The Looking Glass House

by Vanessa Tait

  Mary thought of her photograph, of the Deanery. It would be nice to gaze on it again; nicer, perhaps, than being in the building itself.

  Chapter 24

  Mary had been talking for many minutes – perhaps ten, she could not tell – but the sound of her own voice, bright and artificial, suddenly made her stop. Then there was only the sound of scissors snipping through paper as the children cut out the crests from the letters their parents had received. They were updating their crest books. The table was covered with letters and calling cards and pots of glue.

  ‘Who is this?’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘Only Mrs Heyworth. Does anyone want Mrs Heyworth?’

  Nobody did. Everybody wanted Queen Victoria or the Empress of Russia or an earl at the least. Alice had cut out the royal crest from one of the envelopes the Queen had sent her parents and put it in her book. Edith had cut out another from a different envelope. Ina was in bed with a cold.

  ‘Where did you find the Empress of Russia?’ said Mr Dodgson.

  ‘A friend of Papa’s had a letter from her,’ said Alice, snatching it from him and starting to cut. She had put the crest of Queen Victoria on her front page, with those of other nobility behind. At the back of the book she planned to put the untitled, or lately created titles. Plain Mr and Mrs the children took very little care with, snipping off a feather here, a curlicue there.

  ‘Do you have a coat of arms, Mr Dodgson?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Yes, though it is rather ugly. Respice et resipisce: look back and see reason – a better motto I suppose than “look back and see unreason”, as I quite often do.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Dodgson. There is God’s hand to be found in everything.’ She looked at him and smiled, but he was sifting through the envelopes with his pale fingers, holding one then another up to the light and discarding it.

  ‘May I put your crest in my book?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Certainly, though it is not on all the little notes I write you; I am not as grand as all that. You may have it on some letters, I suppose.’

  Mary had seen Alice’s pile of notes and letters from Mr Dodgson downstairs on the hall table. She had been surprised at the number of them, and that the child, who was usually so careless, had kept them all. The top one was carelessly splayed and Mary had paused to read it. It was a note, it was to a child, it was there, filled with Mr Dodgson’s neat purple ink, to be read.

  It was, or had been, amusing.

  My darling,

  Do you think we will see each other soon? And that there isn’t time for many more letters? Now to me it seems, oh, such a long way off! Hours and hours: 30 or 40 at least. And I should say there is plenty of time for fifteen more letters – 4 today, 8 tomorrow and 3 on Saturday morning. You’ll get so used to hearing the postman’s knock that at last you’ll just say, ‘Oh, another letter from Mr Dodgson, of course!’ and when the maid brings it in you’ll only say, ‘Haven’t time to read it: put it in the fire!’

  No end of love and kisses to Edith and Ina. I’m afraid there’s no use saying ‘and the same to you’, for if I never leave off kissing them, how in the world can I begin on you?

  Mary had a few notes from Mr Dodgson: one asked her to meet him by the old oak tree in the meadows at three o’clock; another wondered about the possibility of bringing the children to his rooms. By now she also knew the times of his lectures, the number of his dinners taken in the Great Hall, the amount of times he had been seen in chapel, his route across the quadrangle every morning, the variation of his ties. She stored all this information in a tight parcel away under her ribcage.

  ‘But if I cut your letters, I would destroy them,’ said Alice. ‘And I would not do that!’ ‘Do not cut them; do not cut me,’ said Mr Dodgson, though he smiled.

  Alice laughed, as she always did, head up, hair shaken back. The child felt Mr Dodgson’s affection for her and grew bolder in it like a weed in the rain. Everything about her was designed to draw attention: his attention. The widening of her eyes, the curling of her hair around her fingers. The wild running in the garden.

  Alice got under Mary’s skin and irritated it, made Mary want to pick her out.

  She thought again of her favourite catastrophe: a storm that would destroy all of Oxford, all of the Liddells, all of the children. She ran her eye quickly over the houses, standing up like an ancient forest: roofs blown off, doors hanging on their hinges, the furniture inside jumbled about. Outside the dazed survivors would stagger about, their hair matted, their clothes torn, their cheeks criss-crossed with patches of dirt. Only there would not be a heavenly voice, as Mr Wilton believed. No sheep, no goats. Instead Mary would be found by Mr Dodgson wandering in the street – he would have been out all night in a desperate search, and when he found her, he would be half crazed with fear and joy. His jacket would be undone, or off, and his high collar un buttoned, and he would fall on her neck and kiss it – her own collar would have come off too; her neck would be long and pale and uniquely inviting.

  Mr Dodgson’s lips would be dry, in spite of the storm, and cool. And they would inch down her neck to her shoulder, his fingers fluttering over her skin like paper. And down over her dress to her breasts like a bird, so light, like the sunlight—

  ‘Pass me the scissors please, Miss Prickett!’ Alice’s voice, full of entitlement. Mary passed them, wordlessly. Her other hand was spread near to Mr Dodgson’s hand. Her little finger and his were inches apart. She crept her finger until it was just a pulse away from his. Her nail was chipped, her finger long and bony.

  His nail was filed into a semicircle with a small pale fleck in the centre, like a star.

  She could feel heat emanating from his fingertip. She leaned forward so that her finger brushed his, still cutting with the other hand but all her attention on the quarter-inch of skin that was touching him. Mr Dodgson carried on talking. He did not move his finger away, even though he must have felt hers resting against it. When she was a child, Mary had seen her own fingertips under a magnifying glass. She had been amazed at the glistening ridges and whorls, hidden in plain sight.

  She closed her eyes.

  ‘Have you got a crest?’ asked Alice. ‘Are you tired?’

  Mary opened her eyes. ‘No.’ Alice must know that. ‘And no.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alice. ‘We have. Quite a nice one. Though we don’t use it on our letters!’

  ‘Is that Lord Newry’s crest? I think it might do well here,’ said Mr Dodgson, leafing to the end of Edith’s book.

  ‘No one will see it there,’ said Alice. ‘It is quite a grand one.’

  ‘But do you expect everyone to start at the front? No, they will start at the back and go forward. Then Lord Newry’s will be in the best position.’

  Alice took the crest from him and stuck it in her book, at the front.

  ‘Lord Newry is one of the new breed,’ said Mary. ‘He seems to me rather arrogant.’

  Mr Dodgson turned his knees to her. ‘I agree, Miss Prickett. Quite agree.’

  Mary said: ‘Monstrously arrogant, yes indeed – I did not like the look of him at all.’

  Tea and a lemon sponge arrived. Mary poured and took a sip; the heat spread from her mouth down to her stomach. Mr Dodgson was still turned to her. She waited to hear what he would say next, if he would whisper it, if it would be for her ears only.

  But it was about the boat trip again, in the diary for next week. Mr Duckworth would be coming, Mr Dodgson said, and she should ask the cook to roast them a chicken.

  Chapter 25

  Mary swung her feet out of bed – there was a nail on the floorboards just there that she must ask Bultitude to hammer in – and went to the mirror. Now that she was nearly thirty, the early mornings showed in her creases: a new line ran from the side of her nose to the corner of her lips. Another mole on her neck that had pushed up from somewhere. She pulled it between her thumb and finger and rolled it; it managed, she thought with a shudder, to be flaccid and springy at the same time, its nobbled innards contained in a da
rk skin like something the Scots ate.

  She took up her comb and began to pull it through her hair, growing it and spreading it until it covered the whole of her back. In the sunshine it was the colour of polished oak. She picked up her brush and ran it over and over her hair, harder and faster, until she was burying the ends of the pigs’ bristles into the skin of her skull with a noise that sounded, to her, as if an animal was trying to get in.

  The boat trip was planned for today.

  Mary gathered her hair together behind her and pinned it back. Then she began to replait it into a tight coil, which she looped around the outside of her head.

  And on the inside, on their own loop: Mr Dodgson in the boat, next to her. His thigh alongside her thigh. His oars, rising up and down. The unevenness of his mouth as the words came out. He insinuated himself into every crevice of her mind, he thrummed constantly beneath the surface of her thoughts so that anything (the shape of a shadow, a window pane, a pair of shoes, even the wind) could spear him and bring him wriggling and silver-scaled up to the surface.

  Only she saw him. Only she knew him as he really was.

  His legs were thin, just like hers. They had a knee bone that pushed sharply against the fabric of his trousers and a foot at the end that constantly jiggled inside its shiny shoe. The hands were so smooth and fine and the voice wound around the mind, but only she knew that the foot beneath the table danced with its secret disease, never ceasing in its tremulous judder, like the beating wing of a trapped bird or the scurry of a boxed mouse.

  Mary ran her finger down her collarbone. She squeezed her eyes almost shut. It was not her finger that caressed her, it was his. What did it feel like to be touched by another’s fingertips, another’s lips?

  Like this, perhaps, and this, only – Mary opened her eyes and saw her own skin and bone – she could not, standing there in front of the looking glass, could not shake free of herself.

  She turned away from the hip bones that jutted out, from the legs that hung off them, from the boy’s breasts and the mottled purple skin, and let the folds of her petticoat fall down over her body. It was time to dress.

  Love always triumphed in the end. The audience demanded it. Morality demanded it.

  The good must have a happy end, the bad a bad one.

  Mr Dodgson stood in the hall with his friend Mr Duckworth, dressed in dark clothes in spite of the bright day, except for his straw boater, which he held by the brim between thumb and forefinger.

  Mary and he were alike in their black garb. If they sat together on the boat, the two of them would merge into one.

  ‘May we go out all day, until the evening?’ asked Alice.

  ‘That is entirely up to your mother,’ said Mr Dodgson.

  ‘Until the evening, yes,’ said Mrs Liddell. ‘It will give me a chance to finish reading my book. But be careful not to entirely ruin your dresses, for I am rather fond of these ones.’

  They set off and were soon at Folly Bridge. ‘Prima, let me hand you down into the boat first, as befits your age.’ Mr Dodgson gave Ina his arm. ‘Eager Secunda, you had better hold up for a moment, else I shall not have a hand for you.’

  ‘But Mr Dodgson, you’ve two hands,’ said Alice, standing in the sunlight, her hair blazing.

  ‘I meant no free hands, for a man may have sixty-six pairs of hands and not a free one amongst them. Here we are now.’

  Mr Dodgson advanced upon Alice with all ten fingers and thumbs waggling. Alice gave a scream; the kind of scream, thought Mary, as she stood in the shade, that was intended to signify a feeling without actually being one.

  ‘You are to be coxswain, are you not? You had best go in the stern.’

  Ina sat in the prow and Mr Duckworth, already hot, took one oar. But Alice: every step, every movement of the boat led to a shriek and a plea for help. She was so conscious of the effect she created, every shake of her head and pout and grimace flew from her, and surrounded her with a kind of jaggedness that others might mistake for vivacity.

  Mr Dodgson helped her into the boat, he held on to her elbow, he brushed a piece of grass from her skirt, he unhooked her hem from a stray nail. He kept addressing her in a mock-gallant way that drilled into Mary’s ears and itched her scalp from the inside.

  ‘Tertia, you are very quiet. Come sit in the bow with Prima,’ said Mr Dodgson, reaching for Edith, who carefully stepped into the back of the boat. Mr Dodgson himself stood with one leg on the bank and the other on the boat until, at the very last minute with a great comic grappling motion he hauled himself into the prow.

  Nature pushed out from every crack and cranny. It grew between bricks in the old buildings. It burst from the bank into the river, trailing green tendrils. It hovered in thick clouds over the water. Tiny insects gathered like commas between the fingers of Mary’s gloves.

  Perhaps the children had gone on boat trips before with Mr Dodgson and were used to it. Mary had not been on the river since she was a child. She stared over at Alice, who had pinched her gloves off and was wiggling her fingers in the air, and then letting her hand drop and waggling her fingers under the water, pretending they were four miniature fish she had caught on a line.

  ‘Stop doing that, it may be dirty.’

  Mary’s voice lacked depth; Alice knew it. She didn’t turn her head.

  ‘I dare say there are fairies hiding under that hedgerow there.’

  Fairies, neat little people who drank from acorn cups and ate their food off pieces of bark. Strange that they should mimic humans while the rest of Nature was so unruly. Mary had never seen them and usually she had no objection to them, but now the thought of them cringing under hedgerows, pausing in their work of extracting honey from a nettle flower and watching the boat as it drifted by, was unsettling.

  She stared down at the waving weeds, which fanned out in the current like hair.

  The chirruping, the rocking, the slap of water on the boat’s sides.

  She wished suddenly that she was alone, brushing out her own hair in front of the looking glass.

  ‘A little to the left, I think, Mr Dodgson,’ Alice said.

  Alice did not seem to feel the motion of the boat at all. She was angular with movement, an elbow leaned on the side of the boat, a bony calf stuck out in front mottled with bruises. She swayed first one way and then another, chewing on her lip.

  Of course Mr Dodgson had only given her the job of coxswain to patronize her. The inner flesh of her arms was as pale as the underbelly of a fish; the vein at her wrist was a thin river burrowing underground. Perhaps there was a boat on it, with children in, and a governess, pulsing inwards.

  Bile rose to Mary’s throat. She had had seasickness as a child: her father had once rowed her out to a lighthouse in Devon to look at the birds, in his shirt tails. She had never forgotten the flurry and flap of them as they shrieked down into the water.

  She swallowed. Took out her fan.

  ‘Have you still got my lock of hair I sent you?’ Alice said.

  Mr Dodgson pulled at his collar. ‘I dare say. That was a long time ago.’ He leaned down on his oar and brought it up without making a stroke. Bright beads spilt from his paddle.

  ‘I should think you need to keep rowing, Mr Dodgson,’ said Alice. ‘Otherwise poor Reverend Duckworth will have to make do on his own and I should think the boat is far too heavy for him to manage.’

  ‘You are quite right, Alice, I was being very selfish, and besides, I must take advantage of your steering, for I have noticed up to now that we have managed not to crash into anything at all, and that is a great triumph on your part. You must be particularly pa-pa-pa-pa . . . Oh dear, that was rather ambitious! Partic. Ularly. There, I have got that one right . . . Per. Spic. Cacious. Perspicacious. Good. If I could only exert my will over the various bits of my body on every occasion I need to, well, things might turn out all right.’

  ‘What is per. Spic. Cacious?’ said Edith. Her voice seemed to blend with the water so she could hardly be heard.
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  ‘Usually, my dear Edith, it means to see clearly, but I cannot be sure about today.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ said Mr Duckworth.

  ‘I mean that in this heat it may decide to take on another meaning if it feels like it.’

  ‘You are being absurd.’ Beads of sweat stood out just below the brim of Mr Duckworth’s hat.

  ‘Not at all, my dear Duckworth. If, say, you were from a tribe of Aboriginals, “perspicacious” might mean something else altogether.’

  ‘That is true, I suppose,’ said Mr Duckworth. ‘But then language would be following another set of rules.’

  ‘But there are no rules as to why one sound should mean one thing and another sound another. It is all quite random. Unless perhaps language developed at first in an onomatopoeic way. Soft sounds and sharp ones. Soft, douce, dolce. They are all soft sounds. Sharp is another word that expresses itself. But most words do not follow in the same way.’

  ‘You are far beyond me, Dodgson, in this heat.’

  When Mr Dodgson was in front of her, Mary stood behind every word she said, weighing up its suitability. But Mr Dodgson’s own words spiralled out of her control. She tried to follow them but she was always running after them somehow, out of breath. And they wound themselves nonsensically into her mind, to replay themselves in sounds that seemed to mean something but didn’t. She remembered Mr Wilton’s church, how words had poured out of her. They had meant something to her then. But now, when she recalled how she had been taken by the Holy Spirit, it was a different woman standing there and letting the words out.

  ‘And prick!’ said Alice.

  ‘And prick,’ said Mr Dodgson. Alice smirked over at him; Mr Dodgson put a hand in front of his face.

  ‘Alice, what is funny? We might all like to know,’ said Mary.

  ‘Oh no, nothing! I just had a funny thought, that was all.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About . . .’ Alice scanned the river. ‘About a story Mr Dodgson told us once. You weren’t there.’