Havisham: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

so she could admire my father’s new saddle. My action was reported back to my father, and he told me quite bluntly that I wasn’t to take ‘company’ – as then and in the future he would refer to Sally – beyond the door at the end of the scullery passage.
    *   *   *
    She had a quick mind. Memory, I know now, is an asset of intelligence; though I also know that to live an easier life, one should have one’s full health and a short memory.
    Sally, I felt, would always be like this, wanting to make things just a bit more difficult for herself. Needing to know what was in the next lesson before we got there; asking me how long it had taken me to memorise a poem and then learning it in half that time; asking me, how can they be sure of this, what proof is there of that? – King Harold losing an eye, five colours showing in a rainbow, the earth’s having a dark side, there being no final number to count to.
    ‘I’m only telling you what the books say, Sally.’
    ‘Don’t you want to know if it’s true?’
    ‘It wouldn’t be there in the books if it weren’t, would it?’ I answered in exasperation. Sally stared at me, with a pitying expression. Was I really as naive as that?
    *   *   *
    I had my arm hooked through Sally’s as we walked back along Hound Street. There was the sound of a horse being ridden slowly behind us on the cobbles. I turned round. It was my father: suddenly not looking at us, as if he hadn’t seen who we were.
    He rode past. I held tighter to Sally’s arm.
    *   *   *
    For the next few days I felt he was paying me closer attention; but silently, furtively, between any remarks he had for me. Whenever I looked up my father would avert his eyes, either to hold on the view outside the window or examine some object in the room behind me. He would place candles where I might be clearer to him. He appeared to have some project in his mind.
    *   *   *
    For a while I saw a little less of Sally. It wasn’t by my choosing, but because her mother had been able to find a position for her, lowly and beneath stairs, but such impressive stairs, in the home of two elderly sisters on Bolley Hill. The ladies endlessly sparred, I’d heard, and fought over everything the other had, or might want, including the respect of each new member of their staff. Sister would struggle with sister to win and keep Sally.
    *   *   *
    ‘I used to think you were proud,’ Sally told me. ‘People said you were proud.’
    ‘I’m not proud to you , am I?’
    ‘No. No, you’re not.’
    ‘And that surprises you?’
    ‘Just a little, yes.’
    ‘I used to think I was expected to be that way. Partly I was – and partly I became it.’
    ‘Not to disappoint them?’
    ‘I suppose so.’
    *   *   *
    And later.
    ‘I think you bring out someone better in me, Sally.’
    I took her hand. She looked quite astonished. I smiled at that.
    ‘Why shouldn’t I take your hand if I want to?’
    Sally managed to smile back, but in a puzzled way.
    ‘Give me one good reason why not,’ I said.
    But she didn’t, because she couldn’t.
    *   *   *
    One winter’s night I had her stay with me in the house, all night, to sleep in my warm bed by my side. I was defying my father, of course, and no one else was allowed in on our secret.
    In the morning, though, it couldn’t be a secret any longer. Sally’s mother had gone looking for her when she didn’t return home, accompanied by some of her neighbours. She had come to the brewery yard at dawn, and it chanced to be a day when my father was up early because indigestion was troubling him.
    He was furious: but with Sally, not with me. I tried to explain it to him; I told him I was the one responsible.
    He instructed our Mrs Venn to strip the sheets from the bed and – why on earth? – boil them. I couldn’t understand what all the pudder was about, and why the big vat had to be heated especially for the sake of my sheets. I watched the blankets