by Ajay Close
‘You go too far.’
‘Or maybe one of the wardresses, eh?’
I remark to my husband that he seems more animated these days. Is he enjoying his work? He replies that he is not paid to enjoy himself. A difficult case has been placed in his hands. A dangerous man? Not a murderer, but yes, dangerous to our country and its security. He will require treatment for some considerable time, but there is reason to think he can be cured.
And so our silent dinners come to an end. Two months of misery is over because my husband wants someone to boast to. Not that I’m not grateful. The battle of wits between doctor and prisoner is interesting. There’s the new light it casts on my husband’s character, the vanity I hear when he speaks of his notorious patient, the superior tone, and yet the trace of admiration. Feeling some sympathy for this schoolteacher with whose intimate habits I am so fully acquainted, I ask my husband, is onanism always unhealthy? Surely all men indulge before marriage. Surely Hugh does still.
The look on his face frightens me.
‘I mean, since we don’t . . .’
‘The last thing the world needs is another idiot child.’
The mystery begins to unravel. Bill and Hilda are blameless. It is Grandmother Kate I have to thank for the misery of my wedding night. What he tells me – eventually – is so grotesque, it can only be an old woman’s fantasy. So I write to my mother, the most embarrassing letter I will ever have to compose. Her reply is curt, no less embarrassed. I am to speak to Aunt Nellie.
Nellie is delighted to see me. George is out visiting his parishioners. She receives me in the drawing room, seats me in the wing-backed chair, tells Aggie to bring the leftover Christmas cake with our tea. Am I quite comfortable? A cushion for my back?
She thinks I have come to break the news that I am pregnant.
Just for a moment, I am tempted to tell her everything. To be pitied and petted in my comfortable chair, knowing she will confide in Uncle George and that, after much discussion, they will feel duty bound to tell Pa and Mama. And then what? I am a grown woman. I chose him of my own free will. I can’t be the only wife in the world who did not get what she bargained for. So I put a decent face on it: my husband’s very natural concern, after speaking to Grandmother Kate. He has some experience of asylums and the wide variety of circumstances that lead men to be admitted as patients, no one is better placed to understand, but he must know the full facts of the case.
Auntie’s eyes fly everywhere but my face. There is nothing she can tell me that Dot does not know. But Mama is down in England, I say; perhaps it is not a matter to be imparted in a letter? This seems to strike home. She bites her lip and quits the room, to return a couple of minutes later, having given Aggie instructions that we are not to be disturbed. Sitting down again, she takes out a handkerchief and rubs at some insignificant mark on her skirt. I catch her eye. She sighs, ‘I only went there once.’
Haltingly at first, she tells me the whole story.
The asylum is set in a hundred acres of parkland. A plain old crowstep-gabled house, shouldered – bullied, it seems to twenty-four-year-old Nellie – by newer wings, so the whole is an ugly agglomeration of cliff-like walls topped by gables and turrets. The Superintendent seems to think this ugliness can be disguised with a profusion of rhododendrons. He is a great believer in the morally elevating properties of fresh air. There are two secure courts where the inmates play bowls and shuttlecock, and walk about, and garden. When it rains, they take carriage drives through the grounds, safe from the inquisitive gazes of strangers. He prescribes an excursion a week for his melancholics, the speed quite restoring their animal spirits. Of course, cases of mania like Mr Richmond’s require more protracted moral treatment. Uncle John returns a curt nod, the way he does when the seedsmen try to haggle with him in front of his nieces. He’s of the old school, holding that women should not be sullied by talk of business, but the fact remains: the sweeping lawns, the strident blooms, the comfort and elegance demanded by patients of higher ranks, all these have to be paid for.
It is 1888.
Nellie wonders how many visits it takes to achieve the indifference her uncle shows to his surroundings. She has eyes for everything. The ornate ceilings and gleaming floorboards, the damask and brocatelle and button-backed upholstery, all these empty chairs. Where is everybody? Shivering in the airing courts? Locked away in their rooms? The silence is eerie. But now, as they climb the great staircase, she hears a noise, a sort of lowing, as if the Superintendent has stalled his cattle on one of the gracious upper floors. She feels a tug and looks down to find that her sister, Dot (who will become my Mama) has grabbed a fistful of her skirt and is holding on for dear life. A maid in drab approaches with a mop and metal pail. Her eyes dart to the Superintendent’s and some wordless communication passes between them.
The Superintendent knocks twice and a bold-faced man of about Nellie’s age appears in the crack between door and jamb. When he sees the Superintendent, the boldness turns to deference. The door swings wide. A hunched figure is sitting by the window. Nellie takes in his sunken eyes, the yellowish skin stretched over his hollow cheeks. His frock coat seems cut for a bigger man. The hands protruding from its sleeves are skin and bone. So changed! Yet how could he not be, in this place?
What choice does she have but to advance into the room, crossing the polished boards to sit on the Chesterfield beside him? He recoils from her nearness, shuffling his skeletal frame into the sofa’s padded arm. They remain like that, side by side, Nellie regarding his profile while he stares straight ahead. It is only now that she notices a man of about fifty sitting in an armchair on the far side of the room. His distinguished leonine head is quite grey, but still recognisable. A flush sears her chest, spreading up over her neck and face, as she rises and makes her way towards him.
Dot gets there first, flinging her arms around his neck.
‘Papa!’
A lump forms in Nellie’s throat at the unforced joy in her sister’s cry. She is his little Prinzessen again, as if the past eight years were a horrid dream, and now she has awoken to a view of mountains and a breakfast of brioche and Schokolade. How is it that Nellie remembers so perfectly the way Dot used to behave with him? She too must have taken a habitual tone, smiling in a particular way, but for the life of her she cannot retrieve them.
The door opens and a third man comes in, a fidgety fellow in an extravagant Paisley coat whose teeming threads coil like her own anxious thoughts. How does it feel to be mad, she wonders? Is it quite senseless, like a child’s scribble when he first holds the pencil? Or is there some pattern to it, a thread of meaning in the maze, until the eye blinks and the attention fails, twisting away into another looping path?
Ask anyone who knows Nellie and they will describe the serious young woman who took over the mothering of her sister so capably after they returned to Scotland. But there is also this other, whose sympathy is a form of pride, a refusal to be shut out from the world’s distress. Her eyes lift from the mesmerising Paisley to the face above. No hair at all on the crown of his head, but great woolly clumps around his ears. His hands move busily, the pad of each thumb rubbing over and over his fingertips.
‘Your waist is thicker,’ he says in a reedy voice, ‘your nose longer, you lack her fresh colour, yet the family resemblance is strong. How unfortunate that she should be so fair and you so plain.’
Tears of shame prick Nellie’s eyes. At the same time, there is a curious balm in hearing spoken aloud what everyone sees and no one can say.
‘I am as God made me.’
The Superintendent will not let this answer stand, but must rebuke his patient, quoting the house rule that those who cannot behave as society expects will forfeit the benefits of society. The attendant ushers the man away. And yet if anyone’s manners are at fault, it is the Superintendent’s. When is he going to withdraw? He seems to think they have come all the way to Edinburgh to see him and his marvellous establishment. What do they care about
the second parlour on this floor, the billiard tables, baths and douche, day room and gallery? On and on he boasts. His asylum is run according to the most enlightened principles. Trained nurses and ladies of the educated classes are employed to exert a calming influence on the more excitable inmates. Seclusion and restraint are seldom used, and only as a last resort. Kindness is the method, and congenial society. He and Matron go to great lengths to ensure that the gentlemen sharing each set of apartments are of complementary tastes and habits. Uncle John gives another discouraging nod. Nellie wonders what Papa might have in common with a tactless popinjay and a breathing corpse.
Now her embarrassment has subsided, she finds the courage to study him. He seems well. If anything, a little fatter than she remembers. His complexion is clear, but his face has undergone a change, as if some invisible servant had draped a dust sheet over his features. He never used to have those flaps of skin over his eyelids, that sagging jawline and bull-frog throat. He meets her gaze and she notices a peculiarity in one – or both – of his eyes, the pupils of different sizes.
‘Hello old girl.’
‘Hello Papa,’ she says.
‘Have you brought Mrs Richmond?’
‘No, Papa.’
He smiles, as if she were ever forgetful. ‘Next time.’
Does he not remember what happened eight years ago?
As far back as she can recall, he was scared of the dark. When her mother was alive Lawhill was ablaze with lights. Even the cowshed. Pails of water everywhere in case the straw caught fire. In the kirk on Sundays he prayed without closing his eyes. Her mother used to say he even slept with one eye open. But her mother died, giving birth to Dot, the daughter who bears her name. Papa had the joiner cut two holes in the coffin lid so she could see out. What was that but madness? Tom disagreed: how could he court Kate Allan so soon after, and marry her, and father three sons with her? No woman marries a madman, even if she is thirty-five. It was grief that had him shouldering the turf-cutters aside that awful day, grief that had him down in the clay trench clawing at the coffin. And perhaps it was. But Nellie was the one who sat by his bedside nine years later, after Doctor Balsiger had given him laudanum. She heard him sobbing in his sleep, begging Grandma Richmond to unlock the cupboard door.
What he loved best about Switzerland was being bathed in white light. Even at midnight, the mountains reflected the moon. The high passes held no fear for him. If he wasn’t drinking Kirschwasser in the Wirtshaus or buying trifles for Dot, he was walking in the snow. They would see other hikers in low-brimmed hats, and even tinted spectacles, to shield them from the glare. But not Papa. No one was worried the day he was late back. They dined without him. Nellie was just finishing her soup when there was a commotion outside the window. The Belgians at the next table left their plates to look. Papa was being led through the hotel gardens, weeping, stumbling, turning his head frantically this way and that.
The physician had treated many cases of snow blindness. Papa cursed and fought when they bandaged his eyes, so they bound his wrists and his thrashing legs. You could hear him all over the hotel. That first night, his wife kept watch. He begged and begged her to loosen the binding that was chafing his wrists. Nellie will never forget being dragged out of sleep by her stepmother’s screams. The marks showed on Mrs Richmond’s neck for days.
Among the hotel guests was an alienist travelling with his wife and sons, a conscientious Austrian who spoke heavily-accented English in a low, measured voice. Nothing surprised him. Was that why Nellie answered his questions so fully? Mrs Richmond blamed her, even when she’d found a way of turning the situation to advantage, but Nellie only told the truth.
Not that Papa seems so very mad today. If anything, he’s too calm, lacking that mischievous spirit Nellie remembers, his way of turning the most humdrum activity into a game. Dot loved this in him. She was never disconcerted by his exuberance. And in return, he let her take liberties Nellie would never have been permitted. Riffling through his pockets. Playing with his moustaches. Even now, perched on the arm of his chair, she holds his big Richmond paw between her small hands. From time to time she strokes it, like a kitten.
‘Nellie is to be married, Papa,’ she says.
And all at once Nellie grasps what her younger sister seems to have understood all along. They are here to seek his blessing on her happiness. To launch her on the long voyage of the rest of her life.
Papa’s face brightens with amusement. ‘Who’s the lucky fellow?’
Just what he would have said in the old days. A great weight of dread lifts from Nellie’s shoulders.
‘George Farquhar.’ She hears herself omitting the middle names Georgie sets such store by, and for a moment she glimpses the life that might have been. Georgie taking tea at Lawhill. And later, Papa mocking the nervous swipe of his tongue over his dry lips. Remarking that most men use two names, or three if their mothers are well-born, but he has never met a fellow so grand he needs four just to say how d’ye do. She explains to Papa that, since Willie Farquhar is set to inherit Pitscandly, Georgie has entered the Episcopalian church. She would like to say more, about the strange workings of fate, how if her stepmother had not reinvented herself as a Piscie, she and Georgie would never have met. But the less said about Mrs Richmond the better.
‘Are you wanting me to give you away?’
The question catches her off guard. In truth, this is the last thing she wants. Papa in the cathedral. Praying open-eyed. Winking at Lady Cheyne.
‘I’m afraid it’s out of the question, old girl,’ he says, when dismay is already written across her features.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a smirk visit the Superintendent’s face.
‘Why?’ she asks.
The Superintendent starts to speak.
‘I would rather hear from Papa,’ she says.
‘I might catch a chill. The sneeze is a dangerous uncontrollable urge. Many men have been sent mad with sneezing.’
Dot laughs and Nellie understands that Papa is teasing.
‘I have not suffered a violent paroxysm for eleven months now,’ he adds. In earnest, as far as she can tell.
‘You’re recovered?’
Papa looks at the Superintendent.
‘He has benefited from our regimen and the quietness of his surroundings.’
Papa says to Dot, ‘It was the stitching that cured me.’
‘Stitching, Papa?’ She was never happier than when being the foil to his jokes.
‘If we rend our garments in our despairing passion, we’re obliged to sew them back together again.’
Even Dot can’t find this funny.
‘Do people really tear their clothes?’
‘To shreds sometimes.’
A silence falls.
The offer is not Nellie’s to make, or not hers alone, but still she says ‘Come home, Papa. We’ll look after you. You can live as quietly as you please, among people who love you.’
The Superintendent coughs, ‘I could not in conscience sanction that.’
Papa’s cheeks redden, his mismatched eyes grow bright. ‘Live with you and your Georgie Porgie?’
‘Or with Dot, if you prefer.’
He smiles. ‘With Donella.’
‘Near Uncle John,’ Dot says, ‘in Brickhall.’
‘And what about my wife?’
‘Mrs Richmond lives in England now.’
But the words taste bitter in Nellie’s mouth. Is this what madness is: being lied to by those who lay claim to sanity?
‘And she may not wish to see you.’
The bony, yellow-skinned man on the Chesterfield looks up at the ceiling. Dot follows his glance. Nellie looks to Uncle John, but he’s half-deaf from forty autumns on the grouse moors. Again it comes. The lowing they heard on the stairs. A human herd, moved by a single impulse. Excitement? Discontent? Or just a bovine urge to make noise? It seems even stranger to her now, more terrible: the thought of Papa sharing a house with men who moo li
ke beasts.
The Superintendent excuses himself.
‘What is that?‘ Dot asks.
Papa touches a forefinger to his lips, waiting until the door closes behind the Superintendent. ‘Poor tormented souls,’ he says.
Nellie wonders if living with so many lunatics has shocked the madness out of Papa. Or was he never properly mad? If snow can make a man blind for a week, why should it not scramble his wits temporarily? And there was the Kirschwasser, of course. Why was everyone so sure of his insanity? She is afraid she knows the answer. Mrs Richmond saw a way of saving her sons’ inheritance before there was nothing left. Tom wanted to go back to Scotland. Nellie was tired of standing in the shadow of her younger sister. And the alienist had spent so long among the mentally bereaved, he saw madness everywhere.
‘It’s time to light the lamps,’ the bony man announces in a fluting Highlander’s voice.
They all turn towards the window. A layer of cloud has blotted out the afternoon sun, but dusk is still hours away. The man rises from his seat and stamps across the wooden floor. Nellie’s chair trembles. A vase of yellow irises rattles on a table. Reaching the door, he raises a fist and hammers on one of the panels.
Nellie comes to his aid, trying the handle. The door opens.
‘Go away,’ he says, pushing it shut and resuming his knocking.
Papa winks. ‘Andrew has no intention of going out. He wishes Jacob to come in.’
There’s no point trying to conduct a conversation over this bombardment. They must sit and wait until the attendant arrives with a burning spill. Andrew stamps after him, around the room, but offers no assistance with the tricky business of removing the glass shades while protecting the flame from draughts. The creamy radiance inside each globe makes little impression on the daylit room, but Andrew seems the easier for it.
Loudly enough for Nellie to hear, Dot whispers ‘Why does he stamp like that?’