by Alice Miller
Her head inclined slightly.
“You recall that part in the Apology, where Socrates decides to consult the poets, because they are clearly the wisest people in the republic? And he finds, when he goes to speak to them—” He paused, waiting for confirmation she was listening.
“That they know nothing at all,” she finished for him. She did not look impressed. “And?”
“I wondered whether you’d found that to be true. In your experience.”
She raised her eyebrows, and he coughed.
“I mean, your Mr. Yeats is extremely well regarded—”
“And you think he might know nothing?”
“I don’t know, Miss Hyde-Lees. Perhaps to know nothing is something impressive.”
“I don’t think that’s what you were suggesting.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“But you meant to criticise him. You’re not very subtle.” She paused, and looked down the ward. “You’re not entirely wrong, however. There is a blindness to him. It just doesn’t seem to be any of your business.”
I hope he isn’t blind to something I see very clearly, he wanted to say, but stopped himself. He wouldn’t let himself launch into praise of her—she was lovely, taking the world so seriously, standing with the light of the window mottled from the trees, dappling over her dress and her cheek. But he held back. He needed more time, he knew. Still, he had been told it was a matter of days before they sent him to convalescence, and then there would be no reason for him ever to see her again. Even after the lamp episode, his feet were healing fast. His body was not behaving as his mind wanted. He needed more time. He looked down at his fingers. He thought of the diagram of the human hand from his studies, the muscles stretching down like ghostly roots.
She had left now, gone to check on Colonel Fraser. Pike watched her awhile and eventually took out his book, opening the pages to where he had slipped the chunk of broken glass from the floor. He looked at it lying on the page. It was frosted, thinner than a windowpane, with uneven edges. He admired it lying there, like a tiny sword. He remembered how when he had picked it up off the floor, it hadn’t cut him at all. Now he picked it up in his left hand, wrapped his fingers around it, and closed his fist.
The blood came pouring out fast, and he opened his palm to see bright red blood everywhere. It was almost a relief.
“Hyde-Lees,” he called to her.
She looked up reluctantly at first, until she saw the blood. She rushed over to him.
“What have you done?”
“An accident,” he said, dropping the sliver of glass onto the bedsheet and clenching his fist again so more blood squeezed between his fingers. It would be enough. He could feel the line of a deep cut sliced through his palm, and other smaller shards glancing through his fingers, furrowing their way farther into his skin. He let out a grunt. It hurt more than he’d expected. Hyde-Lees had disappeared—to the trolley—and returned with some water, which she poured over his hand, onto the floor. She had a towel and tried to mop up some of the blood, and she disappeared and came back with a pair of silver tweezers, trying to pick out the shards. But there was far too much blood.
“Don’t ring the bell,” he said, “please.” He wanted to be alone with her.
“I have to.”
“But I’m fine.” He felt quite distant, however, as though he had clouds in his head. Fog. Rain.
“You did it on purpose,” she was saying. “Why?” He concentrated on watching the silver tweezers bite at the cut, picking out glass as it welled blood. His eyes wanted to shut. She tweezed another thin slice of glass from his hand, frosted glass. She was gone for a moment, and he heard the ting tong of the bell across the room. He looked down to see bright red splashes on the blond parquet. She returned.
“Why would you do it?” She sounded very far away and was pressing a towel against his hand.
“I wanted to stay here with you,” he said, and he saw Hyde-Lees’s pale face as she guided his good hand around the towel. The blood turned the white towel red.
“Hold it,” she said. She took his other hand in her own and squeezed. He shut his eyes.
When he woke, he saw Emma swoop in over him, smiling. Her manner was so easy, he was rather put off guard.
“Dear Tom, are you all right?”
“Hello,” he managed to say. She was still smiling, seeming to take in his surroundings—the window behind him, the enormous curtains, the bright lilies on the colonel’s bedside table—as if she’d never been there before. He tried to unblur his vision. Her blouse was a light blue grey and almost shiny, like the skin of a seal.
“Agnes Thwaite has given such a lot for the war effort,” Emma Wetherford was saying. “The first time I came here, I hardly recognised her home.”
He nodded and blinked. Of course he’d never seen this place before it was a hospital, not being the type to know anyone with a house in Mayfair, but the Wetherfords probably came here regularly to sip their tea and discuss their superiority to the general populace. For a moment, from within his fog, he found himself admiring Emma again, the fact that she would come over and launch into a conversation with him, that within seconds she could reference her elevated social status, flash the wedge of diamonds on her finger, and lower her slender hand in a merry wave. Like a ruler addressing one of her subjects. Not a Wetherford anymore, he remembered. Why did he still, perversely, try to please her?
“What happened to your hand?”
“An accident.” He raised it in the air to prove that it was fine. Someone had bandaged it while he was unconscious. It hurt like hell, but he was still well mannered, speaking to her.
“I did not think a hospital was the place for accidents.”
“My fault, not theirs.” He paused. “Are your family well?”
“Yes, thank you. Except poor Eddie, I’m afraid.”
“Oh?”
“The Somme. Dreadful business. Friendly fire.”
“I’m sorry.” He was. She had loved her brother—hell, Pike had loved him—and he was the only really gentle member of that family. “That’s very sad.” He felt a softening towards her, real pity. She sniffed, but her demeanour was calm. It was only now he wondered, looking at her, what he hadn’t allowed himself to wonder before: Did she come back here because she wanted to marry him? Because he had touched something in her, something fundamentally good? Perhaps she wanted to divorce her titled husband and take him back after all? For what other reason would she keep visiting?
She tossed her head about, her forehead rumpled, as if she could guess what he was thinking. But it was a ridiculous idea. It was all gone, impossible; she was already married. She probably came purely out of guilt, and wanted him to forgive her. Could he? She looked to be struggling not to cry, and he expected her to say something about Eddie, remembering that time they had met in Cambridge, when she had hit her head on that table, poor thing. Instead, she offered a strange smile. “Did you know we got engaged in the exact same place?”
“Pardon?”
“My husband and I. On the terrace. It was very odd. Before Eddie went to the front, I told him about it, and we couldn’t stop laughing.”
This had caught him off guard, and he did not know what to say. He skipped over their own engagement on the terrace and remembered how it had felt to receive her letter at the front—Darling Tom, This is awfully hard for me to write . . . He’d read it in the infirmary on that narrow stretcher, his feet scorched with pain, while the boy next to him lay dying. How long had she taken to write it? Five minutes? Ten? Even now he could recite it word for word. I’m dreadfully sorry . . .
“It’s really all so strange, Tommy,” she said now, and her tone was oddly girlish, almost as she had spoken to him in that hotel room. He looked away from her and across the room, where he could see Hyde-Lees, talking to Lieutenant Gray as she helped him to sit up and tried to coax him to drink a glass of water. He watched them closely, resisting the urge to call out to get
her attention. Sanderson, the other nurse, was nearby. He felt someone touch him, and it was Emma putting her hand on his sleeve, looking down at his bandaged hand.
He looked into her eyes, their cracked blue. “How is your husband?”
“Fine.”
“I’m glad you found someone so well suited to you.”
“Oh, Tom—I felt so awful—”
He shifted his eyes away from her. “What are you doing here, Emma? Why do you think I’d want to see you?”
She seemed genuinely surprised at the question. “I suppose I thought we would make amends.”
“We won’t.”
She looked confused. She took the ends of her perfectly tied scarf and pulled it slightly tighter around her white neck. She was accustomed to being vulnerable but powerful, to lowering her eyes and having everyone wait, in suspense, for what came next.
“In that case,” she said brightly, as if it hardly mattered to her, “another time.”
He watched as Hyde-Lees walked purposefully towards the washroom, at the end of her shift, and he glanced up and squinted at the large chandelier that hung from the centre of the room, each slender thread of strung light dripping from the ceiling.
“No. Not another time. I would ask you, actually, to get out, and to not visit me again. Anywhere.”
“Tom—”
He turned his head away from her. She wouldn’t understand what she had done to him, but he could at least give her a few seconds of that sense of rejection, of not being needed. He waited for her to go, and after a time, he heard her expensive shoes making pronounced claps on the parquet. Listening, he thought of the sound of a waterfall, its pearl glitter against rock. Tomorrow he would ask Hyde-Lees to visit him at the convalescent home. He was getting closer to her, he knew it.
TWENTY-FIVE
“Can we start?” Georgie was not good at pleasantries. They were, again, in the small library, with Nora Radcliffe in the middle, her mother on her right, Georgie on her left.
Nora Radcliffe looked more unwell than the last time; her skin was blotchy and her eyes kept squinting, even though the room was dark. Now they were about to begin, Effie Radcliffe was focused entirely on her daughter.
Nora Radcliffe closed her eyes.
They sat and waited. It seemed that they sat for so long that the quality of the room’s light changed, grew somewhat brighter, as if the room were clearing its throat. Still nothing happened. Georgie thought of Pike’s bleeding hand, of the matron’s face when she had seen the blood all over the bed.
Effie Radcliffe began to shuffle on her seat, shifting her tiny derrière one way, then another, like a small child waiting for a performance, bored before the show had even begun.
Georgie had thought about cancelling her second appointment with Miss Radcliffe after her conversation with Dr. Harkin, but she was too curious. Harkin’s offer was something that she wanted. Being a leader in the Order. Privy to everything. At the same time, the offer had made her nervous. She didn’t fancy mediating feuds between the less imaginative of the members. What she wanted was to find the anima mundi—with or without Willy—not to deal with amateurs and halfwits, those who complained they should be able to choose the colour of their robes, or that the examinations should be made easier so greater numbers could pass, that Germans should not be admitted, or that they should update the portrait of Christian Rosenkreutz to make his hair and beard look less old-fashioned. “Even if you just gave him a homburg or a bowler hat,” she’d heard one fellow tell Harkin, “he would look more like an Englishman.” No, she wanted to find something real, not to organise the people. She needed to ask more about what Harkin had in mind.
Nora Radcliffe was pressing the page with her pen. Her eyelids flickered, as if she were half opening her eyes. The nib of the pen, clasped in her thin fingers, began to quiver, making tiny shudders in a half curve. It took a long time to form a single letter. The girl’s wrist turned, and she appeared to have shaped a G.
Effie Radcliffe was nodding, rapt at her daughter’s face.
The letters were coming faster, and an E followed.
She stopped for a moment before a T formed, then an H, E—a brief hesitation—
GETHER
Another pause as the pen hovered above the page. Then, in even larger letters, all at once:
OUT
“Who?” Effie Radcliffe demanded, her back arched strangely as she leaned over the table. Georgie clutched her fingers in her lap. The girl’s hand had started to move very fast, scribbling the letters in jolts:
GET HER OUT I WILL NOT TALK TILL SHE IS GONE
A pause. The girl’s hand stopped moving. The room was silent.
Effie Radcliffe had also closed her eyes. Georgie glanced at her. She waited. Nothing happened.
Georgie spoke softly. “It wants one of us to go.”
Nora’s mother shifted again. “Which of us would you like to leave?”
The girl’s hand was entirely still.
Georgie tried once more to address Effie Radcliffe. “Perhaps you might leave us for a moment, just to see. The spirit might be referring to you.”
The woman’s eyes flipped open. “And why not you? It could just as well be you.”
“Of course,” Georgie said, trying to sound calm, while she could hear her own pulse beat in her ears. “But I am the one who is paying.”
“Very well, Miss Sheldon,” Effie Radcliffe said. She rose from her seat slowly and turned towards the door without a look at her daughter. As she left, the door slammed, and the two young women jumped at the sound.
Nora’s eyes opened for a second and once more fell shut. But Georgie now saw, instead of a medium, only a woman irritated by her mother, who was using her position to try to mitigate her mother’s influence. It was difficult to believe there were any spirits; rather Nora was making things up as she went along. It was possible, of course, that the medium’s own thoughts had interfered with a spirit’s communication, or that an authentic spirit might still arrive. But it did not give Georgie much hope. Why was she risking her whole position in the Order for this fraudulence? She watched the girl with disappointment. It was strange what people would lie about for money.
For Georgie the urgency had disappeared, although the girl’s hand was still moving. The girl had placed the pen down on the page, and now she picked it up again in the grip she had used in the last session, so it lay between her thumb and her fist. She held the pen above the page and began to sketch. The radiator began to click, like a scatter of rainfall. The girl’s hand kept sketching, in the frenetic manner of the artist, shading shapes from light to dark. Georgie could not make out what was being drawn. Her eyes drifted across the bookshelves around the walls. The books were not in any discernible order; on one shelf she recognised George Mead’s The World-Mystery, and the novels of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot. Underneath, a collection of Hölderlin’s poems, a golden-bound copy of Balzac’s Seraphita, and a thick edition of medieval verse plays. The scratching continued.
When Georgie looked back to see what had been drawn on the page, she was surprised to see the exact image of an arm, the one with the palm facing her, and the two fingers and a thumb raised, the others curled down—the same picture that was drawn on the back of Harkin’s notes from his lecture, the same long lines of the arm, this time shaded in black. The fingers were the same, and the dimensions appeared to be identical. She pulled her chair closer to the table.
“What’s this?” she said.
Nora Radcliffe’s posture had changed, as though she were trying to appear very tall, her head bobbing like it was struggling to stay afloat. She was straining her entire body. The voice that came out of her mouth was not hers. It was a male voice, very low, and thickly accented Eastern European. “You received a message,” the voice said from Nora Radcliffe’s mouth. “Didn’t you?” It paused. “It has confused you, but . . . someone is trying to get through to you. Someone wants to tell you something.”
Nor
a Radcliffe pushed the pen against the paper. From deep in her throat came a low rumbling sound. This rumbling continued, without seeming to need to stop for breath, and she pressed the pen hard against the paper and wrote:
YOU MUST GO
“Who is this?”
There was a pause, and the hand shuddered before writing:
THOMAS
OF THE WHITE HAND
“What do you want?”
YOU MUST GO WHERE I INSTRUCTED
YOU MUST NOT LET THE SAME
HAPPEN TO YOU IT IS
A SYSTEM
“What is? What system?”
YOU ARE
CAUGHT
The rumbling stopped. The girl’s hand lifted off the page.
“Hello? Please? Are you there?” Georgie said.
The girl’s eyes opened. “It’s gone,” she said in her ordinary voice, and she looked down at the page. She glanced up at Georgie. “Do you know what this means?”
“Not yet,” Georgie said. “And he’s—he’s definitely gone?”
Nora Radcliffe smiled at her, an ordinary girlish smile. Yes, he had gone.
Georgie would go to the reading room tonight, immediately. She was almost out of her chair. Thomas of the White Hand. She stared at the paper. “Can I take it?” she said.
Nora lifted her hand off the page.
“Of course,” she said. She looked less tired now. Georgie took the writings of Thomas and the sketch of the arm, folded them, and tucked them into her purse. After she had paid Effie Radcliffe—and tipped her once more—she headed outside, where there was a car waiting at the curb. Initially she thought it was waiting for her, but as she walked towards it, the driver pulled away, and she glimpsed someone in the back seat, watching her. The man was straining forward to look at her. It was Dr. Harkin.
TWENTY-SIX
AUTUMN 1916
Georgie went to the reading room the next morning, and for every morning thereafter. She kept expecting to get a telegram from Dr. Harkin, but as the days went on and she heard nothing, she wondered if she might have imagined seeing him in the car. Could it have been a stranger who happened to resemble him, peering out at the road? Was it her fear that had made her imagine it was him?