Havisham: A Novel by Ronald Frame Read Free Book Online Page A

with my Virgil translation.
    We were tackling Book IV. Dido, Queen of Carthage, is consumed with love for the adventurer Aeneas, but he rejects her.
    I didn’t look for assistance, but Moses was always ready with it.
    How simple he could make it seem.
    ‘Dido, fetter’d in the chains of love,
    Hot with the venom which her veins inflam’d,
    And by no sense of shame to be restrain’d…’
    He had me read aloud the original first, before I construed. Then he would demonstrate how.
    ‘Dido shall come in a black sulph’ry flame,
    When death has once dissolv’d her mortal frame.’
    He put me right about my pronunciation, and the stress I placed on words, and helped me correct my errors; then we moved on.
    I didn’t know why he gave up his time to me. Sometimes I thought I caught a smile on his lips, especially when the back of his hand was raised to his mouth, as if to conceal it.
    ‘Are you mocking me?’
    His face was all shock.
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘weren’t you smiling?’
    ‘Was I?’
    ‘I’m amusing to you? Or my inability is?’
    ‘Not at all. If I was smiling, then it was involuntary.’
    ‘So you may have been smiling after all?’
    ‘At your achievement,’ he said. ‘To hear you conquer the text.’
    ‘Oh, Dido! I wish we could be done with her.’
    ‘She fascinates me, though.’
    His craggy face, which put me in mind of his Northumberland provenance, lightened. His I found a stilted, rather saturnine kind of levity – as if the features of his face were a little too stiff for ready smiles, even at my expense.
    ‘Because she’s weak?’ I said.
    ‘Not at all. Quite the reverse. All that guilt she has.’
    ‘Doesn’t a clergyman-to-be regard guilt as a failing?’
    ‘It can be an inspiration too.’
    ‘Isn’t Dido mad? “ I rave, I rave! ”’
    ‘She sees that everything will be a falling away, inevitably. So she consecrates herself to a greater cause – the happiness she knew with Aeneas – she refuses to let that die.’
    ‘But she has to die herself.’
    ‘A minor detail.’
    ‘Throwing herself on to a pyre?’
    He was smiling again.
    ‘You care for empresses and queens?’ I asked him.
    ‘No. For tragic heroines.’
    ‘Why them?’
    ‘Suffering and courageous women who deserve their own immortality.’
    *   *   *
    We were all talking about the beauty of music. Mozart, Bach. And Purcell, who was their favourite.
    Moses said, ‘It’s almost perfect.’
    ‘You could write better?’ W’m ribbed him.
    ‘I mean … It intimates the perfect, the ideal. It takes us to just a hair’s breadth away.’
    At that Sheba groaned and W’m winked at Mouse. But I found myself listening more attentively.
    ‘It’s never absolutely perfect,’ Moses continued. ‘Because then we would have heard everything. The apotheosis.’
    ‘Heaven on earth?’ Sheba said.
    ‘That’s impossible.’
    ‘“ The music of the morning stars –”’ Mouse sang the words softly. ‘“– Here in their hearts did sound .”’
    ‘The utterly sublime is impossible,’ Moses said. ‘Until we reach the Godhead. Only God, and our absorption, is immaculately perfect.’
    General hilarity. Moses caught me sober-faced, and because I didn’t want him beholden to me I smiled quickly, then widened the smile unapologetically.
    *   *   *
    I had a way with the reels, particularly when I was dancing with W’m.
    He would often choose me in preference to the other candidates in a crowded room. I guessed they were just as worthy, and I sensed his mother’s impatience sometimes, that he ignored the choice she was making with a discreetly indicating closed fan.
    Handsome, lively W’m – how could he not inspire me to my best?
    My feet would turn the nimblest little skip-step of them all.
    In the dance I felt impossibly light. Cotillion or quadrille or double-time galop. I had air beneath my feet.
    *   *   *
    The Chadwycks had friends who had ballrooms in their homes. And public spaces that