The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (8 page)

There was a figure in the bed, but no-one that either of us at first recognised. It was a man, pale and horribly thin. He had lost most of his hair, but what was left of it was black and clammy. Two days of black stubble covered his sunken cheeks. His pale bony hands fumbled convulsively at the duvet. His breath came in short moaning gasps. It looked as if he was in the last stages of some hideous wasting disease.

‘My God!’ said Alex. ‘What the hell is that bloke doing in my bed?’

I could not speak. It is the only time in my life that I have ever been paralysed by fear, but of what? An image on a screen?

One of the hands lifted itself from the duvet and started to make clawing movements as if trying to ward something off in the vicinity of the camera’s eye. The man started to moan words which I could not understand. He repeated the same syllables again and again. It sounded like: ‘Hurninaw, hurninaw, hurninaw.’ Then the face which had been in gaunt profile turned itself towards the camera, and I received the last terrible shock of the evening. I recognised the eyes. They were large and brown, and the lashes, though gummed and slimed with disease, were long.

‘Christ, who the hell is he?’ Alex muttered.

‘Don’t you recognise him?’ I asked.

‘No! Do you?’

‘No.’ But I lied.

**

I can’t remember now how or when I left Alex’s flat. I know I did not sleep that night and the next day, which was a Saturday, is a complete blank in my memory. On Sunday I lunched with my parents and got some sleep in the afternoon. When I went back to work on Monday I did see Alex. He avoided my glance, but otherwise seemed perfectly normal. In the following weeks our contact was minimal. We both stuck to an unspoken agreement that the evening when we watched the recordings was not to be mentioned.

As it happened, my days at DH Associates were numbered. The firm decided to go in for downsizing, or streamlining, or whatever they call sacking people, and I was out. I was not all that sorry to leave and it seemed that nobody was particularly sorry to see me do so. Alex, in particular, made no effort to commiserate.

I spent two months in the limbo of the workless. It was a dark period in which I began to believe I would never work again. At last, through a good friend, I landed a brilliant job at a new up-and-coming PR firm called Murray-Thomson. Alex and DH Associates soon became very distant memories. Then, one evening, about a year later, I happened to find myself in Freek’s wine bar where I had met Alex for a drink that night. I had been meeting a client and, after he had gone, I lingered, idly finishing the bottle of Chilean Chardonnay we had ordered between us. I was in a contented unreflective mood when suddenly I heard my name called. It was Sally, one of the art directors at DH Associates. Though we had never been particularly friendly at DH she greeted me effusively and accepted my offer of a drink.

‘We hear you’re doing great things at Murray-Thomson,’ she said. I smiled. So that was it. Success had conferred status on me. ‘A lot of us were very sorry to see you go. One of our best copywriters. The Management at DH is just so crass. Do you know if Murray-Thomson is looking around for new young blood?’

I made a noncommittal answer and asked after my old associates. Sally said:

‘You heard about Alex, I suppose.’

‘No. What about him?’

‘Oh, God! He’s dead. Didn’t you know? I thought you and Alex were great mates.’

‘No. Not specially. Not at all really.’

‘Thank Christ for that. No. Sorry. I mean it’s just that none of us really liked Alex.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was incredibly quick. He got this terrible disease. Lost weight; lost his hair. The doctors were baffled. Some sort of virus. AIDS maybe.’

‘But Alex wasn’t gay.’

‘You don’t have to be gay to get AIDS, you know.’

‘Sorry. No. Quite. Go on.’

‘Well, they tried everything, but he just kept going down hill. Eventually he discharged himself from hospital because the doctors were getting nowhere. I did go and visit him. The last time I saw him at his flat it was awful. He was delirious. He was in bed and he kept staring at this spot on the bedroom wall and waving something away with his hand. And he kept screaming the same thing. It took me a long time to figure out what it was. It was: “Turn it off! Turn it off!
Turn it off!
” ’

MISS MARCHANT'S CAUSE

I can’t understand how I came to do ‘The Dare’, as it was called. Though not exactly shy, I was a timid, cautious boy at school, with no great ambitions other than to get by and not be punished. My memory of events leading up to the incident is hazy, but I am sure it had a lot to do with what is now called ‘peer pressure’. I was twelve years old and in my last year at Stone Court preparatory school in Thanet.

Just outside the school premises, and strictly out of bounds, was a large, derelict, red brick building standing in a wilderness, surrounded by a high wall. This was in the early 1960s, before the age of the developer, when such ruins were not so unusual. The building, called Grove House, exerted a powerful influence on our young imaginations. Of course, it was said to be haunted, but how and by what was never specified. Masters when interrogated on the subject of Grove House were invariably vague, but whether through ignorance or a reluctance to impart information I could never tell.

The whole school used to take a walk every Sunday afternoon and frequently passed its rusty, padlocked front gates. Through these one glimpsed what had once been a park with fir trees and rhododendrons, lawns and herbaceous borders, now thoroughly wild and weed-ridden. Beyond this was the house, vast and rambling, the colour of dried blood. It was on three floors, and along its front ran a glass-roofed verandah, smashed and crazed by years of vandalism and neglect. The style was plain mid-Victorian institutional with touches of Gothic and, as I now know, it had been built in 1870.

The Dare was to enter the grounds, get into the building and return with some memento of the expedition. One Sunday Summer evening a friend called Farr and I decided to do it. I remember that we climbed over a broken section of the wall and entered the grounds with no great misgivings. The evening was pleasantly warm from the sun which had shone all day and the overgrown park was mysterious without being threatening. However, the Dare was to enter the house. The front door was locked, but we knew from previous darers that we could get in through a window on the verandah. This we did and entered a large white room empty except for a single wicker chair. The evening sun shot great dust-filled bolts of light across the room. Farr suggested we take the chair back as a souvenir and I laughed, as much to reassure myself with the sound of my voice as for any other reason. We tried the only door in the room and it opened. It was darker beyond, but I said we must go on. We still had to find our souvenir, and I felt that our dare was not complete until we had entered the bowels of the building.

We went through the door into a long gloomy corridor into which some light filtered from a window at one end. The floor of black and maroon encaustic tiles was littered with debris, so that every step we took crackled like a fusillade. The feeling that we should get out of here as soon as possible became very insistent. I stooped to pick up a little loose square of tile for my souvenir, and, as I did so, something happened which for a few brief seconds gave me an odd feeling of reassurance. I became aware of a smell with which I was intensely familiar, the smell of my own school, Stone Court, on the mornings when it was being cleaned: carbolic, soapy water, wax polish on wood. Then it occurred to me that this was not a natural smell to find in a derelict building. I turned round to look at my friend Farr.

In the gloom I could see that his round, freckled face was whiter than usual and he was looking at something over my shoulder with a blank expression. It was as if his face was losing the thing that made him Farr and no-one else. I turned back and looked towards the window at the end of the corridor.

There, etched against the light was the figure of a woman in a long dress. She was facing towards us, tall, with a slender, and, as I now think, a voluptuous figure. I could distinguish no features, only a black unmoving silhouette. It was enough. We were off at a run, howling as we went.

After that I only remember that we got back into our own school grounds without further adventure, that we did not boast about our escapade and that I kept the little square of dark red encaustic tile from Grove House.

Very soon the Grove House adventure faded in my memory until I almost began to doubt its reality. The tile was kept at the back of a drawer. Each time I came across it I thought of throwing it away, but I didn’t. It was not that I wanted to remember the incident, but something told me I should not forget.

Then, when I was eighteen, I happened to find myself at Paddington Station about to board a train to Oxford with nothing to read. The selection of paperbacks at W.H. Smith’s was limited, but I chose what seemed to me the most interesting, a compilation volume called
Victorian Scandals
.

I was on the train before I was able to examine the book. I turned first to the thin, smudged spread of photographs sandwiched between the pages of print. There were pictures of Oscar Wilde and Bosie, of Florence Bravo and Dr Gully, of Tranby Croft and Sir William Gordon Cumming. With all of these and the scandals attached to them I was more or less familiar. Then I turned a page and received a shock. It surprises me now to think that a dingy photograph of a drab Victorian building could make my heart beat faster and turn me hot and then cold. I looked round at my fellow passengers to see if they had noticed anything abnormal about me, but they were absorbed in their own affairs. The photograph was of Grove House, and the caption read:

Grove House, the private asylum run by Eleanor Marchant, where over thirty patients died, in mysterious circumstances
.

On the same page was a half-length photograph in an oval of a woman dressed plainly in the costume of the 1880s. Under it the caption read:

Eleanor Marchant, pioneer in the treatment of the insane, who murdered her own patients. Was she mad herself?

The face in the photograph had that strange, stony inscrutability you often see in Victorian photographs, the product in part of the early camera’s long exposure times. The features were severe but handsome, the only unattractive element being a wide thin-lipped mouth. Beneath the stiff bodice one detected a voluptuous figure. My eighteen year old mind scented a powerfully sexual being behind the façade; it returned with a jolting vividness to the silhouette in the corridor. I was enthralled.

The piece on The Grove House Mystery, as it was called, was not well written.
Victorian Scandals
was the work of a hack who specialised in the genre of ‘true life crimes’. One was aware of a straining after sensation which, paradoxically, seemed rather to rob the story of its strangeness. Nevertheless, the bare bones were interesting enough.

Eleanor Marchant had been the daughter of well-off parents. From an early age she exhibited a zealous, crusading nature, a genuine desire to ‘do good’, combined, as it sometimes is, with an exhibitionist streak. Her inspiration was Florence Nightingale, but the sphere in which she proposed to shine was the treatment of the insane. The writer implied that Eleanor’s choice of this field may have been prompted by the fact that there was a record of insanity in her family; though it is just as likely to have been simply that a more humane treatment of mental illness was beginning to be a fashionable cause by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Using family money Eleanor Marchant had Grove House built and set herself up as the superintendent of a private asylum for the insane. At the outset Grove House was run on the most enlightened lines. Inmates had their own rooms and recreations of all kinds were available to them. Exercise in the spacious and attractive grounds was encouraged. Patients had their own small plots of land where they could grow what they wanted. There was a small menagerie of animals which they looked after. The institution was a model of its kind, so that articles appeared in magazines praising Grove House and Miss Marchant’s regime. She herself wrote a highly acclaimed work,
On the Care and Cure of the Insane
.

This state of affairs lasted for about ten years until the middle of the 1880s when a change began to take place. Miss Marchant, always a powerful personality, became more arbitrary and dictatorial. The overall atmosphere remained as enlightened as before, but there was an increase in petty regulations. Patients had to be inside Grove House by certain times, take prescribed amounts of exercise, and dress in a more uniform manner. A system of punishments or ‘forfeits’, as they were called, was imposed on those who infringed the regulations. Some of the hitherto devoted staff left and were replaced by less capable and dedicated employees.

What caused this change is a matter for speculation. It was said that Eleanor Marchant craved attention and that when interest in her waned, as it inevitably did, she resented it. Local inhabitants started to complain that the tone of their neighbourhood had been diminished by the presence of Grove House and that the occasional escape of an inmate threatened their safety. These murmurings embittered Miss Marchant who tended to react violently to any form of criticism.

Another possible agent of change was less known about at the time, but much talked of later. In 1882 a male patient named Bradley had been admitted to Grove House. Bradley had been a doctor and the general consensus was that a combination of drink, laudanum from his dispensary and the tragic death of his wife had affected his mind. There were rumours of assaults on patients, but Bradley’s family had spirited him away to Miss Marchant’s asylum before prosecutions could be instituted.

Within two years, the regime of Grove House, together with abstinence from drink and drugs, had apparently wrought a total cure on Dr Bradley. Miss Marchant had become, in the course of his stay, very close to Bradley, though whether their relationship extended to physical intimacy is not known. Photographs of Bradley show a short, stout man with dark eyes and a wealth of black whisker. It was generally thought, however, that she made a catastrophic mistake when, in 1886, she decided to dismiss the local doctor and employ Bradley as a resident physician to Grove House.

It was shortly after Bradley’s appointment that mysterious deaths began to occur among the patients. There were falls down stairs and from windows, suicides by hanging and self-mutilations. One woman was found burned to death in the summerhouse. Others merely died suddenly for no discernible reason, and the death certificates, invariably written out by Dr Bradley, showed ‘apoplectic seizure’ and ‘heart failure’ as the cause of death.

It took some time for the enormity of these occurrences to become apparent, and in the end it was human greed which exposed it. The relatives of a female patient who had suddenly died became suspicious when they discovered that some jewellery belonging to her had disappeared. Miss Marchant, when questioned as to its whereabouts, felt that her integrity had been impugned and was rude to them. The relatives, who were not used to being spoken to in this way by someone whom they considered to be an employee, reacted by initiating an investigation into the death. Strychnine was discovered in the corpse, and this led to enquiries into other deaths at Grove House. Members of staff, who had become resentful of Miss Marchant’s increasingly despotic ways, aired their suspicions. Miss Marchant and Dr Bradley were arrested.

As it happened, the jewellery whose disappearance started the whole affair, was found to have been taken away to be ‘put in safe keeping’ at a previous date by another relative of the deceased.

In the end, it was only Miss Marchant who was put on trial. There was not a strong enough case against Dr Bradley, who gave evidence against her in court. She was found guilty of murdering six of her patients and of inflicting grievous bodily harm on a further seven, but the number of her victims was generally thought to be far higher. Condemned to death, she was found subsequently to be insane and sent to Broadmoor. Dr Bradley committed suicide in abject poverty a year after the trial.

The story haunted my imagination, and I tried to find out more about the subject. Very little of substance came my way, except that, a year after I had read the account in
Victorian Scandals
, I found another photograph of Eleanor Marchant.

It was in a book about the criminally insane which I discovered while browsing idly through a second-hand bookshop in Oxford. There were pictures from Broadmoor records, and among them a double portrait of Eleanor Marchant from 1905. In many ways, I wish I had never seen the picture.

It showed her in full face and profile lit uncompromisingly against a white background. In each of the pictures her chin was raised and she was looking downwards. This gave her an air of defiance which was accentuated by the eyes, now sunken, but still smouldering with the will to power. The long gash of a mouth was wrenched down at the ends in a rictus of misery and despair. It was the look of a defeated tyrant fighting a last despairing battle in the burning citadel. Behind the rage the fear of death could plainly be seen. A note under the photograph stated that she died shortly after it was taken. After that I lost the desire to discover any more about Eleanor Marchant; the ending of the story was so entirely without hope.