What should I say?’
‘That I have nothing left of my former … frenzy?’
‘Your devil has left you, Uncle.’
A pause. ‘You speak mighty directly, when you speak at all, Catherine.’
Another pause. I could find no words that would fit him.
‘Don’t you find me strange, Kit? I leave the universe alone. I could wish I’d always left it alone.’
‘Don’t you find me strange, Uncle? Strange beyond belief?’
I wished he smoked, so that there might be a substance to these intervals.
‘What do you think of Charles, Kit?’
‘He’s a great man who is fabulously rich and runs the country almost. And he makes you feel cheerful with his visits. He is your friend.’
‘Do you think he looks handsome, Kit? Why don’t you sew or something of an evening? Etta Bellamy embroiders. Didn’t my sister teach you to sew?’
‘She tried, Uncle.’ His face eased into an uncertain smile.
‘Ah.’ Then again: ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Charles. Do you think he’s handsome?’
I’d lost the grip on my sex. I wondered if, being a little the worse for drink, he was going to make some appalling confession regarding his feelings, and to ask for my opinion – or my blessing.
‘Yes. He’s a good-looking man, in an unconventional way; although he’s smaller than you,’ I ventured carefully.
‘Well?’ he said, looking pointedly at me. I glanced down and smoothed my skirt. ‘Are you blushing, Kit?’
‘You needn’t confide in me, Uncle. Shall I make you some coffee?’
‘The Devil, Kit … I beg your pardon. But you don’t have to play the coy virgin with me.’
‘Isn’t that what I must play, Uncle?’ With the merest trace of an intention to wound.
‘Not if you’ll have him, Kit. I grant you he can’t consider marriage, even though he’s free now. Sadly. But he thinks a good deal of you.’
I felt dazed, as though I were a sycamore seed, newly fallen from the tree.
That night in my bedroom I realised the true significance of my uncle’s choice of décor. He wasn’t just the civil servant he claimed to be. He had a new project which had actively outstripped mine. He was way ahead of me. It was a whorehouse – a laboratory whorehouse – and I was the whore.
Mirage
‘Catherine!’ My uncle’s voice called me from my bedroom. I checked my hair and face, leaning over my dressing-table, holding my shell-backed hand-mirrors ludicrously poised behind my ears. My head hurt. My belly hurt. My skin was tender. My breasts were sore. And I’d woken feeling too hot. I tipped some scent water out and rubbed it on my wrists and temples.
‘I’m coming, Uncle!’
I’d been working at my project the night before: the last point, the one about the Lupine Disposition. How difficult it was to make myself look at it, and yet how it nagged at me and made itself of all the most important Question. How its meaning vanished out of my mind just when I thought I had the next move and was about to put my ink on to the page. What had made me feel and act as that monster? Why that animal in particular: wolf, dog, what have you? An accident of birth? A fault in my incarnation? I see myself wrestling then, as I wrestle now, with the recurring words of the room, the man, the wig and the stick.
‘Catherine!’
They were just words, leading to an impossibility, which I’d attempted to displace with those reasonable alternative explanations even as I jabbed my cut quill on to the paper in the frustration of non-recall. The words led to an impossibility, because everything I knew in the world said the opposite so loudly: that God was watching over us, that parents took care of their children, that Adam and Eve had been naughty and were deservedly expiating their sin throughout history, that the Church taught the truth through clergymen on both sides of my family, and that my Uncle Isaac had blessedly transcribed the word of the Creator for the New Age. What matter that as far as I could see, as I’ve said, Isaac’s version, his creation itself, was a deadness in a glass jar against whose hard outside God’s knuckle might knock in vain? That seemed to bother nobody else. They all seemed mightily satisfied with it, and could get on with their businesses the better for it.
‘Aren’t you ready yet!?’
“The merest moment, Uncle. My earrings. Then I’ll be down!’
‘Do try to hurry, Kit!’
Well, I’d been speechless then, yet I could sing. How could that happen? Let us with a gladsome mind. I made myself go back to that moment when it had seemed an inspired idea to give forth those words. In the body; out of the body. Out of the body, of necessity. An intelligent escape – from memory too? Had I done it before, and was that why I hadn’t bitten – because I was inured to such acts, schooled? I had been pulled back in by the act of singing while the evidence was still, I swallowed involuntarily, tangible, and the perpetrator a distinctive stranger. I shuddered. Was that why I remembered only this one time? It was dangerous to think this way. Someone might get hurt; die even.
I scurried down the main stairs, scrunching a fistful of brocade in each hand to clear the skirts from where my shoes were treading. I had on my best blue shoes.
Charles was in the saloon. He had his back to the fire. He was quietly, almost casually dressed, as he often was when he called on us. But his wig was an imposing affair, designed perhaps, like his shoes, to increase his height: a great man. My uncle hovered near the door, while Pet stood with a tray for coffee.
‘Here’s Kit,’ said my uncle. ‘Sit down, Kit.’ I sat in a chair by the wall under the landscape of Greenwich Park. Looking down at my blue shoes poking out as evidence of my legs, I felt painfully self-conscious. The fire made it too hot. Although it was November, there was a freak mugginess to the day.
‘How are you, Catherine?’ Charles said.
‘Well, thank you, my Lord,’ I lied, feeling the room sweat.
Charles laughed. It was a private joke. He’d not made much secret of his angling for a thorough ennoblement, but it was as yet only a royal promise.
‘You look bright. And in good form,’ he said.
My mouth was dry. ‘I feel a touch out of sorts. Maybe I’m starting a cold.’
‘Pull up a chair yourself, Charles,’ said my uncle. Charles placed himself smoothly opposite me. He smiled. Pet put the tray on a little table before the hearth.
‘You’re
