Human Traces Page 30

  Once it had been explained to them that Mary was blind, most of the patients allowed themselves to be massaged naked, and this allowed her to develop a sensitivity to match her strength; she could feel where their bodies needed help to heal, relax or break down the deposits of fat and salt from the large amount of food they were consuming. The young women sat up with a smile when they heard the tapping of her stick approach their door: they were allowed no visitors apart from the doctor and the electrician, and many of them were lonely; they talked to Mary as she worked, telling her the stories of their lives, though not sure that she could understand. She sensed their pleasure in the way they let fall their heavy limbs at the wordless instruction of her hands and in their dreamy gratitude when she had finished.

  Each day her consciousness of what it meant to be alive was growing. There was the realm of speech, to which, after years of silence in the workhouse and the asylum, she was a newcomer. Neglect had made her own voice low and quiet, and it took many weeks before she could converse confidently even with Daisy, in English; no sooner was she there, than another language began to form in her brain and by simple repetition come to mean something. With no distraction from the seen world, she could concentrate on the sounds, remember and repeat them, wishing sometimes she had the courage to ask Thomas what some of the phrases really meant; she grew fluent in the idiom of tired young women, picking up their tics and idiosyncrasies as her own.

  A physical world, not bound by chains or locks, was opened up to her in the extensive grounds of the schloss, somewhere she could move at will, encountering different sounds and surfaces and densities of air. Josef held her hand and made her stroke the gelding’s nose, then compare it to the mare’s. On the other side of the stables was a small pasture where, following Herr Leopold’s suggestion, they had put two cows, which Mary’s educated hands learned how to milk. Beyond all these new perspectives – greater than all the new worlds of language and sensation – was her discovery of what it meant to feature in the thoughts of other living beings. They knew her name; they asked her questions; she became a part of their routines; she believed that to a small extent they even needed her. Sometimes she wondered if there was any level at which this ascent into awareness might end. It was like climbing from the centre of a set of Chinese boxes: how many new worlds can I discover, she asked herself, and still be looking at the same old life?

  Sonia had been at the schloss six weeks and was dreaming one night of a meadow near Torrington where she had often played as a child; she was running up the hill, scattering a flock of sheep, when she developed a stitch that made her gasp for breath. She awoke, sweating, in the warm May night to find that the pain was real – not in her ribs but in her lower abdomen. She lit a candle, checked that Jacques was sleeping undisturbed, and made her way to the bathroom. As she walked, she found that she was bleeding. She locked the door and drew a warm bath, holding a towel between her legs. She placed the candle on the shelf beside the tub and climbed into the water, which she could see, by the light of the flickering flame, was blooming with the blood that poured from her. For a few minutes she lay still, rigid with the spasms and her fear of what they meant. Then the contractions and the cramps grew less frequent; the pain receded, but was replaced by an overpowering fatigue. Somewhere swirling in the candlelight, somewhere in the blood and water, the life of her son had been lost – a mess of red cells she washed away, down through the drains and out beneath the dark fields of Carinthia – no spirit, no laughter, no breath, just red human matter.

  I have failed, she thought: I have failed a second husband. When she had cleaned the bath and the tile floor, she clamped a fresh towel between her legs and pulled her nightdress on again. She did not want to disturb Jacques, who slept far too little, and whom, for superstitious reasons, she had not yet told of her pregnancy. The night was warm and the ceramic surface of the floor was cool against her cheek as she lay down, wrapping her arms round her belly, covering over the pain, squeezing away the absence. The little boy was so real to her that she could almost hear his voice. ‘My little one,’ she whispered. ‘Oh my darling boy.’ She felt the uprushing love towards him fill her soul, then hang, until she crushed it back inside herself with the strength of her arms.

  In the morning, she told Jacques she had bled more heavily than usual. She noticed the flicker of disappointment in his eyes before he offered sympathy; he examined her, palpating gently. She had no fever and he was sure that she was well, but told her she must go to see the gynaecologist in the city hospital, to be certain.

  ‘I shall ask the Executioner to take you in this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I can come with you if you like. It is probably nothing, but to me it suggests something positive. Activity of any kind is a good omen for . . .’ He trailed off with a gesture; the subject was delicate, and they had never voiced their hopes.

  The gynaecologist confirmed that she had lost a foetus. After examination, he ‘tidied up’, as he put it, and assured Sonia that he saw no reason why she should not conceive again; it was only if she miscarried three times consecutively at less than twenty weeks that there was deemed to be a functional problem.

  ‘Nature generally aborts for a reason,’ he said, drying his hands on a towel by the basin. ‘You have lost a good deal of blood. Rest for two days, then be of good cheer. You are a healthy woman.’

  ‘I shall try,’ said Sonia. ‘In return, please do not tell my husband that I was pregnant.’

  ‘Entirely as you wish.’

  Back at the schloss, Sonia ignored the doctor’s order and returned at once to work.

  By the end of the summer, she produced accounts for Herr Leopold at the bank that showed they were already making a small profit; there were several bookings for the autumn, and although the world of human sickness was not predictable, it did look as though the economy of the schloss could be made to work. Heartened by this news, Jacques told her that the time had now come for him to go and fetch Olivier from his asylum. He had not wanted to uproot him until he was certain he could offer him a lasting home, but now, with the good financial news, he felt confident; Thomas would take over his patients while he was away and he expected the return journey to Brittany to take him no more than ten days.

  X

  AS THE TRAIN travelled west from Paris, Jacques had leisure, for the first time since he had made his visit to Torrington four summers earlier, to look back at the period of furious passion through which he had lived. Beyond the shuddering glass, he could see the landscape reel out continuously, sliced into rectangles by the rapid return of his eye. His own life sometimes seemed to him to have that quality of being made up of a series of separate phases, barely understood at the time, for all that they formed part of an unwinding whole. The moment of his appearance before the examiners to defend his thesis had marked the dramatic end of one such section. He had prepared very little for the interview – dangerously little, when he came to think of it. It was as though he could not bring himself to imagine it in advance because too much depended on it; yet he could not have foreseen what really resulted, which was not just the ending of the student years or the acquisition of a licence to practise, but the sense that he had become someone else: for a moment in the churchy upstairs room where the test took place, he had seen himself from the outside, as the examiners saw him, and he no longer felt provisional or disqualified, but filled with power and confidence. If they believed in this strange Dr Rebière, then why should he not do so too? And then, why not send the fellow out to do his lifework for him – this awe-inspiring doctor whose work of ‘first-rate scholarship’ had brought his superiors – no, his equals – to their feet?

  After all, he was inventing other aspects of his life as he went along. The role of husband, for instance, was not how he had pictured it, this one-room urban penury with a divorced foreigner – no solid house, no servants or children – yet Sonia seemed content when all that he had brought was himself and what he carried in his head. So he turned his mind
to his work and found that he could manage German as well as English and that much of what he read among the Germans seemed to fit in with his own preconceptions and interests. Was he allowed to take other men’s ideas, pick them up like a jackdaw and carry them back to his nest? Was this thievery, or was it scholarship? The further he continued, the more he had the feeling that his work was blessed: almost everything seemed to relate to his central concern, to the working of the mind and to the subtle way that thought crossed into flesh. The evidence seemed to lie all about him, yet no one else had bothered to look down and pick it up. That did not matter: for millions of years the leaves had fallen from the trees before Newton described the simple force that made them do so; it was less than a hundred years since the brain had been identified as the organ of thought, relegating other favoured contenders, such as heart, stomach and pineal gland, to their more mundane work. And as for the fact that he had not travelled an orthodox academic road, that might be an advantage. Who had discovered more: overeducated graduates of the finest schools who cautiously added a new level of research to the best that had been bought for them, or men inflamed by a sense of being excluded, driven by their own desire to labour onward, ragged, blind, into the night? Perhaps a little ignorance was a helpful and a necessary thing; it prevented him from feeling it had all been done before, while the blind spots in his vision helped him see other parts of the picture with burning insight.

  And Sonia . . . He had learned to think of himself as she viewed him, everything reflected back from her, so that he became the man she saw. He knew her perspective was only partial, that everyone had a different picture of him, but Sonia was no fool, her gaze was steady and her interpretation sound; and if she was a little too forbearing, more indulgent than he deserved, then he could privately supply the corrections. Sometimes he did yearn for a different idea of what he was; he felt restricted within the role she had assigned him – not that there was anything wrong with it, just that it was singular and he wanted to exist in more than one pair of eyes.

  At Nantes railway station, he caught a branch line to the small town that was nearest to Olivier’s country seclusion, and from the station took a cab across the pale, flat countryside, through the forest roads and the planted acres of gnarled and stunted vines that produced the acidic wine of the region, then across the village itself and onward to his remote destination.

  Night had fallen when he climbed down from the carriage at the gates of the asylum and pulled the bell. A nun came hurrying up the path from the main doors of the building, her habit flapping about her in the gathering wind. She scanned his face anxiously through the gate.

  ‘Come inside quickly,’ she said when he had explained his business. There was a solitary gas bracket in the main hall of the building beneath which he stood while the nun vanished into the darkness. There was nothing to see in the old building and no sound came to him, so he began to think about other things: he pictured Sonia at the schloss; he thought of her in the bright family rooms, so different from the dank lowland where he found himself.

  ‘Come this way,’ said the nun.

  She led him down a stone corridor with a vaulted ceiling, then showed him into a room and indicated a chair at the plain, scrubbed table. She left him again, without explanation, and he heard her wooden clogs going over the floor. He was in what appeared to be a kind of parlour, lit by two small candles in holders on the table; behind him was a sink with a dripping brass tap. His mind began to move on again, and he was aware of disregarding his odd surroundings, because the thoughts in his head were more alive to him. Perhaps soldiers in a cavalry charge were thinking about something other than the guns. With their thighs they could contain the swell and thunder of the horse, guide the sword with a young man’s eyesight, all muscles tensed to kill or die, but could also be pondering the growth of a wistaria above the lintel of an aunt’s front door. Did they deserve to be called brave? He remembered once performing an emergency tracheotomy on an epileptic woman in the Salpêtrière, and – at the moment his dexterity opened up the airway and saved her life – he was thinking about lunch. How seldom it was that you fully inhabited your surroundings, engaging not only your senses but your awareness. On the occasions that you did so, time had a way of slowing, or appearing even to stop. So did we hurry on with other thoughts because we were preoccupied, so well adjusted to the world that it was scarcely worth our attention? Or would committing ourselves to it more fully involve experiences of time or doubt or fear that we did not really wish to have? Had the ability to escape into abstraction, to live outside our surroundings, been favoured by natural selection? It certainly appeared to be an ability lacked by the mentally ill, who were engaged so fully with their reality that they were stuck in it. There was some problem with time here, he felt sure: a healthy mind needed a proper relationship with time, which was clearly no linear given, but something more mysterious, and could be experienced in various ways.

  ‘Come this way,’ said the nun, and her voice caused Jacques to jump back into the candle-lit room.

  Although he had visited the asylum before, it had been by day, and he rapidly became disorientated in the darkness, following the nun’s candle down a twisting corridor. A cat swerved between his feet, causing him to stumble and put out his hand: the wall was damp beneath his fingers.

  ‘Can I take him tonight, Sister? The superintendent wrote to me and said that if I countersigned his report to the Department, then—’

  ‘I am instructed to show you to a room where you can sleep. The lunatics cannot be awakened after darkness. They rise soon after daybreak. I will bring you food in the morning. In here, please.’

  The nun lit a candle in whose light Jacques could see a narrow bed with a crucifix hanging from the wall above it, a table with a jug, a glass and a cloth-covered plate, a washstand and, beside it, a metal bucket.

  ‘Goodnight,’ said the nun, handing him the second candle, which she had fixed in a china holder. ‘God be with you.’

  ‘And with you, Sister.’

  She backed into the shadows and closed the door. Jacques was certain that he heard her turn a key, and looked at the door for a moment in disbelief; by the time he had tried it and found that it would not open, it was too late to remonstrate.

  He carried the candle to the table and found that beneath the cloth on the plate were two slices of dark, mealy bread and a piece of meat. The water in the jug was so cold that it must have been drawn from a well deep below any living earth; it sent jagged nerve pains through his teeth.

  He sat down on the bed and opened the leather bag Sonia had packed for him. His eyesight was not what it had been when he worked upstairs in his father’s house, and the light from the candle was too dim for him to read by, so he resigned himself to sleep, removing his boots and his outer clothes then pulling up the covers.

  He smiled to himself, not the full simian gash that had charmed Thomas in the Pension des Dunes, but a small, solitary grimace: it was an adventure, and in the morning he would take his brother back to human company.

  Jacques was in a narrow tunnel, crawling on his elbows; too late, he felt that his shoulders were too wide: he had reached the point where he could not turn round and he was now trapped. His lumpish heart was rising from his ribs and he could hear the noise of chains, metal grinding on metal, which slowly emerged as the sound of his shutter grating on its hinge, turning slowly in the wind from the Atlantic as he awoke. For a moment he could not pull himself free from the dream: he was exhausted by the struggle, but knew that if he gave in to fatigue and closed his eyes he would be back in the tunnel. He swung his feet down onto the cold floor. The room had the rare and utter darkness of the cave, of a time before fire. He walked forward, holding out his arms ahead of him to protect his eyes. He felt the iron lozenge of the espagnolette and twisted it, pulling the halves of the casement inward. He pushed his fingers into the blackness, but could feel nothing; he worried at the darkness with his eyes until the cornea stung, b
ut there were no shapes and no light. He did not want to return to sleep, so groped his way back across the room, took his trousers from the bedpost and went down on his hands and knees to search for his boots. The second time at the window, his hand encountered the wayward shutter, and he pushed it back on its unoiled hinge. Then he climbed out into the night. He tried to orientate himself by keeping the outside wall under his left hand, though soon there was a narrow ditch alongside the building that made it impossible.

  Through the blackness of the air he tried to picture the deciduous wood he had noticed by moonlight when he arrived; he imagined the high walls about the grounds, the ditches and lanes beyond, but it was no good: he was giddy and lost in the dark with no idea of his way back or forward; even the vast walls of the asylum were not there for his questing fingers.

  He was not frightened; he had seen nights like this as a child, and had found his way back from the woods to his unlit home. Something at last reached his senses, and so concentrated was he on his denied sight that it took a moment before he registered that it was not vision but a sound – and it was that of a human voice. He tilted his head from side to side, trying to catch its direction, and moved uncertainly towards it. Despite the protective outreach of his hands, his head collided with sharp masonry; he closed his hands and found that he was embracing a corner of the asylum. There was no ditch at this part of the wall, and he was able to feel his way along again until the stonework gave way to the wood of closed shutters.