Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  In the middle of October, Frau Holzer, a midwife from the city hospital, took up residence in one of the ground floor rooms of the lower courtyard; and on a rainy Tuesday evening, two days later than predicted by the obstetrician, Sonia went into labour. Daisy volunteered to help Frau Holzer and was sent running up and down the corridor with towels and pans of water. Mary took up a position at the head of the stairs, her refined hearing giving her a good idea of the progress of the delivery, as she wound the hem of her apron convulsively in her fingers.

  Jacques stayed in his consulting room and tried to read. He had developed a picture of what the child would be like, based on the idea that it would be a fusion of himself and his wife. The exact process of heredity was a mystery, but anyone could see the work of parentage: the ovum and the seed guaranteed half shares, and while the boy – like Sonia, he was certain it would be a boy – might have his dark eyes or Sonia’s lighter ones, the details hardly mattered because he would be an intermingling of their blood and, it seemed to him, the baby was sure to represent not just a fusion but in some way an improvement. Soniawould die of no childbed fever, and in her continued life his own mother’s death would be redeemed. The boy meanwhile would have all of the good and none of the bad: he would be the best of them all.

  In the bedroom, Sonia braced herself and bore down as Daisy mopped her forehead with a wet cloth. Frau Holzer spoke to her rather as she remembered Jenkins the stableman talking to the horses at Torrington. Having at first told her not to push, she was now urging her onward. ‘You are not trying, Frau Rebière. Take my hand and squeeze it. I want you to push.’

  Dear God, thought Sonia, I am pleased Jacques is not here to see this mess and strain. She felt the sweat cold on her shoulders and chest as a draught came through the window in the warm night. The pain was greater than she had expected and beyond her control, as though she were caught in a wave that would break only when gravity dictated; yet she did not panic or regret the pass in which she found herself. Though she was surprised at the animal in her, she let it have full rein, she howled, as everything she was – the memories, the instincts and desires – drove her on to break her body’s limitations.

  Daisy screamed. She was standing by the side of the bed. ‘Its head! I seen its head!’

  Frau Holzer stood opposite, the sleeves rolled up on her brawny, bloody arms. ‘Wait for it,’ she said. ‘Wait one more moment.’

  ‘It’s coming,’ Sonia gasped. ‘It’s coming.’

  ‘Go on then, my love. Go on. One more time. Go on!’

  At the stairhead, tears came from Mary’s blind eyes.

  Jacques stood still, craning his head towards the ceiling.

  The shoulders of the baby extruded far enough for Frau Holzer to take them in her hands. She pushed her finger in and round the neck to see if the cord was wrapped there. It was free. As Sonia bore down one final time, Frau Holzer gently pulled the shoulders between her fingers and, with a sound like a huge cork being drawn, the baby, grey-purple, waxed and bloody, slid out into her attentive hands. It was a boy.

  She blew on him, and the child screwed his features into a scarlet howl; she passed him up to his mother and went to wash her hands before she cut the cord. Sonia lay back on the stacked pillows with the boy at her breast and closed her eyes. Daisy wept noisily by the bed; she had never seen such a thing in all her life.

  When Frau Holzer had cut the umbilicus, she examined Sonia to make sure that there was no tearing, then set about cleaning up.

  ‘Stop snivelling,’ she said to Daisy, ‘and get some fresh cloths. Then bring a nice bowl of hot water so we can tidy her up for when Father comes to call.’

  Daisy went out on to the landing, but she did not really know what she was doing. She saw Mary and ran towards her. ‘It’s a boy,’ she said. ‘He’s such a little treasure. He’s so perfect. Oh, Mary, you can’t believe it.’ The two girls clung on to each other, weeping and laughing.

  When all the sheets had been changed, the towels and cloths cleared and Sonia bathed and put into a fresh nightdress, Frau Holzer went downstairs and knocked on Jacques’s door.

  ‘Herr Doktor,’ she said, as the door opened. ‘You have a son. Congratulations. The mother and the boy are both well.’

  Jacques gazed at her, open-mouthed. It was the news that Sonia was well that struck him to the soul: the mother would live, and the son would know her.

  He ran up the stairs and down to the bedroom. Sonia looked up at him, pale, but full of shy pride. He kissed her, but could not find the words to speak. She offered the child up to him and he held it in his arms. Then he laid him on the bed and unwound the simple cloth in which he was wrapped so that he could see the whole body.

  And he saw that it was not a fusion, after all. It was a separate being, like the first man born. You are on your own, thought Jacques: I will do everything I can for you, but in truth, little boy, you are on your own.

  The child was baptised Daniel Thomas on November 25, 1895 in the local Protestant church of St Luke, his father yielding to his mother’s denomination, and his baptismal certificate showed that his godparents were Dr Thomas Midwinter, Dr Franz Bernthaler, Fräulein Daisy Wilkins and Fräulein Mary, who signed her name with a cross. There was a party afterwards at the schloss, where many people from the local villages came to see the baby and to stare at the lunatics in the courtyard. Kitty had come from Vienna to stay the weekend, and the next day, in the afterglow of family pride, they told Jacques and Sonia that they were to be married.

  The wedding itself took place in Vienna in the week before Christmas; there was snow on the streets and candles inside the church, where the bridesmaids (two young cousins of Kitty’s on her father’s side) wore green velvet dresses trimmed with white lace and decorated with sprigs of scarlet-berried holly. None of Thomas’s family could come from England, but Pierre Valade travelled from Paris, and Dr Faverill, who had seen an announcement in the London Times, sent a letter of congratulation. Kitty was given away by her stepfather, ‘Herr P’, a grey-haired man with a face like a deep-sea fish, whose name, it transpired, was Julius Bittmann; she wore a dress of ivory satin that had been her mother’s. When they left the church to go to the wedding breakfast at her mother’s house she put on a long cream coat with a fur-trimmed hood, and in her clear skin and bright eyes there was no sign of the invalid who had arrived at the Schloss Seeblick nine months earlier. Jacques proposed the health of the bridesmaids, having first briefly spoken of his friendship with Thomas. He said how much Kitty had impressed people at the schloss with her quiet stoicism, but did not say how she had been treated, or by whom. Thomas thanked Kitty’s mother and regretted her father’s absence, though his words were not heard by everyone over the sound of Daniel’s fit of crying. A string quartet began to play waltzes and polkas, and Thomas was prompted into asking Kitty to dance. He looked down into her flashing blue eyes as he guided her round the shiny parquet beneath the sceptical gaze of various elderly Prussians. He wanted the day to be over, so that he could be alone with her; but he could see that she was enjoying it and did his best not to tread on her feet as they circled among the trays full of pastries and mulled wine, of champagne and jellies.

  He was reminded of the asylum ball; and for a moment felt himself back on the scrubbed boards of the dining hall, among the meat pies and glasses of ale, while Brissenden tried to slow down Mary Ann Parker’s piano and the old lady danced alone with her arms held out in front of her. When the polka was over, he yielded Kitty to her stepfather’s request and went to find Mary.

  He led her out amid the politely circling couples and felt less stricken by grief and guilt than on the last occasion they had danced together; Mary did not cling to him like a limp doll, but held herself upright, smiled, and, so far as she was able, danced. The movement of her pink pumps made its individual pattern of footprints on the floor.

  Kitty and Thomas had agreed that there would be no honeymoon until the spring, when the weather would be better an
d, after the Christmas and New Year celebrations, there would be less to do at the schloss. Kitty was eager to begin decorating the rooms that had been set aside for them on the first floor of the South Court.

  For the wedding night, however, Thomas had booked a room in a mighty hotel on the Kärntnerstrasse with fiery torches burning either side of the front doors, and Josef delivered them there shortly after ten o’clock. When the bellboy who brought up their cases had been tipped and despatched, Thomas built up the fire and drew the heavy velvet curtains, while Kitty turned down the gas in the lamp and lit the candles by the bed.

  She hung her wedding dress in the wardrobe, but then found herself unsure how to proceed. Her fantasies of making love had generally involved some shameful candour or exposure of herself to rapacious eyes and hands; but now that the moment was there, she found that she was merely worried about doing her duty and not disappointing the man she so loved and admired. When he ran his hands over her shoulders and gently pulled down the straps of her underclothes, she was not able to be the abandoned woman of her imagination. He whispered reassurance, and the sound of his affectionate voice was helpful; there was light enough for her to see his expression and there was an earnestness there that showed he too was anxious. She allowed him to undress her, so that in the end she stood naked in front of the fire, which sent flickering shadows up and down her legs, while he knelt down and kissed her skin, murmuring to himself, as she looked down and stroked his hair. Eventually, he lifted her up in his arms and carried her to the bed, stepping through the tangle of her dropped clothes. The evidence that Kitty had from the words that Thomas whispered, from his sighs and the hunching of his bare shoulders, suggested to her that she did not altogether displease him.

  By the time spring came, Daniel could often sleep an entire night without waking and Sonia was able to feed him without difficulty. Kitty set about furnishing and decorating the five rooms allotted to her and Thomas in a previously unoccupied part of the South courtyard; once she had had the chimneys swept and had installed one of the large cylinder heaters in the sitting room, it became more homely. Thomas spent many evenings in the cellars with Franz Bernthaler, hunched over their histology slides, searching for the bloom and stain of madness.

  One night, in idle and tired curiosity after two hours at the microscope, he tried a barred door at the end of the cellar. He found to his surprise that it opened outwards into a dark passage. He took a candle from the shelf and walked about twenty paces on an earth floor between brick walls; at the end were some steps going up to another door. It was unlocked, though stiff, and when Thomas put his shoulder to it he found that he had emerged at the back of a larder in a scullery in the corner of the South Court. He smiled; it was nothing less than a secret passage, installed goodness knows why, by a previous owner, perhaps even the abbot himself.

  He went up the internal stairs to tell Kitty about it while they had dinner. He had suggested to Sonia that it might be better if they did not all dine together every night, so they took it in turns to be with the patients during the week, all four going to the dining room together only on Friday.

  Thomas was enchanted by his new life. The private world of his intimacy with Kitty was the most thrilling part of it, yet it did not seem to distract his energy from the communal life of the schloss, where he was the sanatorium’s most public face. If at any point during the day his strength or interest flagged, he had only to go down the cloister and double back through the gates into the South Court or, as he now preferred, to take the secret passage underground, to find himself once more in his private world, where Kitty was always willing to stop whatever task she was engaged on, however much she might at first protest. He liked to whisper in her ear as he stroked her hair, to lift her skirt and run his hands up her leg, to touch her while she still had on her reading glasses. As in time she became more confident, and was reassured that she was pleasing to him, she came closer to enacting the fantasies of her adolescence; and once she was inflamed, she wanted him to go through to the conclusion. Thomas was not sure what he had done to deserve the indulgence of his private desires, but presumed that everything was ratified by the sacrament of marriage. He looked at Kitty at dinner on Friday nights, her head tilted to one side as she listened to Sonia or Jacques, and remembered what she had done to him an hour before; he looked at the fuchsia colouring on her lips and wondered which parts of his skin might bear a trace of it. Marriage, he was inclined to think, was a bountiful and surprising invention.

  The only person in the schloss not flourishing was Jacques. He went for long walks round the lake and cried into hands clamped across his face.

  The birth of Daniel had delayed the need for him to face his humiliation and he had thought it better for the practice to behave outwardly in a calm and organised way. Inside, he felt like a child, back in the upstairs room at his father’s house, fiddling with a dead frog. He could only dream of greatness because real achievements belonged to other people, to his betters – people with a proper education. What pathetic self-delusion had allowed him to believe the words of flattery that had come his way? Intern! Doctor! The applause of the examiners, the patronage of Babinski, the encouragement of Janet . . . How vainly he had taken them, allowed them to insinuate themselves into his own picture of himself. But he was just a peasant boy, he was a child and always would be; he was good at mending roofs and trapping rabbits, but as far as science was concerned, his level was teaching at the village school. He had given himself airs, strode about the sanatorium with a grave and masterful demeanour, as though he understood the mysteries of the human mind and body. He knew nothing; he had read some books, that was all. Franz Bernthaler knew more than he did. Thomas Midwinter knew more than he did. In a way, it was a relief that the reverie, the trance of self-importance, was at an end. He had climbed one rung at a time, daring himself to fall, not seeing that the fall would be complete; now he wanted only that people should know that he recognised exactly who he was and would never again have thoughts above his natural station.

  He could not bear to look at Sonia. She had married him on false pretences, taking him at his estimation of himself when he was really her inferior, not worthy of the delicacy of her nature. She had indulged his frenzied working, had not complained when he ignored her in the early years of their marriage, preferring the company of some German book. He had behaved like a boor, and he could never recapture those times or relive them with more grace.

  As he looked over the still waters of the lake, he seemed to understand for the first time the limits of what he might achieve. He could take some comfort from the fact that all ambition, all desire must have an element of delusion. After all, people talked of the necessity of self-belief, of having faith in one’s own abilities, which implied that such capacities were always open to doubt and that it was the act of believing, the leap of faith itself, which somehow made them greater. The degree of comfort that he found was very small, however.

  Sonia did her best to reassure him, telling him that nothing could change her passion for him and that all pioneers faced setbacks on uncharted roads. She said she was proud of the honesty with which he had admitted his errors, but that he must retain a sense of scale: his life’s work was not over, his skill as a doctor was still urgently required. Privately, she welcomed the fact that he seemed so reliant on her and put her feelings first, before his books, but she also felt that this was not the natural order of things for them. She had learned to stand a half pace behind him as he looked forward into the future; she had become content in that role and she did not now want a husband whose imploring gaze was turned sideways on to her, because such a man was not the one she had married or first loved.

  During the spring of the new year, 1896, Jacques fell into a lethargy, which he ascribed to lack of sleep. He had begun to wake at four every morning and found it impossible to fall asleep again. He prescribed himself strong medicines in various doses, but although he could in this way achieve unconsciousnes
s, he never felt rested. He had to be roused from such drugged slumber by Sonia shaking his shoulder, and he felt stunned or stupefied throughout the day; although the clock told him he had been asleep for eight hours, he did not feel renewed by it: there was no sense of replenishment, no appetite for work, merely a feeling of exhaustion, a dryness exacerbated by the strong coffee he drank and a mind going through superficial exercises without the ability to reach down to any worthwhile depth of wisdom, insight or enthusiasm.

  In March, Thomas established that the widow in Salzburg who owned the land and decrepit buildings at the top of the Wilhelmskogel would be prepared to sell them; the news from Trieste was that there was still no chance that the lease on the schloss could be extended. One evening, as he was explaining the situation to Kitty over dinner in their upstairs rooms, Thomas suddenly stopped and banged the table with his fist.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘That’s it. Jacques must go to America. Two birds with one stone. Three birds perhaps.’

  ‘Thomas, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Wilhelmskogel, the site of our new sanatorium. A fashionable perch up in the mountains. But we need some sort of funicular or cable-car to get the patients and supplies up there. You can’t put a madman on a mule track. There is this place in California whichValade was telling us about. They have built a railway and a cable-car, I think, and people go up from the valley for the day. It all works very well, apparently, with New World engineering and enthusiasm.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, don’t you see? We should send Jacques to investigate. It would give him a holiday, it would clear his mind. He has never travelled before, he has just worked and worked and worked. It would be a marvellous adventure for him. An Atlantic steamship. Dinner at the captain’s table. Can you imagine? We have been running now for nearly six years and it is time he took sabbatical leave. We can manage without him for a little while and it would show that we have confidence in the future of the enterprise if one of the co-founders goes off across the world to look at new ways of expanding.’