Nyctophobia (20 page)

‘An academic book about Spanish architecture,’ I said, deciding not to go into too much detail. ‘One of the architects I’m concerned with was employed by the hospital, and had a wife who was incarcerated here in May 1922. I’m just looking for some background information.’

‘I can probably help you there. The old mental institution was closed in 1936, but the files are all intact. If any of the old patients are still alive, we certainly never hear from them. In 2006 the archive records became public, which means we’re able to grant access. If you’d care to follow me?’

Senor Fernandez led the way to the rear of the building and down a concrete ramp. ‘There were horses kept here once,’ he explained. ‘The stables were converted into records offices. There was talk of opening some kind of museum, but I’m afraid the economic downturn put an end to that idea.’

Ahead were tall grey metal stacks filled with boxes containing manila folders, labelled by year, then alphabetically. ‘The years immediately following the Great War saw a massive influx of patients suffering from stress disorders,’ Fernandez explained. ‘Shell shock. Of course, nobody treated the women who were forced to bring up children alone without financial aid after their husbands were killed. In many cases it was simply assumed that they could cope.’ He tapped a box. ‘Here’s your month and year.’

There were only half a dozen folders, and I quickly found what I was looking for. Attached inside one was a small sepia photograph similar to the pictures I had seen in the darkened rooms of the house. It showed a woman’s thin tanned face tipped up at the sun, eyes narrowed in happiness, a broad rictus of a smile. I was immediately struck by the similarity between her smile and the one painted onto the creature’s china mask, the mask she wore to prove that she was still happy, even though she was dying behind it. She wore the black high-collared shift of a widow, and no adornment save for a small pendant at her neck.

A date read;
May 16th 1922 Elena Mendez Condemaine.

‘She was Galician,’ said Fernandez, translating for me. ‘It was common practice to have two last names. The first was usually the father’s first surname, and the second the mother’s first surname. So presumably her husband had an English mother?’

‘I know very little about her,’ I admitted, turning the page. ‘Could I get a photocopy of this?’

‘
Seguro
.’ He unclipped it and went off to make a duplicate. Bracketed into the next sheet was a formal family photograph, two boys and a small girl. I dug a fingernail under the picture and removed it, turning it over. The back read;
August 1913. Augustin, Farriol, 7 anos, Maria, 5 anos.

So Augustin and Farriol were the twins. Francesco Condemaine was killed in battle four years later, and she would have raised the children by herself for the next five years, before being committed. I pocketed the tintype of her before Fernandez returned with the page.

On the next page were clipped some handwritten letters dated 1920 and 1921. ‘Can you help me with these?’ I asked.

Digging out his glasses, he read for a few minutes. ‘These are from Senora Condemaine’s sister-in-law in London, and from other members of her family,’ he said. ‘Mostly descriptions of family life. Her sister-in-law repeatedly offers her help.
You must accept my offer in good faith, for the Blessed Virgin cannot always be relied upon to provide for you.
Another from relatives proposing to take care of the children, but it sounds as if she turned down the suggestion. Descriptions of a picnic, a summer fiesta, hoping the children get over their colds – everyday life, all perfectly ordinary.’

‘So there’s nothing –’

‘Wait, then there’s this, later,’ said Fernandez, ‘a letter from the mayor of the region refusing financial assistance. He says that although he appreciates her husband put every penny he earned into their house, and that she has been left destitute, she must surely have relatives upon whom she can call.’

‘Her husband was half-English. He volunteered to fight and it cost him his life. I’d have thought his widow would have got a war pension.’

‘Perhaps not if he was registered as Spanish and living out of England. There would certainly have been a dispute over it.’ He turned over a series of small printed slips and read them. ‘Yes, these are formal requests for financial assistance, all denied. That’s odd.’

‘What?’

‘There’s no reason given. Usually there’s a space – see? – in which the town clerk explains the reason for the council’s response, but these have all been left blank. Then there’s another reply to a request from Senora Condemaine, who has now declared that they have nothing left to live on. The note on the bottom looks like it’s in her own hand.
No-one in the village will help us. It seems we must rely on providence.
She says this twice –
no-one will help us.
That is very surprising.’

‘Why is it so surprising?’

‘The village councils were usually good at looking after destitute residents.’

‘Elena Condemaine lived out of town in a great house. Perhaps there was a feeling that she was too grand for them, or had ignored them in the past. Perhaps they thought she should sell up, or was being hysterical.’

Senor Fernandez shook his head. ‘From the tone of these letters, there’s no obvious indication of mental fragility. One normally finds something developing. Back in the years before Franco, the asylum was mainly used to house dangerous patients.’

‘What about the servants? They must have noticed something.’

‘There’s no mention of servants. One housekeeper only. From these letters it doesn’t sound as if they had any.’

‘But Francesco Condemaine had servants.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘He must have done, he had the servants’ quarters built into the house and furnished them,’ I said finally. ‘I think it was the estate agent who first mentioned it, but even she wasn’t sure.’

On the following pages were handwritten medical reports. ‘Can you give me some idea of what these notes say?’ I asked, waiting with growing impatience while Fernandez read slowly through them.

Finally he removed his glasses and folded them away. ‘Well, at least that explains why she was sent here,’ he said with finality. ‘Her admittance report has been included. Elena Condemaine either killed her three children or let them die. When the police arrived at Hyperion House, they found her happily living with the rotting corpses. It says;
con felicidas
. They had been dead for over two years – that’s after she wrote some of these cheerful letters to her family, saying that everything was fine. A fairly clear indication of her mental state, I’d say.’

‘That’s awful – does it say how they died?’

‘Only that all three children “departed life suddenly, at the same time, by intention.” If they had died of neglect and malnutrition they would have passed away at different periods.’

‘I read that Elena died a year after being admitted here. Is there anything more?’

‘The diagnosis doesn’t seem very exact. “Hereditary melancholy”, “Disease of the soul”, “Hysterical depravation”, “Discomfiture of the womb”. The latter state was supposedly connected to the states of menstruation and menopause. Elena Condemaine was given a variety of treatments but failed to respond.’

‘What kind of treatments?’

‘We still have a couple of the most widely used devices in our little museum,’ Fernandez said. ‘It’s only open to the public through special request, but I think we can consider yours a request, if you’d like to see them.’

‘Please.’

We left the archive and I followed him along a less well maintained corridor. A small square chamber had iron-barred slivers of window near its ceiling. Inside was a brown leather armchair that looked like an antique desk chair, except that it had wide leather belts attached to the arms and leg-rests.

‘This is the Rotating Chair,’ said Fernandez. ‘The patient was tightly strapped in and blindfolded, and an iron handle was inserted in the side there, attached to a gear. The chair would then be spun on its axis at very high velocity, thereby building a centrifugal force that created extreme discomfort and terror from the intense pressure applied to the brain. It caused nausea and a sensation of suffocation. The idea was that the treatment could be used to reset the patient’s equilibrium and brain.’

‘But that’s barbaric.’

‘Unfortunately it was a time when doctors were prone to experimentation on the most vulnerable.’

He walked over to what I now realised was another device, a large box made of sheets of iron, painted black. ‘This is the Belgian Box. It’s padded on the inside, and there was just enough room for the patient to sit in it with their legs folded up. The hatch would then be sealed and they would be left in the dark for up to twenty-four hours at a time. There are some tiny airholes, but not enough to admit any light. Again, the idea was to “clean” the brain and reset it, allowing the patient to emerge and start afresh. Thankfully the use of both devices was discontinued in the 1920s in favour of more humane methods of rehabilitation.’

‘I think I have quite a human story for my project,’ I said. ‘Elena Condemaine suffered from stress because her husband went to war, presumably against her wishes, and when he was killed she struggled to raise three children alone. At first she was too proud to accept outside help, then was turned down when she finally did so, and it all got too much for her to bear.’

‘It certainly sounds that way. Apparently she committed suicide on the first anniversary of her admission. It doesn’t say how but I imagine she would have hanged herself. It wasn’t uncommon then.’

‘Is she buried here?’

‘There’s no mention of it, and I doubt she would have been.’

‘Why not?’

‘The asylum was a Catholic institution run by nuns,’ Fernandez explained. ‘Patients who died by their own hand could not be buried within the grounds.’

‘Where would they have gone?’

‘I daresay their relatives took them back to their own churchyards or non-consecrated burial grounds. Senora Condemaine was probably taken to your nearest town. I don’t know what happened to the children. It would have been a matter for the police, but pre-Franco police records are very hard to come by.’

I thanked Augusto Fernandez and left. As I walked down the drive, I thought of the appalling cruelties inflicted on Elena Condemaine. Her nyctophobia had not been diagnosed by the doctors. Only her loving husband knew about it, and had even built her a house to banish the darkness from her life.

Instead, when she arrived here she had been blindfolded, spun around and shut in darkness, subjected to remedies that mockingly subverted the means of her salvation.

If any woman had reason to return from the dead and demand wrongs to be righted, it was Elena Condemaine. And I was sure that the means to do so was hidden somewhere in the house.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Graves

‘W
HAT DO YOU
think happened to the original floor plans?’ I casually asked Mateo over dinner that night. Bobbie was battling with a bowl of short noodles – Rosita had taught her how to make
fideua
earlier, and I was showing her how to pile the unfamiliar food onto her fork. ‘I tried the land registry office in Gaucia but they had nothing on file. Weren’t you given anything from the vendor?’

‘You saw the only file they handed over to us,’ he said, peering into a bowl of grey-green mush. ‘What is this?’

‘Aubergines. Our housekeeper has some help in the kitchen,’ I explained, ‘and your daughter has been watching
Masterchef
again. The technical drawing in the file was little more than a sketch. I’ve got all I need from my present measurements, it would just be helpful to compare them to the originals. The estate agent told me that the last owner left all his belongings here. He was sole surviving member of the family, wasn’t he? It seems as if Francesco Condemaine made sure that everyone would keep the house private.’

‘He was building it for his wife, not for public acclaim,’ said Mateo. ‘He wasn’t interested in becoming famous, he only wanted to make her happy.’

I stopped eating and looked at him. ‘Tell me, do I still make you happy?’

‘Of course you do. What a question.’

‘I know I’m not the maternal type, but –’

‘What are you talking about? Bobbie adores you. She’ll miss you when she goes to high school. Bobbie, tell your stepmother you love her.’

‘I
lurve
you,’ said Bobbie obediently, flicking tomato sauce everywhere.

‘When you go off to your glamorous boarding school overlooking the sea, Callie will be left all alone here with Rosita and the gardener,’ said Mateo, ‘so you’d better remember to Skype her when I’m away.’

‘Thanks for reminding me,’ I said with a shiver, thinking of what might happen if I was alone and one of the connecting doors came open at night.

‘If I can find someone to handle the longer trips, I can probably get away with just doing Madrid and Jerez.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘And then perhaps we should start thinking about a baby.’

I froze.

I had been dreading this moment, and now that it was here I was too dry-mouthed to answer. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but my main concern at the moment is to finish the first draft of the book.’ We ended the meal with awkward silences settling between us, silting the air with unspoken doubts.

I sat on the floor of the reading room with my sketches unfolded on the rug. Mateo had driven Bobbie into Gaucia for the evening. As the hours of light shortened, Eduardo’s café showed films in the square, and tonight they were running one of Bobbie’s favourites,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. It seemed like a good idea to let father and daughter spend some time together without me for a change, especially as she would soon be going away. Rosita had the night off, so the house was quiet but for the ever-present ticking of the clocks.

This is what it will be like when Bobbie has gone,
I thought morosely.

Marcos Condemaine’s drawings from his monograph on Hyperion House covered the light parts only, and made little sense. Parts of them were faded and scribbled over in indecipherable Spanish. There were peculiarities I didn’t understand; the passage of the sun was detailed, with pencil lines indicating where light would fall at different times of the year. The only thing you could discern from this was that the so-called servants’ quarters remained in perpetual night. Also, the positions of all of the larger clocks in the house were already marked on the plan. Why would you work out where the furniture was going to be placed when the house was still at the building stage?