Human Traces Read online

  ‘But you will write. You will not lose touch.’

  ‘I promise. Anyway, what about you? What will you do next?’ said Thomas.

  ‘If I am to understand and cure the afflictions of the mind, I need to study them first. To try to understand. I am going to study further in Paris.’

  ‘All right,’ said Thomas. ‘For my part, I promise this. When I am ready, I will come to you. I will take no other work until we have tried together. Until we have tried to climb our mountain.’

  ‘Do you swear?’

  ‘I swear.’ Thomas held out his hand and Jacques took it, then gathered Thomas in his arms. They embraced tightly.

  No need for blood, thought Jacques.

  The wind was beginning to moan softly and waves were starting to swell; there was the first rumble and spray of the coming autumn.

  ‘I love you,’ said Jacques.

  ‘What?’ said Thomas, over the noise of the sea.

  When Sonia asked if he would like to go sailing again, Thomas told her that he needed to study that afternoon; she tried to persuade her husband to come instead, but he was having lunch with a man he had met the night before in Trouville, someone who, he told Sonia, might be the very person he had been looking for.

  ‘He knows everyone in Paris, stockbrokers, people in the Government,’ said Richard, flushed with excitement. ‘He is a marvellous fellow as well. I just know he is the man to turn our little craft about and head her into the wind. I shall telegraph to Jackman. Meanwhile I am taking him to the best lunch in town. You have to spend money to make money, that’s what I always say.’

  So Sonia went alone to the next bay, feeling a little furtive, but not knowing why. When she knocked at the door of the fisherman’s cottage there was no answer, and she went to sit in the garden until someone should return.

  ‘Ah . . . Madame. Excuse me, I did not see you there.’ It was Guillaume. ‘Have you been waiting long?’

  ‘No. I am sorry. I had no way of telling you I would be coming.’

  ‘I am afraid I cannot take you out this afternoon because my grandfather has the boat. He won’t be back before nightfall.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Sonia, ‘I had better return to the hotel. Perhaps we could make an arrangement for tomorrow.’

  ‘Would you like a drink before you go back, Madame? It’s hot, isn’t it?’ He gave an awkward laugh.

  ‘Perhaps a glass of water.’

  In the cool of the parlour, Guillaume seated himself opposite her, with a jug of water and two glasses. He grinned repeatedly and, Sonia thought, if he had had a tail, it would have been thumping the wooden bench he sat on. This made her think of Dido, and Amelia, the force of whose wagging tail had once freed a frozen tap in the backyard, and she felt wistful for her old home.

  Guillaume showed her some fishing hooks and floats he had made, but it soon became clear that what he wanted to talk about was her. Sonia could not think what made her life seem intriguing to him; she presumed it must be the fact that she was foreign, and Guillaume had never before spoken to a person from another country.

  ‘What was your home like?’ he said. ‘Not like this.’ He glanced round the jumble of nets, pots and clothes left to dry over the furniture.

  ‘It was a happy home. We never had very much money, but that did not matter to Thomas and me. When he was young, he used to sleep in my room. I had always wanted to be a big sister because I have an elder brother and I grew tired of being the little one all the time. Thomas was a naughty boy. He made us all laugh. I used to read him stories before he could read for himself. He was always very violent in his feelings. Occasionally he seemed to see things I had not seen, so that I began to look forward to what he would say. Then when we were older I was sent away to learn to speak French and to practise the piano and all these things that make you a more valuable wife while Thomas stayed at school and learned many more things than I ever knew. And then there was a time when I felt he might leave me behind because he was impatient. But something seemed to stop him. Although he argued with my parents, he stopped short with me. It was as though he remembered the old days when we slept in the same room and fell asleep together each night by the light of the candle. And if it was cold, he would climb into bed with me. These are the things you remember about your home, I suppose. The pattern of the candle shadows on the wall, the fiery little boy who needs your arm round him to make him sleep. Nothing happens to make you happy. There are no prizes or thunderbolts or adventures. Just the shadow of the candle on the wall.’

  ‘I see,’ said Guillaume.

  Sonia coughed. ‘Then one day, when you are grown up, you suddenly become aware that something has gone. In any event,’ she said, making an effort to recollect herself, ‘my husband and I live a very satisfactory life. In London. A very big city.’

  ‘I imagine.’

  Sonia smiled. ‘No one has ever asked me these questions. I am not sure that even I know the answers.’

  ‘Excuse me, Madame, I—’

  ‘No, no. It’s all right. In fact, I like it. It’s . . . Reassuring.’

  ‘You like to be reassured?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why, Madame? You are – forgive me, beautiful, and wealthy and—’

  ‘Not really. Neither.’

  ‘But look . . .’ Guillaume gestured with outstretched hand to the messy parlour.

  Sonia blushed. ‘Yes . . . But we are not rich, I promise you. And I am certainly not beautiful.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Ssh. Please. I know. My mother used to tell me my best feature was my feet.’ Sonia laughed. ‘Can you imagine?’

  Guillaume also laughed. ‘Perhaps she did not mean that. Perhaps—’

  ‘Now we will talk about something else.’

  ‘But, Madame, tell me one thing. Why is it that you need to be reassured? If I was like you I would wake up every day and thank God for everything he has given me. I would not need to be told every day how fortunate I was. I would still remember from the day before!’

  Sonia began to laugh. ‘You are right, Guillaume. It is a mystery, an utter mystery. All I can say is that a plant needs water not once in its life but every evening, sometimes more often.’

  ‘Yes, Madame, but a plant—’

  ‘I know. It was not a precise comparison.’

  Sonia took up her hat and prepared to leave. Richard would be waking from a sleep made heavy by the wine he would have taken with his new business friend; it was a slow and fractious time of the afternoon, before the cool of evening brought a change of clothes and a quickening of pace. She pictured him stirring, licking his dry lips and splashing water from the washstand into his face.

  There was a loud knocking on the parlour door, which Guillaume went to open. Sonia, with her back to the door, recognised the English voice.

  ‘I’m looking for my wife – ah, there she is. What on earth are you doing here?’

  Sonia rose to greet her husband. To her annoyance, she found that her face was hot with shame. ‘Hello, Richard. This is where we come sailing. I—’

  ‘I know it is. They told me at the hotel. Why aren’t you sailing?’

  ‘Guillaume’s grandfather has the boat. I don’t think he will be coming back until evening, so Guillaume kindly offered me a glass of water before I set off.’

  ‘Sonia, what on earth do you think you are doing?’

  ‘I told you, Richard. How was your luncheon?’

  Richard snorted. ‘The bounder didn’t come. Wretched man. Made an ass of me, sitting there on my own at the best table with the confounded waiter hovering over me.’

  ‘I am sorry. What a disappointment. I imagine—’

  ‘I think you imagine far too much. It is not your place to imagine, it is your place to be with your husband. Go back to the hotel at once. I will deal with this young man.’

  Richard’s voice was shaking. Sonia had not seen him angry in this way before, yet she sensed that the rage had somehow accumu
lated in him and felt uneasy that she had been responsible for making it overflow.

  ‘Guillaume has behaved with perfect propriety, so please . . .’ Her voice faltered then died, as Richard came towards her.

  ‘Get out of here! Go home.’

  She turned and hurried through the door, without glancing back.

  IV

  THE BUILDING BLOCKED the downland view in both directions: low, brick upon brick, some livid, some ochre, stretching from one horizon to the other. In the centre of the monstrous construction was an oddity: a belltower like that of the cathedral in Siena; and such Italianate fancy was not what Thomas had expected of the county lunatic asylum.

  He entered by the guarded double iron gates where the coach had set him down and walked slowly up the avenue in a mild September afternoon. It was Sunday, and he had been told to report at three o’clock before the arrival of new patients at tea-time. He clasped a leather bag with his spare clothes in one hand and, in the other, the book he had been reading on the coach, A Manual of Psychological Medicine by Bucknill andTuke. Around him on the lawns, containedwithin the high enclosing walls, were specimen trees, some with benches placed beneath them; beyond a pale willow was an ice-house, and beyond that further brick outbuildings, workshops, laundries and what looked to Thomas like the back of pig sties. He walked confidently to the main door of the building, and pulled the bell. A spyhole swivelled, and he saw a single eye inspect him before, with a grinding of numerous locks, half the door was opened. In the entrance hall was a wooden booth with a glass front, in which the porter who let him in had been reading a newspaper by gaslight. Thomas’s nostrils twitched at some unfamiliar smell.

  ‘Dr Midwinter. I am the new assistant medical officer. I believe Dr Faverill is expecting me.’

  ‘The superintendent’s office is down the far end. The name’s above the door.’ The porter spoke with a sceptical edge to his voice, as though not sure if Thomas was who he said he was. Thomas wondered if the man was a former patient.

  ‘Shall I?’ Thomas gestured towards the corridor on his left.

  The porter looked at him, then said, ‘Walk outside the building. You don’t have no keys yet. Take the green door at the end.’

  It was, although Thomas could not have said why, a relief to be in the open air again. He walked along the flank of the asylum, on a gravelled path; at his feet were half-windows from the basement, barred, their lower lights underground. Occasionally he would go past a ground-floor window with the same arched top as the others, but bricked in. He was reluctant to turn his head to look, and kept his gaze ahead of him until he had reached the end of the wing, where he found the green door at the foot of one of the smaller belltowers.

  Inside, he knocked on a door beside which was Dr William Faverill’s name, painted white on a black background, as his own had been at the foot of his staircase at Cambridge. He remembered the time he had climbed his college wall in the small hours after a visit to Newmarket to find that some vandal had painted out the letters ‘winter’ from his name and substituted ‘night’. He knocked. Faverill’s office was full of smoke from a pile of coal in a small grate, beside which sat a woman in a shawl, rocking back and forth in her chair.

  ‘Midwinter. Yes, of course.’ Faverill waved his arm towards a vacant seat. He was a gaunt, tallish man, with fair hair parted in the middle and swept into two curling wings above the ear; his beard was sparse on the upper cheeks, but dense and grey beneath the jaw. He looked at Thomas over the top of his spectacles, then through them, then peeled them off his face altogether as he sat down. ‘You are very welcome, sir. Matilda, this is Dr Midwinter, who has come to assist us in our mission. Dr Midwinter, this is Matilda who helps me with all manner of details, domestic and medical. Forgive the smoke. It is our first fire of the year and I fear the chimney needs sweeping. Let me see.’ He picked up a piece of paper from the desk. ‘Cambridge. Edinburgh. Then St Bartholomew’s? Is that right? Is that where you completed your studies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very good. Commendable. You will enjoy meeting my colleague, the deputy superintendent, Mr McLeish. A Scot. From which town is he, Matilda? A Fifer, I think. Not a real Highlander, though I have never been certain of Scotch tribal terms. An inspired people, though, and with a medical tradition second to none. McLeish is the lungs and liver of the asylum.’

  Thomas wondered who the heart was, but found it difficult to concentrate on what Faverill was saying because he was too interested in the rocking figure by the fire. If the porter was not a former lunatic, then this woman certainly exhibited florid symptoms of insanity, muttering to herself and grinding the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other.

  The office was lined with bookshelves, and Thomas narrowed his eyes in an effort to read their titles through the smoke. Apart from some standard texts on anatomy and two editions of Bucknill and Tuke, there seemed to be little of any medical, let alone psychological nature; most of the space was taken up with books on botany, geography and philosophy. There was even, Thomas noticed, a shelf of novels by Sir Walter Scott. Well, he thought, psychiatry is a young discipline; that is part of its excitement.

  ‘Now we shall have some tea,’ said Faverill. ‘I find it beneficial to have a refreshing cup before the arrival of our new patients. After the reception process is complete I sometimes take something a little stronger. Perhaps you would care to join me then. No, I have another idea. As your introduction to the asylum I shall allow you to write up the new arrivals. McLeish shall do the men and you may do the women.’

  Faverill busied himself with a kettle and teapot. ‘Numbers,’ he said, ‘that is the difficulty that is facing us, Midwinter. In a word. Numbers.’ Thomas was surprised that it was Faverill, not Matilda, who made the tea, but she seemed to expect nothing less, and took her steaming cup from him, as her due, when it was ready. Faverill sat in the rather beautiful wooden chair behind the desk, its walnut curve accommodating his frock-coated back, as he stretched out and placed his buttoned boots on the blotter. ‘Doubtless you are aware, Midwinter, that families once looked after their lunatics at home, but the great men of our calling – I hesitate to call it a profession until it is recognised as such by our equals – have demonstrated beyond contradiction that a well-run asylum can offer restorative benefits unavailable even to the most well-meaning family. Our fellow-countryman Samuel Tuke, among others, has shown that with kindness, a firm hand and tasks to occupy the mind most people can be helped in their affliction. The word asylum, let us never forget, denotes safety.’ He sipped his tea.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Thomas, pleased to have a chance to show his enthusiasm. ‘I visited the York Retreat and was most impressed by what Mr Tuke had established there. It was almost a model society, though of course its citizens were . . . Eccentric.’ He did not look towards the fireside. ‘But the so-called moral treatment is certainly the best palliative that exists – until such time as we can establish the aetiology of the different diseases.’

  He felt pleased with the rigorous way he had expressed himself; his superior would surely see in him an assistant of entirely scientific mind, not someone whose first interest had been in play-going.

  ‘Er . . . Yes,’ said Faverill. ‘Very possibly. But numbers, you see, Midwinter. That’s the thing. We are nigh on two thousand. Your appointment here as additional medical officer has been authorised by the county council, but it was granted only after considerable pleading – yes, I think pleading is not too strong a word – on my part.’

  ‘Do you mean—’

  ‘I mean, that sometimes I find myself the captain of a stricken vessel. I have the stars by which to navigate; I try never to take my eyes from the heavens, because I know the constellations. I know the direction of our landfall. But on bad days I feel that we are holed below the waterline. Do you understand me?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Thomas. A clearing in the smoke had just revealed the poetry of Tennyson and Wordsworth on a shelf behind the desk.
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  ‘Your task – one of your many tasks, I may say, but perhaps the most important single one – is to help me never to take my eyes from the stars in the sky.’

  Faverill stood up and walked round the desk. He smiled at Thomas. ‘Let us go then, you and I, Dr Midwinter. We shall walk the length of the building, at the other end of which I shall introduce you to Mr McLeish. Matilda, the keys if you please.’

  Faverill put his arm round Thomas’s shoulder and ushered him towards the door, clasping in his other hand a large iron ring that Matilda had passed him, from which hung a dozen keys.

  From the inner vestibule, Faverill unlocked a double, iron-barred door which gave into a low-roofed corridor, whose walls and ceiling were tiled in white and whose floor was made of some kind of asphalt – spongy, uneven and disintegrating. There were dim gaslights at intervals of fifty feet or so, though not all were working; a sort of low mist seemed to have gathered from the damp floor, obscuring the way ahead, so that, as far as Thomas could see, the passageway was never-ending.

  ‘This side is the ladies’ wing,’ said Faverill, unlocking a smaller door to his left. He gestured Thomas into a large, twilit room with whitewashed, unplastered walls, a brick floor and a fireplace, inactive, with a padlocked wire guard. Thomas estimated that there were about sixty patients.

  Half a dozen women sat at a plain deal table in the centre of the room, some dressed in black overalls and hobnailed boots, some in bombazine dresses and woollen shawls, a few in clothes they appeared to have stitched for themselves. An elderly, white-haired patient was banging her enamelled tin bowl with a wooden spoon and screeching. Her nearest neighbour was a blank-faced young woman, clearly an idiot, Thomas thought, perhaps also deaf. On a bed behind them lay a woman who panted and moaned and mopped at her face, which even in the gloomThomas could see was flushed; she appeared to have soiled the bed, though had not noticed in her delirium. Typhoid fever, he thought, with the reflex speed of diagnosis he had been taught in the acute wards; little could be done for her, and it would remit in time.