by Sarah Moss
Ally wakes feeling better, less hollow, as if seeing May even in a bad dream offers some kind of strength. May was never afraid of Mamma. May was able to be angry with Mamma, to refuse her demands and reject her reasoning without the reaction Ally suffers from any attempt at resistance. If you wish to reply, May would say—and goodness knows Mamma has left enough of your letters unanswered over the years—tell her that it is not convenient to you or your husband for you to leave Falmouth this winter. If a person wishes a married woman to pay visits, she should not express such opinions about her marriage as Mamma has done about yours; you need no further reason to decline her invitation. Nineteen-year-old May sniffs. If you want to call it an invitation.
But perhaps this is not what May would say. More probably Ally, like Mrs. Ashton, is conjuring the dead in her own image, imputing to a girl nine years buried what she herself knows she cannot say. How can you say such things, Mamma would say, how can you be so hurtful, so selfish? Have you no care for my feelings? Alethea, you run mad. Ally presses her hands over her eyes and sags against the wall. She needs Tom, or Annie, or Aunt Mary, someone whose voice comes from a real face. There are too many voices.
Stop being so theatrical and put your clothes on, says Mamma in her head, there’s nobody watching your hysterical tricks.
I don’t know why you listen to her, says May, she’s driving you mad. Again.
Ally, alone in her bedroom, trying to select her day’s clothes, wants to stop and scream until they both—all—fall silent. She’s not a madwoman. She’s a doctor. She fastens her stockings, her petticoats, her blouse, settles her skirt and goes downstairs. In half an hour, she can leave for the asylum.
She asks William for the key to the record room, and makes her way there directly, before the vortex of patients’ needs pulls her in. Along the ground-floor corridor, the great windows open to daylight like a cage, past Dr. Crosswyn’s office and the parlour to another plain wooden door, stained dark. She has been here before, finding out that Mrs. Middleton’s belief in her own damnation goes back to her girlhood and was probably shared by her mother, that Mrs. Elsfield’s husband was a heavy drinker and that the village doctor knew that Mrs. Elsfield was often seen in church with a black eye in the days of her marriage. The detail of the admissions forms varies widely; some country doctors have narrative tendencies and others appear to regard the form itself as an impertinence. The files are kept in boxes arranged, unhelpfully, by year of admission, with no particular policy governing those admitted more than once. Ally has never heard of anyone consulting the files except to add the note of a patient’s death or discharge to the admission form.
Dust rises as she takes down and returns box after box, beginning nineteen years ago when Mrs. Ashton was sixteen, for although the asylum has housed a fourteen-year-old, sixteen is the usual minimum. Her navy skirt is streaked with it and her hands are dry and gritty. How can a locked room where no-one sets foot from one week to the next accumulate so much dust? Sunshine forms and strengthens in the high window, making banners of dancing grey motes. She should hurry; she will be wanted on the ward and is far from sure that what she is doing here can be reckoned part of the treatment of patients. Three more boxes only, or her curiosity will have to await another opportunity.
It is in the second box. Clare Ashton, previously Clare Constance, aged 31 on the summer day of her admission. Facts Indicating Insanity observed by the doctor in Redruth: patient claims to see and converse with the dead and has caused considerable distress to grieving townspeople by insisting that she has ‘messages’ for them. Inappropriate conduct in church. Patient given to wandering the streets at night in an agitated state. Husband wishes her admission. Family circumstances: patient’s two brothers disappeared together aged 10 and 12, believed to have fallen over the cliffs while truanting from school. Patient’s mother never believed that they were dead. Patient appeared to recover from this loss as a girl but the present disorder began after a stillbirth in the first year of her marriage. Facts Indicating Insanity observed by Dr. Crosswyn: patient appears agitated, speech fast and loud, insists that she sees people in the room where there are none and cannot bear to be contradicted. And then there is the standard form completed by Mr. Ashton, asking to be notified in the event of his wife’s death.
Ally finds that there are tears in her eyes. Patient’s mother never believed that they were dead. At least she and Mamma and Papa had May’s body, the rain-scoured funeral, the mourning clothes, and even so she can still hear May’s voice. Who among us is not haunted? Who does not walk in the shadow of those who are not here? Our dead are always with us and yet always lost. Only those who die young, she thinks, will not be inhabited by dead voices, by shadowy glimpses of figures long fallen to dust. Ghosts await you in the future if they do not follow you from the past. There is no clear border between insanity and grief, no basis for a limit to the permissible time of mourning. A time to reap, a time to sow, she thinks. Mrs. Ashton is caught in the season of grief. Time passes, but there are many purposes under heaven that find no season here.
SHE HAS BEEN NAMED IN JAPAN
There,’ says Makoto. ‘You can see it now.’
They have been coming down the mountainside for an hour, and as far as Tom can see there is nothing visible now that was not apparent some time ago. It is like the Alps, he has been thinking, although he has not himself seen the Alps. The clustered hamlets, where two-storey houses lean in over cobbled alleys, are like Cornish fishing villages, like St Mawes or Marazion. If he were from Canada, or Egypt or the Sudan, he would still find likenesses. The mind reaches for similitude, making the new in the image of the familiar. He wonders again what Makoto saw in England. He thinks again of the lighthouses, of the lights, calling across the world’s waters. Europe, America, Australia, Asia: reflection and refraction, towers and lenses. Not words.
‘Which one?’ he asks.
Makoto tests his grip on the rocky path and stops, one foot shored on protruding roots and the other in a rock’s crevice. He points into the huddle of roofs along the track below.
‘The last one on the right. With three maple trees in the garden.’
An ornamental garden for a farm? The maple trees are like red flags between the grey roofs.
Makoto sets off again, sure-footed along the path that Tom is finding troublesome. There is scrub on the hillside, enough to arrest a tumbling man. It is his dignity and not his limbs at stake.
‘My grandfather planted the trees. He made a walking garden, after my father took over the farm.’
‘A walking garden?’ He wishes Makoto would slow down. But it is natural, to hurry home.
‘For walking around. There are paths.’
Tom steals a glance away from his feet and the path, down into the valley, but dare not spare enough attention to pick out a particular garden. He will address the matter of Japanese horticulture later.
‘You grandfather is still—still with you?’
Makoto scrambles down a section of loose stones, for once using a branch as a hand-hold. ‘The last time I returned was for his funeral. You will meet my grandmother. And of course my mother and father.’
Makoto waits for him as he steps carefully as a girl, not letting go of one branch until the next is within reach.
‘Do you have a brother?’ Tom asks, reaching firmer ground. The oldest son, presumably, inherits the farm.
‘No. A sister, but she is married and lives in another village.’ Makoto holds aside a long branch for Tom, pauses. ‘And you, you have brothers, sisters?’
How, Tom wonders, have they not already exchanged such information, how after so many weeks do he and Makoto not possess these basic schoolboy facts about each other?
‘No. My father died when I was an infant.’
He hears Makoto’s inhalation, almost skids as Makoto stops and turns to bow. ‘So. I am sorry.’
Tom shakes
his head. ‘I don’t remember him.’ He can always hear the other person’s unvoiced response to this: but you grew up without a father. But it is a greater loss not to know the dimensions of what you have lost.
They set off again, almost side by side.
‘It is hard for your mother, then,’ says Makoto. ‘To have her only child so far away.’
‘She is accustomed to my absence. I have not lived with her since I left school.’
He tries to think what else Makoto should know, what his acquaintances and workmates in England know about him. ‘I married only six weeks before leaving England. I rent a small house in a Cornish port called Falmouth. I attended the grammar school in Harrogate, as a scholarship boy, and then took an Engineering degree in Aberdeen. I worked for Mr. Douglass for five years and then for Mr. Penvenick.’
He glances up. Makoto is smiling, as he has not seen him smile before.
‘What is your wife’s name, please?’
‘Ally,’ says Tom. ‘Alethea. Dr. Alethea Moberley Cavendish.’
It is the first time he has spoken her name aloud since he had dinner with the attaché in Singapore, the first time, he thinks, she has been named in Japan. It is late at night in England and she will be going to bed, climbing under his blankets with her legs bare under the white nightgown that has the buttons down the front.
‘Alethea,’ says Makoto. It is not an easy name for a Japanese tongue. ‘Doctor Alethea. So women become doctors now?’
He nods. ‘Not many. There will be more.’
And you, he wants to say, tell me who you are. But he is learning to tread carefully, to be indirect and trust what is not said. It is probable that he and Makoto have an understanding.
THE KEYS AROUND HER NECK
Trouble again,’ says William, helping her off with her coat. ‘Women’s side.’
She takes off her scarf. ‘Nurse Miller’s back?’
‘Not yet. Slow-growing collarbone, that one. No, Mary Vincent. Did herself some proper damage, from what I hear.’
Ally’s patient. Ally will be responsible if—‘She’s not—?’
‘No. Sick ward, though. A lot of stitches. Got hold of a knife.’
‘I’ll go and see Dr. Crosswyn straight away.’
William hangs up her scarf and straightens its folds. ‘Might be best, Doctor. He’s been running about all morning, trying to get to the bottom of it.’
She finds Dr. Crosswyn in the kitchens, interviewing the cooks in turn to find out how Mary got the knife. He looks as if he was summoned from his bed, threw on some clothes and has not glanced in the mirror since. The cooks are also trying to prepare the patients’ midday dinner, which appears to involve a great many turnips and therefore knives.
‘Do you, or do you not, recognise this one?’ He holds up a knife that still bears smears of blood. The kitchen maid recoils, glances about her.
‘No, sir. That’s to say, they’re all somewhat the same, sir.’
‘But you think it comes from this kitchen?’
The kitchen maid folds her hands over her apron, drops her gaze to the floor. Ally hopes she isn’t an ex-patient, or there may be readmissions soon.
‘I couldn’t say, sir. It’s like ours.’
‘Which are kept always under lock and key?’
Her hands clench and her eyes slide round towards the Assistant Cook. ‘Without we have to use them, sir.’
Dr. Crosswyn tips his head back and sighs. ‘So you are telling me it may or may not be a knife from this kitchen, and such knives may or may not be locked up at any given moment?’
‘I—I couldn’t say, sir. Please sir.’
‘Go.’
‘Dr. Crosswyn,’ says Ally. ‘William told me there has been an incident. Perhaps we might—?’
He nods. ‘I am getting nowhere here. Come.’
You know they cannot cook without using knives, she wants to say. You know that blades and fires and needles, irons and bleach and caustic soda, are the fabric of working women’s lives?
He hurries ahead of her, forgetting his usual ballet of holding open for her all the doors that must be unlocked and locked again, to his office, where Agatha has left a tray of cooling coffee and biscuits on the table by the fire.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Sit.’
Dr. Crosswyn stands at the window. ‘We will have to notify the committee and make an official enquiry.’ He does not look at her. He needs a bath, a shave and a comb. ‘I hope to God it was no negligence on our part. The committee’s views, you know—well, Trelennick’s views—are conservative. All patients are lunatics and really I think he believes the safest course would be to keep all of them permanently in straitjackets. I have never known him vote to release anyone.’
‘Then they might as well be dead,’ Ally hears herself say. But it is true; she has tried not to ask herself whether she would prefer death or the certainty of permanent confinement in the asylum even without a straitjacket. ‘And the others must be more reasonable, since we do discharge people.’
He nods. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t call Trelennick unreasonable. Doubt anyone round here would dare, anyway. Traditional. Speaks his mind. Anyway, he won’t like it if Mary Vincent got hold of that knife by—well, by any of the means I can think of, frankly.’
Ally sits forward and pours coffee. Trelennick owns several mines out in West Penwith and finds time also to act as a Justice of the Peace, chairman of Penzance town council and director of the Penzance Hospital Committee as well as of the asylum. Somewhere high up in the building, Mary Vincent’s pain throbs and burns. There is no-one more pitiful, more abject, than the failed suicide.
She holds out the biscuits to Dr. Crosswyn. ‘How is Mary?’
He motions them away. ‘The patient?’
She nods.
‘I put sixty-eight stitches in her at five o’clock this morning. She missed her femoral artery by a rat’s whisker and hit a tendon in the wrist. Should have trouble holding a knife next time.’
‘Femoral?’
‘She went for the—er—genital region. Among others.’ He takes his coffee. ‘The committee will say she should have been on the back wards. After all, she was admitted suicidal. You interviewed her, didn’t you?’
Ally puts down her coffee, untasted. The cup rattles. ‘Weeks ago. She was withdrawn.’
‘But she’d had a knife, hadn’t she? That was why they brought her in. And then we had to force-feed her. All the signs were there, that’s what they’ll say. It was a matter of when, not if.’
Ally feels nauseous. ‘From the history I could piece together, it seemed she might have been holding the knife in self-defence. She had touched her neck with it but the injury was superficial. There was a suggestion that her employer interfered with her. And she wasn’t force-fed, she just saw it happen to someone else and started eating. Which seems rather sane, to me.’
He swallows half the coffee at once. ‘Tell that to the committee. As no doubt you will find yourself obliged to do. I hope the knife was clean, that’s all. Maybe we should make a new rule, if you’re going to leave weapons lying around where patients can get at them, at least sterilise them first.’
‘May I go see her? Mary?’
‘Go where you like. But you know her temperature will be normal now, even if there is an infection. It’s only been six hours.’
She leaves Dr. Crosswyn’s office and leans against the wall. She has made a mistake. She has made a mistake and now Mary Vincent lies lacerated in the sick ward, losing the use of a hand and facing sepsis. If the committee hold her responsible, she will never work again. Her degree and her prize will count for nothing if she cannot be relied upon to keep healthy patients alive. She will be used as proof that women should not be doctors, that women’s sympathies override whatever capacity for judgement they may possess. She should have sent Mary straight to th
e back wards, the back wards that Ally lacks the nerve even to visit. She sets off, unseeing, along the corridor. Did Mamma raise her to flinch from reality, to put her own fine sensibilities before the needs of others? Did Mamma turn away from the girls bound and filthy in the police cells in Paris, from the suppurating wounds of prostitutes injured, sometimes inventively, by their clients? And yet Ally has spent her time picking blackberries and listening to idle talk about spirits while the women on the back corridor plumb new depths of degradation and misery. She does not send patients there because she has been allowing herself to pretend that it does not exist, as prosperous families pretend that their comfort is not underwritten by the misery and hunger of the poor. No-one who knows what happens in the world, what humans do to humans, has any claim to contentment. The truth, she thinks, the painful, unpalatable truth, is that Mamma is right. Knowledge of the human condition is not compatible with happiness, and the weak choose to be happy. She locks the door of the sick ward behind her and hangs the keys around her neck.
Ally goes from Mary’s bedside straight up the stairs to the back ward. She stands under the dormer window at the top of the stairs, trying key after key because this door has two locks and naturally the keys are not labelled. The stairs are too steep for infirm or elderly patients, she thinks, but the patients do not use the stairs because they do not leave the corridor. In a fire—There is a rattling of metal behind the door and a key strikes hers from the other side. The door opens a few inches and a nurse peers around, her face dour. She’s taller than Ally.
‘Yes?’