If there had been a meal, most of the women seemed to have finished and returned to their beds or to corners of the room. Some sat with their arms wrapped round their knees, hunched, waiting, rocking; many chattered, though without care for a listener, like rooks calling to an open sky.
A small woman with large eyes and ingratiating smile made her way across the room to them.
‘Hello, Ruth,’ said Faverill. ‘This is Dr Midwinter, my new assistant.’
Thomas noticed that the woman wore a dress of toughened sailcloth with stitching that might have withstood a force-ten gale; the sleeves were sewn into the side of the dress so that her hands were allowed little movement. She was able, nonetheless, to stroke Faverill’s sleeve as she spoke to him.
‘Do me right now, sir,’ she said, and her voice had an undulating Welsh accent. ‘A little bit of what’s good goes a long way, as the ploughboy said to his master. When I was a girl, you know, they used to come from all parts just to look at me. Some of them wanted to touch me, but I said, “No!” I was never like that. I was a proper girl from a good family. Twelve of us there were and went to chapel every day and twice on Sunday. So don’t think that of me. Don’t tell me you think I’m like that, now, please. When my father comes to collect me, now, he’ll put you right. Have you heard from him yet? Did he write to you like he promised?’
She gripped Faverill’s arm with her separated hands.
‘Don’t believe what they say about me, will you? I’m not that sort of lady, you should know that by now.’
‘It’s all right, Ruth,’ said Faverill, freeing himself and moving away. ‘As you know very well, I have the highest regard for you.’
‘And you!’ she said, turning towards Thomas. ‘Wouldn’t you like to now? I can see from your eyes that you would. You filthy vermin!’
Thomas felt Faverill’s hand on his elbow, moving him down the ward.
‘The ways of gentleness,’ said Faverill vaguely.
‘What?’
‘It was a phrase used by Pinel. It describes the path we try to follow.’
On either side of their slow progress were beds on which lay women with conditions that made them twitch or shake; some cried out as they trembled; one appeared to be at the start of an epileptic fit. Next to her sat a fat girl, no more than fifteen, with mongoloid features and filth-matted hair.
‘Ruth,’ said Faverill, ‘is a good woman, I believe. She is educated, and she worked quite happily as a clerk in a tobacco company for some years.’
‘What brought her to you?’
‘Mania.’
‘Do you have no more detail of her illness?’
‘My dear Midwinter, we have more detail than we can record. The woman is a fountain of detail. For the purposes of the asylum and what we can do for her, however, she falls clearly into the category of mania. You are of course familiar with the categories?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Thomas. ‘Melancholia—’
‘She is seldom melancholic. She has none of the chronic symptoms, no more than you or I.’
‘Idiocy.’
‘Quite the opposite, I should say.’
‘What do we know of her heredity?’
‘Enough to say that there is no degenerative trend. Which leaves dementia. I have occasionally thought, Midwinter, that her mania has had elements of dementia in it. But it is sufficiently concentrated on one thing, what one might call the amorous—’
‘Erotomania?’
Faverill sucked air over his teeth. ‘I recoil from diagnosing any lady so simply, but there is a certain consistency to her mental process.’ He picked his way with skilled elegance down the narrow space between the beds. ‘I shall show you the rooms we are proudest not to use. Come.’
A back door from the main ward opened into a bathing area, stone floored, with three doorless cubicles. An attendant sat on a rush-seated chair by the entrance and Thomas wondered why she was sitting when there seemed so much to be done among the sixty or seventy beds that had been packed into the main part of the ward.
From the bathroom, Faverill pushed open another door into a small cell with ironwork over its window; the walls and floor were padded with canvas from which horsehair was spilling. ‘I am pleased to say that we have not had recourse to this room since I have been here. We leave the door unlocked. I made it my mission when I arrived never to resort to mechanical restraint. I was much influenced as a young man by a book written by a Mr Conolly, an English alienist, onthis verymatter. Perhaps you have heardhis name?’
‘I have read his book, sir. It is inspiring.’
‘Indeed so,’ said Faverill. ‘It is one of the stars by which I navigate.’
As they closed the door on the padded room, they were timidly approached by a young woman of about twenty years old, neater in her dress than most, but with troubled brown eyes.
‘Sirs,’ she said, ‘if I could ask you . . . I am going crazy for want of something to do. I am locked in here for so many hours each day and I had the misfortune not to be taught to read when I was young. Not that there’s books anyway.’
‘You have the airing court for exercise?’ said Faverill.
‘Yes, sir, I do and right glad we are of it.’ She had the accent of the county, Thomas noticed, but not the upward lilt of the voice it normally engendered; her tone was melancholic, and she appeared terrified that she had exceeded her rights and might at any moment, at the wave of a doctor’s hand, be confined more strictly.
‘I shall speak to the attendant,’ said Faverill, ‘and see if she cannot find you some work, on the farm or in the laundry. Should you like that?’
‘Oh yes, sir. Yes, please, sir.’ The girl’s eyes filled with tears, but she was not smiling.
‘You will not forget me, will you, sirs? My name is Daisy.’
‘I shall not forget,’ said Faverill.
Thomas smiled at the young woman as they left, reminding himself to remember her.
‘What is her diagnosis?’ he asked.
‘I am not familiar with the young lady,’ said Faverill. ‘As I told you, we are close on two thousand now, and more than half are on the female side. You can find her name in the register with her admission notes. McLeish will show you. I suggest you look up her Christian name first because she may not have a surname.’
‘No surname?’
‘Some have no names at all.’
Faverill locked the door of the ward behind them, and they were once more in the infinite corridor. Faverill noticed Thomas’s stretched, inquiring look as they set off. He smiled.
‘It is built on an impressive scale, our asylum, is it not?’
‘Indeed, sir,’ said Thomas.
The gas lamps grew less frequent as they walked on over the asphalt floor. Mingled with the damp that rose beneath their feet was an odour of missed excrement and saturated brick, a redolence of despair. This, with the failing light and the narrowing perspective, combined to give Thomas the impression that he was walking slightly downhill.
‘Can you imagine,’ said Faverill, ‘the total length of passageway in this building?’
‘I could not easily put a figure to it, sir.’
‘Including the first floor, where one’s passage is through the wards themselves, we have six miles of corridors.’
Thomas could think of nothing to say.
‘Remarkable,’ said Faverill, ‘is it not? What a feat of engineering. It contains more than ten million bricks and was built in less than two years. And what generous intentions it bespeaks towards the unfortunate!’
Thomas could still not find anything to say; in any case, his mouth was dry, his throat was closed.
‘In the circumstances,’ Faverill continued, ‘you will understand if I do not take you into every ward. We should need several days. This corridor alone is more than one third of a mile long.’
‘One third . . .’ Thomas managed words at last.
‘Indeed,’ said Faverill. ‘We believe it to be the longest c
orridor in Europe.’
After fifteen minutes’ walking, broken only by Faverill’s occasional unlocking of a door, they reached the centre of the building. Through an internal window they could see the hall with the wooden booth where Thomas had first entered. The porter smirked from behind the glass partition.
‘Good afternoon, Grogan,’ called Faverill, moving smartly onwards to a set of double iron-barred doors. ‘Now for the men,’ he said to Thomas, with a faint but noticeable dulling to the brightness of his manner. The doors swung to behind them.
‘Grogan enjoys Sundays,’ said Faverill as they plunged down into the gloom again. ‘He is allowed to take supper with McLeish. When we have admissions, he takes pleasure in seeing the unfortunates as they arrive, knowing they will always outnumber those we release. It reassures him in his sense of singularity. He came here fourteen years ago, raving and incontinent. He spent six weeks naked in the safe room, covered in his own filth.’
‘And how was he cured?’
‘My predecessor gave him henbane, camphor, morphine, I believe. I stopped that. I set him to work in the gardens and the farm. He revealed an extraordinary brain. He can calculate and keep records better than I can.’
‘Should he not have returned to his family?’
‘Wedid ask.’ Faverill coughed. ‘I am sorryto say that they declined. He prefers living in the asylum in any case. If he goes outside the walls he hears voices. I use a number of the saner patients in positions of responsibility. The attendant you saw in the women’s ward, for instance. She came to us three years ago with acute melancholia. She is paid a little now to help the other attendants. She is not a very active person, I’m afraid, but she is intelligent in her way and they tell me they can rely on her. She is very strong. You would not think it from so small a woman, but she can carry the dining table on her back.’
Faverill pulled a watch from his waistcoat pocket, but it was too dark to see it until they reached the next gas lamp. ‘I have time to show you one men’s ward,’ said Faverill. ‘McLeish shall have to show you the rest tomorrow. Where are we? Let me see. Number Twelve.’ He glanced atThomas’s young face in the half-light. ‘No. Perhaps not. Number Fourteen, I think. Yes, I think that might be better.’
He fumbled at the ring of keys and opened a door on their left. The room was similar in shape and design to the women’s ward they had visited, but with an asphalt floor and high, unopenable windows. A few men were playing whist, surrounded by half a dozen onlookers; many were walking up and down, talking to themselves or to the reeking air. It was striking how properly dressed most of them were, in frock coats, suits, white neckerchiefs, pinned stocks, white shirts with collars; so at first only the untrimmed beards and the laceless boots marred the impression of normality. As Thomas moved gingerly into the dense atmosphere, his senses took in other strangenesses. A gentleman with neatly parted grey hair and gold tiepin was masturbating at the dining table; opposite him, oblivious to his behaviour, sat a clerkly looking man, bespectacled, with eyebrows thick as moustaches, who moved his head slowly up and down in time to an incantation he endlessly repeated, which, to Thomas’s ears, sounded like, ‘Di-ater. Di-ater.’
Round them in the tea-time air rotated bootmakers and porters, domestic servants, glaziers and painters, drapers, fishmongers, chimneysweeps, watchmakers and nurserymen; adrift from their former selves, they argued, jabbered or stood motionless, listening to absent voices. Their experience of living, their awareness of the moment, was so individual, it seemed to Thomas, that it could find no true expression, let alone response or comprehension; it was so individual, in fact, that it could only be seen as part of a mass – a ‘mass of lunatics’, he reflected, the most heterogeneous entity you could imagine, a perfect oxymoron.
Most men seemed too lost in their thoughts to register the doctors’ presence in the room, though one man with a beard down to his chest wrapped his arms over his head and retreated to a corner, whimpering, crouched, looking back occasionally through his hands at the intruders. Faverill gestured to an attendant to come over.
‘Tyson,’ he said, ‘this is Dr Midwinter, our new assistant medical officer.’
Tyson held out his hand, and Thomas noticed the bottom of a tattoo at his wrist as the sleeve rode up; he was a swarthy, muscular man with an unsmiling face.
Faverill gestured to the dining table. ‘Can you stop that man doing that? His organ appears to have become blistered.’
‘It bleeds,’ said Tyson. ‘He won’t leave it alone.’
‘Have you given him potassium bromide?’
‘Yes. And they put some ointment on the organ too.’
‘Liquor of Epispasticus,’ said Faverill to Thomas. ‘No wonder it is blistered. Have you tried sewing up the front of his trousers?’
‘Yes,’ said Tyson. ‘He just takes them down.’
‘Does he ever find . . . Relief?’
‘No. We could use the straitwaistcoat. Nothing else can stop him.’
‘Then you had better leave him. Doesit distress the others?’
Tyson pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Not here, sir. They have other things on—’
‘Yes. Quite. There is the most terrible stench in here, Tyson.’
‘It’s this floor, isn’t it? It absorbs it. Them that shits themselves.’
Faverill began to edge away. ‘Do something. Find a mop.’
As Tyson went reluctantly to the bathroom, Faverill said, ‘He used to be a merchant seaman. He has no training, but he has his uses. Good afternoon.’
He spoke to a neatly dressed man, grey-haired, with a polite manner.
‘Doctor Faverill, is it not? Might I beg a moment of your time among these poor lunatics? My brother has written to me, do you see, a long letter from the War Office where he works. As you know, I am a man of considerable means though through no fault of my own I am unable to pay my debts at the moment. Mr Gladstone, who is a close friend of my wife’s family, has graciously invited me to submit my patent for a new kind of warship, which was to have been commissioned next year. The editor of the Pall Mall Gazette has commissioned a lengthy article from me. I should very much like you to cast an eye over it.’
Thomas felt Faverill’s hand on his elbow again. They had to cross the room to reach the door back into the corridor, and Thomas sensed as they made their way through the press that something had changed in the atmosphere. They walked through the moaning and the shouting, with hands reaching out to them. Thomas bit his lip and remembered holding Jacques in his arms on the Deauville shore. From the corner of his eye, he saw Tyson wrestle someone down onto a bed; he felt his sleeve being pulled back roughly, wrenched himself free, and they were outside again, in the endless corridor.
As he inhaled deeply, Thomas realised he had tried not to breathe during his time in the ward.
Faverill consulted his watch. ‘Very well, Dr Midwinter. It is now time for us to see Mr McLeish. I know he will be looking forward to meeting you. We have ten minutes to get to the other end of the men’s wing from here, so no dawdling, please.’
As they tunnelled onward, past the moans and cries that reached them from behind locked doors, Thomas felt afraid. Suppose I become separated from myself, he thought: the warship designer was once as steady and sane as I am. He brought to mind more homely images as he walked on: of Sonia sitting on his bed that cold Christmas at Torrington, inventing a profession for him; he pictured Jacques, his black eyebrows driven to an apex as he puzzled over some point of physiology before the light of victory came into his eyes. It felt important to keep these pictures near the front of his mind.
McLeish’s office was, in design, the mirror image of Faverill’s, but it had no printed books, Thomas noticed. Instead, there were several ledgers on a shelf by the window and two new ones, leather-bound, open on the desk. McLeish was bald, short and meticulously dressed; the shine on his toecaps was like a reflection of his polished head.
After a few pleasantries, McLeish said to Thom
as, ‘The new patients will be arriving in ten minutes’ time. The Superintendent tells me that you are to book in the women.’
‘Yes, if you will show me what to do.’
Although McLeish’s Scots accent was mild, he pronounced the word ‘women’ as ‘woman’, as though there were one in particular that Thomas was to see. As he stood and gathered up the two open ledgers, a white bull terrier, hitherto concealed, heaved itself out from behind the desk. McLeish fastened a chain to its collar and went towards the door.
The three men walked back along the outside of the building to the entrance hall beneath the main tower, where Faverill left them and hurried back towards his own wing and towards whatever ‘something stronger’ was awaiting him.
‘Did you meet Grogan yet?’ said McLeish as they went up to the main door.
‘The porter? Yes.’
McLeish unlocked the door. ‘We tried to discharge the little bastard last year but his family refused to take him back. In you go.’
Grogan had set up two long trestle tables in the hall, behind each of which sat two attendants with papers and ink. ‘That chair’s for you,’ said McLeish. ‘You take their papers, you classify, and the attendant will give them a ward number. Don’t be long about it.’
Thomas said, ‘I am going to wait outside for a moment.’
The September dusk was falling swiftly on the parkland as he looked up the avenue towards the guarded gates where he had himself come in. A fine rain was beginning to drift across the lawns on the first winds of autumn.
It was all unreal. What fate, what loops of time or circumstance, he thought, decree that I stand here? It might as well be me descending now from the carriage that has brought these people from the railway station. In another life that I have lived but cannot recall, cannot quite touch with my mind, perhaps it was me; and in another time, it could be me again. As our real world runs parallel to that of these poor lunatics, to be seen but not inhabited, so other times and lives are separated from ours only by the dimmest veil, through which an awareness more developed, more evolved than mine could reach out.
Human Traces Page 10