The Looking Glass House

by Vanessa Tait

  No, Man – Mary opened her eyes – civilization at its peak, could not have come from that.

  Mr Ruskin had caught Alice awkwardly round the knuckles; the tips of her fingers were turning red in his fist.

  ‘Perhaps you would like a posy?’ Alice said, putting her basket between them.

  ‘A posy!’ said Mr Ruskin. He laughed. ‘Yes. Yes, I will, I will fly in the face of convention – who could not accept such an offering from such a child?’ He reached into Alice’s basket and plucked a bunch of lavender out, then swooped down and pressed his lips to the top of Alice’s head.

  ‘And here is another man with no progeny,’ said Mr Ruskin, looking up again. ‘And happier for it, I dare say. Good evening, Mr Dodgson.’

  ‘I have all I need in the progeny of others,’ said Mr Dodgson, drawing himself up, making himself taller and thinner, if that were possible.

  ‘And what do you think of Mr Darwin’s theories?’ said Mr Ruskin. ‘Are we to be ape men?’ He grinned and leaned towards Mr Dodgson, to the other man’s visible distaste. Mary could see a speckle of Mr Ruskin’s white saliva glistening on the shoulder of Mr Dodgson’s coat, where it bubbled disconsolately for a moment before melting away.

  ‘Perhaps you have seen my photograph,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘The skeletons of humans and apes. They are very similar.’

  Mr Ruskin spread his fingers and said: ‘Ah, so you are—’

  Mr Dodgson cut him off with a prim turn of his mouth: ‘And yet, of course, completely dee-dee-dee-different.’

  Mr Ruskin grunted and turned away. As he did so, his elbow knocked against Mary and tipped her towards Mr Dodgson.

  Mary tried to step back but lost her balance, enough for the wine in her glass to splash out and down on to the back of Alice’s white dress, where it quickly bloomed into a red stain.

  But nobody had noticed. Not Mr Dodgson, not Alice, not Mrs Liddell.

  Mary’s head was heavy and hot. Her feet throbbed in time to the pulse behind her ears.

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Liddell,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘What a party you have given. It will go down in the history books.’

  Mrs Liddell laughed, showing her small white teeth. ‘I doubt that. History books are for the doings of men. But thank you, Mr Dodgson, all the same. Dearest Edith, go to Mrs Cornelius and her daughters, say hello. I have told them you will be coming.’

  The skin behind Edith’s freckles turned red. ‘Must I?’

  ‘Yes, dear, you must. Alice, please thank Mr Ruskin for your drawing lesson – he does it only out of the goodness of his heart and I think you have seen him this evening without thanking him. Ina, no one has yet presented Her Majesty with a posy. Her lady-in-waiting has indicated that the Queen may accept it.’

  Mary stood waiting for her own instructions. ‘And I will circulate,’ she said.

  Mrs Liddell turned to her in surprise.

  ‘With the children,’ Mary added, her cheeks hot.

  ‘The children have destinations, as I have just said. But when they return, you may take them upstairs to bed.’

  The party was still exhaling gusts of laughter as Mary lay upstairs in her bedroom. Her head was spinning. She put a hand on her forehead – burning, as she thought. It was all the excitement, most likely, or perhaps she had a fever.

  Thoughts hit the inside edges of Mary’s skull with a heavy brightness. The Queen, but even as she saw her again in all her power, the word dumpy sprinted across the upper part of her forehead. She closed her eyes and faces immediately came bursting through the darkness. The Queen’s soft jowls, so shockingly familiar; Mrs Liddell’s mass of dark hair; Mr Dodgson’s uneven smile, Alice’s eyes beneath her fringe. All began to jiggle up and down and then follow each other in a figure of eight.

  Ah well, plenty more chances.

  As Mary began to review it in her head, she told herself that the party had in fact gone very well. She had not made a fool of herself. She had not lost control of the children. And most importantly, she had been there.

  ‘A terrible crush in here,’ said Mr Dodgson, as the whole room seemed to shrink.

  The mouths, the moustaches, the pinked cheeks.

  The tea chest pressed in against her calves, the ceiling down on her head.

  My life has begun, my life has begun, my life.

  The party spooled away in circles, away and away until Mary stopped remembering the various elements of it and only felt the rhythm of the unravelling. And then she slept, and had some memory, in the morning, of snoring.

  Chapter 2

  Mary sat at the front of the classroom, a sparse room perched at the top of the Deanery with four desks in it. She was staring out of the window at the elm tree, its bare branches knobbed with buds. An early fly was already trapped on the windowsill, on its back and frantically buzzing.

  Mary, said Mrs Liddell, when she was engaged as governess, had only to continue where the last governess had left off: more reading, neater writing, general knowledge, and manners. The eldest, Harry, was away at boarding school. The girls left behind would have tutors for French, music, mathematics and art.

  Mary’s experience of education had so far consisted only of her own schooling: a school for girls run by another governess not much older than her, in one bare room at the top of a house. Her teacher had had a voice that never varied its register, and she’d relied entirely on books. Indeed, Mary found it hard to recall her face; it was always pointed downwards, or sometimes obscured altogether. Although if she perceived impudence or laziness, she suffered an abrupt change of character, springing out from behind her desk and leaping on the girl in question. In the winter it had been so cold that the ink froze in its pots; they had had to wear gloves to write, and it was difficult to stop the pens from slipping to the floor. And if Mary bent too many nibs she would have to go without for several weeks – which was meant to be a punishment but was not. In summer the room grew oppressively hot and airless and the droning voice of the governess made it difficult to stay awake. Once Mary had actually fallen asleep, for no more than a second, but had awoken to the irate face of her teacher, and her mouth, opened extraordinarily wide – it had been that that Mary focused on; she had never seen her open it wider than the width of a pencil before – screaming at her to wake up. She was a useless, lazy girl to whom nothing good would ever happen. She had been beaten on the back of the thighs with a cane, so hard that she had had to stand for a week.

  It was silent in Mary’s classroom, except for the children’s nibs scratching across paper, and the fly. Each spin a desperate buzz, each buzz a desperate spin. The sound of it began to drill into Mary’s forehead.

  ‘Ina, have you finished writing out “Harriet and the Matches”?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Prickett.’

  ‘Stand up then, please.’

  Ina stood up, smoothed down her pinafore and cleared her throat:

  ‘But Harriet would not take advice:

  She lit a match, it was so nice!

  It crackled so, it burned so clear –

  Exactly like the picture here.

  She jumped for joy and ran about

  And was too pleased to put it out.

  ‘So she was burnt, with all her clothes,

  And arms, and hands, and eyes, and nose;

  Till she had nothing more to lose

  Except her little scarlet shoes;

  And nothing else but these was found

  Among her ashes on the ground.’

  ‘The moral?’ said Mary.

  ‘Do not light matches.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Always listen to your elders.’

  ‘Good. Thank you, Ina.’

  Mary got up and went to the window. The fly seemed to sense her coming and with a desperate effort righted itself and began to blunder up and down against the pane, its back glossy with black fur, its head with its great red helmets for eyes.

  Outside, daffodils stood out on the grass, mouthy and bright. A man walked through
her gaze, across the bright expanse of lawn, his clothes and hat so dark Mary could not initially see his features. His back was very straight and he moved quickly, but there was something uneven about his legs; perhaps one was longer than the other. She recognized him as Mr Dodgson, the man from the party. She had the impression that his body and legs were not properly attached. He was carrying a large object with similarly long disjointed legs; she could not see what it was but the strangeness of them both caught at her.

  ‘May I be finished now?’ said Alice.

  ‘Have you done all that I asked?’

  ‘Yes. I have done it all before anyway.’ Alice stuck out her bottom lip and blew the air upwards, deranging her fringe.

  In the three weeks Mary had been at the Deanery, she had noticed that the child was full of sighs. And more than that, her sighs seemed theatrical – illustrations of sighs, meant to draw attention to the fact that she was sighing.

  Her hair was bright and shiny and as waterproof as a bird’s. When she was reprimanded, she shook the words off. Only the tip of one toe touched the floor; the other foot curled round her leg.

  ‘Alice, it is not ladylike to blow out so much air. In future, if you have the desire to sigh, please hold your breath.’

  ‘But I’ll suffocate!’

  ‘It is not possible to suffocate yourself, as you know. Just hold your breath until the desire to sigh has faded.’

  ‘But if I hold my breath I will only want to sigh more, shan’t I, when I release it?’

  ‘Well then, when you release it, hold it again. Or breathe regularly; you must know how to do that. All this sighing is off-putting for Edith and Ina. Let me see your book.’

  Alice’s lips were very red, her lashes long and thick. Ink splotches littered the page.

  ‘You have blotted your copybook! Your writing must be neater.’ Mary grasped Alice’s hand in her own and forced the pen along over her own pencil marks. ‘You must keep an even pace. I have told you this. And it must go exactly as high as below. D’you see? A child half your age could do it. Write out ten more.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Prickett.’

  Not a crease, not a mole or thread vein or mottle intruded into the porelesss curve of Alice’s cheek, but Mary saw that its natural rosiness had deepened into a darker red of anger or shame, she could not tell which.

  She was, for a moment, glad. And then she was ashamed of her gladness and tried to make it up to the girl by putting her hand awkwardly on Alice’s head, but Alice shrank away.

  Mary turned to look out of the window once more. Mr Dodgson was there again, carrying what looked like glasses, or tubes made of glass, awkwardly, his fingers inserted into the mouths of them so that they resembled giant glass hands.

  She looked at the clock. Still half an hour to go, then perhaps they could all go to the garden for some fresh air.

  She turned back towards the window. The fly was perpetrating a frantic V up and down the pane. Mary reached over to Alice’s desk and grasped her schoolbook, rolled it up, and brought it down with a sharp smack, twice, on the window pane. A heavy body dropped to the sill, leaving a smear on the glass.

  Mary returned the book to the child and went back to her desk. The weight of her new skirts, the swish of them as she walked, still felt strange. She touched the tip of her finger to the raw patch on her neck where her collar had rubbed at the party.

  Edith was gazing up at the phrenology chart Mary had put up on the schoolroom wall. It was more for Mary’s benefit than the children’s, though it was worthwhile to introduce them to scientific principles, if the last governess had not. Mary liked the rational world suggested by the chart; that this or that character trait could be illustrated by the concurrent area of the brain bulging up and pushing out the skull.

  Order in chaos. Answers in an unfathomable world.

  It was a map, she always thought, of all the different sides of human nature. She imagined the various sins simmering beneath the skull, and as each one came to the boil – laziness, or avarice say – the relevant part of the skull would pop out like an excrescence.

  Dean Liddell had a very large forehead, an illustration of his brain expanding in general, due to all his scholarship. Mrs Liddell, Mary noticed, had enlargements in the area assigned to mirth, but also destructiveness. There did not seem to be any related to insolence, but children’s heads were growing all the time, and were harder to read.

  ‘What shall I do now, Miss Prickett?’ asked Edith.

  ‘Have you finished your spellings?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Prickett.’ Edith had red wavy hair and a small nose dotted with freckles. She often pulled down her hair to cover her eyes, so that she was unknowable.

  ‘I will read to you all then.’ Mary reached over and pulled a heavy black volume towards her. She had found that Magnall’s Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People was very useful during her lessons with the children. When she had emptied herself of knowledge, the closely crammed pages had it in abundance.

  ‘“Chapter Seven. Canaan, or the Holy Land. This once populous country, the peculiar object of Divine Providence, was first called the ‘land of Canaan’, from Canaan, the grandson of Noah.” Please study the map.’

  The children looked at her.

  ‘The map of Canaan! Come forward.’

  Mary turned the book towards the small heads of the children. She had never herself been to a foreign land. It was strange to think that God had sent Jesus to so barren a place. England would have been so much more welcoming.

  When the children’s heads were bent over the book, Mary allowed herself to look out of the window again. Mr Dodgson’s body was bent over into the shape of a C. On the inside of the curve there was a large brown box.

  ‘“The posterity of Canaan was numerous. His eldest son, Sidon, founded the city of Sidon and was father to the Sidonians and Phoenicians. Canaan had ten other sons who were the fathers of as many tribes dwelling in Palestine and Syria; namely the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites. ”’

  She read on and on, cramming what remained of the lesson with a torrent of words and facts, until the whole schoolroom was full up with them. She stumbled a little over the unfamiliar names, but after the first few minutes she began pronouncing them as she liked; no one would know to correct her.

  It was not warm, but the spring sunshine was sharp. Mary had left her bonnet off and she had to squint. She knew it was unbecoming, especially in a face as thin as hers, but she was helpless against it.

  The children ran on ahead, their legs stirring their new white dresses into foam.

  ‘Girls!’ she shouted into the wind, louder than she meant to. But it seemed they did not hear her and ran on. Perhaps the wind had snatched her voice away.

  She strode round the hedge, her mouth hooked halfway open on the first guh, her eyes narrowed, and even though she had been expecting to see him, it was a shock to almost run into Mr Dodgson, her cheek moments away from his jacket.

  He let out a startled hummnnnng! Her fingertips grazed the rough wool of his jacket. They both reared back their heads and stepped outwards. An aroma of chemicals emitted from his jacket.

  ‘I’m sorry to sta-sta-startle you,’ he said. ‘I thought Mrs Liddell—’

  ‘No, oh! I am so sorry, my own clumsiness. I was – I was chasing the girls.’

  ‘Mrs Liddell has given me – us – permission to use the garden to-to try-try – to try for a photograph of the children. I beg your pardon! I thought perhaps she wa-wa-wa . . .’ Mr Dodgson swallowed. ‘She WOULD have told you.’

  Mary stepped back another pace. ‘She would have told me?’ She had lost track of the conversation.

  ‘She would have tah-tah . . .’

  She must not stare at his mouth, but she couldn’t stop herself. It was open, it ought to be singing by the look of it, but no sounds were coming out. Above it his eyes
stared at her helplessly. He had not suffered from this disease, if that was what it was, at the party. Perhaps it came on sporadically, like a coughing fit.

  ‘She would have told you I was here!’

  ‘Oh.’ Mary dragged her mind to Mrs Liddell. ‘No, she did not!’

  ‘Oh, Mr Do-Do-Do-Dodgson,’ said Alice, coming round the corner. ‘Have you come to photograph me?’

  ‘Yes, dear Alice. Look, I am all ready.’ He indicated a table with a striped cloth over it and a chair in the middle of the lawn.

  Ina said: ‘I didn’t know we were sitting for another photograph.’

  ‘It won’t take long, Ina dear. Look, I have a broom handle for you to use so that your arm won’t get tired.’ As he was talking, he pushed the children gently towards the furniture. ‘I want you to pretend to feed Alice some cherries.’

  Mary knew of photographs of adults, but not of children, especially without their parents, especially out here in the open, on the lawn. ‘Why would you want to photograph the children?’

  ‘Why, are children not the most perfect beings? They are so recently lent from God. Far more perfect than us adults, grown away from Him and racked with sin.’

  Children did not make good subjects as far as she knew; they were too fidgety. ‘Will Mrs Liddell mind?’

  ‘Mr Dodgson has taken our photographs a great many times,’ said Alice. ‘I think I am very good at having my likeness taken.’

  Mary’s lips tightened further. ‘It is not a skill, Alice. You merely need to sit.’