Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  To the Pump Room with Jane

  THE MORROW BROUGHT still another sober-looking day of oppressive warmth, the sun making few efforts to appear through the general grey as though, having already heated the city intolerably, it felt chary of imposing an additional burden upon its inhabitants. Yet, much as Jane dreaded the consequence of all the white glare of buildings upon eyes already sore, she almost would have welcomed this as alternative to the pervasive dirtiness which the haze brought, with the prospect of soiled gown and yashmak, almost as soon as she should set foot in the street below.

  “A hundred degrees, I imagine, and ninety of humidity,” sighed her mother. “We must hope the Pump Room isn’t as crowded—”

  Jane did not trouble to frame a response, being familiar with her mother’s complaints, which naturally had no effect whatever upon the world outside—nor her wishes the slightest prospect of fulfilment. Pavement and Pump Room would contain precisely as great, and oppressive, a pack of people this morning as any other. Crowds of people were every moment passing in and out of the Pump Room; and occupying the pavements with their full, or empty, water hods. Every creature in town was to be seen in the room twice at different periods of the week. How curious, reflected Jane, that some quota hours should have come to seem more fashionable than others. And how distressing, in these circumstances, that her mother and herself should merely verge upon a fashionable hour, obliged to desert the Pump Room as they were, straight upon the striking of noon! It made her prospects of an acceptable alliance so much the narrower. Had she only heeded the blandishments of Frederick Wentworth eight years earlier and not been persuaded to a course of discretion and daughterly solicitude.

  “We had best be on our way, dear Jane. It is so far to go; eight hundred yards is a long way in such heat and crowds. Our neighbour Mr Allen says it is nine, measured nine; but I am sure it cannot be more than eight; and it is such a fag. I come back tired to death.”

  “What you say is most true, Mother. I certainly should know,” she added quietly, without enlarging on this topic. Eight years before had seen Jane a passably pretty girl, though her bloom had vanished early, as with any countenance exposed to all the injury of a poisonous atmosphere. At least she grew haggard amidst the wreck of the good looks of everybody else; each face in the neighbourhood worsting. Yet this was small consolation, when she recollected on another manner of life she might have led, amidst the cleaner air to be enjoyed only perhaps by a sea Captain’s wife today.

  Who, however, could have predicted, eight years earlier, that he should rise so far and fast in his profession? And what would have been worse than to be the wife of a mere rating, abandoned eleven-twelfths of the year on a rating’s pittance—and no happiness but the dream of a husband coming home yearly to the sorry prospect of more visible decay? A life of restricted circumstances on welfare credits was preferable to such degradation of romance.

  For it had been a fine flower of romance that bloomed briefly, eight years before—a short period of exquisite felicity, when half the sum of attraction on either side might have sufficed. In truth Jane had respected the bloom on this flower too much to allow herself to be rashly persuaded by him; and so yielded to her mother’s own practical, selfish persuasions—yet not for those motives that her mother had imagined. The upshot was that Frederick Wentworth departed her life, believing her weak-willed; without realising the true force of her will for romance.

  Few, however, could have realistically persuaded either mother or daughter eight years earlier, of how truly desolating an eight years’ delay could prove to prospects and features alike—of the sudden inroads of wearisome heat, foul air, and the burgeoning of so many other people; nor how Frederick Wentworth’s flimsy expectations should be a thousand times fulfilled and more, by the responsibility of securing fresh water for this thirsty multitude that had been thrust so precipitately on the Admiralty amid the demise of native rivers and streams.

  Discreetly (with resignation, with shame, with a pang of anger, quietly checked) Jane had followed his progress in the Navy List, displayed in the Upper Rooms along with other Governmental edicts; hastening thither through the crowd whenever her mother felt equal to the task of waiting in line by herself with their water hods; and Jane could summon up excuses of a sufficiently pressing nature—perhaps once in a three months’ or a six months’ period.

  This was sufficient to acquaint her with his rapid rise to the command of the sea tug Grappler, refitted as one of the saviour ’berg tugs that towed the selfsame water in frozen form from Southern Oceans which she and her Mother bore home in hods from the Pump Room.

  Scarcely an occasion of bearing her water hod along the crowded pavement passed without her sparing at least one thought for Frederick, now Captain Wentworth; and Captain of no mean vessel, since the ’berg tug was suddenly become as consequential to the Nation’s survival, as Admiral Nelson’s man-of-war, and far more consequential than any Cutty Sark. Yet she could not expect him to spare one thought for her. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations—all, all must be comprised in it; and oblivion of the past—how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life. Alas! with all her reasonings, she found that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing. She still thought.

  “We must leave, dear Jane. Oh it is so intolerable a fag, that Pump Room! If only we had not to go there with all these other people we do not know, and would not care to.”

  “Perhaps your spirits would be better prepared for the ordeal by a modest tranquilliser?”

  Her mother sighed agreement, and Jane fetched the small bottle of yellow glass from the mantelshelf; each woman swallowed her five milligrams; soon they were picking their way down the crowded stairways to the street, the vapours of the stairs assaulting their nostrils through the perfumed yashmaks.

  Pavements afforded their customary dirty, hot confusion. Along them walked Jane and her mother as swiftly as they might, determined to persevere in disregarding their vile situation of distress, only partly alleviated by the influence of chemistry. Street and pavements alike were thronged with hods being borne empty towards the Pump Room; filled, away; a dense forest of square, transparent boxes upon carrying poles—the innumerable ghosts of empty hat boxes consigned to a Purgatory sadly bereft of millinery.

  Thirty minutes conducted them along Union Street to the archway opposite the Pump Yard; but here they were stopped. Anyone acquainted with this town may know the difficulties of crossing Cheap Street at this point; it is indeed a street of an impertinent nature, unfortunately linked to the great Ring Road, therefore bearing all the permitted vehicles in to the multistorey Park. Today they were prevented crossing first by the approach of a soybean convoy; then by a civic entertainments wagon, with musical artists tuning up on drums and guitars in the chilled air behind thick, wired glass, protected as well from the heat as from the assaults of enthusiastic admiration.

  “Oh, these odious gigs!” cried her mother, “how I detest them!” Yet this detestation, though so just, was of short duration, for she looked again, and exclaimed, “Is that not—? No, it cannot be! I declare the thing to be impossible! Did you glimpse him, Jane? Just then—entering the Pump Room.”

  “Who did you glimpse? I confess to have noticed no one of our acquaintance.”

  “I suppose it was not he,” she sighed testily. “’Tis always the same, looking at everybody and speaking to no one. To know nobody in all this multitude of people! It is intolerable! But who should we know, between eleven and twelve o’clock? If our names might only be transferred to the noon hour!”

  Jane felt inclined to let the topic drop of its own inertia, yet her curiosity was piqued; she pressed; and was tormented with:

  “Why, that Mr Wentworth who presumed on our acquaintance and your affections, some years ago—”

  For once, Jane blessed the yashm
ak that afforded protection against inclement air and vulgar stares at the cost of stifling confinement; since it hid the blush that she may not, herself, have been able to quench.

  The thing was impossible!

  Finally they succeeded in crossing Cheap Street; pressed into the Pump Room with the general crush; had their names written down in the Pump Room book.

  Taking their place among jostling elbows, and jostling hods, the two women pressed slowly forward to where the harvested, melted ice of Antarctica reached its penultimate destination, before being borne like so many pints of finest claret, in the container hods, to hovel and highrise alike.

  Twenty minutes’ slow exertion, attended by sighs and complaints, brought them to the polished Pump itself, where the Master of Ceremonies bestowed on them the usual small cup each of ‘that which cheers, but not inebriates’ to quench the thirst of waiting; whilst the hods were filled, sealed, returned to already weary arms, several pounds heavier in burden.

  Jane had not believed her mother’s eccentric claim; still her heart had fluttered, impertinently.

  As they insinuated themselves with the precious hods towards the Pump Room doorway, the clock already pointing to a quarter to twelve, a heavy foot brushed across Jane’s ankle; she was too dilatory by half a second in evading it; put out her hands to save herself, and in so doing quite lost hold on her hod.

  The horror of that moment! Herself, unbalanced; the water hod, tottering amidst shoulders, elbows, hips, towards imminent collision with the ground. She knew the catch was weak; many feet would soon be knocking against it, even if it did not spill straightaway! And then all must be lost.

  She reached for it; she cried out, impotently.

  In another moment, however, a man’s hand reached past hers. A man’s shoulder parted the throng. He seized; grasped the handle by the end; held on by sheer strength till the hod could be restored to equilibrium and returned to her.

  She turned to face her rescuer; and experienced such painful agitation she could barely find the necessary words of thanks; even then, she did not realise that he might know who she was, till he responded.

  “Miss Jane Elliot? I believe we know each other.”

  “Indeed, Captain Wentworth; but how—?” was all that Jane could summon.

  “You briefly raised your yashmak to drink the waters. I saw then. I was coming down from the Upper Rooms. I beg you to pardon my presumption, and abruptness—”

  “Do not think of it in those terms, Mr Wentworth,” her mother intervened. “You have saved her hod from spilling, silly child. I do not know how we should have tolerated this heat till Saturday, with only the content of one hod.”

  “Mother, please!” whispered Jane, appalled by her mother’s crassness. “He is Captain Wentworth now, of the tug Grappler”

  “Oh indeed? And what is a sailor doing in the Pump Room? I had thought they spent their whole lives amid water!”

  “That is easily explained, Madam,” he rejoined, apparently taking no offence; though Jane could hardly trust he could be so oblivious of her mother’s impudence that passed for frankness. “You must know how this Room receives waters from the great terminal in Lyme Bay. I have just returned from a fortunate enterprise with the dear old Grappler: a twenty-five mile ’berg, that only melted to twenty-one mile on the voyage north—adequate prize-money, and a week’s furlough while the ‘berg is quarried. Why, Lyme Bay is almost wholly blocked by it.”

  “I never understand why you cannot hunt in the Arctic Ocean,” her mother cavilled. “After all, it is so much closer.”

  “The Arctic growlers are such craggy beasts, Madam,” he explained patiently. “The ’bergs of Antarctica are smooth and float like table tops. I thought I should see this Pump Room during the furlough, since I have,” and here he hesitated, glancing away into the distance, “some happy memories of the times before we had need of Pump Rooms.”

  His last words sounded harsh; they seemed to embrace the entire crowd with their hods, including Jane and her mother, in disdain.

  “Mother,” Jane said quietly, realising how demeaned they must appear in their petty anxieties over a few pints of water to a Captain who practically owned the sea, “you forget we must leave the room by twelve. Or there are penalties—”

  “It is not necessary, Miss Elliot. I shall speak to the Master of Ceremonies at once. I am supplied with a free pass for any hour of the day; my guests, too. And did I not say,” he added, “some happy memories—?”

  “We may stay after noon?” cried her mother in a transport of vulgarity. “Into the fashionable hour?”

  For the third time that morning Jane had strong cause to bless the yashmak which good taste demanded and hygiene recommended.

  Yet even in this extremity Captain Wentworth rallied staunchly. Offering her mother his free arm, he shouldered a way for the two women back through the protesting crowd to the Pumpside; where all was arranged; not only for that one day, but for each Tuesday and Saturday. For as long as they attended this Pump, they might present themselves from noon till one o’clock.

  “What a great traveller you must have been, Sir!” exclaimed her mother to Captain Wentworth as he escorted them down to the Lower Room, to show them the great storage tanks and fat inlet pipes that ran all the way underground, from Lyme Regis, by way of Yeovil, Shepton Mallet, and Radstock. “I declare it to be so cool in here, I could catch a chill! Is there ice in these tanks?”

  “Hardly, or it could not have reached here through the pipes,” he laughed.

  “It is so blissfully cool,” Jane said swiftly. “Is it really this way in the Antarctic?”

  “Even cooler, Miss Elliot. Sometimes so bitter, you would not believe. Though passing through the Tropics, we encounter months of heat to match any in this City.”

  “Those hot breezes are not so grey and tainting, I warrant!”

  “True, Miss Elliot,” he acknowledged, with a nod; comparing, perhaps, what he had seen of her complexion when she raised the yashmak with his own—seasoned, but salubrious. She could only hope not.

  Though what was the use of hope? What was there to hope for further from this encounter, beyond what had already been achieved, so amazingly, through a few brief words of the Captain’s: their promotion to the noon hour?

  Their triumphal progress through the Pump Room itself to the Cheap Street entrance, escorted by a gallant Captain, amid the fashionable noon-hour crowd; their farewell plunge into the outer throng, with full hods; the compact to meet again in the Pump Room on the coming Saturday, the last of Frederick Wentworth’s furlough before his return to Grappler and the Southern Oceans; these were enough to spread purification and perfume for Mrs Elliot all the way back to Westgate Buildings.

  Jane almost persuaded herself that they were sufficient for her, too.

  How delightful the encouragements of Dr Hood! reflected Mrs Elliot, as she sat sipping a cup of best Pekoe tea from Wedgwood china; nibbling the small almond biscuits upon which Mrs Hepburn, a fat, jolly housekeeper, lavished culinary art every week.

  Mrs Hepburn would indeed be an acquisition to any establishment. Yet Mrs Elliot entertained no intention of luring Mrs Hepburn away from the good Doctor; rather that the good Doctor should himself be lured—into persuading Mrs Elliot ‘to do him the honour’ of changing her name.

  To this end, she pursued the intolerable burden of bearing weekly witness to dear Jane’s horrid fantasies; and seeing the hideous, wilful wreck of her good looks. It had to be gone through; of this much Mrs Elliot remained keenly sensible. Any affection which was to grow between herself and the Doctor must be based upon compassion: the same compassion that had persuaded him to evade proper recognition of his medical skills for the dour and unrewarding labours of a resident physician at the Bethlem. That at least should be put an end to; with Mrs Elliot by his side, Dr Hood’s excellent talents, both social and medical, should be given their proper recognition in society.

  Yet before these happy visions could be fu
lfilled, she must endure that awful fag, those unhappy visions of her mad daughter.

  “How is my poor Jane, this week?” she sighed. “Is there to be no hope?”

  “I fear not, Madam, if I must be frank; and I freely confess that our growing intimacy compels me to such a course.”

  “True, Dr Hood, there must be no dissimulation between true friends; I should think less of you were you anything but frank.”

  “Let us pay a call on Miss Elliot, then; and I will tell you, as we walk—the little that there is to tell!”

  As Mrs Hepburn appeared to clear the table, Mrs Elliot made a point of lavishing her customary praise upon the almond biscuits; the Doctor’s housekeeper duly simpered and smirked, watching the Doctor by no means disapprovingly as he extended an arm to escort Mrs Elliot. She too, though devoted to the good Doctor, found the Bethlem a less than congenial platform from which to display her many talents.

  Nothing so blatant as the vulgarity of a wink was exchanged between the two women; still, each in their separate stations were of one mind.

  “She sees a different world, one that is not here,” observed Dr Hood, as they walked from his house, down a gravel path to an iron gate. “At first I believed she was rehearsing scenes from the old Bedlam. The dense crowds; the foul atmosphere; the clammering of woe-begotten minds after simple necessities. Yet why should she? There is a library, a music room, a room for games. Whist can be played, or nap or faro. We own a passable piano and spinet.”

  “All thanks to you, dear Dr Hood!”

  The Doctor demurred, showing genuine unaffected modesty. Unlocking the iron gate, he held it wide for Mrs Elliot, and they passed through a gravel yard to another locked door which he opened for her. A long corridor stretched before them, rays of sunlight filtering through the high, barred windows, illuminating motes of dust.

  “Besides, it is not the old Bedlam she sees; or believes she sees. I am almost tempted to suggest that it is a Bedlam which does not yet exist! But that is plainly nonsense; an idle fantasy! I am forced to conclude that the genesis of Miss Elliot’s sad condition lies in her disappointment in love. That provides the scenery of her painful agitation. Magnifying an agonising moment that occurred in the Pump Room at Bath, she projects—if I may stretch a word beyond its customary usage—her own grief upon that Room, till it grows grievous instead of her.”