The Jeweller's Skin (30 page)

I have no gold left, not even my wedding ring, wrenched off my hand one day in the locked ward, by a nurse who wore it not many weeks later, and laughed as the others gave their congratulations.

A man stands up to his thighs in running water, and swivels a shallow dish in both hands.  It is patient work, of the kind they give to women, since we are supposed not to become impatient.  The sun shines down on the crown of his leather hat, and on his hands which are wet and will quickly burn.  A few specks of gold for forty minutes’ standing; then he leans down and scoops up mud again, and swills the water over the dipping rim, so the dirt drifts out, leaving a few more grains.

Alluvial gold like this is the simpler kind.  The man may fall ill with sunstroke, or with hunger; he may go mad, looking for specks of light in the mud of a half-dried river; but he needs only himself and his shallow pan, and a means of returning to some kind of a town, where another man will look disparagingly at the scraps, and pay him less than he knows he has earned for them.

The second way involves machines and other men’s labour.  Reef gold is hidden, inside lodes of quartz, which may be sparkling, or milky, or rose-pink, or green; or in slate, mica schist, granite, porphyry.  To release the gold, the beautiful rock must be mined, then crushed in some kind of mechanical mortar.  The fine rubble is mixed with mercury, to which the gold clings, and the amalgam poured over a blanket table, the heavy particles sticking amongst the hairs.  The mercury then can be driven off as vapour.  A muscular process, requiring all kinds of force.  At the end there are still no more than tiny morsels, and thousands of morsels must be melted down before you have a bar of gold that can be traded.  Someone is
turning the handle of a machine, sweating.  Someone loses his sight over the blanket tables.  Mercury causes a terrible poisoning.  The poorest men, who barely profit from it, spend their own force in this work of decimation, before a man can
stand in a room with filigree-tongs, and distort
the metal into a gift for a woman.

I can see a chain made of twisted links, held up in the cool light of a Balkan workshop; how the air around it glowed with the light off its facets; and I held out my arm and my father laid the chain sleek and light against my wrist for my wedding.

On Tuesday morning Narcisa was shivering, eyes dry and prickling, her nose blocked.   Without energy, she went down to the kitchen and opened up.  The staff seemed excited, chatting about the weekend; the patients eavesdropped, silent, with dull eyes. 

When Narcisa had sneezed for the third time, turning away, handkerchief to her face, Rosaleen Shaw came up to her at the sink. 

‘Excuse me, Cook, but don’t you think you ought to go off sick?’

Narcisa looked at her, half comprehending.

‘I mean, I don’t want to be rude, but it’s not hygienic.  You know when Peg had a cold, you made her go off.’

She was never ill, had forgotten how it was.  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and felt the weakness rise from the soles of her feet, so she had to lean on the sink with both hands.  ‘You are right, I will go to bed.’  Then, as the woman was clearly waiting for something,  ‘Please, take over today.  I am very grateful.’

She slept for two or three hours then woke, coughing, and had to sit up again.  It was cold in her room.  The rest of the block was silent.  Outside she could hear the lawn-mower. 

After a while she got out of bed, and found an old shawl to put round her shoulders.   It seemed as if something had decided for her.  She took out her writing things, the pad with the line-guide, envelopes, ink-bottle, dipping-pen, and cleared a space to work at the dressing-table. 

Dear Dr Bosanquet

Was that right, or should it be Dear Sir?  She remembered his fleshy hands on the blue letter.  What did it matter?

This is to give you notice that I will leave my employment in one month, on 14
th
May.

She stopped to blow her nose.  Was there anything else to say to him?  She thought for a moment, then added:

Miss Shaw, the Assistant Cook, is very capable, and can take over if this is required.

She wrote
Yours sincerely
, and signed her name.  What did people say when they gave notice? 
It has been a pleasure:
but that wasn’t true. 

He would think it was because he’d found out about her past.  He would be relieved: a problem taken away.

She wrote his name on the envelope and sealed it, then sat back.  So simple: as if she had planned it all along.  Perhaps I am feverish, she thought, but didn’t believe it.

She was shivering; she stood up and ran the hot tap, and held her wrists in the warm flow one at a time.  Then she took her handbag from the wardrobe, and found the card for the employment agency.

Dear Miss Flowers

With reference to our meeting
- but she didn’t know what the date had been -
recently, I would now like you to look for employment for me.  I have given notice and will leave this address on 14
th
May.

She will think I am foolish, without a job to go to.

I should like a non-residential position, in a school or something similar, not a private house.  I prefer London but this is not essential.

Was that demanding too much?  It was what she wanted.
 
She could manage for a few weeks, if it came to that.

If there is nothing before I leave the hospital, I will find lodgings and will send you my address.

She sneezed again, twice, and went back to sit on the bed, the pillow propped up, the counterpane over her.  It was very faded, the pink paisley blurred almost to cream, the cotton soft.  She stroked it
with something like affection
.

Would she miss this place?  People did, she supposed.  She couldn’t remember missing anywhere, not since she’d left Prizren and come to England.  She thought of the evening at Victoria, the two cheerful male nurses and between them the haggard young man they were bringing back.

She pushed the covers aside and returned to her task.

My dear Clara

This is to tell you that I am leaving Holywell.  You will say, At last!

She smiled, seeing her friend, in her red coat with the fur collar, at the kitchen table.

I will write to you when I have found lodgings, I hope in London.

Should she tell Clara about meeting Violeta?  But it was too much to manage writing down.              

I look forward very much to see you again.  It was very good that you came before to see me.

For minutes she searched for Clara’s address, suppressing panic.  Finally she opened the leather box she kept her bank book in, and there it was, on a torn slip of paper. 

Perhaps I will live near her, she thought, but doubted.

*

In the morning she got ready for work again.  Her cold was retreating; the sneezing had stopped, and the constant shivering.  Her nose was blocked; that was what had woken her.  It was quarter to five but she got up anyway, and washed all over, quickly, at the basin. As she dressed she looked down at the three letters, a neat pile at the edge of the dressing-table.  No, she had no doubts about what she’d written.  Her head felt weighted, her body empty and clear, as though she’d been fasting.

She opened up the kitchen at half past five.  In the pale-grey light the metal fryers and the white sinks gleamed.  The spring-clean had paid off; the place looked neat and professional again.  She checked the day’s menu, pinned to the back of the door.  Sausage and mash for lunch: straightforward.  There was something Mrs Olby, the old cook, had called it, some odd English joke from the first war. 
Two tired Zeppelins sitting on a cloud. 
She wondered how many of these patients remembered.

She sat at the table to think about the day.  There was June, presumably going ahead with the wedding.  She must have seen her young man, over the weekend.  And Peg, rejected Peg with the round shoulders.  Would it be difficult for them to work together?  They came to work in the kitchens, these young women; you taught them the routines, cooking and cleaning; but all the time their lives were continuing, they quarrelled with their parents or fell in love.  She imagined June and Peg in bed together, giggling at first then reaching out a hand.  And I knew nothing; I had no idea.

She stood up, and walked the length of the quiet kitchen.  It smelled of scouring-powder and hot lard.  Soon the staff would find out she was leaving.  Probably she would have to announce it to them, call them together first thing in the morning.  But not today, she thought, suddenly nervous.  Not until Dr Bosanquet has had my notice.

There were the three letters that she’d written, on the desk in her office now, two waiting for stamps, the third for collection by the post-room man, for internal delivery halfway through the morning.  There was a fourth she still wanted to write, to Alma; or rather that she’d wanted to write but been afraid.  She thought back to the conversation with Anthony, amongst the sweetish smells of the fish-and-chips shop.  He had said he didn’t want her to go to Prizren.   The hair had fallen across his forehead; he had leant across the table and kissed her. 

Did it matter what he wanted?  He seemed at this moment very kind but distant, as if she were already travelling home.  No doubt she had been selfish towards him.  But he’s married, she protested to herself; he’s not planning to leave his wife and children.  She didn’t even remember his wife’s name.  And she was no deceived mistress either.  It was simply an affair between grown people, each with their separate life and their odd secrets.  She had said nothing to him about Violeta; probably now she never would. 

She looked at the clock: a quarter of an hour left till the staff came in.  She leaned back against the shelf of a tall dresser, and looked at the young cook in the picture tiles, kneading improbable dough on a small table.

She would write to Alma.  She thought of the old lady on the train, whose sister met her every week at Wimbledon station.  Would Alma be an old lady by now?  If I am fifty-five, she’s sixty-two.  She tried to picture her sister with white hair, plump and stately, no doubt a grandmother.

What can I tell her? she wondered, desolate.  Her sister thought she had gone mad; if anything, if she ever thought of her now, it would be as that, a long-stay patient in a foreign asylum.

There was a sound out in the corridor.  Narcisa went quickly back to the long table, and blew her nose, still blocked with the cold, and stood very upright as Rosaleen Shaw entered.

*

The day seemed filled with small acute perceptions: Betty Dunlop stalled in the middle of the kitchen, one hand on the dresser, looking down at the floor; Rosaleen Shaw lifting her broad plain face into a moment’s sunlight from the window; Peg peeling potatoes and watching June.  Perhaps it is because of my cold, Narcisa thought.  Again the kitchen seemed noisy with people’s lives.

She was busy today and competent.  Among the glances there was one from June, that might have been finding some reassurance.  At the same time, as if freeing her to work, the thought of Alma stayed with her all day long.  And as if to please her, everything ran smoothly; water was boiled and poured safely into teapots, bread and butter piled itself high on plates, cabbage was drained and dished up without incident.

After lunch she went to her office to do the books.  Hartley the butcher had given no more problems.  No doubt, as soon as she left, Rosaleen Shaw and he would reach some black-market arrangement.  Let them, she thought, as she filled in the week’s order.

She was half-expecting to be called to Dr Bosanquet’s office.  Perhaps he is on leave today, she thought, relieved but equally wanting it to be over.  Perhaps he has an emergency to deal with.

She added last week’s accounts and wrote in the total.  Behind her on the shelf was a row of ledgers, just like this, with flaking leather spines.  Every week, since she took over from Mrs Olby, she had sat at this desk or at the kitchen table, and added the vast sums the asylum spent on cooking.  And now no doubt she would do the same elsewhere: in the office of a school, or a gentlemen’s club.  And then I will close the ledger and go home. 

The thought of leaving brought her back to Alma.  She sat back in her chair and stretched her arms high over her head.  The point is that I don’t know if I was mad.  I don’t know what to tell her.  Once I was in here, yes; but not before.   It came to her, the smell of the bedroom in Camberwell, mothballs, that terrible dead smell, that her perfume never seemed to cover. 

How strong the memory was, after all this time.  But what had kept her there, a fit young woman, in bed day after day?  She could see Edwin coming in from work, perplexed, withdrawing.  His elegant mother with her disapproval.

Was I mad? she wondered.  What had gone was how she had felt in those long days.  Despairing, she supposed: but was it true?

She stood up from her desk and stood in the wide beam of pearly sunlight through her office window.

I had no-one to talk to.  Only Edwin, in French, when he was at home.  But being lonely isn’t being mad.

This was the thing Violeta hadn’t asked.  Surely it was what she would want to know:
Why were you in the asylum in the first place?
  Perhaps she was too embarrassed to say it.  Though she’d asked other questions.  Perhaps she took it for granted, if you were in the asylum you were mad.  And it’s true, Narcisa thought, standing still, leaning back lightly against the book-shelves, the heel of her hands resting on the wood.  I was mad some of the time while I was a patient. 

Then for some reason there was another picture, her handsome father leading her by the hand, down through the house and into the secret place, the workshop she’d never yet been allowed to enter.  There were smells of sawdust and leather and machines.  At the door he turned to speak to Narcisa’s aunt.  ‘She’ll be safe with me.  It may even distract her.’

She was sitting on the high stool, her heels only just reaching the top rung, the tears drying slowly, stiff, across her face.  He looked over to see how she was, but explained nothing.  His long fingers manipulated metal.

And I was distracted, he was right, she thought.  It must have been after her mother’s death.  There was a word they had used to say how she’d been: inconsolable.

I don’t know, she said in her mind to Violeta, to Alma.  I don’t know whether I was mad or not.  Edwin didn’t know what to do with me.

I should have gone home.  I should have gone back to watch my father in his workshop.   There were voices outside in the corridor.  She rubbed her hands hard over her face.  I was not a child, to distract with goldsmithing.

She put away the account books, and locked the office.  Well, I have never known, she told herself.  I have never been able to recall that time.  I have managed so far, no doubt I will again.