Read Havisham: A Novel for Free Online

stones, like tiger stripes. The rest showed good taste, and I was happy to wear them.
    My mother had inherited some of the pieces, and I was aware of the quiet dignity of their age. They weighed me to my chair, they slowed me slightly when I walked – not because they were heavy, but because they came to me complicated by their history – and it wasn’t at all an oppressive sensation. I felt that I’d been granted an intimate contact with my mother. We were sharing this occasion of my wearing a necklace or a bracelet, and somehow my increased pleasure was being transmitted to her, through time and space. This experience was being recreated in another dimension; by wearing the necklace or bracelet, I was helping to close a circle.
    *   *   *
    My father grew sad and despondent for a while.
    He had only just got back to regular work. His illness might have been to blame, still tiring him these eighteen or twenty months on, but I sensed – I had a premonition – that there was some other reason.
    Several times he seemed to be on the point of telling me something.
    Whenever he ventured beyond the brewery gates, he wore his darkest and most sombre outdoor clothes.
    *   *   *
    ‘I married again, Catherine.’
    I thought I had misheard.
    ‘Who married again?’
    ‘Me. I married again.’
    Pause.
    ‘When?’
    ‘A few years after your mother died.’
    ‘Married whom?’
    ‘The woman I wished to marry.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The woman I wished to care for.’
    Pause.
    ‘But she died. Just recently.’
    ‘Who – who was she? Do I know her?’
    ‘You know – you knew her, yes.’
    ‘One of our friends?’
    ‘It was Mrs Bundy. As she used to be.’
    I stared at him. I felt I was falling through a hole in the floor. I was without mass; I’d left the sac of my stomach behind.
    ‘And then of course she became Mrs Havisham.’
    ‘No.’ I shook my head at him. ‘No, that’s our name.’
    At that my father’s face sagged. His mouth hung slack.
    ‘And…’
    He stopped. He stared at the surface of the table.
    ‘There’s – something else?’
    My head was still spinning, like a top.
    ‘We had a son.’
    ‘A son?’
    ‘You have a half-brother.’
    The boy I used to see her with, about the town, who was sent away to be educated.
    As he briefly explained, my father wouldn’t look at me, however hard I stared and challenged him to raise his eyes.
    ‘I’m sorry I have to tell you like this –’
    The boy’s age was close to mine. And yet my father had said he married a few years after my mother’s death. I knew what that meant.
    ‘I should like something, Catherine.’
    I let a few seconds lapse.
    ‘What – what’s that?’
    ‘I should like Arthur – that is his name – I should like Arthur to come and stay here.’
    ‘ Here? ’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How long for?’
    ‘Satis House will be his home.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘It will call for one or two adjustments to our routine. But nothing we can’t –’
    ‘You want him to come and stay here with us ?’
    ‘He will be coming. To be one of the family.’
    I didn’t speak.
    ‘I’ve told him. We’ve discussed it.’
    ‘It’s been decided?’ I said.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Why are you asking me, then?’
    I fixed my eyes on that gulch of loose skin on his neck, his throat, which had only appeared since his accident.
    ‘I should appreciate – if you could help to make Arthur feel comfortable. In his new home.’
    ‘“Home”? Satis House?’
    ‘Yes. Home now for all of us.’
    *   *   *
    Arthur was still thin. The Havishams had always had padding, so he was already marked out as being something less than ourselves.
    He had thin wrists, a thin neck, but it wasn’t the fine sort of inbred aristocratic leanness. I could see the sharp edge of his shoulder bones under his shirt. When he breathed out, or laughed – which meant rolling about at some small witticism from my father, or sneering at me – his ribs poked out of his chest. He had large