The Mistressclass

by Michèle Roberts

  Would they have called Mrs Rochester a nigger? Poor Mrs Rochester: designated mad because she was too sexy, too fond of a drink, and a Creole. Catherine was teaching Jane Eyre this term, in tandem with Wide Sargasso Sea. They fitted together, like two parts of one mind. Jane Eyre was one of Vinny’s favourite novels. Wide Sargasso Sea another. Both so hot and emotional. Catherine always found it a relief to get on to Henry James. Odd how she kept thinking of Vinny. Lucky Vinny, idling about in Jeanne’s garden in France. She wasn’t tied down to a regular job. She could take off there at a moment’s notice. She could lie on the grass in the sun all day, doing nothing, if she so chose. But on the other hand she had no money, no house of her own, no husband and no children. She just drifted.

  The florist was hovering nearby, waiting to pluck up the bunches Catherine pointed out. Niftily, with deft fingers, to pinch out the chosen ones without bruising the others. She was short and barrel-shaped, with a faded orange coiffure. She called you hen. Like her daughter, the manageress, she wore a pink nylon overall and black rubber boots. When she forgot what tulips cost today, or whether they’d had any lilies in earlier, she shouted for her daughter, Rochelle, Rochelle, and Rochelle would lounge out from the storeroom at the back where she made up the showy wreaths that locals liked to send for funerals.

  The funeral parlour was just along the street. You’d see its Victorian-style hearse, the top-hatted and frock-coated driver in sable black twirling his whip over his team of black-plumed horses, heaving along Holloway Road up towards Highgate cemetery. The lofty entrance there, Adam had told Catherine once, was specially designed to allow the high-plumed horses to pass through. You could always recognise Rochelle’s handiwork on the top of the hearse, elaborate sculpted artworks that spelt out Mum or were shaped like guitars or teddy bears. Adam thought such funerals were in poor taste. Catherine had had to convince him that it was all right to allow the mourners to send wreaths for his father, if they really wanted to. People of that generation liked sending flowers. Stupid, outdated symbol, Adam said. To the cremation he wore his red flannel shirt under his 1940s tweed overcoat, and no tie. He stood throughout the short service, tall and bony, with his hands in his pockets. His brown curls were greying. Did he look like his father? Yes. The boys didn’t. They had round faces and snub noses and freckles; skin like hers, that burned easily. She’d packed them off to India with economy-size containers of factor-25 suncream. Oh Mum do stop fussing.

  —Settling in all right, are you? the florist asked: it’s a nice neighbourhood, this, when you get to know it. Friendly. Very mixed, of course. But it takes all sorts, I always say.

  The face glimmered at the window. A woman pressing close to the glass to peer inside. Her eyes were narrowed, her wide mouth set in a curve like a grimace. She had been there for some time, perhaps, when Catherine became properly aware of her, but equally she seemed to appear suddenly, like a waved white handkerchief flung up, held by one corner, flaring into the air. Then, even as Catherine turned and looked at her directly, she faded away; she withdrew and was gone.

  On the counter, by the till, she spotted a paperback book. Its purple and black jacket shouted at her across the shop, as it was expressly designed to do.

  —I’ll take three bunches of anemones and three of hyacinths, please, she said.

  The florist whipped the dripping bunches out of their buckets, spun them into paper sheaths she twisted into cones.

  —Here you are then, hen, she sang out.

  Catherine moved over to the counter. She glanced down at the paperback. Yes: one of hers. Black Lace Handcuffs, by Saffron Day. The heroine, tied up by the hero, gagged, then tenderly beaten, was thus cured of her frigidity.

  —Oh, that’s Rochelle’s, said the florist: I don’t read such nonsense.

  She laid the wrapped flowers in her customer’s arms. Catherine cradled them, waiting for her change, straining to see through the plate-glass door. The strange woman had vanished.

  Leaving the florist’s shop, she felt the cold wind whisk heat from her face. She dithered on the corner of Tufnell Park Road and Holloway Road, opposite the Odeon. This was the refuge to which Adam used to retreat in the afternoons, when he’d finished writing for the day but it was too early to nip out for a pint and he was bored. He lolled in the centre of the auditorium, surrounded by empty stretches of electric blue plush, hooked his legs over the seat in front, and watched films like Terminator 2. He confessed his truancy to her when he came home, as though he expected a scolding. As though I’m some punishing mother, Catherine told him: when I’m not at all. Don’t be so unfair. Adam was her darling, to be indulged. Two hours to herself. A couple of chapters’ worth. She couldn’t afford to take time off in the way that Adam did. Far too much to do.

  At the start of this term Adam had given a public reading in the further-education institute where she taught literature part-time. Catherine organised the event. She put an announcement in the local paper; posted flyers around the neighbourhood; dragooned in her students. Adam was well known enough to attract a big audience. He talked to them about the carpentry and building job he’d taken up in April, made jokes about how bad he was at building walls. When one of Catherine’s students, very serious, asked him: so why become a carpenter? Why didn’t you get a job in a university teaching creative writing like other writers do? Adam replied: it’s bad enough having to go out to work at all, but at least with this one I’m self-employed, I couldn’t face a regular job. Everyone laughed, pleased with his honesty, except for Katy, the young woman who’d asked the question. She went red and looked furious. She came to evening classes since she was out at work all day. Obviously she supposed Adam was mocking people like herself who had what his generation called straight jobs. He didn’t mean to, Catherine knew. It was just that he didn’t want people to know he’d taken up the building job as part of his research for his new novel.

  —Surely you know enough about building already? Catherine had asked: and what will you tell Charlie?

  —Same as everyone else, Adam had replied.

  Charlie, his employer, was an old school friend whom he’d recently re-met. Charlie had trained at art school, then gone into industrial design. Suddenly he’d thrown everything up and decided to open a gallery in the warehouse he’d bought years back as an investment. Adam was working for him six days a week.

  Katy had a pointed chin and pale blue eyes. She was all in black. Catherine watched her push up to Adam afterwards, when he was seated at a small table by the bookstall, signing copies of his books. He’d looked up at her and smiled. Katy had given him one brief, intense look, murmured something, then turned away. There were girls like Katy hanging about at most literary readings. Skinny Pre-Raphaelite beauties in black velvet who wanted to be writers but didn’t know how to write properly and hadn’t the patience to learn, the patience for hard graft, years and years of it, and who thought that fucking writers was the next best thing. A kind of osmosis. Poetic acumen acquired by semen seepage.

  Groupies, they were really. Adam was far too nice to them. He told them about writers’ groups and poetry courses and creative-writing classes. He believed in helping the young. You mean you feel flattered by their attention, Catherine would say to him. Those wide-eyed little sweeties reminded her too much of herself and her friends when they were eighteen. Revelling in their youth and sexiness. Flirting with their male tutors at university as much as they dared. Wearing the briefest of mini-skirts to seminars; flashing plenty of bosom. It was a compliment if you were found pretty enough for a male academic to make a pass at you. Having an affair with the man who taught you gave you high status among your peers. Vinny, of course, hadn’t seen it that way. Too fucking pure, Vinny was.

  Catherine went to the Italian deli just up from the cinema and bought the party food. Holloway Road roared with traffic, stank with traffic fumes. She cannoned along it, head down. Once it had been a country thoroughfare, lined with high banks, down which sheep were driven to the ma
rket in Caledonian Road. Now the Victorian façades, above the garish plastic-fronted shops, were grimy and shabby. The pavements swirled with litter. As a newcomer to the district, she had relished its oddities: the funeral shop displaying headstones and marble angels, the fetish emporium full of black leather thigh-high boots, the scales and weights shop, the junk shops, the barber’s unchanged since the 1950s, the Greek greengrocers selling small round aubergines, baby artichokes, prodigal bunches of rocket and coriander. But today, edgy, all she saw was a rubbish-strewn wasteland. She turned left and made towards Fleet Halt.

  Adam was already back. He was lying on the sofa in the sitting-room, with the curtains drawn, smoking, the TV on, reading the paper by the light of a single lamp. Recently he’d taken to doing that. He said bright sunlight hurt his eyes.

  She put down her bags of shopping and leaned against the doorpost. She wanted to tell him about the face that had appeared in the florist’s window. Of course it must have been her own reflection, somehow distorted by the light on the glass. She opened her mouth then closed it. She presented him with the flowers. He put them down on the sofa beside him. She picked them up again and went off to find a couple of vases.

  —Let’s eat in here, OK? Adam shouted after her: I want to watch the end of the film.

  The boxes of wine and beer for the party had been delivered while Catherine was out. She opened a bottle of white vin de pays, fished in the larder and fridge, laid out a platter of antipasti, a bowl of green salad, a basket of bread. She built a fire and lit it. After lunch she cleared away in the kitchen, then came back into the sitting-room and propped cushions against the sofa. She leaned back against them, legs stretched out, in front of the flames. Adam opened a second bottle of wine, poured himself a glass, gestured in her direction. Catherine shook her head.

  —No thanks. I’ve still got plenty left.

  He settled himself back full-length on the sofa.

  —I bumped into Vinny yesterday, he said: by the way. Down by the river. I forgot to mention it, didn’t I?

  Catherine swallowed a cold mouthful faster than she had meant to. The wine hit her like green-gold fire along her veins.

  —But she’s in France, she said: at least I thought so. I’m sure she told me on the phone. I thought she was due to leave last week.

  —She said she’d changed her mind and decided to stick around for a bit, Adam said: anyway, I invited her to the party tonight. It seemed like a nice idea. She said she hadn’t seen you for ages. She hasn’t seen this house, either. She said she’d like to see where we’re living now.

  His voice was casual. He turned on the TV and began flicking through the sports channels.

  Catherine gulped down more wine. She kept her voice light and brisk, her face blank.

  —Well, you’ve invited her, in any case. So that’s that.

  Adam was yawning over a boxing match. She seized the remote from him and turned down the sound. She pretended to doze.

  PART 3

  Tonight, cher Monsieur, I’ve stayed up late to write to you. Papa is in bed asleep. Arthur is sealed away in his study with a hot toddy, composing this week’s sermon. Rain lashes the window-panes. I’ve wheeled my work table close to the dying fire, for extra light. I’ve set a branch of candles just in front of me.

  Having once begun to speak to you, having torn open the silence of years, I find I can’t stop. I’d wrapped up my soul in silence, as you wrap woollens and store them away for next winter, against the moth; but now I’ve ripped myself open like an envelope and words are tumbling out.

  Don’t worry. I shan’t embarrass you. I shan’t send you this. It consoles me, that is all, to imagine that we may meet anew through this fleshless medium.

  But why do I desire so ardently to see you again, cher Monsieur, when to be in your presence was such torture?

  Here you sigh, lift your hand with that well-remembered gesture of impatience, reprove me for my ridiculous habit of exaggeration. Precision, my dear Charlotte, precision of expression, please.

  Many times you explained to me that the artist must indeed suffer, yes, perhaps to a degree that ordinary well-mannered well-meaning mortals, yes, like Madame Heger, might consider absurd, let alone tasteless and lacking in correct demeanour; but the heart of the message you expounded to me over and over again was that suffering must be taken, held, ground in the crucible, reduced to fine dust in the heat of the fire. Then, only then, could something be made of it. When it was dry. When it was controlled, broken. When it was made into memory; transformed to gold by the power of alchemy; shaped at last into something bearable; finally into art.

  You see I have remembered my lesson, Monsieur.

  What else do I remember?

  I remember that in the end it was indeed torture to be with you. A torture, however, to which I willingly, even eagerly, submitted myself. If pain were the price of seeing you, then so be it. It was a pain I relinquished with sadness, a pain that made me know I was alive, a pain I remember with actual fondness.

  I remember, for example, that last occasion, just before I left for good, on which you invited me to come and eat supper with you and Madame Heger and the children. A Sunday privilege for the children; allowed to stay up; and for me too. All was as usual. The dining-room gleamed with cleanliness: the polished floor, the porcelain tureen on the sideboard, the brass pots of trailing ivies and ferns on the chiffonier, the biscuit ornaments and candlesticks on the shelf above the stove. The oval table was covered with a snowy cloth, and you presided at its head, your white shirtpoints and neckcloth, stiff as the table napery, testifying to the housekeeping prowess of your wife, who sat next to you smiling serenely. I was opposite her, and, as usual, I studied her beauty. She was not small and thin, like me, but well made; curved. Her mouth was soft and red, her cheeks plump. Glistening ringlets, bunched like black grapes, fell on her neck, her embroidered collar. Her eyes were large and dark. All her gestures were languorous, slow; and yet she was the undisputed ruler of the house. Of course she was: you loved her. Inside the house you gave way to her with energy and grace.

  How calm the room. How calm you both seemed. Madame Heger controlled the children with sidelong glances, shakes of the head, the lift of a finger. That was always sufficient, given the threat of greater reprimand: being banished upstairs without cake or dessert, or, in cases of dire badness, being beaten. You kept the rod in your study, or rather Madame Heger did, hung behind the door; a lean little god. She didn’t call it punishment; she called it teaching her darlings better; teaching them self-discipline; she whipped them into behaving beautifully at table; which mostly meant not speaking and not gobbling. I was like one of those children; yes of course I was. I yearned to remain in your presence, to please you in every possible way, and never to arouse your wrath.

  You didn’t need to use rods or whips or switches on your pupils in class. Your methods were to stun with satire, to draw blood with a single, well-aimed insult delivered with a smile, to drive us mad by praising us contemptuously.

  You knew precisely how to make me suffer. All you had to do was avert your face. Speak to one of your other favourites. Ignore me. But at least it was your real face that you turned away.

  Now you sat opposite me at the supper-table and asked me charming and courteous questions about my studies, my hopes for the future. You were cool and impersonal and I knew it was necessary; that you could not behave as you did when we were alone in the classroom or your study together, discoursing warmly, even passionately, on literature; but nonetheless I hated you.

  A tornado blew up in your dining-room. You pretended not to notice. The tornado was in me. A magnetic force kept sucking me across the table. To glue me onto you. I was aware of every movement that you made, second by second, turning left and right to talk to Madame Heger or your oldest daughter (how I loathed that child with her lisped pieties and her corkscrew curls and her soft eyes beaming up at her cher papa; she was shameless, a tiny slut who already knew all the
seductive arts and practised them on you every Sunday), inclining your head to listen, making them feel cherished and important. As of course they were. As they are.

  I was pulled ruthlessly across the table towards you and had to lay my hands on the table edge to stop myself flying to you. I could not speak the words I wanted to. Terror of revealing my feelings kept me dumb and forced me into inane politenesses. Thank you so much, just a little sugar, yes, please, another slice of vanilla cake, some more of this delicious pear conserve. I knew I sounded stupid, insincere, inept, stumbling. I could see Madame Heger thought me as well behaved as usual; also a great gawk; a very dull person. A very correct jeune fille with her lips pinned shut saying nothing out of place. Oh, the boredom I must have caused her. I was her work of charity for the week, the young assistante so far from home: of course we must invite her, chéri. I couldn’t bear her semblance of kindness: so brisk, so easily shrugged on and off. I wanted to scream, to hurl my cup of coffee against the pink-striped wallpaper, watch satisfied as brown liquid stained and splashed and she’d have to leap up with a loud cry and fetch the maid to get a cloth.

  I could not be my true self with her in the room, Monsieur. It was not possible. It was not permitted.

  There she sat, reasonable, cold, composed, pouring out coffee from the tall green porcelain pot, tilting the spout at exactly the right angle, never spilling a drop, and passing the thin gold-edged cups as though the room were not ablaze the table were not exploding with heat I were not rising up into the air screeching like a wounded demon with the pain of all I must repress in my heart. There she sat not knowing that behind her the blue damask curtains were on fire.

  And then the next morning she insisted that she wanted to accompany me on the coach that would take me to the boat. Her duty, she conveyed: to see me off her premises.