Girl With Dove: A Life Built By Books

One night, in her small room at Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre hears a strange gurgling sound coming from the room above her. She stirs and opens her eyes, but she can’t see anything in front of her except smoke! Smoke is filling the hallway outside her room, smoke is pushing its way beneath her door, smoke is filling up her lungs.

Jane leaps out of bed and races down the hall; she flies towards Mr Rochester’s room and shouts through the door. ‘Master, Master, wake up! Wake up! Your room is on fire!’

Lucky for Mr Rochester, Jane is a quick thinker. Quick as a flash, says Maze, fast on her feet, that one. Doesn’t miss a trick. And Jane is practical, too. She drags Mr Rochester out of bed and takes him to safety, to the hallway (the gallery, the Victorians call it, where pictures of dead ancestors hang) outside her room. Mr Rochester knows that, without Jane, he would be dead.

‘Dead as a dormouse,’ Maze says about the brown furry thing the cat has brought in. Mr Rochester might not be dead as a dormouse exactly, but he’d be dead as something without Jane. That night he takes her into his confidence forever; that night Jane becomes his fairy-friend.

The next morning Jane starts asking some serious questions on behalf of her new friend.

‘I am certain I heard a laugh, and a strange one,’ she announces to Mr Rochester’s servant Grace Poole the following morning. ‘It can’t have been Pilot, because Pilot can’t laugh.’ Pilot is a dog.

Grace lifts her needle, takes a new ball of thread, waxes it, pokes the end through and carries on sewing. Her face doesn’t flinch, not even a bit. Jane is furious. Last night Mr Rochester told her that the strange laugh was Grace Poole. Grace Poole must have tried to burn Mr Rochester in bed. Jane is sure of it! She saw his bed: the curtains around it were burnt to a cinder. Mr Rochester is lucky to be alive! Grace Poole is a monster! She should be locked up!

‘I am certain I heard a laugh.’

‘Have you told Master that you heard a laugh?’ asks Grace quietly. ‘You did not think of opening your door and looking out into the gallery?’

‘On the contrary,’ says Jane Eyre, who is beginning to get huffy. ‘I bolted my door!’

‘And you are not in the habit of bolting your door every night?’

‘I have often omitted to fasten my door. I was not aware any danger or annoyance was to be dreaded at Thornfield Hall?’

‘I always think it is best to err on the safe side; a door is soon fastened, and it is as well to have a drawn bolt between one and any mischief that may be about. A deal of people, Miss, are for trusting all to Providence.’

Jane looks at the placid face of the woman in front of her. A Quaker woman couldn’t produce more serenity than this woman with her needle. Why has she not been taken into police custody for her criminal behaviour? Mr Rochester was nearly burned alive in his bed last night by this fiend with her uncanny laugh!

Jane pauses for a moment. Grace is hiding something. It was a woman’s laugh she heard, she is certain, the laugh of an angry witch. A woman burying bones at nightfall.

6

Behind Closed Doors (#ulink_82909d75-6e59-5fd7-b6f2-99959cedde2c)

Some houses have no chance in hell of becoming homes. Thornfield Hall is one of these. It is home neither to Jane Eyre nor Mr Rochester; both come and go from it like fairies.

‘In what order you keep these rooms, Mrs. Fairfax!’ says Jane Eyre to the housekeeper soon after she arrives.

‘Why Miss Eyre, though Mr. Rochester’s visits here are rare, they are always sudden and unexpected; and as I observed that it put him out to find everything swathed up, and to have a bustle of arrangement on his arrival, I thought it best to keep the rooms in readiness.’

In our house, rooms were never ready. We didn’t have a Mrs Fairfax to dust and pull back the curtains, to hoover up the filth or scrub down the surfaces. We didn’t have a Mrs Fairfax to let in the light.

Mr Robinson was the only person we could ever imagine visiting. Mr Robinson who lived on the third floor, right at the top, with his wife, Mrs Robinson, who we never saw. Mr Robinson was the only person who would poke his head through our door if we left it open; Mr Robinson suddenly standing in our front room with boxes of farm eggs in his arms; Mr Robinson suddenly at the window with his long scraggy dark hair and cracked-tooth smile.

——————————

But anyone can barge into your dreams.

One night, Jane sees a woman in her room, a woman with long dark hair. Birds circle around her head; wings cover her lips and eyes, her nose and mouth, her face.

Suddenly Jane sees a garish red face and startling black eyes bearing down on her. A dark cavern opens up, and at the back of the cavern is a red serpent lifting its head and hissing. The woman begins to scream. She drops to the floor and begins to writhe. She writhes and she writhes and then she opens her mouth wide.

Jet-black rocks tumble from her mouth. Black rocks spill across the room and hit Jane on the face. Before long there is nothing but the cold dark and black sea, the sound of waves against her ear.

——————————

Mr Robinson had murdered Mrs Robinson. We knew this because we never ever saw her. Not once, not ever, not after all these years.

Maisie said she had seen her, just the once, early one morning when she was coming in with the milk. But we never had. We’d never seen Mrs Robinson and we were sure that Mr Robinson had killed Mrs Robinson. Mr Robinson was a big fat liar!

Mr Robinson, we decided, needed watching. So we climbed to the top of the house to listen for the sound of his breathing. We wanted to see if we could hear anyone breathing behind that dark door.

We pressed our ears to the door. But the door was thick. We strained and strained to hear something. My brother stuck a piece of string through the keyhole and wiggled it. He tugged and tugged at the key to try to make it fall. Then he stuck his fingers under the bottom of the door until he felt the silver key. The key was hard and cold. He squeezed and squeezed his fingers into the narrow crack until they were red and torn. Then he shone his torch on his fingers, and that’s when we saw the blood. Blood all over his fingers. We screamed and ran downstairs and Mum came out and said, Shhhhh! For Pete’s sake, I’m trying to sleep!

But after a while we went back up. We went back again and again. We peered through the keyhole until our eyes hurt because we were absolutely sure of this: Mrs Robinson had been lying on the kitchen floor with blood caked to her face for years. Mr Robinson was a big fat liar!

——————————

I have at several times in my life recognized that there was evil in the neighbourhood, the surroundings, that the environment of someone who was evil was near me, connected with what was happening.

Miss Marple (Nemesis)

Where were you when it all happened, that’s what you need to know. Where were you, and where was everyone else? If Miss Marple wanted to find out what had happened she would start by asking some questions, some very particular questions.

‘What happened, dear? Can you remember where you were when it happened? Who were you standing next to? What were you wearing? Were you holding anything in your hands? What happened the moment, the very moment, when the man with the dazzling light and the gun said “Stick ’em up”?’

And I would say: ‘I remember the back door standing open and Mummy with a pale face and her hair lit up like a lamp. Mummy’s face wasn’t moving; she looked like a ghost. Mummy was a ghost come back from the dead and the man next to her was saying something in a language I couldn’t understand. He had a red face and no hair and Mummy wasn’t moving at all. Mummy was as still as a statue. The man with the red face was the only one talking, and all the time the light kept shining through Mummy’s hair, shining and shining and shining. And that is all I could look at, Mummy’s hair, which was as neat as a haystack.’

The only word I remember from that day is ‘hospital’. Mummy and the man with no hair said they were going to the hospital. And I thought, hospitals are for sick people or for children who have bashed their heads.

That day Mummy went into her bedroom and shut the door. She went into her room and closed the curtains. She got into bed with her clothes on. Mummy stayed in bed for years, until the day the lady in brown came round with her notepad and began to ask questions.

7

Poor Sue (#ulink_fe616006-a278-5b77-9450-0c11e20c654c)

They were whispering together for half-an-hour before they fell asleep. I caught scraps of their conversation, from which I was able only too distinctly to infer the main subject discussed.

(Jane Eyre)

If you listen carefully, you can work out things that adults don’t tell you. You can hear small scraps, words floating through windows on a hazy summer day. If you sit outside the kitchen window downstairs you can hear Mum and Maze whispering. You can hear bits and pieces of Poor Sue coming your way on the breeze.

Poor Sue was married to a man. His name was David, like my brother. Sue and David were married for a while and then something interrupted it, the being married I mean. I strain my ears but I can’t tell you any more than that because the wind keeps scooping up the words. The words never get any further than the washing line before the line strangles the words.

——————————

Mum speaks Greek but she doesn’t like me listening because she says it’s personal and private. Greek is a special gift from God. But I don’t see how that can be in our house. Nothing is private here.

Private is for someone with a big house with a wooden gate and crunchy gravel stones. Private is for the people who live on Maltravers Drive. Private is for the girls who go to Rose Mead School in the middle of town. Private is a place with pretty flintstone walls around it to keep out the tramps and alcoholics. We could never ever live anywhere private.