The Jeweller's Skin (13 page)

‘No’ - she was vigorous, refusing.  ‘No die.  Baby here - I have here - six month.  Then they take.  One day, take away.  Out of asylum.’  She could hear the cart clattering down the snow-thick lane.

Clara lay back, stroking Narcisa’s hand.  After a while she asked: ‘Boy or a girl?’

‘Girl.  Violeta.  I call Violeta.’  But now she wondered why she had wanted to tell.  It was easier to forget when no-one knew.

‘Vee - say it again?  I’m not much good on foreign names, remember?’

‘Violeta.’  She said it slowly, and nodded as Clara managed.

The boards creaked under the attendant’s uneven walk.  Narcisa looked hopelessly down at the thin face.

‘Time’s up,’ the attendant called, a few yards away.  Narcisa stood; but Clara pulled at her hand till she bent down.

‘Do you want her back?’

Did she?

‘All right, Humphreys, back to your bed, it’s time.’

‘We’ll think of something,’ Clara whispered.  ‘There must be something.’  Then she coughed, long and painfully, the attendant helping her to sit up, while Narcisa walked back along the ward.

Jessie Pilgrim had William home with a sore throat.  Perhaps she should have sent him to school with the others?  ‘He’s just pretending,’ Izzy had said; but no, she’d decided not to take the risk.  William was wrapped in a rug beside the fire, trying to read Fred’s book about explorers.  Every now and then, while she got the dinner, she looked in to see how he was.  He was very good, William; he didn’t make a fuss.  After dinner she’d go and read to him.

I am too soft with him, probably, she thought.  Would Frederick have made him go to school? It was hard to know.  At the beginning she’d been always consulting him, it had seemed so awful to make up her mind alone.  Then after a while the pretence was worse than the loss; sitting by the fire late in the evening, wanting to think he was in the other chair – but he’s not! she’d almost cried out.  It’s all me having to decide, he’s doing nothing!

Certainly he wouldn’t have had the idea of taking a lodger.  There isn’t enough, she’d admitted,  guiltily, not wanting to blame him for not providing: how could he have known there would be a war?  I could take in sewing.  He’d have hated it.  She remembered sitting back abruptly in his wing-chair, and looking up, up through the bedrooms with the children sleeping, up to the top of the house, where the maid slept, a pale little thing, only just left home; but she was a help and it was all Jessie could afford; and there, she saw, was the front attic empty, or it could be with some work, bringing down the trunks, moving the second bed out of Izzy’s room, since there wouldn’t now be another daughter.  She’d stood up, just as if Frederick were there, as if she would have to argue it out with him.

Of course it had had to be a woman.  That had made it harder; it was men mainly who lived away from home; but there was no question.  She’d heard of women like her, widowed, who took in lodgers; and the next thing they were married again, or worse. 

She drained the beans and started serving up.  It was true she had hoped the lodger could become a friend; though Frederick might have been cautious about that: business and pleasure, too complicated, he said.  She’d imagined her lodger coming down in the evening when the children had gone to bed: someone to talk to.  Someone to tell about Frederick, she supposed.  Perhaps one day she’d talk about something else.

‘William, I’m just taking the tray upstairs,’ she called.  It was simpler, really, the woman not speaking English; and then for so long she’d just stayed up there in her room, Jessie had wondered if she was ill perhaps: so thin, those dark brown eyes with shadows all round them.  She could have had the influenza last year, and lived; they did say it took months before you were well.

Jessie knocked at the door.  ‘Here’s your dinner,’ she said clearly, when the woman opened.  ‘I hope you enjoy it.’

The woman took the tray and stood like a statue.  Perhaps she was wanting to announce something.  Jessie waited, though her own meal was on the table, and William would be squirming in his chair.

‘Mrs Pilgrim,’ the woman said, though
Pilgrim
certainly didn’t come out right.  She seemed to be hunting for the next words. Oh get on with it, she wanted to say, shocked at herself.  She’s your paying guest, Jessie Pilgrim. At least she’s trying.

‘Your boy,’ the woman said at last.  ‘
Little
boy.’  She showed her hand at hip-height.  ‘No… school?’  He accent was bad; a good many people would never understand her.  But it was kind, Jessie thought, and found herself blinking.

‘William,’ she said, and the woman repeated, ‘William.’  ‘Oh, he’s just got a bad throat.’  She pointed to her own throat, and coughed a little.

‘Bad?’ the woman asked, looking concerned.

‘No, no, not bad.’  She gestured wrapping up.  ‘He’ll be fine tomorrow.’ She looked to check the woman understood.  ‘Do you have children?’

There was a pause again, the thin woman standing holding the tray, with the cutlet getting cold.  And she couldn’t be that old, Jessie thought suddenly, a few years younger than she was, only she looked…  Then a few sounds, you couldn’t say it was words: ‘I… no… can no…’ and then as she stood herself, gawping no doubt, ‘Thank you thank you,’ the tray held to one side, the door pushed back towards her, the woman shaking her head, and all that piled-up black hair shuddering, almost like some foreign animal.

*

She sits still.

The rocking-chair tilts her gently back, then forward.  She sets her feet firmly on the pink and blue rug.  The chair stops, in mid movement: just there.

Now the only movement is her lungs, steadying; the blood flowing past the pulse-points in her wrists.

She sits still in her rocking-chair, in her rented rooms; in her landlady’s house, in what is now her street.  Although she was brought here, not knowing where it was, it seems that now she has chosen all this: the bright sunlight slanting down from the dormer window, the two attic rooms with their sloping ceilings, the smell from downstairs where her landlady is cooking, the front garden, the suburb.  She sits like a stone dropped in a pond, and feels the concentric circles spread around her.

I hope I will not fall to the bottom.

Outside on the street some children are playing a game.  She can hear their heavy jumps, between ragged pauses, their voices calling out words she doesn’t understand.  A bicycle judders over the cobbles.  A woman calls to someone.  A dog squeals.

Nobody here will ask her to do anything, except pay five shillings to Mrs Pilgrim the landlady on Fridays.  At first Mrs Pilgrim seemed to hope she would talk; but she shakes her head.  Later she will start to put English words to things.  Thank you, she says when the tray is brought to her door.

If she goes out of the house she will start to say Good morning.  So far she does not want to leave the house.

So far I do not have the strength to leave it.

I can choose not to do what I say I have no strength for.

The rocking-chair is made of dark varnished wood, and upholstered in worn brocade.  The smooth wood cools the spread palms of her hands.  The rug at her feet is faded pinks and blues, knitted from soft rags.  In the bedroom there is a patchwork counterpane.

She thinks: no-one else has just this bedspread, made by a woman, Mrs Pilgrim perhaps, from old summer dresses.  It will not return from the wash and be allocated to another patient.

I am not a patient.

The light pours in with a torrent of bright dust.  The room smells of dust and lavender-bags.  When she has eaten, the smell of boiled potatoes and casseroled meat will fade from the air slowly.

She sits here waiting to find who she has become.  Though she thinks to find out she will have to get to her feet, pushing the rocking-chair forwards; go out of the door and down the two flights of stairs.  When the front door latches behind her, she will be a person, in a street with children and dogs and bicycles, a city where there are men apart from doctors.  There she will be one particular person, in the way that the pieces of dress have become a quilt.

While I sit here I do not need to be anyone.

*

She wakes to some sensation from the asylum, a sneering shout, an intrusion on her body; by the time she wakes, she no longer knows what it was.  She lies rigid till the fear moves away a little, when she can feel the touch on her hands of these lighter sheets, and see the slopes of the steep attic ceiling.  These are not memories, in the dreams she can’t remember, but facts that she only knows like this, when no-one, not even she, can challenge them.  But she wakes and cannot bear to be awake; what she thought she had learned from the asylum, to wash and dress, is not enough to take her into the day. 

Someone knocks at her door to bring her breakfast.  She pulls the blanket up over her mouth.  The knock again; the maid Libby’s high-pitched voice: ‘Mrs Humphreys.’  She lies still with her eyes closed.  Another try, and she hears the tray put down, Libby running downstairs.

She is not Mrs Humphreys.  Mrs Humphreys must be the wife of an Englishman, and live with him on Camberwell New Road, in a house with long windows.

Nor is she Narcisa Gashi, daughter of a goldsmith in the ancient city of Prizren.  Narcisa was a young woman with long black hair, who loved music and wanted to know about politics.  She can see her questioning the Englishman her father has brought to the house, about the world.

Then I can only be the mad woman.

She curls up in bed but her mind will not let her sleep.  She longs for one of the day attendants to wrench the bedclothes out of her weak grasp, and pull her by the shoulder out of bed.  If she could, she would use that violence on herself, the fingers digging into her flesh and leaving bruises, the tearing of muscles.  She wants to be walking to the ironing-room, at the end of the silent ramshackle file of women; and stand at the table with a heavy iron, pressing sheets and folding them and pressing again, hours when the push down through her right arm and the whole of her body as she leans over the sheet is the only thing she knows, another sheet done and laid on the pile behind her, so that even the breaks for tea or lunch are a distraction, a requirement to be aware of people round her.

She turns in her bed but nothing is comfortable.  Her nightdress is soaked cold with her sweat, and caught round her thighs.  She makes her hands stroke the pieces of patchwork, the colours dulled in the half-light of the room.

Out here people speak and she understands nothing.  It would be better if they shouted at her, since then she would grasp something from the tone.  There are too many lives, people talking, making meals, bringing milk on a horse-drawn cart.  Even Mrs Pilgrim with her widow’s grief has a substance to her life, and it bangs at Narcisa’s door, it forces itself into her till all there is inside her is the noise of all these people, their incomprehensible words and expectations; and she has nothing, not even a pile of ironing to put between them and the mad woman.

Napoleon Road: so easy to remember; with the sounds and the great thunderclouds of steam when a train went through behind the short streets.  It was not like anywhere she had been before, it was all strange but it could be anywhere, fifty yards from the asylum or the other end of the country, with English people, not very well-off, in little anonymous houses.

She had changed trains, waiting on a high station platform, rain blowing along the tracks, with the thin young man, Mr Noones he was called.  Who had bought the tickets, and carried her trunk, and knocked on the half-glazed door in Napoleon Road, and handed her over to Mrs Pilgrim.  So she had thought of it: being handed over.  By Edwin, in the end, for the second time: the young man worked for Edwin’s solicitors.  He had tried to explain why this house, this woman; but she hadn’t made the effort to understand.  It was a room; and safe; and not the asylum.

It was when she went outside that amazement took her.

Whichever way she walked, there was the river.  I am on an island, the thought, the second time she headed away from the house and came to water.  Had the train crossed over a bridge? She couldn’t remember.  It seemed suddenly to be a special place, a town; was it a town or a suburb? With a name, a life, the way Prizren had those things (but she could not manage just yet to think of Prizren).

The first time, she had put on her coat and hat, her boots and gloves: so elaborate it seemed, such armour she needed to go out onto the street, for when had she last gone out all on her own?  Once from the asylum; but that too couldn’t be thought.  Before that, Camberwell, and Edwin even then had not much liked it, her being out on her own, while he was out at his work in the City of London.  So she had her armour; she had the key Mrs Pilgrim had given her; and still, standing outside the door she had felt giddy, leant her gloved hand hard on the door of her room, hearing the milk-cart rattle down the street, the horse stand still, head down, the milkman call and the maids run out with their jugs.  She had seen all that from the window, the first days that she’d been here: the young girls clustered and chatting, the man flirting, the milk poured out into heavy earthenware, jugs clasped as the girls went regretfully in.  She waited, waited, till she heard the cart rattle out of the cul-de-sac; then went down.

But that time she had gone almost no distance.  Out of the street onto the main road, where there were horse-drawn carts and a motor-bus, and people walking rather fast by the shops, and up to the station where she had first arrived, with its wooden canopy, its sign
St Margaret’s. 
It was what? a month back? And she had hardly seen it then; but the entrance, the ticket-windows were reassuring.  She sat on a bench, and people hurried back and forth around her; a train came in, a man with two small boys ran fast too catch it, someone in uniform received a parcel.  Then the station cleared again and she sat still, not thinking of anything.  After a while a man with a white moustache, in uniform, stood in front of her and said something.  Fear leapt up through her; words in English drained away.  He spoke again, looking into her face.  There was train-noise, and a group of children chattering.  All she could think was: I must escape from here.  She managed to stand up, not looking at him.

A younger man arrived, holding a glass of water.  The old man took it and held it out to her.

Perhaps after all she had done nothing wrong?

She drank a little and handed the glass back: ‘Thank you.’  There, she had spoken, it was possible.  She breathed in, drawing her strength together, while the two men watched her.  Perhaps they would not make her do anything.  ‘I go,’ she said, and took a step forward.

If she hadn’t been shaken, she might have run all the way to her room.

Two days later, determined to shift her fear, she went out a second time, in the other direction.  At the main road there was a busy junction, with carriages, carts, even one or two motor-cars; but eventually she steeled herself to cross.  On the other side were high brick walls.  She couldn’t think what would be behind them, unless another asylum; but the walls looked old, the brick soft-coloured and blurred with lichen.  She headed down a quiet street, the high walls on either side, a few low trees.  There was a cool tinge in the air, the day fine but this street smelling of damp.  She came to a footpath, and the wide river.

It was mud-coloured and bluish, and flowing fast.  The water seemed low; there was a holding wall, with vivid green marks, still wet.  There was a post with a sign, but she couldn’t read it, except for the word
Thames. 
She stood and looked down.  A worn piece of wood was carried hurriedly past, twisting and turning.  A black-and-white duck upended itself abruptly, and came up yards away, a long time later.

She walked slowly along the path in the mild sunshine.  From here she could see what the high walls were protecting: large houses with elaborate gardens.  The lawns sloped down towards her; elegant trees and clipped hedges divided them.  There were long ground-floor windows and white stone walls.  Who lives in a house like this? she wondered.  Someone like Edwin’s mother perhaps: a tall thin woman, severe, lofty in manner.

I don’t think I will go in a house like that again.

She sat on a bench and watched the busy river.  A blue-painted boat chugged down, with a smear of smoke; a man poled a raft across with three women, who each took his hand to jump onto the bank.  What she’d wanted at the station: to sit and observe.  I was stupid that morning, she told herself.  I only need to learn the rules out here.

If she had enough English, the landlady would help her.  She seemed not unfriendly; she might answer questions.  No need for her to explain; being foreign was reason enough not to know things.

Yes, but the language? She leaned forward and watched the water moving past, folding over on itself, pushed into fine pleats like some think smooth fabric, bucking over some obstacle, a rock? something thrown in and settled on the bottom?  It was viscous, heavy, anything dropped in would disappear.  She looked for something to test this with; picked up a light-brown pebble and tossed it in.

The water gulped it down in half a second.  It was flowing too fast to leave even a ring.  The black-and-white duck paddled busily to the place, and let itself drift a little before diving.

I will learn the same way I learned in the asylum: listening to people.  I managed to talk to Clara, after all.

A boy bumped along the path on a bicycle, calling out to her as he passed.  She tensed, corrected herself: I must understand.  She thought through the sounds; had he said
afternoon? 
She wanted to call him back, but the heavy bike was far down the path already.  I think he must have said
Good afternoon.

She said it over to herself:
Good afternoon. 
I do know some English.  It’s the same language I started to learn when I lived with Edwin.

Still, on the way back when an old woman spoke to her, she could only smile, and nod; her mouth wouldn’t open.