by Sarah Moss
It is too cold, really, to sit out here, and it will be some time before the sun touches the camellia blossoms and opens the daisies in the grass. She cups her hands around the cooling tea. Seagulls wheel and cry overhead, and there are two grey chicks on the ridgepole of Greenbank House, open-mouthed with need and severely ignored by the sentinel on the chimney. Until they woke her at dawn, she had forgotten this, the gulls’ lives played out in three dimensions above and around the town, birth and courting and death, hunger and aggression and the ceaseless proclamations echoing over the roofs. Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap. There is nothing for breakfast but the bakery will be open by now.
This is the first time she has taken the boat. She and Tom walked around the estuary to Flushing in the summer, stopping to picnic in a glade of beech trees where the leaves were already beginning to turn and drift into the lapping waves. Tom played at building towers and then walls of pebbles. Every dry-stone waller, he said, understands the basic principles of engineering, every shepherd who builds a sheepfold and fisherman who makes a dock. Every mother who knits a jumper, she asked, but he didn’t need to tell her that knitting offers no challenge to gravity. Well, he said, it is not knitting but what is a corset if not a cantilever? In three months’ time he will be home.
She reaches the quay and buys a ticket from a man who calls her ‘me lover.’ She has often stood on the pier before, but never climbed down the stone steps to the water where the boat approaches. It is like descending into a basement, one’s head at the waist and then knee height of the people left behind. The tide is low and under the pier the waves hiss and echo. Seaweed hangs limp against the pilings and she glimpses fish nosing in the shadows. Those are pearls that were his eyes. She allows the boatman to help her into the boat, tugged on its ropes by each wave. She folds herself into a corner of the stern, glad that her gloves cover her whitening knuckles. Dozens of people do this every day, and the water is dense with boats and sailors doubtless competent in a rescue. She looks up at the sunlit trees on the opposite shore and then back over the town. A new perspective. Falmouth appears to advantage from the water, the windows of its white terraces sparkling and the palm trees bowing over gardens and public greens. A flag flies from the square tower of King Charles the Martyr, the Quaker Meeting House is raised high above the taverns and the synagogue broods on the hill. Sun flashes from the windows of the school on St Clare’s Terrace and Ally wonders if there are children inside looking out at the water, imagining themselves in her place and waiting for the day they can leave the schoolroom and follow their fathers out onto the high seas. Or their mothers into kitchens and bars, into lives shadowed by waiting and wondering, and fearing in some cases the day the husband and father comes home and in others the day he doesn’t. As the boatman pulls away from the pier, across the water and over the one part of the estuary open to the sea, Ally keeps her eyes on her new home.
Dr. Crosswyn sent her the address: Rose Tree House, Mylor Church Lane, but even after she’s found Mylor Church Lane with the help of an old man sitting on the pier, she can’t find the house. On one side the wooded hillside rises, impenetrable as a fairy-tale forest, and on the other imposing gateways announce the bloated follies inhabited by Falmouth’s richest men, the church-sized houses adorned with pickings from the boneyard of European architecture, turrets and watchtowers, onion domes and balconies. Doric columns support gothic arches and stone crenellations erupt out of red-brick bay windows. No-one, surely would choose such a thing for a convalescent home, even if the asylum could buy a building of grandeur. The coals, she thinks, the plumbing, the servants required to fetch and carry. It is the committee’s intention that the residents will act as the Home’s cooks and housekeepers, this being judged an excellent training for their discharge. But here? She checks her letter again. In a few minutes she will be late. He said the house was in the village. She must have come too far.
She has turned back when she hears hooves. A pony and trap comes around the corner. Dr. Crosswyn waves. It is the first time she has seen him outdoors and it is strange, somehow, to see him in a hat, holding the reins, as if like the patients he might be expected to exist only within the walls of the asylum. She approaches the carriage, staying well back from the horse. Dr. Crosswyn leans out to offer his hand.
‘Please do climb up. See, there is plenty of room. How are you, my dear? How does it suit you, to be back in Cornwall?’
His gaze runs from the toes of her boots up the blue suit to the hat she chose from Aunt Mary’s milliner. Madwomen are usually but not invariably dishevelled or eccentric in their dress as mad men, interestingly, are not.
‘I am well, Dr. Crosswyn. Quite recovered. And it is a great pleasure to be back.’
He nods and flaps the reins, which makes the horse set off again. ‘That is good news. And Mr. Cavendish will be home later in the spring, I understand?’
From whom, she wonders. Dr. Crosswyn lives in Truro, not Falmouth, and it seems unlikely that there is any indirect connection between Penvenick and the asylum. ‘I hope so, yes.’
‘Splendid.’
She had missed Rose Tree House because the name and the gatepost itself is hidden by brambles and ivy. The driveway is so narrow that thorns and branches squeak along the side of Dr. Crosswyn’s carriage and the wheels jerk and bump.
‘We could walk,’ Ally suggests. ‘Your paintwork.’
He clucks to the horse. ‘One could go nowhere around here if one worried about paintwork. But even so I will have someone tend the drive. We want the patients to have visitors, family and friends. I thought perhaps an At Home once a week, let them practice tea and entertaining and so forth?’
Let them practice grape-scissors and egg-spoons, the correct number of minutes to converse while wearing a hat. Some are to be returned to the world as ladies and others as servants. Dr. Crosswyn is unmarried; it begins to seem possible that his ideas about the lives of women are uncertain. ‘I am sure something of the kind would be helpful,’ she says.
The drive ends in a gravel circle overgrown with moss, with a broken stone urn in its centre. Trees press in, screening the sea which flickers between trunks and through branches.
‘Here. What do you think?’
The house is modern, no more than fifty years old, but quite free of its neighbours’ pretentions. Whitewashed, square, two-storied, sash windows flanking a brick porch. It looks like a transplanted vicarage, like the house of a country professional man, a village doctor or small-town lawyer. Comfortable and sufficient. And for all the garden could belong to Sleeping Beauty, the whitewash is new and the white paint fresh on the window frames and front door.
‘It looks neat and comfortable.’
Show me inside, she thinks, give me the keys.
The front door grounds on a bristly new doormat in the hall. The wooden floor is newly polished, the smell hanging in the air with new paint and soap. The walls are distempered the colour of cheese or clotted cream. Primrose, Papa would say. The rooms are empty, volatile with possibility. Ally peers into the reception rooms each side of the front door and passes down the hall, past the stairs and into the kitchen. A white-tiled floor (anything dropped will shatter), white-painted cupboards, a double Belfast sink almost big enough to bathe in. She remembers the operating theatre, the women draped and recumbent on the table like artists’ models. She remembers the spread legs, the blood.
She swallows. ‘Perhaps a picture or two in here? Or some colour on the walls?’
He looks surprised. ‘I read that white was preferable for kitchens. Easier to clean.’
Ally moves to the window. The back garden is an overgrown clearing, a tangle of tall grass and brambles into which the woods lean. ‘Yes. But women spend a great many hours in the kitchen.’
‘Just as you say. We thought, the committee thought, we would grant you a certain sum to spend as you think best. Ther
e is furniture already on order, and pots and pans and so on. Household linen. Matron saw to it.’
I could have done that, Ally thinks. But Dr. Crosswyn, the committee, have remembered that she is here as a doctor and not as a woman. ‘Thank you.’
There is moss growing over the slate path from the back door into the clearing, and some kind of fruit tree smothered by thorns and ivy.
‘Dr. Crosswyn? Do you think we might have gardening tools for the women? The exercise and fresh air, you know.’ And perhaps a sense of efficacy, the simple reward of seeing that the work of one’s hands makes change.
His eyebrows rise. ‘It is usually the men who do such work. At the asylum.’
‘But many of the women—some of them, anyway—will be accustomed to farm work, will they not? And others perhaps to flower-gardens.’ A crowd of rooks rises from one of the taller trees. ‘Besides, the outdoor work—the outdoor exercise—would perhaps counteract the tendency to agoraphobia so often found.’
Besides, there is nothing about the possession of breasts and a womb that changes a person’s interest in trees and sky.
‘I think we will begin in a more traditional manner. We are seeking to return the patients to ordinary life, Dr. Moberley Cavendish, not to send them out discontented with their lot.’
But what if it is a choice between discontent and madness? What when discontent is the sane response to one’s ordinary life?
‘Of course, Dr. Crosswyn. As the committee wishes.’
Only part of the money for this house comes from the asylum, the rest being raised by private subscription. And it is unlikely, most unlikely, that the rural gentry and mining magnates who contribute to such schemes will wish to think of women digging the land, unearthing their dissatisfaction.
‘We will send in a working party. Before the women arrive. I do not say that once the ground is dug and planted there is any reason why they should not tend some flowers. Roses, perhaps. Next year, spring bulbs. And matron has ordered two sewing machines and I believe some supplies for knitting and such.’
Let them work, she thinks, let them learn. There are machines now and factories for the manufacture of dresses and stockings; let women employ their brains rather than frittering their time in the painstaking making of objects of inferior quality and superior cost to those that can be purchased by the gross. She says nothing.
‘Many of them will be accustomed to such work, my dear. They will take comfort in it. They are not scholars and do not wish to be, and nor would such a wish profit them or their families.’
She hears what he tells her: your own solution to the problem of female discontent is the height of idiosyncrasy and it is the test of your professionalism that you recognise your patients’ difference from yourself. A doctor must not make her patients in her own image just as she must not come to see them as her negative. It is what Mamma could not do, to understand that each person’s head contains a world as convincing and probably as verifiable as her own. Who am I, she thinks, to take away the embroidery frames and paintbrushes of women who have already lost what cannot be enumerated? Who am I, to appoint myself the arbiter of reality?
She bows her head. ‘You are right, Dr. Crosswyn. I thank you.’
HORTUS CONCLUSUS
They walk down the wide street that runs beside the river, a straight line ruled against the water’s curves. The snow has melted from the hills to the east, but the trees are still bare, the temple roofs stark on the mountainside. The school of small boats under the bridge reminds him of the Falmouth oyster boats, the crowd of shapes on the pale water like moths on a paper lantern. The hall of display, Tatsuo says, is right beside the Imperial Palace, on ground where until very recently it had been unthinkable that a foreign foot, or even a Japanese commoner’s foot, should tread. It is one of the changes, now the Imperial Court is gone to Edo. After one thousand years.
‘That sounds sad,’ says Tom. He wonders how long it will take him, when he goes home, to resume the habit of asking direct questions. Tatsuo does not reply.
The imperial trees are visible long before the Imperial Palace, their bare limbs reaching into the sky, breaking and smudging the grid of streets and walls, and then in the distance, scored across the end of the road he sees a high wall confining the Imperial Park. The walled garden, hortus conclusus. For the last millennium people must have been walking past that wall and imagining on the other side rare flowers and scented paths, fluting streams and still waters, and sometimes the passage of a holy being. A thousand years of violence and oppression, he reminds himself. A thousand years of ignorance and poverty for the many and the constant presence of swords for the few.
Tatsuo’s feet pause as they pass through the great gate, as if his muscles and bones recognise the enormity of his transgression. Like passing behind the altar of a cathedral, Tom wonders, or handling the crown of the England, but he can quite easily imagine himself doing either of these things given an unobserved opportunity. Where are England’s sacred places? Tatsuo fixes his gaze on the ground, avoiding the sight of a park that wouldn’t, really, be out of place in London. The broad gravel paths are not unlike the Rotten Row. There are mown lawns, green again, and beds of rich earth around towering trees. The two men come out at a broad arc of white gravel surrounding a slanting stone wall, and only the swooping red roofs announce that this is Japan. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens: potentates and rulers, parks and palaces. Tatsuo, face averted, sheers right down a narrower path between the trees, and leads Tom through wooden palings to a long low building whose great roof seems to crush it almost into the earth. There is no-one in what appears to be a sentry-box below the veranda, no intimation of eyes watching from the peep-holes on the first floor.
‘This is it? The exhibition hall?’
Tatsuo nods, gestures him on. ‘Please.’
And there are people inside, small clusters of them murmuring reverentially and pausing as if making the tour of a cathedral, as if at the crusader’s tattered banner, the bishop and his wimpled wife in recumbent effigy. But they are not worshipping stone. All the screens dividing this mansion house have been pushed back, making a great hall whose diffuse light and panelled floor remind Tom of a barn or a water tower, some structure meant more as a container than a dwelling. Spaced at intervals along the wall like the Stations of the Cross are what he takes at first for unframed paintings, perhaps scrolls, depicting the usual Japanese landscapes, mountains without perspective and waterfalls and figures in kimono on hump-backed bridges. He already has a dozen such things for De Rivers. And then he sees the cranes, first as five white shapes glowing like moons in the dim and filtered daylight. He approaches and finds himself before some kind of painting or drawing of five long-legged birds wading under overhanging wisteria. He has seen flowers like that, dripping the full height of the trees in a mountain forest, and he has seen cranes dancing and dipping, their white wings raised like the arms of a dancer about to begin. The five cranes are sociable, like a Japanese family preening and teasing in the bath. One is drawn up to its full height to peer down at the others busy at their toilette, and another leans in, neck outstretched so that the black markings on its silver plumage draw Tom’s gaze across the darkness at the picture’s centre and towards the arched breasts and glossy wings of its companions. Behind them, the wisteria blossoms fall like streams of water and it’s not paint, he realises, but silk, the filament of each feather drawn in stitches smaller than a mouse’s hair.
The craftsmen see the world differently, see the shapes of flowers and feathers and blades of grass built up from the tiniest elements—flickers— of light and colour. Such a mind must look at a bowl of tea, and see not only each brushstroke on the bowl’s glaze but the fall of light on each rising particle of steam. Not only each brick in a bridge or lighthouse but the speckles of grit in the clay, almost the currents of pressure and gravity coursing through each grain of cement. How could one e
ndure a world seen in such detail, how could a mind hold the flight path of each mote of dust? He steps nearer to marvel at the stitching, at the eyes and fingers of the makers, the shading finer and more subtle than that of any bird, the light in the silk more mineral than animal. He had not thought that art could exceed its own subject. He wants to tell Ally, to hear her healer’s voice reply that there is no point in any other kind.
GORSE BURNS AGAIN
She is not, she reminds herself, the first person to come back, to climb this hill knowing what waits at the top. She has been studying the numbers: it is very rare for a patient to be discharged well and to proceed to a life of good health and domestic or financial sufficiency. Approximately half of inmates will die without ever leaving the asylum, and of the other half many will return within three years of discharge.
She is almost at the top of the hill and the building rises before her, square and solid as it has always been. Behind those highest windows, she thinks, tucked under that roof. The back wards. Contained in a space that is only, after all, air and stone. It is not there where she will find the future occupants of Rose Tree House, and she does the women of that place no particular service merely by remembering them. Better, perhaps, to forget, better to be forgotten than to exist only as the epitome of degradation in the minds of others. Nonetheless, she remembers. Mary Vincent.
She is breathing high in her chest with the climb, the unaccustomed muscles in her thighs complaining. The exercise will do her nothing but good, but even so she pauses and turns to look back. The gorse burns again with yellow, and in the fields the gashes of winter’s mud are healing. She watches the shadow of a cloud approach across the hillside and stands under the momentary dimming. A few breaths, a few heartbeats, and the sun brightens again on her face as the shadow drifts on, over the field and down towards the town. Out to sea too there is a slow turning of the sky, white clouds trailing shadows of dullness over bright water and the wind following in rushes and sudden darts, stroking the wrong way. In the hedge there is rustling and then birdsong near at hand. Come, she thinks. It is time.