Human Traces (13 page)

have some chocolate. Where does the band normally rehearse? Do we have any good musicians?" "Ah, rehearsal. Yes, a routine more honoured in the breach than the observance. Still, I am certain the prospect of a ball will ensure a better turn-out. It is a mixture of staff and lunatics. We have some fair woodwinds and a couple of good string players, rather too many percussionists. At the last count, we had only one horn player, very unreliable and I fear he has been removed to a basement ward in any event. Do you play an instrument, Doctor?" "I can play the piano, but not at all well." "We have a most excellent pianist. A Miss Mary Ann Parker. A little inclined to rush ahead, but a most pleasing touch. We rehearse in the old dining hall, though of course the piano desperately needs tuning." "Consider it done," said Thomas. "We shall meet on Friday evening at nine in the kitchen. I need to come and fetch you. Which ward are you in?" "Number eleven," said Brissenden. "The attendants call it CD, chronic demented. I call it Beethoven's Ninth. Confounded choirs. Never a moment's peace." Over the days that followed, Thomas found time to submit a programme for Faverill's approval and to send out invitations to the external visitors. The piano was tuned by a wary-looking man from the town and Tyson in due course delivered a list of men. "Some of these will need to be dosed first," he said. "I'll speak to Dr. Stimpson. Half of them shouldn't have beer. The rest should be all right. I shall be on the lookout." Thomas went to the old dining-hall to hear the band rehearse. Among the patients were three attendants who helped Brissenden to produce a ragged but more or less recognisable series of tunes. The sound was quite well served by the high-ceilinged, empty space, which, Thomas noticed, like the dining-hall of his college in Cambridge, had a gallery at the back. If they could find enough staff to supervise the movement of numbers, it seemed to him that many of those not invited to the dance itself might at least be taken by turns into the gallery to watch. On the night of the ball, Thomas walked up to the main gates to welcome the visitors; a light fall of snow had frozen on the path and cracked beneath his feet as he made his way up to where he could see the yellow lamp outside Patterson's lodge. He rubbed his hands together in the frosty darkness and paused for a moment to think how strange his life had become. The asylum, for once, was lit from end to end, and from Thomas's raised position at the gates, looked like an elongated vessel, its bell towers funnels, built to the specifications of a crazed warlord determined to fill onlookers with despair and awe at the number of these twinkling casements, each beaming its untrustworthy light into the surrounding sea. When the dozen or so visitors were assembled, Patterson led the way down through the grounds, holding a flaming torch above his head, so that the distinguished visitors, reporters and representatives of the towns women guild should not lose their footing before they reached the revels. A number of chains and bolts had to be freed on the front doors, by Grogan, at his least hurried, before they were finally admitted to the place of entertainment. Access to the dining hall could not be gained from the central tower, so Thomas had to unlock the doors into the main corridor and gesture his guests to follow. He was aware of conversation dwindling, of anxious glances being exchanged, as they made their apparent descent into the narrowing passageway, through more chains, through air that began to carry feral odours and odd, disconnected cries. At the foot of a ventilation tower, they finally left the corridor by a small side door and emerged into a brighter area, a hallway lit by numerous candles. A banner had been strung from the bannisters, over the doorway and across to the opposite wall; its message was picked out in winter flowers, white and pink, under Daisy's supervision: WELL COME it said; and Thomas had not had the heart to demur. Dr. Faverill showed the guests into the ballroom, where the selected patients awaited them, lined up along the walls beneath streamers and floral decorations. At one end of the room, the band was seated on a raised platform, and at the other, the gallery was filled with faces, some blank, some preoccupied, some craning to see the spectacle below. Thomas had a moment of despair, as he always had when seeing madness en masse, a sense of trying to empty the sea with a bucket. Then, as he made out people he knew, it began to pass and he remembered his own duties for the evening. "Do we mix with the lunatics?" a female visitor asked him. "I doubt whether any of them will ask you to dance. If they do, you are quite at liberty to decline the invitation or to accept it. Entirely as you wish, Madam." Brissenden tapped his music stand with the drumstick he used in place of a baton, and the band struck up a waltz. The attendants, as instructed, approached a patient each and led them on to the polished floorboards. The less demented of the male patients approached female partners and steered them round in approximate time to the music. Faverill watched anxiously from the doorway, running his hand back through his hair from time to time, stroking the beard beneath his jaw and rubbing it between thumb and forefinger into small grey twists. There was the dogged scrape of the string section, a reedy whistle from the woodwinds and the occasional, plangent punctuation of the trumpet, like a foghorn or a battle-cry to some engagement all its own; but apart from that, there was no sound in the hall, so that in the moments when Mary Ann Parker's piano had to pause to allow the others to catch up, Thomas could hear the slide of shoe leather on wood. The dancers did not speak. They held each other at arm's length and watched the patterns of their feet in silence; it was as though the concentration required to make contact and move in time with another being left them no resource for speech. Thomas did not know all their names, but he recognised most of their faces and their ailments. The young man, about Olivier's age, whose thought was controlled by French spies stationed in the park, had so broken free of their influence as to be able to escort Miss Whitman repeatedly from one side to the other. He pushed her carefully, like a gardener with a wheelbarrow full of fragile pots. The old woman in Daisy's ward who wept when anybody spoke to her allowed herself to be rocked back and forth, gravely, on the spot, by the inventor of warships. The woman who had defecated on the grass of the airing court had devised a dance of her own: she made a trancelike pattern with both arms held out in front of her, as though perhaps rocking a large child in her arms, while her face, in which the mouth was puckered inward over blackened gums, was stretched by an expression of concentrated wonder. Thomas moved down the line of female patients until he came to Mary, the blind girl he had admitted on his first day. He laid his hand gently on her arm, told her who he was, and asked if she would like to dance. She shook her head, but only slightly, more of a tremor than a denial, and it occurred to Thomas that she might not really know what dancing was. "Will you trust me?" She nodded, and he placed his arm round her waist, took her right hand in his left and guided her with all the delicacy he could manage on to the floor. He had never been much of a dancer Sonia had laughed at him during the lessons they had had one Christmas but he felt it necessary not to tread on Mary's foot or frighten her. "What you do, Mary, is you allow yourself to move in time with the music. Do you see what I mean? You go with the tune, like this, and like this. The whole floor is full of people dancing, it is not just you and IYou have to hold on like this so we don't bump into someone. You doing very well. Have you ever danced before?" Mary's feet moved only a few inches on the wooden floor. She shuffled one boot forward, brought the other alongside, then slid the first one back. Through the waistband of her dress, however, Thomas could feel the faintest stir of rhythm in her spine. Her glaucous eyes were touched at the corner by what might have been the twitch of shyness, or of mirth, he could not say. The violins swept upward, urged on by the conductor, and Thomas felt Mary's diffident grasp tighten in his hand as her fingers squeezed down onto his shoulder. He saw the inflamed skin of her scalp as she laid her head against the bosom of his shirt, where it hung heavy, like ripe fruit. It was possible, he thought, that she had never before in her life been held in someone's arms. The music ended, and he led her back to her place by the wall. He hesitated before leaving her. He should say something; he could not just cast her off, throw her back into the abyss of time. He moved away a step, then stopped. He wished that he had never patronised her with his kindness, because now he was obliged to her. But he had duties, he had work to do with other patients, a difficult evening to negotiate and in truth he could not bear to look back at her face. He could not bear it because, God forgive him, he was too young to take on the implications of what he knew he would see. He walked away. The mock-Ionic pillars of the dining hall were wreathed with garlands of paper flowers and trails of ivy. On the re-whitewashed walls were festive greetings painted on to boards, each decorated with a sprig of holly. Beneath the central "Merry Christmas To You All' were spread four long trestles, with beer, lemonade, hot chocolate, meat pies and pieces of cake for the dancers; attendants, three of each sex, stood behind to make sure no patient took more than one glass. During supper, programmes were circulated giving details of the entertainment that was to follow. "Reading: "The Arab's Farewell to his Steed": Dr. Faverill; Song: "Trifles Light as Air": Miss Illsley; Recital: "Misadventures at Margate": Dr. Stimpson." Thomas drank some asylum bitter and watched as Stimpson made his way efficiently to the end of his piece. Few of the patients showed much interest when Stimpson took to the stage, or when he came down from it, though there was some shouting from the gallery and some off-key laughter that was followed by the sounds of a scuffle and a slamming door. "I say," said the female visitor next to Thomas, 'that gentleman in the corner." "Which one?" She pointed towards a small bespectacled man who sat hunched on the floor, moving his head convulsively from side to side and pulling at an invisible thread on his trousers. "Is that Mr. Hayward?" "I do not know his name, Madam." "I am quite sure it is. He worked at Evans the drapers. For years and years. My husband bought shirts from him when we were first married. He was the outfitter for my children's school. What is the matter with him?" "He is afflicted with melancholy' The lady visitor seemed a little affronted. "It seems hardly right. All those years. And then to end up... Like that... In here." Thomas filled her glass with lemonade and looked down at his programme: "Recital "Precepts of Politeness": Mr. Grogan. "There was a listlessness among the patients when Grogan climbed on to the platform; they seemed anxious to return to the dancing, Thomas thought, and their mood was not helped by Grogan, whose attempt to introduce humour came over as a kind of leering. The climax of the interval entertainment was a duet:'" Grieve No More": Mr. Tyson, Daisy Wilkins, with Mary Ann Parker, pianoforte." Tyson had a surprisingly pleasant tenor, and Daisy sang with conviction, a semi-tone sharp, occasionally missing a line to catch up with Mary Ann's restless fingers. Neither singer looked at the other; the trio performed as individuals, each apparently bent on completing an unpleasant duty as fast as possible, though in Thomas's mind there was never any doubt about the likely winner. Tyson shuffled his feet and swallowed his last, unsung, half-line as the asylum band resumed their places on the platform behind him. The couples once more took to the floor and resumed their silent marking out of space. Not even Brissenden's liveliest polka, the Louisa, could prompt them into speech, though Thomas noticed a dishevelled old woman occasionally burst into harsh, irrelevant laughter. She tossed back her cropped white hair and showed her edentulous jaw, causing the man who held her at arm's length to pull back further. He was a former watchmaker, well known to the attendants for his conviction that only if he could compete in a walking race to Blackpool would his lost soul be returned to him by the group of Plymouth Brethren who had stolen it. At a quarter to ten, Dr. Faverill took to the platform to declare the evening's festivities over. The double doors at once opened from the vestibule, and a dozen attendants came into the room, taking their appointed places by the wall and marking their patients out with warning eyes. Any escape from the asylum was deemed to be the relevant attendant's fault and the expense of recapture was deducted from wages. . wonderful evening," Faverill was saying, 'and I would like to thank our most distinguished visitors for taking the time to come and share in our seasonal celebrations. I feel sure that they will take away with them the most favourable impression of our asylum. It is an unusual household, we are the first to admit. We have our share of black sheep, of wicked uncles and long-lost cousins. But we have as well the comfort of a Christian faith, which teaches us that God loves each of us as His own. There is no man or woman here tonight whose life is not dear in the eyes of Our Lord. First, I would like to present a small bouquet to Mr. Brissenden, our most excellent bandmaster. There you are. Thank you, sir. And now I should like to ask Miss Whitman if she would be so kind as to present this bouquet to Mrs. Cunningham, wife of the chairman of the Committee of Visitors. Thank you, Miss Whitman. "Before we all go off to our beds, I would like to conclude by thanking all of you, the patients, for coming tonight and making the evening so pleasant for us all. I have occasionally, I believe, compared myself to the captain of a ship a somewhat vainglorious comparison, it now occurs to me. But on a night such as this, I feel proud to think that this vessel sails onward. The weather threatens, sometimes we may steer blind, but, if I may quote the Bard, "Though the seas threaten, they are merciful'; and we must not curse them without cause. The ways of the Almighty are mysterious to men. I cannot presume to unriddle to you the details of his intricate plan. I cannot begin to explain to you my own sense of the strangeness of our human lives and my conviction that it might so easily, with the merest tilt of the world on its axis, be so entirely different. One