Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘I do not know his name, Madam.’

  ‘I am quite sure it is. He worked at Evans the drapers. For years and years. My husband bought shirts from him when we were first married. He was the outfitter for my children’s school. What is the matter with him?’

  ‘He is afflicted with melancholy.’

  The lady visitor seemed a little affronted. ‘It seems hardly right. All those years. And then to end up . . . Like that . . . In here.’

  Thomas filled her glass with lemonade and looked down at his programme: ‘Recital. “Precepts of Politeness”: Mr Grogan.’ There was a listlessness among the patients when Grogan climbed on to the platform; they seemed anxious to return to the dancing, Thomas thought, and their mood was not helped by Grogan, whose attempt to introduce humour came over as a kind of leering. The climax of the interval entertainment was a duet: ‘“Grieve No More”: Mr Tyson, Daisy Wilkins, with Mary Ann Parker, pianoforte.’

  Tyson had a surprisingly pleasant tenor, and Daisy sang with conviction, a semi-tone sharp, occasionally missing a line to catch up with Mary Ann’s restless fingers. Neither singer looked at the other; the trio performed as individuals, each apparently bent on completing an unpleasant duty as fast as possible, though in Thomas’s mind there was never any doubt about the likely winner. Tyson shuffled his feet and swallowed his last, unsung, half-line as the asylum band resumed their places on the platform behind him.

  The couples once more took to the floor and resumed their silent marking out of space. Not even Brissenden’s liveliest polka, the Louisa, could prompt them into speech, though Thomas noticed a dishevelled old woman occasionally burst into harsh, irrelevant laughter. She tossed back her cropped white hair and showed her edentulous jaw, causing the man who held her at arm’s length to pull back further. He was a former watchmaker, well known to the attendants for his conviction that only if he could compete in a walking race to Blackpool would his lost soul be returned to him by the group of Plymouth Brethren who had stolen it.

  At a quarter to ten, Dr Faverill took to the platform to declare the evening’s festivities over. The double doors at once opened from the vestibule, and a dozen attendants came into the room, taking their appointed places by the wall and marking their patients out with warning eyes. Any escape from the asylum was deemed to be the relevant attendant’s fault and the expense of recapture was deducted from wages.

  ‘. . . wonderful evening,’ Faverill was saying, ‘and I would like to thank our most distinguished visitors for taking the time to come and share in our seasonal celebrations. I feel sure that they will take away with them the most favourable impression of our asylum. It is an unusual household, we are the first to admit. We have our share of black sheep, of wicked uncles and long-lost cousins. But we have as well the comfort of a Christian faith, which teaches us that God loves each of us as His own. There is no man or woman here tonight whose life is not dear in the eyes of Our Lord. First, I would like to present a small bouquet to Mr Brissenden, our most excellent bandmaster. There you are. Thank you, sir. And now I should like to ask Miss Whitman if she would be so kind as to present this bouquet to Mrs Cunningham, wife of the chairman of the Committee of Visitors. Thank you, Miss Whitman.

  ‘Before we all go off to our beds, I would like to conclude by thanking all of you, the patients, for coming tonight and making the evening so pleasant for us all. I have occasionally, I believe, compared myself to the captain of a ship – a somewhat vainglorious comparison, it now occurs to me. But on a night such as this, I feel proud to think that this vessel sails onward. The weather threatens, sometimes we may steer blind, but, if I may quote the Bard, ‘Though the seas threaten, they are merciful’; and we must not curse them without cause. The ways of the Almighty are mysterious to men. I cannot presume to unriddle to you the details of his intricate plan. I cannot begin to explain to you my own sense of the strangeness of our human lives and my conviction that it might so easily, with the merest tilt of the world on its axis, be so entirely different. One thing I can say with certainty is this. Tonight my heart is filled with love and pride in you, my dear friends, and I wish you with all the fervour I can command a safe and peaceful harbour at the end of the voyage the Almighty has set out before you. Ladies and gentlemen, good night.’

  The attendants moved into the room, gathering their charges. ‘Come on Alice, move along, girl. Don’t do that, you filthy man. Come here, Jack. Put that down. Bedtime now, come along, come along.’

  Thomas stood in the vestibule as they marshalled their patients through the door and into the long corridor. In the ballroom, the instruments were already packed up and Tyson was turning off the gas lamps; Brissenden was the last to leave, walking silently across the floor with his gathered sheet music furling beneath his arm. He was humming to himself as he walked past and did not hear when Thomas wished him goodnight.

  Dr Faverill had already left the building to escort the visitors to their waiting carriages. Maud Illsley and MissWhitman had put up stepladders to blow out the candles in the hall and take down Daisy’s banner. Thomas stood for a moment, looking, hearing the rattle of keys and the clank of locks being turned, as through the length of the building the lamps were turned out. He took a candle to light his way through the resumed darkness.

  VI

  AS SONIA HAD foreseen, there was nothing she could do to affect the course her husband and father had chosen, and the practical details of a divorce were surprisingly easy to arrange; what was more complicated was the disarray in which she was left by her conflicting emotions. She sighed from the depths of her heart as she packed her trunks and locked up the rooms of the London house. She knew that it was perverse, almost comic, for her to be the last to abandon the marriage when she was the wronged party within it; yet the more her efforts to be a good wife were mocked, the more anxious she became to make them work. Of course, she had been too young to marry; but she was quite grown-up for her age, and she had deceived no one about the nature of her feelings. She had followed the good advice of those who knew better and was content to believe that love would come; or that in its absence, the pleasure she brought to her parents and husband would be reward enough. A sort of love had come – an absolute identification of her interests with Richard’s and an anguished desire for him to prosper, which was tested but not shaken when she saw that as well as being socially inept, her husband was a bully. Any resentment she might have felt at this discovery was stifled by her guilt at being unable to conceive: Richard was entitled to be brusque when he had been disappointed in a man’s simplest expectation.

  In the months after their separation, when she had returned to live with her parents, Sonia endlessly reviewed the course of her marriage. She should perhaps have resisted acting as financial go-between; but there was a sense of unease in her that she had been influenced to marry in the first place by a degree of impatience. Maybe she ought to have left when he casually told her, of the rooms that had been found for him: ‘Of course you can come if you like.’ At the time she put her staying down to a sense of duty, a conviction that someone at least must behave with dignity; but had she really clung on from fear of the unknown?

  It seemed to her, as she resumed her old duties at Torrington, that she had undoubtedly missed a chance, somewhere; she had been made a fool of, sold and rebought. Such was the effect on her self-respect, however, that she could feel little relief at being rid of a man she did not love, and one who had behaved unkindly towards her. So unsure was she now of what value to place on herself that she could not even feel affection for her father: he seemed to think that he had ransomed and redeemed her and to expect her gratitude in return, but she felt that he had merely dealt with her at Richard Prendergast’s level.

  For some months, Sonia wept at night from a sense of injustice. She even missed the rough embrace of her husband, alone as she was, and cast back into her child’s bedroom. Then, very slowly, a little relief did find her; she became able to smile a little at the memory of some
of Richard’s absurdities, and her own. By the time the spring came, her grief had turned through tears into a kind of mute acceptance. She was in all probability unable to conceive, though this had not, in her view, been proved beyond doubt. Assuming the worst, however, her prospects as a wife were limited; but this was something she could adapt to, and need not circumscribe her life too narrowly. One thing in all the uncertainties did become clear to her: that she would never, in any circumstances, allow herself to be so used again. She held this determination tight in her heart, as some of the old lightness, her humour and her influence about the house began to return.

  One morning in early summer Jacques received a package from England. Madame Maurel, his landlady, handed it over in person, curious that one of her tenants should have an overseas correspondent, but Jacques did not respond to her imploring glance as he walked out into the morning. As he tore open the envelope on his way to the hospital, two pieces of paper fell out: one was a folded English banknote, and the other was a return ticket, issued by Thomas Cook and Son, for the Channel steamer. There was also a brief accompanying letter in English from Thomas.

  My dear Jacques

  I cannot bear your procrastination any longer. I am certain that your studies in neurology are most engrossing, but time is short and my asylum overlords allow me scant leave. Go to Calais. Take this ticket to the harbour and walk on to the vessel. You may study all you wish on the waves; no need even to raise your eyes from the book to view the white cliffs as they approach. The money will buy you a train ticket to London, a cab from Victoria to St Pancras and a ticket to Lincoln. I shall be waiting for you at the station. What could be simpler?

  At Torrington will be assembled: the undersigned; his sister Sonia (sans Prendergast, who has departed our lives); his aged parents; his brother Edgar, his wife Lucy and assorted children; Miss Brigstocke, a cook, and her maid, May; new girl, name as yet unknown; sundry Dalmatian dogs; pages, hautboys, drums &c. The action takes place in the space of a summer week. You need to bring one decent suit for dinner, otherwise clothes suitable for outdoor activity, fishing, riding and so forth. Your linen will be cared for by the maid, who, though nameless, is reported by my sister to be fair of face and ‘obliging in all things’. What can she mean?

  Please do not disquiet yourself about the money. My masters pay me a salary of £190 per year; my board, lodging, laundry and coals are understood in this sum. In the eight months I have been at the asylum I have contrived to spend no more than 24 guineas (beer, books, photographic equipment; it is hard to find anything at all – even my shoes are mended by the lunatics). So this is my first investment in our joint venture – which we will discuss at length beneath the cedars of Torrington. You can repay me out of your first cheque when we set up our clinic.

  Do not reply; only come. We await you with impatience.

  Sincerely

  Thomas Midwinter

  PS Have you heard of lawn-tennis? It is a game patented by a British army officer a few years ago, an adaptation of the original game to the exigencies of an ordinary lawn. It is apparently popular in Lincolnshire. You are warned.

  Jacques smiled as he tucked the letter away in his pocket. Presumably Thomas had hoped to pique his interest by his mention of the new maid, but it was not the presence of an anonymous girl that interested him.

  He sat by the window on the hard bench of the Channel packet. Although the function of the boat was to carry the mails, there were about three dozen passengers, tradesmen he supposed, reading newspapers or books. Many had brought food and wine, which they spread out beside them. A woman at the end of his bench produced a half camembert and a slab of terrine the size of a small headstone; she sliced a loaf neatly, smeared it with butter from a paper packet and began to pile up each oval plank with food. As she ate, she pulled the paper stopper from a bottle of red wine, which she upended against her pursed lips, so thin red dribbles mingled with the excess of terrine on her dimpled chin. The smell of pork and garlic caused Jacques’s belly to make such desperate noises that he had to move to a different seat.

  The time had come, he thought, when he and Thomas would have to start behaving like serious men. In the language of the student, which had till then been their rhetoric, there was always comedy and exaggeration; there was the self-consciousness that sprang from the difference between their private estimation of their worth and their knowledge of the public fact that others, more eminent, had preceded them. There was the self-mockery that was their pre-emptive defence against their elders, and against the unyielding nature of the obstacles ahead. So many sentences in the conversations of students began with the words, ‘Apparently, they . . .’ ‘They’were the masters, those who had gone before and probably sought, for no clear reason, to obstruct the young; and ‘apparently’ showed how little students knew at first hand, how much of what they dealt in was hearsay.

  Jacques felt it was time to take possession of the facts, to confront the ‘they’ and to cease to hide behind self-mockery: to stare the world, unsmiling, in the face. At the same time, he was reluctant to lose the humour of his dialogue with Thomas. Three times since their meeting at Deauville, Thomas had visited him in Paris, where Jacques had been not only exhilarated to see him, but impressed by his determination. He had not retreated one pace, one half-pace, from the ambition of their shared objective and he had showed himself resolute in the surroundings of his English asylum. Having visited Olivier, Jacques knew what such places were like.

  For almost ten years, Olivier had been in the public asylum. Jacques went to see him when he could, though the distance to be travelled and the hours of his work, first as a student then as an intern, made it difficult. Olivier had intervals of lucidity, occasions when he seemed to know who Jacques was and to be able to communicate almost normally, but such times seemed to give him no insight into his condition. When he was better, he could not understand or picture himself when he was possessed; and when he was worse, he could not draw on any deposit of reason or comfort from his better periods, because he could not remember them.

  Jacques had at first persuaded Abbé Henri to accompany him, but the Curé found the experience so harrowing that he had reduced his visits to one a year. He told Jacques that after each occasion it required several weeks of prayer and meditation to restore his faith: the sights he saw, the sounds, the parodies of human grace, made it hard for him to discern God’s purpose. Jacques did not sympathise, but his debt to Abbé Henri was such that he could not express his misgivings.

  At least the Curé did visit; old Rebière had not been once to see his son. Jacques could forgive Tante Mathilde, who was not related to Olivier, for not visiting, and Grand-mère, who was too frail to manage a journey by coach, but not his father, whose attitude to Olivier was that of a farmer rejecting ill-bred livestock at market: take it away, he seemed to say, it is of no value to me. Yet Olivier was his son, his first-born, and in his blood and brain ran particles of Rebière’s own transmitted self. As a consequence, Jacques had ceased to write to him and no longer visited Sainte Agnès. Often in his narrow attic room at Madame Maurel’s he dreamed of the fields and paths where he had grown up; he walked again along the shingled beach or emerged from the wood at dusk and saw the thin drift of smoke coming from the chimney of his father’s house below: this was the country of his heart, and no human changes could supplant it.

  His plan was to remove Olivier from the asylum as soon as he had a place for him to live and the money to support him. He did not share Thomas’s view that living in an asylum could in itself be of benefit. Although Esquirol had had success with patients in his private hospital at Charenton, Jacques doubted the severity of their illness. Olivier’s health had certainly not improved by his being incarcerated with other lunatics; and although he generally evinced little awareness of his surroundings, Jacques felt that in his periods of relative calm it could not be helpful to Olivier to see himself surrounded by others suffering, in squalor, the torments from which he ha
d a brief remission. The only worthwhile thing that Olivier did in the asylum was to make drawings in his neat, clerk’s hand; he had studied some architectural books and, in his saner interludes, drew up intricate plans for improved accommodation.

  Jacques ordered some lamb cutlets and beer at a chop house in Dover and ate them wolfishly with some sort of suet pudding, unknown to him, in a dark savoury broth. He seemed to have plenty of money left over when he took the train to London and watched the hopfields of Kent gliding past the window. This was England . . . Pale, flat, lacking the grandeur and variety of Brittany, but pleasant in its own way. It was the first foreign country he had seen. Until he had met Thomas, he had given little thought to the island across the water; he knew that its people were warlike and practical, but they had, so far as he had been taught, contributed nothing original to civilisation – some agricultural tools, a play or two, perhaps; but otherwise his own country had remained a self-sufficient universe, which had discovered or invented all it needed to make it, and keep it, pre-eminent. Yet Thomas had a sort of confidence, Jacques noticed, that was not a personal trait but seemed to spring from the power of a tradition, as though he were able to draw at will on some sort of inheritance; so as the train neared London, he decided he had better be watchful in what he assumed about this new country. He did not want to betray the fact that besides Olivier, whom he had lost, and Thomas, he had seen no need for friends and so had never dined in company or attended social events.

  Thomas was waiting for him at the station with Jenkins the coachman. He squeezed Jacques so hard in his arms that Jacques began to cough and had to push him away.

  ‘Tussis nervosa,’ said Thomas. ‘Jump in the coach. Quick. We can still be in time for dinner. I presume you are hungry?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Drive like hell, Jenkins. We’ve killed the fatted calf. The fatted sow at any rate. What do you think of my country?’