Hyde

by Daniel Levine

  I took her back to Ghyll. I’d never taken anyone there. We didn’t speak on the walk over. She followed me with her hands in her pockets, humming to herself. She wore a shabby coat and slipperlike shoes, in spite of the ice on the stones. When we came to Ghyll’s front gate, she stopped in the road behind me, looking doubtfully up at the unlit house slotted into its shadowy recess. I was fishing my chain of keys from under my collar. It’s all right. This is home.

  The entrance hall was cold and laced with its distinctive odour that struck me every time I returned after a few days away. Like ammonia, or whatever Mrs. Deaker used to clean, if she cleaned at all. I was ushering the girl toward the stairs when the old woman’s voice crooned, Master returns, and we froze. Mrs. Deaker bobbed in the dim drawing-room doorway. Good evening to you, Master. Welcome back. She chuckled, a wet treacly sound. She was drunk. Good evening to you, Mrs. Deaker. The old lady scuffled a step forward. I saw a flash of her eyes, reflective, like a cat’s. And young missy, welcome to you as well. What a treat. We don’t receive many visitors, do we, Master? Thank you, Mrs. Deaker, that’ll be all. Yes, time for bed, isn’t it. Well, good night to you, Master, and young missy. She swayed there, at the far end of the entrance hall, eyes shining and then winking out. I gave the girl a nudge and led her upstairs to my room.

  A slant of blue light fell through the verandah doors, slicing across my canopied bed. I let my greatcoat drop to the floor as I went to the sideboard. I held up the bottle to see how much Mrs. Deaker had nipped in my absence, then sloshed gin into two tumblers. My hand was unsteady. I could hear the girl behind me stepping tentatively over the creaky floor. This was new. Bringing this girl here, up to my room, my sanctum. This girl who seemed so familiar, as if I’d known her in a dream. I was almost afraid, a voluptuous fear thickening in my throat with Jekyll’s urgency pounding behind it. I turned.

  She stood with hands in coat pockets, watching me, her face very still and white. I held out her gin. Nightcap. She came slowly over, took the tumbler in both hands. The top of her head barely reached my chest as she stood before me. I watched my hand rise as if on a string; the crook of my finger found her chin and lifted her tense white face. She breathed through her nostrils, eyes fixed upon me, trying to look cool and detached. But I could see her behind that, alive with wary fright, reckless excitement. I had an urge to lean down and kiss her on the mouth. The impulse welled in me like music; I lowered my head and she took a step back, slipping off my finger. She eyed me over the rim of her glass as she brought it to her lips. I walked past her, toward the bed, loosening my tie.

  Naked under the satin sheets I waited, shivering, as she undressed. When the baggy drawers had dropped she stood, turned away, marble blue. I followed the knobs of her spine and dimpled coccyx to the lavender bruise on the back of her thigh. She sat on the edge of the bed and lay down as I swung the sheet over her. It settled like silky oil over her contours. She was shivering too. I held myself up on one arm, looking down at her. I felt on the brink of something, an exhilarating fall. Jeannie. It is Jeannie, isn’t it. She nodded, eyes wide upon me. How old are you? She swallowed. Sixteen, she whispered. Sixteen, I repeated. Then I let myself go.

  I truly did. In the midst of it I sucked down her trim length and spread her legs, kneeling in between as before a sacrificial altar. Oh, I did it, the thing that Father taught us, forcing our head into Alice’s lap. As if his hand were gripping my head now, I knelt before her and lapped and slurped at her neat, musky quim. She squirmed and twitched and tried to get away, and then she squealed and ground the slippery flesh against my teeth as something quaked inside her and Father whispered, Good, good boy. From behind I buried my face in her hair and twisted handfuls of satin sheet, and when the end came I crushed shut my eyes into sparkling blackness.

  I woke before dawn. Jeannie was sleeping with her face pressed into the pillow, mouth open, snoring faintly with each breath. I sat up and watched her. I had found this girl for a reason, as if she were indeed a key to a lock opening into the unknown, into Jekyll’s past. There had been no women in that past, I knew. There could be no women, no lovers. For Jekyll there could be no nakedness, no vulnerable soul. His costume had to be impenetrable, a monk’s mantle. This Georgiana, this flirtation, friendship, whatever it was, had turned out to be, in the end, yet another failed experiment. A failure, it seemed, I was now being offered the chance to rectify. Jeannie’s eye opened, and she focused upon me. She lifted herself onto an elbow. The side of her face was seamed with a scar from the pillow. I got to get home, she said. She slipped from the bed and, covering her breasts, began collecting her clothes from the floor. I watched her, unable to speak. At last she had her shabby coat back on, and she stood at the edge of the bed, picking the thready hem of her sleeve. You said a fiver after too.

  I have to see you again, I whispered.

  Day Two, Before Dawn

  Have to see you again. I said it as though I hadn’t any choice. This is what strikes me, increasingly, as I dredge out these details and reassemble them into their proper, murderous order: that they could not have happened any differently. It wasn’t just coincidence that Georgiana was dining in that particular restaurant that evening, that Jeannie was drinking exactly where I had been told to look. I’ll say it again: There are no coincidences.

  Why does it obsess me so, that idea—that everything happens the way it was always going to happen? Because it means that there is no escape? Yet I already know there is no escape, from this cabinet, from the ending that awaits me. Utterson banging at the cabinet door, then the axe, the door splintering apart, me cringing by the windows clutching the phial of cyanide. That’s how I’ll do it. With the cyanide. Jekyll cooked up the dram of clear, colourless extract a month ago. As if he could see the ending too. As if the cyanide were to be his parting gift to me. That is what I’m saying. Inevitability. You cannot evade what is going to happen because, in a sense, it already has happened. It’s just a question of perspective. Even as I lie here on my bed of hard floorboards, atrophied, exhausted, but perfectly alive—even now I am already dead.

  I met Jeannie at the Toad the following night and again took her back to Ghyll. After the climax, Jekyll receded, sinking like a body into watery depths after thrashing for life at the surface. Yet his mind still rang like ripples in the air. Propped against the headboard, Jeannie and I devoured the remains of a ragged lamb joint and a loaf of crusty bread I had scrounged from the kitchen, and as I surreptitiously watched her chew, I slipped inside a memory. A parlour, cup of tea on Jekyll’s knee. Young Georgiana was playing the piano, and her mother beside the bench was singing Italian opera in a terrible soprano. The sounds were muted as he focused on the girl, just a few years older than Jeannie, sharply pretty with honey-white hair piled up in a bun. Her clavicle jumped as she played. Her eyes slid askance and met Jekyll’s, a cryptic, intricate look, eyebrows lifted as if in question.

  The scene dissolved. With a lump of meat in her cheek, Jeannie eyed me as I stared at her, a tang of tenderness in my throat. It was quiet in the bedroom. The fire low with big shadows minutely atremble. The thing is, I found myself saying, you remind me of someone. Your daughter? Jeannie said, brushing crumbs from her belly. She glanced quick at me, as if the quip had just slipped out. I don’t have a daughter. I looked down at the bloody plate between us. Who do I remind you of? Jeannie asked quietly. Someone from another life. Jeannie nodded. I get that all the time. Really. How many lives have you lived? She thought hard for a moment, squinting. Four, she said. Somehow I had known she was going to say that: four. She giggled, tickled by herself, and I reached for her hair. Already I was mad for her hair, magenta-dyed, like a disguise, and heavy with unwashed odour. I reached to take a strand and she allowed me, watching my fingers as I let the hair run through. Then I reached for the back of her neck and she pulled away. No, sir, no more, I got to get home. She made to throw off the sheet and I took her wrist. Stay. I can’t, she said. Her eyes flicked up to me, flat and ha
rd, wary again. I can’t. My da. I held her a moment longer, then let her go.

  Stay? I’d never felt this way about a dolly, never wanted anything to do with any of them afterwards. Yet when I had closed the front door on the girl, down in the entrance hall, a fresh pain whistled through me like air sucked through a rotten tooth. I stood in the gloom savouring it, the sharp, sweet ache.

  I saw her the next night as well, and when she left in the early hours I almost snuck after her to see if indeed she had a home—and a da. I went as far as Ghyll’s front gate and then stopped, gripping the iron spears of the fence, listening to her high aimless humming dwindle down the road. Back in my room, I tried to sleep and could not. At last I threw off the sheets and dressed, found my stick, and stalked back to Castle Street.

  Jekyll was anxious to see if Georgiana had written. A day or two later, she did. Poole brought the letter up to Jekyll in his study. It had been delivered, Poole said, by the boy from the wine merchant. Yet it was addressed to the London Ornithological Society, and the letter inside was written in code, confirming the date two days hence as acceptable for an outing, provided the weather held. Jekyll folded the letter back into its envelope and stood at his study window, hands behind his back, and for a second I glimpsed into a yellow sitting room with a pair of ugly wing chairs and Georgiana standing very close, with a sad smile of pity. Henry, she said gently, it’s all right.

  Jekyll flinched, turned from the window, and glared at the envelope on his desk. The familiar script looped across its face. He hesitated, then reached out and lifted it by the corner. He opened his desk drawer and dropped the letter inside. And did nothing. He was standing at his study windows again when she came two days later, as promised.

  It was the first or second of February, a dark morning on the verge of sleet. Jekyll had taken an hour to decide on a beige twill suit with a knitted burgundy waistcoat. He turned from the windows as Poole entered the study to say that Miss Georgiana had arrived. Very good, Poole. I’ll come down with you. Poole followed him down the corridor. Mr. Hyde tells me that he’s felt very welcome here, Jekyll said. I’m sorry I haven’t been home to receive him, but I saw him the other night and thought I’d pass his compliments along. Thank you, Poole, it means a great deal to me for him to feel at home here. From behind, Poole murmured, Sir. You do not care for him, do you. I do not offer an opinion, sir. Well, you aren’t alone. I don’t imagine there are many who do care for him. He has much to learn in the way of manners. But he is a kind of genius. And genius must be nurtured, must be protected. Jekyll turned and gazed into Poole’s languid, Arabian eyes. Can you understand that? Poole met his gaze. Perfectly, sir. Jekyll considered him a moment longer, then nodded. Good man.

  Downstairs he found Georgiana in the parlour reading the spines of the books in the case. She held out her hand. She looked older than she had at the restaurant; the lines at the edge of her eyes and mouth seemed deeper, and for a moment I couldn’t quite recognise the woman with her shining head cocked and her knowing smile. Henry, she said. Jekyll bowed over her hand, and she pressed his thumb with hers underneath. He let her go, cleared his throat. Perhaps . . . Georgiana nodded. Yes, that’s what I was thinking.

  I knew he was going to bring her up to the cabinet. Jekyll had been upstairs an hour before, warming the stove, scanning for anything that might seem suspicious. It struck me as madness to take her up there. This was our room. The cabinet was the nexus of our lives. And yet I also knew that the cabinet had not always been our room. It had been Jekyll’s private consulting room, many years ago. He met with patients up there. He had met with Georgiana up there, several times, when he was young and fresh from his training and success on the Continent, full of promise. Now he led Georgiana across the courtyard to the surgery block squatting in the midmorning damp. The steel door gave a rusty shriek, and something flapped about the glass cupola, trapped. Jekyll lit the lantern and offered his hand.

  He unlocked the cabinet door, lined on the outside with a layer of thick red baize, and Georgiana stepped in behind him. In her navy dress and shawl, flushed in the cheeks, she gazed about the room, running her eyes past the windows and around the furniture until she came to the blank space of wall near the corner where Father’s portrait hung. She went over, stopped a few paces from Father. Perpetually young, with his rich brown hair, his full drooping moustache and nether-lip tuft, his collar raked open beneath the black velvet jacket, he sat on a stool with his precious violin propped on his knee. His expression remote, yet at the same time wet and sentient in the lachrymal ducts. This is your father, Georgiana said.

  It is. Jekyll was standing by the table. It’s quite remarkable, she said. How did you come by it? He left it to me. He’s dead.

  Oh, Henry, I’m so sorry. When did he die? In August. Not this August past? This last summer, yes. He left me the portrait, and the violin he’s holding in it. He gestured at the mirror, where the black violin case was leaning up against the wall behind it. It’s a Stradivarius. Quite valuable. It has its own name, some Italian name. You told me he was a conductor, I believe? Georgiana said. Yes. Of the Edinburgh Orchestra. The youngest they’d ever had. Unconventional too; he would sometimes play the violin solo himself, or so I heard. Fame, travel. Then my mother died.

  I am sorry, Georgiana said.

  I’m not. I’m not the least bit sorry. He lived far too long. I had begun to think he was really going to outlast me, like some perverse joke.

  Georgiana turned to Father’s picture again, his sedate and constant stare. Mother made me sit for a portrait, she said. I’m playing the piano. I had to sit there for hours and hours. Now it’s in the parlour. Opposite her own picture. So they just look at each other, from across the room. Mother goes on and on about the likeness. That’s her word, the likeness. I don’t think it looks like me at all. Something in the face is wrong. Georgiana let out a nervous laugh. Now we’ll both outlast ourselves, Mother and I. Isn’t that why people have these portraits done? So they can hang there on the walls, staring out at whoever’s left? Sometimes I imagine taking the picture down in the middle of the night and cutting out the face. My face. Then hanging it back up and pretending to be horrified in the morning. She’d probably think it was one of her spirits. We have spirits living in the house, according to Mother. Three of them. Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. She lives with you too, then. Oh yes, Georgiana said. The house is quite large, too large for the three of us. There was a sensitive pause. So, you have no children? Georgiana met his eyes for a moment, then looked down at her hands. Georgiana, would you like to sit?

  They sat in the chairs by the windows. Jekyll crossed his legs and rested two fingers at his temple. Georgiana frowned at her hands in her lap, twisting her ring round and round the finger. I know what I’m doing isn’t right. Coming here again. Asking you to listen to me, involving you in a deceit. I would never have contacted you—I mean, I thought of contacting you, but I wouldn’t have. I even saw someone else so I wouldn’t have to impose on you. But then I saw you in that restaurant, and I thought, It’s fate. So here I am. And not just for myself. You asked if I have children. I don’t. Georgiana glanced up, out the window, still twisting her ring. But I’m pregnant.

  Jekyll’s eyes involuntarily slipped down to her belly. It was trim behind the tiny-buttoned front of her dress. How far advanced are you? Six weeks or so, I’d guess. Have you been examined? She shook her head. Not yet. But I just know. I can tell by now. Jekyll watched her profile, the little twitching frown at the edge of her mouth. Have you miscarried before? She nodded, her eyes going glassy. How many times? Eight, she replied.

  Jekyll stared at her. You’ve miscarried eight times? She nodded. At what stage? Jekyll asked, holding on to his voice. It varied, she said. In the second or third month, usually. One of them—one of them made it almost to the very end. Jekyll looked out the window, at the grim courtyard growing darker still. Georgiana sniffed. It feels good just to say that, you know. I’ve never said it to any
one. That one—they just took him away; I didn’t get to see. They didn’t even want to tell me it was a he. Georgiana wiped her eyes, let out a sobbing laugh. Oh, poor Henry. A nice hysterical woman to start off the day.

  Outside the window, flakes of snow were beginning to straggle down like bits of ash. Georgiana took a breath. There’s something I’d like to ask you. It’s something I’ve been thinking, and I’d like to know if you think there’s any validity to it. She waited, as if for Jekyll’s permission. He motioned with his hand: go on.

  I’ve been trying to be scientific. To analyse my, my condition. One conclusion is that the problem is physical. That something is wrong, misshapen, inside me. Sometimes I think this must be the answer, that I’m deformed inside, in which case there’s really nothing I can do differently this time that will matter. But then, there’s a second possible conclusion. What if the problem isn’t physical, but mental? Psychological, I mean. What if there is something in my mind that is causing the—the miscarriages? Like a poison? It doesn’t sound very scientific when I say it like that. But you told me, all that time ago, that emotions and thoughts are not merely mental, that they have a chemical aspect as well. You spoke of the body having its own chemistry. Which is why I thought you, of all people, might understand what I’m saying.