The Painted Bridge (31 page)

“May I see her, Mr. Abse? Perhaps I can talk to her, persuade …”

“Enough,” he bellowed, shouting right into her face, blasting her with sour breath and rage. “My own daughter thinks her father a common
jailer. My most esteemed and reliable patient is dead. And you dare to tell me you don’t want gratitude.”

Anna took a step back. She felt more frightened than she had at any moment so far in Lake House.

Abse picked up a pen from the desk and smoothed the trimmed feather between his fingers. His voice when he spoke again was controlled and he did not look at her.

“I have written to your husband to request your transfer to another asylum. Until then, you will be treated for mania. We shall try every means at our disposal to help you. But moral insanity such as yours is most often beyond cure.”

“Come along, Palmer.”

Makepeace’s voice was cheery despite the early hour, the bitter cold in the corridor. She walked in front of Anna, and Lovely came behind with the corner of her apron stuffed in her mouth. It was not yet light; the bell hadn’t rung for breakfast. They walked past the treatment room, past the shower room and on, to a set of steep, curved stone steps. Anna followed Makepeace down, holding a rope slung from the wall like a banister, and arrived in a cellar, its floor scattered with straw, an old brick oven on one wall.

The room was filled with noise; a machine was running somewhere nearby. Fludd loomed out of the corner, dressed in a smith’s leather apron. Anna gasped at the sight of him. He was adjusting a strange contraption, festooned with straps and attached to a long wooden arm. It was a chair. A high-backed chair, attached to the end of a wooden beam.

“What’s happening, Lovely?” Anna’s voice was a whisper.

Lovely shook her head.

“You’ll be alright, miss,” she whispered back. “It’s the chair. It don’t kill yer.”

Makepeace cleared her throat. “This is the patient, Mr. Fludd. I think you recognize her.”

Anna met his eyes, blue and intense, as he walked toward her. She shrank against Lovely, had time to feel the soft bulk of her, breathe in her smell of sweat and lye, before the man lifted her off the ground and with one movement thrust her into the chair. She kicked at him and tried to push him away with her fists. He laughed.

“No funny business,” he said. “Not with Fludd.”

He leaned his shoulder against her chest, pinning her in the chair while he tightened a belt around her waist, strapped her legs to the legs of the chair, her chest to its high back. His hair fell forward and Anna caught a glimpse of a scar on the back of his neck—a white circle that looked like teeth marks. Fludd stood up and the machine in the distance quietened. For a moment, everything was still.

“Have a care, Mr. Fludd,” Lovely said.

Lovely, Makepeace and Fludd all stood back behind a wooden partition, and Fludd bent over a wheel. As he turned it, the chair started to move. Anna felt herself traveling around the brick walls of the cellar in a circle as if she was in an open carriage, the air cooling her face, her neck. For some slow-moving seconds, she felt nothing more than loneliness, a sense of herself in motion while the others remained stationary. The chair gathered speed, the room became round. The walls disappeared; corners, individual stones lost their solidity. She tried to grip the arms of the chair but her fingers refused.

Soon the chair was turning so fast she couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hold anything with her eyes. She tried to shout but nothing emerged; her mouth was open, she realized, her head thrown back against the chair. The air had become solid. It slammed into her, choked her, battered her body and then her mind. She was struggling to breathe. She felt nausea rising, turning her body liquid, her bones as formless as the spinning walls. She summoned the last scraps of will, tried again to scream and as she did so she felt the chair slowing. It came to a halt.

She heard Lovely crying, could feel something warm and wet on the seat. Anna was sitting in her own urine. She was sick, suddenly and violently. She half closed her eyes, waiting for the straps to be undone, the room to cease turning.

“All right, Fludd.” It was Makepeace. “Get on with it.”

The chair began to move again, in the other direction. She traveled backward. A panicked, choking wave rose in her chest but the chair turned so fast the sound was forced inward. It lodged in her head so she was the scream and the scream was she. Her head was thrown forward on her chest, the vomit gathered in her throat and choked her. She knew nothing but the impulse to fight, fight for air.

*   *   *

Anna was in bed. The walls were spinning around her, rotating in a way that made her sick. She reached out to still one as it passed by, saw a white hand appear in front of the blurred thistle heads of the wallpaper. The hand was moving too, it floated up to the ceiling; there was no still place. The thistles had turned to roses, green and thorny, each one different from the next.

She heard a door closing, saw a tray spinning on the chest of drawers that tumbled in space. A hot hand held her wrist. She understood; her skin no longer contained her—she had left her body and was rolling weightless around the room. Her self had been driven out of her. Anna felt a pure, detached sorrow that this was her life. Her path had been leading her here from the very beginning and she hadn’t guessed. She had walked through the days in ignorance, without fear, and each one brought her closer to this one. Life had betrayed her.

*   *   *

On the second day, Makepeace instructed that she be kept longer in the chair.

“Five minutes each way, Mr. Fludd.” Her voice was excited, as hard and jangling as her rings as she clapped her hands to indicate that he should commence. Anna heard herself whimpering as she was lifted into the seat. She didn’t struggle, she tried to put her hands over her eyes, to block out the cellar walls, Makepeace’s face, but Fludd grabbed her wrists, trapped them on the arms of the chair. She began to scream, but not for help. There was no help. The chair started to move.

When they lifted her out, she was lost in an impossibly large body. She couldn’t find her lips or her tongue. Her feet and her head were on each side of her and her elbows were distant and out of reach. She was cold, colder than she’d ever been in her life.

After a week of the treatment, Anna stopped trying to remember where she was or why this was happening. She opened her eyes one dusky afternoon to a small bedroom and saw two candles lit on the mantelpiece. A photograph of a woman she didn’t know. The loneliness was unbearable. She called for Louisa. For her mother. For any
human soul. They were there, all of them, her mother and her sisters looking down at her from the top of the cliff and Anna was below, the tide turning and rising around her ankles. She grew silent, waded in the shallows, heard the sigh and suck of the water, knew the terrible emptiness of her open hands. Only her eye could hold the image of him as he sank. Her hands were useless.

She prayed for a sign. Anything at all. Nothing came. Nothing new. Only herself on the shore and then in the shallows. She saw the scene, the freezing water, the disappearing child, with a sense of detachment. She lived in the shallow waves, her hands trailing through the water, could experience it with her eyes closed or open, could hear the sighing waters over and under the echoes from along the corridor, feel the urgent emptiness of her hands around the cup Lovely pressed into them.

*   *   *

Dr. Higgins had instructed that she be purged, Makepeace announced. They were in the treatment room; Lovely had been sent out. Makepeace turned to Anna. She had rolled up her sleeves and taken off her rings. Anna closed her eyes as Makepeace took hold of her, pulling back her head and pinching her nose.

“Come on, Palmer,” she said, as she poured chalky liquid through a spout down Anna’s throat. “Open your eyes.” She jabbed at one of them with her finger. “You’re not a child, to be hiding away. Anyway …” Makepeace came closer, her face lowered over Anna’s. “There is nowhere to hide. Not now.”

Anna’s bowels turned to water; she was left shut in the bedroom with the stench, the slops freezing in the chamber pot. Next day was another kind of emetic; she vomited until she thought her insides would spill into the tin bowl, stood up with black spots dancing in front of her eyes and at once collapsed on the floor.

Days later, Makepeace arrived in her room again, early. Anna walked behind her down the wormy boards, weeping silently and unstoppably, supported by Lovely’s arm around her waist. The corridor grew narrower and darker every time she passed down it. It had once seemed long but now it was never long enough.

In the treatment room, Lovely brushed Anna’s hair—slowly, with a patient gentleness in her big hands, smoothing the tresses with her palm between each brushstroke. Anna wished the moment could last forever.

“Enough of that,” Makepeace said. “I’ll ring if you’re required.”

Lovely left the room backward; the last thing Anna saw was her broad, concerned face. Anna closed her eyes, her ears jarred by each snip of the scissors. When she opened her eyes again, it was done. Her hair lay on the floor all around, in long, dark skeins, unaware of its severance and shining in the beams of sun that fell through the window. She felt the shock in her fingers as they ran over her head from her forehead to the nape of her neck. Makepeace doused Anna’s head with water, came toward her with a bar of soap, an open razor.

“It’s for your own good.”

Her scalp, readied by shaving, was first blistered with hot irons. Later, it was frozen with crushed ice that had been packed in an India rubber cap. Anna saw herself as if from above, as if she floated over the woman she had been. She saw her own familiar body dressed in a calico nightdress, strapped to a chair in the treatment room. Saw Makepeace, pushing the ice down hard on her head, breathing heavily.

“What are you doing to me?” Anna heard herself say.

“Cooling the blood. Mr. Abse’s orders.”

The pain was sharp and jarring, as if something had come loose inside her skull.

Afterward, in the mirror at the washstand in her own room, her lips were as blue as cornflowers. Her scalp looked angry, the skin raised and red. The pain had changed. It was as solid as iron; it enveloped her from the inside of her head. She threw the towel over the mirror. The creature she saw in the glass was a stranger and the stranger frightened her.

Next, a week later, came the leeches, applied to her private places by Dr. Higgins. She was maniacal, he said, as he lifted her skirts, due to a disorder of the menses. He had renewed the certificate for her own safety. Anna didn’t protest. She couldn’t. It seemed to be someone else this was happening to while she watched from above, dispassionate and helpless. The bites oozed blood that would not cease.

*   *   *

After some days, she didn’t know how long she had lain there, time couldn’t be measured anymore in the old ways, they brought her out of the bedroom. Put her into the window seat in the dayroom, wrapped in a blanket. She still couldn’t speak, she discovered. She couldn’t respond to Lizzie Button’s gentle inquiries. All she could do was look into Lizzie’s brown eyes. She gazed at her for a long time until Makepeace stepped between them. Mrs. Featherstone laughed and sang to herself, tore the tassels off the edges of the curtains and scattered them on the floor like flowers. Talitha’s chair was empty, waiting for her.

Anna no longer felt sorrow. She didn’t feel anything. She was not there. She could smell sea air underneath the boiled cabbage and potatoes and feel the spray of surf sharp on her skin as she sat in the gloom of the dayroom. Eating a mouthful of herring at breakfast she tasted the whelks they boiled in seawater over driftwood fires. When the two friends quarreled, shrill and resentful, she heard the voices of children, playing.

She saw the sun on the chimney breast, over a far horizon, the water merged with the sky. The chalk shore turned pink and gold in its fiery light and she roamed it, up and down. The sky lay flattened and stilled on the sand, caught in the wet remaining lick of sea, the pink gleam of sunset brought to earth, the fire of it cooled. The sea could do that, could unify earth and sky. The sky over the earth was bereft, could not regard itself in the mirror of the sea, find itself rosily beautiful.

Not always beauty. The beach could be starkly ugly. The light muddy and neutral, overcast, the tide not in nor out and hard to know which way it traveled. The sea grumpy and recalcitrant. Sulking, midtide. It deceived, appeared to pause. Or ran away like a coward, a bully. Disappeared toward the far horizon and left everything scattered and stranded on the beach—translucent, twisted tails of weed or rope, expired jellyfish, flat with exhaustion—the sea departed as if it was a thief disturbed. Ebb tide spoke of death.

Sailors who died at sea had their tattoos cut off, the patches of skin brought back for their relatives. She heard these things as she heard the sea, without quite hearing them, as if they washed into her through
her skin, soaked into her being. As if they had always been part of her and she could not rid herself of them.