The Looking Glass House (6 page)

Rules, yes, that was what Mary was always trying to impart to the children. So she was surprised at what Mrs Liddell said next: ‘And if they are broken for one night? I suppose civiliza­tion would end!’

Mary opened her mouth in surprise; out of habit, she nearly spoke, but she was a governess now. She closed her lips again and put her hand up to scratch her chin, to mask her expression.

‘But don’t let us keep you from your work!’ Mrs Liddell said, turning back to Lord Newry. ‘I should hate to be the cause of the failure of an artistic endeavour.’

Mr Dodgson’s smile, as he was dismissed, was full of difficulty.

As dusk was falling, Mary went out for a walk in the garden. Now that it was almost summer, she preferred to be out of doors than in her little room with its high window and pipe running through it that ticked and stamped into the early hours. She was surprised to see Mr Dodgson still there. ‘Have you had any success?’ she asked him.

‘What?’

‘Your photography.’

‘Ah – some. Trees are better at standing still than children.’ He stood up from the wheelbarrow that he was filling with his photographic apparatus. ‘Has Lord Newry gone?’

He had, hours ago.

‘Is he here often?’

‘I have not met him before,’ said Mary. ‘But I believe him to be a favourite of Mrs Liddell’s.’

‘Ah, Mrs Liddell, the kingfisher. Bold and bright .  .  . and a fisher of kings.’ Mr Dodgson threw his funnels and trays into the wheelbarrow noisily.

‘Fisher of kings?’ Mary echoed.

Mrs Liddell was ambitious, Mary knew that. She had once overheard an argument between Mrs Liddell and the Dean; he had been offered another position it seemed, that of the Queen’s chaplain. Mrs Liddell had been so ecstatic that Mary had heard her voice from the other side of the house. The Dean had not been so happy. ‘We shall have even more cares, troubles, busi­ness and all sorts of things to interfere with our arrangements!’ Then Mrs Liddell, in pleading tones, pointing out the merits. Then the Dean, sterner: ‘Be not ambitious, Lorina. Desire not a higher place for me. If ever I was serious, I am here – on this point.’ Then a door being slammed, and sobs.

The air was colder now and midges jumped about in it.

‘Do the children like him?’ asked Mr Dodgson.

‘Who?’

‘Lord Newry.’

‘I don’t know. Alice prattles on to anybody, as you know.’

‘Yes, and is the more charming for it. She still retains her innocence! Dear Alice. My sisters were the same as children. I miss them.’

‘Do you have many?’

‘Seven. I am used to entertaining them,’ said Mr Dodgson, standing up and gazing past Mary at the elm tree.

‘Goodness, your mother must be busy.’

‘My mother, alas, is dead,’ said Mr Dodgson.

‘Oh dear. I am sorry to hear it. The loss must be hard to bear.’ Mary stood awkwardly, half turned towards him, half turned away.

‘I was never happier than when I was a boy and my dear mother was alive!’ He still looked up and Mary thought she saw tears in his eyes.

‘Mothers.’ Mary turned away. She thought of her own. ‘Yes. May I help you with your equipment?’

‘Oh no. But there is one thing you could do for me – the Aclands,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘I would be very grateful if you could warn their governess in advance so that we can all arrive on time. Punctuality is a good start to the day.’

‘That is what I always tell the children,’ said Mary.

The more she saw of Mr Dodgson, the more she realized there were many things on which they agreed.

Chapter 6

When Mr Wilton’s note came, mary read it twice over and folded it carefully away beside her bag of laven­der in the top of her drawer. The note was short; it proposed a visit together to Mr Ruskin’s Science Museum. He did not mind taking the children, he said, and although Mary had somehow forgotten to include the children in her imaginings of the day, they could not be helped, as it was not her afternoon off.

She started her preparations early, just after lunch, brushing out her hair and making one thick plait with it, which she wound over the top of her head so that it resembled the first layer of a hat. But somehow she had got it in the wrong place and her bonnet over the top was too sharply angled. So she tried again, and again, but it would not come right. By this time the children had been ready for half an hour, and had torn their own bonnets off. So she had to go out unhappy, and with aching wrists.

Mr Wilton was waiting for them outside the door of the Deanery. She had not remembered the sagging of his jawline, the collapsing flesh at his chin criss-crossed with lines that suggested the future direction of his face. His flesh looked almost womanly in spite of his stubble; Mary shut her eyes – the feel of it pierced her. When she opened them, she saw only his smile, wide with no trace of anything behind it.

‘Hullo!’ he said in his deep voice. Mary hurried over to him, the children behind her, and they set off.

The children were in a wild mood. On the way to the museum they ran on ahead down the pavement, even Ina, her heavy-booted feet stamping at the edges of puddles. Edith seemed to want to nearly throw herself under the wheel of every passing carriage. Mary could not concentrate on Mr Wilton’s conversation at all.

‘.  .  .  that it comes from as far afield as Africa and is really as fine an example as you will find anywhere of such a thing.’ Mr Wilton stopped and looked at her expectantly.

‘What does?’

‘The ivory, as I said.’

‘Alice – get back here AT ONCE!’

‘Do you like dresses very much, Mr Wilton?’ said Alice, still ten feet away.

‘Alice!’ said Mary.

‘But I was only asking! I should think it very interesting to work at a haberdasher’s.’

Mary looked hard at the child. But she only wore an expres­sion of curiosity, her neat little head cocked to one side.

‘Not dresses so much as what goes on them. Buttons and braid and such. Very interesting.’

‘Go off now,’ said Mary, with a squirm of shame, even though she had only just told Alice to come back.

By the time they reached the museum, all of Mary’s careful preparations for Mr Wilton’s visit had been lost. The cooling and refreshing effects of the Rowlands’ Kalydor lotion she had patted on her cheeks had been outdone by the anxiety of keeping the girls in sight; the two patches of scent she had dabbed under her chin had been overcome by the smells of the street: horse manure, distantly roasting meat.

Inside the tall domed building, Mr Wilton’s voice continued in its implacable way, talking on about fabrics and flannels, twill and tweed, bouncing from the stone floor on to the displays of animal skeletons and up into the ceiling. Mary imagined his words clustering up there and growing ever more populous until they joined together and fell back down as rain.

The children had stopped in front of the remains of Buckland’s Giant Lizard, standing up on its hind legs. Ina hung behind. ‘Dinosaurs give me nightmares,’ she said.

Mary nodded. She had always thought them the very worst combination of bird and lizard.

‘Strange to think that they were walking around here. Even on this very spot!’ said Alice.

‘Were they as big as a house, or bigger?’ said Edith, in her precise way. ‘Or smaller? Some ought to be smaller, I think.’

Mr Wilton turned to the children. His hands were in his pockets. ‘Perhaps you would like to hear this. Most of these bones were found by a Mr Chapman, a watchmaker, on a botanizing expedition. As the first bone came into sight, he found the foreman, stopped the digging, then telegraphed Mr Phillips, Professor of Geology, who oversaw their removal to this place here, as you see.’

‘You know a great deal about this, Mr Wilton,’ said Mary.

‘May we go now, please?’ said Ina.

‘I have some interest, yes. But I prefer not to parade my knowledge about. There is no better attribute than modesty. Ambition is the curse of the age, I always say.’

Did he look approvingly at her black dress and its high collar as he spoke? Mary blushed. Though perhaps there was some­thing not modest about the way he was looking at her. His eyes narrowed and roved about over her body until she felt his gaze had a weight to it, and a heat. His mouth below hung slightly open, his lips wet.

‘
Please
may we go?’

She turned to Ina. ‘Yes, go,’ she said. She put a hand up to her cheek.

The next exhibit was a large bone which was at first thought to be the thigh bone of the large humans mentioned in the Bible but was now known to be an animal’s. As Mary walked towards it she was conscious of the movements of her own bones: the way her hip bones swivelled in their sockets, the way her shoul­ders rotated as she moved, her wrists as she lifted her hands away from her sides.

‘Did people and dinosaurs get along together?’ asked Edith.

‘Some did, some didn’t,’ said Mr Wilton. ‘I dare say people weren’t too fond of the Tyrannosaurus rex.’

‘Certainly,’ said Mary. ‘But there is some new evidence to suggest—’

Before she could finish, Alice cut her off. ‘Why are dinosaurs extinct?’

‘Because God ordered it so,’ said Mr Wilton.

Survival of the fittest, thought Mary. Though of course that was not true, as Mr Wilton said, when applied to animals. But when applied to humans, to
her 
.  .  . The prettiest girls all married early and had two or more children. Except for the few who had died in childbirth. Perhaps they were meant to die, if God ordered it. But that seemed harsh, to leave children without mothers .  .  . Mary shook her head and tried to recapture her original thought:

She was unmarried. Therefore unfit.

‘But why would He do a thing like that?’ said Edith. She looked up at Mr Wilton, worried.

‘We don’t know the mind of God,’ he said. ‘But I imagine He wanted Mankind to be safe from dinosaurs.’

There was still time to put it right.

She turned to Mr Wilton. ‘So you are not a believer in this theory of Mr Lyell’s, that the earth developed slowly over millions of years?’

‘I am not.’

‘But he has some geological evidence, layers of rock .  .  .’ Mary stopped. She had read something about it but hadn’t understood all. She did not want to seem a fool.

‘The earth developed as it says in the Bible. Six thousand years is a very long time. That’s what I was taught and I don’t think my teacher, old Mr Scammell, would lie to his pupils. He was most definite on the matter. No, I dare say we won’t be hearing much more about the so-called Theory of Evolution! It is just not right – does not seem right and therefore cannot be. Thinking too hard leads to strange results.’

The Dean thought a great deal and was not happier for it, or healthier. Mary could not help thinking, though perhaps her type of thinking was not as dangerous, not being in Ancient Greek or somesuch. She thought about the same things often, running on their thousand legs down the same paths in her brain: the purpose of her life, the appearance of someone to save her, the possibility of marriage. She sometimes felt as if she had ants in her skull.

‘I quite agree! Mr Darwin and his acolytes ought to be sent somewhere far away so that they can stop poisoning the minds of the general population. And children!’

‘Quite, quite, Miss Prickett,’ said Mr Wilton, looking her over again.

Mary looked away, blushing. His low brow and broad shoul­ders, his hair that pushed out beneath his cuffs, all left an uncomfortable imprint on her retinas. She said with more force than usual: ‘I have never seen an ape give birth to a human, or heard of it. And nowhere else in nature does one animal turn into another.’

‘You have read up on it, I see,’ said Mr Wilton.

Mary nodded. There was a further thing: if Mr Darwin was right, there could not be a God, at least in the way that she understood Him. And there was most certainly a God, at the end of life, to divide the sheep from the goats. That was the purpose of a good life. Her struggle must, in the end, be acknowledged. Otherwise Mary could let her thoughts run on into the night, full of petty resentments and jealousies, and on certain occasions hatred. For it was so easy to hate! Sometimes she just had to walk down the street to see a man she hated for no more than the way his eyes flickered over her face and away again, or a woman stepping out of a carriage in a pair of calfskin boots, or a child being luxuriously embraced by its mother.

But she hacked these thoughts off at the stem, when she caught them, for fear that God might be listening. God knows everything, as her mother always said. He can see what you do alone in your room, He can see into your bed at night. Mary had the idea, when she was a child, that God would like her to sleep very straight in bed, with her legs and arms directly up and down. When she woke in the morning to find herself on her side and her limbs crooked, she always felt as if she had failed Him.

But she must try to be good, and try to make the children good, even if it was a struggle against human nature.

‘Perhaps you would like to come to my church?’ said Mr Wilton.

They had left the museum and were walking home. Mary squinted up at Tom Tower; it looked as if it had been pulled upwards by celestial fingers.

‘Your church?’

‘Yes, it is on the outskirts of Oxford. I could meet you here and we could go on together.’

‘Which church is it?’

‘A Christian church. God’s own church, I believe.’ Mr Wilton was walking quickly but his head was turned towards her and his eyebrows were raised. ‘I think you would find it enlighten­ing.’ He smiled. ‘In view of our recent conversation.’

Mary could see Mrs Chitterworth approaching from the opposite direction. She smiled back at him with a thrum high up in her chest. ‘Yes, Mr Wilton. I would be pleased to accompany you.’

‘You look exceedingly happy, Mr Wilton,’ said Mrs Chitterworth. ‘What has happened?’

Mr Wilton coloured. ‘Nothing. I mean – not nothing. We are .  .  .’ He trailed off.

Mrs Chitterworth cocked her head and shook her ringlets, like a spaniel with water in its ear.

‘We are just returning from the Science Museum,’ said Mary.

‘Oh, that place! Nothing in there of any interest, I’ll be bound. And these must be your charges.’ Mrs Chitterworth nodded at the children without seeing them. ‘But you have caught me on my way to the pharmacist; I have an inflammation of the eyelid. Do you see?’

‘It does look red,’ said Mary.

‘Have you seen Lady Tetbury at the Deanery? She has grown very thin, they say on account of unhappiness.’

‘I have not,’ said Mary. ‘Why is she unhappy?’

Mr Wilton shifted beside her.

‘They say on account of her husband.’ Mrs Chitterworth leaned closer. ‘I wouldn’t like to speculate on him. But they say he is never at home, always in London. Still. I dare say she has brought it on herself. Her home is not one you want to go into, by all accounts. Not well managed, and dreary. Who can blame him for leaving occasionally? But I must go on, Mary. I must get to the pharmacy, for relief. Good day to you, Mr Wilton, and to you, Miss Prickett. I am glad to see you out together.’

‘Friday next, then,’ said Mr Wilton, as they were near to the gates of Christ Church now. His bow to her was a tree trunk bending in half.