Nina In Utopia

by Miranda Miller

  Last night I dreamed that I lay with Jonathan. We Said Goodnight, and he did not feel a bit like a man who has not yet been born. We talked and laughed and delighted in one another, and it was very sweet and natural and not at all like disgraceful crim.con.

  This morning Dr Hood asked if I wished to go home.

  ‘You are almost cured, and I see no reason why you should not return to your family for a few days. Your sister will be able to look after you if necessary, and perhaps we could arrange for your son to come home from school.’

  I was sitting in the long gallery sketching Jonathan’s London. The doctor was beamish as he stooped over me, and his magnificent brown eyes were alight with kindness. I thought of Charles and Henrietta and burst into tears.

  He handed me his pocket handkerchief - he has always a good supply ready - and I hid my face in the clean white linen. I was very glad of both tears and handkerchief, for they allowed me time to register my own thoughts. I do not want to see Charles or Henrietta. I long to see Tommy, but I know Charles will not allow me to. I heard him say to Dr Weasel in the carriage on the way here, ‘My wife cannot be allowed to pollute our son. I will tell Tommy that his mother is dead.’

  I was ashamed to explain this to Dr Hood lest he think ill of me.

  ‘I hoped to please you, but naturally you do not have to go home if you do not wish to. Now here is something to cheer you up.’

  He handed me a sheaf of my own drawings and watercolours. On the back of each one comments had been written in neat handwriting. For example: ‘Most curious and interesting.’ ‘Are the immodestly dressed young ladies related to Titania?’ ‘I think you had better study perspective.’ ‘The shadow of the tall building would fall to the right, not to the left.’

  ‘Did Mr Dadd write this?’

  ‘He did. And asked me to tell you that you have talent and originality and that he is very glad you have not confined yourself to botany.’

  They were the most encouraging words about my work that I have ever received. It is true that they came from a madman but from one who has lived among artists as well as lunatics.

  ‘Thank you so much! Tell him - tell Mr Dadd I should be so happy if he would be my drawing teacher. And I should like it of all things to see his work. Is he able to work in that dreadful place?’

  ‘Indeed he does. All around him chaos seethes and the most vile ruffians brawl and riot. But he sits there, calm and patient, drawing and painting.’

  ‘Poor man! Can he not be separated from the others?’

  ‘He is under the jurisdiction of the Home Office. I have no authority over him, but I am petitioning Lord Palmerston to transfer Dadd and some two dozen others - scholars and gentlemen despite their tragic histories - to our more civilized regime.’

  Now when I look out of my window at night my heart races with fear and indignation. I long to fly down into the darkness and rescue Richard Dadd. I imagine the wonderful conversations I would have with him if he were in the same building and we somehow contrived to meet - how I should tame him and win his confidence. It is strange to live only among women. Dr Hood and the jovial Mr Haydon are our only daily visitors of the opposite sex.

  However, the other ladies are not dull. I never would have expected to meet such interesting people in Bedlam.

  Susan was here just now. She is quite convinced I am her school-friend Eliza. Susan is old enough to be my mama and grew up in Sussex, but there is no arguing with her. So I allow her to pet me and try not to mind that she seems never to wash her clothes. Every evening she scolds Horatio Nelson and Christopher Columbus who are in her bed. Her cubicle is next to mine, and her language is so scurrilous that Mrs Dunn has deprived her of pudding for a week.

  ‘My sweet Eliza!’ A sweaty kiss. ‘Come, let’s run away from Jemima.’

  Susan sees all the ladies here as people from her previous life when she was at a boarding-school in Chichester. I think she was happy there and has not been since. It is possible to have a sensible conversation with her as long as I allow her to pretend I am Eliza and do not laugh at her when she lisps and giggles and plays skipping games. She is a stout lady of forty-eight with leathery brown skin and grey hair, so the effect is rather comical.

  We play cat’s cradle and hopscotch and gossip about girls who must be grandmothers by now. Then there is a horrid screeching in our ears as Lavinia passes. She becomes incensed if we call her Lavinia, for she insists that she is Jenny Lind the Swedish Nightingale, although Marian calls her the Southwark Crow. Lavinia is tiny and withered - somewhere indeterminate between thirty-five and fifty - and has a truly hideous voice. It is so flat and so intrusive that I want to cover my ears and shut my eyes. Instead I smile and clap.

  I tried to be honest with Marian because I like her best of all the ladies here, but it was not a success and now she is cross with me and says Albert is afraid of me. I do not like it when I am told that the things I saw with Jonathan could not have happened. I feel hurt and dizzy and want to cry, and so it is with all of us here. The truth is, I no longer know what the truth is.

  Lavinia’s caterwauling has disturbed Susan, who begins to be flighty again. She leans towards me and whispers (her breath is not sweet, and she is inclined to spit), ‘How did she get in here? People often can get in through windows and keyholes.’ This is true. I suppose all of us ladies have our keyhole lovers and all the gentlemen, too.

  Susan has tired of being a schoolgirl. Her face is flushed and her eyes are wild and glistening. Is this how I looked to Charles? I move away from her, for last week she broke some vases on our ward and attempted to jump out of the window. She took the parrot out of its cage outside her cubicle and wrung its neck, and when the attendant restrained her Susan tried to bite her.

  Before I can escape Susan grabs me and puts her hands on my shoulders and forces me to my knees. ‘You must kiss my hand, Eliza, for I am the Empress of all the world except the East Indies, which is too hot, and you are only a chit of a girl.’

  Fortunately Mrs Dunn is passing with a pile of sheets. She rescues me from the Empress and gives Her Highness a glass of Tranquillity Tea. None of us knows what is in it, but it tastes delicious and has a most magical effect. Susan abdicates and goes to lie down in her cubicle.

  Sometimes I imagine I am the hostess at a Harley Street ‘at home’ with Marian, Susan, Richard Dadd and Jonathan. Lavinia would provide the musical entertainment. How the conversation would fizz and startle - there wouldn’t be a word about the weather. And how surprised Jonathan would be, for he told me he thought the Victorians (his name for us) were boring and hypocritical and never said what they thought.

  But none of us here is ever at home. Dr Hood is the only one among us who is comfortable in his own skin, and so we all love him and hope we may discover how it is done.

  Betty is melancholy mad, and a peasouper of misery surrounds her. I am afraid to approach her. Once she asked if I was going to cut off her head.

  ‘I do not believe in capital punishment.’

  ‘Then how am I to be punished?’

  ‘Why should I wish to punish you?’

  ‘For my wickedness.’

  She fell into such a fit of weeping that my own eyes brimmed with tears. Betty is tall and bony with sparse grey hair in a bun and dark eyes which are red where they should be white and sunk deep in shadows from all her weeping. Her eyes are like caves pulling me down inside a goblin mountain.

  Betty was screaming just now. She can hear workmen erecting the scaffold for her execution tomorrow morning. Sometimes she is silent for days on end, and I have never seen her smile. Nobody seems to know what wickedness she has committed, although, of course, we are all dying of curiosity. I think of her as Cassandra, and then I remember that Cassandra was right. Betty does prophesy, and although she has not enough hair to tear she wails most alarmingly. After one of the assistants calmed her and told her the banging she could hear was only the water pipes being fixed Betty stopped screaming. Instead, she ra
n around the ward shaking us all and warning us, ‘You must leave this place! All the houses are tumbling down, and everyone will be killed!’

  Of course, leaving this place is the one thing we cannot do and most of us do not wish to. I would not wish to die in Betty’s dismal company. She is quite an expert on Heaven and tells me she has been there lately and is going back in a day or two. Betty has just fallen over again, for she is near-sighted. Dr Hood provided her with spectacles, but she broke them because she said they hindered her salvation.

  This has been a peaceful afternoon. I sit in the long gallery and work on the watercolour I am to show to Mr Dadd. My pencil and brushes fly over the paper since I received his message. It is so good to know that my work is appreciated and by such a judge - a man who has moved in the highest artistic circles.

  How I long to speak with Mr Dadd. I feel sure that he would understand my vision of the future. Perhaps he would not find it strange at all, for artists move freely between phantasy and reality. I could tell him of Jonathan and of the wonderful future that awaits us. Mr Dadd and I shall not see it, but we could celebrate the happiness of generations to come who will live without poverty, war, ignorance or pain. I know Mr Dadd would listen to me and would not laugh as Marian did when I tried to tell her. She told me to get back to Cloud-cuckoo-land, which was not kind or helpful.

  In the watercolour I am working on now Jonathan (how handsome he was! or is! or will be!) sits in front of his teavea in darkness illuminated by its weird blue light. His room is bare, but his mind is furnished with beautiful thoughts. He stares at moving pictures of horrible massacres,, but his expression is calm, for he knows that such barbarity is safely in the past. Our past.

  A woman with dark hair sits beside him on the black leather sofa. Her features cannot be seen in the shadows, but I know they are my own. The paints blur as I weep from envy of that future Nina. Her children will all live, and she will have machines to do the chores of servants and will be educated to use her mind to earn hard cash and be free. How happy she will be.

  ‘More tears? Turn off the waterworks or I shan’t dance with you tonight.’ It is Marian. Although her voice is brusque I am very glad that we are friends once more.

  We have an upright piano on our ward. Mrs Dunn says it a great privilege and we must earn it by our good behaviour. Last week Susan threw her porridge down it, and the keys are somewhat sticky. We practise dancing for the ball next month. I have not yet attended one, but I am told our balls are famous all over London. The great and the famous come to watch. We are all making paper flowers to decorate the ballroom, and many of the ladies are cutting and sewing their own ballgowns. Dr Hood lets them have lengths of fabric in return for extra work in the laundry and kitchens. Before she married, Marian used to be a lady’s maid in an aristocratic household in Grosvenor Square. She is very dainty and fastidious and helps the other ladies with their dressmaking. Of course, Marian and I will have to stay in mourning even at the ball. I will send Emmie a note asking her to send my best black silk.

  It is a little difficult to practise dancing without any men. Betty and I and the taller ladies have to dance the masculine steps. It is so many years since I have danced that I fear I shall have forgotten how and will make myself ridiculous by asking the gentlemen to dance and guiding them in an unfeminine manner. And what sort of gentlemen will they be? I do not want to dance with Jesus Christ or the Tsar, for I should not know what to say to them. We are all agog to know if Dr Hood will dance at the ball, but nobody has dared to ask him.

  We all look forward to our dancing except Betty, who says it is frivolity and fiddlesticks and goes to bed early. There are three attendants standing by with Tranquillity Tea lest the excitement overcomes us. Lavinia accompanies us on the piano and screeches. We are all the teachers and try to remember what we can about dances we attended when we were young and beautiful and had men at our feet.

  I am not at Marian’s feet but mostly under them as we stumble around the ward. I imagine I am in the arms of Charles or Jonathan, but in order fully to imagine this I have to shut my eyes, and then I become even more clumsy. I discover that I would prefer the arms of Jonathan, but it does not matter since he is not here either. There is only Marian, whose hair smells of custard. She tells me to be careful not to tread on Albert’s toes.

  All of us are dancing now. Lavinia is playing a waltz that tugs at my heart strings, and the music floats us on a cloud of memory and romance. Around and around and around we whirl in circles of joy. A gaiety I thought lost for ever swoops over me as I fall backwards into the melody. We are dancing with the music as much as with each other, and while the music embraces us we are not alone. By gaslight our faces are softer and brighter and happier. I want all to share in our music as the piano’s voice seeps through walls and floors. I want it to infiltrate the dreadful criminal block and soothe all those savage breasts - and most particularly Mr Dadd’s.

  CHARLES

  HENRIETTA STOPPED ME again as I was leaving the house to ask if I would return for supper. I am rarely at home; I suppose she eats and prays alone. A saintly woman, but I had rather not meet a saint on the stairs when I am going to discuss aphrodisiacs with William.

  All this talk of the fatal passion is having a most unfortunate effect on my own passions. An appetite I can scarcely afford to gratify if I am to be a Bedlam bachelor for the foreseeable future, for I have no cash for a flutter outside the blanket. Indeed, I learned this morning that I have overdrawn my bankers by three hundred pounds.

  In William’s elegant library I felt the familiar acid of envy. It filled my mouth like poison, but I had to swallow it together with my pride, for William is my only hope of escaping from this detestable no-man’s-land between respectability and insolvency. He let me know that he has a petite amie at the Drury Lane Theatre in addition to his house in Hanover Square and the country house where he conveniently stores his wife and children. He has no need to boast; his very presence reminds me of how little I have to boast about.

  Over sherry and exquisite little almond cakes made by his Italian chef we discussed our patent magneto-electric box, the Elysium.

  ‘Puffery is all, my dear fellow. We must advertise. The Times won’t print this sort of thing, but we’ll write a sizzling pamphlet. I count on you for that, Charles; you’re a literary sort of chap. I remember how you used to read poetry and that kind of thing. Next week I shall order thousands - no, hundreds of thousands - of sticky labels. They will appear on every wall and railway arch in London, on wagons - and for a few shillings we can hire our own sandwichman to parade up and down Oxford Street. The Elysium will become a household name, like Pears’ soap. By Christmas we’ll have Tommy’s school fees and Maria’s dowry under our belts. Now, to work!’

  William sat me down at a walnut davenport desk and pushed a large and alarmingly blank sheet of paper towards me.

  ‘But how can we write of these things? Will we not be prosecuted for obscenity?’

  ‘These things, as you call them, are of concern to everybody. There is nothing obscene about the propagation of the species. You have only to hint delicately at the marvellous efficaciousness of our invention. With the Elysium mutual satisfaction is guaranteed and pregnancy ensues. ‘

  ‘But you know perfectly well that a few wires in a box can do nothing!’

  ‘Charles, in a minute I shall think I have chosen the wrong partner.’

  His threat was enough to liberate my imagination. As I puffed I sucked my pen and sipped my sherry. The more genteel my phrase-making became, the more I burned with lust.

  ‘To restore a woman’s response …’ Nina on our wedding trip, after I had unwrapped her layers of frothy whiteness. She lay on the bed, so slender and pale and young. I felt like one of the coarse soldiers in a painting carrying off a Sabine woman; I felt ugly and hairy and expected her to scream or run away. She smiled at me with perfect trust and held out her thin white arms to me. I think nothing in my life has delighted me as
much as that moment. ‘Exhaustive satisfaction to both partners at the same moment …’ Nina was both innocent and wanton; she gave herself with such sweet generosity. It was not a dance she had danced before, of that I am quite sure. Yet she enjoyed me, we enjoyed each other, with such frankness. Rams-gate, not a town usually associated with Elysium.

  Memories inspired me to write a somewhat lurid description of a beautiful young bride driven to adultery because her husband was impotent. ‘Lady Theodora writhed and thrashed alone in the night. She strove not to think of the dashing young Sir Percival and his passionate notes. Poor Lord Bruce lay beside his pulchritudinous young wife. All night he longed, he adored, but he could not act upon his desires. If only the Elysium had been available to them, to synchronize their yearning …’ Why is it that titles lend romance to even the most sordid plots?

  ‘The mere presence of the Elysium is the matrimonial bed will be enough to transport both partners …’ It is a fairy-tale but a charming one. If only I could find such a magic box to restore my little Nina to me in all her loving freshness.

  To lend my pamphlet some intellectual respectability I ended with a quotation from Galen: ‘The pleasures of love, when they are moderate, and not indulged in until the body has had time to repair … promote gaiety, contentment and a sense of freedom in the female.’

  William was delighted. ‘Marvellous! Next year we will patent a machine to cure cholera. Professor Benvoglio has a great future!’

  We have agreed to conflate ourselves into this illustrious quack, who has degrees from the Universities of Leipzig, Milan and Vienna and Testimonials and Honourable Mention from Their Imperial Majesties the Emperors of Russia and Austria and from the reigning monarchs of Italy and Transylvania. It would be foolish to use our real names in case one of our pamphlets falls into the hands of the College of Physicians.

  ‘I am glad you like my literary efforts. By the way, William, we must discuss the financial aspects …’