Sleep, Pale Sister

1

Don’t look at me that way-I can’t bear it! You’re thinking how much I have changed. You see the young man in the picture, his clear, pale brow, curling dark hair, his untroubled eyes-and you wonder how he could be me. The carelessly arrogant set of the jaw, the high cheekbones, the long, tapered fingers seem to hint at some hidden, exotic lineage, although the bearing is unmistakably English. That was me at thirty-nine-look at me carefully and remember…I could have been you.

My father was a minister near Oxford, my mother the daughter of a wealthy Oxfordshire landowner. My childhood was untroubled, sheltered, idyllic. I remember going to church on Sundays, singing in the choir, the coloured light from the stained-glass windows like a shower of petals on the white surplices of the choristers…

The black angel seems to shift imperceptibly and, in her eyes, I sense an echo of the pitiless comprehension of God. This is not a time for imagined nostalgia, Henry Paul Chester. He needs your truth, not your inventions. Do you think to fool God?

Ridiculous, that I should still feel the urge to deceive, I who have lived nothing but a life of deceit for over forty years. The truth is a bitter decoction: I hate to uncork it for this last meeting. And yet I am what I am. For the first time I can dare to take God’s words for myself. This is no sweetened fiction. This is Henry Chester: judge me if you wish. I am what I am.

There was, of course, no idyllic childhood. My early years are blank: my memories begin at age seven or eight; impure, troubled memories even then as I felt the serpent grown within me. I do not remember a time when I was not conscious of my sin, my guilt: no surplice, however white, could hide it. It gave me wicked thoughts, it made me laugh in church, it made me lie to my father and cross my fingers to extinguish the lie.

There were samplers on the wall of every room of our house, embroidered by my mother with texts from the Bible. Even now I see them, especially the one in my room, stark on the white wall opposite my bed: i am that i am. As I passed the summers and winters of my boyhood, in my moments of peace and the contemplation of my solitary vices I watched that sampler, and sometimes, in my dreams, I cried out at the cruel indifference of God. But I always received the same message, stitched now for ever in the intricate patterns of my memory: i am that i am.

My father was God’s man and more frightening to me than God. His eyes were deep and black, and he could see right into the hidden corners of my guilty soul. His judgement was as pitiless and impartial as God’s own, untainted by human tenderness. What affection my father had he lavished on his collection of mechanical toys, for he was an antiquarian of sorts and had a whole room filled with them, from the very simplest of counterweighted wooden figures to the dreamlike precision of his Chinese barrel-organ with its hundred prancing dwarves.

Of course, I was never allowed to play with them-they were too precious for any child-but I do remember the dancing Columbine. She was made of fine porcelain and was almost as big as a three-year-old child. Father told me, in one of his rare moments of informality, that she was made by a blind French craftsman in the decadent years before the Revolution. Running his fingers across her flawless cheek, he told me the story: how she had belonged to some spoiled king’s bastard brat, abandoned among rotting brocades when the Terror struck and godless heads rolled with the innocent. How she was stolen by a pauper woman who could not bear to see her smashed and trampled by the sans-culottes. The woman had lost her baby to the famine and kept Columbine in a cradle in her poor hovel, rocking her and singing lullabies until they found her, mad and starving and alone, and took her away to the asylum to die.

Columbine survived. She arrived in a Paris antiquarian’s the year I was born, and Father, who was returning from a trip to Lourdes, saw her and bought her at once, though her silk dress was rotten and her eyes had fallen into her head from neglect and rough handling. As soon as he saw her dance, he knew she was special: wind the key set into the small of her back and she would begin to move, stiffly at first, then with a slick, inhuman fluidity, raising her arms, bowing from the waist, flexing her knees, showing the plump roundness of her porcelain calves under the dancer’s skirt. Months of loving restoration gave her back all her beauty, and now she sat resplendent in blue and white satin in my father’s collection, between the Indian music-box and the Persian clown.

I was never allowed to wind her up. Sometimes, when I lay awake in the middlle of the night, I could hear a faint tinkle of music from behind the closed door, low and intimate, almost carnal…The image of Father in his nightgown with the dancing Columbine in his hands was absurdly disquieting. I could not help wondering how he would hold her; whether he would dare to let his hand creep beneath the foaming lace of her petticoats…

I rarely saw my mother; she was often indisposed and spent a great deal of time in her room, into which I was not allowed. She was a beautiful enigma, dark-haired and violet-eyed. Glancing into the secret chamber one day I remember a looking-glass, jewels, scarves, armfuls of lovely gowns strewn over the bed. Among it all lingered a scent of lilac, the scent of my mother when she leaned to kiss me goodnight, the scent of her linen as I buried my face in the washing the maid hung out to dry.

My mother was a great beauty, Nurse told me. She had married against her parents’ wishes and no longer communicated with her family. Maybe that was why she sometimes looked at me with that expression of wary contempt; maybe that was why she never seemed to want to touch or hold me. I idolized her, however: she seemed so infinitely above me, so delicate and pure that I was unable to express my adoration, crushed by my own inadequacy. I never blamed my mother for what she made me do: for years I cursed my own corrupt heart, as Adam must have cursed the serpent for Eve’s transgression.

I was twelve; I still sang in the choir but my voice had reached that almost inhuman purity of tone which heralds the end of childhood. It was August, and the whole of that summer had been fine: long, blue, dreaming days filled with voluptuous scents and languorous sensations. I had been playing in the garden with friends and I was hot and thirsty, my hair standing on end like a savage’s, grass-stains on the knees of my trousers. I crept into the house quietly; I wanted to change my clothes quickly before Nurse realized what a state I was in.

There was no-one there but the maid in the kitchen-Father was in church preparing for the evening’s sermon, and Mother was walking by the river-and I ran up the stairs to my room. Pausing on the landing, I saw that the door to my mother’s room was ajar. I remember looking at the doorknob, a blue-and-white porcelain thing painted with flowers. A scent of lilac wafted out from the cool darkness and, almost in spite of myself, I moved closer and peered through the door. There was no-one in sight. Looking guiltily around me, I pushed the door and entered, telling myself earnestly that if the door had been open, I could not be accused of snooping, and, for the first time in my life, I was alone in my mother’s private room.

For a minute I was content to stare at the rows of bottles and trinkets by the looking-glass, then I dared to touch a silk scarf, then the lace of a petticoat, the gauze of an under-dress. I was fascinated by all her things, by the mysterious vials and jars, and the combs and brushes with strands of her hair still caught in the bristles. It was almost as if the room was my mother, as if it had captured her essence. I felt that if I could assimilate every nuance of that room I might learn to tell her how much I loved her in the kind of words she could understand.

Reaching to brush my reflection in the mirror I accidentally knocked over a little bottle, filling the air with a heady distillation of jasmine and honeysuckle. My hurried attempt to pick up the bottle only resulted in my spilling a case of powder across the dressing-table, but the scent acted so strangely upon my nerves that, instead of being panic-stricken, I giggled softly to myself. Mother would not be back for some time; Father was in church. What harm could it do to explore? And I felt an excitement, a power, looking over my mother’s things in her absence. An amber necklace winked at me in the semi-darkness; I picked it up and, on impulse, put it on. A transparent scarf, light as a breath, touched my bare arm as I passed. I raised it to my lips, seeming to feel her skin, her scent against my face.

For the first time I began to feel an extraordinary sensation, a tingling in all my body focusing more and more strongly on a point of exquisite tension, a growing friction which filled my mind with half-recognized images of carnality. I tried to make myself believe that it was the room which was making me do it. The scarf wanted to coil lovingly around my neck. Bracelets found their way on to my arms on their own. I took off my shirt and looked at myself in the glass and, with hardly a second thought, I took off my trousers. There was a wrap lying on my mother’s bed, a delicate, transparent thing of silk and frothy lace: experimentally I draped it around myself, caressing the thin fabric, imagining it touching her skin, imagining how it would look…

I began to feel physically faint, disorientated, the potency of the spilled perfume assailing me like an invisible army of succubi-I could hear the beating of their wings. It was then that I knew I was the devil’s creature. Some inhuman instinct impelled me to continue and, although I knew that what I was doing was mortal sin, I felt no guilt. I felt immortal. My hands, knotting and clutching the wrap, seemed possessed by a demonic intelligence: I began to caper in a frenzied, ecstatic glee…then suddenly I was frozen in sublime paralysis, doubling up beneath the force of a pleasure I had never conceived of. For a second I was higher than the clouds, higher than God…then I fell like Lucifer, a little boy again, lying on the carpet, the silk wrap crushed and torn under me, the jewels and trinkets grotesque around my scrawny limbs.

A moment of stupid indifference. Then the enormity of what I had done broke upon my head like a hailstorm and I began to cry in hysterical terror, dragging on my clothes with shaking hands, feeling my knees buckle. I grabbed the wrap and rolled it into a ball, thrusting it into my shirt. Picking up my shoes I ran out of my mother’s room and into my own where I hid the wrap up the chimney behind a loose stone, promising myself to burn it as soon as Nurse lit a fire there.

Feeling my panic abating a little, I took the time to wash my face and change, then I lay on my bed for ten minutes to still my trembling. An odd sensation of relief overwhelmed me: I had escaped immediate discovery. Fear and guilt were metamorphosed into a sense of exhilaration: even if I were punished for having been into my mother’s room, the very worst thing would never be known. It was my secret, and I kept it coiled up in my heart like a serpent. There it grew with me-and, even now, continues to grow.

I did not escape entirely undiscovered, of course: the spilled powder and perfume gave me away-along with the theft of the wrap. I admitted that part to my father: that I had gone into the room because I was curious, that I had been clumsy and had trodden on the lace of the wrap by mistake, and had torn it, and that, to avoid punishment, I had thrown the wrap into the pond. He believed me, even commending my honesty (how the devil within me laughed and capered!), and, though I was whipped for my foolishness, the feeling of relief, even excitement, did not abate. From being all-powerful, my father had suddenly dwindled: I had fooled him, lied to him, and he had not known. As for my mother, maybe she guessed something, for I caught her looking at me with an odd expression once or twice, but she never spoke about the incident and it was soon, apparently, forgotten.

For myself, I never did burn the wrap I had concealed in the chimney. Sometimes, when I was alone, I would take it from its hiding-place and touch the silken folds, until years of handling and rising smoke from the chimney turned it brittle and brown as parchment and it fell to pieces of its own accord, like a handful of autumn leaves.

My mother died when I was fourteen, two years after the birth of my brother, William. I remember her lovely chamber transformed into a sickrooom, with heavy wreaths of flowers on every piece of furniture; she pale and thin, but still beautiful to the end.

My father was with her all the time, his face unreadable. One day, passing the room without entering, I heard him weeping in violent abandon, and my mouth twisted in derision; I prided myself in feeling nothing.

Her grave was placed in the churchyard just outside the entrance to the church, so that my father could see it as he greeted his parishioners. I had often wondered how such a stern, God-fearing man had come to marry such a delicate, worldly creature. That he might have passions I could not guess at made me uneasy, and I dismissed such thoughts.

When I was twenty-five my father died. I was completing my Grand Tour at the time, and did not hear of it until all was over. It seemed that during the winter he had caught a cold, had neglected it-he hardly ever lit fires in the house except in the bitterest weather-had refused to take to his bed and, one day in church, had collapsed. Fever set in and he died without recovering consciousness, leaving me with a tidy fortune and an inexplicable feeling that now he was dead he would be able to watch over all my movements.

I moved to London: I had a certain talent for drawing and wished to establish myself as an artist. There I discovered the British Museum and the Royal Academy, and steeped myself in art and sculpture. I was determined to make a name for myself: I rented a studio in Kennington and spent my first five years accumulating enough work for my first exhibition. I painted allegorical portraits especially, taking a great deal of my ideas from Shakespeare and classical mythology, working in oils for the most part, that medium being the most suitable for the meticulous, detailed work I liked. One visitor who came to see my work told me that the style was ‘quite Pre-Raphaelite’, which delighted me, and I took care to nurture this similarity, even taking subjects from Rossetti’s poetry-although I felt that the poet, as a man, was very far from the kind of person I should like to emulate.

My main problem was finding suitable models, for I had few friends in London and, after a most embarrassing experience near the Haymarket, did not dare to approach likely females with offers of work. I had no interest in painting men: I found more poetry in the female form, and a certain type of female form at that. I advertised in The Times, but found that from twenty or so applicants only one or two were even passably handsome, and that none of them could be termed ‘respectable’ women. As long as they didn’t open their vulgar mouths I did not complain, however, which is why, when I look back at some of my earlier works, I find it hard to trust my memory, recollecting that sweet-faced Juliet had an illegitimate child or innocent Cinderella an addiction to the gin-bottle. I learned more about women in those days than I ever wished to know. In spite of their pretty faces, listening to their conversations, their lewdness, their unclean thoughts, I despised them.

Several of them tried their cheap seductions upon me, but at that time the serpent within me was well under control: I went to church every Sunday, painted at my studio during the day and relaxed at a respectable club in the evenings. I had a small circle of acquaintances, but found little need for company. After all, I had my art. I even fancied that women had no power over me, that I had finally conquered the stirrings of my sinful flesh. Such conceit is the wheel upon which God breaks sinners; but time runs on a short leash, and I must skim over three more years to a time when I was just thirty-three, to the clear autumn day when I met my nemesis.

I had been painting children for some time: it was always easy to find a beautiful child whose mother was willing to spare her for a few hours a day. I paid them a shilling an hour, and it was more than some of these women themselves earned. Thus I was walking in the park as I often did when I happened to catch sight of a woman and a child: the woman a dowdy customer in black, the child a little girl of about ten with such unusual and striking features that I stopped to stare after her.

She was a thin child, wrapped in an ugly black cape which looked like someone else’s hand-me-down, but she moved with a grace unusual in one of her age, and her hair was a most troubling colour, a shade closer to white than gold, so that for an instant she looked like a little old crone, some changeling among the happy, rosy children around her. Her face was pointed and almost colourless but for her large, deep eyes; her lips were full for a child’s, but pale; her expression quaintly tragic.

I knew instantly that I had to have her as my model: there was an infinite promise of expression in her face; each movement was a masterpiece of definition. Looking at her I knew that child would be my salvation; her innocence moved me as much as her spectral beauty, and there were tears in my eyes as I ran towards the couple. For a moment my heart was too full for me to speak.

The girl’s name was Effie; the dowdy woman was her aunt. She lived with her aunt and her mother above a little milliner’s shop in Cranbourn Alley and they were of a respectable type: the mother, Mrs Shelbeck, was a widow, living in straitened circumstances. A shrill, annoying woman, I later found, with none of her daughter’s striking looks, and my offer of a shilling an hour was accepted without any of the modesty and reserve usually exhibited by genteel families. I suspect that if I had offered half the sum it would have been accepted with equal alacrity-as it was, I would have gladly offered double.

Effie came to my studio-respectably accompanied by the aunt-that very week, and I spent a whole morning simply drawing the child from various angles: profile, three-quarter, full-face, head high, head to one side…each more enchanting than the last. She was a perfect model: she did not shuffle and fidget as did other children, nor did she chatter or smile. She seemed overawed by the studio and by me, studying me covertly with an expression of respectful wonder. She came again; after the third time the aunt ceased to come with her.

My first painting of her was called My Sister’s Sleep, from the Rossetti poem, and it took two months to complete: only a small canvas, but I flattered myself that I had caught the look of Effie. I painted her lying on a little narrow bed such as children use, a cross on the white wall above her and a vase of holly on the bedstand beside her, the family’s concession to the Christmas spirit. Her brother was sitting on the floor beside the bed, his head buried in the coverlet, and her mother, in black, was standing at the foot of the bed with her face in her hands. The painting focused on Effie; the other figures were faceless and dark-clad, but she was all in white, wearing a ruffled nightdress I had bought for the painting, her hair spread out on the pillow all around her. Her arms were bare, one hanging limply by her side, the other tucked childishly under her cheek. The light from the window transfigured her, promising redemption in death, the purity of the innocent who dies young. It was a theme close to my heart and I was to repeat it many times in the next seven years. Sometimes I was reluctant to let her go home in the evenings for she was growing so fast that I was afraid to lose even an hour of her company.

Effie never spoke a great deal: she was a quiet little thing, untouched by the conceit and vanity exhibited by other girls of the same age. She read avidly-especially poetry, Tennyson, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare-hardly any of it suitable for a child, although her mother seemed to pay little attention to the fact. I ventured to point this out to Effie one day and was pleased to find her properly attentive to my advice. I told her that poetry, although unexceptionable reading for, say, a young man, was rather too difficult for a susceptible young girl. The subject matter was too frequently indelicate, the passions too violent. I offered to lend her some good, improving books, and was delighted when she read them dutifully. There was no wilfulness in her: she seemed created to embody all the feminine virtues without any of the perversity of that sex.

I had never wanted to be a bachelor, but my mistrust of women, born of my professional contact with them, had led me to doubt whether I would ever find St Paul’s ‘one in a thousand’, who is virtuous and obedient. However, as I saw more of Effie, as I was charmed by her beauty and her sweet ways, I realized that, after all, there was a way to achieve that ideal.

There was no taint on Effie: she was absolutely pure. If I could nurture her qualities, if I could keep a fatherly eye on her development, I was certain that I could make of her something rare, something wonderful. I would protect her from the rest of the world, educate her to be my equal. I would mould her, then, the work done…as I formulated the idea my mind threw back at me the memory of a small boy in a room full of forbidden marvels, and that fleeting, nostalgic scent of jasmine seemed to fill the air. For the first time the image brought no accompanying twist of guilt: Effie’s purity would redeem me, I knew it. There was nothing worldly, nothing sensual about her; hers was the cool indifference of the true innocent. Through her I would find salvation.

I engaged private tutors for her-I wanted her to have as little contact with other children as possible-I bought her clothes and books. I employed a respectable housekeeper for her mother and aunt so that Effie would not have to waste time helping around the house. I befriended her tedious mother so that I should have the excuse to frequent Cranbourn Alley and I kept the money flowing in.

I was painting Effie almost incessantly now, abandoning all my other models unless they were needed as secondaries in a canvas. I concentrated upon Effie: Effie at twelve, taller, in the pretty white dresses and blue sashes I encouraged her mother to buy; Effie at thirteen, fourteen, her dancer’s figure as graceful as a colt’s; at fifteen, her eyes and lips darkening, her face taking a more adult shape; at sixteen, her pale hair bound up in a tidy coronet around her brow, her mouth the tenderest of arcs, her lovely rain-coloured eyes heavy-lidded, the skin around them so fine that it seemed almost bruised.

I must have drawn or painted Effie a hundred times: she was Cinderella, she was Mary, she was the young novice in The Passion-Flower, she was Beatrice in Heaven, Juliet in the tomb, draped with lilies and trailing convolvulus for Ophelia, in rags for The Little Beggar Girl. My final portrait of her at that time was The Sleeping Beauty, so like My Sister’s Sleep in composition, showing Effie all in white again, like a bride or a novice, lying on the same little girl’s bed, her hair, much longer than it had been when she was ten-I had always urged her never to cut it-trailing on to the floor, where a century’s worth of dust lingers. Sunlight filters through the skylight on to the floor, and tendrils of ivy have begun to drop through the window into the room. A skeleton in armour, twined all over with the encroaching ivy, warns of the perils of disturbing the sleeping innocent. Effie’s face is turned towards the light; she smiles in her sleep, unaware of the desolation around her.

I could wait no longer. I had woven the enchantment which had kept her waiting for me all these years: now was the time to break it. She was still very young, I knew, but to wait another year might be to risk losing her for ever.

Her mother did not even seem surprised that I should want to marry her daughter. Indeed, the eagerness with which she welcomed the offer made me suspect that she had already envisaged the possibility. I was a rich man, after all: it was certain that if Effie married me I would be obliged to help her relatives, and I was almost forty while Effie was seventeen. When I died, all my fortune would be hers. The maiden aunt-a sour-mannered creature whose only redeeming feature was an overpowering devotion to Effie-disapproved. Effie was too young, she said, too sensitive. She did not understand what would be required of her when we were married. I did not care about her objections. Effie was my only concern. She was mine: trained to grow along me like ivy on the trunk of an oak.

She married me in the same antique embroidered dress she had worn for the Sleeping Beauty.