The Asylum

by John Harwood

  My own taste in dress was formed by my mother, who, like my aunt, refused to wear a bustle, or endure any form of tight lacing. She, however, had embraced the artistic fashion when I was still very small: plain, loose-fitting gowns in muted shades and soft fabrics, which she cut out and sewed herself. With me, she was abundantly affectionate; even during my lessons, we would nestle together on the sofa, whereas Aunt Vida, though I never doubted her love for me, could manage no more than a clumsy pat on my shoulder, as you might pat a horse you were not entirely sure of. But sometimes, if I caught my mother unawares, I would find her staring absently into space with a haunted, fearful expression—was it dread, or physical pain? I could not tell, because the instant she caught sight of me, she would shake herself, beckon me into her arms, and assure me that it was nothing, nothing at all. If she was in pain, or visited by some premonition of approaching death, she concealed it resolutely; if I suggested a walk, and she did not feel up to it, she would simply smile and say that she thought she had better rest. And so, with my aunt out roaming the countryside, I was left a good deal to myself in the afternoons.

  The only remarkable thing about my bedroom, from a child’s point of view, was a full-length mirror in a tarnished gilt frame, fixed to the wall beside my bed. When I was about six years old, I invented a game—at least it began as a game—in which my reflection was my sister, Rosina. The name simply floated into my head one day, and I liked the music of it. I would stare at my reflection in the glass until I drifted into a strange, half-mesmerised state in which Rosina’s gestures and expressions seemed independent of my own. Rosina, of course, looked exactly like me, except that she was left-handed. But in personality she was quite different: bold, headstrong, defiant of authority, and entirely fearless. And oddly, though it did not seem so at the time, she was not my mother’s daughter, despite being my sister; she had sprung fully formed from the mirror, a law unto herself.

  I had a separate voice for Rosina, higher and fiercer than mine, and sometimes our exchanges would become quite heated, if she was taunting me for refusing to do something forbidden, such as creeping downstairs before dawn to play in the moonlight. As I grew more adventurous, it was always fear of Rosina’s scorn, which I could summon as vividly as any feeling of my own, that kept me from turning back. When my mother was resting, I liked to play by myself in the garden, which was enclosed by a rough stone wall—I suppose it was no more than six feet high, but to me it seemed immense—partly hidden from the house by a coppice of ancient fruit trees. I was forbidden to climb it, but at Rosina’s urging I went a little higher each time, until I was perched on the very top. Looking along the coast, I could see the edge of the cliff, cut as cleanly as a pat of butter, and hear the wash of the sea far below.

  That was as far as I dared go for a week or more, and it was even longer before I made my first tentative descent to the rough, tussocky grass outside. The hillside around was overgrown with gorse, which made it easy to keep out of sight of the house, though I learnt to be very careful of the thorns. Despite my apprehension, I knew at once what the next dare would be: to go right down to the edge of the cliff and look over.

  I do not know how far I believed in Rosina as a separate being. Part of me, at least, was aware that I was playing a game with myself; yet the Rosina-voice also seemed to come from outside. I did not want to be bad, or cause my mother distress, but Rosina simply did not care; I was afraid of the cliff and had promised never to go near it; but Rosina was not afraid of anything. And so, day by day, I ventured closer to the edge.

  Though the slope down to the cliff was quite steep, there was a place where the ground curled up like a lip: a small patch of grass, growing right to the edge, flanked by two gorse bushes. The afternoon I chose for my attempt was mild and still, but I was scarcely conscious of the sun’s warmth on my back, or the droning of the bees amongst the gorse, as I crawled up the lip on my hands and knees, too intent even to notice the stains accumulating on my pinafore. But the grass was higher than it had seemed from above, and I could no longer tell where the edge was; the gorse bushes on either side obscured everything beyond the small circle of crushed grass. All I could see before me was a tangle of green and brown stalks against the shimmering blue of the sky.

  It did not occur to me that I could turn back. With my heart thudding violently, I lay flat on my stomach, stretched my hands as far ahead of me as I could reach, and inched forward, expecting every moment to feel empty space beneath my fingers. The coarse, springy grass confused me. Was the ground sloping up, or down? Was I pushing myself along, or beginning to slide toward the brink? Panic seized me. I dug in my toes into the earth, and pressed myself even flatter. I felt my fingers slipping through the grass, until they encountered a large stone, at which I clutched frantically, pushing myself back with all my strength.

  The stone stirred like a live thing. It seemed to lift itself slightly, and shiver, before the grass beneath me vanished in a great slithering rush. Something caught me across the chest, and I was left suspended in midair while a mass of earth and rock hurtled down the cliff-face. It struck the undercliff in a silent explosion of debris, followed by a sound like a muffled peal of thunder. A plume of reddish-brown dust hung in its wake.

  I found that my hands were gripping a gnarled tangle of roots, projecting from what was now the cliff-face. Small rivulets of dirt were spilling around me. I was lying side-on to the precipice, too terrified to move or breathe. Far below, jagged spurs of rock protruded from a mound of rubble, like teeth waiting to devour me. My perch was trembling in my grasp.

  Whimpering with fear, I turned my head very slowly away from the abyss. The gorse bush whose roots had saved me, was now poised on the very edge of the cliff, the base of its trunk half-exposed. With every slight movement I made, more dirt trickled from around the roots.

  I was perhaps two feet below the brink. To survive, I would have to pull myself closer to the trunk, wedge my feet amongst the roots, and actually stand up, balanced against the crumbling bank, before I could scrabble over. It was impossible: my feet and hands would not move. I tried to scream for help, but no sound came out.

  Climb, you fool! Rosina’s voice seemed to explode inside my head, scornful, imperious. The roots shook; a rush of earth and pebbles spurted from the bank. I remember one glimpse, as if looking down from above, of myself pressed against the cliff with my fingers clawed over the brink. The next instant, as it seemed, I was sprawled on the ground, scraped and bloodied and weeping with shock and relief.

  I do not know how long I lay there before realisation struck me. I had broken my solemn promise never, ever, to go anywhere near the edge; I had set off a landslip; and what if more of the cliff should fall? I was covered in dirt from head to foot, and my pinafore was torn and filthy. I sprang to my feet, raced up the hillside, heedless of the need to keep out of sight of the house, and scrambled back over the wall with a horrid rending of cloth. I dared not tell the truth; I would have to say that I had fallen in the garden; or perhaps I should say that I had tried to climb the wall to look over and had fallen off. Then at least I should be confessing to a small part of my sin. Yes; I could say that I had heard a strange noise from the cliff, climbed up to see what it was, and slipped. And I knew that I must go indoors straightaway, and not wait to be called and have to explain why I had stayed in the garden in such a dreadful state.

  As it happened, my mother was still asleep, and the first person I met was Amy, who scolded me roundly, scrubbed me down, and gave me a clean pinafore. Mama was alarmed rather than angry when she saw my scrapes and bruises, said she hoped I had learnt my lesson, and made me promise, which I did with heartfelt sincerity, never to climb the wall again. I was still afraid that more of the cliff might collapse—what if our house was swallowed up in the night?—but as no one had heard the noise, they assumed I had imagined it.

  I tried not to show how shaken I was, but every time I closed my eyes I would find myself back on the cliff-face, and I was
so pale the next morning that Mama thought I might be sickening for something. Though I would much have preferred to do my lessons with her, I was made to rest in bed, with nothing to do but brood upon what I had done. If Rosina had not shouted at me—as it had truly seemed—I should certainly have died; but then if she had not taunted me with my fear of the cliff, I should never have gone near it. After a while I slipped out of bed, confronted my reflection in the mirror, and berated her for putting me in such danger. “I might have died!,” I was shouting, when my mother appeared behind Rosina—as it momentarily seemed—in the glass, staring down at me with a look of consternation.

  “Georgina! What are you doing?”

  “I was only playing at charades, Mama,” I said lamely. I was not sure what charades were, but I knew that they involved pretending to be other people.

  “But you were shouting at your own reflection, and calling it Rosina; you said you might have died.”

  “She is only someone I made up, Mama; it was just a story I was telling myself.”

  “Georgina,” she said, kneeling down, taking me gently but firmly by the shoulders, and turning me to face her, “I am not angry, but you must tell me the truth. This—what you were doing with the mirror—is not good for you. And what is this about dying? Is it to do with your falling off the wall yesterday?”

  “Yes, Mama,” I confessed, and to turn my guilty thoughts away from the cliff, I proceeded to tell her all about Rosina, and how the idea of a sister had come to me from the mirror, and that Rosina was the bold and reckless one who had dared me to climb the wall, aware as I spoke that my mother was regarding me with deepening anxiety, until my voice trailed off altogether.

  “But why did you name her Rosina?” she asked. There was a note of fear in her voice that I had never heard before.

  “I don’t know, Mama,” I said helplessly. “It just—came to me.”

  “I see,” she said, and was silent for a little. “Now, Georgina, you must not play this—this game anymore; it is bad for you, as I said. We need not trouble Aunt Vida, but I know that she would say the same. I shall ask Mr. Noakes to take away the mirror when he comes on Saturday, but meanwhile you must promise me not to do it again. If you are tempted, come and tell me; I promise I will not be cross. And if you are lonely, we must find you playmates; it will be much better for you to have real friends than—”

  She did not finish the sentence. I did not think I had been lonely, but I agreed that I should like some real friends, and said that I felt well enough to come and do my lessons. Despite my promise, I tried once more to summon Rosina before the mirror was removed, but all I saw was myself, pale and uneasy, with a bruise upon my forehead. And though she pressed me no further, I was aware, for some time afterward, of my mother’s anxious scrutiny.

  Though I kept well away from the edge after that, I soon forgot about Rosina, and even the terror on the cliff-face diminished in memory until it seemed no more than the shadow of a bad dream. But alone in the infirmary at Tregannon House—where I found myself sitting up again, with no recollection of having done so—it was my mother’s reaction that came back to haunt me. Why had she been so alarmed? Had she thought Rosina was some sort of ghost? Could I have had a sister who had died? No; she would surely have told me.

  Madness in the blood, however, was a very different matter. Of course she would have kept it from me, even if—perhaps especially if—she had feared that my fascination with the mirror was the first sign of its coming out in me.

  Apart from Aunt Vida, the only relation I had ever met was her elder brother, my great-uncle Josiah, who used to come to us every two or three years for a week in September. He was younger than my aunt but looked much, much older: completely bald, except for a thin fringe of white hair at the back of his skull, and so stooped over that I used to think he must be a hunchback. He had a white moustache, and a narrow, projecting jaw, which, with his stooped, wiry figure, gave him a distinctly simian air. He wore thick-lensed spectacles and used a magnifying glass for close work. His manner was always courteous, though very reserved; you could sit with him for a whole evening and realise at the end of it that he had scarcely uttered a word. There was—or so I felt as a child—a benign air about his silence; he would sometimes look up over his spectacles and smile faintly at me, but by the time I went to live with him, I cannot have been anything more than a familiar blur.

  My mother’s father, George Radford, who had worked all his life at the Treasury, was the youngest of the three. Mama had talked quite freely—or so it seemed when I was small—about growing up in Clapham, telling me all about her brothers, Edgar and Jack (Mama had been the youngest by six years), and how handsome they had looked in their dress uniforms when they came to visit, tramping about the house in a great clatter of spurs and sabers, until they decided to go out to New South Wales and make their fortunes, and how Grandmama (whose name was Louisa) had missed them so much that she had gone to live in New South Wales, too. Mama had stayed in Clapham with Grandpapa, who had died soon after she married my father.

  Mama herself had died before I came to realise that she only ever talked about her father or her brothers, repeating the same few comic stories about the scrapes they used to get into, whilst revealing almost nothing about herself. But from the caustic snippets Aunt Vida let fall in later years, I pieced together a very different version. Louisa Radford had been a vain, foolish woman who had led her husband a dog’s life (“poor George never had much backbone”) and doted slavishly on her sons, no matter how badly they behaved, to the exclusion of her daughter. Mama had been George’s favorite, and Louisa had resented her for it; my mother once told Aunt Vida that if she could have had one magical wish, it would have been for the power of making herself invisible whenever she chose.

  Why Edgar and Jack had gone to Australia, my aunt professed not to know, beyond hinting that they had left the army under some sort of cloud. Louisa insisted upon following them (“no more than they deserved”); but my mother refused to accompany her, and my grandfather George, taking courage from his daughter’s example, had refused to go either, and so the family split in two. According to Aunt Vida, Louisa had never written to my mother again.

  The only likeness my mother had kept was a miniature of her own grandmother—her father’s mother, whom she had never known—it showed a fair, pretty young woman with her hair elaborately curled, but gave no sense of her personality. The miniature lived in Mama’s jewel box, along with a wonderful array of rings, pendants, beads, bracelets, necklaces, and earrings—nothing of any value, she said, but to me a treasure-trove. Her one truly precious possession was the brooch her father had given her when she came of age; she discovered after he died that he had paid a hundred pounds for it, far more than he could really afford. It was a dragonfly in silver and gold, less than two inches across, with rubies for eyes and a larger ruby, surrounded by clusters of tiny diamonds, set into each of its four wings. There were even smaller diamonds studded along its slender tail; its delicate legs and feelers were made of pure gold, and when Mama pinned it on her dress, the long gold pin was completely hidden; the dragonfly seemed to have settled upon her breast.

  About my father I knew even less. I had never seen a picture of him, either, and I had only the vaguest idea of what he might have looked like: bearded—but so were most men—with brown hair—like most men; tall, but not especially tall; handsome, but not in any particular way. As a child, I had simply accepted whatever Mama had told me, which was mostly about their life in London when they were first married, and especially about his work amongst the poor of Clerkenwell, and what a good and kind and conscientious doctor he had been, but somehow these conversations had left me with very little impression of him. Papa’s parents had died, she said, before she had met him, and if he had had brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts, she had never mentioned them. For all I knew to the contrary, his entire family might have been locked up in Bedlam.

  By the time I was eight or nine, I
had come to believe that the subject of Papa—and especially their time at Nettleford, where he had taken so long to recover his health, even after I was born—was painful to her, though she tried very hard not to show it, and so I gradually ceased to question her. Perhaps if Mama and I had been living alone, I might have been more insistent. But our little household seemed to me quite complete, until all thought of my father was swept away by the shock of Mama’s sudden death.

  I had become so absorbed in these recollections that I was startled to hear Bella’s voice in the doorway, telling me that “Mr. Mardent” would like to see me, if I felt well enough. I did not connect the name with Dr. Straker’s parting remark, and agreed uneasily, assuming that another doctor had come to examine me. But the young man who appeared in the doorway a few moments later looked, as Dr. Straker had intimated, more like a poet than a physician.