Dusk was brewing when Iris arrived at Kath’s ward. Some of the other patients had recovered and been discharged. One had died. Kath remained in the corner next to the window overlooking the car park, still sleeping, chest rattling. But tonight, Albert was by her side.
He stood for Iris and offered her his chair while he brought over another one. They sat beside Kath, staring at the little old lady neither of them recognised.
‘Thank you for doing all this.’ Albert gestured at the vases of fresh flowers and the tubes of sweets that Kath had not eaten. ‘The nurse told me you’ve been every night.’
‘I should have called you before, but I thought she would be better by now. I didn’t know if you’d want to see her like this.’
Albert took Kath’s hand. ‘They were giving her physio when I came. It seemed to help a little.’
Iris got the hairbrush out of the bedside cabinet and brushed Kath’s hair as best she could. ‘The nurse told me they are going to give her a bigger dosage of medicine, see if that will clear it up.’
Kath opened her eyes as Iris leant over her. ‘Read to me,’ she whispered.
‘I’ve forgotten it, Kath. I left it at home. I was in a rush this morning.’ Iris turned to Albert. ‘I’ve been reading her diary to her.’
A shadow danced across his face. ‘How far have you got?’
‘We’re a couple of months into her time at The Retreat.’
Albert nodded, the shadow passed. ‘Do you remember how we met, Katy? April 1898. The twelfth, I think.’
‘Tenth,’ Kath breathed, her eyes lifting to Iris, glinting for the first time.
‘The tenth, sorry.’ Albert laughed. ‘I’ll never forget you, stood in that scullery doorway. It had been pouring down, a real April shower, you remember? I’d been out on my deliveries, and I was soaked. It was hammering down, and I banged on Cotton’s back door, expecting to see old Mrs Cranleigh, and then there you were.’ Albert stroked the back of her hand, and her smile slowly dissipated as sleep took her.
‘She was the fairest girl I’d ever seen,’ Albert whispered. ‘Hair the colour of flax. Skin as pale as cream. She frowned at me as I stood there, waiting to be brought in from the rain. She was having none of it. She kept me out on that step until I told her exactly what my business was and showed her the delivery in my basket. She let me in to stand by the range then. I can remember the steam coming off me as she whirled around in that kitchen all by herself, up to her neck in vegetables that needed scrubbing and rabbits that needed skinning and shoes that needed polishing.’
He was back in that old kitchen, the fire warming his legs, watching Katy as she worked.
‘I loved her ever since.’
‘And she loved you.’
‘Not at the start. It’s different for boys – we fall in love like falling down holes. Katy took her time. She gave me nothing for weeks, months even, but then she started to come around. I couldn’t believe my luck the first time she kissed my cheek. The most beautiful girl in the world had kissed me!’
A spot of pink bloomed on his cheeks.
‘She loved you in the diary,’ Iris said. ‘She really loved you.’
Albert’s head sunk down. ‘She gave me everything in time. I had her whole heart. I didn’t deserve it.’ He gripped the edge of Kath’s bed and used it to lever himself up. ‘I need to go home.’ He kissed his fingers then put them on Kath’s wrist.
‘Will you come again?’ Iris said. ‘It’s nice to have you here.’
Albert looked at her sideways, nodded, then hobbled out of the ward.
She could smell beef as she changed; the fat melting, that lovely, earthy smell reserved for Sundays. She slipped off her best Sunday dress, which she had worn for church, and pulled on a thin brown skirt and white top. With the diary safely in her bag, she skipped downstairs.
‘Where are you off to?’ Mum sat at the kitchen table, podding peas.
‘I’ll be back in time for lunch.’
‘That’s not what I asked. You going to meet that Simon?’
‘No.’
Mum’s face dropped. She would have preferred Iris to be sneaking around meeting boys than going to visit an old lady.
‘I’m seeing a friend.’
‘This friend’s name?’
‘Katy.’
‘Never heard you mention her before.’
‘She’s from Smedley.’
‘Is she why you’ve been late getting home all this last week?’
Iris nodded, popped a pea in her mouth and grinned at its sweetness. Her mum slapped her hand away.
‘When you next seeing Simon?’
Iris marched for the door. ‘I’m not.’
‘Eh!’ Mum pushed out her chair and put one hand on her hip. ‘He seemed like a nice boy, walking you home like that. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, my girl.’ She jabbed an empty pod at Iris.
‘When will you realise that I don’t want a boyfriend, or a husband?’
‘Don’t be so daft. You really want to be a spinster all your life?’
Iris rested her head on the cool wooden door. It was hopeless trying to get through to her mother. Iris couldn’t understand how a woman who had lived through the war and been an ambulance driver with independence and purpose would happily return to this kind of life.
‘What time do you want me back?’
‘Half past one.’
Iris left her mother squeezing the ends of the pods as if they were Iris’s head. She took the bike to Smedley instead of walking, gaining an extra twenty minutes. She sprinted up the driveway, the sweat dribbling down her neck and forehead, and dumped the bike outside the main doors.
It was unusually quiet at Smedley; there was a Sunday hush to the place. The staff didn’t walk as quickly, the patients were quieter, and most people offered her a smile. She turned left instead of right into the main corridor, slipping away from Ward 13. When she looked through door windows this way, she saw outpatient clinics and therapeutic rooms. The whole area seemed brighter, the breeze blowing freely through the open windows.
She neared Kath’s ward. She had come to expect the worst each time she visited, sure that one time she would walk in and find Kath’s bed empty, the nurses sweeping away the last traces of her. Yet today, Iris was shocked.
Kath sat up in bed, her eyes open and looking out of the window. Sunlight bathed her, blanching the blue bed clothes to white and making Kath’s hair shine. When she heard Iris’s footsteps, she turned with a smile.
‘I didn’t expect to see you today.’ Despite her brightness, Kath’s voice was quiet and punctuated by rasps of strained breaths. She coughed and spat bloody phlegm, and Iris was about to call the nurse for help when Kath stopped her. ‘A burst blood vessel, they said. Too much coughing. Nothing serious.’
Iris put the sputum dish on the side. ‘You seem better.’ Placing the back of her hand against Kath’s forehead, she was relieved to feel the fever had passed.
‘Getting there.’
‘We were worried about you. I’ve brought the diary today.’
Kath reached for Iris’s hand. Her skin was as smooth and dry as grease paper, but when Iris met her gaze, she saw the fleeting image of young Katy – fierce, keen, tender. ‘Thank you, Iris.’
‘For what?’
‘For listening.’ Suddenly, Kath’s strength ebbed. She let go of Iris’s fingers and her head fell into the pillows. ‘I haven’t heard those words of mine since I wrote them.’
Iris opened the diary: the book of secrets. The scratched writing sprawled across the pages, Katy’s messy letters unreadable at times. Ink spots flicked onto the edges of the paper. Iris could imagine Katy sat in bed with the flame of one candle flickering beside her, ferociously scribbling down her memories.
‘They used it against me. When they took me away. A journal of a madwoman.’
A sudden pang of anger flared in Iris’s gut. To think that foreign hands had been through these pages, ridiculing Katy’s thou
ghts and feelings, laying her bare for men to dissect.
‘I haven’t seen it since. I asked for it to go to Bertie.’
‘It’s yours again now. No one need read it if you’d prefer.’
‘I want you to. I couldn’t do it by myself.’
11
1900
Wednesday, 5th December
We have been kept inside for much of the time lately. The weather is so bad; the clouds are low again, and the rain spits at us from the sides. The fires keep damping down, and we have to stoke them far too often, but even then the room is so huge that it is well past midday before it begins to grow a little warmer.
Mrs Leverton sits with her furs about her. I do even more cleaning than necessary, for scrubbing the floors on my hands and knees is one way to make sure I do not feel the cold. My hands do not thank me for it, though, and they have grown red and sore, so that I cannot sew easily, for the needle feels as if it goes straight into my flesh with each push.
Mrs Leverton is fidgety for the lack of outside excursions. She paces up and down in the day room, keeping close to the windows, though the valley below has vanished. Even the woods are hidden behind the mist.
As way of distraction, earlier today I asked her to play the tin whistle and take a seat before the fire.
She sat with a grumble but removed the instrument from the hidden pocket in her skirt. The fire set a soft glow upon her face, smoothing out the lines of old age, making her dark hair look like black treacle and the tin whistle glimmer like a stick of toffee. She put it to her lips and began. She closed her eyes as she blew, her thin fingers prancing up and down like the legs of show horses.
I wriggled into my chair, cracking out the ache in my back and letting the blood flow into my legs. I have heard this tune so often that I began to hum along and closed my eyes, but this time, for some unknown reason, I felt such sadness that when I sang the final high note a tear fell onto my cheek.
‘You should not cry,’ Mrs Leverton said. ‘It is not a song of sorrow.’
She should not have seen my tears. I wiped my face quickly and smiled garishly at her. ‘Where did you learn to play?’
‘Edward taught me.’
We should not speak of him, but it was the first time in days that she had sat for so long and I didn’t want her to go back to pacing and getting herself worked up.
‘That was a tune he created for me. “Persephone’s Melody.”’ She laughed, just a little. ‘He would play it after we made love.’
I checked the room to make sure no one had heard her.
‘You think I care what they think of me? I will die here, Katy, so I will tell my memories whether they think me insane or not. It makes no difference.’
‘You will be released if your delusions cease, if Dr Basildon believes you are of sound mind.’
She tilted her head as she looked at me, her smile soft and crooked. ‘You are an ignorant child.’
I set my gaze onto the fire once more, determined not to indulge her again.
‘Come, let’s not fall out,’ she said. ‘I say this in kindness to you.’
I didn’t know how calling me an ignorant child could possibly be kind, but it would do me no good to sulk at my own charge. I handed her a book to read but she would not take it from me.
‘Aren’t you curious about what happened?’
She saw me hesitate. I should have said no and ended the conversation, but of course, I forget that it is not only me who observes Mrs Leverton; she watches me just as closely. She knows my interest.
‘It was a long summer that passed too quickly. I used to watch him from the gallery as he worked. He was a gardener, you see, an outdoorsman. I would find him by the wood store, cutting logs as if he were slicing through butter.’
‘What about your children?’ I said, the meanness barking out of me. It brought her up short, and for a moment, I felt satisfaction. But it soon dissolved.
‘James,’ she sighed his name. ‘He came here once. I couldn’t believe the size of him. I’d last seen him in a little sailor suit, and there he was suddenly, a twin of his father.’
‘What happened?’
‘I will never forget how he looked at me. He sat there, where you are now. He wouldn’t call me mother. He said Clara was his mother.’
‘Who was Clara?’
‘A whore.’ Mrs Leverton glared at the flames, then her anger burned out. ‘James’s governess before I... left.
‘He asked me why. I told him it was a mistake, a bad accident, I never meant to hurt Edward. And then James stood up, his face cold, not at all like how it used to be when he was a boy – a sweet little boy. He said to me, “I meant, why couldn’t you love us?”’
Mrs Leverton dragged in a breath. I wished I had never mentioned her children.
‘Why couldn’t I? Patience was the bonniest of babies. She had fat little arms and legs, a perfectly round head. Her eyes were as blue as the sky, and she never cried.’
She was beginning to crumble, her eyes wide and wet.
‘I would love her now; I know I would. But then...’
‘Mrs Leverton, please don’t upset yourself.’
‘I wished her dead.’
My hand dropped away from her, too late to hide my shock – my disgust, in all honesty.
‘I wished my own child dead.’
‘Why?’
She shook her head. ‘I have asked myself that question so many times. She was an anchor, I suppose, to that place, to Henry. She was so small and fragile – she needed protection, and I didn’t want to protect her. I wanted to run out of that valley, out of the dark, and never come back.’
‘Was that when Edward arrived?’
She trailed her fingers across her brow. ‘He said he’d take me with him. He said we would sail the seas. I would stand on his boat and close my eyes and pretend that we were on the ocean, that if I opened my eyes there would be water for as far as my eye could see and a sky so vast I could fall into it.’
She sighed. The memories which had blurred her eyes vanished. Her brown pupils sharpened, her face lost the soft golden glow, and she scowled at the tin whistle in her lap.
‘I will not call him a liar. Edward was not a liar. He was just a man. But I’d forgotten that that was all he was.’
I’ve been replaying mine and Mrs Leverton’s conversation in my head. I don’t know how any woman could wish her child dead, and I must confess I am finding it hard to talk to her properly since she told me her feelings.
I keep imaging her in a grand old house, her white face pressed to the window, watching Edward on his boat while her family go on without her. I imagine her stuck there as Edward cuts away the rope and sails off down river. I imagine her screaming as she watches him leave. I imagine her breaking the glass and jumping from the top floor. I imagine a little boy in a blue suit wailing for his mama.
Friday, 7th December
Marion woke me last night. I found her crouching over me, her face nothing but a black shadow in the darkness of the room. She was shaking my shoulder and calling my name.
‘What is it?’ I said, once my tired mind allowed me to form words.
‘You were crying, Katy, and talking to yourself.’
‘What was I saying?’
‘I don’t know; I couldn’t make it out.’
I breathed in deep and pressed my hands against my face to find that it was indeed wet. When I turned my cheek onto the pillow, it was cold and damp.
‘Sorry.’
Marion got back into bed and blew on her hands. I could hear her rubbing her legs under the sheets to warm up. ‘Bad dream?’
‘I can’t remember.’
We fell quiet for a while. I could have let her drift back to sleep – the longer I waited, the harder it became to say what I wanted to say. But then I heard her breath grow heavier, and I thought if I didn’t say it now, I never would.
‘I think Mrs Leverton is telling the truth.’
Silence. I didn�
�t let it stretch too long.
‘I think there was an Edward.’
‘Why?’ Marion’s voice muffled against her pillow.
‘The things she says. She describes him as if he were as real as you or I.’
Marion rolled over and sighed somewhat impatiently. ‘Delusions do seem real, Katy. That’s why they are so terrifying. Mrs Huxley can describe the devil to me, from the horns on his head to the hairs on his toes. She tells me, word for word, what he says to her. She tells me how he peels away her son’s flesh on his face, how the blue veins burst and run with blood.’
I didn’t want to think of devils and tortured children.
‘That is different though. We know that is not true.’
‘We know that Edward is not true.’
‘Do we?’ I said. ‘How?’
‘She would not be in a madhouse if Edward had been real, would she? She would have been hanged.’
Sunday, 9th December
I dreamed of Edward last night, but of Bertie as well... It was all so confusing.
I was lying in a bed on a boat – Edward’s boat. I could feel it bobbing up and down in the current. I heard the tin whistle playing “Persephone’s Melody”. Edward was on top of me, and I turned my head to see where the sound was coming from and found Bertie sat beside us, his eyes shut as he played.
I looked up to Edward. His hair was dangling around his face, tickling my nose, his smile like a wolf. When I looked down, I saw he was naked, his body lithe and taut, unlike Bertie’s. I saw I was naked also.
He kissed my lips and then my neck and breasts. He pressed into me, and the pain was sharp before the pleasure. I pulled his face up and saw that he was now Bertie, white and plump and gentle, but the tin whistle was still playing. He wouldn’t look at me as we made love, and I kept dragging his face towards me, but he would not open his eyes. I shouted at him to look at me, but it was like he was deaf.
Suddenly, the walls of the boat fell away, and there was nothing but blue sea all around us, on our raft. Fearing the water, I struggled, pushing at Bertie’s arms. But they would not move. He continued to pound into me. His hands came up to my neck, and his grip began to tighten, and I was writhing to get away from him, my legs kicking but meeting nothing but air. I was reaching for something that might save me but never found it, and then his hair swung back over his face and showed me Edward once more, his eyes grey and mean, his mouth twisted in effort as he pushed down on my throat.
Woman on Ward 13: A haunting gothic novel of obsession and insanity (Iris Lowe Mysteries) Page 8