Pinkerton's Sister (20 page)

“Gonorrhea!” she would snap waspishly in a “Very-like-a-whale!” sort of way, and Charlotte would go pink, moving discreetly a few feet to one side to avoid the thunderbolt. Whatever it meant, it sounded absolutely
filthy
, mainly because it sounded like “diarrhea,” not a word one would choose to employ in polite society.

(“Bosomptious!” Alice felt like snapping in reply, as a correspondingly crushing rudery. It was her and Charlotte’s own private rude word – one they never shared with Mary Benedict, with anybody – and it was based upon Mrs. Albert Comstock’s mightily unbifurcated bosom. If someone was being “bosomptious,” they were being arrogant, condescending, snobbish, or displaying any one of a number of other undesirable qualities. They were – in short – being exactly like Mrs. Albert Comstock. If countless insufferable hairy-faced men could qualify as being one of The Bearded Ones, there was – and could ever be – only one woman who could be referred to as The Bosomed One.

(“Rather bosomptious!” they would comment secretly to one another about someone else, feeling greatly daring. Mary Benedict was bosomptious, though they never told her so, and she never knew. “Bosomptious” beat “gonorrhea” any day.)

Alice – as a smaller girl – had longed for “diarrhea” to turn up in a spelling bee, to show that she could spell it (it took advanced skills to get “diarrhea” right), but Miss Caulfeild had skillfully avoided controversial vocabulary, and she had never been given the chance. “Desiccated”: that had turned up (an approving tick for Alice Pinkerton: “desiccated” always seemed to her to be a word designed more for spelling tests than for everyday usage); “embarrassment” (
tick
: no embarrassment here), “onomatopoeia” (
tick
), and “graywacke” (
tick
) (“graywacke”!) – all advanced stuff, if of limited use in casual conversation – had turned up (Miss Caulfeild believed in challenging her students), but there was never any sign of “diarrhea.” “Graywacke” was a reflection of Miss Caulfeild’s interest in geology. Specialized terms for rock strata or the features of underground caves (Alice had soon learned to distinguish between stalactites and stalagmites) regularly featured in spelling bees, alongside “accommodation,” “receive,” and “fearsome.” (“Fiercesome” seemed far more convincing.) Miss Caulfeild, who rattled as she entered a room, seemed to wear most of her geological specimens as jewelry, and her sharp little hammers must have ached to tap-tap-tap experimentally on Mrs. Albert Comstock’s Himalayan Bosom, gouging out some of the looser sections, and activating life-threatening landslides. “Graywacke” held no fears for Alice. It was some of the more common words that tended to give her pause for thought, words that failed to feature in spelling tests. The more you looked at “eighth” or “twelfth,” the more unlikely their spelling seemed, and she’d once stared at “shelf-ful” for ages – “shelfful” was even worse, verging on the Hebrew – without being convinced of its correctness. After a while, all words looked meaningless. Ennui was so easily induced, as they lurched toward the
fin de siècle
.

Mostly, Mary Benedict (not a very good speller: few ticks for her; she was more of a cross, cross, cross speller: she often looked cross) didn’t speak; she just assumed an expression of
knowingness
, and – irritatingly – faint disapproval. If she chose to speak – this was the general impression – she would say things that would render others dumb with astonishment, and pinker than the pinkest pink induced by cursing. Mary Benedict was an irritant who produced no pearl. “Especially
you
” was
very
irritating.

Another irritating thing about her was her middle name, Thérèse. Not only did she actually
possess
a middle name – unlike Alice – but she possessed one with not one, but
two
accents, which smacked of boasting. Mary Benedict was a great one for boasting. Alice had always had a hankering for a name with an accent, and here was Mary Benedict – of all people – with two. A name with two accents outdid even Pharaildis. Give her accents rather than hens, any day.

Ever since she’d read
Jane Eyre
she’d envied Adèle Varens. This was not because she had Rochester for a father, or Jane Eyre for a governess. It was certainly not because she had hair falling in curls to her waist (which made her sound all too like Myrtle Comstock as she had looked in those days, distinctly off-putting). It was – of course – because of the accent in her first name, particularly as it was a grave accent, so much rarer, so much more valuable – she had felt – than a mere acute accent, that little hovering mark that was not a letter of the alphabet adding an exotic touch to the otherwise unremarkable. She understood, all those years later, the appeal of a ligature to Oliver Comstock, the attractions of the “æ” in “æsthetic”. For a while – when he was at his most æsthetic – he had always written Linnaeus’s name as “Linnæus” whenever he had written to him, little notes, invitations, in the beautiful italic script he had taught himself. Trust Mary Benedict to have both a grave and an acute accent, forming a little protective roof in the middle of her middle name, under which she sheltered with an air of infuriating superiority. It had been uncharacteristically restrained of Mary Benedict not to pile on more accents, until the letters of her name groaned under them, like the chest of an undeserving South American general with more decorations than uniform, his every square inch emblazoned with bright silk sashes, bulletproof with glittering medals. She could surely have weighed herself down with a few randomly inserted apostrophes and circumflexes, breves and tildes, the odd unusual umlaut, her name glinting and jingling like the chandelier-sized earrings dangling from Mrs. Albert Comstock’s capacious earlobes. Saint-like she’d die – well, one could hope – scourged with sharp-edged accents, impaled on cruelly-hooked cedillas.

Not only did Mary Thérèse Benedict have the benefit of accents, she also had ballet lessons. She was clearly a cultural beacon, blazing out in a benighted wilderness, a symbol of the higher things in life,
far
too high for the unenlightened masses.

Alice had never been to ballet class. The thought of seeing Mary Benedict and Myrtle Comstock tottering about and assuming graceful postures in the hall above the ice-cream parlor had comprehensively daunted her.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
thundered the Benedict and (enormous) Comstock feet, enclosed in pink silk ballet shoes, and a steady fall of dust and splinters fell through the floorboards to coat the cherries, whipped cream, and chocolate strands in the tall-glassed sundaes on the tables in the parlor beneath, adding an intriguing crunchiness to the treats on offer. No need for nuts with these multi-textured munchies.

Alice looked again at Mary Benedict, not betraying the sourness she was feeling. Mary
Thérèse
Benedict’s feet were in the second ballet position. She’d suddenly gone bowlegged, moved her heels a very precise distance apart, looking as if her high standards would have been better served if she’d had the use of a ruler and set square.
My parents can afford ballet lessons
, her feet were saying.
I have acquired social graces. I can dance to Delibes.
A few years later, and they’d have been boasting
I can twirl to Tchaikowsky
. So much could be said with a simple gesture. She’d
en l’air
her. They’d be faced with wobbly simpering-faced
arabesques
next. Not a pleasing prospect. Once Mary Benedict was in balletic mood she could keep going for hours, lumberingly cranking herself into repellent postures, like someone frozen at moments of intense pain. It was a blatant attempt to draw attention to herself, and hog the limelight.

“First position!” she’d announce, sounding like a star pupil eager to demonstrate her abilities to awestruck, envious, less-favored classmates.

“Second position!”

She always announced what it was she was about to do, like Sobriety Goodchild just before he unleashed one of his god-awful dirges. Her mind rested briefly, lightly – not really touching – upon “god-awful,” as if the word had never entered her head, and left not a mark behind it. She’d only just heard the expression for the first time, and wasn’t quite sure how dangerous it was. She was extremely careful to ensure that she thought of the word “god” with a small “g,” concentrating ferociously. She was taking no chances.

(“Bosomptious!”)

“What are they doing?” Charlotte asked, loyally sounding fascinated, leaning forward, pointing at the
Macbeth
panel. Charlotte was utterly reliable.

“Second position!” Mary Benedict announced belatedly, suddenly noticing her feet, blatantly attempting to turn the attention upon herself. Not only did she invariably announce what she was demonstrating, she also always held her hands as if about to curtsy, like a little ballerina clutching the edges of her ballet dress. Alice ignored this. It was like something by Edgar Degas gone horribly wrong, a disturbingly debased new development in the history of art as they moved into the last decades of the nineteenth century. Art tended toward decadence as centuries drew to their close. In fifteen years’ or so time, Mrs. Albert Comstock – in that racily bilingual way she had – would be disapprovingly referring to the scandalous proximity of the
fang de sickle
, as nightmarish
Swan Lake
s, heaving with galumphily
pirouetting
deepwater monsters (these were very dark, very deep lakes, and the swans mutated strangely), sent small and soggy ballet-besotted girls screaming out of theatres.

“They have met Macbeth after a battle,” Alice continued, with a friendly, patient expression, not facing Charlotte, but looking Mary Benedict right in the eyes.

(Just you wait, Mary Benedict. Just you wait. She’d get her in the end. She’d look like th’ innocent flower – something dark and weed-like, found in soggy ground, in her case – but she’d be the serpent under’t. Hypocrisy was much undervalued as a source of pleasure. “Under’t” was a most satisfactory word to pronounce when you were in a bad mood, with a hiss and a spit at the end. It was a word to say very forcibly, very wetly, a word like a blow to make people duck.)

“What are they doing?”

This was Charlotte again. Mary Benedict – Mary
Thérèse
Benedict – would not admit to curiosity, preferring to imply that she knew already.

“They are prophesying what is going to happen to him in the future.”

“What does happen?”

Charlotte was on incandescent form.

“He becomes evil. He murders people. He has his head chopped off.”

“I still haven’t found a goatskin.” This was a reference to one of their latest plans to kill Mrs. Albert Comstock. It involved decapitation, and they were distinctly keen to put it into execution. What an excellent choice of word “execution” was. They’d found the necessary brass shield, and the sword, but they were experiencing some difficulty with the goatskin. Charlotte displayed an impressive persistence once she had firm hold of an idea. When they were alone, Alice must let her know that they could not possibly carry out their original plan for Mrs. Albert Comstock. How on earth could they dispose of such an enormous body, even one lacking a head?

“A goatskin?” Mary Benedict had been stirred into interest – here was a rare event – but they both ignored her. Her feet were in the third position by now.

“Third position!” Her hands hovered in the about-to-curtsy position, right heel digging away at left instep, as if she were attempting to unbalance herself. The simper appeared, pinging into position. In such a manner, Alice imagined, Papa would stand and recite “The Children’s Hour” over and over, the heel of his right foot pressed into the instep of his left foot, his toes turned out as far as they’d go. One push in the chest would have him hurtling to the floor with a thunderous
Aaaaghhhh!
-howling crash.

They ignored this, also.

The panels stretched away around all four sides of the castle. There were nine along each wall, and one of
Hamlet
above the main entrance, though they were arranged in no particular chronological or thematic order, as far as Alice could make out. By the time of their third visit – and these became regular, once the initial uncertainties had been overcome – Alice was using the panels to tell stories, as if they were the consecutive illustrations for a serial, like the installments of a Dickens novel lined up into the distance. She did not relate the stories of the Shakespeare plays, but used the figures in the panels as quite other people in quite other stories, one continuous story each time. She’d relished the thought of being Scheherazade, ever since she’d read
The Arabian Nights
. It was from this book that she’d learned the words “Mameluke,” “hammam,” and “concubine,” though these were not words that Miss Caulfeild ever selected for spelling. They lacked the necessary geological associations, especially the last one. She began to hum an appropriate passage from Rimsky-Korsakoff to get herself in the right mood, “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship.”

“Fourth position!”

Mary Benedict began to move one foot in front of the other, concentrating hard to give the impression that she wasn’t interested in anything that Alice Pinkerton might have to say. She seemed to be under the impression that Alice Pinkerton’s insistent humming was a tribute to her balletic skills, an attempt to tempt her into terpsichorean fireworks. All that mattered was the unparalleled grace –
ha! –
of her postures. She was visualizing the red roses raining down upon her from every part of the auditorium, seeing the standing ovation, hearing the cheers, the orchestra joining in, tapping enthusiastically on their instruments – the percussion-players were going berserk – and the white-gloved applauding hands. (She wasn’t
entirely
keen on the gloves; they did tend to muffle the sound too much.) The curtsies were upon them, Mary Benedict’s cutesy-cutesy curtsies, the ones with the radiant Oh-I’m-so-modest- please-don’t-applaud smile (rapidly supplanted by her rather more insistent Oh-all-right-then-applaud-if-you-must smile), Mary Benedict’s GOD-AWFUL curtsies. (Alice had recklessly progressed to capital letters by now.)