Read The Jeweller's Skin Online
Authors: Ruth Valentine
The Jeweller's Skin
THE JEWELLER’S
SKIN
Ruth Valentine
Published by Cybermouse MultiMedia Ltd, 2013.
101 Cross Lane
Sheffield S10 1WN
Email: [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or stored in an Information Retrieval System (other than for the purposes of review) without the express permission of the Publisher in writing.
© copyright 2013 Ruth Valentine
The right of Ruth Valentine to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover illustration by Bill Allerton
© copyright 2013 Bill Allerton
In memory of Catherine Müller, 1881 – 1918
and her daughter, Katherina, 1906 - ?
whose story this might have been, but wasn’t.
Prologue:
1915
Part 1:
1946
Part 2:
1911 – 1917
Part 3:
1946 – 1947
Part 4:
1918 – 1919
Part 5:
1947
Part 6:
1922 – 1935
Part 7:
1947
Part 8
: 1917 – 1935
Part 9
: 1947
Epilogue:
1919
1915
She woke with the sound of someone whimpering. The words like most English words were shapeless to her, like the gurgle of pigeons outside in the trees; then
No,
she heard, a complaining tone,
No John.
In the darkened ward it could be any of them, the voice transformed: perhaps the woman with the withered arm, or the girl who fought with the nurses. She could see nothing: or nothing beyond the grey blanket over her, which around her feet merged into the darkness.
There was some creaking, too: a bed perhaps? But the sound was wood, a bedside locker maybe, the door swinging on its hinges. Carefully Narcisa sat up in bed, not wanting to add to the betraying sounds for anyone else who was lying there awake.
No,
the voice whimpered,
No, it’s not my fault.
The air was cold: the stove would have gone out. There was the faint smell of damp coal, or ashes perhaps; and then another smell she breathed in, testing, a peppery, sour smell that after a while she realised was the odour of all their bodies, sleeping, sweating, days since the weekly bath. It came to her as if she could see them all, naked, with flesh in folds, or else thin across the ribs, their armpits and crotches and hair all giving off odours, their indecent closeness inescapable even in sleep.
She got down from the high bed slowly, her feet chilled, and pulled the sleeves of her nightdress down over her hands. The blanket was scratchy but warm against her palms, the metal bed-frame icy. Her feet seemed to spread on the linoleum, seemed to stick to it, resisting moving on. At the end of the bed she paused, uncertain.
The ward was outlining itself in the dark around her. A foot stuck out beyond a tall white bedframe, as pale as bone, the toes half bent together. Something, perhaps a shift or a pair of drawers, had slipped off a chair and lay bunched on the floor.
She let go of her bedstead and walked on down the ward. By one bed there was the meaty smell of blood. Once she thought a woman might be awake, lying straight on her back with her hands outside the bedclothes; but there was no sign of attention as she passed. At the bend in the L-shaped room she stopped sharply: what if someone else was up beyond that corner? Her back felt cold under the flannel nightdress. She listened: nothing. And past the corner everything looked the same; she could have been entering her part of the ward again, with the lines of bedsteads, the grey blankets pulled up.
It seemed a long time before she reached the door. Where was it that the night attendant slept? She stopped herself reaching out for the china door-knob. Was it this end bed? She peered; but there was nothing to distinguish the grey mound, the sheet pulled up away from the foot of the bed, the hair blurred colourless against the pillow.
The door-knob was round and cold, and stiff to turn. She moved it slowly, slowly, hearing the quiet click, pulling the weight of the wooden door towards her. A half-light entered, a widening geometric shape that showed the linoleum as a dull blue-grey.
What..
a voice said from sleep and gave in again.
She slipped out through the gap and pulled the door closed again behind her.
It was the long curve of the corridor. She had forgotten where the door would take her, the night world of the ward was so compelling, the sense of strangeness and risk filling each moment. Only two or three of the lights were on, the other brackets dull like broken branches. The opposite wall was blank, no doors, no windows, just the bulge towards her of the dado-rail and the brown wallpaper below it. On her side, on either side of her were doors, exactly like the one she was leaning against, panelled, with white china handles and finger-plates. And behind each of those doors there is a ward, with white bedframes lined up, and grey blankets; and upstairs above us exactly the same again; and beyond that door at the end of the corridor the men’s wards, their different smells, what they say in their sleep.
Someone will come. I’ll be punished in the morning.
She walked barefoot down the centre of the corridor, her hands stretched out a little towards the walls, till she came to an outside door, which was swaying, open.
1946
The men were carrying wire netting out to a van. Narcisa, on her way to the stores, rested the flour-bin on a brick ledge to watch them. The head gardener was there, and Wilf, the boy who’d recently come to help him: a heavy blond lad, clumsy in his walk, good-tempered. Then Colin the maintenance man with one of the porters. They manoeuvred the netting in its rusty frame down the path to the van. Colin saw her and nodded, one hand high on the frame, which seemed to have been cut through, sawn jaggedly across, the netting like blackened crochet fraying open: to make it moveable, she supposed. The men pushed the netting into the back of the van and rubbed their hands.
It must be the exercise yard they were taking down. The exercise yard will have to go, of course, one of the doctors had said. Of course. One evening years back there had been a ward sister, some gangling Scottish woman with a cross round her neck, explaining how humane it was, the courtyard with the high netting, back behind the workshop where it got hardly any sun: ‘Otherwise their health would deteriorate, you know.’ Why tell me? Narcisa had wondered, saying nothing. Not that the sister would have expected her to answer. Second cook, she must have been at that time; and known presumably for not talking. ‘Let her alone,’ she’d heard the cook, Mrs Olby, saying once. ‘Nora Humphreys is all right, she’s just not a talker.’ By then she was almost used to being Nora.
She hefted the flour-bin onto her hip and entered the store-room. The air was mild and smelled slightly of grain. She opened the mouth of the sack in the corner, and began scooping out flour into the crock. The sack was almost empty, its depths tawny brown in the half-light. She leaned forward and scooped, stood to fill up the bin, enjoying the strong movement; like a farmer, she thought, like someone scything. It wasn’t only the yard they were taking down; last week they had sawn away the bars on the ward windows. Well, they must think it’s going to make a difference. She locked the store-room behind her. The late autumn sun was warm on the side of her face, the few steps till she was back in her kitchen. Doing the place up was a good thing. They were talking about painting the walls some pale colour, cream or light green, eau-de-nil someone said. So much paint! Just the long semi-circular corridor would need how many gallons? and several coats to cover the dark green. And then all the wards, the dining-rooms. Not that they’d notice, most of them: not the real patients. The others, the bombed-out civilians, still seemed to her intruders in the asylum, though they had been coming and going for six years, since almost the beginning of the war.
Not everyone felt as she did. She stopped again, though the van had gone, to feel the sun on her face, and rest the heavy earthenware crock on the ledge; after all the stew was on, she had a moment. Most of the staff, she knew, welcomed the sane ones, found them a relief; even though some had terrible injuries. ‘You know how to get on with them,’ that’s what a porter had said. ‘They don’t scream and holler and tear off their clothes.’
She went in and closed the kitchen door behind her. Something was wrong, she felt at once. The thick mutton-stew steam hid what it was. ‘June,’ she called sharply, the girl thinned out and blurred in the fatty mist. ‘What has happened?’ They hated that she always knew, these young girls. They had left home and still there was someone who knew. Only she understood it was the best way to train them. ‘You must not try to hide your mistakes,’ she told them.
June, she found, stepping firmly into the steam so that after a moment it was no longer there, was at the sink, potatoes falling apart in the great colander. Narcisa took the handles and shook it hard. Another chunk of potato fell open; cloudy water dripped into the sink.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked the girl.
‘Mash?’ The voice emerged high, upset rather than sullen.
Narcisa looked at the clock. ‘Get the working patients to help. You know what to do?’
The girl set the colander on the side, and bent to the drawer to find a potato-ricer. Narcisa lifted the abandoned flour-bin onto its shelf. She never asked, she couldn’t bring herself to ask, What were you doing? What were you thinking of? She’d had enough of that, in the past; it did no good. It made you resentful; made you not care. But these girls were used to being asked and so they told her, unnerved probably, feeling blamed by her silence. She knew they were always nervous of her. The only way.
June Ragless was not a bad girl. She wanted to learn, Narcisa thought; she minded that the food should be good enough, even for those poor things who scarcely noticed. June rammed the ricer down into the pan, and muttered, ‘Sorry, Cook,’ not looking at her. Hoping, Narcisa thought, I’ll say it doesn’t matter; but it does matter. ‘I was cutting the beans.’
You were thinking about your young man, Narcisa thought. It was like that in the hospital; everyone knew. She couldn’t have said how: June herself had never confided in her. June’s young man, Donald, she thought he was called, had been working down here at something, the last year or so of the war. But why wasn’t he fighting? What was wrong with him? He had gone back north, to Liverpool or Manchester. That was what happened with men. They were here, the sun shone or it snowed, something definite; and then they went, like a counter moved on a backgammon board, lifted and slapped down by some impervious hand, the army, the company; and never came back. Surely little June Ragless was too clever a one for that? Not one to stay moping about the kitchen, letting the potatoes disintegrate, the bread burn. That was what she quite liked in the girl: not a fool.
She lifted the lid off the stew and poked a piece of meat with a thin knife. Twenty minutes or so; she looked up at the clock. June was at the sink, with the second pan of potatoes. ‘You have twenty minutes,’ Narcisa said. June tipped the pan and steam rose through the kitchen.
*
In the evening she sat at the scrubbed-down table with her account books. The girls had gone. The smells of scouring-powder and cake and mutton stew had settled back into the heavy air. Narcisa raised her head briefly and sniffed. The kitchens had been built with not enough windows: just three, rather high, at either end, giving onto two of the closed-in courtyards. The smells never completely dissipated; as if they were stored on the high shelves, ready to be taken down next time they were needed. Sometimes at night she smelt them in her hair; she would be lying on one side, about to go to sleep, and smell greens or fried fish faintly on her pillow.
She opened the butcher’s book. The meat he sent her was getting worse. The last order of bacon had been rank; she’d sent it back and he’d said there was no more, so she’d had to change the menu and give them gammon, eking it out, because in truth there wasn’t enough. She must speak to Hartley the butcher yet again. An unpleasant man: he sneered at her accent. He stood, fat and blond, in his shop and looked at her, as if he knew something nasty from her past. Well, she thought, writing
Returned unfit
against bacon on the invoice, and folding it into the butcher’s book; I’ve done it before. ‘I can go to Gaffney’s in Raynes Park,’ she’d said, in the shop in front of his customers. ‘They provide already for several hospitals.’
Perhaps soon she would get better vegetables again. It was true that the diet was not good enough. It had never been very good; she had no illusions. Coming back here, eleven years ago now, she’d been appalled. She had got used to a certain style of life. The food, anyway. With fruit: greengages and raspberries and plums from the garden; lots of eggs and cream. Working in a private house you could make good things. She added the butcher’s account, leaving out the bacon. It was possible they had been late in paying him; that might be it. She would ask the accountant before she went to see him.
She sat back and stretched her arms above her head. Lately her back seemed to ache more often. It was standing; but her whole job was standing. She looked over at the cook in the picture tiles, next to the saucepans. A young woman, twenty years old perhaps, rolling out pastry. Not a real cook, she thought, as she always did. The hands on the rolling-pin were soft and flaccid; there was no effort in the arms or the thin shoulders. Behind this fake cook was a Welsh dresser with flowered plates; another young woman, with no cap on her dark hair, was carrying a pie straight from the oven. Narcisa stood up and looked for a cleaning-cloth, and wiped the sheen of grease off the tile picture. The colours shone; the late sun from the far window struck across them. Cobalt blue for the girls’ uniforms, with white aprons; a rich dark green for the wall beside the dresser. He couldn’t draw pastry though, she thought. The dough looked puffy; more like unironed muslin.
She turned to the greengrocer’s book and began adding. It would be good to have more from the hospital farm again. She had never understood why so much had gone: the eggs she supposed sent off to make egg powder; and then the staffing, the farm workers called up, and fewer male patients to be working with them. Will they start that again? A lot of the men had liked farm work; it was outside, physical but not too exhausting; and probably the farm hands were kind to them. She remembered the men going out to the milking shed; and before that, years back, gangs of men in asylum uniform, being led out single file to the kitchen garden. The men at least were allowed to work outside.
I must have seen that out of the window some time.