The Book Collector

by Alice Thompson

‘He talks about you very fondly.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She could see the doctor thinking that she should be grateful.

  ‘Don’t worry, your son is fine. But we don’t want the delusions to come back.’

  ‘I’m fine. I promise. I need to get home.’ Tears, in spite of herself, were filling her eyes.

  ‘You are working yourself up needlessly, Lady Murray. You need to relax. You don’t want to harm your baby again, do you?’

  ‘I haven’t harmed him.’

  The doctor looked surprised. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Remember what?’

  He started writing in his book.

  ‘What do you mean, I don’t remember? Are you saying I harmed my baby? Did Archie tell you about the scratches? It was only my fingernails. Because of the insects.’

  The panic was starting up. She was feeling hysterical.

  ‘Don’t go. I need an explanation.’

  ‘Lady Murray. You’re tired. Everything is fine. You need to sleep.’

  Chapter 13

  SHE STOOD UP to look out of the small window. Through the bars, she saw the mottled leaves of the tree and the silhouette of a bird perched on a branch. She thought the bird was part of the tree before it fluttered to a lower branch, vivid and alive like a panicked thought. She thought of home, of Archie and her baby and the garden. I will be with them soon, she thought. They will be waiting for me in the garden with the rhododendron and the rosemary and the scent of lavender and the hot sun beating down. And she crawled onto her bed and put the coarse blanket over her head and fell into a dark place where nothing, no memories or longing, could reach her, just a deathless present.

  In her memory, Archie was even more handsome and strong. He began to represent all the strength that she had lost in here, all her hope for future happiness. She had to remind herself he had only put her in here out of concern for her welfare and a desire to protect Felix. He had had no choice. Any angry thoughts were quickly subsumed by gratitude. Who knows what might have happened, what she might have done to Felix if Archie had not taken this course? This place was a cure for her dreadful imagination. And once she realised that, she moved towards acceptance of her situation. She learned to wait, for if it were a justifiable punishment, it would be finite. At some point this would all come to an end.

  For the next few days she just slept and ate, seeing only the nurse who bustled in and out to change the sheets or bring her food. The screams of the other patients became background noise, ceasing to have any effect on her. After a while she stopped thinking about Felix. He only appeared in her dreams, looking up at her in her arms, with his dark eyes, seeing everything that was necessary, no more and no less.

  The only colours in the room were the latest flowers her husband had sent her. She stared at them, the lush purple and sensual pink of the poppies with the morass of seething blackness at their centre. She would stare at them for hours, as if the colour could bleed into her, bring her back to life.

  The doctor came in.

  ‘Have any of the delusions come back?

  ‘No.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘No.’

  She watched, waiting for the doctor to smile, in case he was just another delusion. This time the doctor didn’t smile. ‘We will be able perhaps to reduce your medication.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You don’t seem very pleased.’

  She just shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘You will still need to stay in a while longer. For observation. To see how you do under the lesser dose.’

  He disappeared suddenly. And a moment later she saw him in an adjoining room through a glass window laughing with Archie, saw the doctor being charmed. But Archie turned towards her and she saw it was not Archie after all, but someone she had never seen before.

  Violet was allowed out of her room in the early mornings to clean the asylum floors. The corridor floor was so shiny and polished she had to walk carefully in case she slipped. Some of the doors to the rooms were open, others were shut. She looked into one room and saw that grey rubber lined the walls and floor.

  She washed the ward floor for the third time that day. The soapy water splashed up and over the white tiles. She also cleaned the walls that were opposite the lavatory stalls, which had no doors. A nurse like a little Dutch doll with short blonde hair and pearly blue eyes painted onto an oval face came to supervise her. She looked innocuous but every so often a look of malice entered her eyes. She wants to manipulate me, Violet thought.

  ‘The floor is still dirty. You will need to do it again,’ the nurse said quietly.

  Violet picked up the bucket and poured the dirty water over the nurse’s head. The nurse gave a smile through the water dripping from her cap and face, as if this was what she had been waiting for all along,

  ‘It’s the rubber room for you,’ she said and dragged Violet along the corridor and flung her into the well-padded grey room.

  After the nurse had locked the door behind her, Violet stood still for a moment before beginning to throw herself against the wall repeatedly, not sure whether this room was real or just part of a dream where there would be no consequences. A place where she could jump off the edge of a precipitous cliff and land in a cushion of marsh-cotton flowers. Finally exhausted, she curled up in a corner of the room and fell asleep. She woke up to the sound of the door being opened by the nurse.

  ‘Violet,’ the nurse said commandingly.

  She turned round again. Was that her name? She saw the nurse had in her hand a plate of boiled beef and potatoes. She placed it down on the floor by Violet’s mattress.

  ‘You need to eat this. You’re looking thin.’

  Violet looked down at her long arms. Her skin looked so translucent she could see through it to the veins and blood and muscles, as if her arm were an anatomy drawing.

  ‘How long have I been here?’

  ‘You really don’t remember?’

  Violet shook her head. She could see the nurse make a note of this in her head and Violet inwardly cursed herself. She had to be careful. If she wanted to get out of this place she had to be careful, like a pierrot clown tip-toeing along a plank in a circus, a few feet above the ground. This place was full of disturbed people; it was a place that succumbed to psychotic things.

  ‘A few days?’ she guessed, uncertainly for she had lost so much weight.

  ‘You have been here lying comatose for a long time. Delirious. You kept saying Felix, Felix, over and over.’

  ‘He’s my son.’

  ‘I know.’ And then the nurse’s head rotated right round.

  Violet tried to keep her face impassive, not register her horror.

  The nurse continued as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  ‘It’s important you eat. Or you know what we have to do.’

  Violet didn’t know, but she sat down on the mattress, balancing the plate precariously on her knees, and skewered a piece of meat and put it in her mouth. She chewed and chewed. She knew she would find it difficult to swallow, and when she tried she started to choke. The chewed meat spewed out of her mouth, back on to the plate.

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’

  The nurse had watched her intently. She picked up the plate with a disapproving manner.

  ‘I am going to have to call the doctor,’ she said.

  Violet nodded. She remembered the doctor. He had been kind. He would help her get her out of here.

  ‘Where is Felix?’ she asked.

  ‘Best not to talk about him now. It will only upset you.’

  Tears had started to pour down Violet’s face. Where are they coming from, she wondered. All this water inside her, pouring out of her eyes. If felt so strange. But she needed to know about Felix. And there was something in the harsh tone of the nurse that made her think, he is better off without me. He is being well looked after now.

  Chapter 14

  THE DOCTOR AND the doll-nurse came
into the padded room. The force-feeding equipment, with its narrow rubber tube, was coiled up like a sleeping snake in the nurse’s arms. The nurse forced the rubber tube up Violet’s nostrils as she struggled. The fluid gushed up her nose, down her throat into her stomach. As she tried to resist, the doctor held her down. The pain and discomfort were so great she wanted to scream, but she thought, I must remain quiet so I can get back to Felix.

  The next day she heard the handle of the door turn and the doctor came in. He looked the same but she felt different, as if she had once been in the same world and now had been exiled to this different world for those who had strange dreams.

  ‘Hello, Lady Murray,’ he said. He was looking at her in exactly the same way he had always done. There was no shock or pity in his eyes but she knew this was his professional manner. She knew exactly what she looked like. She had seen her face reflected in the blunt knives they gave her to eat with. Her eyes were staring with an odd light, as if she had seen visions. Her hair was tied harshly back. Her sagging skin had grown dry.

  ‘You are prepared to start eating again?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He made notes with his pen. His handwriting was slanted and regular. The writing, she thought, of a man in control of everything: emotions, his life and other peoples’ lives. By fate and circumstance he had become entitled to wield power.

  ‘How is Felix?’ she asked.

  He wrote for a while longer, then looked up.

  ‘We don’t think it’s good for your recovery to discuss that. You can return to your room now. It’s dinnertime.’

  Dinner was the only time when all the other inmates came together. They congregated in the dining hall, a large cavernous dark, institutional room, lined by wood panelling with rows of tables and benches. A large oil portrait of the founder of the asylum, a man with a grey beard and apparently benign eyes, hung above the head table where the doctors and staff ate.

  As Violet struggled to eat her meal of meat and potatoes and gravy, a plump young woman sat down opposite her. Violet was used to eating alone and looked up, resentfully. The woman had black curly hair, olive skin and pugnacious features. She seemed lively and different from the other thin, passive women in the asylum who haunted the place like ghosts. Violet wondered what she was doing here.

  ‘You’ll get used to it here, dear. Don’t cause trouble with the nurses. Just do what they say. And pretend. Pretend to be normal. Then you get out sooner. I’m Betsy.’ Her bizarrely optimistic face beamed at her with rosy cheeks. Round her neck she wore a silver pendant in the form of a letter B. ‘They use threats here. Threats that unless you do what they say, you will never be able to leave. That’s how they keep you down! You have to get better in spite of them. Use your own will. Shrewdness. And fire.’ She laughed gaily.

  It was the first authentic conversation Violet felt she had had in weeks. It was as if she were listening to the truth directly rather than trying to overhear it through a dense fog.

  ‘Are you going to be let out soon?’

  Betsy smiled. ‘Oh, I’m never going to be let out.’

  ‘But you seem perfectly sane.’

  ‘Oh, I am. But my husband wants me in here. He pays the owner of the asylum to keep me here. He has moved his mistress into our house. She has become the mother to my children.’

  She said this with vivacity, with a happy gleam in her eye.

  And Violet suddenly wondered about her sanity, after all.

  ‘But don’t you worry about me. We all have our problems in here. Look after yourself first. Do what I say. And play the game. It is all just a game here. Everyone is pretending to cope, the mad with their madness, the nurses with their impossible jobs, the doctors with their new-fangled cures.’

  Violet looked around the room. Women were eating or staring into space, or looking into the fire or wandering aimlessly around the room. And for an insane moment she thought, this is no different from normality, just women existing and surviving, this is what happens to women who don’t fit into a world created by men.

  Chapter 15

  A FEW DAYS later, she was walking down one of the corridors when, in the flickering gaslight, she saw a tall man with the natural fluidity of Archie moving down the passageway and then turning left into the hallway.

  ‘Archie,’ she shouted. She ran after him, her legs getting caught in her long nightdress, forcing her to take smaller steps. ‘Archie, wait. It’s me.’ The man didn’t look round but turned the corner out of sight. He was leaving the building without her. A hand forcefully grasped her arm.

  She turned round to see the doctor’s strong assured face. He looked as if he were about to lean over and kiss her, he looked possessed. She bent back from him as far as she could, instinctively. He was still holding her arm so tightly it was hurting. The beard had more flecks of grey than before, she could see that. Had so much time passed? Or had she just never seen his face so close up to her before?

  ‘Archie, it was Archie,’ she said in a quick whisper. ‘You saw him, didn’t you? Has he come to take me away?’

  ‘Calm down,’ he said. But it was he who looked harried. He’s been caught out, she thought, he doesn’t like that. He has been seeing my husband behind my back and not telling me. And she remembered Archie’s secret walks at night, his previous walks to the edge of the asylum’s estate.

  ‘What have you been saying to him?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been saying I’m not ready to leave, haven’t you?’

  He looked at her gently, but came out with the cruellest of words.

  ‘Quite the opposite, Lady Murray,’ he said.

  She was too bewildered to question him further as he gently led her back to her room. All her bones ached as she lay down on the bed and flung the grey blanket over her.

  What did he mean, she wondered over and over again, by ‘quite the opposite’? She couldn’t work it out. The words seemed so muddled in her head she couldn’t connect them with a meaning. Archie would never have left her here if he had been sure she was ready to leave. He would want her home with him. And with Felix. He would want his family together. She knew that about him. How important she was to him, how important his family was, how he would do everything to keep his beloved family together.

  Over the following week, as her mind gradually became more lucid, she began to see the asylum not as a collection of misguided rules but a collective organisation run to carefully laid-out regulations, involving systematic observance of the inmates’ behaviour. This of course was subject to the individual jailor’s idiosyncrasy, his or her power-hungry whims or sadistic impulses.

  The head of the asylum or his lackeys could manipulate the rules for their own ambitions and lack of empathy was key to furthering their own ends. Any weakness or sign of madness was a sign of their failure. It was a perfect combination and she thought of organised responsibility and individual temperament. The doctors, as well as the inmates, were highly confined in their own small world where madness was managed by systematising it and difference eradicated by using medical treatments. It had become about method, not result.

  She longed to return to the unassisted loneliness of her marriage but something in the back of her mind had begun to disturb her. Was there a hidden system to her marriage she hadn’t realised, also? Was she no less manipulated in her marriage than she was here? But she put this to the back of her mind. The only thing wrong with her marriage was herself and her delusions. It was her madness that manipulated her, no one or nothing else.

  The doctor came into her room. ‘A few more days and you will be able to leave,’ he said. He told her she would be allowed to wear her own nightgown. She saw his grey beard, his lively intelligent eyes, his genuine smile. He seemed so unthreatening and she felt so grateful.

  She would be let out soon, she thought, to see Felix. She tried to separate him from her life here, didn’t want him to be tainted by this place, even in her memory. If she thought about him here, he would be associated with this
place, but she couldn’t help but think of him. The memory of him would drift towards her. She wondered how he had changed, how Archie and he had managed without her. Oh, she hoped Archie hadn’t altered their way of life too much. She wanted everything to be exactly the same when she returned, as if she had never been away.

  Chapter 16

  ‘HERE, LET ME help you.’ The asylum doctor pulled back the bed sheets. She felt naked, although her own nightgown covered her amply, flowing around her like a bridal gown, lace trimmed. He took her hand and pulled her gently to her feet. ‘Here, I’ll take you to the drawing room.’

  She moved hesitantly down the corridor, her legs weak. He took her into a dark room, with paintings hanging on the red and gold flock wallpaper, and china ornaments standing forlornly in glass cabinets. There was a smell in the room, of lilies and death. An oppressive aura that permeated the rich mahogany furniture and golden-framed paintings of the previous doctors who had worked in the asylum. It was a facsimile of a drawing room in a country house.

  ‘This room is for our special patients, who are soon ready to leave.’

  By special she presumed he meant wealthy.

  ‘Stay here a little. Read. Look out into the garden.’ He then brought out a book from his pocket wrapped in pale blue tissue paper.

  ‘Archie has brought you this.’

  She tore off the tissue paper. It was a beautiful calf-bound book. The pages were blank.

  ‘Looks like human skin, doesn’t it?’ the doctor said.

  Violet held it tenderly in her hands, stroked the softness.

  She opened it up. Archie had inscribed it inside. ‘To a new beginning.’ She felt an urgent need to get back to her husband and son, to feel safe again.

  She glanced out into the garden. Beech hedges crisscrossed the formal layout of beddings and gravel paths, stretching out to the woodlands at the end. Beyond that lay the rest of the uncultivated estate that bordered the road that led to their own estate. Everything here was so ordered, she thought. And in this dark, heavy, still room, also silent. The doctor put his hand on her shoulder and left it there for a moment as if in a medical benediction. He then closed the heavy dark wooden door behind him. She sat down on the leather armchair by the window. She felt oddly self-conscious as if someone was staring at her.