A Petrol Scented Spring (14 page)

‘Your waist is thicker,' he says in a reedy voice, ‘your nose longer, you lack her fresh colour, yet the family resemblance is strong. How unfortunate that she should be so fair and you so plain.'

Tears of shame prick Nellie's eyes. At the same time, there is a curious balm in hearing spoken aloud what everyone sees and no one can say.

‘I am as God made me.'

The Superintendent will not let this answer stand, but must rebuke his patient, quoting the house rule that those who cannot behave as society expects will forfeit the benefits of society. The attendant ushers the man away. And yet if anyone's manners are at fault, it is the Superintendent's. When is
he
going to withdraw? He seems to think they have come all the way to Edinburgh to see him and his marvellous establishment. What do they care about the second parlour on this floor, the billiard tables, baths and douche, day room and gallery? On and on he boasts. His asylum is run according to the most enlightened principles. Trained nurses and ladies of the educated classes are employed to exert a calming influence on the more excitable inmates. Seclusion and restraint are seldom used, and only as a last resort. Kindness is the method, and congenial society. He and Matron go to great lengths to ensure that the gentlemen sharing each set of apartments are of complementary tastes and habits. Uncle John gives another discouraging nod. Nellie wonders what Papa might have in common with a tactless popinjay and a breathing corpse.

Now her embarrassment has subsided, she finds the courage to study him. He seems well. If anything, a little fatter than she remembers. His complexion is clear, but his face has undergone a change, as if some invisible servant had draped a dust sheet over his features. He never used to have those flaps of skin over his eyelids, that sagging jawline and bull-frog throat. He meets her gaze and she notices a peculiarity in one – or both – of his eyes, the pupils of different sizes.

‘Hello old girl.'

‘Hello Papa,' she says.

‘Have you brought Mrs Richmond?'

‘No, Papa.'

He smiles, as if she were ever forgetful. ‘Next time.'

Does he not remember what happened eight years ago?

As far back as she can recall, he was scared of the dark. When her mother was alive Lawhill was ablaze with lights. Even the cowshed. Pails of water everywhere in case the straw caught fire. In the kirk on Sundays he prayed without closing his eyes. Her mother used to say he even slept with one eye open. But her mother died, giving birth to Dot, the daughter who bears her name. Papa had the joiner cut two holes in the coffin lid so she could see out. What was that but madness? Tom disagreed: how could he court Kate Allan so soon after, and marry her, and father three sons with her? No woman marries a madman, even if she is thirty-five. It was grief that had him shouldering the turf-cutters aside that awful day, grief that had him down in the clay trench clawing at the coffin. And perhaps it was. But Nellie was the one who sat by his bedside nine years later, after Doctor Balsiger had given him laudanum. She heard him sobbing in his sleep, begging Grandma Richmond to unlock the cupboard door.

What he loved best about Switzerland was being bathed in white light. Even at midnight, the mountains reflected the moon. The high passes held no fear for him. If he wasn't drinking Kirschwasser in the Wirtshaus or buying trifles for Dot, he was walking in the snow. They would see other hikers in low-brimmed hats, and even tinted spectacles, to shield them from the glare. But not Papa. No one was worried the day he was late back. They dined without him. Nellie was just finishing her soup when there was a commotion outside the window. The Belgians at the next table left their plates to look. Papa was being led through the hotel gardens, weeping, stumbling, turning his head frantically this way and that.

The physician had treated many cases of snow blindness. Papa cursed and fought when they bandaged his eyes, so they bound his wrists and his thrashing legs. You could hear him all over the hotel. That first night, his wife kept watch. He begged and begged her to loosen the binding that was chafing his wrists. Nellie will never forget being dragged out of sleep by her stepmother's screams. The marks showed on Mrs Richmond's neck for days.

Among the hotel guests was an alienist travelling with his wife and sons, a conscientious Austrian who spoke heavily-accented English in a low, measured voice. Nothing surprised him. Was that why Nellie answered his questions so fully? Mrs Richmond blamed her, even when she'd found a way of turning the situation to advantage, but Nellie only told the truth.

Not that Papa seems so very mad today. If anything, he's too calm, lacking that mischievous spirit Nellie remembers, his way of turning the most humdrum activity into a game. Dot loved this in him. She was never disconcerted by his exuberance. And in return, he let her take liberties Nellie would never have been permitted. Riffling through his pockets. Playing with his moustaches. Even now, perched on the arm of his chair, she holds his big Richmond paw between her small hands. From time to time she strokes it, like a kitten.

‘Nellie is to be married, Papa,' she says.

And all at once Nellie grasps what her younger sister seems to have understood all along. They are here to seek his blessing on her happiness. To launch her on the long voyage of the rest of her life.

Papa's face brightens with amusement. ‘Who's the lucky fellow?'

Just what he would have said in the old days. A great weight of dread lifts from Nellie's shoulders.

‘George Farquhar.' She hears herself omitting the middle names Georgie sets such store by, and for a moment she glimpses the life that might have been. Georgie taking tea at Lawhill. And later, Papa mocking the nervous swipe of his tongue over his dry lips. Remarking that most men use two names, or three if their mothers are well-born, but he has never met a fellow so grand he needs
four
just to say how d'ye do. She explains to Papa that, since Willie Farquhar is set to inherit Pitscandly, Georgie has entered the Episcopalian church. She would like to say more, about the strange workings of fate, how if her stepmother had not reinvented herself as a Piscie, she and Georgie would never have met. But the less said about Mrs Richmond the better.

‘Are you wanting me to give you away?'

The question catches her off guard. In truth, this is the last thing she wants. Papa in the cathedral. Praying open-eyed. Winking at Lady Cheyne.

‘I'm afraid it's out of the question, old girl,' he says, when dismay is already written across her features.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a smirk visit the Superintendent's face.

‘Why?' she asks.

The Superintendent starts to speak.

‘I would rather hear from Papa,' she says.

‘I might catch a chill. The sneeze is a dangerous uncontrollable urge. Many men have been sent mad with sneezing.'

Dot laughs and Nellie understands that Papa is teasing.

‘I have not suffered a violent paroxysm for eleven months now,' he adds. In earnest, as far as she can tell.

‘You're recovered?'

Papa looks at the Superintendent.

‘He has benefited from our regimen and the quietness of his surroundings.'

Papa says to Dot, ‘It was the stitching that cured me.'

‘Stitching, Papa?' She was never happier than when being the foil to his jokes.

‘If we rend our garments in our despairing passion, we're obliged to sew them back together again.'

Even Dot can't find this funny.

‘Do people really tear their clothes?'

‘To shreds sometimes.'

A silence falls.

The offer is not Nellie's to make, or not hers alone, but still she says ‘Come home, Papa. We'll look after you. You can live as quietly as you please, among people who love you.'

The Superintendent coughs, ‘I could not in conscience sanction that.'

Papa's cheeks redden, his mismatched eyes grow bright. ‘Live with you and your Georgie Porgie?'

‘Or with Dot, if you prefer.'

He smiles. ‘With Donella.'

‘Near Uncle John,' Dot says, ‘in Brickhall.'

‘And what about my wife?'

‘Mrs Richmond lives in England now.'

But the words taste bitter in Nellie's mouth. Is this what madness is: being lied to by those who lay claim to sanity?

‘And she may not wish to see you.'

The bony, yellow-skinned man on the Chesterfield looks up at the ceiling. Dot follows his glance. Nellie looks to Uncle John, but he's half-deaf from forty autumns on the grouse moors. Again it comes. The lowing they heard on the stairs. A human herd, moved by a single impulse. Excitement? Discontent? Or just a bovine urge to make noise? It seems even stranger to her now, more terrible: the thought of Papa sharing a house with men who moo like beasts.

The Superintendent excuses himself.

‘What
is
that?‘ Dot asks.

Papa touches a forefinger to his lips, waiting until the door closes behind the Superintendent. ‘Poor tormented souls,' he says.

Nellie wonders if living with so many lunatics has shocked the madness out of Papa. Or was he never properly mad? If snow can make a man blind for a week, why should it not scramble his wits temporarily? And there was the Kirschwasser, of course. Why was everyone so sure of his insanity? She is afraid she knows the answer. Mrs Richmond saw a way of saving her sons' inheritance before there was nothing left. Tom wanted to go back to Scotland. Nellie was tired of standing in the shadow of her younger sister. And the alienist had spent so long among the mentally bereaved, he saw madness everywhere.

‘It's time to light the lamps,' the bony man announces in a fluting Highlander's voice.

They all turn towards the window. A layer of cloud has blotted out the afternoon sun, but dusk is still hours away. The man rises from his seat and stamps across the wooden floor. Nellie's chair trembles. A vase of yellow irises rattles on a table. Reaching the door, he raises a fist and hammers on one of the panels.

Nellie comes to his aid, trying the handle. The door opens.

‘Go away,' he says, pushing it shut and resuming his knocking.

Papa winks. ‘Andrew has no intention of going out. He wishes Jacob to come
in
.'

There's no point trying to conduct a conversation over this bombardment. They must sit and wait until the attendant arrives with a burning spill. Andrew stamps after him, around the room, but offers no assistance with the tricky business of removing the glass shades while protecting the flame from draughts. The creamy radiance inside each globe makes little impression on the daylit room, but Andrew seems the easier for it.

Loudly enough for Nellie to hear, Dot whispers ‘Why does he stamp like that?'

‘Andrew? He was driven mad by love.‘

Dot frowns and Nellie knows she is thinking of Norman Atkins and what he would have to do, how far he would have to go, to separate her from her wits.

‘It is common enough in this place,' Papa says, ‘though not so common as those sent mad with grief. Men
and
women. Otherwise we keep to our separate maladies. Women go mad with birthing, and praying, and looking in the glass. Men with dissipation, or being swindled. Or with pride, or the shaking sickness, or sunstroke, or self-hate, or sitting hour after hour without moving, or moving too excitedly.'

‘Or with drunkenness,' Nellie says.

Papa nods. ‘It's carried in the blood.'

Nellie's dread returns.

Dot too looks stricken. ‘But we're not mad, Papa.'

He seems to search her face for corroboration. ‘I thank God for it,' he says at last.

Dot is looking at Nellie. She is the elder sister. It's her duty to ask the uncomfortable question.

‘Are you saying your madness waited within you all the years you were well?'

‘So they tell me, old girl.'

The attendant brings his lighted spill to the lamp by Papa's elbow.

‘
Fiat lux
,' Papa says.

Nellie would not dream of lighting a lamp before seven o'clock in late spring. It is a question of not wasting God's good gifts. And Uncle John might think the less of her – Uncle John, who has said and done nothing since they arrived, unless she counts studying his boots. He, too, had reason to wish an end to his brother's spendthrift ways. Silk waistcoats and neckties. Jewelled stick pins. Kid gloves so soft they made her shiver. To Papa these were necessities. It occurs to Nellie that the asylum, with its Rococo sideboards and gilt-framed panoramas, its Ormolu clocks and Persian rugs, is perfectly suited to his tastes.

‘Are you happy here, Papa?'

‘Of course.'

‘You don't feel imprisoned?'

‘No more than any spy,' he says in such a reasonable tone that her mind flails like a landed fish, trying to find the sense in his words.

‘Why spy, Papa?'

He leans forward confidentially, ‘They've not told you?'

She shakes her head.

Again he brings a forefinger to his lips, ‘I'm here in disguise, to ascertain how these pour souls are treated—'

She looks at him, fascinated, appalled.

‘—We care for all our subjects. Even lunatics.' His lower lip shines wetly through his mutton-chop moustaches. ‘The Queen sent me here on a special commission.'

‘No, Papa,' she says gently.

‘My wife, the Empress Victoria.'

Dot giggles, but Nellie does not think he is joking. And neither does Dot, deep down.

‘You're still married to Kate Richmond, Papa.'

‘Oh yes. Her too—'

Uncle John heaves a sigh as if wearily familiar with this line of talk.

‘—I have five hundred wives.'

‘
Papa
.' Dot shoogles his hand as if to shake some sense into it.

‘Don't be jealous, Donella,' Papa says, kissing her full on the mouth.