Page 21

CHAPTER XX.

MR FISHAL’S SURPRISE.

I sit on the edge of my bed, my gaze fixed upon a spot on the wall, smiling, smiling, when the dinner bell rings.

Throughout the house the bed-room doors open and close, the floorboards creak, and a low muttering rises as the guests take to the halls and descend the stairs.

I have been reminded by Mrs Able, in a flurry of agitated whispering, that I am to chaperone Drusilla all through dinner, and only chaperone Drusilla, and to make myself as small and inconspicuous as possible. Small and inconspicuous. Those were her very words.

Eager to begin said chaperoning and confirm Drusilla poses no threat to me or my quest – although she talks of nothing but Christmas and the guests, one can never be too sure of the goings-on inside girls’ heads, so trained are they to hide them – I stand, pat my braided, slightly passé hairstyle with a hand that trembles with anticipation, and step out of my apartment in my black silk dress, the finest of the three I own.

The air is blanketed with the sharp tang of soap and bergamot oils and hogs-lard-and-lavender pomade.

At the foot of the stairs I am deliberately ignored by two liveried footmen endowed with the kind of stiffness pertaining to candlesticks, their feet in first ballet position, as I enter the drawing-room, where the guests have all gathered.

They turn towards me, their gestures interrupted mid-conversation so they all appear to have contracted rigor mortis. I feel as if I’ve stumbled into a tableau vivant. I position myself in a corner and raise my arms in an impression of a lion rampant. A startled Mrs Pounds quickly swats my arms down before she loudly ushers everyone towards the dining-room.

The flayed ox observes us, headless, from its painting, as we congregate. The food is arranged on the table a la francaise ; the red walls (have they always been red?) rich and deep as oil, rippling in the candlelight. Somebody remarks how extraordinarily bright the flower arrangements are, and somebody else sniggers, and the intention of the presumed compliment remains ambiguous. ‘I shall ask our head gardener to prepare some blooms for you to take home,’ Mrs Pounds says, opting for optimism.

‘Our apprentice gardener appears to have eloped with one of our housemaids,’ a cheery Mr Pounds tells everyone, to his wife’s visible chagrin.

Mrs Pounds sinks her nails into my arm and steers me into the chair furthest from all the others and away from the candles, so that I am draped in a cowl of shadows. Drusilla is sat next to me, smiling so tightly that a tear slides down her face. Andrew and the visiting children have been relegated to the nursery.

Once we are all settled, Mrs Pounds begins: ‘I’d like to welcome you –’

‘Excuse me, dear.’ Mr Pounds, I note, resorts to apologizing when he wants to silence his wife in front of guests. ‘Hallo, hallo, all,’ he exclaims, ‘and welcome to Ensor House. We are so honoured to have you, so very honoured to have you.’

He smiles stupidly, looking down at his napkin as if his welcome speech is written on the fabric. ‘I am both proud and delighted to have been selected as the conveyor of your happiness this Christmas,’ he begins, in what becomes increasingly clear to me is a speech flagrantly plagiarized from Dickens, and which he concludes with the following convoluted toast: ‘The evening shines brightly tonight, in the candles and in the silver and in your eyes, dear friends, the warmth of which cannot possibly exceed the generosity and cordiality you inspire in me, which in turn cannot gift one any greater pleasure, as only Christmas allows for, than the opportunity to fill one another with joy.’

There is some muffled, confused muttering as guests raise their glasses.

For better or worse, we dine.

Mrs Pounds stares sharply in my direction when Drusilla slurps on her boiled capon with white sauce. I pinch the girl’s leg under the table. She cannot feel it under all her petticoats, so I pinch harder, twisting multiple layers of fabric and flesh. She jumps, drawing the attention of Mr Fishal opposite. He smiles at Drusilla, twirling a fine leek in his fingers. Drusilla smiles back, tilting her face sideways in a manner I suppose she considers most seductive.

‘Honestly, Drusilla,’ I whisper to her, ‘you could stand to smile more at boys your own age.’

Drusilla, still smiling, whispers back: ‘But then how shall I learn?’

Reader, she doth make a fine point.

Mr Fishal has hair of the most vibrant orange, and thick eyebrows and riveting feminine eyelashes in the same shade, which call to mind the eyebrow wattle of the red grouse, native to the heather moorland. Mr Fishal arrived without his wife, whom he left in confinement in his ancestral hall. When Mrs Pounds makes an inquiry into her health, he scoffs at his wife’s ‘slight hysterical tendency’. She has been languishing on settees and refusing meals since witnessing the drowning of their youngest son.

‘Nothing a good rest devoid of intellectual strain can’t cure,’ Mr Pounds says brightly.

‘Agree wholeheartedly,’ Mr Fishal says. ‘Mrs Fishal said writing energised her, so I took away all her quills and now she’s decreed that she’ll write in her own blood if she must.’

There is some good-natured tittering around the table, some good-natured shaking of heads. Women! Theatrical bitches.

‘I remember the shape of her forehead – there was rather a good organ of perseverance about the temples – and I can assure you, this alteration won’t last long,’ Mr Pounds says through a mouthful of stodge, speckles of brawn sprinkling his plate.

‘I’m sure she will be happy, upon your return, to see you,’ says Marigold with romantic yearning through her buck-teeth.

Mr Fishal frowns at her comment.

‘Yes, we have a rather un- happy mess of our own to deal with upon our return,’ says Mr Fancey.

‘I told you not to allow the boy up there,’ Mrs Fancey snaps.

‘Well, you were the one complaining about soot on your silk dresses, were you not?’

‘There’s a chimney sweep stuck in our dining-room chimney,’ Mrs Fancey explains moodily. ‘Mr Fancey tried to pull him out, but it seems he’s stuck there.’

‘We lit a fire underneath him to coax him out,’ Mr Fancey adds.

‘So much fuss with children workers nowadays,’ Mr Pounds says empathetically, in direct contradiction to his earlier stance. ‘All those rules which can’t possibly be enforced .’

Dreamily I pick at something clingy and soft, like brain matter, on my forearm, which turns out to be creamed spinach.

The Dowager has been squinting at me, nose wrinkled, ever since we sat down, clearly not in favour of the whole servants-as-equals charade Mr and Mrs Pounds are putting on. I have been waiting for her to pipe up, when – ‘You’re quite fortunate to be in the employ of such generous masters, Miss Notty.’ Her voice slices through air. ‘I would not venture to be so magnanimous. It really is rather unusual.’ She drawls out the word – an- yoo- shooal.

‘Oh yes, I agree,’ I say, sipping on a spoonful of stewed eels. ‘I am very happy to have found employment with the Pounds. Poundses.’

‘Nobody said anything about your being happy ,’ retorts the Dowager, the drooping folds of her neck dangling over her plate of marrow and potatoes.

‘Miss Notty, you may be excused,’ Mrs Pounds says, sweat trickling down her ringlets. ‘You too, Drusilla. The hour is late.’

‘Not yet, dear,’ Mr Pounds says. ‘They are not to miss the surprise.’

‘The surprise?’ Mrs Pounds’ panicked eyes belie her smile.

‘Indeed, a surprise which Mr Fishal has so generously arranged for us.’ Mr Pounds smiles even wider than Mrs Pounds amidst the screech of grating enamel.

The staff arrives with dessert and make a tiresome point of serving me my Yorkshire curd tart last. The Dowager observes with grim approval.

I masticate audibly, my tongue coated with the rich beestings, my teeth lodged with currants. Mr Pounds follows my lips as I chew.

AFTER DINNER WE CONVERGE in the library, where Art Fishal’s surprise awaits, wrapped in coarse swaths of linen on a table, which has been cleared of chess pieces and old issues of Punch .

The ladies sigh longingly at the maple cabinet-on-stand in the corner, romantically lithographed, for storing dry butterflies. I envision opening the cabinet to a collection of fingers, and rows of eyes with beautifully lashed eyelids, and severed ears, their lobes twinkling with jewellery. All of it displayed neatly upon the specimen drawers with their glass tops and little ebony knobs.

The space above the chimneypiece, which was to host the portrait of Mrs Pounds, currently displays a portrait of Mr Pounds, looking grave and dignified and altogether much more interesting than his in-the-flesh counterpart, who is motioning excitedly as he incites his friend to speak.

‘As you may know,’ begins Mr Fishal, ‘I have recently made a taxing but successful journey to Egypt. My most remarkable find by far was the discovery of a buried pyramid. With great strength of spirit I set eighty Arab children to work for sixteen days and nights to unearth the structure. They called me a madman . But luckily for mankind, I persisted. And, finally, on the seventeenth day, a child spotted a small opening between two stones. I crawled my way in and found myself in a massive, mighty chamber, and rooms and rooms brimming with . . .’ He pauses, swallows, as if he had not rehearsed his presentation, then whispers: ‘Tombs.’

Mr Fishal kneels on the carpet and grabs the nearest lady’s hand for effect.

‘Above the doors to each tomb were a series of hieroglyphs and a pair of foxes, the usual guardians of such burial-places.’

I believe Mr Fishal is confusing foxes with jackals, according to my study of Egyptology (which was exhaustive – I was trying to understand how to preserve viscera in homemade canopic jars, and, well, never mind).

‘And it was in the mummy pit where I found myself surrounded by . . . bodies!’ He hisses. ‘Bodies as far as the eye could see! – piled on top of each other, leaning against walls . . . and such droll poses! All welcoming us in, as if they recognized they’d been lying in wait for modern persons of our superior knowledge to uncover them. One could barely step in any direction without crushing a skull or two.’

As Mr Fishal rhapsodizes, my gaze falls upon a letter opener on a nearby davenport, the desk’s leather inlay reflecting red on the sterling silver blade. I extend an arm, ever so slowly, and pocket it.

‘And so, it is without further ado that I present to you: The Mummy of Gourna. John!’

Mr Pounds rushes to his friend and displays, laid out on his palms like a holy offering, a pair of scissors.

Mr Fishal takes the shears, surveys his stunned audience, and unsheathes them from their gold housing, as one would a tiny sword. With performative grace, he hunches over the mummy and begins to cut, with slow deliberation at first, followed by a desperate stabbing at the petrified linen, before ripping at it with his bare hands.

As the bandages slip off, an ancient odour of incense and mould and dust seeps into the room. It arouses in me memories of the apothecary at Hopefernon, where the druggist would dispense lumps of opium and arsenic.

Teeth are the first thing I see. There is a shocked murmur from the guests. Mrs Manners clutches her pearl-and-gold mourning brooch, into which a lock of her husband’s hair is neatly woven. Drusilla stares, her forced smile long gone, at the shrivelled pile of skin before her.

‘Such high cheekbones,’ Marigold says with envy.

Sweating through his silk cravat, Mr Fishal continues his unwrapping, the occasional turquoise scarab dropping to the library floor. A necklace pools onto the carpet, and Mrs Fancey quietly places the sole of her shoe upon it and slides it towards her.

The mummy, face locked in a silent shriek, hands clasped in twisted modesty upon its sternum, trembles slightly as Mr Fishal continues to undress what I now see is the corpse of a woman, unrolling her pelvis with a particular kind of glee that suggests that he has done this to women before.

Eventually he stands back to admire his work, the soiled, cracked linen coiled into a pile at his feet. The ladies, in full evening dress and white gloves, gawk at the naked mummy as if at an unfashionable spinster at the opera.

‘Once word got out, the tourists were positively scrambling over themselves to get into the tombs,’ Mr Art Fishal says. ‘One had better choose one’s prize and run.’ He looks down lovingly at his withered memento. ‘I had to fight two Londoners for her!’

An unimpressed Mr Pounds also looks down at the mummy, his arms crossed.

‘I had chosen a more impressive specimen,’ Mr Fishal clarifies with a sniff, ‘a male. But after a French archaeologist tore off one of its limbs in his greed, I didn’t really see the point in keeping him.’

The guests circle the corpse, speaking loudly and jovially amongst themselves as the servants bring in silver trays bearing digestifs.

‘What a wonderful mummy unrolling,’ Marigold says.

‘I’ve seen better,’ Mrs Fancey mutters.

I keep to the back of the room. In my pocket, I rub the mother-of-pearl handle of the letter opener with my thumb.

LATE THAT NIGHT, after the ladies have retired and the men have stumbled up to their chambers, their breaths laced with the sweetness of port and the bitterness of cigars, Mr Pounds knocks softly on my bed-room door.

Without waiting for a response, he slips inside and closes the door behind him. I am in bed, twiddling with the stolen letter opener. I say nothing, nor do I reach for a shawl as he approaches, combing his eyebrows with his pinkie nail.

He observes my immodest form, which is silhouetted against the moonlight through the thin cotton of my nightdress. ‘Come. I would like to show you something,’ he says.

We tiptoe out to the hall, past the line of guest chambers and through the gallery and down the stairs, back to the library. The mummy, I am sad to see, has been removed, leaving behind nothing but a light memory of her scent.

Mr Pounds bounces toward his desk and opens a drawer which he keeps under lock and key. Proudly he shows me his father’s books, as well as a few he bought himself in Holywell Street. In one illustrated edition, a robust woman in corset and drawers holds a gauzy veil before her, the fabric reaching the floor. On the following page, the gauzy veil has been lifted to reveal her ankles, the woman’s face now pulled into an expression of playful surprise.

I glance at Mr Pounds’ face, at his small tongue flicking at the corners of his mouth, as I decide upon my reaction. Mr Pounds turns another page, and another, the images growing progressively more suggestive until a penis appears, clutched in the hand of a leering man who points it towards a woman lifting her many skirts. Mr Pounds looks at me meaningfully. He is so close I can smell his horse’s pelt on him. I return his gaze, ready to participate. ‘Ooh,’ I say with a mixture of curiosity and surprise.

The library door flies open, and a maid walks in lugging a coal bucket. Upon seeing us huddled together she silently circles back, closing the door behind her.

‘It must be nearing dawn,’ Mr Pounds says. ‘We should return to our chambers, ready ourselves for breakfast.’

He caresses my cheek with a curled finger. ‘I do so enjoy spending time with you, Miss Notty,’ he says. ‘Phrenology twin!’ he whispers, and he giggles.