A Place Called Winter (2 page)

BETHEL

A violent and excited patient is forcibly taken by his legs and plunged head foremost into an ordinary swimming bath. He is not permitted the use of his limbs when in the water, but is detained there, or taken out and plunged again in the bath, until the required effect of tranquility is produced.

L. Forbes Winslow,
The Turkish Bath in Mental Disorders
(1896)

Chapter One

The attendants came for him as a pair, as always. Some of them were kind and meant well. Some were frightened and, like first-timers at a steer branding, hid their fear in swearing and brutality. But this pair was of the most unsettling kind, the sort that ignored him. They were talking to one another as they came for him and continued to talk to one another as they fastened the muff on his wrists and led him along the corridor to the treatment room.

He was the first in that day, so the echoing room, where even ordinary speech was magnified to a shout, was quiet except for the sound of filling baths. There were eight baths in a row, only three feet apart. From a distance they looked like ordinary baths. Close to, they were revealed as having a kind of hammock slung in the water.

‘I don’t need the hammock,’ he told them. ‘Or the muff. If you want me to climb into a bath and lie there, I’ll do it. I don’t need the hammock. Please?’

Ignoring him, the attendants broke off from their mumbled conversation. One unbuttoned Harry’s pyjama jacket. The other undid the cord on his pyjama trousers so that they dropped to the floor.

‘This is to calm you,’ one said, as though reading out an official notice. ‘You’ve been excitable and this is to calm you down.’ He tweaked Harry’s jacket off his shoulders. ‘In you get.’

‘I’d much rather have an ordinary bath. Please, not the belts.’

In a practised movement, one of them seized his ankles while the other took his shoulders and they tipped him and lowered him into the nearest bath so that he was held in the hot water by the hammock. The temperature was high but not unpleasant. It was the loss of control that was unpleasant. One attendant held Harry’s wrists in place near his waist while the other buckled a thick leather belt across his chest. They held his legs in place with a second belt, then they tugged up a thick tarpaulin cover, like a sort of tent, to enclose the bath entirely. There was an opening in this which they brought up around his shoulders and secured about his neck with straps so that as little steam as possible would escape. He was now held, immobile, in the flow of hot water with only his head on view.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave me.’

The attendants wandered away, still talking. They passed two more attendants bringing in someone else who was shouting that they were trying to murder him. When the new man was undressed, he pissed on the attendant crouching in front of him and the ensuing fuss gave him the opportunity to run away. There were curses and yells from the corridor and whistles were blown, then came the muffled sounds of someone being kicked and sat upon.

The man’s silence, when they brought him back in and secured him in the bath immediately next to Harry’s, was worse than any shouting. And when they left him alone in the running water, he twisted his head so as to stare at Harry, which was more disturbing yet. Harry gazed through the clouds of steam at the taps and the sea-green tiles, and tried to pretend he wasn’t really there.

‘I know you,’ the man said, quietly but insistently. ‘I know you I know you I—’

He woke with a convulsion and sensed his own shout had roused him. He wasn’t in the dormitory. The dormitory had so many bedsteads crammed into it that some, including Harry’s, were in the middle of the room. The bedstead here was iron and painted white, but there the resemblance ended. He was in a small, wood-lined room, painted a calm sky blue and with thick white curtains across the little window. It was simply furnished. There was a rag rug beside the bed and a bedside table with a lamp and matches on it. His boots were on the floor and his coat on a hook above them. A suit that wasn’t his hung on a hanger on the next peg along. On a plain wooden chair was a neat stack of underwear, shirts and socks he knew were not his either.

Wide awake now, he found water on the washstand in a jug and washed. He stared at his face in the little spotted mirror hanging there. A gaunt stranger stared back at him. He did not remember growing a beard, but, of course, where he had come from there were no razors and no looking glasses either: nothing to wound or inflame.

Dressing in the spotlessly clean clothes, which fitted him so well he might have been measured for them as he slept, he made an effort to be calm.
Breathe
, he told himself.
Remember to breathe
. And he remembered another man’s voice telling him that very thing and had to sit abruptly on the little bed to compose himself, so acute and ambivalent was the memory stirred.

Venturing out into dazzling morning light, he would have thought he had woken in a kind of heaven, were it not for the lingering sense that hell was flickering just out of sight, whichever way he turned his gaze. He knew he had been in hell. He had livid marks on his wrists and ankles where restraints had cut and bruised his flesh, and when he moved his back, it still ached from blows and kicks that had rained upon it.

Earlier than that, before hell, his memories were more damaged still. These memories lay in rooms he couldn’t enter. In the quiet moments of lucidity between baths, he had approached them closely enough to sense they were wrapped in a grief so powerful that even to put his hand on the doorknobs would fry his skin.

Now he was in a river valley with lush grass cropped by sheep and a couple of languid cows, running down to a broad, brown river on whose powerful current he had already seen several fallen trees sail past from left to right. Great ranges of blue iced mountains lay to either side, their lower slopes thickly forested. A church bell rang somewhere off to the left. The beauty of it, the intensity of the colours and the relative silence, overwhelmed him for a moment and he sat on a little bench to recover.

He was not insane, although he felt sure the experience of being treated as though he were would soon have deprived him of his wits had it continued much longer. He looked up, attention snagged by a buzzard’s cry.
I know a hawk from a handsaw
, he thought. It was an asylum, not a prison, where he had been, but he had been deprived of liberty, and, so far as he knew, without trial.

The attendants had come for him as usual, after breakfast, and he had assumed that the endless, soul-eroding process of pacifying him by water treatments was to continue. He marginally preferred the cold wrap to the continuous bath, if only because it was administered in a smaller room where he had precious peace and quiet, provided he didn’t begin to shout out in a panic. If anything, though, it was even more constraining than the bath, involving as it did being tightly wrapped in a sheet dipped in cold water, around which were wound two more sheets, a rubber mat and then a blanket, before he was left secured to a wire bed frame, sometimes for three hours, quietly dripping first with water, then with sweat.

Today, however, he wasn’t to have a treatment.

‘You’re going on a journey,’ one of them told him. ‘Young Mr Ormshaw has picked you to help with his research, so we need you nice and quiet.’

They rolled up his sleeve and administered an injection that was clearly a powerful sedative, for by the time they had given him socks to wear and handed him back his old boots and overcoat, he was so foggy in the head that he couldn’t have spoken any of the questions that crowded his mind.

His little cabin had a shaded terrace on one side of it. It was one of several such, clearly built from identical kits, arranged in a half-circle before a large log-framed house that resembled some fanciful idea of a Tyrolean chalet and on to whose veranda he half expected chorus girls to emerge in dirndls, holding hoops of paper flowers and singing of love and springtime.

For it was springtime, which was presumably why the river was so mightily in spate. The greening woods behind him were full of birdsong and, sitting on his terrace, he watched birds, chipmunks and squirrels darting back and forth on the grass, going about the exhausting spring business of putting on fat and finding a mate.

He had no sense of where he was or how far he and the silent attendant with him had travelled. Being expected to board a train had stirred up in him such violent misgivings that they had been obliged to administer a second dose of the sedative, so he had slept like a drunkard for much of the journey. The latter part of the voyage, by road, was undertaken in darkness. All he registered as he tumbled into a bed whose linen had been chilled by sharp mountain air, was relief that his bed was on its own, and that he could hear only his own sighs and breathing, not the shouts and weeping of others.

A gong sounded from the main house. Harry flinched, prepared for the idyll to be broken by orderlies or nurses, but glanced across and saw only a simply uniformed maid standing by an open door. Noticing him, she raised a hand in greeting, tapped the gong a few more times as though for his benefit, then slipped inside again. The door of the next cabin along opened and there emerged a slender blonde woman wearing respectable but antique clothes.

‘Good morning,’ she said in a high voice, and he rose to meet her. As she offered him a small, lace-fringed hand, he saw she was considerably older than her figure suggested.

‘How do you do,’ he said.

‘Are you going to breakfast?’

‘I . . . I imagine so.’

‘You must be hungry after your journey,’ she said. She had one of those little-girl voices which so often seemed to mask an aggressive nature. ‘We heard you arrive but were under strict instructions to leave you in peace. I’m Mabel. We use no surnames or titles here. The good doctor is Quakerish in his leanings.’ She laughed, skittishly.

‘I’m Harry,’ he told her.

‘Delighted. Harry, let me take you to breakfast.’

‘Is this a hospital?’ he began, and she laughed again.

‘Another forbidden word. You’re quite the rebel, I can see! It’s a
community
. A therapeutic community. Now, here’s Bruno.’

A mannish woman in a boxily tailored outfit, a sort of suit, had emerged from a third cabin. She shook Harry’s hand and fired off a series of questions about his journey he felt quite unable to answer, not having been aware even of where he had come from. She was gently rebuked by Mabel, which she took in good part, and they proceeded towards the house. Other doors had opened, and all told, some eight of them were now walking that way. Apart from the two ladies he had met, all were men. One of them, a black man Harry assumed was someone’s servant, stood back respectfully and, naturally, unacknowledged, until the rest of them had passed.

As they neared it, the door to the cabin closest to the house opened. A tall Indian woman had emerged, dressed in quietly elegant Western clothes. She ducked her head as he looked at her, showing off the black hair she wore in a thick cascade. Mabel gave a little cough, drawing his attention back to herself.

There were two rooms at their disposal, both overlooking the river. One was the snug library, into which he merely glanced; the other the dining room, in which their host bade them all a general good morning before singling Harry out for greeting.

Harry recognised him as one of the doctors who had occasionally questioned him at the asylum – a tall, dark-haired young man with a thick moustache that emphasised his sad, moist eyes. Instinctively Harry stiffened.

‘It’s all right, Harry. You’re among friends now,’ the doctor said and shook his hand emphatically in both of his. ‘Did you manage to sleep in the deafening quiet?’

‘Yes, thank you, Doctor. Mr Ormshaw.’

‘I’m Gideon, here, Harry. Now, let’s see . . .’ He glanced at his pocket watch. ‘At ten o’clock please come to my study.’

Breakfast was spread out on the sideboard in a sequence of steaming dishes. ‘No meat or alcohol here,’ Mabel told him in a murmur. ‘Gideon believes they are destabilising.’

‘Thank God for coffee,’ Bruno added. She noticed that Harry was standing staring. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Do . . . do . . .’

She watched kindly as he stammered. ‘Take your time,’ she murmured.

‘Do we help ourselves?’ he asked at last.

‘Yes.’

‘And . . . where are the attendants?’

‘Bless you, there are no attendants here.’

They were informal to the extent of serving themselves and sitting where they chose. To his surprise, the Indian woman and the Negro had joined them. Unsurprisingly, they each ate alone. One of the men was a nervous giggler. Mabel was a person who chatted even when no one was talking to her. It made him wonder what she was like when there was no company to animate her. Bruno hung on her every word, clearly an abject slave, but was constantly passed over by Mabel, who seemed to regard mere female attention as cheap currency.

With their tidy spring suits and small touches of elegance, a silk handkerchief here, a pocket watch there, the men clustered at one end of a table reminded him of something. It was only as he watched them roll their napkins at breakfast’s end that he realised it was the gentlemen of the Gaiety chorus. In London. A lifetime ago.

Each resident was assigned a napkin ring of a different design. Harry’s had a pattern of ivy leaves. Feeling the heavy white damask between his fingers, he struggled to remember the last time he had used a napkin.

‘A far cry from the snakepit, isn’t it?’ one of the men said, watching him, and was shushed by Mabel.

‘We don’t speak of such places here,’ she said, then turned a kind face on Harry. ‘Gideon believes in the healing power of civilised touches,’ she said.

Both black man and Indian had left the room without his noticing. Emerging on to the terrace, after hot breakfast rolls as soft and pale as infancy, he saw that the man was at work in the garden already, tidying the path edges with a spade and tossing the trimmings into a barrow. Perhaps Mr Ormshaw was a socialist as well as a Quaker, to have patients dine with his servants.

A small macaw had been set out on a perch to enjoy the sun. It was discreetly shackled to its post, he saw. It waved its wings in greeting as he emerged, displaying feathers so bright they scorched the eye, before picking a nut from its little bowl and falling to preening. For the second time since waking, Harry was overwhelmed by the clarity and beauty of it all and felt he might cry.