The Jeweller's Skin (3 page)

The records were in a terrible state.  That was what Howard Rathfelders saw, coming back to the asylum from the war, promoted from Assistant Clerk to Clerk, because Hume his irascible boss had been killed in action.  Hume would have raged, seeing the gaps in the ledgers, the papers falling out of manila files.  Hume would have stood still, hands in his pockets, the greying stubble sinister on his jaw, and defeated Howard with his sarcasm.  ‘Who did you think would sort this out?  Stafford Cripps?’

Failing Cripps, Howard himself arrived at eight in the morning and left at seven, updating the patient records, locating minutes and pasting them into books, subtracting figures for bank reconciliations.  ‘You can’t do everything,’ his sister Lilian said, and he knew she meant: I miss you here at home.  Somewhat nervously, he approached the Medical Superintendent, Dr Bosanquet; who glanced down casually at the black leather glove pinned over the blunt end of Howard’s left arm, and said, ‘Of course, of course, quite understand.’  The result, the next Monday, was a Miss Carrington, pale and round-shouldered, as disappointing to Howard’s suppressed sadness as he no doubt was to her, being both Jewish and maimed.  For the first time he felt old Hume stir in him, the sarcasm that came he saw from humiliation.  Fearing that impulse, he scarcely spoke to her.  One day he saw her hurrying up the drive, a leather music case in her left hand.  ‘You play?’ he asked awkwardly, as she took off her coat.  She turned away from him to hang it up.  ‘Oh no,’ she said, into the laden hat-stand.  ‘No, I sing.  You know, in a choir.’ 

He remembered the madrigal group he’d joined at college, the strange lamenting harmonies of Dowland.  ‘What are you working on now?’  he asked.  But it was Mendelssohn:
Elijah,
of course, the stalwart of dull provincial churches.  After that he imagined her in a white surplice; and once, in his startling dream, she took it off, and showed him unsuspectedly full breasts, with large dark nipples.  He realised he scarcely heard her speak.  Between them, without conversation, they filed and wrote in copperplate and added, and something a little like order crept back in; and in Libya the remains of his left hand, already fleshless in the heat, sank further under the dune and into fragments.

He was cold this morning, lingering in his hat and coat; thoroughly chilled by the long walk from the station.  Before the war he had cycled every day, from Lilian’s house in Kew and back again, an exertion that cleared his head and carried him through the heaviness of the asylum.  Cycling was one more thing that was lost to him.  He had tried, once, on the towpath by Kew Gardens, and nearly fell straight into the Thames, with neither grip nor balance.  So he read the
News Chronicle
on the train, and walked through the back alleys of the town, to the wind off the fields and lawns of the asylum.  It was cold; and he was worried about Lilian, whose husband Gibb was still fighting, stuck out in Burma, where the war wasn’t over.

Miss Carrington had arrived before him, and opened the post.  Howard warmed his hand on the radiator, then sighed and came to sit at his oak desk.  Here were bills, a circular from the London County Council, instructions for transferring the war patients; and one of the small blue envelopes, hand-written, that would be a plea from some mother or brother for the discharge of an asylum patient.

Send them all out, he thought, nihilistic this morning.  Why not?  Why has Miss Carrington given me this to deal with?

Attached to the slit envelope with a paper-clip was a note in her small meticulous writing:
Are we permitted to release this information?  MC.

He held down the envelope with the weight of his arm, and took out the folded letter.

Dear Sir

I should be very grateful if you could assist me.  My mother was a patient at Holywell in 1916..

Dear God, he thought, what happens to families?  Thirty years.  Didn’t anyone keep in touch?

He stood up and went to the Admissions Registers.  It took some time, working back from 1916, before he found the name given in the letter.  Admitted just before the First World War.  A small fear turned in his stomach, that the woman would still be here, on a back ward, aged and madder no doubt than the day she came in.  His finger moved slowly across the line; but no, the final column was filled, in red ink:
Discharged cured, 7 April 1919.

Cured, he thought.  What optimists they were.

Not going to be much use to the letter-writer.

At lunch-time his assistant stood before his desk.  He set himself once again to observe her voice, to find the tone or breadth it might have in her singing.

‘Yes, Miss Carrington?’  he asked, quite gently.

She was holding the letter.

‘Is there something not clear in my note?’  he asked.

It took her a long time to speak to him.

‘No, Mr Rathfelders.’  She never managed to say his name fluently.  ‘It’s just that the person, the patient, is still here.’

He felt his impatience bubble.  ‘The register..’

‘Yes, Mr Rathfelders, I know, I don’t mean that.  The patient, the former patient; well, at least there’s someone of that name.’

When she had gone he tidied up his papers and walked briskly along the chilly corridors to the staff dining-room.  Dr Bosanquet was already at the table, tucking in with enthusiasm to shepherd’s pie and greens.

Well, I have to eat, Howard told himself, and sat down.  Almost at once the plate was in front of him.  He knew Bosanquet would watch how he ate with one hand.

At least today I have something to distract him.

The sun rose beyond the creosoted perimeter fence.  The line of poplars that sheltered the female wing from the lane - or perhaps it was the other way - was shining, sun fractured through the small leaves and orderly branches.  A squirrel ran head-first down the trunk of a horse-chestnut, and stopped alertly by the rose-border.

In E Ward, the nearest to the Medical Superintendent’s house, Herbert Jennings tried not to be awake.  His right hip was aching.  He turned carefully onto his left side, hoping to rest it.  But the mattress was terrible; he’d had no idea hospital beds would be so poor.  The image came back, the same as every morning: waking in their big front bedroom in Haggerston, the daylight in slivers beside the curtains, Evie curled on her side in a pink nightgown.  He put his hand flat on his hip-bone to draw the pain.  The house was gone, the bed, the bedlinen - he didn’t want to go over that list any more.  And I’m stuck out here in the country with the loonies.  At the far end of the ward somebody muttered gloomily in his sleep.

Kitty Bosanquet, the wife of the Medical Superintendent, sat in the drawing-room with a cup of tea.  She preferred to be out of the way when her husband got up.  Not that he was ill-tempered in the morning.  Mrs Stewart had confided once that Dr Stewart shouted at her in the mornings, which James would never do.  Simply he needed his routine, his shaving water the right temperature, his breathing exercises at the window.  She quite understood, with all his responsibilities, the massed grey-brick buildings of the hospital, all the people in it, that he needed to start the day with a routine.  Only she could no longer bear to watch his thickened back in the blue pyjamas, as he stood at the open window and flung out his arms.  She came down and made herself tea; got out of the way of the maid, Turner, a fat rather surly girl, and sat on the chesterfield.  The white roses on the mantelpiece were starting to fall.  She should ask James how he had enjoyed the concert.  A pity she’d missed it; she would like some music.  She looked out across the lawn where the grass was brightening, towards the men’s wards with their dark windows.

In 12, the Women’s Acute ward, Mary Godley sat crouched up on her pillow.  The  curtain edges were red like diluted blood.  All the poor fools in the ward were still asleep, more than one of them snoring.  They had no idea how important this time was.  Time was what mattered.  She no longer had a wrist-watch - it must have been stolen - but she always knew exactly what the time was.  Now, with the curtains red, it was nearly six.  Soon the nurses would come to wake them.  The rest of them will complain or plead or pretend to be unwell, but not me.  I know what I will have to do today.  I will say nothing; if I say nothing, they cannot do anything.  I have had that happen, being taken by surprise; I’ve learned my lesson.

In the milking-shed Alun Harris was half-way down the row already.  The whitening sunlight poured in through the end door, and gleamed on the aisle which was already sleek with muck.  The ten cows in their stalls stood beyond the slice of light.  One near the door lifted her tail and pissed loudly.  Alun stood and patted his current cow on her brown-and-white flank, then manoeuvred the full bucket out of the way of her hooves.  She could be vindictive, this one.  He lifted the bucket high and let the milk pour fast, foaming, into the churn.  For a moment the smell of warm milk was stronger in his nostrils than the smells of cow-skin and dung and urine; then they blended again.  He moved to sit by the old Friesian.

Noise spread from the farmyard up to the hospital buildings.  Doors opened, curtains were swished back, water poured.  The day gate-porter took over from the night gate-porter, talking about the film he’d seen last night.  Win Dewhurst, who had overslept, ran downstairs to the laundry with her face unwashed.  The skin on her cheeks felt thick as she crossed the yard.  In one of the back wards a woman began to shout, short bursts like a dog yelping, on one note over and over.  Nurses came and went in the long semi-circular corridor that linked the wards.

The hospital, cramped and neglected throughout the war, was starting up.  The last of the civilian casualties - Herbert Jennings and a dozen others, slow-healing, recalcitrant - were to be transferred.  The mentally ill would return.  Those who all through the war had escaped diagnosis in the new sharp light were seen clearly again, their depression a silence amongst the festivities, the voices only they heard shouted down.

The wards were filling.  The farm, all clanking and calling, was buying in livestock.  The upholstery, the grocer’s, the metalwork shop were staffed again.

In the locked wards and the open ones, in the needleroom and the greenhouses and the chapel, in the nurses’ block and the offices, the long-past patients and their dead attendants watched as the routines settled back again.  On the lawn near the mortuary George Thomas Hine, stout in his late Victorian hat and greatcoat, checked off the grey-brick buildings against his drawing.  Of course they had lasted: this was his sixth asylum.

In the kitchen Narcisa watched porridge thicken in huge pans, air belching up through the surface like a geyser; boiling water being poured into gallon tea-pots; bread being cut; crimson jam being spooned onto flat dishes.  For a moment there was a quite different taste in her mouth: apple.  A long time since she’d had any such thing.  What was the kind I liked at Edwin’s?  Laxton Superb.

‘Mrs Humphreys, I am disappointed in you.’

She flinched, and looked down.  There was flour caked along the sides of her fingernails.  She hadn’t had time to scrub her hands properly, only rinse them under the tap, and take off her apron and overall, while the domestic sent to find her, a middle-aged woman with a broad incurious face, leaned against the doorframe, humming a tune.

Across the desk Dr Bosanquet was waiting.  There must have been a complaint.  Had somebody seen her at the George?

‘You have worked for the hospital for a number of years, and on the whole your work has been satisfactory.’

On the whole!  She stared at the side of his neck, where the collar dug in.  I have worked hard, very hard, for how long is it?  Nineteen thirty-five: eleven years.  The injustice of it made her flushed and sullen.

His pale fat hands stretched out towards a letter on the desk in front of him: a small blue envelope, the address hand-written.  Could it be the butcher, Hartley, aggrieved, trying to get her into trouble?

‘I have reason to believe that you were once a patient at this asylum.’

All the force she’d summoned drained down through her body, till what was left was cold and motionless.

‘Mrs Humphreys?’

She nodded.

She sat still while he went on berating her, in his rolling voice.  She sat and felt herself switch off understanding, become again the solitary young woman around whom officials stated their decisions, in English she had no way of penetrating.  Strange-sounding words came through to her:
false pretences.

He was going to fire her.  She would have to leave again, with just once suitcase, down the drive and out through the main gate, onto the lane and up the long empty road to the railway station, with no work and nowhere to live.  Could she still stop him?  When he paused for breath, leaning back in his chair, she managed, ‘I am sorry.  I did not think it was relevant.’

‘Not relevant!’ He leaned across the desk towards her, the lapel of his suit brushing the blue letter.  ‘Mrs Humphreys, this is a mental hospital.  Our expertise is the nature of mental illness.  The psychiatric history of our staff is of the utmost relevance.  And in any event, as your employer..’

I will never find a job again, she thought.  I did it before but I cannot do it now.  Perhaps he is going to fire me on the spot.  Not even let me go back to my kitchen.  But who would they get to manage tonight’s supper?

He turned the envelope over in his hands and took out a single sheet of paper.  Someone must have told him.  Can there be someone still working from that time?  She watched as he unfolded the flimsy paper.

‘This is from a person,’ he said, and Narcisa’s English returned reluctantly, ‘who wishes to learn of your present whereabouts.’

‘My.. ?’

He looked up, irritated, interrupted.  ‘Your whereabouts, Mrs Humphreys.  Where you are living.’  He spread the letter flat with his thick hand.  ‘She has written, ignorant of the fact that you now work here, enquiring because you were once, as she says, a patient.  It was only the Assistant Clerk, a conscientious young woman, who brought it to our attention that there was in fact a person of that name.’

Clara, she thought, it must be from Clara.  But no, Clara had come to see her, before the war, tall and thin as ever, with greying hair.

She waited.  The Matron’s voice sounded outside in the hall: ‘Certainly not.  What are you thinking of?’

‘This person is claiming to be your daughter.’

*

She came out of Dr Bosanquet’s office and walked the wrong way, across the tiled entrance hall and out of the front door of the asylum. Thin snow covered the grounds.  The air was icy and almost still.  One side of the giant cedar was mottled with white. 

She walked tentatively down the steps into the cold.  She had work to do.  She needed to plan the menu for the week.  Instead she turned right, along the path towards the gate.

Beyond the fence, across the road, were the milking sheds, the blacksmith’s shop, the farm workers’ cottages.  She stood in the cold, her hands pushed inside her sleeves, the chill of the gravel path drawn up through her soles.

She remembered standing in the ironing-room, flat-iron in hand, turned towards the steam-covered window, a sound that could have been the workhouse cart diminishing outside on the drive.  She had tried to keep it in hearing, straining towards it, and when it had gone she had put the iron down flat and run, calling her daughter, out of the room.

The smell of scorched linen.

She went on walking round the perimeter fence.  A bus lumbered past between the hedges, tilting towards her as it turned the corner and went on up the lane towards the town.  She caught sight of a boy in a flat cap, sitting upstairs.

Violeta.  I wanted her so much.  Her arms and her body ached, wrapped round a void.  As soon as I got out, I wanted to have her with me.  Even though Edwin said no.  I did keep trying.

She remembered sitting on the piano stool, in the house in Pimlico; the image she kept having of Violeta running into the room, five or six years old, her thick dark hair in bunches. 

Ahead of her eight or ten male patients, heads lowered against the cold, were walking back from the cabbage field, with Alun the farmhand sauntering behind them.  Not wanting to speak, she stopped and stared out at the muddy road, till the men had turned down the path to the main building.

I wanted the best for her.  I thought she would have a better life without me.  Foster-parents, a nice house, an education. But when did I start to think that?  I must have given up.

She turned back towards the asylum buildings.  From here the chapel, long and low like a shed, half-blocked the view of the entrance porch and windows.  The square brick tower was grey on the grey sky.

I betrayed her.  In the end I did nothing.

A few hard snowflakes struck against her cheek.

‘Cook!’

Someone was running down the path towards her.  She gasped, looking up.  But it was only young June Ragless, still in her apron, fair hair flying, her cheeks pink with the cold and the pleasure of coming outside on an errand.

*

A man was standing by the larder door, stocky and awkward in a rough brown jacket, a green knitted scarf loosened around his neck.  She looked at him with fear, and then away, down at his wellingtons which were shiny with wet.  There will be mud on the stone floor, she thought.

At the far end of the kitchen someone giggled.  June leaned towards her.  ‘Please, Cook, he’s off the farm.’

Not punishment, then.  The new farm manager.

‘Good morning, Mrs Humphreys.  Sorry to disturb you.’  His spectacles were blank with steam; he wiped them carefully on a blue handkerchief.  The pale skin round his eyes made her feel queasy.

She was shivering suddenly, back in the warm kitchen, though outside she had hardly noticed the cold.  She held onto her fore-arms to keep them still.  There was another sound from the far end.  Wrenching the words from somewhere lost in her, she said, ‘You will please organise the working patients.’

She turned back with another effort to the man.  ‘There is a problem?’

‘I’m sorry to say there is a bit of a problem.  That’s why I come down to have a word.’  He went on; but she was already back in the office, Dr Bosanquet’s fat hands on the blue letter.  He would certainly fire her.  Perhaps he had; perhaps he’d said it and she hadn’t heard. 
Down the drive
, that was that they called it: humiliated, the whole asylum knowing.  Out past the porter’s lodge without a greeting, without a goodbye, out into the lane and where?  With all her things in a suitcase, just as she’d come here eleven years before; and who would give her a job once she’d been fired?  Not at her age.

The man from the farm was waiting for an answer.  What had he been saying?  Something about the milk.  She spoke weakly, her voice still rough and jerky, like someone’s else: ‘What do you suggest?’

He looked relieved; he cleaned his glasses again.  The smell of strong stale tea reached her abruptly, and straight away the sound of water pouring, then June’s high-pitched voice: ‘No, what you do with the grouts..’

‘We can see if East Hill have got some,’ the man said.  ‘They might have, they’ve just bought some new Friesians.  Otherwise it’s the dairy down in Ewell.  I’ll get one of my lads to cycle over to East Hill straight away, if that suits.’

She tried to think.  ‘Yes, of course.  Thank you.’  But perhaps there was something she had not understood.  ‘You think this will be enough?  From East Hill, or where you said, the dairy?’

‘We’ll manage between them, don’t you worry, Mrs Humphreys.’  He seemed more at ease now, offering reassurance.  ‘Can’t have you short of milk for tea, now, can we?  Now if you’ll excuse me.’

Why had he come, she wondered, turning back to the busy kitchen.  June and the round-shouldered girl who was her friend were dragging a sack of carrots to the sinks; the patients had washed up and were putting away.  Had he been told she would be difficult?  The sense she’d had, seeing him standing there in his brown jacket, stayed with her: that he was something to do with her disgrace; that he might be spying.  Perhaps I would be difficult normally.  Perhaps I should have been angry with him.  It all seemed remote and trivial.  If there was not enough milk they would use milk-powder.  Dr Bosanquet, she thought, and saw him again, his round bald head, his wide shoulders in the good navy suit as he leaned forward.  She had stood and stared across his desk at his tie, gold and red diagonal stripes that meant something, she was sure someone had told her they meant something.  All the time he was berating her in his ponderous English, she’d watched the gold and red tie lifting and falling, as he breathed more air into his lungs; as if the simple answer, what his tie meant, would free her from all this, would be the answer she could give to him and stop him speaking at last, so that she could carry on as she had all this time, living here in the asylum, working.

‘Excuse me, Cook,’ the round-shouldered girl said.  Peg, her name was Peg.  ‘Isn’t it time to put the brisket on?’

She looked around.  The kitchen, the line of giant cooking-pots, the sinks and dressers, the staff and working patients, all seemed poised to judge her.  They know, she thought, and had to tell herself that it was nonsense.  They will know when I’m fired.  She turned to Peg, her neck and her spine aching.  The girls looked down, hands wound in her apron.

‘Very well,’ she said, not knowing what would come out.  ‘You will see to the brisket, please.  You have seen before how to do it?’

‘Um, yes, Cook.’

‘Ask two of the patients to work with you.’  She looked to see what else there was to do.  The week’s menu was pinned up beside the dresser; she squinted slightly but couldn’t make it out.  The carrots lay gnarled and grubby in their sack.  ‘Today I will do the vegetables.’  It was all she could do this morning, something simple, even if if turned out to be the last day in her kitchen.  She was still there in her ordinary clothes.  She put on her overall and apron,  and went to the first sink, rolling up her sleeves.  One of the patients by the larder whimpered.  ‘Enough,’ she said, not looking, and there was quiet.

The cold water struck her hands with a kind of pain.  For a minute or more that was all there was, her hands pale in the sink full of cold water, the effort to make them grip the scrubbing-brush and the large, lumpy carrots.  The mud flaked off in pieces and then dissolved; the water turned milky brown.  She scrubbed hard, one carrot after another, and tossed them into the bowl on the draining-board.  As her hands got used to the cold, the fear returned.  She should have said at the start that she’d been a patient.  But no: she had come without references, having walked out of her job as housekeeper; she had had to lie, claiming she’d worked abroad.  She tried to recall the interview, in the Matron’s office some time in late autumn; but the figure of that Matron would not come clear, overlaid with the present stout form of Miss Atkinson, and the gaunt grey-haired woman from thirty years before.

At the next sink June Ragless had finished scrubbing, and was scooping potato peelings into the pig-bin.

None of this mattered, she understood suddenly, slicing the carrots in rounds, fast, rhythmically, the heavy knife bouncing up from the board.  She would be fired; but that was not the point. 

This person is claiming to be your daughter.

For a moment, standing in Dr Bosanquet’s office, she had seen the young woman of her long imagination, slim and dark-haired, at an elegant writing-desk.  If she had thought of Violeta at all, in these last years, it had been like this: calm and contented, stylish, educated; a spacious modern house with doors to a garden; the husband perhaps an officer in the Navy; two young sons.  Then as he went on speaking it fell away, the image she now understood as her cowardice, her reluctance to wonder what had really happened.  It collapsed like glass out of a broken window, and what was left was nothing, the blank of her knowledge of the past thirty years.  Violeta could be anything, a teacher, a cook like herself, someone working long hours in bad light at a machine, always ill, always poor.  She could be a married woman whose husband beat her; or even - she made herself think it - a prostitute, under a railway bridge with a drunk soldier.  Narcisa bent over her work, tears in her eyes, the knife at rest in her hand.  There was no knowing who her daughter was, except that she had lived all her life without her mother.