The Mistressclass

by Michèle Roberts

  Madame Heger gave Emily and me cubicles next to one another, at the far end. If I awoke in the night I listened for my sister’s breathing close to mine. I knew immediately if she had left her bed and gone wandering. The air sagged empty. I would pull on my dressing-gown, thrust my feet into slippers, and pursue her into the dark. She might come to harm. The dormitory door creaked open under my fearful hand. I fled softly down the shadowy corridor, in and out of shafts of moonlight piercing the uncurtained windows, my felt soles sliding on the tiled floor. She might be in the classroom, hunting for a book, or strolling in the oratory, flicking her fingernail over the carved backs of prie-dieux, or in the kitchen, foraging in the larder for leftover supper scraps. If I found her I could join her. That was her rule for that game. Once, we climbed out of a skylight onto the flat edge of the roof, perched swinging our legs above the gutters, shared filched slices of redcurrant tart. Emily liked to pretend, sometimes, that we were still ten years old. Why not? Girls and boys come out to play the moon doth shine as bright as day.

  We stole extra time for ourselves to persuade each other that we were somehow special, that we did matter. Too many girls in that school, uniform in drab dark dresses and white collars, like nuns, and we wanted to stand out, for one another at least. I depended upon Emily to look back at me and remind me that I was myself. This was a burden for her, I daresay. I didn’t let myself imagine that it was me she was escaping at night; that, in her turn, she needed to feel utterly free, even of me.

  The other pupils saw us as the spoilt foreign girls. You had a little troupe of favourites who clustered adoringly around your estrade after class, hung about in doorways to watch you pass, blushed and turned away, giggling, when you caught their gaze. You did distinguish us among those nincompoops, Monsieur. To Emily you remarked that she might make a great navigator, and to me you indicated that I had a certain facility for storytelling. Once I’d learned to control my over-exuberant style, to prune ruthlessly, to keep my imagination checked within bounds.

  Madame Heger watched all the schoolgirl simperings and oglings indulgently. It was she whom you went to bed with every night, after all. She could afford to indulge your need for favourites and flatterers; your need to flirt. She approved of us too; at the beginning, anyway. Odd little English students in their ugly, outlandish clothes. Charlotte’s accent is really improving, she would declare. And Emily shows a most pleasing willingness to learn.

  But then there began a period when I could not find Emily at night at all. She vanished from the dormitory in the few moments it took me to feel her absence and waken properly. She disappeared into the shadows. I hunted her in vain. I suppose I clung to her too much. She needed to shake me off. She must have felt she had to be brutal or she would never have had a moment to herself. In the morning she’d watch me through a slit in the bed-hangings, out of the corner of her eye, enjoying her triumph. Silly old Char. You can’t catch me.

  I tracked her down by imagining where I would most like to go myself. The answer was obvious.

  That house was a complete world; an entire geography. It was divided in two. One half was dark, and the other light. One half was plainly furnished. The other boasted vases of flowers, pictures in gilt frames, velvet cushions, sofas. Softness and glitter and perfumes belonged to your half of the house, Monsieur. All Madame Heger’s taste, which Emily and I despised as showy and flash. Everything of hers was decorated, wrapped in lace, hung with tassels. We preferred your study, which we had peeped at on our first day, exploring the place, before we learned about the dividing line, beyond which we must not go.

  The study was your sanctum and bolt-hole, because it was your library. You had an entire roomful of books all to yourself. New ones, bought from the bookseller two streets away, stacked in piles on the table, smelling freshly of ink and leather, the pages uncut, awaiting your paper-knife to slice them apart and reveal their contents. Not schoolbooks such as we had to be content with, inky and battered, covered in fresh coats of brown paper at the start of every term, passed on from pupil to pupil then collected back in. Your books, neatly bound in half-calf, titles in gold leaf stamped on the spines, and your name flowingly inscribed on the flyleaf, belonged to you and no-one else.

  Your study was scented with your cigars, with your pipe tobacco. A rich smell that curled into one’s heart and stomach. Intoxicating as the warm smell of earth in spring. I loved your smell.

  From bed to book. From dormitory to library. That was Emily’s preferred trajectory. And then mine too. I crept after her. I listened outside your door and heard your two voices plaiting happily together. You didn’t always go to bed at the same time as Madame Heger. Sometimes you sat up late, by yourself, reading. You allowed Emily in, pretending she was still a child, just a pupil who couldn’t sleep, a homesick girl, far away from her family, in need of comfort and reassurance, some words of advice. And then, since you discovered what a clever girl she was, how intelligent, how talented at translation and composition, you began to take pleasure in talking to her. You allowed her to stay up longer each time. You let her curl up in the armchair opposite you, bare feet tucked under a cushion, and stare at you with her big eyes, and talk to you of books. While I shivered in the passageway outside and clenched my fists until the nails dug into the palms of my hands.

  That’s how I knew I wasn’t dreaming. Not making it all up. Waking in the morning and seeing the red dents and scratches on my hands.

  PART 10

  When she got back from her summer holiday Vinny was broke. Her former job at the charity had finished. Dully she went out and got another one. Practical problems could supersede emotional ones. When she remembered, she winced, then felt raw, untouchable, as though her arms had been torn off. Her stomach seemed to have been torn out too. She couldn’t eat; she drank and smoked instead. She supposed she was angry with Adam and Catherine, who had stayed on in France, but habits of love died hard; she missed them as well. They were the ones who knew her best. She ached for their comfort; as though, having punched a hole in her, they could mend her too. She had brought back with her some postcards of Loire valley châteaux, since she had found none of Sainte-Madeleine in the local tabac, and she imagined writing them one. Beautiful weather—having a terrible time—think my heart is broken—wish I weren’t here—love and kisses. That was it: she wanted them to feel guilty. Anger was too much to cope with just now. She felt it settling on her skin like rust.

  In London you could vanish among the other walking wounded on the street. Vinny sat for hours in her local at Mile End, crouched over glasses of Guinness. She reread Jane Eyre, comforted because Jane was so fierce. Cast out from belonging anywhere, a homeless wanderer who had to beg for food and sleep rough, she claimed the moon for mother and fought to survive. Turning the pages, Vinny licked creamy froth off her lips. She always drank pints, defying the barman, who thought them unladylike. Vinny compounded the insult by smoking roll-ups and not smiling. John the barman considered her, unmade-up, wearing scruffy clothes and drinking alone without a male chaperon, to be a supercilious middle-class show-off, probably a dyke. The women who drank in his pub always looked nice, because it was a treat to get out and they dressed accordingly, and they were accompanied by their husbands or boyfriends. They could be placed as decent; slotted in as good. Unlikely to kick up rows or fuss when men teased them; able to give as good as they got; of course that made them preferable as customers. He knew them all and had their respect. But since Vinny had got to know some of these women regulars, and was tolerated by them, John was forced to put up with her. He watched sardonically when, assuming Vinny was very poor, they shyly presented her with items of their daughters’ cast-off clothes, tactfully wrapped up in brown-paper parcels.

  Early Sunday lunchtimes were her favourite: the emptiness and quiet; the door of the public bar propped open letting in the light; the planked floor, newly scoured, smelling of soap. Her drink finished, Vinny would get on her bike, which she had left chained to the r
ailings outside, and go for a ride along the canal out towards Hackney Marshes. The distant tower blocks, sparkling in the sun, looked like giant batteries. She wheeled over muddy sand, past clumps of wild Michaelmas daisies and rosebay willowherb in prodigal flower. The abandoned factories looked very white. The canal smelt of weed and rot and petrol. Something saltier, too, which made you feel the river was nearby, and suggested the memory of the sea, which Vinny had crossed by herself, coming back, fleeing to this inner-city landscape which let you pull itself over your head like a thick scarf. Green images of the French countryside receded, streaks of paint on a distant brick wall.

  In their place came memories. She was parted from her childhood shared with Catherine; across a sea of pain. When she called for her sister a mocking voice replied. Catherine shortening her name from Delphine to Finny. Then Vinny. Then, sometimes, Vin. Vin de table, Catherine labelled her: Vin ordinaire. Only Vinny was allowed to call her elder sister Cath. She tracked her through school, borrowed her green eye-shadow without asking, tried on her stiletto heels. Stop copying me, Catherine complained, but Vinny copied everything that Catherine did, from buying jeans that zipped up at the front and not at the side to insisting on letting her hair grow and putting it in rollers at night. A Formica-clad salon in Stanmore was where her mother had taken Catherine and herself for haircuts, all through their adolescence. An old Polish man with a grey, exquisitely mounded coiffure. Mr Lecky, that was it. Could that have really been his name? Perhaps he’d changed it, in order to fit in. He was a Catholic, which was why they went to him. He wore a hip-length grey nylon jacket, from whose breast-pocket poked a pair of scissors, a grey comb. He smelt of sweet aftershave, which clashed with the scent of hairspray. He gave them savage short cuts with square fringes and flirted with their mother. Pink-cheeked, she lapped up his compliments. The two girls wriggled and scowled. At the age of sixteen Catherine had rebelled against Mr Lecky and insisted on growing her hair. He was permitted to shave half an inch off the ends twice a year; no more. Vinny had rapidly followed suit, to Catherine’s disgust. Then in her early twenties Vinny went out and got a crew-cut. She’d been the first to rebel. She was also the first to get pregnant and the first to have an abortion. The abortion clinic was in Stanmore, not far from Mr Lecky’s shop. Did he know there was an abortion clinic close by? Presumably not. Mr Lecky’s scissors could stab Catherine in the belly, the heart. Would Catherine have a child with Adam? Vinny thought so. She didn’t tell either of them about her abortion. There was no point.

  On the evening of her return from the clinic she went to the pub and drank whisky. At home, sodden with drink, she slumped into sleep. She dreamed she was a library housing many books printed in invisible ink; stories of women that nobody wanted to read. The library would have to be burned down. Vinny was the arsonist. She set fire to herself and smelt her flesh begin to roast; greasy, and blackening. She heard it sizzle.

  PART 11

  You don’t know the true nature of my departure, Monsieur. That’s because you never bothered to find out.

  You don’t know what goes on when your back is turned; when you go away. You imagine, I daresay, that the rituals of domestic life continue as normal: Monsieur’s shirts must be washed and pressed, his boots blacked, his bookshelves dusted; fair copies of his manuscripts made; against his return. The house revolves; stops; revolves again. The music-box is wound up and plays. The pigeons coo in the allées in the garden. The cabbages in the vegetable plot grow in the straightest possible lines.

  Of course you like to get out of the house and enjoy a little freedom, a little wildness, from time to time. Every so often you grow bored with ruling over fifty adoring students, a sedate compliant wife, your well-behaved children. It’s too easy to command their devotion, their admiration; just as it was too easy to command mine. A man needs change; a little salt instead of this diet of sweetmeats. Off you hop for fresh stimulus elsewhere and who can blame you? Too much worship drives a man mad. You need new battles to fight; new territories to conquer. New disciples to impress.

  How bitter you have grown, Charlotte, I hear you say. Certainly I have, Monsieur. I have lost any trace of sweetness I once had. It melted away with too much crying and I’m all the better for it: scrubbed clean of sentimental hope; rinsed of delusion.

  She waits, my dear Monsieur, that lovely wife of yours, until you’re absent for several days, away on a lecture tour. Then she seizes me. When you return, she’ll say that a telegram arrived, summoning me urgently home to England. I’ve gone. I left you my best regards, my thanks for your many kindnesses, and said goodbye. When, later, a letter fails to come from Haworth, thanking you again for all you did for me, she’ll shrug. Mal-élevée. I always said so, mon cher Constantin.

  I’ll die here and you’ll never know. She has dragged me from my books, whirled me downstairs, and locked me up in the back cellar. Screaming and kicking; but I’ve been overpowered. She stands in the place of a mother to me, she hisses, and so she has the right to inflict this punishment.

  My prison is a whitewashed cube, lit by a tiny barred window high up in the far wall. I sit in the centre of it, wrists crossed behind my back, my arms and legs tied by strips of bandage to the heavy white chair, gilded and ornate, whose claw feet sink into the earth floor.

  It hurts to breathe. Air like snow crystals scrapes my skin. I’m wearing only a petticoat; I’m barefoot; the cold, striking my goosepimpled flesh, turns it blue. My toes can’t curl up and away because I’m trussed by the ankles. Once, the cold was only outside me. Fool: I stretched out my arms to clasp it. I stuck and burned. Like trying to embrace a block of ice. Now the cold has got inside me. Ice vapour wraps me in a shawl of frost.

  How long since I last ate? Time is a blank white corridor. I ricochet down it banging against the walls; then back again. The gaps between meals are so long I’m stupid with hunger; can’t even imagine anymore what food tastes like. What is food? Something I’m not allowed to have.

  Famished longing scours me out, sticks my belly against my spine. A thousand little knives, tips pointed and sharp, jab into my stomach, over and over again. Sometimes they catch, and twist, turning around in the bloodied slits they’ve made, wounds like little mouths screaming in harmony.

  Occasionally the door at the top of the stairs opens, and Madame Heger appears, treads down with a tray, shovels a bowl of pap into me, departs. I’m not in control of this feeding; the spoon bangs at my teeth, dives into my mouth too far; I choke and dribble. I gobble at the food and I’m afraid I’ll gag on it and I’ll never swallow fast enough before it is withdrawn, leaving me still starving.

  I imagine biting through the window glass, in order to shout for help, and my mouth filling with blood. I imagine biting off my hands and feet in order to free myself from the chair. I imagine gnawing at my own breast to feed myself, at my own entrails. Hurting myself enough so that I’ll die and put an end to it.

  But she doesn’t want me dead quite yet. First of all she has a few lessons to teach me. Anger does not exist in her neat little house. So she pours hers into me; I belong outside; I’m her rubbish, to be chucked out; I’m her anger bucket. I pour all the anger in the house into myself. Learning self-control. That’s what she wants me to learn. To be my own jailer. To punish myself whenever the system goes wrong. If ever I feel the start of warmth I shall rip off my fingernails or slash at my hair with wild scissors; I’ll scratch the insides of my arms until I draw blood. If I can’t get rid of anger altogether I’ll give it just a tiny bit of house-room, at my edges: torn-off fingernails, torn-off toenails, chopped-off tufts of hair.

  Good Charlotte.

  Around the walls hang the naked bodies of women who weren’t so good. Madame Heger points them out. Madame Bluebeard her real name is. Here they are, the bad girls, strung up by butcher’s hooks stuck through the lips of their cunts. Their nipples. Their mouths. Madame Heger wears leather bracelets studded with curving hooks. She wears long false nails made of razorblades. Wh
en she lifts her claw and strokes you then you bleed. That’s love, she tells me: sentimental little fool, stupid little idealist; you don’t know that real love involves real pain. It must hurt or it’s not love. She puts her arms around me and embraces me; I relax; she cuts me; then she croons and smiles and kisses it better again.

  Sometimes she sits down opposite me in a second white chair. She hands me paper, pen and ink, and insists I write. My confession. What I’ve done and what I feel and what I fantasise. So that she can punish me again.

  I sit there stolid as a potato greening in the dark. I’m so dull that she loses interest, gets up, leaves. The door clanks shut behind her.

  It’s better not to write. It’s better to starve. It’s better to wait here, hidden underground.

  To pass the time away I recite the lessons you and she have taught me, cher Monsieur.

  Cut off your hands so they can’t want to touch him.

  Cut off your feet so they can’t want to run to him.

  Cut off your lips so they can’t want to kiss him.

  Cut out your heart so it can’t insist on loving him.

  Peel off your skin. Roll it up, off, over your head; drop it. So you’re untouchable. Reborn; blooming in blood. Unrecognisable as human.

  That’s the ghoul, Monsieur. Simply a woman in love. Searching for you; padding upstairs on her bloodied feet; blundering towards you over the tips of knives. Innocent and faithful as a dog; she runs to and fro in her tight, confined space, head down, shaking her grizzled mane; uttering sounds you can’t translate. In the night she tries to come to you but she can’t reach you. You’re too well defended; your chamber door is locked and Madame Heger keeps the key. No chance that the madwoman can break in and bite, tear your flesh, sink her teeth into your neck. As you imagine, in your nightmare, she longs to do.