The Jeweller's Skin (31 page)

1919

I was wearing a saxe-blue dress and a navy coat.

The clothes felt strange; I didn’t know how my body might move in them.  I walked and fabric flowed around my legs, in wide folds.  The bodice seemed to pull my shoulders straight, to make me keep my arms close to my sides. 

I dressed with a big group of the women watching.  Two or three rubbed the cloth between their fingers; Bet from the ironing-room was looking scornful.  They stood around me in their asylum dresses, washed-out blue cotton, soft with wear, with patches under the arms or at the hem; too tight over one woman’s weighty breasts, too short on another and showing her white stockings.  It was only being in my own clothing - a dress and underthings I’d been measured for, standing still with my arms stretched out, while a grey-haired woman touched me with a tape-measure - that I could see what had happened to all of them.  They were subdued by the shapeless shared clothing, all of them, even the savage ones who shouted at nobody and soiled themselves.  It was as if they had no bodies, or only lumps of flesh that could walk around and work.  I took a few steps down the ward in my dress, and began to remember how it had been, to feel a kind of pulse that rose up through me and spread right to my fingers.  Then I was frightened and quelled myself again.

The young attendant Clarkson came to escort me.  She was trying not to grin at the special task.  ‘Humphreys,’ she said.  ‘The gentleman has come to collect you.’  Somebody made a deep throaty comment; the others sniggered and watched for me to react.  Clarkson looked away, not to be seen to smile.

The old woman called Ann stood up slowly, and came towards me, leaning on the bedframes.  She stood close in front of me; I could smell her rank hair, white and yellow like the moustache of a man who smokes.  ‘Good luck,’ she said clearly, to be understood.  Then she leaned closer; I saw that it gave her some pain.  ‘Tell them, don’t forget, will you?  Tell them.’

‘Get a move on, Humphreys,’ the attendant said.  ‘Can’t keep the gentleman waiting, now, can we?’

I said good bye to two or three of the women; Liza and Tris from the beds either side, the young girl Cissie who I had kept an eye on.  Cissie started crying.  ‘Goodbye,’ I said again, to all of them, and turned to follow Clarkson.  ‘Goodbye, Nora,’ I heard somebody call.  Then there were voices saying Goodbye, good luck, look after yourself, fading behind me as I left the ward.  I wondered if it was kindness or only envy.

We walked down corridors I had never seen.  Clarkson slowed down so as to chat to me.  ‘He’s very young,’ she said, ‘the gentleman.  Do you understand me, Humphreys?  He’s not bad-looking.  Maybe you could - you know?’

She was used to my silences, and not deterred.  ‘What an adventure, eh?’ she said.   ‘Aren’t you excited?  Time to have a normal life again.  Your husband will be home tonight, I suppose?’

I stared.  ‘ Well, I didn’t know,’ the attendant said.  ‘Well, never mind.  You won’t know yourself once you’re out of here.’

She opened a door and we came to the entrance hall.  The floor was polished; a dark green carpet led to the front door.  Beside the umbrella stand was a small black trunk.   ‘That’s your things,’ Clarkson said.  ‘You know, the rest of the clothes they got made for you: things like that.  I’ll just go and get him.’

She came back with a thick-set young man who looked nervous.  ‘Mrs Humphreys?’ he asked, and held out his hand.  His handshake was brief and firm, a man’s touch, strange.  ‘My name is Noones; from your husband’s solicitors.’  He spoke carefully, watching to see if I understood.  ‘Where are your bags?’ he asked.  ‘I’ll have them put in the cab.’

‘There’s just the one trunk,’ Clarkson said, and pointed.  ‘People don’t have much in here.  It’s not a hotel.’

He opened the door and called.  A burly man in heavy boots came in, looking down as if ashamed, and lifted the trunk on his shoulder.  A bar of sunlight lay across the floor, and brightened the leaf-pattern in the carpet.

‘Well, ta-ta, Humphreys,’ the attendant said.  I was astonished to see that she looked moved.  ‘Don’t forget us.’

‘I am ready.  We go?’ I said to Mr Noones.  He opened the door and I walked on my own, across the porch with its pillars and down the two steps.  The sun was suddenly hot on the side of my face.  A grey horse stood in its traces before the cab, its nose in a hessian bag.  The man in the brown boots held the cab door open.

The ‘jeweller’s skin’ is the leather apron tacked to the goldsmith’s bench to catch the leftover fragments of gold.  This and other details of goldsmithing and gold mining emerged from the fairy-tale stacks of the London Library.

The idea for Narcisa’s story came from research I did in 1996 in the London Metropolitan Archives for a history of Horton Hospital in Epsom; the book was published that year as
Asylum, Hospital, Haven
by Riverside Mental Health Trust.  Ten years later, I went to the Family Records Centre (now, alas, closed) to follow up the story that obsessed me, and wrote it up in a piece for Iain Sinclair’s
London, City of Disappearances
(London, Hamish Hamilton, 2006), called ‘Stalking the Tiger’
.
  The essay includes an extract from this novel.  I have borrowed a few historical and topographical details from Horton, but otherwise Holywell and its staff and patients are entirely fictional. 

I owe very many thanks for advice, support and encouragement to my tutor on the Sheffield Hallam MA in Writing, Lynne Alexander; to the inspiring, exasperating, late and much lamented Archie Markham, also at Hallam; to my fellow students Bryony Doran, Julia South, Emily Brett and Lily Dunn; to other friends who read and commented, Caroline Maldonado, Mimi Sanderson, Barbara Stow and Bill Allerton; to Hana Islami and Indira Kartallozi for reassurance about Narcisa’s origins in Prizren; to Garry Kennard for the cover illustration; and to everyone who lent or rented me a space to write in, put up with my agonisings and refused to accept my defeatism.

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