Pinkerton's Sister (26 page)

A little while later – when she knew that Annie would never be returning – it fitted any finger on her hand, and she began to wear it all the time, on her middle finger.

When she first wore it to Mrs. Albert Comstock’s, she had noticed – no doubt she was meant to notice – the nudge-nudges at the cheapness of the ring she wore, and Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild had made twinkly, carefully kind-faced (or as near as they could manage) inquiries. The sensation of strain had been exhausting just to witness, quite nauseating. She had remained enigmatic. It was the best way to annoy them, and she wasn’t going to tell the bejeweled warthogs that it had been given to her by “that darkie girl,” the grinning crocodile. (They would not have recognized “Annie,” not known the name.)

Gracious!

Ha-ha-ha-ha.

(Alice heard the sound precisely, the hippopotamus honkings.)

What a lot of teeth!

Sometimes, when she didn’t feel up to bright repartee, she turned the ring the wrong way around, so that only a simple gold-colored band showed, and she felt the little mirror and the gouging claws that held it when she clenched her hand. She clenched harder and harder as the afternoon became increasingly unendurable, forcing the little mirror into her mount of Saturn, cutting into her line of heart.

Sometimes, when Alice returned home, she found that there was blood on her palm – she had gripped her hands so tightly – and marks that looked as if some small fierce creature had made them, scratching to escape from a place in which it had been trapped. Blood smeared her need for solitude, and seeped along the feelings of her heart. She had a double heart line, and this meant that she had an unusually developed capacity for love.

Mrs. Alexander Diddecott had talked of such things one afternoon, peering dubiously at the lines and markings of her hands, a woman attempting to decipher an unfamiliar – and not very well written – foreign alphabet. She had held the outer edge of Alice’s hand lightly, possibly reluctant to grasp something suspected of grubbiness. She probably had a crystal ball at home, well polished on a nicely brushed red velvet cushion, looking rather like the glass dome that Mrs. Alexander Diddecott had, the one containing the plaster cast of her baby boy’s arm.

The left hand was the hand to read first. This was the hand that revealed what was inherent, that which was within you.

The lines on the mount of Saturn made a distinct square. This meant that she was in danger from fire. Perhaps she really was Bertha Rochester after all.

One day she would clench her hand so tightly that the tiny mirror would shatter.

“Gracious!” Mrs. Albert Comstock would exclaim, as the shimmering blood-edged fragments tinkled downward.

“Gracious!” Mrs. Goodchild would exclaim, slightly louder, not to be outdone.

I Belong To Annie.

The ring was the first message.

The picture was the second message.

She hadn’t seen the picture at first. She’d placed the ring on her finger immediately, to feel some closeness to Annie, and looked at her reflection in the tiny oval looking-glass, thinking she might look different in that particular mirror. She looked the same as she always did, she eventually decided, only a little smaller, a little further away. Some improvement there, then, she thought. She sometimes felt that, of all the looking-glasses in the house, she looked best in the oval mirror – another, larger, oval – at the back of her wash-hand-stand, because – glancing into it as she washed her face – she was not wearing her spectacles when she looked. This was not because her spectacles gave her appearance an ugliness it otherwise would not have possessed; it was because she could not see herself at all without her spectacles.

The picture was in color, a small reproduction of a painting she later knew to be by Vermeer, the girl in blue reading a letter at a window, and was tucked beneath her bookmark for her to find. It was a picture she knew well, and had always been drawn to, though she had never known its title, or the name of the artist. Not knowing anything about it, knowing only the image that was in front of her (something she had always seemed to know, like a memory), somehow made it speak to her in a way that was more personal, a way that was beyond the reach of words. She felt something of what Linnaeus must have felt – years later – thinking that that Danish artist painted only for him. He and Ben were babies when Annie disappeared. They would have no memories of her.

Something about the girl in the picture made her think that it was a portrait of the artist who had painted it, the thought that all paintings were self-portraits, serious-faced artists studying their own reflections in the way that Hamlet studied Yorick’s skull, or Aristotle contemplated the bust of Homer. There was something about the smock that made her seem like an artist, something about the firm, clenched hands, the way in which the light caught the knuckles. She’d looked for telltale smudges of paint on these hands, stains on the front of the smock, and then it had occurred to her that everything she was looking at was composed entirely of paint: the reflective face with its lowered eyes, the whole figure, the room in which she stood. Women artists to Alice, as a child, were women who stood in silence all day at their easels in front of paintings by men in art galleries, copying them. The copyists – the public galleries were crowded with them – all seemed to be women, a sex with nothing original to say in paint, one that could only mimic what men had already said. Copying Day was a clarion call – this mediæval instrument linked them neatly with their stitch-stitch-stitching forebears – for all amateur women artists to root out their brushes and watercolors and assume attitudes of artistic endeavor. Those unwilling to thus expose themselves to public scrutiny had to be content with needles and silks, the unceasing stitch-stitch-stitch of the past. Her ideas for her novel
The Life Class
must have been forming far earlier than she had realized.

Vermeer was another artist much loved by Linnaeus. It was he who had given her the name of the artist, he who had identified the painting when she had shown it to him. He didn’t grasp at crowded value-for-money canvases, packed with gesticulating figures, and filling the whole of a large wall (they’d have golden frames, elaborately carved); all he desired was the small-scale depiction of the solitary figure of a silent girl in a room. It would have a simple black frame, “Dutch frames” Linnaeus called them. To Linnaeus, Dickinson Prud’homme was a purveyor of pulchritude, not an artist, a man who dealt in bosoms and buttocks, a rival to Comstock’s Comestibles as a purveyor of fresh meat.

Because she could not read, Annie had a particular fondness for pictures of people reading, and sought them out. Alice imagined the walls of her room as being lined with such pictures, inward-looking faces angled downward, or turned a little to one side, and the room filled with an intense, concentrated silence like a Quaker Meeting in the moment just before someone felt the need to speak. She had imagined wrongly. On the one occasion on which she had been into Annie’s room – a night of snow and storm – the white walls had been bare.

Alice had studied
The Woman in Blue
, trying to understand what it was that Annie had been trying to say, to discover the encoded meaning. Because she could not write, Annie had left the picture to speak for her. The young woman in the blue smock was facing to the left, standing at a window, though the window was not depicted. It was something that you knew was there, but could not see. The whole picture had a sense of things that were not there, things just out of reach, things that yet were central to its meaning. The light flooded her face, and the front of her body, as she stood – utterly absorbed – her head bent slightly forward as she read the letter that she held with both hands, her arms resting against her. She was gripping it tightly, her knuckles clenched. Her mouth was slightly open. It was a depiction of the moment at which a reader or viewer melted into the text, into the play or opera, into the painting, the moment at which breathing halted, time ceased to exist, and Alice found her own mouth drooping open, her breathing slowing, as if it were she who was reading the words in the letter, she who was the woman in blue. The young woman’s head and shoulders were in profile against a large map that hung on the white wall like a tapestry behind her, the lines and markings of a place that had been exhaustively explored, its frontiers delineated, all details named, a place that had lost its mystery. The young woman herself was mystery entire; nothing was known about her, and it was what the viewer was that made him (or her, or
her
) see what was seen in that captured moment.

It was in a book that she had first found the picture, and it was in books that she kept it, keeping her place in each book that she read. She always penciled comments in books as she read them, marking passages that particularly struck her, and always read a book with a blank piece of paper folded inside it, jotting down thoughts that opened out from a text. The Vermeer picture she kept next to this, all unfolded musings drawn out by studying it, a silent form that teased her out of thought. When she came across these words in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” she knew exactly what Keats had meant, but she had never known what Annie had meant by the message in the ring, the message in the picture, if messages were what they were. She studied her face in the miniature mirror, looked at the girl reading the letter, and the words of what she was reading became a part of what she saw.

Now years had gone by and Mrs. Albert Comstock was a widow, the mother of Myrtle and Oliver; and the Reverend and Mrs. Goodchild were the grandparents of simpering Serenity, fruit of the loins of their son Sobriety and his wife whatsername, though they would prefer not to think of her in these terms, and Alice had long since ceased to be a girl.

She liked to think of the Reverend Goodchild undertaking his grandfatherly duties and unenthusiastically dandling Serenity on his knee at regular intervals. She was a “big-boned child”: that was Mrs. Goodchild’s description of her, said in a tone that made it sound her proudest boast. She sounded, in fact, remarkably like Albert Comstock had sounded when he had been recommending a particular cut of beef, dangling from a hook in front of him like an ill-treated corpse, as he stood there in his long white apron. A few vigorous sessions of Serenity-bouncing should reduce the Reverend Goodchild’s lifespan by a few years, or – at the very least – exacerbate his hemorrhoids.

If she was feeling particularly vindictive – this happened quite frequently – she liked to visualize the Reverend Goodchild gingerly attempting to bounce Serenity up and down on the end of his leg, in the position of Edith’s old iron toy, a stomach-churningly life-size version of the Baby Quieter Wheel Toy. The figure of the father seemed to be totally unaware that there was a baby firmly attached to his lower leg, and leaned back in his carriage, his hands nowhere near the baby’s, reading his
Evening News
. He had a bald head, like Papa, but no beard.
Baby Quieter
was the headline that absorbed him, a rather disturbing headline in a sensational newspaper that seemed to consist almost entirely of lurid descriptions of crime. A quiet baby in the
Evening News
was unlikely to be sleeping peacefully, cooing to itself as Mama sang a lullaby.
Ring! Ring! Ring!
went the bell, as the wheels trundled round and round, and his leg shot rigidly high into the air, over and over again, like a spectacular nervous twitch, with the unnoticed baby grimly clinging on. It had the exact pose of one of Miss Stammers’s embarrassing dogs, the dogs that would clamp themselves to the legs of blushing visitors, and snuffle noisily with eyes-closed bliss at inappropriate parts of their anatomy. They had a particular fondness for the Reverend Goodchild himself – that smell clearly awoke some deep-seated ancestral instincts – and he would clasp his hat protectively in front of his person if he spotted the dogs, Miss Stammers in tow, pounding eagerly toward him, salivating, already starting to sniff, tensing their hind legs as they prepared to hurl themselves ecstatically at his crotch.

“Phew!” they would be saying, in their doggy fashion. “Get a whiff of that, chaps!”

Ring!
went the bell.

Ring!

Ring!

Serenity rose and fell with increasing speed, until the bell sounded like a nighttime warning in a fire-threatened city, and hemorrhoids exploded like overheated sausages. If he built up enough momentum, he would be able to hurl Serenity high over his head with a resounding
Kerboing!
, and propel her several hundred yards into the distance, as if she were the terrifying ammunition of some advanced mediæval siege-machine. If this weapon had fallen into the hands of the English or the French, the Hundred Years War would have been over in three weeks.

– little! –

Splat!

Splat!

Splat!

The skies would have been black with squawkily descending Serenity Goodchilds, catapulted over the walls of besieged cities to explode messily inside and spread plague. City walls would have collapsed instantly into heaps of rubble (plenty more ammunition for Mrs. Albert Comstock’s thwunking here), pushed down from inside as panic-stricken, fleeing citizens stumbled across the debris, and it would have been like a nation of Jerichos at the blasts of the rams’ horn trumpets.

“We surrender!” the English would have cried, emerging shakily, pale-faced, nauseated, hands above their heads.

“We surrender!” the French would have cried (in French, you wouldn’t catch
them
lowering themselves to speak English: “
Nous
something-or-other!”), still trembling after the impact of the terrible new weapon that threatened all civilization, though – being French – they would be more used to awful smells, and would not be so shaken by the appalling stink.