The Mistressclass

by Michèle Roberts

  Have mercy, Monsieur. I dare not ask you for what I want. Yet you know it without my uttering a word. You read my begging thoughts, my pleading eyes, as expertly as you read your students’ essays.

  Correct me, chastise me, but don’t blot me out completely. Show me how to do better next time.

  Now I’ll burn this.

  Ever your

  Charlotte

  PART 4

  Reader, I married him.

  Vinny let Jane Eyre fall closed, the hardback cover coming down like a lid, and folded her hands across it. The copy she’d had since early adolescence, pages yellowing and dog-eared, end-papers spotted and foxed; given to her by her mother forty years before.

  Box of words balanced on her stomach. She hugged the novel to her. She had been inside it, like Jonah swallowed by the whale in one convulsive gulp, but now held it separate from her. Two whales. Fin touching fin, swimming together in the sea of story. The book was a casing for something alive, made of the same stuff as herself. Entering it was stripping off to run into the water, returning to her true element. Words surrounding her, buoying her up.

  She knew Jane Eyre almost by heart. Reading it was effortless, like floating rocked in salt waves just off a boulder-strewn coast. Opening the novel you kicked out through curling foam as the shingle dropped away and the blue-green depths opened up beneath you; then you turned onto your back and let the current carry you where it would. Also, reading Jane Eyre was like reaching land. Being tipped out from turquoise sea; beached; stumbling up a slope of silver-white sand towards a fringe of trees to find what lay beyond. Inhabiting a new country. Compelling; drawing you in. You vanished; dissolved. No ego left. That was the rapture: the self no longer existed. You were gone.

  If you thought about reading you couldn’t do it. The words ceased to be transparent, a web of little black stars, black shining connections, but stood up like metal lines of fences, knots of barbed wire, forbidding entry. What a bizarre activity, when you considered it: transformative like an act of magic, the brain rapidly translating arcane symbols into sounds and signs that it understood. A work of resurrection. Something flat and seemingly dead stood up and waved and sang. You could only read if you forgot you had a body located in time and space, if you allowed yourself to become transported. To that new place where you had never been before. A land of bliss. Yet at the same time it was the body that responded, shuddering all over at the pleasure given by the prose.

  Reading was about being carried away. Just like falling in love for the first time all those years ago. Snatched up and taken elsewhere, like Persephone rapt by the king of the underworld; overpowered and carried off. But those philosophers she’d read in the late seventies had put it the wrong way. They said the pleasure of reading was like coming; a sexual thrill. But Vinny thought it could be the other way round: the pleasures of sex could trail the pleasures of reading. She’d loved reading way before she ever had sex. Reading had been the primary rapture, the primary glow. Did that make her neurotic? That psychiatrist she’d had to see, all those years ago, when she was trying to get her abortion, would have thought so. He suggested Vinny had trouble engaging with what he called real life. Vinny loved the fantasy world too much, he said. Writing was all very well but. What was she doing, a healthy young woman in her mid-twenties, asking to abort a child? She should marry the father and get on with her life. She should be ashamed of herself.

  Vinny rolled a joint, lit it, and inhaled. Heady aromatic rush. She let out her breath in a sigh. Rapture of sex rapture of reading rapture of drugs. She leaned back. The room was warm. It smelt of dope and of the sprays of lilac she had stolen and brought home with her last night. Coming back late, walking slowly in the freshness after the spring rain, half tipsy, she had smelt the lilac blossoms in the darkness, the invisible tree heavy with sweetness, its full branches arching over evergreen hedges, catching her hair, touching her forehead as she stopped and looked up.

  Loose pearls of water tilted down like blessings. A shower of dewy drops. She drank in the heady smell. Glimmer of whiteness. Irresistible. She reached out her hands and broke off the jigging branches, jerking more wetness onto her face. She encircled the flowers with her arms, tenderly and greedily, their cool cones of curled petals, then walked home holding them. Steady and stately, cradling her bouquet. Like a bride. Now the long sprays of lilac, green and white, filled her room with their powerful scent. Like the wafts of perfume drifting through the garden of Thornfield on that Midsummer’s Eve; the walled, enclosed garden; paradise by moonlight; when Mr Rochester finally tells Jane he loves her.

  Her mother had had little sympathy with Vinny’s love of novels. She thought that reading was dangerous because it stirred you up and encouraged you to imagine things. All manner of falsity and wickedness. The imagination was a term her mother used to designate everything that was not true and that therefore caused trouble. Books made Vinny cry. They gave her ideas. Sometimes they gave her nightmares. The madwoman in the attic certainly had, first time around. If her mother caught Vinny reading in the afternoons at weekends, when all sensible children like Catherine ran about playing, she would snatch the book from her younger daughter’s hands and pack her off outside. The nuns at school also thought books were dangerous, but for different reasons. Books brought you too much pleasure, they hinted, especially if you lay reading them on your bed before lunch. Books had to be measured out in doses, for education, but swig too deep in secret and their delicious nectar clouded your mind and corrupted your soul. Books were sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll. The nuns were at one with the philosophers about that. It’s a mercy, Vinny thought, that between Mumma and the nuns I ever got any education at all. But, thanks to all those books she had devoured, she had got into university easily, no problem. There, you could lie in bed all day reading and call it work.

  She took a long toke of her joint. That was the other reward of reading. Books were inexhaustible. You ate them and drank them and, mysteriously, they renewed themselves. Magic bread and wine, like Holy Communion; oases in the desert; fountains that never ran dry.

  She yawned. She was stretched out in the big armchair she had hauled in, up five flights of stairs, off the skip down the road. Her left foot was planted on the floor and her right leg slung over the arm, green leather mule tilting off her toes and swinging, just far enough that it did not fall off. The armchair was wide and deep, its sagging springs nailed back into place under two strips of wood. Four nails, four whacks with a hammer. She’d covered the chair with a couple of old curtains from a jumble sale, pinning on the worn blue and green chintz with heavy drawing-pins. She’d done two cushions to match.

  The council flat was low-ceilinged and poky, but Vinny didn’t care. The triumph was to have got a flat at all. Single people were not a priority on the waiting-list. It had taken ten years of queuing, persuading, complaining, haranguing, arguing. Finally, fifteen years ago, she’d done it. She’d acquired her own scarlet front door on the fifth floor. Riches. She even had a small metal-sided balcony she’d turned into a garden in the sky. A morning-glory, just in bud, rose from a pot and wreathed along the railings. Sweetpeas and clematis hooked green tendrils up the trellis on the back wall. The kitchen window-sill bore pots of herbs, a trough of geraniums. There was room for two canvas chairs, if she sat knee to knee with guests. The noise of cars seemed far away, muted. You could look down over Seven Sisters Road or you could look up and watch aeroplanes go by.

  Vinny had painted the walls of her two rooms turquoise and lime-green. Her bedroom was just big enough to hold a double bed, shelves for clothes and books. In the small sitting-room the armchair was her important place, because it was where she sat to do her reading and writing. You could curl up in it, or perch in it cross-legged. You could wheel it about, to face the window, or to approach the rickety little bamboo table, another skip treasure, where she kept her stash tin, cigarettes, and current pile of books. In the mornings she got up early, made coffee and toast in
the galley kitchen, then returned to her armchair, to lounge, balancing her cup and saucer, sipping coffee and gazing out at the morning sky in the intervals of reading, or reworking a poem. A good day began that way, with enough time to slide from sleep to a silent breakfast, hunched and intent, beginning a new chapter of her book or a new piece of writing. After concentrating for an hour she was ready to go out to work. Poets had to have day jobs. Vinny took whatever she could find. She had enjoyed her part-time residency in the local hospice in which Robert had died. Perhaps it was in acknowledgement of that death, she thought, that she had made the effigy.

  No time to wonder about that now. Five o’clock in the afternoon. She shook off her slippers and swung herself up out of the chair. The party began at eight. If the rain held off, she could walk there, rather than undertake the tortuous journey by bus and tube.

  Adam and Catherine had moved months ago to Fleet Halt, between Holloway Road and Tufnell Park tube. Vinny had never yet visited them there. She’d looked up the street in the A–Z. A district, so close to her own, she didn’t know well. A separate village. Though she’d strolled around it last night, on a whim, just to get a taste of it, in anticipation of arriving there the following day. Wanting to feel in control of the unknown. Promising herself she’d just dart through. Certainly she wouldn’t go near their house. Though the address was imprinted on her memory. But she hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d slowed down then circled back, retracing her steps along the street to stare at Adam’s new home, a late-eighteenth-century cottage, small and low, one of several in a row squashed in between two mid-Victorian terraces.

  She had let herself walk past the house just once, last night; she’d paused by the gate, summoned by the scent of the flowering lilac; she’d stolen a branch or two; then she’d darted away, almost running, in case Catherine came to the uncurtained window and spotted her. This morning, when she’d paused outside the Odeon on Holloway Road to check the new programme, she’d seen her sister go into the florist’s shop, watched her choose an armful of flowers. Interesting, to study someone you knew well, when they weren’t aware of you. Not spying, exactly. Vinny told herself she preferred to be the one who looked rather than the one who was looked at, that was all. And she knew so little about Catherine’s life now. She had been waiting a long time for an invitation to visit Adam and Catherine in Robert’s house, and at last it had come. She wanted to see what her sister would be like in that place. Usually they met in bars, for a quick drink. Nothing too intimate. Likewise, she went to an occasional exhibition with Adam. She rarely saw the two of them together. Threesomes were too difficult. Too painful. She wanted to go to their party but she felt nervous at the prospect. The dope began to ease through, and calmed her.

  She rummaged through the clothes hung on the back of her bedroom door. She had hoarded three 1940s crêpe-de-Chine frocks bought from jumble sales in the late sixties; slithery; cut on the bias. She chose one in dark red. Knee-length, with square shoulders, a V-neck, elbow-length sleeves, and beading on the yoke. She put on sheer stockings, black wedge heels.

  The walk from Seven Sisters Road and through Fleet Halt seemed endless tonight. Houses repeated and repeated, flashed up and past, made you feel you were dancing on the spot under strobe-lights. The weather changed while Vinny was en route, grew newly cold and rainy. She walked as fast as she dared in her rigid heels. Underfoot, cracked, uneven pavements, grouted with black tufts of weeds, tilted to trip her up. She kept an eye out for the dog turds toppled and smeared by the feet of previous passers-by. One anonymous row of bow-fronted façades gave way to another, front gardens dark and bedraggled in the rain. She bent her head against the wet and struggled on, the wind whipping at her clothes.

  Number four was in the centre of the row of cottages, which were set back from the narrow street behind a row of tall black railings. Pushing open the gate, walking past the denuded lilac tree, up the flagged path, Vinny saw what she had not noticed last night: the long crack running up the brick front. Adam was working as a builder now. So why didn’t he mend his house?

  Catherine opened the front door. Colour and light and music rushed out from behind her. Vinny blinked. Her tall sister looked like the angel with the flaming sword guarding the entry to Paradise. She stood haloed in a gold glow, one hand on the doorknob. Then she smiled, and became human again.

  —What a filthy night, Catherine cried: you must be soaked.

  Vinny stumbled in. The tiny hall smelt clean and flowery. She halted, aware of mud and grit from outside brought in tracked across the pale carpet, her sodden jacket leaking. She peeped again at her sister. Catherine’s long, red-gold hair framed her pale, oval face. She looked invincible. Like a warrior princess in her knee-length scarlet silk shift, which showed off her slender legs.

  They kissed each other gently, putting their hands on each other’s waists, brushing cheeks. Catherine was very slim. Scant flesh on her. Vinny felt she clutched a handful of bones.

  —You’ve had your hair done, she said: you look lovely.

  —So do you, Catherine said: that colour really suits you.

  They eyed one another, half smiling. Ritual skirmish of swords over with. Bows and flourishes exchanged.

  —Why didn’t you tell me you were still in town? Catherine asked: why didn’t you go straight off to France, as you said you were going to?

  —There was this art competition I decided to enter, Vinny said: but then I lost my entry. It got stolen.

  She wanted to tell Catherine about making the effigy, but she had chosen the wrong moment. Catherine was not interested. She interrupted.

  —Come and leave your jacket, there are lots of towels if you want to dry your hair, in here, look.

  Catherine’s voice and hand whirled her into a cloakroom furnished with a washstand and dressing-table. Square gilt-framed mirror tipping forwards. Chintz-covered chair. Dark crimson walls thick with pictures.

  —Then when you’re ready come and join us through here and get a drink, Catherine went on: there’s brushes and combs there. Help yourself to anything you need.

  She whisked off, was gone. Vinny shook off her jacket and laid it on a heap of others, on the armchair. Then, realising how wet it was, she picked it up again and draped it across the sink. The room smelt of damp coats. Like the cloakroom at school, that dark, inviting place where you could hide on freezing November afternoons, pretending to have bad period pains in order to skip hockey. Their mother had always provided the requisite note. She had chosen an institution run by nuns because she thought that meant a better education, but she did not force her daughters to do sport they disliked. Oh, I do sympathise, darling. I remember at my grammar school we had to play hockey and netball in awful grey-flannel divided skirts. What Vinny remembered was not the game itself but the wind shaking the tops of the black elms, the red braid tied across her yellow Aertex shirt, her raw purple knees, her hurting breath on the way home, the studded boots clogged with mud, which she scraped clean outside the kitchen door, sitting on the step.

  Robert’s place did not look like a grey-flannel and hockey household. The paintings were pastiches of Matisse: smiling women in dressing-gowns reclining on chaise-longues. The cake of carnation soap smelt spicy and expensive. Even the clutter seemed festive. Briefcases and open carrier-bags of books were wedged together on the parquet floor. Umbrellas had been stuck in a bucket. Boots and shoes had been flung down here and there, lolled about in mismatched pairs.

  Vinny took a fluffy blue towel from the pile on a little table and applied it to her face. She squirted on some eau-de-toilette from a bottle on the washstand and tweaked her hair into place.

  She breathed deeply, to calm herself. Then she went back into the hall, plunging down it away from the front door, towards the back of the house and the party.

  Originally the little house must have had two small rooms on the ground floor. The tiny hall and cloakroom had taken a slice off the front one, leaving the back one wider. The divid
ing wall had been knocked down, an archway built in its place. The room swung like a golden bell, tonguing out laughter, conversation, music, cigarette smoke. Vinny shimmied into it, around the edges of it, as though she were dancing. Floating in this pink-golden tent suspended between long windows black with rain; watching Catherine swivel past with a bottle under each arm, her white wrists encircled by gold bangles. That shiny badge on her left hand: gold wedding-ring. Firelight, glittering from the iron basket of burning logs in the white marble fireplace, reached out to the pale yellow wooden floor strewn with salmon rugs, to the lace blinds and the cream and white striped curtains, tied back with white cords finished with gold tassels, and was reflected in the mirror hung opposite. Still-lifes of fruit and flowers in gilt frames jostled each other on the pale pink satiny walls. Catherine had told her she’d done the place up. You should have seen it, Vin. A terrible tip. The refurbishment was opulent, even gaudy, Vinny thought. Like a boudoir. What on earth did Adam make of it?

  Her eyes raked back and forth like spotlights, found Adam on the far side of the crowd. He stood out, just as he always had, as though he glowed in the dark and was eight feet tall. She began to inch towards him. He was carrying a tray of glasses and bottles and she needed a drink.

  Catherine, hardly turning her head, watched Vinny wriggle through the pack of people, and smiled. Not very subtle, her little sister. Not just pretty, but determined too. Ferocious when necessary. That little one could bite. And I can bite back, Catherine thought. They might both be turned fifty but inside they were still teenagers, jostling and pushing, the older one forever chivvying the younger, the younger one forever trying to overtake the elder. As children they contained their struggles by playing at being dogs. Trotting and gambolling. Apparently casual. Ready to snap into snarling and pouncing; worrying their prey. Dogs make secret paths through gardens, run on hidden routes. Whistling through the grass, noses down, hunting. Next day you spot their flattened track, narrow, between the seed-laden stalks. Catherine was like that tonight. She followed her own tunnel between groups of her friends, clusters of her teaching colleagues, a scattering of neighbours. She was disguised as a good hostess going where she was needed, offering her guests canapés, topping up their glasses of wine, but she was scenting as keenly as any hound. One eye on Vinny and Adam. Her run took her back and forth near the door to the hall and so to the front door. Every so often she paused, ears pricked, alert and listening. When the bell sounded she could ease out of the crowd and go promptly to answer it.