Alias Grace (40 page)

Lies and evasions on his side, and on hers, plottings and enticements. What does he care about Miss Faith Cartwright and her endless and infernal needlework? Every letter his mother sends him contains news of yet more knitting, stitching, and tedious crocheting.
The Cartwright household must by this time be covered all over – every table, chair, lamp, and piano – with acres of tassel and fringe, a woolwork flower heavily abloom in every nook of it. Does his mother really believe that he can be charmed by such a vision of himself – married to Faith Cartwright and imprisoned in an armchair by the fire, frozen in a kind of paralyzed stupor, with his dear wife winding him up gradually in coloured silk threads like a cocoon, or like a fly snarled in the web of a spider?

He crumples the page, drops it onto the floor. He will write a different letter.
My dear Edward. I trust you are in good health; I myself am still in Kingston, where I continue to
 … But continue to what? What exactly is he doing here? He can’t sustain his usual jaunty tone. What can he write to Edward, what trophy or prize can he show? What clue, even? His hands are empty; he has discovered nothing. He has been travelling blindly, whether forward he cannot say, without learning anything except that he has not yet learned anything, unless he counts the extent of his own ignorance; like those who have searched fruitlessly for the source of the Nile. Like them, he must take into account the possibility of defeat. Hopeless dispatches, scrawled on pieces of bark, sent out in cleft sticks from the swallowing jungle.
Suffering from malaria. Bitten by snake. Send more medicine. The maps are wrong
. He has nothing positive to relate.

In the morning he will feel better. He will collect himself. When it is cooler. For the moment, he goes to bed. In his ears there’s a simmering of insects. The damp heat settles down on his face like a hand, and his consciousness flares up for a moment – what is it he is on the verge of remembering? – then gutters out.

Suddenly he starts awake. There’s light in the room, a candle, floating in the doorway. Behind it a glimmering figure: his landlady, in a white gown, a pale shawl wrapped around her. In the candlelight her long loose hair looks grey.

He pulls the sheet up over him; he is not wearing a nightshirt. “What is it?” he says. He must sound angry, but in fact he’s frightened. Not of her, surely; but what the Devil is she doing in his bedroom? In future he must lock the door.

“Dr. Jordan, I am so sorry to disturb you,” she says, “but I heard a noise. As if of someone attempting to break in through a window. I was alarmed.”

There’s no trembling in her voice, no quavering. The woman has a very cool nerve. He tells her he will come downstairs with her in a minute, and check the locks and shutters; he asks her to wait in the front room. He fumbles into his dressing-gown, which sticks immediately to his moist skin, and shuffles through the darkness towards the door.

This must stop
, he tells himself.
This can’t go on
. But nothing has been going on, and therefore nothing can stop.

I
t’s the middle of the night, but time keeps going on, and it also goes round and around, like the sun and the moon on the tall clock in the parlour. Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can’t stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it’s the day itself. A Saturday. The breaking day. The day the butcher comes.

What should I tell Dr. Jordan about this day? Because now we are almost there. I can remember what I said when arrested, and what Mr. MacKenzie the lawyer said I should say, and what I did not say even to him; and what I said at the trial, and what I said afterwards, which was different as well. And what McDermott said I said, and what the others said I must have said, for there are always those that will supply you with speeches of their own, and put them right into your mouth for you too; and that sort are like the magicians who can throw their voice, at fairs and shows, and you are just their wooden doll. And that’s what it was like at the trial, I was there in the
box of the dock but I might as well have been made of cloth, and stuffed, with a china head; and I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out.

I said that I remembered some of the things I did. But there are other things they said I did, which I said I could not remember at all.

Did he say, I saw you outside at night, in your nightgown, in the moonlight? Did he say, Who were you looking for? Was it a man? Did he say, I pay good wages but I want good service in return? Did he say, Do not worry, I will not tell your mistress, it will be our secret? Did he say, You are a good girl?

He might have said that. Or I might have been asleep.

Did she say, Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to? Did she say, I will pay you your wages on Saturday and then you can be gone out of here, and that will be the end of it and good riddance?

Yes. She did say that.

Was I crouching behind the kitchen door after that, crying? Did he take me in his arms? Did I let him do it? Did he say Grace, why are you crying? Did I say I wished she was dead?

Oh no. Surely I did not say that. Or not out loud. And I did not really wish her dead. I only wished her elsewhere, which was the same thing she wished for me.

Did I push him away? Did he say I will soon make you think better of me? Did he say I will tell you a secret if you promise to keep it? And if you do not, your life will not be worth a straw.

It might have happened.

I’m trying to remember what Mr. Kinnear looked like, so I can tell Dr. Jordan about him. He was always kind to me, or so I will say. But I can’t rightly remember. The truth is that despite everything I once thought about him, he has faded; he’s been fading year by year, like a dress washed over and over, and now what is left of him? A faint pattern. A button or two. Sometimes a voice; but no eyes, no mouth.
What did he really look like, when he was in the flesh? Nobody wrote it down, not even in the newspapers; they told all about McDermott, and about me as well, and our looks and appearance, but not about Mr. Kinnear, because it is more important to be a murderess than the one murdered, you are more stared at then; and now he’s gone. I think of him asleep and dreaming in his bed, in the morning when I bring in his tea, with his face hidden by the tumbled sheet. In the darkness here I can see other things, but I can’t see him at all.

I tell over his pieces, counting. The gold snuffbox, the telescope, the pocket-compass, the pen-knife; the gold watch, the silver spoons that I polished, the candlesticks with the family crest.
I Live In Hope
. The tartan vest. I don’t know where they have gone.

I’m lying on the hard and narrow bed, on the mattress made of coarse ticking, which is what they call the covering of a mattress, though why do they call it that as it is not a clock. The mattress is filled with dry straw that crackles like a fire when I turn over, and when I shift it whispers to me,
hush hush
. It’s dark as a stone in this room, and hot as a roasting heart; if you stare into the darkness with your eyes open you are sure to see something after a time. I hope it will not be flowers. But this is the time they like to grow, the red flowers, the shining red peonies which are like satin, which are like splashes of paint. The soil for them is emptiness, it is empty space and silence. I whisper,
Talk to me;
because I would rather have talking than the slow gardening that takes place in silence, with the red satin petals dripping down the wall.

I think I sleep.

I’m in the back passage, feeling my way along the wall. I can scarcely see the wallpaper; it used to be green. Here are the stairs going up, here is the bannister. The bedroom door is half open, and I can listen. Bare feet on the red-flower carpet. I know you’re hiding from
me, come out at once or I’ll have to find you and catch you, and when I’ve got hold of you, then who knows what I will do.

I’m keeping very still behind the door, I can hear my own heart. Oh no, oh no, oh no.

Here I come, I am coming now. You never obey me, you never do what I say, you dirty girl. Now you will have to be punished.

It is not my fault. What can I do now, where can I turn?

You must unlock the door, you must open the window, you must let me in.

Oh look, oh look at all the spilt petals, what have you done?

I think I sleep.

I’m outside, at night. There are the trees, there is the pathway, and the snake fence with half a moon shining, and my bare feet on the gravel. But when I come around to the front of the house, the sun is just going down; and the white pillars of the house are pink, and the white peonies are glowing red in the fading light. My hands are numb, I can’t feel the ends of my fingers. There’s the smell of fresh meat, coming up from the ground and all around, although I told the butcher we wanted none.

On the palm of my hand there’s a disaster. I must have been born with it. I carry it with me wherever I go. When he touched me, the bad luck came off on him.

I think I sleep.

I wake up at cock crow and I know where I am. I’m in the parlour. I’m in the scullery. I’m in the cellar. I’m in my cell, under the coarse prison blanket, which I likely hemmed myself. We make everything we wear or use here, awake or asleep; so I have made this bed, and now I am lying in it.

It is morning, and time to get up; and today I must go on with the story. Or the story must go on with me, carrying me inside it,
along the track it must travel, straight to the end, weeping like a train and deaf and single-eyed and locked tight shut; although I hurl myself against the walls of it and scream and cry, and beg to God himself to let me out.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

F
rom the Governor’s wife, Simon accepts a cup of tea. He doesn’t much like tea, but considers it a social duty to drink it in this country; and to greet all jokes about the Boston Tea Party, of which there have been too many, with an aloof but indulgent smile.

His indisposition appears to have passed. Today he’s feeling better, although in need of sleep. He’s managed to get through his little talk to the Tuesday group, and feels he’s acquitted himself well enough. He began with a plea for the reform of mental asylums, too many of which remain the dens of squalor and iniquity they’d been in the last century. This was well received. He then continued with some remarks about the intellectual turmoil in this field of study, and about the contending schools of thought amongst alienists.

First he dealt with the Material school. Such practitioners held that mental disturbances were organic in origin – due, for instance, to lesions of the nerves and brain, or hereditary conditions of a definable kind, such as epilepsy; or to catching diseases, including those that are sexually transmitted – he was elliptical here, considering the presence of ladies, but everyone knew what he meant. Next
he described the approach of the Mental school, which believed in causes that were much harder to isolate. How to measure the effects of shock, for example? How to diagnose amnesias with no discernible physical manifestation, or certain inexplicable and radical alterations of the personality? What, he asked them, was the role played by the Will, and what by the Soul? Here Mrs. Quennell leaned forward, only to lean back when he said he did not know.

Next he proceeded to the many new discoveries which were being made – Dr. Laycock’s bromide therapy for epileptics, for example, which should put paid to a great many erroneous beliefs and superstitions; the investigation of the structure of the brain; the use of drugs in both the induction and the alleviation of hallucinations of various sorts. Pioneer work was constantly going forward; here he would like to mention the courageous Dr. Charcot of Paris, who had recently dedicated himself to the study of hysterics; and the investigation of dreams as a key to diagnosis, and their relation to amnesia, to which he himself hoped in time to make a modest contribution. All of these theories were in the early stages of their development, but much might soon be expected of them. As the eminent French philosopher and scientist Maine de Biran had said, there was an inner New World to be discovered, for which one must “plunge into the subterranean caverns of the soul.”

The nineteenth century, he concluded, would be to the study of Mind what the eighteenth had been to the study of Matter – an Age of Enlightenment. He was proud to be part of such a major advance in knowledge, if only in a very small and humble way.

He wished it was not so damnably hot and humid. He was drenched by the time he concluded, and is still conscious of a marshy smell, which comes from his hands. It must be the digging; he’d done another spell of it this morning, before the heat of the day.

The Tuesday group applauded politely, and Reverend Verringer thanked him. Dr. Jordan, he said, was to be congratulated upon the
edifying remarks with which he had honoured them today. He had given them all a great deal to think about. The Universe was indeed a mysterious place, but God had blessed man with a mind, the better to understand whatever mysteries were truly within his comprehension. He implied that there were others, which weren’t. This seemed to please everyone.

Afterwards, Simon was thanked individually. Mrs. Quennell told him he’d spoken with heartfelt sensibility, which made him feel slightly guilty, as his chief goal had been to get the occasion over with as quickly as possible. Lydia, very fetching in a crisp and rustling summer ensemble, was breathless in her praise, and as admiring as any man might wish; but he could not shake the notion that she hadn’t really understood a single word he’d said.