept apart from other children, I’d heard, which was to the good. The children from the better homes knew that Estella was my ward, and brought their parents’ prejudices with them. This boy had no such expectations.

  ‘Play,’ I told them. ‘Play together.’

  Estella treated him roughly.

  ‘Why do you keep staring at me? Are you slow-brained?’

  I laughed. Estella so trenchant, and the boy – dressed up in his starched best – so out of sorts. They played with marbles, and then Estella showed him her articulated wall puppets, but the boy tangled the limbs of his and Estella snatched the puppet from him and flung them all back in the box.

  ‘They’re ruined now.’

  ‘Take yourselves off into the yard,’ I said. ‘Or the garden.’

  I heard them from my window.

  ‘I don’t know why she dresses like that. Why do you dress like that, boy?’

  They returned, and played Beggar My Neighbour.

  It’s called a game of chance, but I knew my Estella would win.

  ‘Hear him! He calls the knaves “jacks”, this boy.’

  I watched him. How his face crumpled whenever she said something to hurt him. Then, between times, how he got a little of his confidence back, and tried to recommend himself to her. And how cleverly and instinctively my Estella would put him down again.

  Even a blacksmith’s stepchild may have some little pride, and Estella was set on puncturing it. But a cat will kill its mouse, and so I had to ring the bell and summon Mrs Mallows, before my entertainment was ruined. I had to prolong the pleasure.

  ‘You will come to us another day, Master Pirrip,’ I said – I commanded.

  At that he looked quite shocked. But I knew it was also exactly what he’d been hoping against hope to hear.

  * * *

  For a while Estella had been aware of her attractiveness.

  It was precocious in a child, but her associations with other children had been of a kind – brief, and to the point – that enabled her to sum them up quickly. She could read their opinions of her from their faces.

  She felt as isolated on that score, I guessed – because she carried the stigmata of beauty – as she did because I kept her to myself. Later she must want to let more people see her, a different sort from the ones who saw her performing her piety in the cathedral on Sunday mornings; that was bound to make my task easier when the time came. She might become haughtier than she currently was, but that would be her strength and her safeguard.

  * * *

  The Pirrip lad had returned to us, for more of the same.

  Further visits – in response to my summonses – followed.

  He was quite willing, and Estella didn’t object. And I was curious to see what would happen.

  He had clever eyes. He’d been born, as some are, out of their proper locus in life. His manners were still crude, he had all a country boy’s gaucheness. He would learn manners, though, that was the easy part; natural intelligence will take anyone far.

  ‘So, Pip, what do they say about me?’

  He told me, eventually, when I had worried at him and worn him down.

  That I was crazed in the head. I didn’t ever bathe, ate as little as a sparrow, and drank only French champagne. I could sleep standing on my feet. My belfry bats were allowed to fly about the house.

  The loud report thro’ Libyan cities goes.

  Fame, the great ill, from small beginnings grows:

  Swift from the first …

  Soon grows the pigmy to gigantic size …

  ‘Well, Pip, you’ve certainly been keeping your ears open.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to hear.’

  ‘And you’ve got a good memory, I’m thinking too.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Talk is her business, and her chief delight

  To tell of prodigies and cause affright …

  Things done relates, not done she feigns, and

  Mingles truth with lies.

  ‘And what do they say about the fair Estella?’

  They said that she was an angel for looks, but as conceited by nature as I was. She was inclined to society (‘Aa-ha!’), but not sociable. They wondered what she was doing in such a town as this one, when it was clearly her destiny to dazzle on a larger stage.

  ‘And she’s still only a child!’ I said.

  Some folk, the boy added, foresaw an unhappy end for her.

  ‘Then we must prove them wrong, mustn’t we?’

  ‘Must we?’

  I laughed.

  The door opened, and Estella walked in. She didn’t look at our guest, but her question was directed at him.

  ‘I suppose you bring the local scandal about me.’

  I looked at Pip, and he looked between me and Estella.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  An inspired fibber, even if not one by forethought. I smiled at him. I’d been hoping to find some complications in him, some density, and now – thank God – I had. With some esprit, but also with some mental ballast in reserve, he might be able to put up a challenge to Estella, to test her as any weak reed would never do.

  He expected to see my hands like claws. But my hands had always been judged one of my better features – a lady’s hands and not a brewer’s daughter’s, pale and etiolated (a word Moses taught me), elongated and tapering. They had a way of arranging themselves, hanging loosely over the end of a seat arm, like the gently winnowing fronds of some sea plant.

  How he stared at the flashing stones of my rings.

  ‘Play, boy, will you? Play!’

  I watched the two of them, the forgeman’s charge and my Estella. Her behaviour with him was natural at one moment and then artificial the next. She ran skidding on the gravel like a girl, threw her doll to him like a girl, but she spoke to him – proudly, dismissively – and flounced past him like someone twice her age.

  The boy was losing his bearings with her. How he stood with his shoulders hunched and his arms gawkily loose and limp by his sides, and his eyes not so clever that they could disguise his dejection as he stared after her.

  He could write his letters very neatly. He multiplied and divided quickly in his head.

  ‘Would you like to learn Latin?’

  ‘I don’t know if I should have need of it, Miss Havisham.’

  ‘That depends on what you want to do in life.’

  ‘I’m bound to be something in Mr Gargery’s line, I think.’

  ‘He is…’

  The boy looked awkward, ashamed to admit it.

  ‘… the blacksmith, isn’t he? Out Lower Higham way?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Havisham.’

  ‘And what do you want to do?’

  (Those good hands, not made for the anvil. His clear skin would coarsen in the forge-fire.)

  ‘I haven’t thought, Miss Havisham. Not really.’

  ‘A doctor? A lawyer?’

  ‘Me, Miss?’

  ‘Or a teacher? A scholar?’

  ‘I don’t know – Mr Pumblechook, in the High Street –’

  ‘A shopkeeper, you mean?’

  ‘No. He’s a corn factor, Miss Havisham.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re quite right to correct me. I was wrong.’

  He shifted from foot to foot, raising his eyes and then, whenever he caught mine, lowering them again.

  In the dragon’s den!

  He laid temptation before me, to give my leading-lady performance – to act Sarah Siddons off the stage and into the wings. He was my perfect audience.

  He was remembering this, all of it. One day he would attempt to make sense of the experience, meaning to tell himself that Estella couldn’t have been as unbenign as she appeared – so implacably hard on him.

  The boy with the absurd name and the clever eyes. Pip Pirrip.

  * * *

  Estella liked to search through the clothes presses in my dressing room.

  ‘And this?’

  ‘A chemise de la reine,’ I explained. ‘I wore it in the mornings. There’s a sash for it somewhere. Blue Persian, that was the fashion.’

  A history lesson.

  ‘And my riding habit.’

  ‘I’ve seen that.’

  ‘My summer one. Nankeen.’

  How important it had been to be comme il faut. It must be stone-coloured, lined with green, and matching green for the waistcoat.

  ‘“Habillée en homme”. Jolie comme un cœur.’

  And hats. The wide brims had buckled and creased, but Estella tried to uncurl them. I fitted her with the little cane undress hat, and straightened the festoon of ribbons which hung down at the back. The pink had faded; some of the strands in the weave were quite colourless now.

  I thought of another straw hat with scarlet ribbons and a white flower, afloat on the Cam. In my memory it floated forever on that surface of darkening water, like a wreath.

  ‘You wore this hat?’

  ‘There are always rules,’ I said. ‘And those were the rules in the ancient of days.’

  * * *

  I watched her sleeping. I stood back, in case my shadow falling across her should wake her. Seen like this in profile, her peerless features cried out to be touched, but very very gently. The merest contact of a finger skimming over them might wake her; better the most evanescent shiver of a feather.

  I dreaded disturbance, causing her to open her eyes, having her stare up at me not able to comprehend for the first few moments. Oh, Estella! You don’t realise the reach of the power that lives in you. You mustn’t let it be squandered through ignorance.

  * * *

  I woke once more in my bed, in the night or the day, convinced a man was close to me, lying naked, ablaze on the sheets alongside me.

  I stretched out my hand and touched only a very little warmth where I had been lying over on my flank. I was alone. Of course I was.

  It didn’t happen again. I felt no shame, nor regret either. My life was now spared those fleshly embroilments. I rarely felt those surges between my legs which I used to, and the want was less urgent.

  I lay back. The tide of desire was ebbing quickly, drying off to traces, and I was left safely stranded, among my reliable shadows and with the same tried and proven air I had been breathing in and breathing out for long months, for years.

  * * *

  ‘Hand me my stick, young Pip. I have an ache today.’

  He did as he was bid.

  I pointed ahead, across the passage, to the circuit of the dining room we followed.

  ‘You know what comes next?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Havisham.’

  I held on to his shoulder.

  ‘Very well. Walk me, walk me.’

  * * *

  We proceeded along both sides of the long table.

  He stepped on a dead beetle. The husk crackled under the sole of his shoe.

  Cobwebs covered everything, draped like spun sugar over the feast and the chairs. The disintegrating bottom layer of cake had started to subside, and the other three above leaned tipsily.

  He stared at this rich woman’s indulgence. But he must have known that the worst disgrace to befall a woman was not to be abandoned before she was married, but to be jilted while she was wearing her wedding dress. My shame excused my capricious ways: my lunatic ways, if you will.

  How he stared.

  ‘Come along! Walk me, walk me!’

  * * *

  We had bewitched him.

  But he had fallen under our spell, I could believe, before he ever set eyes on us. Out at the forge he would have heard all about us, and been set wondering. I pictured him walking past the high walls and looking up at the shuttered windows. He had imagined the secret garden that must grow behind the house. He had envisaged the rooms ill-lit by candles, rooms as vast as sea caves.

  And now – it was his original enchantment he was trying to recall. The reality, or what we offered him, couldn’t ever match the pictures of us he’d carried in his head. He used his politeness – his unctuousness – to try to conceal the disappointment, but I saw right through his cover.

  ‘This is my birthday, Pip.’

  ‘Happy –’

  ‘No, I don’t suffer it to be spoken of.’

  I stared at the mouldering food which lay strewn with spider silk and dust.

  ‘And on this same day my wedding breakfast was set out. The mice have gnawed at it. And sharper teeth – fangs – have feasted on me too.’

  His shoulder had stiffened under my hand as he concentrated harder.

  ‘Maybe my death day will be on this day also?’

  I didn’t mean it as a question, but he answered me very earnestly.

  ‘Oh, I should hope not.’

  I meant to smile at that, but for some reason my lips wouldn’t oblige. As he looked round at me in the gloom, he must have thought I was grimacing. I made out the expression of disquiet on his face.

  ‘But I have much to see achieved before then, Pip – you’ve no idea. I have my curses to lay first.’

  ‘“Curses”?’ he asked, right on cue.

  * * *

  It was always twenty minutes to nine in Satis House. The passage of the weeks was marked for me instead by the Wednesday afternoon arrival and departure of the cousins, on their petitioning business that was never satisfied.

  I was annoyed by their myopic clock-watching regularity, even though I insisted on it: presenting themselves, I presumed, at the same minute of the same hour every week, staying not a moment longer than I had demanded of them. I was relieved that they were so compliant, but I felt the differences between us were exemplified by their servitude to time: time as it was measured out to the artificial dictates of a pendulum swinging (as is the clockmaker’s tradition) on a length of gut, the tube that carries semen from a bull’s testicles.

  * * *

  ‘And now, madam –’

  Estella jiggled forward in her chair with joy decipherable on her face. I heard it in the sudden breathlessness of her voice.

  ‘– for the first time –’

  She threw down her last card, the Queen of Spades.

  ‘– I have beggared you!’

  I sat back. I couldn’t withhold a smile.

  She wasn’t expecting me to smile. Her own pleasure faded from her face. Those petulant furrows reappeared in the middle of her brow, drawing in her eyebrows. They were the only blemish she had, but they bothered me. (How was I going to eradicate them? Not by my smiling.) It seemed I had ruined her moment of victory: the ‘daughter’, as through the whole of human history, managing at last to trump the ‘mother’.

  ‘You’ve trounced me, Estella.’

  She pushed her chair back.

  ‘It’s only a stupid game of cards!’

  It was always when the game excited her that she took colour to her face. Now her anger was burning her, from the inside out. But that, poor child, only aided her beauty, like refiner’s fire.

  FORTY

  The passing years had done no favours to the fabric of the house. Thieves attempted to break in several times, at the back, and once they succeeded. I had bars put up at the windows.

  I couldn’t take myself into my father’s office now, nor the Compting House. It pained me too much to remember … I had those windows bricked up. Inside I locked the doors, and placed the keys somewhere for safe keeping, and later I wasn’t able to recollect where. The maids occasionally spoke of hearing noises from behind the office door: surely not ledgers being opened and shut or papers sorted through, as they liked to frighten themselves by thinking, but whatever had happened to fall down the chimney, maybe a bird with a broken neck beating its wings on the hearth stone.