by Anna Hope
But he did know.
Boredom. He had been bored. By turgid, indigestible tracts of information delivered by desiccated lecturers with half of the students asleep by the end. Lectures he skipped in favour of music practice or lunchtime concerts at the Wigmore Hall. Only Karl Pearson had interested him. Pearson, who stood at the front of the lecture theatre and studied his pupils like a hawk, who spoke of Malthus. Population. Empire. Disease. Charles still remembered the question Pearson had posed to the room: I ask you, gentlemen, to consider, do we not take more care in breeding our animals than we do in breeding our men?
During his lectures, Pearson spoke of many things, but alongside the danger of the inferior man he spoke of the superior man and of the need for these superior men to populate the world, and Charles’s seat, over the months, had drawn ever closer to the front, so by the time the lecture series had finished he had an inviolate place towards the middle of the second row. Sitting there, listening to Pearson talk, it had seemed inevitable that he too would become one of these superior men; just by sitting close to him it would occur.
But standing before his father, he felt just about as far from the superior man as could be imagined.
‘This is what I have decided,’ his father decreed. ‘One, you will take your meals at home; two, your days will be spent in the Central Library studying for your exams, which you will retake at the end of the summer and in which you will excel; three, your allowance will be stopped.’
The law laid down, Charles was left alone to contemplate his fate. He stared at the aspidistras, rampant as jungle plants in the clammy, overheated air. ‘I cannot stay here,’ he said to them. ‘I will suffocate. I will die.’
But the aspidistras, in that smug, silent way of theirs, had nothing in the way of reply.
At the library he found himself a desk at the back of the reading room and dutifully opened his textbooks, but staring at the pages, at their cross-sections of liver and lymph and bone, he felt only creeping despair. He missed London. He missed his concerts. Even if he were to survive the summer and pass this exam, the future only contained more of them. In truth, he did not know if he had any real wish to become a doctor at all. He would rather, much rather, have found some way to pursue his music instead. He knew he had talent, perhaps not great talent, but talent enough to play in an orchestra perhaps, not first violin, not by any means, not even second, but enough to be a dedicated fiddler amongst the ranks.
The beginnings of a headache prowled around the edges of his skull, and he built his textbooks into a defensive wall on the edge of his desk, put his head on his hands and went to sleep.
Later that evening, when the family dinner had been served and cleared and there was nothing to do but to retreat to his room and ‘study’, Charles opened his window, climbed out and sat on the ledge. He took out his violin, lifting it to his chin, feeling the bow balance in his hands, and fiddled a Bach partita to the suburban lawns of Roundhay. And when he played, when he poured out his soul to the flaming June air, Charles was no longer himself, no longer the lonely ten-year-old who made up friends to play with, no longer the twelve-year-old who was sent away to school and cried himself to sleep, no longer the twenty-two-year-old who had returned in disgrace to a house that he hated. When he played, he was something other, something that reached, something that did not disappoint.
This became the pattern of his days: he would play his violin till late, sleep a little, or sometimes not at all, then take himself to the library, where he would doze, textbooks unopened, and catch up on the sleep lost to practice in the night. If he focused only on the matter and the moment in hand, life was tolerable, but if he looked ahead, the future closed upon him like claws. He would fail to improve his exam results – this much seemed certain. What then?
Then there was the question of money. His allowance had not been much, but now there was nothing, nothing for a magazine subscription, or a concert ticket, none of the myriad inexpensive things that made a man’s life tolerable.
He began to read the newspapers in the library, taking particular interest in the advertisements for jobs, copying out the names of those that took his fancy. Circus Performers Wanted! (he circled the exclamation mark, which seemed to encompass a world of adventure and risk) or Trainee Pastry Chef.
He drew stick figurines of himself in costume in the margins of his notes: dressed as a ringmaster, or in one of those outlandish chef’s hats. But often the jobs he came across conjured futures even more depressing and constrained than his own: countless clerk’s appointments – a desk among many other dusty desks, men bent over ledgers, totting up columns till the day they died. Nonetheless, he would mark the rate of pay and imagine how it would be to have money, making lists in the margins of his notebooks of the things he would do:
1. Visit London once a month.
2. Attend Pearson’s public lectures.
3. Stay in a hotel, and visit the Wigmore Hall.
4. Never set foot in a lecture theatre again.
Then, one hazy morning in high summer, when he was one of the only people left amongst the stacks, and the dust the only moving thing, his eye was caught by a few spare lines:
Nursing Staff. Both male and female.
Able to play an instrument.
Sharston Asylum.
The rate of pay was meagre, but it was more than his father had ever given him, and food, accommodation and uniform, as well as a ‘beer allowance’, were included in the sum. They were looking for people to start immediately, holding an open interview in Leeds the following week. Charles launched himself from his seat and, once home, took the stairs two at a time, locked himself into his bedroom and practised his fiddle for five hours straight.
In the waiting room at his interview were two men and one woman, their clothes patched many times over: the working poor. He waited a fervid hour, during which the sounds of warbling alto voices and honking clarinets escaped from the room next door, and when his turn came, sat nervously before three pale-faced and serious men. He began to tell them the story of his education, of University College, of becoming a doctor but not quite doctor enough, until one of them, a man with a shockingly bulbous nose, waved his hand to silence him, as if all of that were of no consequence at all.
‘Thank you, Dr Fuller.’ He spoke in a thick Yorkshire accent. ‘That will be fine. Now, if you wouldn’t mind fiddling us a waltz.’
Charles stared, then coughed. ‘Certainly, sir.’ He bent to his case and, bringing his violin beneath his chin, played them a few bars of Strauss.
The men exchanged looks. They asked him for another. He gave them a little Morelly. They offered him a job on the spot. ‘But with your skills, Dr Fuller, we feel Second Assistant Medical Officer will be closer to the mark.’
His mother cried at his leave-taking, chin wobbling over the tight collar of her dress, handkerchief bunched in her hand. ‘It is a terrible place. I have heard stories of its horrors for years …’
And yet. Sitting here now, with the wind outside, Charles smiled.
His mother had been wrong.
Nothing could have prepared him for the splendour of that first view. He had approached from the south along the main drive, the curve of Rombald’s Moor rising to the west, and the buildings appeared before him like something from a dream, so wide his eyes could not encompass them all at once, hewn from the same gritstone as the Yorkshire mills, but the whole, with its turreted outline and its bell tower ten storeys high, seeming more like a fairy-tale castle or a vast country house.
It was high summer, and the beds were fringed with lavender, bursting with roses in fullest bloom. Men were dotted evenly over the grass, working on their hands and knees. At first sight they seemed to be gardeners, but the attendants standing close and watching showed them to be patients. Charles studied their faces with fascination as he walked up the drive; there were some who appeared ill but many more who seemed possessed of their faculties and who nodded and smiled politely as he pass
ed. The front door was large and freshly painted, with a single day bell set into the wall. It was answered by a hall porter dressed in morning coat and watch chain, cravat and enormous tiepin, who bowed from the waist and enquired in a sonorous voice, ‘What is your business, sir?’
He made himself known and thence began a tour of the asylum, to which the porter made a most knowledgeable and agreeable guide. The scale of the place was staggering – corridors of which Charles could barely see the end (‘The finest example of the broad arrow system, sir’). A cool room devoted entirely to bacon, one to milk and one to cheese (‘We have our own flock of Ayrshire Heifers, you’ll see them when you visit the farms’). A room for the preparation of vegetables (‘six hundred acres in all’) and one filled with hanging meat (‘our own slaughterhouse’). One filled with the sweet, yeasty scent of loaves upon loaves of bread (‘all of the corn and all of the wheat come straight from our fields’). Kitchens with ovens that were themselves twice the size of his mother’s scullery; a butler’s pantry; a china closet; a library; special rooms for the assistant medical officers to take their meals; finely appointed ones for the medical superintendent and the other doctors to receive patients in; and a committee room, twenty by thirty feet across.
‘How many staff are there?’
‘One superintendent, sir. Four assistant medical officers. Four second assistants like yourself. One hundred and seventy nurses and attendants, and eighteen administrative staff.’
Then, on to the patients’ quarters (‘all the wards face the south’), the men’s day rooms, the wards (‘eleven of them’), the vast dining rooms.
‘And how many male patients have we …?’
‘About a thousand, sir.’
‘And the women?’
‘More or less the same.’
Washing rooms for patients led from the wards, with four baths in each, fully plumbed WCs and marbled washstands with brass taps (‘The water is all from our reservoir, sir. Spring fed’).
Not only was the scale astonishing, but the detail was remarkable: the miles of corridor half-tiled and dadoed. (‘Burmantofts faience, sir, you see, the glazed terracotta tiles? World famous, but made in Leeds’). Polished oak used for skirting boards and doorframes, the vaulted ceilings of the corridors studded with skylights, and, in the entrance hall, an exquisite mosaic floor tiled with marble (‘Specially imported from Carrara. I believe that’s in Italy, sir’). And, then, sitting at the dead centre of the asylum, forming, in so many ways, Charles had come to feel, its heart, something entirely unexpected: a magnificent ballroom, a hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet wide, with a stage at one end.
Fine stained glass was set in the sixteen high, arched windows. Birds and brambles painted upon it. Summer light pooled upon the sprung wooden dance floor. Above, an arcaded gallery stretched the length of the room; the ceiling, gently curved, was panelled with gold.
‘And all this, for the patients?’
‘For the patients, sir, yes.’ The man’s voice rang with pride.
Charles was dumbfounded. It hardly seemed possible.
By the time he reached his quarters and was left alone, he had walked for miles, his feet were aching, and he was almost ready to collapse. The room he was taken to that first day was the room he sat in now: spartan enough but lacking nothing of necessity, and as he touched his hand to the coarse regulation coverlet on the bed, Charles was filled with an overwhelming sense of relief. He had escaped his family. Wrested the rudder of his life from his father’s hands.
And now here he was, five years later, first assistant medical officer, with a salary of five pounds a week, and newly appointed bandmaster and head of music. It had been his first action in his new post to institute a programme of pianism in the day rooms: an hour a week in each, carried out by himself. He believed he was already seeing a positive effect amongst the patients. He had great plans for the orchestra too; under his care he was determined to see the ballroom thrill and live as never before.
Charles stood, brought out the Call for Papers from his pocket, smoothed it out and placed it on the desk, weighting it down with his moorland stone.
Patience.
There was something coming; he felt it. A chance, perhaps, to take his place in the pantheon of superior men.
Ella
ON THE SECOND day, when the small room was filled with pale morning light, footsteps stopped outside her door. Ella pulled herself up from where she had been lying. Her legs were stiff. She had hardly slept.
‘Ella Fay? Come with us.’
She tried to remember their steps, tried to fix the route they were taking in her mind: along the dark underground corridor, past the doors with holes in them, then upstairs into the greenish light. Down another corridor, with high, strutted ceilings above, but soon they passed through too many doors to count. It was hard to walk. Several times she tripped, but the nurses caught her before she fell, yanking her straight, pinching and nipping at her skin. Eventually they reached the room she had been in that first night, the ranged beds empty of women now. Only a small group were there, hunched on hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. She was marched past them, into a side room where four baths stood, one of which was half filled with water.
The nurses moved behind her, unlacing her ties with quick, hard fingers and pulling the jacket up and away. Ella fell forward, sinking to her knees, her arms heavy and useless at her sides. They did not seem to belong to her. She cried out at the strangeness of it all.
‘Take off your clothes.’ The Irish nurse dragged her to her feet.
‘I can’t move my arms.’
‘Here.’ The nurse leant forward and unbuttoned her dress with rough fingers. It fell, pooling heavy on the floor. Her stays and petticoat were yanked up and over her head and her knickers pulled down, and she was made to stand, arms hanging, shivering in her nakedness, the vinegar smell of her body sharp on the air.
‘Get in then.’
Hunched over herself, Ella stepped into the water. It was warm around her heels.
The nurse made an irritated sound. ‘All the way. You won’t get clean standing like that.’
She managed to crouch down.
‘Ten minutes,’ said the nurse. ‘And make sure you use the soap.’
Her heels clattered back over the tiles. Ella stared after her. The door did not seem to be locked behind her, but that way led only back to the ward. Ahead of her the windows were large but covered with bars.
She inched gradually further into the bath, flexing her swollen fingers in the warmth, gritting her teeth against the pain. Bit by bit she stretched herself out. She looked down, curious; she had never seen herself like this before. Her legs were filmed with grime, and there were cuts on her knees where she had fallen, from which blood curled through the water like thin red smoke. The rest of her skin was white, blue nearly, something made in the dark and meant to stay there. Where her legs met her body, her hair floated, a black river plant in the water. On her upper arms were the purple-brown smears of bruises. She reached her fingers to her cheek, wincing as she touched the swollen skin.
Beyond the windows was green, mucky-dark in the low winter light, but green all the same. Hills in the distance, covered by a thin haar of mist. She stared out at the green, not moving for a long time, and the water had grown cold and scurfy by the time the nurse came back.
‘Hurry up. You’ve to put this on.’
The woman carried a uniform with writing on the pocket. Ella knew what it said. Sharston Asylum.
It was hard to dress with the feeling not yet back in her arms. The nurse watched, impatient, then pushed her hands away and stepped in to button the jacket herself. The clothes were clean but faded and soft with use, and Ella wondered how many people had worn them before her.
The nurse bent to shove her feet into cramped boots, then, ‘Sit down,’ she said, pulling out a needle and thread from her apron. ‘This will hurt.’
Ella bit the inside of her cheek as the
needle passed through her skin. But the woman was quick at least.
‘How long?’ she said, when the nurse was done.
‘Till what?’ Standing again now, the nurse yanked Ella’s collar into place.
‘How long till I leave?’
The nurse lifted her upper lip. Her teeth were grey. ‘Depends. Most get moved. Chronic ward. And then you stay there.’
No.
Not me.
She was taken to a room and the nurse stood by while a man pushed her down into a chair from which straps hung on either side. When she was strapped in, he went and stood behind a camera, which blinded her with a sudden burst of light.
Back in the ward, five women were on their hands and knees, scrubbing. Ella looked, but Clem wasn’t amongst them.
‘Take this.’ The nurse pointed to a brush beside a bucket.
She did as she was ordered, dropping to her knees and joining the line. It was hard to grip the brush, but she wet it, bending her head and setting to scrubbing till the floor around her knees had darkened with damp. She could feel the nurse standing behind her watching. But she knew what she was doing, knew how to be good, knew how to work hard, and after a while the nurse went away.
After dinner, they were shunted together into the day room, which was painted brown; the windows had bars, and it had a thick reasty stink to it, even worse than the ward. In the far corner was a piano and a thin yellow bird in a cage. Fires were lit in the grates, but they were covered with a padlocked guard. Clem was there though, and Ella felt a small lift at the sight of her, sitting by the piano bent over a book.
Close to where Ella sat someone was muttering. ‘My head. Head is boiling. My head is boiling, my head, my head.’ The speaker kept reaching up to pluck at herself. Patches of her scalp were so bald they shone. In her lap lay a tangled bird’s nest of hair.
One woman stood before her chair, gaze fixed on a point just ahead of her, arms and hands making the same movements over and over again. Ella’s eyes passed over her and then were pulled back. She watched the woman reaching out – plucking the fibres to test the strength of the thread. She was performing the actions of a spinner at the mill. Forward and back. Forward and back. Searching for the broken threads. Watching the thick, fluffy wool get thinner and thinner, till your eyes couldn’t see straight any more.