The Jeweller's Skin (21 page)

There was a new patient to work with them, a woman in her forties, very fat, with downcast light-blue eyes and a sly expression.  Or perhaps she was just sleepy, starting work at six, Narcisa thought.  Her own lack of sleep made her feel empty, floating.

June and Peg were giggling, making tea.  Rosaleen Shaw had asked for the day off. ‘Though of course if you need me to help with the new patient?’  she added, deferential; and Narcisa swallowed back her irritation.

The woman walked slowly, stiff-legged, with a great lurching motion of her hips.  Narcisa took her round the kitchen, opening cupboard doors on mixing-bowls, roasting-tins, tureens, and naming each pile, perhaps unnecessarily.  ‘You will soon remember it all,’ she said, though the woman had given no sign of being awed.  There was a faint smell about her of diarrhoea.  Dear god, I hope she’s clean, Narcisa thought.  She would talk to the Ward Sister later.  ‘This is where you wash your hands,’ she said, perhaps too loudly, since June Ragless looked up.  ‘You must not wash at the sink, it is not hygienic.  You wash your hands here when you come on duty.’  She stood back to let the woman get to the basin.

The woman muttered.

‘I did not hear what you said?’

‘I done it already.’

‘Still you must do it again.  It is the rule.’  She took the soap and lathered and rinsed her hands, then dried them on the roller-towel beside her.  The woman copied her, hastily, not bothering to pull dry towel towards her.

She will be an ally for Rosaleen Shaw, Narcisa thought.  There was something about her sullen half-compliance, the way that she stood blocking space with her body.  Well, I must get her on my side first, she thought; and felt tired at the effort that would mean.

‘What is your name?’  she asked, trying to sound gentle.

‘Dunlop.’

‘Here we use first names, not surnames.  What is your first name?’

‘My
Christian
name?’  The woman said it sullenly; it was an attack.  I suppose she thinks I am heathen, Narcisa thought. 

‘Yes, your Christian name.’

‘Betty.’

‘Well, Betty, I hope you will like working here.’  But why should she like it?  The glib phrase seemed hypocritical.  It was work.  Bad enough to be in the asylum, without having to work.

‘It can be satisfying,’ she went on.  ‘We feed all the patients and all the staff.  It is a lot to do, and we manage it every day, three meals, and tea in the morning and afternoon.’

The woman shifted about, as if embarrassed.  Her feet were small, the flesh at her ankles puffy and overflowing.

‘June will show you what to do,’ Narcisa said, giving up.  ‘If there is anything you don’t understand, please ask.’

June tried to catch her eye as she led the woman Betty away, towards the great jars of marmalade, by the trolleys.

Certainly this one would be difficult.  She would resent being managed, that was clear.  She would need supervising: she might try to steal, food probably, maybe other things.  At the start of the war there had been that other woman, a little skinny thing, subservient, who turned out to have taken four serving-dishes.  Am I being unjust to this one?  she asked herself.  It was the woman’s physical presence that disturbed her; something she read as stubborn and ignorant.    But she was a patient; she had learned to survive there.  Narcisa watched as the woman spooned out marmalade onto white dishes.  Her movements were jerky, in spite of the short fat arms; as if with each spoonful she were saying: So there.

Narcisa sat down to go over the lunch plan.  She was tired.  She had stayed after all at the inn with Anthony.  She had not had permission to be out overnight.  Mullins the gate-porter might well report her.  And here I am telling this woman about the rules.

Lunch at least was straightforward, no long preparations: steamed cod, green beans, potatoes, then tapioca.  Was this the last of the salted-down beans, or was there another crock in the back of the larder?  She made a note. 

She had woken and found Anthony looking down at her, serious.  ‘I’m afraid it’s time to get up,’
he had whispered.  Now it seemed to her extraordinary, that he had remembered and got up for her, driven her over to Epsom in the dark.

Then why this time hadn’t she enjoyed being with him?  She had sat in the bar and struggled to concentrate.  He had seemed so remote from her, a professional man who could come and go, criticise Dr Bosanquet or whoever he’d met.  She thought with some dread: perhaps feeling this is the same as losing time?

There was a clatter, Peg dropping a pan.  ‘Sorry, Cook.’  It had been a relief, his aggression in bed with her.  Before that nothing he did had roused her body; she had felt solid as wood, unreachable.  She remembered from the previous time his belt tightened round her ankle.  I am becoming someone different.  I was rude to him; and I wanted him to hurt me.

She sat still, the noise of the kitchen rising round her, kettles boiling, smells of tea and scouring-powder.  I should go to the office, she thought, but didn’t move.

Betty Dunlop was muttering to another patient.  And why is she in here? Narcisa wondered.  She seemed so ordinary, with her shifty manner, her evident contempt for authority.  Not depressed, or manic, or deluded.  What catastrophe in her life had brought her here?  It seemed suddenly, oddly, important to find out.  If Betty Dunlop with her immoveable bulk, her cunning could still find herself in here…

But I was a patient.  I could be again.  She smoothed open the pages of the meal-plan in front of her.  It wasn’t that she had ever forgotten.  She had never pretended that it hadn’t happened, even if she’d chosen not to tell Dr Bosanquet, or Miss Gray and Miss Ainsworth before him.  Or Anthony.

I can’t do this now, she told herself abruptly, not even knowing what it was she had to do.  She stood up and walked slowly through the kitchen.  The patients had taken the trolleys through.  June and Peg were relaxing, leaning against the sink, June telling some story that was making Peg look shocked.  They caught sight of her and turned back to the draining-board.

*

Miss Fleming, the housekeeper, had asked for a meeting.  In her office beforehand Narcisa combed her hair and pulled her skirt straight.  She felt bloodless from lack of sleep.  Later, she told herself, I’ll think later.  Betty Dunlop’s sweetish unclean smell stayed in her nostrils.

‘Is Miss Shaw not joining us?’  Miss Fleming seemed taller, her grey hair more metallic.  There were white chrysanthemums in the vase on her table.

‘Miss Shaw is needed to supervise the lunch.’ 

Someone else came in, a younger woman with colourless hair in earphones, and a doubtful manner.  ‘Miss McNab, my assistant; Mrs Humphreys.’  Miss McNab stood leaning against the bookcase.  The little key-cupboard was just above her shoulder.

‘It is about your kitchen assistants.’

The smell of the chrysanthemums reached her, almost like cumin.

‘The kitchen assistants?’

‘Ragless, is one of them called?  And her friend.’

‘June Ragless and Peggy Skinner?  There is something wrong?’

‘My girls tell me that they are behaving, well, not properly.  Not how you’d expect of Holywell staff.’

She felt indignation rising. ‘I do not understand.  Please explain, Miss Fleming.’

‘Behaving.’  Miss Fleming was irritated.  She opened the stapler on her desk, and closed it again.  ‘Unsuitably.  That’s what my girls tell me.’  She put the stapler down.  ‘Perhaps it would be better if Miss Shaw - ’

It was sex, of course; nothing else would make this woman so tongue-tied.  No doubt they had talked to the Shaw woman already.

‘You have some evidence?’

Miss McNab came to stand beside Miss Fleming.  ‘Well, not evidence, Mrs Humphreys, you wouldn’t expect it.  It’s just that the girls felt it was rather disturbing.’

‘You mean they have gossiped.’  She stood up.  ‘You have encouraged the domestic staff to spy on other staff and report to you.’

‘Mrs Humphreys.  This is quite unsuitable language.  Your staff…’

‘My staff work very well.  I have no complaints about them.  You are telling me, what?  That they have boyfriends?’

‘Not boyfriends,’ Miss McNab said, her accent sad and insinuating.  ‘No, Mrs Humphreys, not boyfriends.  That is the point.’

And I am meant to be shocked.  She turned back to the housekeeper.  ‘Well, Miss Fleming, it is not the first.. ’  She stopped herself with some effort.  ‘What my staff do in private I am not interested.’

A vein in her neck was throbbing as she went back to her office.  Miss Fleming and her girls!  What had she wanted: Narcisa to discipline June and Peg?  To fire them?  She wanted to prove she knew something I didn’t.  Perhaps it is true, she thought, remembering the two young women working together.  It is not important.  And are the domestics spying on me too?  Is that it, that she knows I was out all night?

She close the door of the office and went to the window.   It was raining, a dark puddle on the asphalt marked with grey rings that spread and were replaced.  I am questioning everything now, she thought.  This place expects to know everything about you.  Probably I am supposed to ask June and Peg if it is true.  Miss Fleming might tell Dr Bosanquet that she’s told me.

I am angry with everyone, she thought.  Have I never seen these things before?  It is Anthony; he has shown me how people live.

She warmed her hands on the big grey radiator.

And if they knew that I had an illegitimate daughter?  That I made love in the open air with one of the gardeners?

She crossed the room on the threadbare pink carpet, and back to the radiator, and warmed her hands again.

I should show them.  I should bring Violeta here and introduce her.  Oh, didn’t you know?  I was a patient here.  After all, she thought, I have nothing more to lose.

She could see Violeta, tall and confident.  ‘Of course,’ she said, facing the housekeeper down.  ‘She’s my mother.  I am very proud of her.  Illegitimate?  How old-fashioned you are.’

Stupid, she told herself, and sat at her desk.  Still the imagined victory made her smile.

She hasn’t answered.  Perhaps she is ashamed, because I work here.

Perhaps she is simply away.  Or very busy.

I wonder how it will be, to get an answer.

The clock on the library wall clicked and whispered.  At the long oak table an old man turned a page of the
News Chronicle
, with a rustle like the wings of a beetle opening.

The dust of dried leather and newsprint and human skin held still in the daylight through the leaded windows.  Miss Cowden, the new young librarian, slotted white cards into an index box, the crowded contents squeezing the tips of her fingers.

A small boy stood on tiptoe to reach a book, afraid he would fall forward onto the shelves, and be shelved himself, unnoticed, under CHILDREN.  He pulled at the top of the spine and heard it tear.  With the book in both hands he stood right in the corner, as invisible as he could be against the dust-jackets.  The words like a paperchain turned into a story as fast as his narrow blue eyes could read them.

Alone at a table in the reference section, Narcisa sat with a pile of newspapers, and three heavy volumes lettered in gold on the spines.  In front of her another book lay open, thin, with smudgy black print and foxed paper.  On the right-hand page, the first paragraph began:
In Prizren.
  Her navy hat was pushed back on her head, her coat unbuttoned.  The skin on her hands felt dry with ink and dust.

She had been sitting reading for three hours.  The English was hard, the sentences in the books long and obscure.  The newspapers all referred to events she knew nothing of.  There were leaders’ names, and places that had some significance, and dates:
since the assassination
and
before the defeat. 
None of this print connected in her mind with the full, fast river, or the low stone bridge where as a child she had stood with her sister Alma, looking up at the hills, or the orchards outside the city, or the icy winters. 

Perhaps it was that, she thought in desolation, staring ahead at the encyclopaedias.  That it was so hard to believe she had once lived there, in this place that even a two-day-old newspaper chose to report from:
Yesterday, Marshall Tito and his forces. 
While all the time her father, Alma, her aunts, Alma’s husband and children were living there, were eating and working and speaking and getting older.  Or dying there.  Her father if he had survived would be eighty.  What killed people was not only war, but illnesses, accidents, heart attacks, malnutrition. 

So much had happened.  So many events, kings created and dying, one she had never heard of assassinated, in his car in the South of France; there was a photo.  Poor harvests and new economic policies.  The imprisonment and release of political figures.  Alliances, within the country and with other countries, the Croats with one, Slovenes or Serbs with another.  Reported all of it in passionless English, in a tone she knew from the asylum itself: that scientific contempt for human beings.  And now, at the end of her long reading bout, she could not have told what had happened first, why anything had happened, not even where, amongst the fragile collection of small nations.  Not even, she thought, and stared down at the book, what might have reached the lives of her family there.

In Prizren, meanwhile,
the paragraph began.  But it was no use.  Her ability to read sentence after sentence in this language, more unforgiving than ever, had been worn through.  I can come back, she thought as she closed the yellow-covered book, but knew that she would not.

She stood, the chair scraping on the parquet floor.  A grey-haired woman looked up and frowned at her.  I do not want to be here, she thought, exhausted, not knowing what
here
was.  She did up her coat.

Outside the air was soft against her cheek.  She turned her bike and rode back out of the town, along the back alleys and out into the lane, where the chestnut trees of the asylum were in bud, and the asylum cows looked up from the grass to assess her.

*

She felt the stillness come over the room, at once, like snuffing a candle.  They were all facing towards her, Rosaleen Shaw, June and Peg, and three, no four of the working patients.  For a moment she thought she had caught them out at something.

‘Oh, Cook,’ the Shaw woman said, too loudly, so that one of the patients started to shake.  ‘Thank heavens.  Are you all right?  We were so worried.’

‘Thank you,’ she began, not understanding, though the woman’s tone was sickly, menacing.  Then suddenly it was clear, the used white plates stacked on the trolley, the massive teapots ranged next to the sink.  She stopped herself reaching out to hold onto something, the dresser it would have been.  Her feet in her old shoes were heavy on the stone floor.

It was twenty to five.

‘Thank you,’ she managed to say again, since they were all still staring at her; though Peg had turned away from Rosaleen Shaw and was watching from half-closed eyes, like a child at the circus.  ‘Please carry on.  Miss Shaw  - ’ this was needed - ‘thank you for covering.’

They moved back slowly, reluctantly to their places.  Rosaleen Shaw waited beside the table.  Narcisa took down her apron from its hook.  Her movements seemed all to have been slowed down.  She could see Peg emptying the teapots, swilling the tea-leaves into the sink-tidy and then shaking them out into the bin.  The acrid smell of tannin filled the kitchen.

‘I was beginning to think something awful had happened.’  There was enjoyment in the woman’s voice, scarcely disguised.  ‘Like I said to Dr Whitchurch, Mrs Humphreys is always so punctual.’

‘You have reported me to Dr Whitchurch?’  It came out too quickly; she couldn’t stop herself.

‘Not
reported,
Cook, no, I wouldn’t do that.  I was concerned.’   She was still angling for an explanation.

But I have to get away from her, Narcisa thought.  She drew in a long breath.  ‘Very well.  Thank you, Miss Shaw.  Now we will continue as usual.’

She sat at the table to plan the tasks for supper.  She had missed tea duty.  She had sat in the library under the great plain clock for how long? three hours? and never thought of the time.  As if I were used to having hours to myself, she thought, and that was almost the worst part.  As if I had always been someone who didn’t work.  Was it the same as the other day, losing time?  But no, she had been reading all the time, she could remember.  Then she must simply have forgotten.  To forget to come on duty: what would she think if June had done that, or Peg?  She watched them working, dragging the pig-bin between them out to the yard, talking under their breath.  June glanced over towards her but she couldn’t tell if the look meant reproach or pity or something else.

And Shaw of course had gone straight to Dr Whitchurch.  She made herself concentrate on the evening meal: the meat to put through the mincer, onions to chop, and what was the vegetable?  Leeks; so make sure they know how to clean them.  Miss Shaw could supervise two of the patients.  She listed the tasks, in large clear handwriting.  As if I won’t be here by this evening.

It was possible.  At any minute, a patient could knock at the door and say, ‘Dr Whitchurch wants to see you, Cook.’  She sat still for a moment.  There was no sound outside.

She put the pen down.  She had never been in trouble; she had made sure, had made herself cautious and conscientious.  It was like being a patient: you stayed quiet, you did what you had to do invisibly.  You didn’t attract the attention of people who had the power to hurt or humiliate.  Just one slip, she thought, her eyes brimming: once in almost twelve years.

But it wasn’t once.  There was Dr Bosanquet.  ‘As your employer I am entitled to expect complete honesty, Mrs Humphreys.’  She had become a problem; he would be pleased to be rid of her.

She stood up; the chair scraped on the stone floor; people looked round.  ‘Now,’ she said, making her voice firm.  ‘June, water on for the steamed puddings, please.  Peg, bring another sack of potatoes; take someone with you.  Betty.. ’ The reactions might have been resentment or relief.  She went on, standing still in the middle of the kitchen, her kitchen with its layered smells, its constant steam of boiling and washing-up, its vast mutated fish-fryers and pans, and made some order, some kind of authority, though the unknown patient with the message for her might that moment be closing the door of the Deputy Medical Superintendent’s office, and setting off through the asylum, full of his errand.