The Jeweller's Skin (11 page)

She remembered his fat hands holding Violeta’s letter, and shook her head.

May Gemmell stood up to go and wash her hands.

*

She woke in the night.  The curtains were rippling out into the room; the window rattled.  She pulled the blankets up over her shoulders.  She had had a dream; but nothing was left of it, except the image of a high dark wall, and a dull feeling of dread.

She turned on her side, and shifted the pillow down, to keep out the draught.  There was June Ragless, her mascara smudged, saying, ‘I’m worried I’ve got her into trouble.’  ‘All right,’ Narcisa said, ‘I’ll find out; I’ll make sure the nurse who did it is disciplined.’  But that wasn’t what she had said.  She lay on her back again and closed her eyes; but soon the whole scene started up again, Rosaleen Shaw warning June, ‘I thought we’d agreed,’ herself responding sharply; June waiting to see her. 

She gave in, and sat up, leaning against the pillow.  She could hear the wind swishing through the trees.  The bed in the next room creaked briefly.  It’s true, she thought, I ought to do something.  I’ll go and see Sister Healy in the morning.  Which one was Healy?  There was a small, plump woman, always making jokes; was that her?  But surely it was the Ward Sister’s job to tell her, if a patient couldn’t work.  Except that the Shaw woman was the one who’d decided. 

The side of her neck was starting to ache with the cold.  This is stupid, she told herself.  All I have to do is talk to the Sister.  But it wasn’t so simple: June was right, it might get Esme into more trouble.  So I will just have to be careful what I say.

She sat with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the wind outside, with the same dread that the vanished dream had left her.  It would be safer if she said nothing.  It might count against her if Dr Bosanquet got to hear.  It was never wise to speak out, she’d learned that.  These things happened.  How did she know Esme wasn’t exaggerating?  Perhaps she had been getting out of control, and the nurse had restrained her.

She got out of bed and put a cardigan round her shoulders.  The curtain billowed and she pushed it aside, and stood looking out at the grounds in the dark.  The trees dipped and swayed in the wind.  Further along the block, light from a window lay in a yellowish streak across the gravel.

I have no reason to be afraid, she told herself.  It’s normal to raise concerns with the Ward Sister.  I have done it before.  But it didn’t feel normal, or safe.  She watched a branch sway in the wind, and thought she heard it crack.
 
             

*

‘Well now,’ said Sister Healy, still arranging bottles in the medicine cupboard.  ‘That’s quite an accusation your girl is making.’

The cupboard smelled sweetish and powdery.  Narcisa tried to read the names on the bottles, but there was nothing there that she had heard of. 

Sister Healy glanced at her, over her shoulder.  ‘She didn’t say which nurse it was, by any chance?’

You see: something in Narcisa was vindicated.  She doesn’t want to take it seriously.  It’s too much bother.

A patient in a washed-out dressing-gown shuffled behind them.  Narcisa waited till she was out of hearing.

‘I have told you what I know.  It will be for you to find out what has happened.’

Sister Healy locked the cupboard and turned round.  ‘I’m two auxiliaries short this week with the flu.  Admissions is full so I’ve got three of theirs down here.  One of them keeps trying to cut herself with broken glass.  You see what I mean?’

She made herself stay there.  ‘I can see you are busy.  But if a nurse has assaulted a patient..’

‘Assault!  I can tell you don’t get on the wards much, Cook.  Assault, indeed!  Where I worked before, they had an investigation - ’

She had to stop herself shivering.  ‘Sister Healy,’ she said again, ‘It is for you to decide.  I have told you that there is’ - but what was the word? - ‘there has been an allegation.’  She turned and walked out of the ward, though she could hear Sister Healy’s voice following her.  A domestic was mopping the floor between the beds; Narcisa stepped carefully across the wet patches. 

The ward looked much the same as in her own time.

1918

-

1919

To make fine filigree wire you need rubies; but the rubies themselves must have been mined and cut, a hole drilled through the centre of the stone, the thing then set in a thick plate of brass; so that what the ruby is, its individual way of drawing in light and letting it seep out like blood from a cut finger, the faceted surfaces that look like movement, all these are ignored, are made invisible, the uncopiable stone put into service, the brass plate mounted on a wooden bench with a chain, a hand-wheel, heavy machinery, the engineering processes through which men drive their determination that the world must be re-formed as they wish it to be.  A ruby then is only an inner surface.

The gold wire has been softened on the flames; but that’s not enough.  Here is the workbench, the ruby plate: a machine such as you see in early paintings, a serf set to his work turning a wheel that will draw out the guts of some misguided Christian who believed he was all soul.  The gold wire has been filed smooth, the tip pointed, the great labour of pulling out fine begins.  If the wire won’t go through, it is annealed again.  If it survives the first drawing-out - but it must survive; if it breaks it will only be sent back for rolling, and return reshaped to the wooden bench, the smell of sweat on the man turning the wheel, the screech of the coarse machinery. So it’s squeezed as through the eye of a fine needle, into the orifice of the first ruby; then again, burnt up and cooled once more, through the tighter second; then when it is hardly recognisable, through the third which is like the hole made by a bee-sting. 

Only now is the goldsmith satisfied.  The ruby is cleaned, ready for the next time. The wire is now available for working into something beautiful, whatever beauty it already owned crushed and drawn thin in the strong grip of the draw-tongs.

She was working on a pile of petticoats.  This one had thickened darns in several places, and a square patch near the hem.  The cloth was thin and yellowing under the arms.  She sprinkled more water onto the patch.  It was put on badly, the cloth underneath pulled slantwise.  With the point of the iron she pushed towards the corners.  The steam rose to her eyes. 

She folded the petticoat and ironed it flat, then laid it on the pile on the shelf behind her. Across the room a bony red-haired woman was talking loudly to the woman next to her, who was pressing shirts dispiritedly and nodding.  The red-haired woman made an impatient gesture, the iron in her hand.  Somebody ducked out of her way and swore.

The windows were already netted in steam.  She paused at the shelves, trying to see out.  The sky was pale blue.  At the far edge of the grounds there was a chestnut-tree, and every day she tried to catch sight of it; for no reason, for something green when it was green, something tall and beyond the order of the asylum.  Through the misted window she could see it was bright brown.

She worked on, smoothing out the thin white cotton, the anonymous petticoats one after another, so mostly she didn’t think of them as garments, something she herself might have worn the day before, but as puzzles, to make a shoulder-strap lie flat, a flounced hem hang properly without creasing.  She liked the energy needed to press down, the strength in her arm as she did it; the precision.  And then there was the feel of fabrics under her hand, the sturdy linen of bedclothes, the fine cotton under-things, the men’s shirts: evidence of another universe, closed to the women in the ironing-room, with a locked door on the semi-circular corridor; a place where men stood doing up shirt-buttons, contemplating the day.  She had no curiosity about them, no need that could pull her towards the male wards or the ground staff; not any more.  Better to arrive in the ironing-room at eight-thirty, after breakfast, and work through, with breaks, till four, and then be tired.

And now it was better not to be on the ward; or only to sleep.  The illness was spreading; she had seen it.  The old woman, Amelia, had died of it.  Amelia who shouted out at everyone, the doctors, the other patients; she had been on the ward when Narcisa was first moved there, a strong old woman with grey hair she had cut short herself with scissors, so she looked like a farmhand.  She shouted out, and sometimes people laughed, and she raised her arm, threatening them.  Narcisa had never known what it was she said.  She had woken one morning, in the bed at the end of the room, and shouted out but this time clearly with pain, and fallen down on her way to the wash-basins, fallen and stayed lying on the floor, curled up like a child and moaning all the time.  -
Please,
Narcisa had said to the attendant, and grabbed her arm:
Please.  Amelia. 
The attendant, a fat young woman, had laughed at first, and shaken free of Narcisa’s hand; reluctantly she had wheeled round, calling
Come on!
; but when she touched Amelia’s sallow arm, the attendant’s expression had changed, and she’d gone, half-running, calling:
Oh my lord!

Narcisa pressed the last of the petticoats, and added it to the pile.  Someone, the laundry-maid probably, had wiped a patch on the window clear.  Drops ran down it.  She could see the chestnut-tree, half in sunlight, and a scattering of rich brown leaves on the grass.  ‘You finished them, Humphreys?’  the laundry-maid called out.  Narcisa nodded.  ‘Take them pillow-slips down at the end there.’

She spread out the first of the pillow-slips and started; but her iron was cooling.  She took it back to the stove at the end of the room, and picked up another to test on the ironing-sheet.  The cloth was luke-warm against the palm of her hand.  She put back the iron and tried another one.

‘Here,’ called the red-haired woman, close to her, but looking out at the others: ‘What’s wrong with her?  Too la-di-da to spit like the rest of us?’

Somebody sniggered.

Not again.

She couldn’t grasp the words but the tone was enough, and the one word
spit
that she could guess from the sound.  She stood tense, next to the stove, the weight of the iron dragging at her hand.

Across the table someone called out something.  There was a laugh.  The laundry-maid looked up from sorting linen.

‘Well,’ said the red-haired woman, flapping a sheet out in front of her: ‘Ain’t you got nothing to say for yourself, then?’

Again the words meant nothing.  She felt herself flush.  What little English she knew had all left her.  She thought in her own language:
You stupid ignorant woman, what does it matter whether I spit or not?

She moved to go back to her place at the ironing-table.

‘You!  I’m talking to you!’  the woman said, and brandished her iron close to Narcisa’s arm.  ‘Watch out now Fairbairn,’ the laundry-maid said flatly.

She must not speak.  Her accent, her bad English would make it worse.  It had all happened before, it was terrible and at the same time tedious. 
You are not worth speaking to,
she said in silence.  She made herself move away, back to her place.

‘Did you see that?’  the woman began, but the thin girl opposite Narcisa interrupted.  ‘Come on Bet, you know yourself she don’t speak English.’  The tone was relaxed; Narcisa looked up sharply.  The girl made a slight move of her head towards her.

‘Well she bleeding should.  What’s she doing in here if she don’t speak English?  My boys are off fighting the likes of her.’

The girl laughed, still folding and pressing handkerchiefs, more swiftly than Narcisa had ever seen.  ‘You think it’s so good in here it should be rationed?  She’s here cos she’s mad, just like the rest of us.’ 

The others chuckled; the red-haired woman subsided.  Narcisa wondered what the girl had said.  The dinner-bell rang.  She held back, finishing a pillow-slip, till the others had put back their irons and got into file.  The thin girl was just in front of her.  She turned and grinned, and walked beside her towards the dining-hall.

She was taller than Narcisa, with an easy walk, that seemed only half-constrained by the double-file moving sedately along the corridor.  Her hair was pale, and very fine, wisps of it escaping the untidy bun and drifting across her face.

When she was sure they would not be overheard, Narcisa said, ‘Thank you.’ 

‘Oh,’ said the girl, and grinned: ‘so you do speak English!’

Narcisa shook her head: ‘Little.’  She demonstrated, her fingers an inch apart.  She searched for what she needed to say: ‘You help.  In ironing-room.’  The girl was bending towards her, listening.  ‘I understand little, I can not say.  There.  Cannot say to her.’  She was frustrated, needing for the first time in years to explain something.

‘Not worth it,’ the girl said, laughing.  Narcisa shook her head.  ‘She’ - the girl pointed ahead to the red-haired woman: ‘stupid.  You understand?  Better to keep quiet.’  She laughed again.  ‘Here, what’s your name?’

‘Narcisa.’  The girl stopped and looked at her.  ‘Come along, you two,’ the laundry-maid called over her shoulder. 

‘Say it again?  I didn’t get it.  Nar..?’

‘Narcisa.’  She said it slowly this time; but the girl shook her head.  ‘Too difficult for me.  I’ll call you Nora.’  Then she must have seen Narcisa’s expression, for she took her arm: ‘Look, I’m sorry.  It’s me.  Not very bright.’  Narcisa was still perplexed.  ‘Me - school - only three years.’  She looked crestfallen.  ‘Can I call you Nora instead?  My name’s Clara.’

‘Clara, ‘said Narcisa, and smiled back.  She had said her name for the first time in so long, she realised now; she had hoped to be called by her name, a sharp, sudden hope, but it would not happen.  She would be Nora; but still it would be worth it.  To be called anything at all except Edwin’s name, she thought.  They reached the dining-hall and went in in silence.