The Looking Glass House

by Vanessa Tait

  Mary had had her own photograph taken last year, in one of the little studios that had sprung up in Bear Street. It had been a whim of her father’s. She had found herself placed stiffly on a chair with her corset pulled tight and the monstrous eye of the camera trained upon her, each moment brought into unbearable focus. Every part of her exposed face prickled with a new and horrible awareness, pushed in on and made worse by the cheery banter of the photographer, who managed to convey, by the number of his requests, that she was not making an attractive picture. Although when she had got the results back, her father had professed himself pleased. And when she looked at the photograph herself, to her surprise she had looked really quite ordinary.

  ‘How were your lessons this morning?’ Mr Dodgson asked.

  ‘I have been doing “Harriet and the Matches”,’ said Ina.

  ‘I know it well,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘It is a little like the poem I wrote for my sisters when I was a child. Would you like to hear it?

  ‘I have a fairy by my side

  Which says I must not sleep

  When once in pain I loudly cried

  It said, “You must not weep.”

  ‘If, full of mirth, I smile and grin

  It says, “You must not laugh.”

  When once I wished to drink some gin

  It said, “You must not quaff.”

  ‘“What may I do?’” at length I cried,

  Tired of the painful task.

  The fairy quietly replied,

  And said, “You must not ask. ”’

  ‘I don’t see that it has anything to do with “Harriet and the Matches”,’ said Mary, staring at the polish of Mr Dodgson’s shoe, solid against the grass. ‘“Harriet and the Matches” is a useful poem.’

  She watched as Mr Dodgson took off his hat and allowed himself a shake of the head; his curls bounced gently in the slanted sunlight that sporadically took hold of the lawn. Air meeting hair; he longed for it, she could see, to feel the breeze drifting through follicles like a replenishing gust through a stagnant forest.

  But after a moment Mr Dodgson’s fingers tightened on the brim and with his other hand he smoothed down his curls. Quickly he pushed his hat more firmly on to his head.

  ‘Nothing at all to do with it,’ he said. ‘I wrote that when I was a boy, at the Rectory, years ago. Only I cannot bear moralizing!’

  Mary nodded, though she kept her eyes on his shoes. Weren’t morals a useful tool? She had always been taught they were. Her mother had raised her on moral sayings: Elbows off the table, hands in laps. Don’t speak until spoken to. Eat your greens or you’ll get warts. And her mother’s favourite: How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child. They were the coat-hanger on which she hung all her moral fibres.

  ‘Edith, you sit on the table. You, Ina, stand with your back to her, facing Alice. Good!’

  Mr Dodgson handed Edith the bag of cherries to hold and gave one to Ina to dangle above Alice’s mouth. Alice was to open her mouth as if in the process of receiving it. Then he disappeared into the darkroom that he had set up in the Deanery’s broom cupboard, and reappeared carrying a glass plate, which he pushed into the back of the camera. It did seem magical, thought Mary, to be able to crystallize the exact image of a thing on to a photographic plate, as if spirits had got in.

  The camera was in front of Mary on its three spindly legs, its great eye staring at the cathedral. Mr Dodgson stooped and pulled the hood over his shoulders, then reached round and pulled off the cap.

  His bent-over shape, his buttocks, pointed straight at Mary’s face.

  Should she object? But then she would be drawing attention to it . . . Better to say nothing. A grey flannel trouser, and a bone, two bones, clearly visible behind.

  Mary slid her eyes over to a tree, its leaves just coming out. She slid her eyes further, on to the cathedral. What a peaceful building! She wished she were in it, underneath the arches, sitting on a pew, asking God to have mercy upon her. Just the act of asking Him, in amongst all the others – the old lady with the lace cap, the luxuriantly bearded man with such an air of purpose – comforted her. Apes for ancestors, fornicating and frolicking in the jungle, had no place there, could not in fact exist in the same reality. One was so much more real than the other, there in front of her: a cathedral. Jesus, on a cross.

  Mr Dodgson fidgeted and stepped from foot to foot, each movement sending a minute ripple down his trouser legs.

  How many seconds did it take to make a photograph? Time beat in a slow pulse at her temples.

  It seemed unfair that thinness, while perfectly acceptable in a man, was judged so harshly on a woman.

  Mr Dodgson’s buttocks were reversing. Mary leaned back as far as she dared. But he was only straightening up to replace the cap.

  It seemed it was usual to follow Mr Dodgson into the broom cupboard to see the photograph being brought to life, but when she went in, Mary found the place unrecognizable. It still smelt of dust, but in front of that now there was a tang of something else, a sharper smell. The brooms had been cleared away and glass funnels and trays stacked in their place. The skylight had been covered with a black square of material and a subterranean gloom hung over the room, in which Mr Dodgson moved with an urgency and fluidity Mary had not noticed before. He reached up and poured a strong-smelling liquid into one basin and quickly thrust the glass plate into it.

  ‘I muh-muh-must think of a way to make the time pass more quickly in front of the camera – a story, perhaps – because you know you can hurry time along if you push him very hard from behind,’ Mr Dodgson was saying as he agitated a tray full of chemicals.

  ‘I should like that during lessons!’ said Alice.

  ‘Lessons are not meant to be interesting,’ said Mary. ‘They are meant to be educational.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘Though it does not make me popular in college.’

  Mary looked at him in surprise. His poem seemed to say the opposite. She would have imagined him the most whimsical tutor.

  They all stared down into the basin. Slowly something began to emerge, a light patch in the middle of the plate.

  ‘Oh look, here come my teeth!’ said Alice.

  ‘That is not your teeth, Alice, that is your hair. Your teeth and dress will be black, and your lips and hair white. It is all reversed – negative into positive, positive into negative.’ ‘Is that why the plate is called a glass negative?’ asked Ina. ‘Exactly so, yes. When I make a print from it, it is all turned round back to normal.’ Slowly the children’s image came into being. Even in the spectral version Mary could see there was a symmetry to Alice’s face, a rightness to it, that she had not noticed in the real Alice. And yet, as the image swam up at her into sharpness, there was something . . . Even in the negative she could see it: the tilt of her head and the pout of her mouth. Something aggravating.

  ‘We have something here, I think,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘This will make a fine photograph. Excellent even. A story, entire and complete.’ He leant down and kissed Alice on the top of her head, then Ina, then Edith. ‘For once to have achieved what I set out to do in the morning is most satisfying.’

  ‘You could not have done it without me,’ said Alice.

  Ina turned away and pushed open the door into the garden. When Mary came outside, blinking, she found her sitting alone on the farthest bench.

  ‘I do not see why I should have to be photographed. I don’t like it.’

  Mary put her arm round her shoulder. ‘You all looked very pretty. Your father will like to see it.’

  ‘All that holding still. It is stupid.’

  ‘I will give a very good report of you to your mother today – shall we see if she is back?’

  ‘She is back, look, there she is.’

  Mrs Liddell was indeed sailing over the lawn towards them in a sweep of satin and lace. Her hoops flattened grass and disturbed shrubbery; even from this distance Mary could hear the jangle of gold bracelets o
utside her gloves.

  ‘My darling Ina!’ Mrs Liddell stretched out her arms and sent a noisy kiss over her eldest daughter’s head. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘In the darkroom,’ said Ina.

  ‘Oh yes, with Mr Dodgson. Was he here again?’

  ‘He took our photograph.’

  ‘Really?’ Mrs Liddell inclined to the side.

  ‘He said you had allowed it.’

  ‘Alice said she had been photographed before, many times,’ said Mary.

  ‘And so she has. Nevertheless, this time I was out. I do not remember giving permission.’

  ‘I am sorry, Mrs Liddell, he was quite persuasive.’ Mary flushed.

  ‘Mr Dodgson said he would come on Monday to try for another photograph of us, if you were agreeable,’ said Ina.

  ‘Am I agreeable, Miss Prickett?’

  The question hung in the air. Mary struggled to formulate a reply, conscious that she was blushing. She did not know if she was being mocked, or punished for letting Mr Dodgson take the children’s photograph. Any answer sounded too familiar.

  ‘Well, my friends say I am, if my governess does not!’ Mrs Liddell laughed, letting her mouth open. Mary could see her teeth, very white, and her tongue in a point behind.

  Mary stretched her own mouth towards the corners of her face, her lips sticking on her teeth. She was attempting a smile but she felt as if she was not making a good job of it.

  Mr Dodgson and Alice came out into the garden, still talking.

  ‘Mr Dodgson. I see you are photographing my children again,’ said Mrs Liddell.

  ‘Yes, I think I succeeded in a good image. You may like an imprint—’

  ‘And yet I have no recollection of the appointment.’

  ‘I am sure . . .’ Mr Dodgson smiled; Mary saw the tendons in his neck.

  ‘Did you know my husband is a very good artist?’ Mrs Liddell cut in. ‘Mr Ruskin says so. His blotting-paper sketches are quite prized. Usually executed during some dreary meeting or another, I dare say.’ She laughed again. ‘Can photography be called art, do you think?’

  ‘There is some skill in photography perhaps.’ Mr Dodgson rocked back and forth on the soles of his shoes. ‘For one thing the collodion must be quite right, and then the timing—’

  ‘But that seems to me a scientific skill, not an artistic one. The Dean, on the other hand, is very keen on photography, as well as art. He tells me that I cannot appreciate the science of it, and I dare say he’s right. After all, a mere woman could not be expected to understand.’ Mrs Liddell flashed out a smile to Mary.

  ‘No, a woman’s understanding is in general far below a man’s,’ said Mary.

  ‘Yes, on most things, Miss Prickett, but perhaps not all.’

  Mrs Liddell turned to go, but halfway across the lawn she stopped and turned back to Mr Dodgson, still smiling.

  ‘The Dean tells me you have been having troubles with your lectures.’

  Mr Dodgson flushed.

  ‘Students can be so lazy, but I dare say now that my husband has had a talk with them they will turn up. They do seem to be in awe of Mr Liddell, I can’t think why.’

  Mr Dodgson stood very still, his fingers worrying at a loose thread on his trouser leg.

  ‘I suppose that is a skill that some men have.’ She smiled again, broader than ever, and then turned again towards the house, pushing her children in front of her.

  They stood there together for a moment, united by the stirring of awkwardness that Mrs Liddell had created.

  ‘Students can be lazy,’ said Mary.

  It was the wrong thing to have said. Two angry spots appeared on Mr Dodgson’s cheeks.

  Mary rushed to fill the silence with more words. ‘Not that I have had as much experience as you!’ She had surmised that Mr Dodgson was a tutor of some kind at Christ Church. ‘I have only taught the girls, of course . . .’

  Mr Dodgson worried at the lawn with his foot. ‘If I only had girls I think I would be much better off. It is lazy young men that afflict me. But I am afraid that is the problem with modern life. Everybody affects boredom.’

  Mary had not come across modern life before. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I am afraid no one is interested in serious thought, or difficulty.’

  ‘No,’ said Mary. Mr Dodgson looked very solemn, but at the same time quizzical somehow. She imagined his mouth could quickly change from stern to amused, and back again. The wisp of breath coming out of it smelt faintly of cloves.

  Alice’s laugh floated across the lawn, and a shriek from Edith.

  ‘Oh, to be a child once more!’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘I find I long to be a child again, the further away from it I become. But we all grow older, do we not, every day!’

  Mr Dodgson did not look old, thought Mary. His skin was clear and unlined. Though perhaps his body seemed older, in the way that he carried it.

  At twenty-eight the line between her eyes was beginning to shape itself into a permanent furrow. ‘We do grow older every day, that is true,’ she said, frowning even as she spoke.

  ‘Though of course ladies age much more slowly than men,’ said Mr Dodgson.

  Mary blushed. Was he paying her a compliment or was he speaking in generalities? She could not tell from his face, which was still turned to the Deanery.

  Mary had not much practice with gallantry. The best way forward, she thought hotly, was to ignore it. ‘Good afternoon to you then!’ she said, though she thought she felt his eyes on her all the way back across the lawn.

  Chapter 3

  Mary’s childhood had been spent in a large town house on Beaumont Street belonging to her grandmother, but when her grandmother died the family had been forced to sell up and move to a smaller one on Folly Bridge. Mary had not been back to it since she moved to the Deanery, and now that she was here again, the rooms seemed to have shrunk even further. The whole house was filled with steam. Her mother’s servant was boiling a pig’s trotter on the stove, and Mary could hear the sound of the bone clacking against the sides of the saucepan as if it had been brought back to life and was trying to get out.

  Mary, her mother and her mother’s friend Mrs Chitterworth sat in the parlour, between them a pile of hats like awkwardly landed birds.

  ‘You know what they say, of course: “I am the Dean, this Mrs Liddell. / She plays first, I, second fiddle. / She is the Broad, I am the High/Together we are the University! ”’

  When Mary’s mother, Mrs Prickett, hinged open her jaw to make University rhyme with High, Mary could see the sticky pink powder gathered in the crevices of her face.

  ‘I have heard that,’ said Mary. ‘Though of course if you said University the right way, it would not work so well.’ Her head throbbed just above her eyes; she took up a straw hat and began to attack it with her scissors.

  Her mother could not sew; it hurt her fingers, she said. But she did not want to waste money on a new hat every year when the old ones could just as well be updated. So Mary was called in, to change a feather for ribbons, wilting silk roses for bows.

  ‘And I suppose her position is unassailable now. Your father said that the whole of Oxford was there hoping to catch a glimpse of the royal carriage,’ said Mrs Prickett.

  ‘And I was there waiting just at the gates,’ said Mrs Chitterworth. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it. Though I did get cold and have a very sore throat this morning. I have already been to the pharmacy.’

  ‘You spend your life at that pharmacy, dear,’ said Mary’s mother.

  ‘You are clever, Mary, with your needle. My fingers could never manage it!’ Mrs Chitterworth leaned towards Mary. ‘But what of the party? I am desperate to hear.’

  ‘The party was very grand,’ said Mary. ‘I saw the Queen up close and Ina presented her with a posy—’

  Her mother interrupted. ‘Yes, yes, but you, did you hold up?’

  A nub of silk, where the flower had been sewn on, remained clinging to the felt. Mary stabbed at it with the tip of her sc
issors. She was damaging the material round it; a small hole was starting to blossom.

  ‘Oh, let her finish, do!’ said Mrs Chitterworth. ‘I must hear about it all; I cannot wait.’

  Her mother blew air out of her nostrils – not a snort, nothing that Mary could argue with. But air rushing through a mother’s nasal cavities can be open to many filial interpretations, which Mary now ran through:

  Her mother did not trust her. She did not think she had ‘held up’, as she put it.

  Her mother thought her a figure of fun.

  Her mother was conveying her amused derision that Mary had not yet managed to find a husband and had to go out to work for a living.

  Or her mother’s nose had become inflamed.

  She could settle on that.

  ‘Who was there? And what about the royal family, and was the Queen magnificent?’ asked Mrs Chitterworth. (Mrs Chitter worth was a woman who had reacted to the difficulties in her own upbringing by refusing to look inwards. Thus she spent her whole life in gossip, although her body hatched all sorts of ailments in protest.)

  So Mary had to give out every name of every person she could remember from the party, and who talked to whom, until her mouth was dry. As she spoke, she remembered the wine stain. It would be discovered by now, even if she hadn’t heard anything about it. A red wine stain might never come out. But the stain could have come from anyone’s glass. Alice could have been clumsy and bumped into someone herself.

  ‘It went off very well,’ Mary repeated.

  ‘I heard the most amazing news! Lady Malmesbury’s daughter has eloped and she is only fourteen. Can you imagine?’ said Mrs Chitterworth. ‘The poor woman.’

  ‘At least the girl is married, or will be,’ said Mrs Prickett.

  Mary stabbed her needle into the felt. ‘I need more ribbon.’

  ‘That reminds me. Sidney Wilton came to call last week. I told him you lived in Christ Church now. He wanted to know how you were getting along.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Fine, I said.’

  Mary wanted to tell her mother that she was doing more than fine; she was doing very well at the Deanery; she was now moving in a circle that her mother could have nothing to do with. She might have scooped up more of the pieces from the party and dropped them into her mother’s lap to force out of her some spurt of accidental admiration. But her head was aching, her finger was throbbing where she had stabbed it, and now her mother had brought up the topic of Mr Wilton.