Human Traces (7 page)

I am going crazy for want of something to do. I am locked in here for so many hours each day and I had the misfortune not to be taught to read when I was young. Not that there's books anyway' "You have the airing court for exercise?" said Faverill. "Yes, sir, I do and right glad we are of it." She had the accent of the county, Thomas noticed, but not the upward lilt of the voice it normally engendered; her tone was melancholic, and she appeared terrified that she had exceeded her rights and might at any moment, at the wave of a doctor's hand, be confined more strictly. "I shall speak to the attendant," said Faverill, 'and see if she cannot find you some work, on the farm or in the laundry. Should you like that?" "Oh yes, sir. Yes, please, sir. "The girl's eyes filled with tears, but she was not smiling. "You will not forget me, will you, sirs? My name is Daisy' "I shall not forget," said Faverill. Thomas smiled at the young woman as they left, reminding himself to remember her. "What is her diagnosis?" he asked. "I am not familiar with the young lady," said Faverill. "As I told you, we are close on two thousand now, and more than half are on the female side. You can find her name in the register with her admission notes. McLeish will show you. I suggest you look up her Christian name first because she may not have a surname." "No surname?" "Some have no names at all." Faverill locked the door of the ward behind them, and they were once more in the infinite corridor. Faverill noticed Thomas's stretched, inquiring look as they set off. He smiled. "It is built on an impressive scale, our asylum, is it not?" "Indeed, sir," said Thomas. The gas lamps grew less frequent as they walked on over the asphalt floor. Mingled with the damp that rose beneath their feet was an odour of missed excrement and saturated brick, a redolence of despair. This, with the failing light and the narrowing perspective, combined to give Thomas the impression that he was walking slightly downhill. "Can you imagine," said Faverill,"the total length of passageway in this building?" "I could not easily put a figure to it, sir." "Including the first floor, where one's passage is through the wards themselves, we have six miles of corridors." Thomas could think of nothing to say. "Remarkable," said Faverill, 'is it not? What a feat of engineering. It contains more than ten million bricks and was built in less than two years. And what generous intentions it bespeaks towards the unfortunate!" Thomas could still not find anything to say; in any case, his mouth was dry, his throat was closed. "In the circumstances," Faverill continued, 'you will understand if I do not take you into every ward. We should need several days. This corridor alone is more than one third of a mile long." "One third..." Thomas managed words at last. "Indeed," said Faverill. "We believe it to be the longest corridor in Europe." After fifteen minutes' walking, broken only by Faverill's occasional unlocking of a door, they reached the centre of the building. Through an internal window they could see the hall with the wooden booth where Thomas had first entered. The porter smirked from behind the glass partition. "Good afternoon, Grogan," called Faverill, moving smartly onwards to a set of double iron-barred doors. "Now for the men," he said to Thomas, with a faint but noticeable dulling to the brightness of his manner. The doors swung to behind them. "Grogan enjoys Sundays," said Faverill as they plunged down into the gloom again. "He is allowed to take supper with McLeish. When we have admissions, he takes pleasure in seeing the unfortunates as they arrive, knowing they will always outnumber those we release. It reassures him in his sense of singularity. He came here fourteen years ago, raving and incontinent. He spent six weeks naked in the safe room, covered in his own filth." "And how was he cured?" "My predecessor gave him henbane, camphor, morphine, I believe. I stopped that. I set him to work in the gardens and the farm. He revealed an extraordinary brain. He can calculate and keep records better than I can." "Should he not have returned to his family?" "We did ask." Faverill coughed. "I am sorry to say that they declined. He prefers living in the asylum in any case. If he goes outside the walls he hears voices. I use a number of the saner patients in positions of responsibility. The attendant you saw in the women's ward, for instance. She came to us three years ago with acute melancholia. She is paid a little now to help the other attendants. She is not a very active person, I'm afraid, but she is intelligent in her way and they tell me they can rely on her. She is very strong. You would not think it from so small a woman, but she can carry the dining table on her back." Faverill pulled a watch from his waistcoat pocket, but it was too dark to see it until they reached the next gas lamp. "I have time to show you one men's ward," said Faverill. "McLeish shall have to show you the rest tomorrow. Where are we? Let me see. Number Twelve." He glanced at Thomas's young face in the half-light. "No. Perhaps not. Number Fourteen, I think. Yes, I think that might be better." He fumbled at the ring of keys and opened a door on their left. The room was similar in shape and design to the women's ward they had visited, but with an asphalt floor and high, unopenable windows. A few men were playing whist, surrounded by half a dozen onlookers; many were walking up and down, talking to themselves or to the reeking air. It was striking how properly dressed most of them were, in frock coats, suits, white neckerchiefs, pinned stocks, white shirts with collars; so at first only the untrimmed beards and the lace less boots marred the impression of normality. As Thomas moved gingerly into the dense atmosphere, his senses took in other strangenesses. A gentleman with neatly parted grey hair and gold tie ping was masturbating at the dining table; opposite him, oblivious to his behaviour, sat a clerkly looking man, bespectacled, with eyebrows thick as moustaches, who moved his head slowly up and down in time to an incantation he endlessly repeated, which, to Thomas's ears, sounded like, "Di-ater. Di-ater." Round them in the tea-time air rotated boot makers and porters, domestic servants, glaziers and painters, drapers, fishmongers, chimneysweeps, watchmakers and nurserymen; adrift from their former selves, they argued, jabbered or stood motionless, listening to absent voices. Their experience of living, their awareness of the moment, was so individual, it seemed to Thomas, that it could find no true expression, let alone response or comprehension; it was so individual, in fact, that it could only be seen as part of a mass a 'mass of lunatics', he reflected, the most heterogeneous entity you could imagine, a perfect oxymoron. Most men seemed too lost in their thoughts to register the doctors' presence in the room, though one man with a beard down to his chest wrapped his arms over his head and retreated to a corner, whimpering, crouched, looking back occasionally through his hands at the intruders. Faverill gestured to an attendant to come over. "Tyson," he said, 'this is Dr. Midwinter, our new assistant medical officer." Tyson held out his hand, and Thomas noticed the bottom of a tattoo at his wrist as the sleeve rode up; he was a swarthy, muscular man with an unsmiling face. Faverill gestured to the dining table. "Can you stop that man doing that? His organ appears to have become blistered." "It bleeds," said Tyson. "He won't leave it alone." "Have you given him potassium bromide?" Yes. And they put some ointment on the organ too." "Liquor of Epispasticus," said Faverill to Thomas. "No wonder it is blistered. Have you tried sewing up the front of his trousers?" "Yes," said Tyson. "He just takes them down." "Does he ever find... Relief?" "No. We could use the strait waistcoat Nothing else can stop him." "Then you had better leave him. Does it distress the others?" Tyson pursed his lips and shook his head. "Not here, sir. They have other things on ' "Yes. Quite. There is the most terrible stench in here, Tyson." "It's this floor, isn't it? It absorbs it. Them that shits themselves." Faverill began to edge away. "Do something. Find a mop." As Tyson went reluctantly to the bathroom, Faverill said, "He used to be a merchant seaman. He has no training, but he has his uses. Good afternoon." He spoke to a neatly dressed man, grey-haired, with a polite manner. "Doctor Faverill, is it not? Might I beg a moment of your time among these poor lunatics? My brother has written to me, do you see, a long letter from the War Office where he works. As you know, I am a man of considerable means though through no fault of my own I am unable to pay my debts at the moment. Mr. Gladstone, who is a close friend of my wife's family, has graciously invited me to submit my patent for a new kind of warship, which was to have been commissioned next year. The editor of the Pall Mall Gazette has commissioned a lengthy article from me. I should very much like you to cast an eye over it." Thomas felt Faverill's hand on his elbow again. They had to cross the room to reach the door back into the corridor, and Thomas sensed as they made their way through the press that something had changed in the atmosphere. They walked through the moaning and the shouting, with hands reaching out to them. Thomas bit his lip and remembered holding Jacques in his arms on the Deauville shore. From the corner of his eye, he saw Tyson wrestle someone down onto a bed; he felt his sleeve being pulled back roughly, wrenched himself free, and they were outside again, in the endless corridor. As he inhaled deeply, Thomas realised he had tried not to breathe during his time in the ward. Faverill consulted his watch. "Very well, Dr. Midwinter. It is now time for us to see Mr. McLeish. I know he will be looking forward to meeting you. We have ten minutes to get to the other end of the men's wing from here, so no dawdling, please." As they tunnelled onward, past the moans and cries that reached them from behind locked doors, Thomas felt afraid. Suppose I become separated from myself, he thought: the warship designer was once as steady and sane as I am. He brought to mind more homely images as he walked on: of Sonia sitting on his bed that cold Christmas at Torrington, inventing a profession for him; he pictured Jacques, his black eyebrows driven to an apex as he puzzled over some point of physiology before the light of victory came into his eyes. It felt important to keep these pictures near the front of his mind. McLeish's office was, in design, the mirror image of Faverill's, but it had no printed books, Thomas noticed. Instead, there were several ledgers on a shelf by the window and two new ones, leather-bound, open on the desk. McLeish was bald, short and meticulously dressed; the shine on his toe caps was like a reflection of his polished head. After a few pleasantries, McLeish said to Thomas, "The new patients will be arriving in ten minutes' time. The Superintendent tells me that you are to book in the women." "Yes, if you will show me what to do." Although McLeish's Scots accent was mild, he pronounced the word 'women' as 'woman', as though there were one in particular that Thomas was to see. As he stood and gathered up the two open ledgers, a white bull terrier, hitherto concealed, heaved itself out from behind the desk. McLeish fastened a chain to its collar and went towards the door. The three men walked back along the outside of the building to the entrance hall beneath the main tower, where Faverill left them and hurried back towards his own wing and towards whatever 'something stronger' was awaiting him. "Did you meet Grogan yet?" said McLeish as they went up to the main door. "The porter? Yes." McLeish unlocked the door. "We tried to discharge the little bastard last year but his family refused to take him back. In you go." Grogan had set up two long trestle tables in the hall, behind each of which sat two attendants with papers and ink. "That chair's for you," said McLeish. "You take their papers, you classify, and the attendant will give them a ward number. Don't be long about it." Thomas said, "I am going to wait outside for a moment." The September dusk was falling swiftly on the parkland as he looked up the avenue towards the guarded gates where he had himself come in. A fine rain was beginning to drift across the lawns on the first winds of autumn. It was all unreal. What fate, what loops of time or circumstance, he thought, decree that I stand here? It might as well be me descending now from the carriage that has brought these people from the railway station. In another life that I have lived but cannot recall, cannot quite touch with my mind, perhaps it was me; and in another time, it could be me again. As our real world runs parallel to that of these poor lunatics, to be seen but not inhabited, so other times and lives are separated from ours only by the dimmest veil, through which an awareness more developed, more evolved than mine could reach out. The lunatics began to walk down the avenue, their heads low, some supported or cajoled by family, some resolutely alone. Many were in the clothes of the workhouse, some brightened with colourful additions, gifts or remembrances of home. For most of them, the journey was almost over: another hundred yards of park and drizzle, then the doors would swing shut behind them. In the terraces or slums, the farm cottages, shops or houses that had once been home, this evening would begin with candles, lamps or gaslight; there might be Bible reading and sewing; there might be strong drink and violence; but from all this and much more that passed for normal they were now removed. In a place of safety, in the name of comfort, they were hereafter free to relinquish their struggles with the life outside and battle only with their several realities. Attendants brought the women one by one to Thomas when he took his seat behind the trestle. He was handed two doctors' reports for each patient. Some were cautious and detailed: "Patient imagines herself to have been hypnotised. She declares she hears voices, and instances one as saying that her brother has been shot. They order her to carry out various acts. She declares there is electricity in the air that acts in her. Her appetite is poor and she has become anaemic' He looked up and saw a woman in a black dress, half bald, with strong features, and hands like a man's. "Do you know where you are?" he asked. "What is your name?" She had been transferred from a private asylum where she lay with sheets over her head, talking to voices in a state of agitated depression. "How do you feel? We are going to make you better." "Classification," muttered the female attendant on his right. Thomas sighed. "Dementia." "Refractory?" "I cannot say after one minute with the