A Place Called Winter (11 page)

‘Oh no,’ Harry confessed. ‘Not really. I’m to try my hand at farming – taking on a homestead – but I doubt it will make my fortune.’

‘You don’t . . . if you don’t mind my saying . . . you don’t look like a farmer.’

‘Not yet. I dare say that will come.’

‘You have never farmed before?’

‘No. I’ve been reading a book my brother gave me.
Elementary Agriculture and Animal Husbandry
, which seems about my level.’ He laughed.

Troels Munck, however, became extremely serious. ‘Please take my advice,’ he said. ‘Learn to farm first. How to handle animals, how to plough, how to make hay and stack corn. There is an abundance of land but very many people with no idea what they are doing on it. The posters lie; the wheat does not grow itself.’

‘Well, I know that—’

‘And the winters and the isolation will be harder than anything you have experienced in your soft English countryside.’

‘I’m a Londoner, actually.’

‘All the more reason! Ah. Beef. I like beef very much.’

Munck gave his full, painstaking attention to the meat and vegetables set before them, breaking off only to look across the little table at Harry, almost boyishly, as if for reassurance.

‘The sea air makes one hungry,’ Harry said, and his solicitude felt like a flirtation. He was suddenly conscious of the spectacle they must present to the waiter: two men eating and drinking together at an isolated table for two, like a grotesquely mismatched courting couple.

He stifled the idea as it formed, but not swiftly enough to stop it triggering the absurd and painful notion of Browning. Of Browning on the boat with him, perhaps in an adjoining cabin; of Browning travelling to Canada to start a new life alongside his. By a kind of emotional convulsion, he sought to muffle these thoughts by recalling his blurted declaration of love and Browning’s harsh dismissal of it.

He ate his overcooked beef and sipped his unpleasantly cold claret, but the loneliness left in the wake of the swift succession of thoughts was so keen he felt it must show in his face like the rouge casually retained on a chorus boy’s cheek after a show.

Munck met Harry’s eyes and raised his glass, with a half-smile. ‘You’re not stupid,’ he said. ‘Are you? Not like those English puppies, so sick in their bunks.’

‘I hope not,’ Harry said, stirred, despite himself, that they were now somehow complicit. ‘They are like puppies, aren’t they?’

‘Barely house-trained . . . So you’re a man about town. Why homesteading? Why such a drastic change? Are you in disgrace? Did you murder someone? Should I be locking my door?’ Again that tempting, dangerous sense of mutual understanding. Those blue eyes glittering with cunning.

‘Nothing so exciting.’ Harry kept his voice measured.
I must get used to this
, he thought.
I must rehearse
. ‘If you must know, my business affairs took an unexpected turn. The best way of supporting my wife and child was to leave them to live off what I have left while I live simply and alone in order to earn more.’

Munck’s face registered surprise.

‘Does that strike you as odd?’ Harry asked.

‘You being married?’ Munck said. He shook his head. ‘It’s understood.’

Waving aside the waiter’s offer of puddings, he divined correctly that what they both wanted was a little cheese to help down the remains of the wine. The cheese, unlike the claret, was at the perfect temperature and proved to be the first delicious thing Harry had eaten on board, apart from the honey at breakfast.

‘What about you?’ Harry asked.

‘Am I “broke”?’

‘Are you married?’

‘No.’ Munck looked momentarily sulky, like a boy deprived of a treat. ‘I was crazily in love when I was a student, in love like a fool, and it spoiled me for marriage.’

‘Didn’t she love you back?’

‘Her family thought I was the wrong nationality. And that I was common.’ His frankness laid the ugly little truth on the table between them, where he seemed to regard it a moment before sweeping it aside with a gesture of distaste. ‘So now I travel from here to there, helping foolish young men to part with their money.’

‘Are you wilfully deceiving them, the English puppies?’

Munck smiled.

‘No need. They are rich and stupid, determined to have fun and impervious to inconvenient truth. No. I help them. I book their tickets on the boat as I shall for the train, for which the shipping line lets me travel for a fraction of the usual cost. I shall find their homesteads for them, somewhere they can waste their time hunting and drinking. I’ll order them wooden houses to live in, and hired hands, glad of the money, to build those houses and fulfil their cultivation quotas so they get their land after three years. If they freeze to death or abandon their land, I shall see that I acquire it at a knockdown price. No deceit necessary.
Skål!
’

‘Cheers.’

They took a turn around the deck before retiring. The plunging and rising of the boat was as dramatic as ever. Or was it the water that rose and plunged? It had become impossible to tell. The wind was powerful, drawing great washes of spray across them, but the clouds had briefly cleared so there was a moon lighting a path to the rocking horizon. Harry held on with both hands to a rail – it felt greasy in the wet – and looked at the stars until he was dizzy.

Munck was perhaps a little drunk. He clapped a heavy hand on Harry’s shoulder to shout in his ear that this was nothing, that to see the night sky in the Canadian West would be like seeing stars for the first time. Then he insisted on shaking Harry’s hand again, saying, ‘I don’t care that it’s not correct or whatever. You can call me Troels. I hate my surname. But that means I have to call you Harry.’

‘Done,’ said Harry, and then laughed because Troels did sound awfully like Trolls, at least when an Englishman attempted to say it.

Then Troels marched them as near the bows as the deserted deck would take them, exclaiming that it was better than the Test Your Sea Legs ride at a funfair and laughing as the plunging of the ship briefly took the deck from under their feet.

For the first time Harry felt sick, not with seasickness but with fear.

It would be so easy to plunge over the rail into the salty abyss and for nobody to know. And this new would-be friend seemed as out of control as the ocean around him and might even tumble alongside him. It would be terrifying, of course, but matters would rapidly be taken out of Harry’s control. He would change his mind, as so many suicides surely did, as he was launched out into the void and the black waters rushed up to slap him in the face, but what did that matter once it was too late?

He took his leave, his lips accidentally brushing Munck’s ear as he was obliged to shout over the noise of sea and wind, squawking lifeboat fastenings and clanking cargo.

‘I thought you were a man!’ Munck laughed, trying to hold him back, which made Harry all the more desperate to be safely inside. Munck’s mocking laughter followed him as he lurched his way up the deck from handhold to slippery handhold. When he finally arrived at a hatch and let himself in, far wetter than he had realised, he turned to see the Dane’s white-blond hair seeming to flare in the darkness as he continued to take his violent pleasure.

That night Harry suffered dreams in which Troels Munck murdered Browning with his huge bare hands. This was frightening in itself but became all the more disturbing for the mounting understanding that he did so under Harry’s instruction, leaving Harry obliged to kill for him in turn.

BETHEL

I write to introduce to your professional notice the Rev. Mr Outram who I regret to say is a sexual pervert or invert. He has been in danger in England & I hear he has been in Vancouver in danger. I feel the only way is for someone to get a medical hold on him & if possible get him into some retreat for treatment & observation.

Dr George Henry Savage to Henry Stearns of the Hartford Retreat, 1902

Chapter Twelve

Harry walked the trails in the woods, trying to do as Gideon advised and not dwell on the memories their session had begun to dredge up but simply to be
open
and
neutral
.

‘Think of the memories as pus; once it comes to the surface, you wipe it away. Or better yet, as mud; brought out into the air, it dries in the sun and then crumbles to dust.’

It was good to be outside again, to feel the sun on his face and hear birdsong. Birds in woods sounded so different from birds on the prairie. There were far more of them, for one thing, and their song seemed to come from all around, as in a cathedral. He watched ground squirrels furiously chase one another around a fallen tree. The view across the valley, when the trees parted to grant him one, was like a young girl’s watercolour in the simplicity of its unmixed, banded elements: meadow, river, forest, mountain, sky. It was early June, he guessed, though in fact he had no idea, not having a calendar and not having thought to ask. Everywhere he saw yellow lady slipper orchids in bloom, and he passed several tangles of a pretty clematis that reminded him of one in Mrs Wells’s garden at Ma Touraine. Here and there between the pines grew a small silver-leafed shrub he recognised from somewhere. From before the asylum. It had a yellow flower with a powerfully sweet scent out of all proportion to its tiny size. He forgot its name. Plant names had never been his department.

The view was miraculous, a vision of heaven, as he had thought on waking, but it was also oppressive in its foreshortening of the horizon. Only when he had climbed right through the woods to a treeless, rocky ridge where the view opened out on every side was there relief to his prairie-moulded mind.

‘Wolf willow,’ he said to himself, abruptly remembering the name, and with it, the scene glimpsed through a prairie cabin’s bedroom window when he had been recovering from fever. Cree women sitting in a row at the table on the cabin’s veranda, polishing and drilling through the seeds of its bitter berries for use as beads. For the second time since arriving, he heard a train approach and tracked its smoke as its great length crossed the far side of the valley from west to east. Its whistle sounded and he experienced the same sensation of dread it had caused him that morning.

He was still in the woods when the gong rang for lunch and he was obliged to run. He arrived in the dining room red-faced and breathless, to find everyone sitting already and staring at him.

‘Ah! There he is!’ Mabel exclaimed.

‘We thought you’d run away,’ Bruno added.

Abashed at the thought of having been the subject of the group’s conversation, and finding his head too full of thoughts and fears to talk, he glanced around for an empty chair and impulsively turned away from the main table to where the handsome Cree woman was sitting in the same isolated spot she had occupied at breakfast, by one of the windows.

‘May I join you?’ he asked. ‘Oh. I do apologise.’

She had just taken a mouthful so couldn’t answer him, but glanced rapidly over to the others, anticipating disapproval. Then she gave an apologetic little wave of her napkin and gestured towards the empty chair, so he set down his plate and sat. He filled both their water glasses from the jug, knowing how easy it was to choke when suddenly expected to speak while eating.

‘It’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘You needn’t talk. My head’s so full of things after my first session this morning, I’m not sure I could get my words out in the right order.’

She mimed her thanks, took a sip of water and dabbed at her lips with the napkin. Aged no more than twenty-five at most, she had the strong brows and dramatic cheekbones of many of her sisters: a face from a museum. He was amused to notice that although her dress – a midnight-blue thing with lace at the neck and cuffs – was much like any white woman of fashion might wear, the beads around her neck were not jewels but seeds threaded on a sturdy piece of wire.

She noticed him looking at them and instinctively touched them with thin, brown fingers.

‘Wolf willow,’ he said. ‘I was enjoying the delicious scent of it on the hillside just now.’ To his surprise, he saw, as the beads came free of her lace jabot, that a small ebony crucifix hung from them. ‘I’m Harry,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Having said I’d leave you in peace, I don’t seem to be able to stop talking!’

She held out a hand so hesitantly that he realised she sat on her own not simply because the white residents wouldn’t have her with them but because company frightened her.

‘Ursula,’ she said, and even though she spoke very softly, her voice cracked.

There was a titter from one of the men at the main table, and Harry suddenly realised they had all been watching since he’d scandalised them by sitting to dine with a redskin. He must have frowned when he looked their way, for they promptly turned back to eating and chatting. Facing Ursula again, he saw she wasn’t a woman at all but a man in woman’s clothing.

Her hand was large, but he found that the way she had presented it made him shake it gently. He was angry on her behalf with whoever had tittered, and felt that he too was being tested. Her effort to be female was so complete, so intense, that he found he still thought of her as a woman, and felt accordingly protective and solicitous.

‘How did you manage?’ she asked quietly. ‘In your first session?’

Her accent was not exactly English, but neither was it Cree; she spoke as one who had been rigorously educated.

‘It was . . . strange. I had no idea what to expect. It was so different from . . . where I’ve been.’

‘We’ve all been somewhere bad before this,’ she said. ‘Now you’re relaxing finally, you’ll find you need to sleep a lot. Just give in to it. The dreams need to come out. Do you have chores yet?’

‘No.’

She looked out of the window and smiled drily. ‘You will. We all get chores. I think those are our real cure, and not what goes on in our sessions. Some work in the garden. Some cook. Billy and his friend Kenneth care for the sheep. Bruno has been redecorating a bedroom with murals – she’s a gifted artist. Samuel,’ she discreetly indicated the black man at the other isolated table, ‘is tidying the grass and hedges. Mabel is cataloguing the books.’

She continued to talk very softly, almost in an undertone, as though afraid that if she spoke up, her manly voice would burst through like muscles through a bodice.

‘Do you have a chore?’ Harry asked her, and this time her smile had a trace of bitterness.

‘I’m the unpaid housekeeper. Some of us chore more than others.’

Lunch was a faintly punitive cheese and parsnip tart with beans and boiled potatoes. They ate in silence for a while listening to a funny story one of the men at the main table was telling. Evidently its climax was slightly improper, for he dropped his voice to a barely audible level and, having strained forward to hear his final sentences, Mabel laughed and flapped her napkin at him while Bruno looked uncomfortably elsewhere.

Harry was given no chores that day. Possibly, as a new arrival, he was being allowed time to settle in. Feeling guilt that he had nothing to do, he approached Samuel, who was clipping a hedge. ‘Could I help?’ he asked. ‘I farm at home. I’m quite capable.’ But Samuel only smiled, as though the idea were absurd and Harry plainly of no practical use to anyone. So, thus kindly dismissed, Harry retreated to the wicker chair outside his cabin. Unable to keep awake, he retreated yet further to lie on his bed. There, as Ursula had said he would, he fell into a deep but mercifully dreamless sleep, in which birdsong, the occasional bleating of a sheep and the clicking of Samuel’s shears reached but did not wake him.

When he opened his eyes again, the light was no longer on his open doorway and Gideon Ormshaw was standing at the foot of his bed in his dazzling shirtsleeves, looking at him with those beseeching seal eyes of his.

‘Sorry,’ Harry said, sitting up.

‘Whatever for? You’re bound to be tired. I doubt you slept properly or relaxed for a moment in all your months at Essondale.’

‘Funnily enough, I can’t remember,’ Harry said. ‘At least, I prefer not to. Are you going to make me?’

‘Only if it comes to seem relevant.’

Harry sat up further, rubbed his eyes and stood. The cabin felt very small with two of them in it. He walked outside so that Gideon would follow him, but felt afresh the ambiguity of the situation. This was the doctor’s home and yet they were not quite guests; a host would not enter one’s room without knocking. It was supposedly a place of healing and yet one felt it was not wholly merciful; one might be turned away, one was constantly being watched and assessed.

‘You seem uneasy,’ Gideon said.

‘I am always uneasy when I’m unoccupied. It’s funny. I was raised to idleness, but now, if my hands are idle, I worry. And also . . .’

‘What’s troubling you?’ Gideon gently touched Harry on the arm. ‘You can speak freely here.’

Harry looked down to the brown river. ‘I feel you are experimenting on us, or with us,’ he said.

‘I am. Of course I am. I trained up in its systems, but one of the many points on which I disagree with psychiatric medicine is its confidence that it knows what it is doing.’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘No.’ Gideon sat on a bench and Harry sat beside him. ‘Places like Essondale exist because we don’t know what else to do with people who threaten themselves or who frighten us by hearing voices or talking to people who aren’t there. We have sought to catalogue all the ills of the mind, giving them tidy Latin names and subdivisions – dementia praecox and hebephrenic schizophrenia – like so many strange flowers in a sinister corner of a garden, but really they’re of no more use than the fanciful names of the constellations. As for treatments, we pretend we know what we’re doing, using darkness or continuous baths or cold wraps or sedatives, but strictly speaking, it is all experimental and every unfortunate inmate of a place like Essondale is a sad hybrid of untried prisoner and guinea pig.’ He sighed, turned, smiled, and patted Harry’s knee. ‘Sorry, Harry. You got me preaching.’

‘Did you come to give me a chore?’

Gideon pulled a wry face at that. ‘Not exactly. At least, I hope it won’t
feel
like a chore. I’d like you to continue something you’ve already started.’

‘Sleeping?’

‘Talking to Ursula!’ Gideon exclaimed, apparently impervious to irony. ‘More importantly, letting her talk to you. Until you so startled the others by sitting with her at lunch today, she had spoken to nobody.’

Harry pictured Ursula alone at her small table, picking at her food, heard again her painfully shy shred of a voice.

‘You call her she,’ he observed.

‘Yes. But I take my cue from her clothes.’

‘Was Ursula in . . . that other place too?’

‘Only briefly. You won’t have seen any Indian patients because, naturally, they’re kept in a separate section. I was lucky to find her there before the flu epidemic wiped that section out. Before that, she was in one of the Indian boarding schools. Where, of course, she was obliged to live as a boy. I’ve asked her to fetch us provisions tomorrow. I thought you could accompany her, help carry things.’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Good. Thank you, Harry. And, er, don’t feel you have to report back everything she says. The important thing is that she’s opening up at last.’

Harry nodded, and Gideon smiled before leaving him on the bench and turning back to the house. Harry watched him break off to talk briefly with Samuel and then being accosted by the giggler from breakfast whose name he found it quite impossible to remember.

Harry tried to imagine Gideon without the drooping moustache. The lips it concealed were full, rather girlish, perhaps. It was easy to imagine the good doctor an adored child, praised and indulged so as to give him his placid air of entitlement. They had, none of them, Harry suspected, asked to be there, grateful though they were. They were his human toys, taken from the dirty box on a whim, and could be thrust back into darkness and neglect just as casually if they somehow failed to interest or satisfy.

Ursula arrived a little late at her separate supper table, having had some business with the servants, by which time Harry had been claimed by the Giggler and his friends with the worrying insistence that he was
not to be a stranger
to them. Happily Mabel came to the rescue, never one to listen when she could talk, and he found himself drawn instead into a pleasantly impersonal conversation with Bruno about horses and the sad fates of the ones shipped out to the war. When Ursula came in, she caught his eye and gently inclined her head in greeting.

After supper, they crossed to the library so that Gideon could read to them, a regular occurrence apparently, but not an obligatory one, for Samuel and both the Giggler’s friends absented themselves.

‘I want to read you all a recent short article by Edward Carpenter. Mr Carpenter’s socialist outlook might not be to all your tastes, but I believe you would find him sympathetic in other ways. You may remember I read you a piece of his on the inequality inherent in marriage.’

Gideon made a little bow, cleared his throat, smoothed a page of the booklet before him, and looked around their little gathering quite as though he were about to read them ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ or ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’.

‘
A curious and interesting subject
,’ he began, ‘
is the connection of the Uranian temperament with prophetic gifts and divination
.’

It was a fascinating article about the tradition common to so many ancient and enduring cultures, including the Inuit and North American Indian tribes, in which certain boys and girls adopted the characteristics of the opposite sex and were elected as shamans or priests. It leapt back and forth in time, from the Sioux to the Assyrians, to mistranslated references to temple prostitutes and attendants on Ashtaroth or Astarte in the Old Testament and Herodotus. Oddly, it said nothing of the continuing practice among Christian priests of hiding their legs and gender in robes in order to impart mysteries.