A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  He had no sense of where he was or how far he and the silent attendant with him had travelled. Being expected to board a train had stirred up in him such violent misgivings that they had been obliged to administer a second dose of the sedative, so he had slept like a drunkard for much of the journey. The latter part of the voyage, by road, was undertaken in darkness. All he registered as he tumbled into a bed whose linen had been chilled by sharp mountain air, was relief that his bed was on its own, and that he could hear only his own sighs and breathing, not the shouts and weeping of others.

  A gong sounded from the main house. Harry flinched, prepared for the idyll to be broken by orderlies or nurses, but glanced across and saw only a simply uniformed maid standing by an open door. Noticing him, she raised a hand in greeting, tapped the gong a few more times as though for his benefit, then slipped inside again. The door of the next cabin along opened and there emerged a slender blonde woman wearing respectable but antique clothes.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said in a high voice, and he rose to meet her. As she offered him a small, lace-fringed hand, he saw she was considerably older than her figure suggested.

  ‘How do you do,’ he said.

  ‘Are you going to breakfast?’

  ‘I . . . I imagine so.’

  ‘You must be hungry after your journey,’ she said. She had one of those little-girl voices which so often seemed to mask an aggressive nature. ‘We heard you arrive but were under strict instructions to leave you in peace. I’m Mabel. We use no surnames or titles here. The good doctor is Quakerish in his leanings.’ She laughed, skittishly.

  ‘I’m Harry,’ he told her.

  ‘Delighted. Harry, let me take you to breakfast.’

  ‘Is this a hospital?’ he began, and she laughed again.

  ‘Another forbidden word. You’re quite the rebel, I can see! It’s a community. A therapeutic community. Now, here’s Bruno.’

  A mannish woman in a boxily tailored outfit, a sort of suit, had emerged from a third cabin. She shook Harry’s hand and fired off a series of questions about his journey he felt quite unable to answer, not having been aware even of where he had come from. She was gently rebuked by Mabel, which she took in good part, and they proceeded towards the house. Other doors had opened, and all told, some eight of them were now walking that way. Apart from the two ladies he had met, all were men. One of them, a black man Harry assumed was someone’s servant, stood back respectfully and, naturally, unacknowledged, until the rest of them had passed.

  As they neared it, the door to the cabin closest to the house opened. A tall Indian woman had emerged, dressed in quietly elegant Western clothes. She ducked her head as he looked at her, showing off the black hair she wore in a thick cascade. Mabel gave a little cough, drawing his attention back to herself.

  There were two rooms at their disposal, both overlooking the river. One was the snug library, into which he merely glanced; the other the dining room, in which their host bade them all a general good morning before singling Harry out for greeting.

  Harry recognised him as one of the doctors who had occasionally questioned him at the asylum – a tall, dark-haired young man with a thick moustache that emphasised his sad, moist eyes. Instinctively Harry stiffened.

  ‘It’s all right, Harry. You’re among friends now,’ the doctor said and shook his hand emphatically in both of his. ‘Did you manage to sleep in the deafening quiet?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Doctor. Mr Ormshaw.’

  ‘I’m Gideon, here, Harry. Now, let’s see . . .’ He glanced at his pocket watch. ‘At ten o’clock please come to my study.’

  Breakfast was spread out on the sideboard in a sequence of steaming dishes. ‘No meat or alcohol here,’ Mabel told him in a murmur. ‘Gideon believes they are destabilising.’

  ‘Thank God for coffee,’ Bruno added. She noticed that Harry was standing staring. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Do . . . do . . .’

  She watched kindly as he stammered. ‘Take your time,’ she murmured.

  ‘Do we help ourselves?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And . . . where are the attendants?’

  ‘Bless you, there are no attendants here.’

  They were informal to the extent of serving themselves and sitting where they chose. To his surprise, the Indian woman and the Negro had joined them. Unsurprisingly, they each ate alone. One of the men was a nervous giggler. Mabel was a person who chatted even when no one was talking to her. It made him wonder what she was like when there was no company to animate her. Bruno hung on her every word, clearly an abject slave, but was constantly passed over by Mabel, who seemed to regard mere female attention as cheap currency.

  With their tidy spring suits and small touches of elegance, a silk handkerchief here, a pocket watch there, the men clustered at one end of a table reminded him of something. It was only as he watched them roll their napkins at breakfast’s end that he realised it was the gentlemen of the Gaiety chorus. In London. A lifetime ago.

  Each resident was assigned a napkin ring of a different design. Harry’s had a pattern of ivy leaves. Feeling the heavy white damask between his fingers, he struggled to remember the last time he had used a napkin.

  ‘A far cry from the snakepit, isn’t it?’ one of the men said, watching him, and was shushed by Mabel.

  ‘We don’t speak of such places here,’ she said, then turned a kind face on Harry. ‘Gideon believes in the healing power of civilised touches,’ she said.

  Both black man and Indian had left the room without his noticing. Emerging on to the terrace, after hot breakfast rolls as soft and pale as infancy, he saw that the man was at work in the garden already, tidying the path edges with a spade and tossing the trimmings into a barrow. Perhaps Mr Ormshaw was a socialist as well as a Quaker, to have patients dine with his servants.

  A small macaw had been set out on a perch to enjoy the sun. It was discreetly shackled to its post, he saw. It waved its wings in greeting as he emerged, displaying feathers so bright they scorched the eye, before picking a nut from its little bowl and falling to preening. For the second time since waking, Harry was overwhelmed by the clarity and beauty of it all and felt he might cry.

  ‘Look but don’t touch,’ Bruno said behind him. ‘Gideon took him on when he bit a girl’s finger clean in two. We all have our unspeakable pasts here . . .’ And she made him a kind of salute with her fingertips before striding down the steps and off through the grounds with the air of one taking a constitutional.

  There was a piercing whistle from across the valley and he saw the steam from a train making its way through the trees and caught a flash of its paintwork. The sight sent a painful shudder through him which he felt briefly distort his face. A cuckoo clock, surely chosen in irony, was chirping ten in the hall as their host stepped out to find him.

  ‘This way, Harry,’ he said.

  For all the informality, Gideon had not eaten breakfast with them. Perhaps, despite his socialism, he found the maintenance of a certain distance useful? He led the way through the library, where several residents were reading or writing, out into a sort of conservatory and into his consulting room on the far side, which stuck out from one corner of the house so as to command a fine view of the river.

  He stood with Harry admiring the swirling waters for a minute.

  ‘The mighty Athabasca,’ he said.

  ‘Does it ever flood?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. I lost my dog to it last winter.’

  ‘How upsetting.’

  ‘There was a hole in the ice and the silly thing was fascinated by the way the water repeatedly splashed out of it. He wouldn’t stop going over there, so I kept him tied up. But then some kind person let him off and he fell through and drowned before we could cut him out.’

 
‘Have you forgiven them yet?’

  The doctor smiled. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I forgave the resident right away – she was so upset. Forgiving the river may take a while longer.’

  They sat on either side of his mahogany desk, on which he had an open file.

  ‘So, Harry. Welcome to Bethel. How was breakfast?’

  ‘Delicious, thank you.’

  ‘Good. This isn’t an asylum, although everyone here is what my colleagues at Essondale – where you were – would call mentally ill. All of you have displayed behaviour or declared opinions that have caused people to want you put out of the way.

  ‘I happen to be making some of those behaviours my particular study. I depart from my colleagues in regarding them not as pathological but as intrinsic to a personality type. And I have won the state’s trust sufficiently to have been allowed to bring some of you here to help me with my research. You are not under lock and key. You are at liberty to walk in the gardens, to follow the trails in the woods and even to go into Hinton, should you wish. All I ask is that nobody leave the immediate grounds unaccompanied and that you always let me know your whereabouts by signing yourselves out in the register on the hall table.

  ‘I also ask that you respect one another’s privacy; we all have stories but I prefer those stories to emerge voluntarily, not through interrogation.

  ‘I ask that you respect one another’s differences, too. You may already have seen – you almost certainly will see – behaviour you might regard as odd or even wrong. But remember that, in the eyes of the attendants at Essondale, or wherever, your behaviour has been odd or wrong as well.

  ‘Here endeth the homily. Do you have any questions, Harry?’

  ‘Only . . .’ Harry began. ‘It’s so different here. Like a private house.’

  ‘It is a private house.’ Gideon smiled. ‘It’s my house.’

  ‘Do we pay fees?’

  ‘You are all here as my guests. When you leave, if you choose to send a donation for the furthering of my work, I won’t stop you. I inherited a certain amount from my father and it pleases me to spend it this way.’

  Harry sensed the good doctor and his father had not been in sympathy.

  ‘So. I need to ask you a few things before we start . . .’

  He rattled off a series of questions. What was Harry’s name and birth date, where did he live, who was the king, who was the prime minister, how would he react to a slug beneath his shoe, a cat being tormented by small boys, a naked woman in a public place. Harry avoided crushing the slug, chased off the boys and covered the woman with a blanket.

  ‘So,’ Gideon said. ‘In the crudest terms, we have established that you are not insane or dangerous. You are, however, suffering from a trauma, a trauma not unlike that which we’ve seen in all too many men returning from Flanders with battle scars to the mind. Harry, I plan to use hypnosis to help your mind open the doors it is so desperately holding closed. Has anyone ever hypnotised you before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No need to look apprehensive. You will be aware throughout, and if I find you are becoming upset, I will bring the procedure to an end. Agreed?’

  Harry nodded.

  ‘Hard to take your eyes off the river, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s good. I want you to sit over here in the armchair. That’s it. Sit back. Take a few deep breaths. Relax. Why do you laugh?’

  ‘Sorry. You just reminded me of someone I used to know.’

  ‘Happy memories, I hope.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry told him, surprised by a memory of lying on a narrow bed, listening to the sounds of a Jermyn Street afternoon through an open window. ‘From this distance, I believe they are.’

  ‘So. Deep breaths. That’s it. Relax. And keep your eyes on the river. Find a point in its middle, where the current is strong. Imagine the current is flowing through you. It’s sweeping through your mind, sweeping all thoughts away. Your mind is just a chamber. An empty chamber, quite white, utterly peaceful. There are no rules here. You can speak your thoughts and nobody will know. Nobody will judge you. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Harry?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Tell me who you love.’

  STRAWBERRY VALE

  England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

  E. M. Forster, Maurice

  Chapter Two

  Harry Cane’s father had died of boredom. The medical diagnosis had been apoplexy, its unofficial translation a surfeit of rich foods and alcohol. The root cause, though, Harry felt sure, was leisure, and the boredom it engendered. Harry’s father had in the past lived for work and had not known how to fill his time from the moment he sold his business and stepped sideways into the dubious luxury of idleness.

  For most of his twenty-eight years, Harry’s life had been largely, complacently male. And he had the good fortune not to have to work for a living. His father had done very well setting up one of the first horse-drawn omnibus services south of the river, which he had expanded to a small empire serving four busy routes, before he was one of the wily ones, along with Tilley’s and Widow Birch, to sell out late to the LGOC.

  Rich, and no longer tainted by direct contact with horse sweat and the streets, Cane Senior married for love, but wisely too. Her family’s money was older, rinsed by time. They had met, before he was quite so wealthy, because it was dung purchased cheaply but in great quantity from Cane’s stables in Greenwich, Brixton and Sydenham that enriched her father’s fields and orchards in Kent. Her family disapproved, but not so very hard – she was the youngest of six and had both a stutter and a heart defect. When she died – of the heart – being delivered of Harry’s younger brother Jack, it was found she had left her own money to Harry so that he might be raised a gentleman.

  Some widowers took consolation in their children, but Harry and Jack’s father discovered he could not bear to look upon his; they only reminded him of what he had won and lost. Jack was still a baby, of course, but at four, Harry was already his mother’s child, with the same high brow and candid curiosity of expression. Neither child had a weak heart but Harry stuttered when nervous, just as his mother had, and, like all the men in her family, pronounced his Rs as Ws, which made it particularly irritating that he had not been christened Thomas or William.

  Mr Cane entrusted the boys to a wet nurse and nursery maid respectively and, as each turned five, to a bracing preparatory school on the Kent coast, where they boarded in the holidays as well as term time. He, meanwhile, pursued discreet consolation on the Continent. He was an assiduous, if stern, letter-writer and he sent presents at intervals: cricket bats, penknives and such.

  Once Jack joined Harry at school, the brothers were devoted to one another, and protective. They were in effect a family of two, and were by no means objects of pity. Each had classmates whose parents had sent them ‘home’ from brief, idyllically filthy infancies in India or Africa for the indefinite future, concern that they should grow up English trumping any weak parental pangs.

  In time, the boys were moved on to Harrow. The school had been picked by their late mother, apparently, because it was smart without being overly intellectual. It would, she believed, make them useful metropolitan contacts while lying reassuringly beyond the reach of their father’s former bus routes. Word of how their bills were paid leaked out, however, perhaps via some spiteful teacher, perhaps from Jack’s unguarded, trusting chatter.

  Although he was the younger, and thus fell naturally under Harry’s protection, Jack had always been the stronger and more confident of the two. He faced the world openly, with a sunny faith in others that won everyone’s favour in turn. His most habitual phrase was ‘It’s simple.’ Life for him was as straightforward as a boys’ adventure story: people were either good or b
ad, the right course of action was clear, and good would always triumph. God, being English, meant everything for the best, and the life He gave us was full of rewards if only we buckled under and did our bit. Jack was handsome, good at games, decent, and thus a constant source of worry to Harry, who was sure that at any moment something would happen to shatter his cheerful outlook.

  Perhaps because he had been old enough at their mother’s death to suffer by it, to have known the pillowy welcome of the boudoir from which he was abruptly banished ever after, Harry was as unlike Jack as their mother had been to their father: wary, fearful, given to brooding. He was not proud, but teasing left him with a horror of humiliation on the playing field and elsewhere, so his defence was to withdraw. He was not a scholar – his brain seemed too sluggish or too dreamy to grasp the things demanded of it – but he was never happier than when left alone among books, and would spend hours turning the pages of atlases, novels or tales from history, alive to the alternative versions of himself they seemed to proffer. He lacked the knack of forging easy friendships but grew habituated to benefiting from the ones Jack was forever striking up.

  Jack would never accept defeat in the face of his brother’s shyness; it was so alien to his nature that he could not understand it, could not imagine how shyness might feel. As they grew into young men, the younger became as solicitous of the older as the older had been of him when they were boys, so that it was a reflex in him to make room for Harry in any social engagement, in any pleasure or outing. As often as not, his friends would have a retiring sibling in their turn, and so Harry would form not-quite friendships, friendships at one remove, which remained dependent on the generous impulses of his brother. When Jack joined the Harrow cadet force, as was expected of them all, Harry took to terrible fantasies that his brother would sign up for some distant war and be lost to him.