The Looking Glass House (12 page)

Why would Alice tell her mother about her photograph?

There could only be one reason: to embarrass Mary, to humili­ate her. Well, she would not be humiliated. But she stayed staring down at the floor so that they would not see the colour of her cheeks. A woodlouse was trying to bury itself underneath Ina’s boot.

Mrs Liddell was staring at Mary with one eyebrow raised.

‘It was a gift. Mr Dodgson is liberal with them, as you say. That was not the reason why I punished Alice, however. It was for taking something that belonged to her sister.’

‘But I wonder, if I may, why Mr Dodgson is giving a gift to my governess?’ Mrs Liddell’s voice was sharp with excessive politeness.

Because he had followed her in the dark and they had sat on a bench together – she could not say that. Because she had heard him talk as she had never heard a man talk – she could not say that either.

Because he was paying court to her – she certainly could not say that.

‘I don’t know, Mrs Liddell. He gives his photographs to everyone, as you say.’ Mary kept her tone even. She knew he did not give his photographs to
everyone
.

‘And you have brought yours up here, on a perilous journey to Wales.’

Mary swallowed. The room was small and smelt of damp tweed and galoshes. It was crowded with oilskins and umbrel­las, ranked in their stand like curious birds. ‘I had not the time to look at it before.’

It only took a moment to look at a photograph, especially of the Deanery. Everyone knew that. ‘Alice, let us go!’ said Mary quickly. ‘We have troubled your mother enough.’ ‘No,’ said Mrs Liddell, tightening her hand round Alice’s shoulder. ‘I think I will keep her. She may like to see her father.’

One other thing happened while Mary was in Penmorfa, that at the time she did not consider important. She happened to glance at a letter Mr Dodgson had written to Alice, which Alice had left carelessly open on the side table in the hall.

My dear Alice,

I liked your letter better than anything I have had for some time. I may as well just tell you a few of the things that I like, and then, whenever you want to give me a birthday present (my birthday comes once every seven years, on the fifth Tuesday in April), you will know what to give me. Well, I like, very much indeed, a little mustard with a bit of beef spread thinly under it, and I like brown sugar – only it should have some apple pudding mixed with it to keep it from being too sweet; but perhaps what I like best of all is salt, with some soup poured over it. The use of soup is to hinder the salt from being too dry, and it helps to melt it. And I like two or three handfuls of hair; only they should always have a little girl’s head beneath them to grow on, or else whenever you open the door they get blown all over the room, and then they get lost, you know.

Mary could not help but compare the letter, whose images poked her in the eye like awkward elbows, with the one Mr Wilton had written to her. Mr Wilton’s letter told her about the visits he’d paid (Mrs Storing, old Mr Flumy, Mrs Mull), the weather (better in Oxford than in Wales) and news of a horse that had gone lame.

But he was not good with words, as he often said. That did not mean anything. The tone, however, suggested domesticity. And domesticity suggested marriage.

Mary tried to imagine kissing the red lips that were pointed to so sumptuously by his sideburns, in front of the altar, in her wedding dress. But she got snagged on the texture of him; his lips would be moist, flaky. His sideburns like stroking a glossy bear.

His hands, blossoming with dark hair. The railings at her back.

Did the gift of a photograph suggest marriage too?

A sharp rush through Mary’s chest made her fold up Mr Wilton’s letter and put it away.

Chapter 15

Mary had not been back in Oxford long when Mr Wilton came to visit. He had put on extra pomade for her; his hair smelt strongly of soap and candles, and was greased back from his temples in a way that probably suited his work at the haberdashery.

They had the schoolroom to themselves. The children were next door, arguing; their voices could be clearly heard. ‘What is the point of a book without any pictures?’ said Alice.

‘You are a baby,’ said Ina.

‘I am not! Yours are dull.’

‘Why is whatever I like dull?’ said Ina.

‘Tea, Mr Wilton?’ said Mary, pushing a cup towards him.

‘Children,’ said Mr Wilton. ‘I suppose to be childish is in their nature.’

‘I am going to read my book,’ said Alice.

‘But I thought we were going to read together!’

Mary got up and went next door. ‘Alice. Read together as you promised, then you may read on your own.’

‘But it’s boring!’

‘Do as I ask.’

‘But I can do what I want, you said so!’

‘I certainly never said so! You do what I want, that is the end of it.’

Mr Wilton was sitting with a hand cupped over each knee. In each fingernail there was a crescent, as polished and white as a new moon.

Mary shut the door. She smiled. ‘Well.’

Mr Wilton shifted on to one haunch and brought out some­thing from his pocket: a square of folded tissue paper. He held it out to her. It was light, insubstantial.

She unwrapped it in silence, the leaves of tissue papers shuffling away from her fingers; she tore a hole in them getting to what was inside.

A length of Belgian lace, so delicate she could not at first make it out against the tissue. It was beautiful. Flowers so fine their stamen could be clearly seen, berries with bulging seeds, leaves made to show even their veins – the world remade in black and white. It reminded her of one of Mr Dodgson’s glass negatives.

She held it up draped between her fingertips, a spider’s web. She was aware of Mr Wilton watching her.

‘It is beautiful. Thank you.’

‘When Mrs Liddell bought some, I thought you ought to have some too.’

‘Yes,’ said Mary, staring down at it.

‘One day you may have a dress to put it on,’ he said.

Was he criticizing her clothes? ‘I already have a dress, only .  .  .’ Mary was about to add that the lace was far too beautiful to attach to it when his meaning caught at her.

He was smiling at her, or had been, and now was absorbed at scratching dirt from his trouser leg, waves of embarrassment rolling from him.

Belgian lace was used for weddings.

Or perhaps it had many uses that only Mr Wilton knew about. ‘It came to the store only yesterday,’ he said at last. ‘From Belgium. I thought of you.’

‘You are very kind. It won’t fit my usual dresses. Much too fine!’ She stared down at the floorboards.

Now she had brought up the subject of the dress. But there didn’t seem to be any other conversational alleys. She sounded as if she were waiting for a proposal, or at the least as if she were too poor to own a nice dress.

‘It would do very well on a handkerchief,’ she said.

It was only later, when Mary was wrapping the lace back up and putting it in the drawer next to her bed, that she remem­bered the full story of Belgian lace. It was made by old ladies in Flanders in rooms made deliberately dark, to preserve the quality of the lace. But the quality of the old ladies’ eyes was not taken into account. As they laboured in their dark rooms, beautiful gossamer webs blossoming on their laps, their eyes grew ever weaker and more clouded, until in the end they were rendered totally blind.

Chapter 16

Mary ran into the garden, on to the emerald carpet of the lawn. She had heard Edith scream; she dreaded something happening to the children, especially after Penmorfa.

But it was Villikens who lay on the grass in the brightness of the day, his white and tan fur ruffling in the breeze, his lips frozen in a final snarl, blood crusted round his mouth.

Alice exploded into tears, as if she had been waiting her entire life for this moment.

The cat, whose bony spine Mary had run her hand over so often, was unnaturally stiffened and arched.

Ina started to cry in gulps. ‘Oh, Miss Prickett! What hap­pened to him? Why is he dead?’

‘It looks like poison,’ said Mary. She had seen the gardener putting it down in the shed.

‘We all loved him so much, I don’t understand why he had to die!’

Ina wrapped her arms around herself and rocked. Mary started to go to her, holding back her own tears; she wanted to comfort her in her loneliness. But she had never got close to the girl like that before – Ina was almost grown up and she had something contained about her, unlike Alice, who seemed to sprawl. Even as Mary went towards her, Ina put her arms back by her sides. Mary wished that she could have more of Mr Dodgson’s easy familiarity with the children. When she got to Ina, she rested one hand on her starched shoulder and palpated it. She could feel the bones beneath her dress.

‘We still have Dinah,’ she said.

‘But we have lost Villikens! Oh dear!’ said Alice. She stared down, tears falling off her chin, her face swollen and red and not inviting comfort.

‘We should come away. The gardener will bury him at the bottom of the graveyard.’ Mary thought of the swan, the maggots, Mr Dodgson.

‘Will he be in heaven by now?’

There was no provision in the scriptures for cats. ‘I don’t know.’

Mr Dodgson would know what to do. He had a limitless supply of knowledge about animals, dead or alive. She wanted to see his face with its clear skin; she wanted to rest in his cool eyes. And she wanted to thank him for her photograph and to tell him she had found a place for it, just above her bed. ‘Let’s pay a visit to Mr Dodgson’s rooms,’ she said. ‘He will cheer us up.’

Mary let the children run ahead; she had not had time to send him a note, but children could traverse social barriers usefully.

When she came into his room, he was still standing at his writing desk, silhouetted against the window. She had an impression of movement even so, of wavy hair and lips curled up. He was different from the man she had seen in her mind all through the holidays and it took a few moments to readjust the images, to see that his features were just as pleasant as she had thought.

‘I missed you all! How was your vacation?’ he said.

Alice ran into his arms and started to cry again.

‘Something is wrong. What is it?’

‘Villikens is dead,’ said Ina.

‘Who is dead?’ said Mr Dodgson

‘Villikens. The gardener found him poisoned,’ said Ina.

The children started to cry again.

‘Oh, I don’t know why he went into the shed in the first place! Silly cat!’

Mr Dodgson sat down and motioned for all three children to sit within the boundaries of his arms. ‘Poor dear cat. I do so hate pain and suffering.’

Mary remembered the bench in the darkness, Mr Dodgson’s grief.

‘But why, why did he die, Mr Dodgson?’ said Alice.

‘Well, we must all die some time, and it just happened that today was Villikens’ day. And Dinah, are you sure she did not eat the poison?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Alice. ‘Only Villikens was in the shed.’

‘But why today?’ said Ina.

‘Because God wanted him to come to heaven today. But lucky Villikens, who will never know the pain of growing old and grey and stiff with every friend gone. He will always be a kitten, full of play, up in cat heaven.’

‘Is there such a place?’ asked Alice.

‘There is. Each cat has its own enormous ball of wool, never taken away by a human for their knitting. Sardines for break­fast, salmon for tea and any number of mice in between.’

Alice looked at him. ‘I shouldn’t think mice are happy in cat heaven.’

‘No, indeed they are not. But they are quite happy if they think they are somewhere else. Swan heaven, for example. They are in no danger there.’

Alice said: ‘I don’t think Dinah would eat mice for fun, although I have seen her with a dead mouse, I’m sure.’

‘It is in their nature to eat mice for fun. Just as it is in your nature to like bread and jam. A cat cannot change that,’ said Mr Dodgson.

‘Oh,
poor
Villikens, I will miss him.’

‘Did you get my note I wrote to you all? I wrote it on your first day back.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ina. ‘Mama did not mention it.’

‘Perhaps she has been too busy unpacking,’ said Mr Dodgson, turning to look out of the window. ‘But come, we need some­thing to cheer us up. I have an idea: what do you say to a play?’

‘A play?’ said Mary. ‘At the theatre?’

‘No, no, perhaps the children are too young for that. I meant the performance of a play, here in my rooms.
Away With Melancholy
is my favourite. It is a sort of farce. The title seems particularly apt today. If Mrs Liddell can spare you.’

‘Mama likes plays. She often goes to the theatre,’ said Edith.

Mrs Liddell could not mind if it was to enliven the children, and if it was to be performed in Mr Dodgson’s rooms. She knew the children still saw him, and he had been a part of the Liddells’ life for so long.

‘Who will put it on?’ said Mary.

‘I will, I have performed it quite often.’

‘What is it about?’

‘About love lost and gained.’

‘Oh, will you not perform it for us?’ asked Alice.

Mr Dodgson looked at Mary.

‘I don’t see the harm in it,’ she said.

‘Of course .  .  .’ said Mr Dodgson. He smiled at her with such charm, his head slightly at an angle, his eyes gazing at her, that she could not meet it.

‘Of course?’

‘It would go off so much better if you could take one of the roles.’

‘One of the roles?’ said Mary stupidly.

‘Otherwise, you see, I have to run back and forth across the stage pretending to be everyone, male and female, and I get quite exhausted.’

‘But I am no good at that sort of thing.’

‘I am sure you are better than you think.’

‘I am not!’ said Mary, colouring.

‘Miss Prickett, it would not make you an actress if you were to put on a performance for the children.’ She glanced at him. He was still smiling. Had not stopped looking at her.

Her cheeks were hotter, as if his gaze was some kind of grill.

‘Oh do, please say you will, Miss Prickett,’ said Ina.

‘There is a role, Mrs Maynard, that would suit you very well. The last time I read the play I thought of it for you.’

Thought of it for her. How did he see her, through what prism?

‘In London I went to see
The Tempest
. The scenic effects sur­passed anything I had seen before: the shipwreck of the first scene seemed to feature a real ship heaving about on huge waves, finally ruined, to my delight, under a cliff that reached up into the roof. Shakespeare reminds me of my nobler aspirations.’

‘Shakespeare,’ Mary repeated.

‘And as I sat there in the darkness of the stalls it seemed to me to be the embodiment of the place between waking and dreaming, a fantastical world made real. Theatre can be a force for the good, I think. Shakespeare and, to a lesser extent, the modern plays are uplifting and educational. But I am afraid to say that my favourite type of play is a modern farce, just like
Away With Melancholy
, because they have no moral at all! I could bring over a copy of the play this evening. Perhaps you could look at it before you refuse absolutely.’

Later that evening, Mary crept downstairs to the hall. There on the table was the volume of the play, as Mr Dodgson had prom­ised. Nothing on the cover to suggest impropriety. It was a slim book; there could not be too much harm in reading it, surely. She clamped it under her arm and made her way quietly back upstairs. It would be hard to explain if one of the servants should see her. The book grew hotter with every step until she felt sure that the print had come off on her dress.

But no, when she reached her room, Mary had the same colourless dress on as ever. She unhooked her bodice and slipped off her shoes and sat down heavily on her bed. Her arms were thin and pale; her bones moved sharply about underneath her skin as she reached up and took out her hairpins.

Mary’s hair was thick, though nobody but her own reflection ever saw it brushed out in its auburn mass. Usually she sat brushing it until she was hypnotized, one hundred strokes, as her mother had taught her. But tonight she did not sit in front of the looking glass. Her two heavy plaits fell down on her shoulders and she let them lie there.

While they had been visiting, Alice had asked Mr Dodgson about the photograph. She had not even thought to ask in a low voice, but kept to her usual insolent tone, while Mary’s face burned away nearby. Mr Dodgson had replied quite calmly and openly that it was a gift. Then he had turned to her and smiled.

Mary opened the book.

Mrs Maynard, Mr Dodgson had said. She began to skim the text.

She saw at once that Mrs Maynard had a large speaking part. At first she was supposed to be droll but melancholy. Then there was a verse she was to sing.

But she, Mary Prickett, could not sing. If she took part, she would make a fool of herself. The children would laugh at her.

After the singing, she was supposed to be happy. Because she was in love with Mr Windsor. Mr Windsor – that must be Mr Dodgson’s part.

Mary closed the book quickly, and shut her eyes. A pulse beat behind her eyelids.

A love story. Had he chosen the play specially? Was it a message to her? He had never asked her to put on a play with him before. It must be a message, then. A glow began in Mary’s chest. She could not do it, of course, but the fact that he had chosen it for them to do together was enough.

She opened the book again and let her eyes roam across the pages. They had no scenes together at the start, it was true. But eventually Mrs Maynard was reunited with her lost love and they had plenty. They had to saunter, sing, and sway. She saw them on stage together, darkness all around, locked together in a single beam of light.

At the end, she could see, Mr Windsor made Mrs Maynard a passionate proposal of marriage.

Mary buried her face in her hands. She was glad she was in the sanctuary of her little room, hidden away at the top of the house.

What would Mrs Liddell think? Mrs Liddell did like the theatre, she often went, but that was not the same as having her governess perform. Though she would not be performing as such, merely reading.

Still.

She would make a fool of herself, never having been to the theatre, not knowing what people did there.

The children would laugh at her. She would be exposed. All her outside would be rubbed away and just the raw nub would be left: a slug on a toothpick. Even the children would see into her.

Mary smoothed the pages back down, closed the book and got into bed. She would say no, but she would say it regretfully; she would try to communicate to him that she understood why he had suggested it, but without using words.