Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  Mostly, Mary Benedict (not a very good speller: few ticks for her; she was more of a cross, cross, cross speller: she often looked cross) didn’t speak; she just assumed an expression of knowingness, and – irritatingly – faint disapproval. If she chose to speak – this was the general impression – she would say things that would render others dumb with astonishment, and pinker than the pinkest pink induced by cursing. Mary Benedict was an irritant who produced no pearl. “Especially you” was very irritating.

  Another irritating thing about her was her middle name, Thérèse. Not only did she actually possess a middle name – unlike Alice – but she possessed one with not one, but two accents, which smacked of boasting. Mary Benedict was a great one for boasting. Alice had always had a hankering for a name with an accent, and here was Mary Benedict – of all people – with two. A name with two accents outdid even Pharaildis. Give her accents rather than hens, any day.

  Ever since she’d read Jane Eyre she’d envied Adèle Varens. This was not because she had Rochester for a father, or Jane Eyre for a governess. It was certainly not because she had hair falling in curls to her waist (which made her sound all too like Myrtle Comstock as she had looked in those days, distinctly off-putting). It was – of course – because of the accent in her first name, particularly as it was a grave accent, so much rarer, so much more valuable – she had felt – than a mere acute accent, that little hovering mark that was not a letter of the alphabet adding an exotic touch to the otherwise unremarkable. She understood, all those years later, the appeal of a ligature to Oliver Comstock, the attractions of the “æ” in “æsthetic”. For a while – when he was at his most æsthetic – he had always written Linnaeus’s name as “Linnæus” whenever he had written to him, little notes, invitations, in the beautiful italic script he had taught himself. Trust Mary Benedict to have both a grave and an acute accent, forming a little protective roof in the middle of her middle name, under which she sheltered with an air of infuriating superiority. It had been uncharacteristically restrained of Mary Benedict not to pile on more accents, until the letters of her name groaned under them, like the chest of an undeserving South American general with more decorations than uniform, his every square inch emblazoned with bright silk sashes, bulletproof with glittering medals. She could surely have weighed herself down with a few randomly inserted apostrophes and circumflexes, breves and tildes, the odd unusual umlaut, her name glinting and jingling like the chandelier-sized earrings dangling from Mrs. Albert Comstock’s capacious earlobes. Saint-like she’d die – well, one could hope – scourged with sharp-edged accents, impaled on cruelly-hooked cedillas.

  Not only did Mary Thérèse Benedict have the benefit of accents, she also had ballet lessons. She was clearly a cultural beacon, blazing out in a benighted wilderness, a symbol of the higher things in life, far too high for the unenlightened masses.

  Alice had never been to ballet class. The thought of seeing Mary Benedict and Myrtle Comstock tottering about and assuming graceful postures in the hall above the ice-cream parlor had comprehensively daunted her. Thud! Thud! Thud! thundered the Benedict and (enormous) Comstock feet, enclosed in pink silk ballet shoes, and a steady fall of dust and splinters fell through the floorboards to coat the cherries, whipped cream, and chocolate strands in the tall-glassed sundaes on the tables in the parlor beneath, adding an intriguing crunchiness to the treats on offer. No need for nuts with these multi-textured munchies.

  Alice looked again at Mary Benedict, not betraying the sourness she was feeling. Mary Thérèse Benedict’s feet were in the second ballet position. She’d suddenly gone bowlegged, moved her heels a very precise distance apart, looking as if her high standards would have been better served if she’d had the use of a ruler and set square. My parents can afford ballet lessons, her feet were saying. I have acquired social graces. I can dance to Delibes. A few years later, and they’d have been boasting I can twirl to Tchaikowsky. So much could be said with a simple gesture. She’d en l’air her. They’d be faced with wobbly simpering-faced arabesques next. Not a pleasing prospect. Once Mary Benedict was in balletic mood she could keep going for hours, lumberingly cranking herself into repellent postures, like someone frozen at moments of intense pain. It was a blatant attempt to draw attention to herself, and hog the limelight.

  “First position!” she’d announce, sounding like a star pupil eager to demonstrate her abilities to awestruck, envious, less-favored classmates.

  “Second position!”

  She always announced what it was she was about to do, like Sobriety Goodchild just before he unleashed one of his god-awful dirges. Her mind rested briefly, lightly – not really touching – upon “god-awful,” as if the word had never entered her head, and left not a mark behind it. She’d only just heard the expression for the first time, and wasn’t quite sure how dangerous it was. She was extremely careful to ensure that she thought of the word “god” with a small “g,” concentrating ferociously. She was taking no chances.

  (“Bosomptious!”)

  “What are they doing?” Charlotte asked, loyally sounding fascinated, leaning forward, pointing at the Macbeth panel. Charlotte was utterly reliable.

  “Second position!” Mary Benedict announced belatedly, suddenly noticing her feet, blatantly attempting to turn the attention upon herself. Not only did she invariably announce what she was demonstrating, she also always held her hands as if about to curtsy, like a little ballerina clutching the edges of her ballet dress. Alice ignored this. It was like something by Edgar Degas gone horribly wrong, a disturbingly debased new development in the history of art as they moved into the last decades of the nineteenth century. Art tended toward decadence as centuries drew to their close. In fifteen years’ or so time, Mrs. Albert Comstock – in that racily bilingual way she had – would be disapprovingly referring to the scandalous proximity of the fang de sickle, as nightmarish Swan Lakes, heaving with galumphily pirouetting deepwater monsters (these were very dark, very deep lakes, and the swans mutated strangely), sent small and soggy ballet-besotted girls screaming out of theatres.

  “They have met Macbeth after a battle,” Alice continued, with a friendly, patient expression, not facing Charlotte, but looking Mary Benedict right in the eyes.

  (Just you wait, Mary Benedict. Just you wait. She’d get her in the end. She’d look like th’ innocent flower – something dark and weed-like, found in soggy ground, in her case – but she’d be the serpent under’t. Hypocrisy was much undervalued as a source of pleasure. “Under’t” was a most satisfactory word to pronounce when you were in a bad mood, with a hiss and a spit at the end. It was a word to say very forcibly, very wetly, a word like a blow to make people duck.)

  “What are they doing?”

  This was Charlotte again. Mary Benedict – Mary Thérèse Benedict – would not admit to curiosity, preferring to imply that she knew already.

  “They are prophesying what is going to happen to him in the future.”

  “What does happen?”

  Charlotte was on incandescent form.

  “He becomes evil. He murders people. He has his head chopped off.”

  “I still haven’t found a goatskin.” This was a reference to one of their latest plans to kill Mrs. Albert Comstock. It involved decapitation, and they were distinctly keen to put it into execution. What an excellent choice of word “execution” was. They’d found the necessary brass shield, and the sword, but they were experiencing some difficulty with the goatskin. Charlotte displayed an impressive persistence once she had firm hold of an idea. When they were alone, Alice must let her know that they could not possibly carry out their original plan for Mrs. Albert Comstock. How on earth could they dispose of such an enormous body, even one lacking a head?

  “A goatskin?” Mary Benedict had been stirred into interest – here was a rare event – but they both ignored her. Her feet were in the third position by now.

  “Third position!” Her hands hovered in the about-to-curtsy position, r
ight heel digging away at left instep, as if she were attempting to unbalance herself. The simper appeared, pinging into position. In such a manner, Alice imagined, Papa would stand and recite “The Children’s Hour” over and over, the heel of his right foot pressed into the instep of his left foot, his toes turned out as far as they’d go. One push in the chest would have him hurtling to the floor with a thunderous Aaaaghhhh!-howling crash.

  They ignored this, also.

  The panels stretched away around all four sides of the castle. There were nine along each wall, and one of Hamlet above the main entrance, though they were arranged in no particular chronological or thematic order, as far as Alice could make out. By the time of their third visit – and these became regular, once the initial uncertainties had been overcome – Alice was using the panels to tell stories, as if they were the consecutive illustrations for a serial, like the installments of a Dickens novel lined up into the distance. She did not relate the stories of the Shakespeare plays, but used the figures in the panels as quite other people in quite other stories, one continuous story each time. She’d relished the thought of being Scheherazade, ever since she’d read The Arabian Nights. It was from this book that she’d learned the words “Mameluke,” “hammam,” and “concubine,” though these were not words that Miss Caulfeild ever selected for spelling. They lacked the necessary geological associations, especially the last one. She began to hum an appropriate passage from Rimsky-Korsakoff to get herself in the right mood, “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship.”

  “Fourth position!”

  Mary Benedict began to move one foot in front of the other, concentrating hard to give the impression that she wasn’t interested in anything that Alice Pinkerton might have to say. She seemed to be under the impression that Alice Pinkerton’s insistent humming was a tribute to her balletic skills, an attempt to tempt her into terpsichorean fireworks. All that mattered was the unparalleled grace – ha! – of her postures. She was visualizing the red roses raining down upon her from every part of the auditorium, seeing the standing ovation, hearing the cheers, the orchestra joining in, tapping enthusiastically on their instruments – the percussion-players were going berserk – and the white-gloved applauding hands. (She wasn’t entirely keen on the gloves; they did tend to muffle the sound too much.) The curtsies were upon them, Mary Benedict’s cutesy-cutesy curtsies, the ones with the radiant Oh-I’m-so-modest- please-don’t-applaud smile (rapidly supplanted by her rather more insistent Oh-all-right-then-applaud-if-you-must smile), Mary Benedict’s GOD-AWFUL curtsies. (Alice had recklessly progressed to capital letters by now.)

  It wouldn’t be long before the arabesques were unleashed. You had to stand well back for these. Once she’d assumed the pointe position there was no controlling her, and the air fairly whistled around her scraggy contours. If she and Charlotte were feeling bored, or – a common occurrence, this – in a sadistic mood, they’d develop a sudden fascination with Mary Benedict’s ballet positions.

  “Show us the first position, Mary!” they’d cry, as if to see it demonstrated would be to have a long-cherished dream come true.

  Mary obliged, seizing her opportunity, the daunting simper at full power.

  “First position!”

  “Now the second position.”

  “Second position!”

  Mary obliged once more.

  “Now some arabesques.”

  “Arabesque!”

  (You could hear the italics distinctly when Mary Benedict said it. The word sounded suitably Scheherazadian for the story-teller Alice was about to become.)

  Mary arabesqued.

  (Alice should arabesque, also, draw a veil mysteriously across her features, and assume the rapt tone of voice of a Scheherazade possessed by the power of storytelling. “New lamps for old,” she should be saying. “New lamps for old.” “What happens next?” King Shahryar would be begging her. “What happens next? Tell me what happens next!”)

  “Now ten pirouettes.”

  “Pirouette!”

  The lurch to the right was quite pronounced at times.

  “Now ten more.”

  “Pirouette!” (Slightly breathless by now, the italics unraveling at the edges.)

  Beginning to pant a little, Mary did ten more, the simper losing some of its intensity.

  They could keep going like this for ages.

  On their more successful days, Mary Benedict would end up racked with cramps, heaving for breath and writhing on the floor, as spasms overwhelmed her. She was incapable of curtsies, incapable of simpers, incapable of speech, utterly overwhelmed, lying there as if she’d just crashed down from heaven.

  This was their favorite ballet position.

  Just you wait, Mary Benedict.

  “Give me a number between one and thirty-seven,” Alice would say, once, twice, three times a week, when the ritual had become established.

  Macbeth was number one, and they numbered the panels counterclockwise around the castle, until they reached Hamlet, number thirty-seven. The chosen number would be the starting point for the story, and they would walk around the building as Alice told a story – a different interpretation each time – as she included the scene on each panel in turn, ending her story at the panel immediately before the one with which she had started. A clockwise walk was a normal sort of story; a counterclockwise walk was a ghost or horror story. There were more of these as the fall and the winter approached, and the days darkened earlier. She beset them round with dismal stories.

  Alice began to feel that all of the permutations of literature were contained in those thirty-seven panels, just as all of the permutations of fate were contained in a pack of tarot cards. She had heard of tarot cards from Mrs. Alexander Diddecott, and there were more of these than there were Shakespeare plays, seventy-eight of them. They had the simple gaudy fairground colors of cutout paper theatre figures, or the grotesquely caricatured characters on the cards in a pack of Happy Families, with its monstrous, murderous families of four. There’d be no happy futures if fortunes were read from these families. (Mr. Spade, the Gardener and his family; Mr. Chip, the Carpenter and his family; Mr. Dip, the Dyer and his family; Mr. Soot, the Sweep … How many could she remember of the thirteen families?) She’d seen the tarot cards only once, and would have been hard put to name more than half a dozen of them (Mrs. Alexander Diddecott kept some of the cards away from her, as if they were unsuitable books, the very touch of which would contaminate), though she knew that those with names were named – you might have guessed, she could hear Mrs. Albert Comstock snorting (Typical!), sensing the nearness of the Black Arts – in French. There was La Maison de Dieu (The Tower Struck by Lightning); there was La Force (Fortitude, a beefy woman who appeared to be on the point of forcing back the jaws of a resisting dog, Mrs. Albert Comstock at last losing patience with Chinky-Winky and attempting – Harder, Mrs. Comstock, pull harder! – to rip off the dog’s head); there were Le Soleil, La Lune, and L’Etoile (The Sun, The Moon, and The Star). She rather suspected that the illustration of the scandalously naked woman in L’Etoile – she’d clearly escaped Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s vigilance, and flaunted her breasts like St. Agatha in the stained glass window in All Saints’ – was a representation of Madame Etoile. She certainly shed light on the tenebrous in that position. So that was why no gentlemen were admitted. Kneeling down beneath a star-crowded sky, pouring out water from a pitcher in each hand, her disordered hair falling loosely down over her shoulders – though not far enough down to cover those perkily pointy breasts – she undoubtedly possessed the smugly self-satisfied look of a woman who had never been known to fail. There was L’Amoureux (The Lovers); there was Le Bateleur (The Magician) …

  Tarot cards and ballet movements. You couldn’t deny that the French led a richly vocabulary-packed life.

  La Lune was card number XVIII, and she knew what this card meant. On the card, two battlemented towers seemed to stand guard over the horizon like giant chess pieces, and two dogs howled up at
the moon, as a parasitic-looking creature crawled up toward them out of a deep, dark pool. It was not a good card. It meant that a secret would be brought to light. It meant that the imagination was dangerous if it were not controlled. It was a card, Alice felt, to which she would be drawn repeatedly. Choose a card, any card. This was what the fortune-teller would order, and this would be the card that she always chose. She wouldn’t be able to stop herself. It would be like having a secret never to be told, and being unable to stop yourself from talking about it. “Choose a card, any card,” the cardsharp – his eyes obscured by his pulled-down green eye-shade – would urge, fanning out the pack seductively, the identically patterned backs of the cards held out for her to select one, and – every time – the card that she selected would be La Lune, just like Carmen always finding death in the cards she drew.

  “Any card.”

  La Lune.

  “Any card.”

  La Lune.

  La Lune. La Lune. Seventy-eight moons would blaze down their light from directly overhead with noontime radiance, and seventy-eight creatures would crawl out of seventy-eight pools. This would be no place for shadows. The tenebrous would not survive here. (“La Loon! La Loon!” She heard the voices chanting, felt the sharp-nailed fingers as they pointed knowingly in her direction.)