The Captain's Daughter (27 page)

Ella stared back at the rolling sea, hearing the gulls wheeling overhead. The salt spray and the seaweed stung her nose. As long as she lived she’d never forget the sight of her mother running into the waves as if she meant to drown herself. Who will look after me now? she sobbed as silently as she could.

She turned to look at the water stretching out to the grey horizon. Clouds were gathering, dark storm clouds. The sun was hidden and the sea was choppy and noisy in her ears. Somehow her mother’s fever was all the fault of waves and water and shore.

I never want to see you again . . . I hate you . . . I never want to see the sea ever again.

Celeste stood on City station. They’d come straight from Liverpool a long enough route that she had had time to adjust to hearing those Midlands voices shouting down the platforms. The platform air was stiff with hops from the nearby brewery iron filings and soot, and a stiff easterly tugged at her coat.

‘Look,’ she pointed out to Roddy. ‘The cathedral spires.’

‘They’re not very tall,’ was his only comment.

‘Let’s give Grandpa a surprise,’ she said, then saw him looking puzzled.

‘Grandpa’s not here, he’s in America.’ His tiredness was making him confused.

‘You are a lucky boy to have two grandpas. Come on, we’ll put all our things in a taxi.’

Roddy wasn’t impressed by the vehicle. ‘This is only a horse-drawn one – where are the automobiles?’

They had travelled light with just their hand baggage. Not a lot to show for ten years abroad, Celeste reflected, but none of that mattered now. She wanted to track every inch of their journey. What shops did she recognize? There was the old theatre, now a picture-drome, the clock tower, the Swan Hotel, the museum and library buildings and Minster Pool, just as she’d left them. They turned into the Close through the ancient wall and alighted. She couldn’t stop smiling. What a surprise she was going to give them.

Half dragging her son through the little tunnel into Vicar’s Close, she felt like a child again, ringing the door pull of number four, desperately hoping her father would be inside.

An old man with a stoop stared up at her, amazed. ‘Oh my goodness, come in, come in. May thought you’d not be long in coming home again, but this . . . and this young man must be Roderick. I’ve heard so much about you.’

Celeste stepped inside the tiny cottage. It was a muddle of books and papers. A smell of tobacco smoke and burned dinner greeted her nostrils. ‘I see May’s not seen to you for a few days,’ she laughed.

Her father paused. ‘Oh, you won’t know, will you? Poor May’s in hospital.’

‘How?’ Celeste replied, shocked. This was not how it should be. ‘I didn’t know she’d been ill.’

‘That young May is full of secret sorrows, I fear. We had no idea either. Selwyn was most upset. How wonderful to have you back with us after all your . . . your difficulties. Your timing is perfect. So much has happened. But sit down, let me fill the teapot. It’s around here somewhere.’

Celeste jumped up. ‘I see we’re going to have to roll up our sleeves and sort you out. Oh, Papa, you’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this return.’ She stopped, seeing her father peering over his half-moon glasses at her son.

‘He’s so like Bertie, isn’t he?’ he said, looking at the silver-framed picture of Bertram in his uniform. ‘I still can’t believe he won’t be coming home to us. I’m glad your mother didn’t have to know this . . . but now, how wonderful to see you both. Wait till Selwyn hears. I must warn you, though, Selwyn isn’t quite as you will recall him. He’s been very ill but he’ll mend given time, like May.’

‘What
is
wrong with May?’

‘Didn’t I say? She’s in St Matthew’s.’

‘The asylum?’ Celeste was shocked. ‘How?’

‘She’s not herself. They can help her there.’

Celeste took another deep breath at this bad news, knowing her return was not a minute too soon. Here she was needed and here she was welcome. They were home at last.

May awoke, not knowing where she was at first. Her eyes blurred as she tried to focus on the room. It was a ward with high ceilings, iron beds along the walls and the smell of Lysol in the air. She felt she’d been asleep for a long time: her limbs were stiff and heavy, her tongue thick and her mouth dry. Her hands fingered the thin nightdress that had ridden up, barely covering her. Her head was throbbing as she tried to lift her head off the pillow. What was she doing here?

Panic flooded her body and she sank back. I don’t care where I am I’m so tired, she thought. Her head was as fluffy as cotton wool. At first she had no recollection of how she came to be here, nothing except sleep and heaviness with glimpses of a long journey somewhere at the back of her befuddled mind. Her throat was sore and parched. Where was she?

There were other women shuffling up and down the room, eyeing her with interest, but they soon moved away when a nurse in a stiff white cap marched in. At the sight of her movement she smiled. ‘Ah, Mrs Smith, you are with us once more.’

‘Where am I?’

‘You are in St Matthew’s Hospital, my dear. Here for a long rest and a good long sleep.’

May couldn’t take in her words at first. What was she doing in an asylum, a lunatic asylum? ‘Where am I?’ she asked again.

‘I told you . . . in hospital.’

‘But where?’ Bits of memory were jolting back into place. She’d been on the train and there were crowds and the sea. Oh my God, the sea!

‘Where’s Ella? My daughter?’ She sat up to get out of bed but the room spun round and she almost collapsed.

‘Now, just get back into bed, Mrs Smith. Your daughter is being well cared for, don’t get upset.’

‘We were at Colwyn Bay . . . I know we went on a train. Am I in Wales?’ Why did her lips not move when she tried to speak? Every word had to be forced out of her mouth.

‘Now do I sound Welsh? You’re in St Matthew’s, Burntwood. You’ve been here over a week now. Don’t go getting upset. We need to keep you calm. I don’t want you upsetting the other patients. I’ll tell Dr Spence you’re awake. He’ll want to speak with you.’

What did I do to be put in here?
May’s mind was searching for those shards of broken memory – the icy stabs as she was thrashing in the water and the screaming. What had she done? Where was Ella? She wanted to feel anxious but everything was numb.

‘I’ve got to go home. I shouldn’t be here. I have a job. I must go home and see to things.’

‘If you don’t calm down we’ll have to put you to sleep again,’ the nurse insisted as she bent over her, straightening the bedding. ‘You need to rest your mind, not stir it up. You’ve been very run down.’

‘When can I see Ella?’

‘We don’t have children visiting, but your friends have come. They will give her news of you.’

‘What friends?’

‘The lady from the cathedral has been asking about you. She’s called in twice with flowers. See, over there? The beautiful gladioli.’ The nurse pointed to a glass vase full of coloured spears that were out of focus.

Had the wife of the college principal been visiting? How kind of her. ‘I’m sorry to be a trouble, but I must go home.’

‘Now that won’t be possible, dear, just yet, not until you’re better. You tried to drown yourself.’

‘I did what?’ May shrank under the covers.

‘You ran into the sea and had to be restrained. You scared people with your antics. Now we can’t have that, can we?’

May’s head was spinning at her words. If only she could remember, but everything was fuzzy and blurred, just pictures that fell into pieces when she tried to stare at them. There was the sea, yes, like a silver mirror glinting, reflecting her wickedness back at herself. She had wanted to smash that mirror. It stirred things up in her head she’d never wanted to see again. How the waves had crashed over their heads . . . how the ship had slid under the surface of the cruel ocean. She felt tears, but none came; her eyes were dry and sore.
Why am I here? What did I do wrong? And where’s the captain’s little girl now?

She turned her face from the nurse in shame, wanting to sink back into the mist of forgetfulness, to disappear into the autumn fog drifting over Stowe Pool early in the morning.

In the days that followed everything around her seemed bleached and colourless. She felt like a stranger in threadbare laundered linen wandering around in a daze of confusion. The food in the dining hall was tasteless, like over-blanched vegetables, and her drugged limbs were heavy as she dragged herself into the exercise yard and later around the corridors to the day rooms.

There was a smell of bonfires drifting through the open windows, and when she shuffled round the grounds of the hospital, the leaves scrunched under her boots like crushed glass. Her fingers were stiff and swollen as she sat in the workroom watching others struggling with basketwork. She couldn’t concentrate on stuffing toys or knitting. A nurse tried to persuade her to do something. ‘I can’t,’ she complained. ‘My fingers don’t work.’

It was as if everything here was in slow motion. She watched a woman making lace with pins and bobbins bent over her cushion slowly twisting threads, ignoring her, deep in concentration. If only she could lose herself in something like that.

She fingered the bone bobbins wrapped with cotton and saw herself young with all the hope in front of her, the clack of the machines, the chatter of the girls mouthing their gossip over the noise. She was back in the mill, so full of life and love and expectation. Who was that girl? Where had she gone? Who was this drab sorrow-burdened old woman?

‘Would you like to try this, Mrs Smith?’ asked the nurse, guiding her to a seat to watch how the lace was woven from pin to pin. The cotton threads followed the pattern of the pins, the lace grew so gradually, so delicate but so slow, and her eyes were soothed by the flicking of the bobbins, the rhythm of the twisting threads. She thought of spider webs, loops and links with gaps in between. Her mind was like a piece of lace, full of holes and spaces, and gaps with threads of worry twisting round the pins. Joe and Ellen. Ella, the ocean and that terrible night. Would the nightmares ever end?

How could she make sense of any of it now? She was too tired and fearful, but she could twist threads and make something grow. She sat down and watched and wondered at the delicate bobbins, like tiny fingers dancing over the cushion. This was something she could try.

Later, as she paced around the outer building, she sensed St Matthew’s was not the workhouse of her fears. It rose majestically like a brick castle out of the mist, and she was overawed by the size. She had heard about this place but had never seen it. Here she didn’t have to think or prepare meals but just sit in the vast dining hall and be served. She was given menial jobs to do but there was time to sit with the bobbins and lose herself in the threading, learning a new skill that was loosening her stiff fingers.

Life here wasn’t real, none of this was real. She’d been taken out of the real world into this mansion for a rest, but across the valley there was the child to consider.

Ella didn’t deserve what was happening to her. She was just a child, confused and frightened, now orphaned in effect. Who was looking after her? If only she wasn’t so tired and heavy. Perhaps Ella was better off without her? Who would want a mother like her?

During the weeks that followed the terrible trip to the seaside everyone at school was kind to Ella. She felt people were tiptoeing around her as if she was wearing a label round her neck that said: ‘Her mother is locked away. She’s got no one to look after her so don’t keep staring.’ But that wasn’t true. Hazel was kind and her mother was letting her stay with them, on a camp bed in Hazel’s room. She didn’t understand why Mum had to be taken away with her arms tied up or why she wasn’t allowed to visit her in St Matthew’s. Mrs Perrings tried to explain.

‘She needs rest, love. She’s been under a lot of strain. Seeing the water, well, it reminded her of your father and how he drowned. The doctors will take care of her. She’d want you to get on with your schooling. I’ve been to see Canon Forester and the College, and they will visit her and she’ll get what she is entitled to . . . Don’t worry. We’ll collect her post and get a few things for you.’

Ella had just one question: ‘How long will she be in there?’

‘Until the doctors think she’s well enough to come home, but don’t fret, you can stay here for a while until we see how things unfold.’

It was good walking with Hazel to school, and Miss Parry kept her busy if she looked sad. She missed Lombard Gardens and the view from her own room over Stowe Pool. She didn’t have time to go to the cathedral as the Perringses were Methodists and she had to go with them on a Sunday to their Tamworth Street church.

No one there knew about her mother being sent away, and soon, as the days turned into a week, she began to get used to living with this new sister and her mother and meeting Uncle George the soldier.

On the first Saturday together they played alongside the brook at Netherstowe and Ella remembered the little shrine to St Chad that had been their wishing well, covered over with an ivy roof. When Hazel was at her piano lesson she took herself down the road to the well and said a long prayer to the saint, telling him to hurry up and make her mum better. Why had Mum not come home? Did she not want to see her again? Was it right that she wasn’t her real daughter? She had to know the truth. It was then that she had her big idea.

‘We’ve come to see Mrs Smith,’ Celeste announced, clutching some pink dahlias as she and her father stood in the grand entrance of St Matthew’s, watching the clock ticking round to three and listening for the visitor’s bell.

‘She’s not having a very good day,’ the nurse warned. ‘Very weepy . . . She has these spells. Still, your visit might brighten her mood.’ It was Celeste’s third visit but so far she’d not seen the patient. This time she was determined to see for herself what had happened to May. She eyed the hospital with a certain admiration. Of its kind it was clean and functional and on a grand scale.

They followed slowly behind the nurse, the canon faltering to catch his breath, stumbling with his stick. It was not one of his good days either, but he was determined to accompany her.