The Jeweller's Skin (12 page)

The asylum is ill.  When it breathes it is in pain.  The attendants hurry along the great corridor.  There are fewer and fewer of them, and more to do.  Outside in the grounds the grass has not been cut.  A broken branch hangs down next to the gatehouse, and no-one snaps it off to chop for firewood, though it bangs impatiently on the gatehouse roof as if it too were desperate to escape.  The kitchen garden is wavy with loose tendrils, potato plants hoping to attract attention, runner beans climbing their poles to see the giant.

It may be that god is against the asylum.  For the first time, on Sunday there was no communion, the chaplain being too ill to leave his bed; being (though this is not said) in such a fever, he calls out more than once for his grandmother, who when he was small and sick used to read him stories.  Though whether the illness is the punishment, or the cause of divine wrath, no-one in the chaplain’s absence can explain.

The asylum aches all over: shoulders, hips, thigh-muscles, back, head.  It is too weak to move.  In the laundry they are forever boiling linen, and bleaching out the stains that seep out of illness, for who wants to be reminded of what happened to the last mouth to press on this pillow-slip?  The sheets flap on the line and are unpegged damp, and carried through into the ironing-room, where those patients that are still able press order into them, before they must be put to use again.

The Medical Superintendent himself is ill, or so it is whispered in the staff quarters.  He paces between the wards in a heavy coat, sweat shimmering on his forehead.  Spreading the illness further, someone murmurs; ungrateful perhaps; but then everyone is frightened.

At the best of times the asylum is in poor health.  It flushes; shivers.  More than the shouts and whimpers of the insane, the brisk order of the matron and the doctors, the usual sound of the asylum is a cough, a wretched, exhausted cough that can never reach the resolution it’s looking for.

First the war, people are saying, all those men gone, look at the ones left you can get to work.  The patients sent from the neighbouring asylum, where they have wounded soldiers instead (is that easier?).  And TB up, what with the overcrowding.  And now when the war might be coming to an end (but can you believe them?) this, the influenza.

Morgan Redpath, farmhand.  Went to a dance in Esher, and danced all evening with a lively girl, whose laugh he specially liked.  The next day headaches, he thought from all the beer; then pains, intolerable; and then dead.

Ella Winthrop, laundry-maid, aged just eighteen.  Started work two weeks ago.  Her friend Lydia caught it, and then she did.  No time to inform her parents back in Sheffield.

Also handymen, porters, attendants, needlewomen.  The assistant matron, the doctor who came out of retirement.  As for the patients.  The beds are crammed close together in the wards, the symptoms are not recognised fast enough; or not by the nurses, who are overworked and frightened, and stay away from the wards as much as they can.  In any case there is little to be done.  The infirmary never has an empty bed.

Insanity no protection against the germs.  Though a doctor somewhere else had tried to prove it, before he and his patients provided the evidence against.

The asylum shudders; with fever, up to a hundred and five at times, and fear.  Of death, of having to watch the others dying, drowning, a high tide with breakers crashing inside them, red sea-spray marking their lips.  Is this the Old Testament you are living in?  You lie in your bed and you listen for people dying.  And because it is not only here, the outside world, always absent-minded about asylums, seems to have forgotten.  Flour doesn’t come these days, or fish from Grimsby.  So few left eating, you’d think they might have plenty, for once; but no, it is less than the usual ration.  The cook refuses to be ill, but her assistants are pale, and their mothers want them home.

The asylum may not recover, and who will notice?

It was still light.  The curtains were closed, but still the subversive brightness crept back in, through the worn loose weave, or at gaps where someone had tugged them roughly together.  A bird sang madly somewhere out in the grounds.  The gravel crunched at a foot’s pace; a man’s voice chuckled.

Narcisa’s neighbour got carefully out of bed, and walked silently to the far end of the ward, a tall broad figure in a cloak of hair.  In a little while there were gasps and moans.  A hoarse voice complained, ‘You two, leave it out.’

Somebody snored, a steady complex rhythm.  Somebody coughed.

The curtain opposite billowed out, then subsided.

Narcisa slept, not for long it seemed.  The light seeping into the ward was cooler, perhaps moonlight.

The cough again, muffled, a rasp, persistent.

She lay on her back, watching the curtain moving.

‘Nora?’

The curtain swelled sideways and stayed a moment.

‘Nora, you awake?’  It was the coughing voice, husky: Clara’s voice. 

I must be Nora.  ‘Yes.’

Someone turned over, mumbling in her sleep.

‘Come and talk to me.’

Narcisa leaned on her elbows and looked round.  The chair where the night attendant sat was empty.  It was the epidemic: not enough staff.

‘Where you are?’  In the dusk the beds were smudges of grey muslin.

‘Here.’ 

A hand waved, on her side, half-way down.

The small cough guided her along the row.  Clara’s face on the pillow was full of shadows. 

Narcisa stood awkwardly.  ‘Ill?’  she whispered.

‘I’ve got this cough, it’s worse at night.  And I’m hot - feel.’  She reached and pulled Narcisa’s hand to her forehead.  ‘Have I got a fever?’

The skin was dry, smooth and very warm.  ‘I think,’ said Narcisa.  She wanted to keep her hand there on Clara’s forehead, the fine pale hair wisping across her fingers.  Instead she let go.  ‘You say nurses?’

‘What are they going to do?’  She wriggled across and held up the bed-covers.  ‘Do you want to get in?  It’s all right’ - seeing Narcisa hesitate – ‘not like them two.’  She laughed, but the sound turned into a cough.  ‘Oh damn it.’

Narcisa was trembling.

‘You afraid you’ll catch it?’  sadly.

‘No afraid,’ said Narcisa, though it wasn’t true. 

Under the sheet, with Clara’s arm round her, Clara’s thin body relaxed next to her own, the heat of Clara’s illness pressing through cotton, she had to tense up her face to stop herself crying.

‘You never done this, all the time you been here?’  The lost seductive whisper of confidences, herself and Alma after their mother died.

‘Here, I no speak.  No know someone.’  She heard her own voice breaking as she said it.  She will hate me, she thought; she will think I’m self-pitying.

‘When I was a kid,’ Clara said, story-telling, ‘there was four of us.  Me, two sisters and my little brother, we all slept in the one bed.  That was all there was.  Till my mum thought Robert was getting too big.’  She giggled.  ‘Coming here was the first I ever slept on my own.  Hey, do I talk too fast?  Do you understand?’

She understood the warmth against her skin, Clara’s voice, humorous, wistful, out of breath.  A burst of Clara’s coughing shook both of them.

‘Course,’ the voice went on, ‘it was different with my boyfriend.  Clarence he was called.  How’s that for a name?  Clara and Clarence.’

She didn’t know what to ask first.  ‘Still boyfriend?  Clarence?’

The arm tightened round her shoulder.  She let herself relax in the narrow space, and turned her face towards Clara’s on the pillow.

‘He’s alive in any case.  He lost his right leg: you know, in one of the battles, I can never remember all those foreign names.  When he came back he was, I don’t know, moody.  Who wouldn’t be?’

Narcisa was struggling.  ‘His leg?  Cut?’  She made a sawing motion with one hand above the bedclothes.

‘More like boom.  I ain’t seen him since I been here.’  She lay back.  A strand of fine hair drifted over Narcisa’s face.

Narcisa ventured a touch on Clara’s shoulder.

‘Oh it’s all right.  Well, it’s not all right, but you know.  He was nice, but he wasn’t the love of my life, exactly.’  She turned to smile: ‘Still, he was nice in bed.  Very cuddly’ - she hugged Narcisa to demonstrate.  ‘I like that.  Liked making me happy.’

So it was possible to speak these things.  And if you can’t say them in the asylum, where?  she wondered.

‘What about you?’  Clara asked.  ‘You’re married, ain’t you?  What’s he like?’

What was there she could say to explain Edwin?  It was too long since she’d had to say anything. 

‘English,’ she said, by fits and starts. ‘He English.  In my country.  He work.  My father know him.  He English, not like men in my country.’

But that was only the half of it, she thought.

‘So you came here?  Was he nice to you, then?’

She turned and hid her face on Clara’s shoulder.  A hand stroked her hair.  She breathed in the acrid smell of Clara’s sweat.

‘You got any children?’

She felt her shoulders shrink from Clara’s arm.  Oh let me not be here.  It is too dangerous.

‘Oh Lord,’ Clara whispered. ‘Here’s me making it worse.  Here, I’m sorry.’  She hugged Narcisa close and rocked her a little.  ‘You should shut me up.  I ask too many questions.’

Someone wailed at the end of the ward, a drawn-out sound, high like a trumpet; then stopped. Narcisa held her breath.  The wailing started again, on the same high note.  There were steps, a slap, loud in the dark like a pistol.  The wail drew back into whimpering.

A long pause.  Only the simmering sounds of breathing.

‘What do you say we go to sleep?’

In the bed opposite someone farted and groaned.  The bird sang again from the tree outside.

She woke pressed up against Clara’s back, her own nightdress clinging with the heat and damp, Clara’s breathing rasping in and out like old leather bellows.  It was light already.  She got out of bed and tucked the covers back over Clara’s shoulder.  ‘Another one at it,’ a voice muttered as she passed the ends of the beds.  Her tall neighbour was back, asleep and snoring.

She lay between the cool unused sheets.  Her flesh felt different, soft around her bones.  There seemed to be hand-prints, one on her left shoulder, one on her hair.

I must not show this, she thought.  I must be careful.  She lay awake till the attendant came, and listened out for the sound of Clara’s coughing.

That night, though it was light till late, and the trumpet wailing started up again, she made herself sleep straight away, out of fear.

*

She waited to go to the wash-basins the next morning, restless, standing at the foot of her bed, while other women muttered or combed their hair.  The washed-out nightdresses were bright with deep blue creases in the sunlight.

The attendant, a short dark woman with a bad limp, was scolding someone further down the ward.  Someone laughed; the wailing started up, then stopped.

She saw that Clara was still in bed, the covers drawn up, her pale fine hair glinting on the pillow.

She will get into trouble.

The attendant leaned forward to grab the bedclothes.  Clara was speaking, her light hoarse voice half-audible from where Narcisa stood.  Then coughing took over, dry, unrelieving.  The attendant pressed her hand on Clara’s forehead.  Then she left the ward, with her deep lurching limp, and came back with a nurse who hurried on before her.

She is going to die, Narcisa thought in the wash-room, rinsing the soap off her face with tepid water.  She thought of Amelia, the old woman, falling down in the corridor and moaning.  She moved aside to let the next person in.  Something seemed to be draining out of her like fluid, down through her bare feet on the stone floor.  She stood until someone jostled her out of the way.

When they filed back, Clara seemed to be asleep.

Narcisa worked steadily, all day, in the ironing room, keeping her concentration on the worn fabrics, the creases she chased out with her weight on the black iron.  It was as if the room had fallen silent, or she was deaf.  Once or twice in the day, as she went for the mid-day meal, or waited for another batch of washing, she thought again: Clara is going to die.  Already the message seemed to be losing meaning.  Only the draining feeling, as if there were nothing left under her skin.

By evening, exhausted, she thought: I should never have known her.  Then slowly the shock of thinking it came through, the smell of Clara’s skin as she turned her head, the warmth of her body as they fell asleep.

I can’t cope with this.  I will go mad again. 

*

After supper she found two women standing by Clara’s bed.  She recognised them from the ironing-room, a small, thin woman with grey hair in a bun, who complained a lot, and Bet, the red-haired woman who had taunted her.  She walked past quickly, and then heard Clara call ‘Nora!’ in a small, breathless voice, so painful she pretended not to have heard.  She walked past her own bed to the bay window, and stood looking out at a blackbird pecking at something in the lawn.  After a while it jerked out a long pink worm, that dangled from either side of the yellow beak like string.

When she turned back the two women were gone.  She wanted to go straight away to Clara, but was stopped by shame.  Instead she stood holding a fold of the curtain, till Clara turned towards her and waved a hand.

But then the words in English refused to come.  She looked down, puzzled, at Clara’s thin face, the hair darkened with sweat, the blue eyes deep in their sockets of mauve shadows.

‘I had a day in bed.  Ain’t I lucky, then?’

She nodded, not knowing how to understand.  ‘Very ill?’

‘I don’t know about very.’   Clara coughed.  ‘I didn’t think I could do the ironing-room.’

‘Hot?’

‘Yes, I’m still hot.  Here’ - she smoothed the grey blanket – ‘Sit down.  It’s not the influenza, that’s one thing.’

‘No influenza?’  She felt her body slacken.

‘That’s what they say.  I was worried, I thought I’d given it you.’

‘You think...?’ 

‘Sorry, I’m going too fast, ain’t I?  I thought - if I had influenza - you’d catch it.  The other night.  Well, you still might get whatever it is, but it’s not that.’

She stopped trying to understand; the relief was what mattered.  ‘Today I think’ - but she couldn’t say I thought you were going to die.  ‘Infirmary?’  She stammered over the word.

The attendant limped purposefully towards them.  ‘Come on now, Humphreys, leave the patient alone.’

Clara said something she didn’t understand.  She sat on the edge of the bed, looking down, not trying to interpret the words that went between them.  A spider scuttled across the floorboards by her feet.

‘Did you hear that, Humphreys?’  The attendant gripped her shoulder.  ‘Fifteen minutes, no more.  She needs her rest.’

‘I hear.’

‘Well, do it then.’  The hard fingers released her.  She watched as the woman went towards the door with her lurching walk, the weight thrown heavily onto the left foot, the right hip jutting and the leg dragging.

‘Don’t worry about her,’ Clara said.  ‘She’s not too bad.  I told her you cheered me up - made me feel better.’

‘I make you better?’  She looked in astonishment.

‘Course you do.  I’ve been bored stiff all day on my own.  Come on Nora, talk to me, tell me something.’

She looked down at the floor by her feet, where the spider had been.  There was a groove of dust between the boards.  She had nothing to tell, only ironing, the tasteless food.  She spread her hands, helpless.

‘Like the other night.’

The smell of Clara’s skin.  Sleeping curled beside her.

She took a breath.  ‘English.  Difficult.’  But she had to say it.  Clara might still die and there would be no-one.  She realised she had been preparing this.

‘Two years.  Before two years.  I have baby.’  She watched Clara’s expression.  ‘No Edwin, you understand?  No my husband.’  She was speaking as low as she could.  A woman pushed past her to the next-door night table.  Narcisa paused till she was out of hearing.

‘Here, that was bad luck.  Was that why they sent you here?’

She shook her head.  ‘No, no sent.’  She struggled for words.  ‘I here.  Escape, one day only.  Then baby.’

‘Blimey.’  Clara pushed damp hair out of her eyes.  ‘Who was the man, then?’

‘Does not matter.’  She remembered briefly his head on her shoulder.  ‘Clara, you hear.  Baby’ - she covered her face a moment.  When she looked up Clara took her hand.

‘What happened to the baby?’  she whispered.  ‘Did it die? ‘