Pinkerton's Sister (16 page)

“Tra la la la la la la la …”

What he knew was a secret, and no one was ever going to find out.

(“S” was saucy.

(“S” was seductive.

(“S” was secret.)

It was completely dark.

Annie was beside her now, and they were holding hands. Under the trees in the park, in the part at the far end of the lake, furthest away from the houses and the gas-lamps, in the cool light of a full moon, was her father, squatting down in the darkness, not fully visible. Albert Comstock, G. G. Schiffendecken, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, and the Reverend Goodchild were there with him, though she couldn’t see them. The soft cloth coverings of the corsets had been removed, like clothes at bedtime. Whalebone gleamed whitely in the darkness, as though the remains of something dead were lying there, as if Hilda, Carlotta, Ethel, Dorinda, and Little Missy had all met violent ends at the hands of a corset-crazed killer, and the glint of polished metal reflected the gleam of Annie’s eyes. Her eyes seemed enormous. A wind had blown up, quite strong, hissing in the branches like falling water, but the loudest sound was the sound of breathing. The ragged breathing — loud, raw, slightly wheezing, like that of people who had been running too fast and too far — gradually co-ordinated into one rhythm, and became louder, like the beginning of a cat’s purring, or the contented sound of sun-warmed, sleepy doves.

She tried to move her head to one side, as if what she was seeing was actually in front of her, and not inside her mind.

She had a sense of the coldness of the metal, the rigidity of the bone. There were the fat white hairy thighs, big and meaty, and the stained, gaping undergarments.

The coarse, insinuating texture of the beards.

The smell of tobacco.

Lips.

The goblins and their misshapen creatures massed beneath the castle as they sought to carry away Princess Irene deep into the darkness. Always there was the sound of digging and digging, as they drew closer to their goal, hollowing out their narrow corridors into the foundations, drawing closer every day. You could hear them if you listened carefully, their furtive pickaxes gouging into the rock.

Alice gripped Annie’s hand more tightly. The two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, lay asleep in their curtained bed, their arms around each other, the moon and star gazing in at them. Lizzie and Laura crouched close together amongst the brookside rushes in the evening, Laura bowing her head to listen to the goblin voices.

“No,” said Lizzie: “No, no, no …”

Laura did not listen.

Alice started to tremble, and the newspaper, which she had been clutching all this time, began to shake, making a tiny rattling sound.

Why hadn’t Allegra and Edith been able to help?

They were all little girls, but there were three of them. Ben couldn’t have helped. He had been a baby.

Why hadn’t her sisters helped her to save Annie, as Laura’s sister had saved her in “Goblin Market”?

Why hadn’t she helped her, all by herself?

Instead, she had found for her the address of Madame Roskosch, the woman who had promised — in her newspaper advertisements — to produce THE DESIRED EFFECT within twenty-four hours. She had thought she was helping Annie, doing what she wanted her to do. Madame Roskosch had offered a SURE CURE FOR LADIES IN TROUBLE in the way that Madame Etoile offered to see the past, the present, and the future, and never to fail. Madame Roskosch had not told Annie all that she wanted to know; she had not guided her in all aspects of life with her professional skill. She offered consultation and advice FREE. She offered ELEGANT ROOMS and claimed not to make use of injurious medicines or instruments.

She had lied.

Papa had destroyed Annie, coldly and deliberately, and she was the only person who knew.

Then, nine years later, during the 1888 blizzard, he had killed himself.

Mama — before she had been struck down into silence and invalidity — had begun to convince herself that there must have been some sort of terrible accident (
ha!
), a very messy one, if it had been, but Alice liked to think that his death was planned, and was because of what he had done to Annie. She tried to convince herself that he had killed himself because he had made Annie pregnant, had driven her away, but he had done it because of problems with money. These, and not a girl of fourteen, were what had been important to him. He would not have killed himself because of a girl, especially years after he had last seen her. Money was what mattered, especially if you did not have enough of it.

He had been struggling for years.

If Annie had never gone to Madame Roskosch, if she had given birth to her child, this child — when Papa died — would have been almost the same age as Alice herself had been during those secret journeys through the wall and to the Celestial City, the time when Annie had been made pregnant. If Annie had lived, her child would now be almost twenty-five, the same age as Ben. But Annie had gone to Madame Roskosch, to the address that Alice had read out to her, and Annie had died because Madame Roskosch had been an incompetent abortionist. She hadn’t brought together those long separated, shown Annie an accurate likeness of a future husband, and given his name; she had killed her. This was what Alice believed had happened, what she had worked out over the years, though she did not know for certain.

What was certain was that she had never seen Annie again.

Upstairs, down a long corridor, a door opened, and she heard her father’s voice.

“Alice?”

“Yes, P-P-Papa?”

It seemed excessively vindictive of fate that the stutter she had developed should experience particular difficulty with the letter “p.” She couldn’t say “Papa” without stuttering.

“Has the newspaper arrived?”

“Yes, P-P-Papa.”

She couldn’t say her own name without stuttering.

“Bring it to me in my room.”

“Yes, P-P-Papa.”

She wasn’t Miss Pinkerton. She was Miss P-P-Pinkerton. She had heard Myrtle Comstock, Mrs. Albert Comstock’s daughter — a woman who pushed the frontiers of sophistication ever outward — calling her this to Mrs. Goodchild. “Myrtle! You really are
dreadful
!” That had been the response. Mrs. Goodchild had been
delighted
. Alice ought to join Miss Stammers on her action-packed dog-walking expeditions, Miss Stutters and Miss Stammers — what, precisely,
was
the distinction between a stutter and a stammer? — jerkily advancing, leashed to unruly hounds, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of speech impediments.

It would take them so long to say the dogs’ names that if any dog made a break for freedom it would be off and away before they could call it to heel.

“H-H-Hamlet!”

“H-H-Hans!”

“K-K-Kierk-k-kegaard!”

(You could virtually guarantee that Alice would be the one charged with the duty of summoning Kierkegaard.)

Distant triumphant barks.

Mocking woofs.

A landscape empty of dogs.

The idea was so appealing that she ignored the fact that Miss Stammers did not, in fact, stammer. With Miss Stammers, Chastity Heighton, and Sobriety Goodchild and his daughter Serenity amongst its inhabitants, Longfellow Park was positively awash with the misleadingly monikered. You’d barely recovered from the shock of grasping that the poisonous squat sniggerer in front of you bore the Christian —
Christian! —
name Serenity, when it dawned upon you that her surname was Goodchild.

Carefully, she began to smooth the newspaper where she had crumpled it slightly, Annie saving a page with the names of women who could foretell the future, women born with a genuine gift. She folded it carefully, arranging it with the engraving of the Board of Governors on top, their beards neatly on display, all lined up like an illustration in a sporran catalogue. Gradually, the trembling began to slow.

“Alice?”

“Yes, P-P-Papa.”

She began to walk upstairs. The newspaper still shook slightly in her hands, as if from a distant subterranean tremor.

She was at the bottom of the stairs, and there was no newspaper lying on the tiles. It was Sunday. There would not have been a newspaper there. Yesterday’s newspaper had already been read, and she had used it to wrap around one of her writing journals when she stored it away.

She was conscious of letting out her breath suddenly, as if she had been holding it all that time, breathing suspended for a while. She had experienced one of those moments that sometimes happened when a certain passage in a book was read, a certain picture contemplated. It happened over and over again. Time ceased to exist, and she became one with what she read, what she contemplated, within the work of art, like her namesake Alice within the looking-glass. It happened every time she studied Linnaeus’s painting in the schoolroom. The water in the ewer was still hot, steam rising. It must be like dreaming was supposed to be, when time was concentrated into a few seconds, or like drowning, when a life passed before the eyes in moments. Maggie Tulliver must have experienced this, clasped in Tom’s arms, as she and her brother sank to their deaths beneath the flood water: beating her doll’s wooden head against the pillars, cutting her hair jaggedly, Behaving Worse than She Expected, Trying to Run Away from Her Shadow …

She looked into the room — glass-enclosed, plant-filled, cold in winter — where the piano was, at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. No fire had yet been set in this room, and her breath whitened. She didn’t know why she looked in there; she knew her mother was still asleep upstairs. It was a major undertaking now, to attempt to bring Mama downstairs, and she spent most of her time in her room.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s eyes looked intensely across at her from the music rack. The last thing she could remember her mother playing on the piano had been not Gottschalk but “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” and the music for this was still there. It was in a book with several other songs, and the illustration on the cover was for “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” She hadn’t seen it for a while, and seeing it again made her realize how much she disliked it.

It depicted a black man and woman, and the two figures were utterly grotesque. Somehow, they reminded her of an illustration of an elephant she had seen in an eighteenth-century travel book, obviously drawn by an artist who had never seen an elephant. He must have drawn it from a written description, rather in the way that Mrs. Albert Comstock designed her laugh, and the result — like the laugh — was oddly, disturbingly
wrong.
On the cover of the sheet music the theme was more that of crocodiles than of elephants. The two clumsily drawn figures — a man and a woman awkwardly bidding farewell by shaking hands (this seemed a curiously formal gesture: they appeared to be holding each other at a distance, rather than embracing), the man carrying a carpetbag — had bizarrely extended feet, as if they were wearing clowns’ boots, long and narrow like crocodile jaws. Continuing the crocodilian theme, they had small pointed teeth in their enormously wide mouths, bared all ready for a dentist’s inspection (though G. G. Schiffendecken would not have been enthusiastic: no money here), completely without humor. No smiles, these.

It brought to mind — she shuddered at the recollection — a performance of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
she had seen as a child, in which Topsy had been played by a middle-aged white man — a little, stunted figure with a falsetto voice — in blackface. There had been something nightmarish about this figure.

“I ’spect I grow’d!” it said, drawing out the last word — “grrroooow’d!” — and visibly waiting for the laughs, which came.

The audience shrieked, and it stood there, rolling its bugged-out eyes, with its mouth wide open. He was famous for playing this rôle. It was the most disturbing thing she had seen in the theatre until Dum-Dum the Dummy came along.

She saw a whole row of blackfaced white people looking like this. They were swaying from side to side, white-gloved hands fluttering like flocks of escaping birds, and tears, crocodile tears, poured down their faces as they sang a sentimental song. It was like seeing Mr. Soot, the Sweep, and his family, with their soot-blackened faces, bursting into a harmonious rendition of some popular minstrel-show favorite, waving their brushes in time to the music as dark clouds billowed Hades-like around them. Their voices echoed hollowly up the soot-encrusted interiors of the chimneys, adding a mournful resonance to their words.

“Weep no more, my lady, O, weep no more today!” they sang, and the more they sang about not weeping, the more they wept. White tracks ran down from the eyes through the burned cork blackness, their brushes drooped, and the crocodile faces became the faces of zebras. This Happy Family enjoyed a good sentimental snivel. It quite cheered them up. They’d be merry, all happy and bright.

Alice thought again of the moment when Annie had opened the door to Mrs. Albert Comstock for the first time, and Mrs. Albert Comstock had seen that the Pinkertons’ new servant-girl was black. It was something she would not forget. It was something she had to remember. Annie had just joined them. It was her first job, and she had been nervous. Annie opened the door, bobbed a little curtsy, and looked up with a smile. Alice had seen her practicing in the kitchen, when she thought no one was around. Mrs. Albert Comstock — who rarely deigned to notice servants, in any case — swiftly overcame her initial expression of surprise, and looked through, beyond Annie, to where Mama had been approaching.