The Mistressclass

by Michèle Roberts

  Sometimes she appears to me in human shape, when she is no less removed from me. When I wake up I know it was only a dream, that I’m supposed to push it aside, as unimportant. Nothing to do with the business of the bright day. Yet while I’m in it the dream is the most real thing, and Emily too. Dreams are more true than daytime; in them I go down to a new country, one that I recognise is most surely my home, where I find all those who have vanished and left me; all those I love.

  Even in daytime, sometimes, I’ll suddenly find myself there.

  It begins with a queer physical feeling that creeps up on me. The skin on the top of my head starts to tighten and pucker up, closing like the fontanelle of a baby that’s just been born. The skin between my shoulder-blades similarly twitches and draws together, as though it has been loose and is now being tightened like strings. All my flesh is alive, dancing, as though stung with invisible pinpricks. My insides begin to turn over and over; I’m falling downhill; and I want to cry; and I want to make love; and my arms fly open searching for what’s not there. I dissolve, yet I’m also utterly present, tingling all over with life coursing through me; all these changes in me and in the atmosphere signal that something is up; there is some disturbance; don’t be afraid; but something or somebody is here even though you cannot see them; and all the time that fizzing feeling creeps about my back. Yes, like when I was a child lying in bed with Emily and she stroked me and whispered her truths. I want to cry and to come and I open my eyes and I see her.

  Ghost is not the right word. Or, at least, if it is not adequate, I should have to say why. Ghost is the word people use after a vision, to put it away at one remove from themselves, to deny the validity of their perception, that the experience described did happen. If I say I believe in ghosts you can shrug and smile and suggest I am superstitious and foolish. So I shan’t say I believe in ghosts so much as I believe in Emily. Incarnate, here, now, in some way I don’t understand. She’s not a remnant or a revenant, not an image of someone who’s absent, not the shadow of herself, not pale or see-through or otherwise unworldly. Yes: she comes to me now from somewhere else, but she is here; she is real; she is my sister; she has never left me; I know her and I could not possibly feel afraid when she comes. There is only joy.

  There is some humour, too, in these visitations. She puts on an appearance that will help me recognise her, in her changed being. She invokes those folk tales that used to enchant us when we were little. She’s not afraid of borrowing items of angels’ costume, of announcing herself with touches of gothic atmosphere. I think she does it to make me laugh. That’s another way to know it’s Emily—her silly jokes. Once she came to me on a shaft of sound, of music that was light, forming a silvery tightrope: her passage into this world. She arrived in the house. I heard a high, unearthly voice singing upstairs, and went to see what was the matter. I was pulled towards the source of the music, the light, by the quality of the singing. It was a haunting voice; a haunted voice. I sped up the stairs as though my slippers had wings, and found Emily in my bedroom. She was in her old white nightdress, barefoot, her hair undone flowing down her back. She was radiant and young, fifteen again. She was whole and unblemished and perfect and undamaged and she had come back from the dead to show me that.

  Right at the end she was a little sack of bones huddled on the sofa, curled up on her side, her head lolling, her two enormous eyes like holes burnt in paper. Her coughs rattled her fleshless frame. In between coughs Emily whispered how black I looked, seated against the light. I can’t see your face anymore, Char.

  After her death she returned to show me her face, in case I’d forgotten it. Alive with intelligence and humour. That smile that split her face; a child’s grin.

  She came to cheer me up, to tell me that she was all right now, that I was no longer to worry about her, that I should not hold on to my grieving as though to her body. I was to give up my sister and give up my weight of sorrow and return to the land of the living. I was to find another reason for going on. Grief was over and done with and buried and changed into this Emily who hovered in the sunlight in my bedroom and smiled at me.

  I obeyed her. I woke up alone and bereft but determined to do whatever had to be done next. That turned out to be marriage to Mr Nicholls.

  PART 8

  Grow up! Catherine yells at Vinny all through their adolescence. But Vinny clings on to certain childish habits. Even aged twenty-four she still doodles on pavements.

  You buy chalk in tens or twenties, like cigarettes, rootling for the blue and white cardboard packets on the stationery shelf in the newsagent’s. A fresh stick of chalk is smooth and cool, rolling between your fingers while you decide what to write. Soon your hands are smeary with white dust. Your sweat puts greasemarks on the chalk’s clean skin.

  Vinny buys coloured chalks too. Wiping her palms absentmindedly on her face she gives herself green cheeks, a blue moustache, as though she’s been to a clown workshop at a children’s festival. Only afterwards, in the ladies’ at the pub, does the mirror over the washbasin show her what she’s done.

  She keeps the chalks in her pocket, along with her keys, cash, handkerchief, notebook and pen, lip-salve. Women’s clothes don’t have proper pockets so she wears a man’s jacket; double-breasted; worn striped lining and plentiful inner pouches with turned and stitched lips. When she bought the jacket in Brick Lane she slid her hands into these neat pockets, fiddled into their corners, digging around to check for relics. She found ridges of woolly dust, a mother-of-pearl button, a threepenny bit. The jacket skims round her. Laden with her bits and pieces, it doesn’t bulge. It’s like taking your own cupboard out with you. You can pack it with paperback books and your lunchtime sandwiches and nothing shows.

  Vinny dons this roomy coat for her writing expeditions. She maps the city by treading across its pavements and writing on them where appropriate. In London the pavements seem grey until you study them, when you distinguish pale pink and pale green and cream. Pressure of weather and use makes them crack and tilt up, collecting rain. In the wet nights they shine, black reflectors, shimmer with oil rainbows.

  Sometimes workmen prise up the broken paving-slabs from their bed of sandy grit, hammer new ones flat into place. Sometimes they peel them back, underworld lids, revealing coils of bright electric stems that sprout forth like jack-in-the-boxes, tangling bouquets of red yellow blue green flowers. You’ll see the stooped back of a man sitting, patient and serious, indigo legs dangling, on the edge of a black pit, twiddling all the plastic wires like macramé. Knitting the city’s secret veins and arteries back together again.

  Fallen gravestones on other days the pavements seem to her, pressing down on the too lively dead to keep them in their place and stop them haunting passers-by in daylight. Underground, the coffins shunt about, breaking free from cemeteries, shooting the rapids of sewers, and their passengers only too keen to burst up in Nunhead or Kensal Rise for a taste of sunlight and the bitterness of traffic fumes on their rotted tongues.

  Sometimes, though, pavements are just blank surfaces for writing on, like sheets of paper or schoolroom slates.

  Outside certain houses in certain streets Vinny stops, stoops, and scrawls. A quotation, or the whole of a short poem; a name plus dates. The houses of famous writers are marked with blue plaques. So her services are not needed by Rimbaud and Verlaine in Mornington Crescent, by Mallarmé in South Kensington, by Doctor Johnson and Dickens in the City, by Defoe and Mary Wollstonecraft in Stoke Newington. She walks to these sites anyway. To pay her respects. Then progresses on her solo pilgrimage to other, unmarked shrines. Outside Jean Rhys’s temporary rented room in Elgin Crescent she chalks her testimony. She pursues Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson and Dorothy Sayers down shabby-genteel streets in Kensington and Pimlico. She paces Cornhill seeking traces of Charlotte Brontë arriving to confront her unsuspecting publishers who think she’s a man. She searches for the Chapter Coffeehouse, where Charlotte slept.

  Passers-by assu
me she is a hawker or a gypsy, leaving esoteric messages for her companions working parallel streets. They skirt her boot soles, splayed left hand, hunched dark back, and hulk past with their shopping bags and pulled toddlers. They can see she’s not one of those pavement artists able to reproduce the Mona Lisa or the Last Supper in pastels. Is she a vagrant? Mentally retarded? A madwoman? Dogs sniff at her then wander on. She writes in the flowing and legible script she learned at primary school. After a shower of rain her words will wash away.

  Dead people are Vinny’s companions. They line the bright world with necessary shadow; silvery grey. In their subtle way they remain part of the living, roving the streets as she does, packing into buses, jostling in the corners of shops. The dead love the living and don’t want to be parted from them. Or perhaps it’s envy, that we still have blood in our veins and can kiss each other. Look, murmur the dead: soon you’re going to end up like me. The land of the dead presses in on us from all sides. That was how the Anglo-Saxon writer saw it, too: life the brightness, noise and jollity of the great hall that the sparrow darts through so briefly; death the enormous surrounding darkness, the mystery from which the sparrow came and to which it must return.

  Each of us walks with a crowd of the dead at our backs, tugging them along like bunches of invisible balloons. Vinny welcomes their approach. She wants to be connected with them. She searches for them. They often congregate in derelict places where they can set up camp and not be disturbed. Boarded-up yards behind abandoned factories, Victorian school playgrounds awaiting conversion into the patios of luxury flats: in these pockets of older use tucked into the modern townscape the city swarms with ghosts.

  They fly in the sunlight like specks of dust. Layers of them hover in the air she breathes just outside garden gates. The hands of the dead carted scuttles of coal four flights of stairs up from that cellar whose silvery lid shines just in front of the porch. Smoothed up that wallpaper palimpsest. Dusted that gas-mantel. Set jellies in that larder.

  Dead writers are her way into the community of the dead in general. Dead writers, if she can track down the pavements over which they once trod, the beds in which they slept and made love, clarify and redefine her city, help her find her place among the living. By discovering their haunts she becomes an agent. She acts. The city becomes manageable, begins to make sense. She plants her own signposts around it, stringing together its parts into her own patterns. Everyone does that. Her parents did, while they were alive; before they died of cancer. First one, and then the other. Father. Then mother. Vinny was twenty-one, Catherine twenty-two when their mother died. Babes in the wood. Her parents had tried to scatter trails of white breadcrumbs through the urban forest for them to follow. But then they got lost and birds flew down and ate the crumbs. The sisters went on, hand in hand; got on with life. Nothing else to be done.

  Vinny doesn’t inscribe the kerbs outside the houses of living writers. Phantoms they may be for readers who never meet them, but nonetheless it’s mainly the unseen presences of the dead that fascinate. Written language, stored in books, let you travel backwards, through and beyond death. It let you stand in the presence of the person who made it. Perhaps five hundred years before.

  At secondary school, still in Catherine’s footsteps, she learned that great literature lasted forever, because of the eternal verities it enshrined about the human condition, and thus conferred immortality on the writer. The book, in this version, became a substitute for the body. Great writers died and their bodies decayed but their books lived forever.

  Vinny didn’t see it that way. She saw simply the words. This poem was made in the seventeenth century. The structure of its grammar, twist of metaphors, spelling, cannot be faked up by a later time. It is utterly authentic. It is itself. In its presence I am therefore also in the presence of its making. When I read it I am living in the seventeenth century, witnessing its formation. Reading is a form of time travel. Reading is a form of resurrection, a past time resurrected as the reading of the poem is made. There is no death in this sense. No death of language. Language goes on, despite death, the skein that binds the generations, making itself new between the life and death of every poet. Language is as certain as death but triumphs over it.

  So you didn’t need religion. What you needed was poetry. Immortality was embodied inside language itself, did not exist separately from it.

  This could only happen with poetry she considered good. Bad poems’ language might have weathered down over a couple of centuries to become intriguing or quaint, but the poem remained a fossil, merely an image of something once alive. Most criticism was fossil-like, too. Only the very best survived like a good poem. Because—why? Because the language of criticism depended on theories that wore out as they became unfashionable and were replaced. Whereas the language of poetry and novels was hammered out of something else; metaphor; purer and sparer. Like bones and blood. Clothes changed from generation to generation, but flesh was flesh. And poems were like bodies. Bodies with souls. Language was the soul? Poetry was the soul? That part of us which went on and did not die. So heaven was literature.

  When she wasn’t working at her part-time research job for a children’s charity Vinny prowled London. She inscribed the London pavements as a way of paying homage to writers London had sheltered, writers she admired and whom she considered undervalued. Fetishistic perhaps but she didn’t care. She wanted to draw attention to these inspiring writers. Other people wrote newspaper articles on such subjects. She recorded the writers who wrote beautiful books and flitted, poverty-stricken, debt-ridden, escapees from lovers or landladies, from one cheap let to another. She pointed to them with chalk arrows. With chalk nails she banged up melting and dissipating plaques.

  When she told Catherine she wanted to do this outside Adam’s house, that he was a living writer aged twenty-six whom she had actually met, her sister remarked: sounds like you’re joining the real world at last.

  Vinny encountered Adam first of all in a bookshop.

  She flagged the meeting in her diary. Four o’clock on 30 November 1973. The eve of All Souls’. Vinny Delamare, aged twenty-four, entered Colet’s bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. For the purpose of browsing. She wanted something to read over a cup of coffee in Maison Bertaud while she waited for Catherine, whose teaching job often kept her late.

  She saw herself in the shop assistant’s assessing gaze. She was wearing blue platforms with puckered elasticated ankle straps, a skimpy cheesecloth smock, flared embroidered loons with buttoned fly, a man’s dinner jacket. Short hair, one diamanté stud earring and one pearl, no makeup. Face and hands powdered with white chalk. Was she a bit of street theatre? Her coat obviously had large pockets. She could be a shop-lifter, so at first the assistant kept an eye on her, then lost interest, and swivelled back to her till.

  Vinny’s method was to approach the table of new publications, close her eyes, pick at random.

  She opened her eyes. Looked down at her hand. The Angel in the Cupboard. A novel by Adam Shepherd. The book was a pleasure to hold and opened easily. Thick laid paper, cream-coloured. Roman typeface, twelve-point. She dived in. Standing by the table in the centre of the shop, leaning on it with one hand, holding the book up in front of her with the other. Then, as it drew her into itself, she walked away into one of the alcoves between the stands of bookshelves and propped her shoulders against the wall.

  The world tilted she lurched missed her footing almost fell. A great silence everything was stilled she held her breath outside changed place with inside. With one part of her mind she knew she was standing in a cold damp bookshop in Charing Cross Road, the ribbed gas fire sputtering yellow and blue, two other customers braying haw-haw at each other, but none of that mattered, and her surroundings now began to recede because in front of her were these words curved and black like a wrought-iron screen and now she had slipped through and was inside.

  First the world cracked open and tossed itself up into the air in bits, then recomposed its
elf fell back into shape after that great breaking and put itself back together on the page as this sentence. Everything every single word was now in its right place; she could feel that in her own flesh, the rightness of it; she could see how the world and her body were one, held so lightly, breathed into being; how fragile and yet how solid; she could see each word and their connections, the whole and the parts. It was a huge consolation: the world was mended and she herself too; everything had been reshaped and she along with it; everything was in order again; a new order; this was beauty, this pattern never seen before, shining and perfect; it lived and breathed and was whole; it was so right she wanted to fall down to cry and laugh to explode.

  She was yawning and the shop was closing and so she had to come out of her dazed and blissful state because the assistant was turning out the fire and the lights and shooing out the customers with irritated cries. All of them, not just Vinny, lurched out into the street like lovers reluctant to part. No paper bag for her book. She clutched it in her ungloved hands, along with the flyer advertising Adam’s forthcoming reading, and went to Maison Bertaud. She ordered a cup of coffee. Opened the book again.

  Catherine was practical when she arrived, untwirling her long stripy scarf and throwing her Greek shoulder-bag onto the floor under the Formica-topped table.

  —Go to the reading. It’s obvious. I’ll come with you if you like.

  —No thanks. I’ll go on my own.

  * * *

  In this photograph Vinny looks younger than twenty-four. Big eyes, wide mouth, cropped hair sticking up in tufts. Flawless skin. Lips pinched shut and forbidden to smile. She’s trying to seem cool but failing. That intense, wavering look of someone who’s stoned. She wears a sleeveless sequined waistcoat over flared blue jeans and her blue platform heels. Brown slender arms. Roll-up balanced between her fingers. No, it must be a joint. She leans back on a purple floor cushion, which is propped against the side of a low double bed. Pelvis tilted at the ceiling, long legs crooked up splayed out open in front of her, displaying her neat denim crotch.