Havisham

Of course it was a pretence. She felt almost giddy at how quickly people had eaten up her story. Then lightly insulted. They really thought she was capable of grief at this depth over such a trifling occasion as being jilted. What a way to hand over power. And to a man, of all creatures.

Satis house was stifling. She’d forgotten at what point the joke turned into a pretence, and the pretence turned into life as she knew it. What started as a stubborn statement slowly enveloped her and became, through the eyes of both friends and strangers, her reality. The entirety of her home was committed to the narrative. A story that floated onto lips to be shared wider; the legend of a mausoleum to lost love; cobwebbed and decaying, as their inhabitant was said to be. The front garden was the sad, public arena, visible from the lane, which stretched the length of her capacious hermitage. Weeds pushed through nooks and leaves rotted in crannies. Everything was left just as it had been on her wedding day, fated to an unkempt life. It was only the back garden, a secret trove of plants, hidden behind a walled garden, that she could tend to, unseen. Imaginations would run wild that this small little space was as overgrown and putrid as those yellowing lawns that greeted guests. None would guess at the haven that welcomed her whenever she stepped from the kitchen door, through the small, locked wooden gate, and into her own Eden.

Here, ironically, was where she could lose days, those days her acquaintances assumed already lost to heartbreak. Here, she could breathe fresh air, away from the stale, dusty enclaves her house hosted. Here, she could smile, laugh, feel the breeze on her face and dig her fingers into the dirt. Here, she was no longer defrauded, jilted, assumed broken. No longer linked to Compeyson and his betrayal, no longer pitied, no longer gossiped about. Here she could wear two shoes.

It was the one place where she could tell the time. The sundial in the centre of the garden, flanked by Hollyhocks, using shadows to inform her of what the clocks in her house were incapable of, what the small, engraved pocket watch from her father would only correctly tell her twice a day. Here she could hear birdsong, imagine a life where she could be happy. Be more than the myth she had become. Here, fleetingly, she was free.

With fingertips trailing through the pond, watching her reflection, she saw the young woman she’d once been. Lines mirrors harshly highlighted smoothed by the water’s surface. Oftentimes, on a spring day, she would remove the wretched dress, pull off the stale stockings and sink her small, naked body into the cool, waterlily-strewn natural pool. Today was such a day. Easing in, she noticed she was losing weight. Wrists becoming scrawnier, skin stretching over the bones so fiercely the blue veins swum alarmingly to her own surface. Cake going to waste was one thing. Her body going to waste was simply too much to bear.

‘Today is the day,’ she murmured to herself. It was a resolution. She always felt powerful in this garden. Could see clearly the pathway she ought to take. A fresh page would be written. No longer one clouded with despair, with make believe of the sombre spinster. ‘I rather fancy I might change my frock,’ she mused. Who are you talking to? She thought to herself. Then chuckled. Was thinking out loud any worse than thinking silently? At least in a conversation with herself she knew only sensible people were involved. It was other people who proved to be the problem. Unless she was talking to her daughter; her daughter by name, if not by blood. Then, the conversation was delight layered upon delight. All parents were biased with the lens through which they viewed their children, but she really was certain of it. Perhaps because she had been chosen rather than created. Estella was quite simply the most beautiful girl in the world. Her girl. Her everything.

Scraping fingernails across her belly, noticing the trails they left behind, she thought of what lay beneath. She was only in her thirties. It wasn’t unheard of for women her age to have families, later in life. A sister for Estella, perhaps. This seclusion was only hurting one person. Edith Catherine Havisham. She’d been so long in this pretence, she was beginning to lose sight of why she’d started it. Initially it had been punishment. For her, for being so stupid. For him, if word would ever reach the ears of the man who had left her, to feel the full force of his guilt. Then it had been a statement; of her scorn. Of her pain. But now, she was a museum piece. Her love a relic. Eyes flitting around her secret garden, the only place of life, of change, showed her how stuck she was. Like the trees that sat either side of the small locked gate; giant Poplars, rooted to the ground, standing to attention, watching with jealous eyes as the birds that nested within them took flight and escaped.

There had been the plan, she remembered, with a small sense of shame. Once Estella grew, once her beauty began to blossom, the notion that pain could be inflicted back on the male species. That Edith would pick her equivalent; an unassuming, quiet type. One so wholesome and pure they believed love could exist in a bubble, free of the expectations of society. A boy, not yet moulded as a man, who could love her daughter, then feel the full force of love being removed.

Satis was crumbling. From this angle she could see the weary building, juxtaposed against the vibrant life of her garden, blossoming with the season of hope. The building, by comparison, was archaic and worn. She didn’t care much for it. Her father had left her the house. She hadn’t cared much for him either. But the garden. This garden. It had been her mother’s. Edith spent hours whiling away the seasons in this sacred space, wondering what its shades and succulents could tell her about the woman who had planted them. A woman she’d never known, other than in those secret spaces we can’t see but know are there; her heart, her soul. The walls enclosing the garden, rather than making it feel as a prison, instead created protection, where the sun could dance with her, encouraging subtropical blooms to flourish, giving off a lush, year round green glow. At one end, her mother’s temperate house, a glass dome for those ferns that would suffer in Kent’s colder months. Within those translucent walls were plants of such beauty, such rarity, that as a child she’d been astonished such things existed. Wondering how her mother managed to curate such flamboyance. Wondering why she had not been spared to lavish the same level of love on her daughter as on her garden.

Learning how to spell Bromeliad, her mother’s favourite plant family, knowing the names of twenty different palms by the time she was five made Edith a natural botanist. She quickly outgrew governess after governess with her sharp eye for detail and inquisitive mind. Attending school with the neighbouring boys was, to her disappointment, out of the question, but Arthur, her darling brother, had been good enough to bring his biology books home to allow her to pore over them in the dim light of the library. Funny, how a bastard’s place in society still outshone a legitimate heiress, simply for the fact of her sex. Not so funny when it came to mansions rather than education, to inheritance rather than making one's own way in life. Funny, how such a thing should put such a wedge between them.

Part of this charade had been a cry for help she hoped would reach Arthur’s ears. For she no longer knew where to find him. She had stood still for thirty eight years. The caricature of her pain would surely reach the most eager, those that took their sustenance from gossip. Perhaps wending its way to the more respectable spheres of her self-made brother, wherever he may reside. For in her darkness, she’d craved one thing and one thing alone. Family. The garden was her gateway to her mother, but her essence was as faded as the engravings on the statues, as intangible as the breeze that lifted the skirts of the Fuchsias. The house was Edith’s reminder of her father. Perhaps that was why she’d allowed it to fall into ruin, to become decayed and broken, reflecting the man who betrayed her with his affairs, and only made it right with the words of his will, as opposed to affection, love or belief in her. That left Arthur. Her only living family. ‘You’re my favourite brother,’ she would tell him, an edge of tease in her voice, when they were younger. When they were Edie and Artie.

‘I’m your only brother,’ he reminded her. ‘That doesn’t count.’

But he was her favourite. She would have given anything for his arms to envelop her, ever since that day. Ever since that moment. That minute. That second. Twenty to nine. And forty seven seconds.

She remembered, cheeks burning with shame, the time she’d taken the joke with Artie too far. That was her specialty, she thought, laughing hollowly, eyes meeting the yellowing fabric of her wedding dress, slung on the brick next to the pond. Yes, that was her specialty all right. On that day, he’d been teasing, jostling, but she was prickly. She remembered why, clearly, as if it were yesterday. Her womanhood had arrived. She’d seen the last governess off a week prior and her father hadn’t found someone brave enough to take on the reputation that preceded her. Instead, her only choice had been the woman she hated with the darkest layers of her soul. Arthur’s mother.

‘Cook,’ she’d said, bossily, standing at the kitchen doorway. She knew the power in this instance didn’t sit with her, and loathed this fact. Holding her own in the conversation was a salve for her naivety.

‘Yes Miss ‘Avisham,’ Arthur’s mother had said, sadness in her voice, calling her by the title she had insisted on in a screaming rant at her father, who had enforced it apologetically to the mother of his lovechild. It was the least he could do.

‘Cook, my courses have arrived. I’ve read of such things, of course, in the books at my disposal. But on a practical note I require assistance managing this situation.’

Cook had, to her credit, helped, with a nurturing, motherly manner that would have touched the hardest of hearts. Except one.

Later, sitting quietly reading, Arthur had happened upon her, wanting a playmate.

‘Not today Artie,’ she’d said, quietly.

‘I just wanted to play,’ he’d said, sadly.

‘You’re my favourite brother,’ she reminded him.

‘I’m your only brother,’ he had re-joined. But in the background, she’d sensed something. An agitating shadow. Perhaps it had been his mother doing the rounds of the house. Perhaps another spirit altogether. It had unnerved her. Caused her to utter the cruellest words she’d said to date.

‘That we know of,’ she’d snapped, words tumbling out before she could stop them, taking on a power of their own once released into the space between them. His face crumpling into a cry hadn’t caused her any satisfaction; quite the opposite. The hand she’d reached out, to say sorry, to attempt to comfort him, had been brushed aside as he ran from the room. She forgot, he was younger, sensitive, gentle-soulled.

She’d never forgotten their exchange that day. Never stopped regretting it. Whenever she missed him, which was always, she thought back to it, wondering had she sown the seed of their future discord with those cruel four words.

Taking it too far. It had also been her masterplan, the final stage of her revenge. ‘How awful I was,’ she murmured, feeling her skin growing chill in the water, feeling goosebumps clustering. Her face was dipped in the shade, no tell-tale sign of sun could touch her skin, giving away that instead of sitting in pallor, in frigid isolation, she was, in fact, lazing in her private garden, laughing at herself. How could she have thought to use Estella, her blooming beauty a web, to draw in some young, gullible child and make him suffer as she had suffered.

‘Thank goodness I’m moving on from that,’ she muttered, mind resolute, pulling her frail, spindly body from the water and standing, dripping on the brick, shaking herself from side to side to dry off. Although a second, shadowy voice whispered, ‘thank goodness no boy was found’. There was self-disbelief that she could step from her quiet rage. Take the high road. Was she capable of more, or had she simply been spared the temptation. Here, in the garden, it was possible to believe the former. She looked at the prison of the wedding dress. The symbol of her oppression. Picking it up by the sleeve, as if holding a sad child by the hand to offer comfort, she gently pulled it towards the gate at the garden’s entrance. As she always did, Edith paused, turning to look back at the garden. Realising how lucky she was to have such a beautiful, enticing escape. Springtime was her favourite season. If there was ever a time for her to start anew, it was now. Tree fronds waved at her, old friends who she would see again the next day. Perhaps wearing something fresh. Trying on a different skin.

Walking naked into the house, she put one foot on the staircase, a grand, oaken affair, covered in plush red carpet, which was itself, as per all of the house, suffocated by a thick layer of dust. Estella would soon be finished with her studies. It was time to dress. Musingly, Edith thought through the delights her wardrobe held. What shade of pink she might throw on. What beautiful fabric she could clothe herself in. ‘Today is the first day,’ she murmured to herself, ‘the first day of the rest of your life.’ A smile flitted across her lips. A burden drifted from her shoulders, like the seeds being blown from a Dandelion head by a light dawn breeze. She lifted her second foot, intending for it to land on the next step up when a sound startled her reverie. The great clanging bell of the front gate.

‘Dammit,’ Edith muttered, eyes glancing to the upstairs hallway, sadness clouding them. It wasn’t worth breaking the mould for some stranger, or some tradesperson, a mere country person. Swiftly, taking the moves she repeated day in, day out, she pulled on the dreaded dress, taking care not to tug and tear its fragile material. People expected a constantly worn dress; it couldn't look harried. Easing the stockings over her legs, she popped on one shoe, holding the other in her hand, ready to replace it in the usual spot.

Stepping back down to the hallway, she looked longingly along the stretch of carpet towards the kitchen, thinking of the doorway to her garden. To the self she wanted to be. With a sigh, she turned from it, walking towards the staircase, ascending to her fate.

Estella passed her going down to the doorway.

‘There’s visitors,’ her daughter told her. Edith stopped. Raised her hand to cup that beautiful face.

‘Thank you my darling, please do show them in and remember...’ she paused, tapping the side of her nose.

‘I know. You’ve been here all along,’ the girl said, smiling, understanding, as beautiful people inherently do, the need to keep up appearances.

Edith had been right in the garden. Today was the first day of the rest of her life. The first step towards the end of her life.

Today was to be the day she met Pip.