Becoming Jane Eyre (2 page)

Next door she hears the nurse moving about with purpose, dropping things on the floor. Living in such proximity, she has taken a dislike to the large, hard-faced woman who enters the room in her navy uniform, her round, white cap with its ribbons flowing down her back, her black stockings brushing together with a sigh.

Charlotte nods her head in response to her greeting. The nurse’s presence is an intrusion she attempts to ignore. She prefers to listen to her father’s breathing, to be alone with him. A distant, God-fearing man preoccupied with his Christian duty, his concern for his large, poor parish, his grief, and his only boy, she has never been alone with him like this.

The nurse asks how she is feeling this morning. She replies that her tooth aches, that sleep seems to have abandoned her. The nurse suggests a walk, in a voice that sounds loud and shrill. Charlotte shakes her head. She has little desire to walk in these charmless, suffocating streets.

How much walking she has done in her life! She has scampered as a child on the moors for the joy of it, the freedom, the escape from the cramped house, the adults’ oppressive presence. She has walked for necessity, for exercise, for pleasure, and for the beauty of the natural world around her. She has walked to tire herself out. Here, she prefers the time alone with her father in the early morning, before the nurse comes bustling into the room, moments of escape into the world of imagination. Here, she is able to let her mind go where it will, even while her eye is fixed on him.

She lifts her gaze from the page, where she has written words and crossed them out. She surveys the scene. Things seem very still to her and, oddly, in the darkened room she now seems to see more clearly. It is being alone with her father, being his eyes and his hands and even his voice, his link with life, that brings this clarity.

She finds herself drifting into a moment of reflection. It is difficult to fix the boundaries between imagination and memory. She absorbs what comes to her, drawing images into this dim, silent space. All the small objects in the room—the bulb-shaped water bottle, the green counterpane, the plant on the windowsill—seem to mean something. She is in a moment of transition. She looks for signs of what she will become.

She was glad to come here on her own with her father, yet reluctant to leave her brother and her two sisters at home. What will happen there? Will her sisters find the time, the courage, to work on their new books? All through the summer, before she came to Manchester, they took their desks out into the garden, to work in the shade of the cherry tree. What mischief will her brother be making? She sees him, sitting in his study, his head in his hands, an empty bottle before him, raving about a woman called Misery who follows him everywhere, a woman he calls his wife.

Shudders run through her father’s body, as they did through hers as a child when he would shoot his pistol at dawn, as though a shock has run through him.

“What?” she asks. “What is it?” She reaches a hand to still his beating heart. She has never been able to stare at him like this, touch him freely in the muted light. He reaches out for her. What does he know of her, or she of him, after all these years? What secrets would he tell her if he could speak? Would she want to hear them? What would he say about his marriage, his parents, his God? Had he chosen her mother for love or for her superior position in society, the fifty pounds a year? Or was it her religion? Did he want her help with his work in the church? Did he think she could advance his career? Was his religion simply a means of advancing socially?

But he only asks for water, as he does repeatedly. He has always been a thirsty man. Though he is president of the local Temperance Society, she is not sure he has not used alcohol for more than medicinal purposes.

She pours the water, resumes her seat, and takes up her pencil and her square notebook again, as though tied to her post beside him.

On her return home from Brussels after New Year’s Day, burdened with her own sadness, she was appalled to find her father so helpless. Blind, like his beloved Milton, he could not venture outside in the snow because the glare hurt his eyes. Full of pity and terror, as well as impatience at his helplessness, she was obliged to lead him through the narrow streets to visit his parishioners and to read and write and see for him, describing the landscape she knows so well, the fields, the sky, and snow. In his thankfulness he showed her more consideration than he had ever done, accepted her help and love, yielded to her attendance on him.

Each evening when they sat together, she brought up the good chance of having his eyesight improved by the operation. All through the winter and spring she worked on him. He procrastinated, finding excuses. Finally she persuaded him to go through with it. Was this wise? Was she being selfish or merely dutiful? Was her motivation one of revenge?

She relives the scene: two men in white at his side, like the flaming angels she had seen as a child, standing at the head of her youngest sister’s cradle, but here prepared to wrestle with her father, their hands on his shoulders, pinning him down. The glint of the scalpel. She holds her breath, unable to avert her terrified yet fascinated gaze as the surgeon cuts through the cornea. She watches her father’s face contort with agony and hears the cry escape his lips. Afterward, she needs the arm of one of the assistants to take her from the room.

Now her mouth is dry, her lips chapped, her bowels blocked. She puts her hand to her cheek, feeling her flaking skin. What will the future bring for them all? Will this let in the light? What would they all do without him, he who provides the rent-free house, the yearly stipend?

It is this which clothes, feeds, and shelters them. They are entirely dependent on him. Without him they would all be separated again, scattered to earn their bread in the professions they all hate and have failed at abysmally: teaching, tutoring, and, in the brother’s case, clerking on the railways. Their livelihood, the roof over their heads, their beloved parsonage, all will be taken from them at his demise, perpetual curacy holding only so long as the curate lives.

Will she be the one to save them all from penury with a new book, when her first one, her
Professor
, has just been rejected? She cannot believe it was without merit. Her soul is marked on every page. She is each one of her characters: the two brothers who are estranged, as were so often the ones in her own brother’s tales. She can still hear their voices, see their faces, feel their forms. She hears the wicked brother’s wife, Mrs. Edward Crimsworth, say with her lively lisp, “You are late.” She hears the swish of Edward’s whip. The child, Victor Crimsworth, has her brother’s fiery glint in his eyes.

What is she to write about now, in the silence of this darkened room?

She reads Psalm 119 to her father in the faint light of the candle, “Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light to my path.” She watches his familiar face beneath the bandage: the high cheekbones, the decisive nose she has inherited—better on a man than on a woman, she thinks. She stares at the grim mouth, which dips at the corners, the jut of the determined chin, even the fine, broken veins in the cheeks. Her words seem to console and revive him. Blind as he is, smiles play over his face, and joy dawns on his forehead.

She brushes the bristles of white hair, which give him a surprised and unexpectedly roguish air, from his forehead and studies the long oval of his face. She feels a contained elation in the moment, a whisper of self-knowledge. Now that she can be useful to him in his reduced state, she loves him more than ever. She reaches out with the tip of her finger to wipe away a tear, which trickles from his cut left eye, and traces the strong lines of his fine face with her middle finger.

She makes a rough sketch of him in her notebook.

He feels small fingers brush his face like a cobweb. He sniffs at them, at the smell of the body. Since the death of his wife, no one has touched him so. He has almost lost the torment of his celibacy. “Who is this?” he asks, straining to see. He conjures up his wife’s small, neat form, the verbena scent of her skin. “Maria, is it you?” he says in his dream, and reaches out to catch at her skirts and her slim waist. “Saucy Pat,” she says, and slaps at his hand.

He sees his wife as she was at the end, begging for relief from pain. All her life she had been so well balanced, so sensible, pious, and self-effacing. Now at the end, the Great Tempter, envying her life of holiness, no doubt, had come to her and disturbed her mind. He sees her plainly, sitting up, her long hair wild about her shoulders, her face pinched and gray, wasted with illness and repellent to him. In her creased gown she reaches out to him, imploring him to help her. “Where is your damned God now? Where is He?” she screams at him, her hands to her belly where the pain is eating away at her.

Now, for the first time, he understands what she must have felt during those seven long months she lay dying. Then, he could only warn her that blasphemy was a mortal sin and urge her to think of the Judgment to come. “Help me! Your words are not helping me,” he still hears her scream. He would like to cry out the same words to his daughter, who is sitting beside him, scratching away with her pencil.

When he carried the children into the room—first the eldest, the most pious and brilliant, his favorite, his wife’s namesake, and then her favorite, their only boy—thinking it might comfort her to hold them in her arms, she cried out as though he had affronted her. Only the old servant, with her prosaic gestures, was able to calm her. Maria watched her clean the hearth, the way it was done in Cornwall, or let her softly brush her hair or bring a pillow to lift up her legs. Above all, she brought her the laudanum she craved in increasing quantities. “Give it to me! Give it to me!” she would say, reaching for it. “This is more help to me than your God.”