by Sarah Moss
‘Nurse? Do you think we might let Mrs. Middleton sit up? And have you—’ she pauses. Don’t provoke them, it is the patients who will suffer for it. ‘Has she taken her breakfast?’
The nurse, the fat brown-haired one who is either Smith or White, doesn’t turn around and takes her time to finish folding a pillowcase.
‘Nurse?’
She puts down the pillowcase, sighs, and turns around, dusting her hands on her apron. ‘Yes, Mrs. Cavendish?’
Ally swallows. To rise to the bait or accept the insult?
Nurse smiles with her teeth. ‘Oh, you like to be called Doctor, of course. Well, Doctor?’
‘Has Mrs. Middleton eaten anything since yesterday, and have you allowed her to use the commode?’
‘I couldn’t say, Madam. You see, Madam, we came on duty this morning, didn’t we? So it would be the night-nurses you’d be wanting to ask, Madam, only unfortunately one of them’s in Matron’s room now with a broken shoulder, see?’
Ally finds herself thinking that one would not need to be particularly deranged to push this woman down a flight of stairs. It is more surprising that most nurses are not assaulted by patients than that some are.
‘Thank you, Nurse. Please get Mrs. Middleton up, allow her to use the lavatory and wash her hands and face, dress her in her usual clothes and have her ready on my return in an hour or so. Mrs. Middleton, in a little while I shall take you to my office and we will have a talk.’
Mrs. Middleton’s brindled hair, sewn into a plait, nods on her pillow, and Ally goes to register the new patients.
She starts with the farmer’s wife, because the woman is returning to the asylum for the third time and readmissions are easier. Mrs. Minhinnet, having been home for two weeks, stood beside her kitchen dresser and, piece by piece, working from the bottom of the dresser towards the top, threw her dinner service across the kitchen. She was stopped, she observes ‘before I got to the gravy-boat, which is a shame because it would have smashed nicely.’ When Ally asks why she did this, Mrs. Minhinnet laughs and then sits with her mouth hanging open. She spat, accurately, at the vicar and doctor whom her husband summoned, and, according to the admission form, ‘availed herself of obscene and abusive language.’ In her fortnight’s liberty, she has also accused her dairy maid of ‘fornication’ with an elderly neighbour, providing unseemly and improbable detail about the imagined transgression, and waylaid the same neighbour with propositions which he found distressing and distasteful. Mrs. Minhinnet, noticing Ally’s wedding ring, makes some rather startling suggestions about her marital life. Ally returns her to Ward Two.
The girl from Mylor is more troubling. She sits on the edge of her chair, knees pressed together under a dress too big for her, head bowed, thin hands writhing in her lap. Her nails are bitten to the quick and weeping blood. Ally checks the admission form. Mary. Mary Vincent. Melancholy, delusions, and, last night, an attempt to harm herself with a knife, wrested from her hands by her employer before much harm was done. Ally draws up a chair and sits beside her.
‘Good morning, Mary. I need to ask you some questions.’
Mary glances up. There is a bruise on her jaw, probably four or five days old, as well as the line of red across her neck.
‘Did someone hurt you, Mary?’
Mary shakes her head.
‘Your jaw is bruised.’
She shakes her head again.
‘I understand that last night you tried to injure yourself?’
Her head drops again and the writhing hands speed up.
‘Mary, did you want to hurt yourself?’
Ally thinks she saw a slight shake of the head.
‘But you had a knife? Your mistress took a knife from you?’
Mary looks up. ‘The carving knife. Master uses it, Sundays. For the joint.’
Rain runs down the window.
‘What were you using it for, Mary?’
Mary shrugs and looks away.
‘You must have been very unhappy?’
There is no reply.
After a few minutes, Ally sends her to Ward Two. It is not as if there is anywhere else for her to go.
Back up to Four. She can hear Mrs. Middleton from the door, the usual rising and falling rhythms of the hell-fire preacher. Mrs. Middleton sits on her bed, wearing a shrunken asylum dress on which the ghost of a pink rose pattern is still visible around the seams and hem. Across the ward, Mrs. Elsfield, somehow neat even with sagging stockings and a dress that trails on the floor, is listening, her head cocked like that of bird wondering whether to fly away.
‘It will be burning and burning forever. Not like when you touch your hand to the range, no, not like when the bath water’s too hot. Flames stroking your bare body and the skin blistering and then darkening, crackling, and the flesh underneath turning white like pork and it won’t end. When they used to burn people at the stake it ended, they died, but you’ll be already dead and it will go on and on down all the years, fire eating your face oh yes, and down there too, flames in the dirty places and you deserve every minute down all the years, yes you do—’
It goes on for hours, sometimes days.
‘You know,’ says Mrs. Elsfield, ‘I always think, whatever you say to the Established Church, you don’t find Anglicans going off like that. I can’t say I know what the unforgiveable sin might involve, exactly, but wouldn’t you think it’s not likely a middle-aged Methodist Cornishwoman has committed it?’
‘Skin popping and crackling like logs, like apple logs at Christmas, nice and dry, and then they come with the pincers, iron to tear flesh from bone and you think to die but you won’t, there’s no rest and no end and it’s what you deserve, every moment of it—’
Mrs. Elsfield nods. ‘It’ll be a terrible deathbed, won’t it, her thinking she’s bound for the bad place and smelling the smoke as she goes. I hope she finds peace at the end, that’s all. Don’t believe in all this promiscuous praying in the parlour but that’s what I ask come Sunday. Bring her peace. All of us, come to that. Wouldn’t you like to see the silly thing’s face when she sees it at the last, the fields of lilies and the silver sea and St Peter waiting at the gate when all this time—’
Ally almost saw that silver sea once, at Broadstairs when May was still alive.
‘Pitchforks stabbing and stabbing, deep in your belly and twisting in your guts and other places too, the places you want, and the pincers ripping at your feet, on down all the years and no end to it.’
‘Mrs. Middleton,’ says Ally. ‘Come with me now. Come.’
The dark-haired nurse has paused in her reading of letters. ‘Yes, Mrs. Middleton. Go have a nice little stroll with Mrs. Cavendish. Because that’s what happens when you kick a nurse down the stairs, a kind lady comes for a chat. Isn’t that so, Mrs. Elsfield?’
Ally takes Mrs. Middleton’s hand and the monologue stops. She finds herself stroking the roughened knuckles. The nurses touch the patients all the time, she knows, pushing them into their places at table, pulling them into the line for the airing courts, getting them into and out of the weekly baths, but how long is it since any of them was stroked or embraced? It is no-one’s job to do that, least of all hers.
‘She’s got three little girls, you know,’ says Mrs. Elsfield. ‘And wasting her whole life in here. And who’ll marry them, with their mother off her head? It’s no wonder they stay away. That, and you wouldn’t want children hearing her, would you, even without they’re already weak that way.’
Mrs. Elsfield has a group of invisible companions, some of whom are unpleasant, but between times she can seem perfectly rational. At least, Dr. Crosswyn says, until she is discharged. Ally might like to consider making a study of such patients, for there are several who appear to recover after a few months in the asylum but relapse within weeks of ‘release.’
‘Come. We will go to my office, Mr
s. Middleton. We have things to discuss.’
SOME KIND OF MEMORIAL
The jinrikisha man is blue. He’s wearing only a loincloth, and his skin, from elbows to neck and down to his knees, is stained with indigo and ornamented with patterns that shine and ripple under his sweat. A giant fish, the curve of its belly looping his spine, the scales etched into his shoulder. A foaming wave, and small red things—flowers?—across his trunk. The man pulls the canopy forward to protect Tom from the sun before they set off. He is older than Tom, and so thin that his bones and musculature under the painting, naked and yet adorned, remind Tom of the drawings in Ally’s anatomy books. As the man begins to pull, even the cords fastening muscle to bone stand out, as if the giant fish, the carp, shifts over his skin. Tom has seen tattoos before, initials and hearts, sometimes the name of a ship, the result of voyages so long that men who can’t or won’t read and write take to a kind of self-mutilation out of boredom. I was here, they write in their own blood. I love her. He imagines himself taking a needle, a knife, and carving Ally’s name on his breast.
The wheels rattle and bounce on the cobbled lane. They need springs, the Japanese, Tom thinks, and more than that they need horses or donkeys or teams of dogs, anything less stark than one man pulling another through the streets. The contraption reminds him of a perambulator in reverse, and although the passenger is in theory master, he feels sometimes like a frustrated child being carried too fast past things he would like to see and too slowly when his blood fizzes with energy and his muscles long to work. There is no reason why another man, an older and poorer man, should move two bodies around the streets. There must—or at least there might—be some inoffensive way of explaining to Makoto that he simply likes to walk. Although more probably anything he might say would be a slight, to Makoto who arranges the jinrikshas or to the Japanese Department of Public Works that pays for them or even to the Emperor who probably approved the import of the idea from India. In Japan a man cannot sneeze without giving offence. A group of children notice him and run alongside the man, shouting. Foreigner, devil, what a stink.
Next week is meant to be the first day of autumn when, Makoto says, women and country people will assume autumn clothes regardless of the weather. Tom is hotter than he has ever been, hotter, it seems (though cannot logically be) than in Singapore. He fingers the fan Makoto has given him, made of some kind of shiny paper with the fossils of leaves in it. Merely a tool for a job, he thinks, and plenty of men here use fans, but he would feel a fool, a red-haired man being wheeled about in a giant perambulator fanning himself, and anyway the air is so damp that the effort of waving the fan would probably generate more heat than its draft would alleviate. It will be cooler at sea, and when they reach the island they are to stay in a house on the shore. Tom will rise early, he thinks, and perhaps swim before the day’s work begins. He imagines the waves tugging at his knees, soothing the heat rash behind the joints, slapping around his white belly and then lifting him so he can look back at the land, at Japan, from water that may eventually surge onto the sand at Gyllyngvase. He could launch a message in a bottle: my darling Ally.
They pass the last bridge over the widening river and there are the docks, the buildings without depth under the midday sun, pale stone too bright for English eyes, and the sea a mirror for the white sky.
KATE’S BABY CRYING AGAIN
Who is it with you, my dear?’
Ally, despite herself, glances round. ‘With me, Mrs. Ashton?’
‘The cold one. Terrible cold. Shaking with it.’
Her heartbeat lurches. May. No. May is ten years dead. However much Ally has longed for May, whatever joy it would bring to see her on earth again even for a moment, to reach for her wet hair and shivering bones, May is gone. Interred.
They are looking at her. Ally shakes her head. Mrs. Ashton suffers constantly from delusions and often speaks to invisible beings.
‘There’s no-one with me. Though it has turned cold, hasn’t it? And the leaves are beginning to turn, I noticed.’ Soon be Christmas, she stops herself adding.
Mrs. Elsfield stops making her bed. ‘Are the blackberries ripe, Dr. Cavendish? I mean Mrs. Moberley. Whatever you call yourself. Though I must say, calling yourself two different people tends to cause trouble. In my experience. You’ve met the Lady Clarinda. I’d stop pretending to be a doctor, if I were you. They won’t like it.’
Ally nods. ‘Not yet, Mrs. Elsfield. Just a few beginning to redden. It will be another two or three weeks, I’d say, and they will need some more sun.’
‘She’s often with you, isn’t she?’ Mrs. Ashton says. ‘The cold one. She has something to tell you.’
Much to tell, Ally thinks, many things unsaid. But May is not here, or anywhere. There is a draught on her neck. Dr. Crosswyn says it’s impossible to keep the asylum warm in winter and that he will postpone lighting fires in the wards as long as possible. There were incidents with patients and fires last winter.
‘Where is Mrs. Middleton, Nurse? Dr. Crosswyn asked me to visit her.’
Nurse Miller is still at home. Dr. Crosswyn must know that the collarbone of a healthy young woman will have knitted some time ago. This is the small mousy one with a Cornish name, Penhallow or Pol-something. She looks up at Ally with her mouth open.
‘Nurse?’
Mrs. Elsfield shakes what passes for her pillow. Ally sighs: if there is scant money for coal, there will be none for new bedding. ‘She’s on the pot. Be back in a minute.’
Mrs. Ashton stands up and comes towards Ally. ‘She shakes with cold. Did she pass outdoors?’
‘How are you today, Mrs. Ashton? I hope the new medicine is helping with your sleep?’
It will be. No one could stay awake on that dose.
Mrs. Ashton reaches out to touch Ally’s arm. Her hands are grimy, a crescent of dirt under each long nail. Ally’s arm clenches, but instead of pushing the hand away she makes herself pat it. Mrs. Ashton herself is cold. Mrs. Ashton has no chance to walk up the hill from the station, or even up the stairs, to make her heart pump and her blood surge. Mrs. Ashton doesn’t see the fruit ripening in the hedgerows or the ebb and flow of the sea. It is no wonder that someone so deprived should attend more and more to the voices and images of disordered fantasy.
Ally shakes her head. ‘Nurse, is there a wrap for Mrs. Ashton? We don’t want her to take a chill.’
Mrs. Ashton laughs. ‘I expect we do, you know. It’s cheaper that way. And there’s Kate’s baby crying again.’
Kate—Miss Rawson—doesn’t have a baby, but across the ward she is yet again sitting down and pulling at the front of her dress. Nurse Miller used to put Kate Rawson in the closed gown to stop her exposing herself so.
‘He’ll never thrive, whatever she does.’
It is Mrs. Ashton, Ally thinks, who ought to be kept in solitude. The little nurse finds her tongue and tells Kate Rawson to leave her dress alone, for shame, can’t she see the doctor’s here? Kate looks up, her eyes blank, seeing no doctor.
‘She does no harm, nurse,’ Ally says.
Mrs. Elsfield folds down her top sheet for the fifth time. She gets stuck, sometimes. ‘I wouldn’t say that, Mrs. Cavendish. She’s been feeding that child at least three winters now. Time it had some proper food, I’d say.’ She pulls the sheet out again.
Mrs. Middleton returns, her arm held by another nurse as if she might try to run away between the lavatory and the ward. She is twisting her hands and muttering about Satan. Most of these women, Ally sometimes thinks, wouldn’t alter their daily rounds one iota if someone left all the doors wide open. They forgot how to make choices a long time ago. She wonders what she is trying to do, and why. Indulging the mad, says Mamma’s voice in her head, wasting your days and the training for which others made sacrifices on the fantasies of the degenerate. Are there not real problems in the world? Did I not teach you to see the crying needs always at your feet
?
As she leaves the asylum, there is rain drifting over the north coast, blurring the fields and trees as if someone were breathing on a window. Weather doesn’t always cross the peninsula, but she can feel the damp on her face and curling her hair as she hurries down the hill. It won’t help Mrs. Elsfield’s blackberries, and she has still not learnt to heed Tom’s advice and impede herself by carrying an umbrella even when the day looks fine, but the cold and wet, the reality of physical sensation, feel salutary. Maybe it would help some of the patients to leave the room where at this very moment they will be lining up ready to go down to the dining room to eat bread and dripping, go out into the fields and feel the rain and wind on their faces. But the cold water treatment, she recalls, is already in use in some asylums, and it is not kind, not a process over which she or Dr. Crosswyn would be willing to preside.
Her skirt is heavy with rain and beginning to cling unpleasantly around her ankles by the time she reaches the station. As she crosses the footbridge, hunger beginning to churn under her ribs, there is a shrieking whistle and then the bridge rumbles under her as if in an earthquake. The London train is coming, and she stands there, out of the way of the worst smoke and steam, to watch. There are few holiday-makers now, and most of the men of business boarding the train are probably going no further than St. Austell or at most Plymouth, but some will reach London, where Aunt Mary will be awaiting the tea-tray and Freddie’s return from school by the drawing room fire, probably passing the time with a novel rather more colourful than Mrs. Gaskell’s. If Ally were to appear, even unexpectedly, Aunt Mary would kiss her, fuss over her wet clothes, command a hot bath and the addition of buttered crumpets to the cakes and scones already on the tea-table. The train below her feet won’t reach Paddington until late tonight, long after tea has been cleared, dinner served and the servants gone to their beds, but even so the thought of Aunt Mary seems to bring warmth and sustenance. Mary pampered you, Mamma would say. She indulged you with flattery and taught you to share in her shameful extravagance. There is a beggar girl hiding from the railway staff in the shelter of an archway; Ally leaves the bridge as the doors of the London train slam and hurries down to give the girl the shilling she had been keeping to buy saffron cake on the way home. Who is she, to eat cake while others starve for want of bread?