by Vanessa Tait
Mr Dodgson spoke to her reflection, more boldly than he usually did. ‘You must do it, Miss Prickett. Don’t you see?’
He brought his other hand to join the first upon her shoulder.
They stared at each other in the looking glass.
She did see.
‘The hat suits you so well, it’s as if you were made for the part.’
Made for the part. The part of marriage. She had never felt made for the part before: her body was too shapeless, her face too thin, and all the other things were awkward and wrong.
But now here was Mr Dodgson saying that she was made for the part.
‘And your head – it is most interestingly shaped. Your brows, they are quite the opposite to a criminal or savage kind.’
‘My brows?’ She looked at her reflection again. She had never paid much attention to her brows before: they were thin, and straggled along in a haphazard way above her eyes. But perhaps they were something that should be admired. Perhaps she ought to invest in a pair of tweezers.
‘In the science of phrenology,’ said Mr Dodgson.
Mary tried to remember what her poster said about brows.
‘I went to visit a phrenologist once,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘The results were quite extraordinary. He ascertained that I had a taste for order and dress, good analogical reasoning and a strong love of children. The last is certainly so! But who cannot love children?’
She and Mr Dodgson had so much in common; she was only just beginning to realize how much. Was there a protrusion on the skull that denoted a matching love of phrenology? She was about to mention it to Mr Dodgson – she felt light-headed – he might like it. But his hands had left her shoulders and he had turned towards the stage. ‘Come, Miss Prickett, your part is not taxing. You will find your main appearances are towards the beginning – when you are sad, though you pretend not to be – and the end, when you are truly happy. It is a kind of farce, I am afraid, as I said.’
‘I have read it.’
‘You have? Good, then, you are persuaded.’
There was a knock on the door. It was the Acland children.
‘I hope you don’t mind, Miss Prickett. I took the liberty of asking them. I think a crowd makes a better audience.’
He handed her a green robe – it looked Chinese, she would never have worn it usually – to put on over her dress. She raised her arms, mute. It felt supple and cool, the shimmer of its colour surprising after all that black.
‘Miss Prickett, you look like a lady in the magazines,’ said Alice.
‘She does!’ said Mr Dodgson.
‘I hope not,’ said the governess, her hands flying up to the hat.
‘I think Alice meant it as a compliment. A lady of fashion,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘Of course, if you would be more comfortable without the hat, you can leave it off.’
‘No, no,’ said Mary. If she took it off now, it would look as if she did not know her own mind. And he had complimented her in it, twice.
‘Good. Is everyone else ready? Then let us begin.’
Mr Dodgson made a scraping bow and in a grand voice announced the play and the two players, making such stupidness of it that the children were shouting with laughter before he had even begun.
He put on his top hat.
‘My name is Windsor,’ he said. ‘I am a man of six-andtwenty. I am as happy as can be; at least, that is what I tell people. But I have lost my only love. Shall I tell you about her?’
‘Yes!’ said the children.
Mary stood awkwardly, holding the script with both hands.
‘My affection for her commenced at rather an early period of her existence; she was a mere child – ten next birthday – whereas I had reached the mature age of eleven and a half! Well, the course of our true love ran on smoothly enough till I was twenty-one, when I made a proposal for Julia’s hand, which her father, Smith, rejected. And why? Simply because my father, Brown, who had made all his money in the soap line, had christened me Windsor! Indeed, if it hadn’t been for my mother, his original intention was to have me called Best Windsor.’
The children laughed.
‘How silly,’ said one of the Aclands. ‘Imagine not marrying someone just because they were called Windsor!’
‘But it’s the name of a soap,’ said Ina.
‘It is silly, very silly indeed. But alas, the world is silly, as you will soon find out,’ said Mr Dodgson in his Windsor voice. ‘Well, Julia and I separated, vowing eternal constancy. I plunged into the law and became an attorney; she rushed into matrimony.’
Mr Dodgson dropped to his knees and sank his head into his chest.
‘Finding that she had become another’s, I resolved to forget her! To place the wide wide ocean between us! I went to Margate: there I might be seen walking by moonlight on the jetty in my Margate slippers, singing Mrs Maynard’s favourite duet all by myself.’
He wandered from side to side, swaying and clasping his hands together, and sang in a high voice:
‘Away with melancholy,
Nor doleful changes ring
For grieving is a folly,
Then merrily merrily sing.’
Then he conducted the children, until they all sang along with him.
Mary looked down at her book. Hers was the next scene. She was anxious. Feeling that she ought not to be anxious added to her anxiety.
Now was the time to step forward.
‘Oh, but I am so sad,’ she said. ‘I know not why.’ Her voice did not seem to belong to her. Her cheeks were burning hot.
She had several more lines, which she spoke without lifting her head from the text.
Then she and Mr Dodgson took the stage together, supposedly reunited after many years. She felt Mr Dodgson’s wiry presence close to her, swooping away and returning, his voice lifting and falling. Gradually she found her self-consciousness dropping away. All the time Mr Dodgson was there, teasing her, imploring her, making fun. Soon she was reading the lines as if she were Mrs Maynard, and Mr Dodgson Windsor.
Then she turned the page once more and came upon the final scene. The love scene.
Mr Dodgson stopped abruptly in his pacing. He hardly seemed to be looking at the script. Suddenly he turned to face her.
‘I have loved you since I was eleven and a half!’ he declaimed. Mary could not find her place. She stumbled, but Mr Dodgson carried on, dropping to one knee. He took her hand quite fiercely, pulling her down on to the edge of the wooden box.
‘I must insist that you marry me – and I will not hear a word against it.’
Mary looked down at her script in a haze. Mr Dodgson did not seem to be following it.
‘Oh, I, should I?’ she said. She was present and not present, herself and someone else.
Mr Dodgson shouted: ‘You should – say yes, oh do!’
‘Yes, then,’ said Mary. ‘I will!’
For a moment she thought he would embrace her. He took her one hand in both of his and brought it to his lips. She let her hand lie in his, even though she felt the imprint of his lips as if she had been branded.
And then Mr Dodgson was up and skipping about the stage. The children clapped and cheered. Mr Dodgson went into a long speech about how all his prayers had been answered and how nobody could be more content. Mary noticed his eyes – she had read in her romance novels that eyes flashed, but until now she had never seen it. Perhaps she had never really seen anybody alive before. Bowing and taking the children’s applause; now pretending they clapped him too much, now imploring them to clap more wildly. He bowed deeper and deeper until his head came down on his knees and his top hat fell off and he pretended to fall into it.
Chapter 19
All day it had been unimaginably, unseasonably hot, even though it was only the end of April.
Mary went over and over the play, her neck and chest sweating. She had always thought that if a thing had been felt and remembered, physically remembered with a jolt in her chest, say ten times or more, that it might
lose the power to shock, but it never seemed to.
Mr Dodgson going down on one knee. Her heart leapt in its cage. His face coming towards hers. The smile that came up on one side higher than the other that would be wrong on anyone else, but that on him did not seem so at all. She had read somewhere that a truly symmetrical face, a mirror image of itself, looked horrible. Perhaps the reverse was true: an asymmetrical face such as his looked so pleasing. She could hardly now remember when it had not been – she fancied now that even when she had first seen him, when he came to photograph the cathedral, she had thought the same.
She stared at her phrenology chart and tried to impose Mr Dodgson’s head upon it. Order and dress were not represented on her chart, though she saw conscientiousness and wit. She had never seen a love for children represented, but perhaps the phrenologist intuited it.
She imagined pressing her fingertips through his hair to feel his secrets.
Had it really been her up there? It was so unlike her. But she had put the emerald robe over her black dress and she had read those lines and (the sharp pulse again in her chest) he had gone down on one knee, wild-eyed, and he had looked as if he were about to kiss her.
All her life Mary had known, had been told it, that she had no special talents. The list of what she was not far outweighed the list of what she was.
She was not pretty, she was not plump, she could not play the piano beyond a few thumping chords.
She could not paint; she was not a conversationalist.
She could not dance.
She could not find a husband.
Possibility and yearning rushed from her chest. She threw herself down on the bed, dislodging the pile of books she usually kept there. Jane Eyre, its corners curled up. Vanity Fair. East Lynne, which she hid away in a cupboard, with its infidelities and children born out of wedlock.
Sweat dripped from her temple; her hair was damp and loose tendrils clung to her face. Moisture gathered around her waist, her upper lip and her wrists, where her dress clung to skin.
The sun blazed away in the middle of the cerulean blue.
There was no possibility of going out, or of anyone coming in. She would not see Mr Dodgson today, then.
Mary threw one arm over her head. It could not be hotter anywhere than it was here today. A swim in the sea would be delicious. To strip away her clothes, layer by layer, to sink into the cool water, to close her eyes and drift beneath the surface, the cool, clear water seeping into every crevice of her body . . .
She had gone to the seaside once, when she was a girl. Her mother had said it was good for the constitution, healthy, happy and wise, cleanliness next to godliness. All these things related to the sea, she said, and had let Mary swim away into it. It was cold but she had not felt it; she had loved the feeling of her limbs striding out into the water and the taste of salt biting into her mouth. When she was far away and her mother was nothing more than a black dot, she imagined she could go back to any one of the other black dots on the shoreline and become some one else.
In Oxford she had gone to a quiet part of the river, with some screeching classmates. The rocks underfoot poked blindly through the mud and she slipped and nearly fell. Her bathing costume had sewn-in weights at the hemline to prevent the dress from billowing up in the water and revealing her body. As she had struggled in, mud oozing shudderingly between her toes, the water crept up her thighs and up to her waist, but instead of the lightness she had been longing for, the weights and the heavy fabric of her bathing-suit material dragged her down the further she went in. She had only managed a few strokes, the weed’s soft hair clinging to her calves, until she had lumbered out.
Mary took off her clothes and lay down on her bed. She closed her eyes and began to drift away, swim away, in the sea again, though instead of being cool, it was hot; the water clung to her like sweat. She pulled at the waistband of her drawers; it was her bathing costume she pulled at, wanted to be free of.
The sea took on an amorphous weight; it pressed down on her and lapped over her breasts, a hot and moulding pair of hands. Mr Wilton was motioning to her with a strange look on his face; she could not tell if he meant her to come or to go further away. But at once she was next to him and there was a painful feeling between her legs that needed to be rubbed, a rising point that needed to be flattened. Mr Wilton stretched his hand and burrowed into her and the pain increased in pulsating bursts until she was one throb of pain vibrating around a central point.
When she looked again, it was Mr Dodgson’s face, a line between his eyebrows, his hand caught between her legs.
Mary came up to the surface with a lurch. The feeling inside her exploded and then violently dissipated.
She woke up properly then, her own palm flat between her legs, hot and damp, the picture of Jesus hanging balefully over her.
A while later, after the children had been put to bed, Mary sat reading by the light of a candle in the schoolroom, as she sometimes did when the walls of her room became too oppressive.
She was not tired now.
She ought not to have slept.
She had seen a poster once, representing ‘The last stage of self-pollution’. A man lay on a chaise longue in a torpor, his cheeks hollow and his eyes gazing listlessly into the distance. He was wearing a green smoking jacket and a silk burgundy waistcoat underneath that signified, somehow, his lack of agency in the world.
Although Mary had never heard of self-pollution referred to in women. Perhaps it did not exist. But she ought not to have woken up with her hand pressed into the folds of flesh and the curly black hair, so unpleasant to the touch, and some horrible moistness. Those parts that were never named.
Her eyes fell on the picture of Jesus again. He looked nothing like the pastor after all. Perhaps he looked nothing like the picture either; he was unlikely to have had blonde hair, being a Jew.
A sickness, as if she had eaten bad meat, started to spread from the point just below her breasts.
The feeling she had had at Mr Wilton’s church, just as she was speaking in tongues – of ecstasy – was the same one that she had experienced now, in her dream.
The blood crawled down His arms and down the rack of His ribs. His head was twisted away from her – in disgust, Mary now saw.
She put her hand up to her chest and rubbed it; the sickness was in her neck now, making it hard to swallow.
Self-abuse led to madness. And if self-abuse led to madness, it followed that night-time emissions did too. Although she was a woman: she had no emissions to spill out and leak from her oozy soul and seep her energy away.
Exercise, a proper diet, and self-control; even – or especially – as far as dreams went. That must be possible, must it not?
Chapter 20
A few evenings later there was a knock at the schoolroom door. The children’s nanny bent her head round.
‘I have lost Edith’s cardigan; I thought it might be in here.’
‘I have not seen it,’ said Mary.
The woman walked about, the heels of her boots ticking sharply on the wooden floor. ‘Have you seen Mr Dodgson today?’ said the nanny, after a while.
‘No, not today. Still too hot, I think,’ said Mary, glancing at her.
‘I suppose you must have grown used to him by now.’
Mary looked at Nanny Fletcher’s face. She often disagreed with the woman, even though she was the one who was most nearly her equal. Yesterday the nanny had launched into a long story about a girl who had been foolishly allowed by her parents to wander around the library to read as much as she liked, and whose brain grew so large she fell down dead.
Most things she said seemed to be directed obliquely but critically at Mary’s sphere; in general Nanny Fletcher did not stay to make conversation. But this evening she circled the room, picking up cushions and replacing them in a way that did not suggest particular urgency as to the whereabouts of the cardigan.
‘I think the cardigan is not here,’ said Mary. ‘It may be
in Edith’s room; perhaps you will find it tomorrow. I had best turn in.’
Nanny Fletcher hesitated. ‘It may not be my place . . .’
Mary noticed peripherally how small her feet seemed, how agile, underneath the bulk of her body.
The woman had heard something.
‘It may not be my place,’ Nanny Fletcher said again. ‘There is gossip, around Oxford . . . I thought perhaps you ought to know.’
Mary had made a fool of herself and now she would be shamed. Discovered. In the centre of her a thing that should never see the light squirmed upwards.
Nanny Fletcher paused, and then came out with the rest of the words in a rush. ‘Some say that Mr Dodgson is paying court to you; that is why you see him so much.’
Mary kept her face very still and turned away from the other woman.
‘Of course they are wrong. Aren’t they? But I thought you ought to know.’
She wanted to smile, was desperate to smile; she would have no choice but to let the corners of her lips turn skywards if the nanny did not leave.
She had been right.
She pressed her hand over her mouth and shook her head; she hoped it would look like disbelief.
‘Thank you, Mrs Fletcher. It was good of you to bring it to my attention.’
Still with her hand over her mouth, she pushed past and rushed to her room.
Mary threw the stack of books that were on her pillow on to the floor and sat down. She pressed her knuckles into her eyelids. Mr Dodgson rushed into the space behind them, the acid-sweet smell of him, his long pale fingers.
His wild look when he proposed on stage. His smile as he handed her the Ammoniaphone. His strange confession in the dark.
She got up from her bed again and paced up and down the room. She was fierce with joy, terrible with it.
She could leave this place and set up her own home. But where would they live? She sat down again, the springs squeaking.
Tutors could not marry. She had heard Mr Dodgson say that that was why he would never marry, as his father had; he would never give up his career to be the rector of an obscure parish somewhere, as he put it.