The Painted Bridge (8 page)

He lived on bread and cheese but kept Stickles on because she didn’t insist on getting the skivvy to clean the darkroom or tidy up. He stored his periodicals and case notes on the dining room table in what looked to others like random heaps but were in fact a carefully calibrated system, foolproof until some other hand interfered in it. All he asked, he told her, was that she should keep down the dust in the house and especially on the second floor. Stickles laughed. He would have to remove to the countryside, if he wanted to get away from dust. “It’s what Lunnon’s made of, sir,” she said.

The lamplighter climbed down from the post in the street outside; a round-topped rectangle of flickering light appeared across the floorboards. The heat in the sole of Lucas’s foot, the smell of singeing leather, had become impossible to ignore. He shifted his leg along the fender, emptied the last drops of whisky down his throat and got up to jerk the heavy curtain along its pole. It always got dark earlier on Sundays.

“Time you went, Dox. I’m on duty in the morning and I’ve got work to do tonight.”

“In a minute. Have a look at this.”

Maddox dug in his breast pocket and passed over a small card. It was a photograph of two girls lifting their skirts, showing bandy legs and childish pudenda. The print was amateurish, with no contrast and no detail, the flesh crudely colored with carmine. Lucas grimaced and passed it back.

“No thanks.”

“Come on, old man. Every chap enjoys looking at pictures of naked women. Especially drawn from the life.”

“I don’t disagree with that. But not when I’m thinking about work. Anyway, these aren’t women.” He exhaled and looked at his friend through the softening drift of smoke. “It’s time you found a wife.”

Maddox grunted. He was fingering his tooth again, tracing its outline, his top lip drawn up like a snarling dog. He looked like the old statue of a raving maniac, outside Bedlam. Maddox bared his teeth further, lifting his top lip on both sides.

“Got it done by a chap in Holborn. Swore it was ivory. D’you think women care, about teeth?”

“Some of them might, I suppose.”

Lucas himself had no interest in marriage. He was too busy for social life. And if he wasn’t, he would want a woman he could talk to. Not some creature who spent her energies on stitching and sketching and tinkling the piano keys. Half the female patients in his care had been driven to the edge of reason by their limited lives, in his private opinion. Human beings needed a purpose.

While Maddox entertained a string of women at his rooms at Regent’s Park, female callers at Popham Street were restricted to Lucas’s mother, on her annual visit to London from the Cotswolds, and his sister, who claimed to find the parlor more comfortable than any other in town and who if she called without her husband smoked a Turkish cigarette while Lucas puffed on his pipe.

He leased the house from a silver merchant. It was adequate and the rent reasonable. On the top floor, where other men had bedrooms for children and servants, he had his darkroom. He’d had water piped up for the purpose and although he had not bothered to install a water closet, he was particular about the long basin, the drain that carried away the spent materials. The back bedroom was for dry work, varnishing and retouching, as well as storing the plates. Whatever time he didn’t spend at his post at St. Mark’s, Lucas spent on his research. He’d agreed to give a lecture in the spring to the Alienists’ Association on photography in the diagnosis of lunatics. The members of the Association were like-minded, progressives in tune with himself and hungry for new approaches to mental disease. He had been working on his research in every spare minute, trying to take further the science that Dr. Diamond had begun.

Lucas put his glass down on the floor and rubbed his eyes with the tips of his long fingers. Most of the older generation were resistant. The superintendent of his own hospital, Sir Harry Grieve, was downright hostile. “The human eye does a better job of assessing a lunatic than a glass one ever will,” he liked to pronounce from behind his half-moons. He’d refused Lucas permission to take photographs at St. Mark’s, which forced him to seek out private asylums.

As soon as he was able to establish his research more firmly, he planned to leave St. Mark’s. With luck, he would get a superintendent’s
post himself and with it the chance to build a progressive retreat. In the four years he had spent working with the insane, Lucas had come to believe that mental pain was the worst kind of pain. It was worse than bullet wounds or gangrene. More agonizing than cancers or dropsy. And there was no consensus on how to alleviate it. Blistering was an agony. Purging weakened patients and left them depleted. Cold showers could kill. The intricate variations in medicines were more articles of faith than proven treatments.

Lucas was convinced that photography could constitute a decisive break with the old ways. That it could lead to improved diagnosis, which in turn would inform better-judged treatments. But if he couldn’t even persuade Maddox of the utility of the method, what chance did he have with the medical establishment?

Evidence. It was the only way. He had to come up with the evidence. He must get back up to Lake House at the first opportunity to discuss Mrs. Button’s picture with her; he owed his subjects that much, he believed. And he wanted to meet the new patient Abse mentioned and see if she would agree to being photographed.

Maddox was dozing. His head lolled on the antimacassar and his jaw was slack. The tooth gleamed in the lamplight, whiter and larger than its intended twin. Lucas and Maddox both had posts at St. Mark’s; they had been at the same university and before that, boys at school together. The event that had bonded them more deeply than friendship, than shared history, was the one thing of which they spoke with difficulty and usually only when both were drunk. Maddox too had lost an older brother in the Crimea. George Maddox was mowed down alongside Archibald St. Clair in the slaughter at Balaclava. Lucas and James were older now than those men had been when they met their deaths. They had no right to squander even a minute of their lives.

Maddox gave a thunderous snore and Lucas nudged his shin with the toe of his boot and stood up.

“Bugger off home, Dox,” he said. “I’ve got things to do.”

A fox emerged from the trees on the edge of the lake, made its way up the side of the field and broke cover, heading across the grass for the house. It reached the gravel path that led to the airing grounds and stopped, its tail a flag of intent.

Querios Abse watched from the study window, stroking the quill of his pen against his chin, enjoying its sharp, soft edge. He’d been too busy to get out again with the gun, occupied as he was with readying Lake House for the next visit from the inspectors. He’d had the whirling chair dismantled at last. Jethro Fludd carried it up through the servants’ quarters into the roof space between the attic rooms and laid it piece by piece across the rafters. Querios had ordered dried lavender from Baldwin’s and supplies of chloroform in fluted bottles that couldn’t be mistaken. He’d permitted the introduction of ham, once a week, to be served with English mustard. The photographic portraits were now up in the dayroom as well as the dining room. The magistrates were sure to be impressed by Dr. St. Clair’s techniques, even if the art critics found such pictures offensive.

He’d rehearsed with Fanny Makepeace the code of whistle blasts by which, the instant that the magistrates’ carriage reached the gates, every member of the staff at Lake House could be alerted. On hearing the signal, the groundsman was to release the peacock, the attendants were to throw the lavender on the fires and Makepeace was to take the agreed measures to subdue any patient who threatened to embarrass the visitors.

The birds were the only part of the preparations that gave him personal
satisfaction. He liked peacocks and when the magistrates had complained last time of too few diversions for patients, amongst other things, he’d had an idea. He’d ordered a silver one, with two hens, from a man in Suffolk. They arrived in a wooden crate and the cock began immediately to molt. A week later, one of the females was found dead in the run, her head detached from her body. Querios had been out then with the .12-bore and an oil lamp, taken potshots in the direction of movement in the shrubs. The noise disturbed the patients, Makepeace reported; in particular, Talitha Batt.

The fox was raising its leg against the old oak. He banged on the glass and it took off in a leisurely canter up toward the walled garden, the groundsman’s cottage, the coop. His father, Septimus Abse, had shot a whole family of foxes. The dog prowled forever in a case in the study, stuffed fuller than he had ever been in life; the vixen was made into a stole, for his mother. The ineffable softness of the tips of fur flicking against his cheek, the feel of the lifeless paws and claws in the palms of his hands, had been a motif of his childhood, a symbol of all that was inexplicable about the adult state.

Returning to his desk, Querios put down the pen and picked up the new brochure. It featured Lake House on the cover, looking solid and dignified as a country hotel. In the engraving, the windows were bigger and the walls lower. Three women walked together toward the lake, their skirts and bonnets a deep rose pink. The edges of the picture were soft, as if the house was shrouded in fog or floated, unanchored, above the city it surveyed.

The paragraphs inside described a comfortable, well-situated retreat in the district favored by poets and philosophers, near enough to London to be accessible for visitors but far enough away to be removed from cares, smogs and the din of construction. The notion that they were interested in poets flattered the families. Relatives liked to think they could visit patients, if time allowed. They were less keen on the idea that patients could take it into their heads to visit them. He hadn’t included the rates in the brochure. The accountant’s plan was to raise them but so far Querios hadn’t dared. Losing existing guests could be disastrous.

A log fell in the fire and he put aside the brochure, opened up a
series of ledgers and once again began to go over columns of numbers that denoted reasons for admission, conditions, modes of treatment, cures, lengths of stay. The figures were an attempt to explain something that Querios Abse increasingly believed was not subject to explanation: the female mind.

*   *   *

The dayroom was the gloomiest Anna had ever seen. The high ceiling, the length of the room and the doors at each end gave it the air of a grand and static corridor. Brocade curtains soaked up the light from three long windows. A line of gas lamps suspended from the ceiling gave off more noise than illumination, the mantles hissing overhead, spent fumes souring the air.

Fifteen or twenty women sat at intervals around the room. Mrs. Violet Valentine and the other old ones clustered by the fire. The rest were stationed either alone or in groups of two or three on chairs and sofas. Lizzie Button paced about most of the time. Two of the women, Miss Todd and Miss Little, were inseparable except after one of their frequent quarrels. Then they made sure to sit at opposite ends of the salon.

“Are you feeling stronger, Mrs. Palmer?”

Talitha Batt’s face was composed under a mask of powder that to Anna looked suspiciously like flour; her hands unspooled a length of vermilion silk in rapid, efficient movements.

“I’m perfectly well, thank you.”

Anna answered without thinking, despite her resolution not to talk to anyone. Batt bit off a length of thread and smoothed out the fabric on her lap. The embroidered piece was large and densely worked, a complex, deep-colored tableau of exotic-looking flowers and insects. It was almost finished. She brought the tip of a needle up through a half-completed petal.

“Generally, one is out of sorts after an emetic. The muscles ache. One feels fatigued. Low in spirits and without appetite.”

She glanced at Anna again, her darkened brows raised. The ruff standing up under her chin gave her an old-fashioned look; a Queen Elizabeth with a pointed chin and small ears. She could have been carved on a cameo, she was definite and distinct.

Batt had described so precisely how Anna felt that she might have been inside her body.

“You needn’t bother about how I am, thank you. In fact, I would rather you didn’t.”

“Why is that, Mrs. Palmer? We are thrown together in this place, after all.”

“I won’t be staying long. I shouldn’t be here but my husband has misunderstood my state of mind.”

“Husbands so often do.”

Her voice was mild. Anna flushed.

“He’s a clergyman. He’ll be coming soon to take me …” She thought she would say
home
but her lips refused. “Out.”

“I do hope so. This is no place for a young woman. For any woman.”

Lizzie Button was walking up and down, singing a lullaby, patting the piece of wood cradled against her chest. She moved like a mother in a nursery, her hand rhythmic, her voice soft. Anna made a long, low intake of breath. Poor thing had lost a child. It was obvious. She threw her a look of sympathy. Button glared at her.