The Painted Bridge (39 page)

Anna thought about peace and quiet, struggling with her blue coat. About what it meant. The buttons were too big for the buttonholes and her fingers stiff. The back door was open: Louisa had gone on without her. She got one button done up and ran through the glasshouse, sniffing the dry, fragrant smell. Through the garden, holding her hands tight over her ears to keep the cold from getting inside her head. There was no wind and the air was frozen like the milk. It felt solid with cold.

She came fast down the path, slipping and sliding, the chalk layered with ice, the bushes tearing at the skin of her hands. Reached the bottom, her head rushing with the downward plunge, feeling dizzy. Inspecting the beads of blood that stood up on her palm, she put her hand to her mouth and tasted her own blood, then felt with her teeth for the tip of the thorn and pulled it out. All the time, Anna was aware of a silence. A silence that should not have been. When at last she looked up, she cried out.

The sea was solid in front of her. It was pale and stilled, shut under a lid of ice with its top turned white. It was angry underneath. Raging at the imposed stillness. She knew that. Anna was frightened. She called for Louisa and heard nothing back but her own voice dying on the air. She walked toward the sea, tested the uncertain edge through the toe of her boot, keeping just a small part of it in her sight. She dared not look to the horizon, wished she had stayed in the flint house and never seen it. It was an evil omen, like in the Bible—a sea of glass.
And before the Throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal.

She hadn’t been thinking about him. She never did. He was just there. Always there. Trailing them, crying if they left him behind. Falling asleep on the sand, in a corner of the garden, anywhere. She wasn’t thinking about him.

And then she saw him. Standing on top of the chalk stack, the low one, closest to the cliff at the edge of the bay. He was there, with his spinning top in his hand. He threw the top out over the ice as if he tossed a ball. It sailed a short distance through the air, then fell and
bounced and skidded on the surface. He watched it fall, observed its sliding path. Then he jumped, his face creased with smiling. He flew through the air, landed, paused for a moment as he imagined he would, as if he arrived on solid ground. He stumbled, slid half from view, slowly. Anna saw his face change, the expression turning from joy into puzzlement. He slid farther and disappeared. His hair was there for one last arrested moment, bright against the colorless matter of the sea ice. Then gone.

Anna ran along the hard strip of exposed sand, scrambled and crawled along the rocks to where he had been, farther out around the edge of the bay. The ice wasn’t solid there. It was in jagged pieces with cracks between them. She climbed down onto the largest of them, under the rock, pushed her hands down though the crack, felt the bite of the water closing on her hands. Felt their emptiness as they sought and did not find. She was shouting at the top of her voice. No sound came. After a while, the cold drove the breath from her chest; she couldn’t shout, couldn’t breathe, could only whisper. She stayed there, plunging her arms down into the water, dragging her hands through it, her fingers spread. There was nothing. Her hands were empty. Only her eyes still held him. She turned back, crawled on her hands and knees, along the beach, up the path, through the garden.

She was in bed; the roses turned gray. Her hands were raw and grazed. She couldn’t feel anything. She should have been watching. It was her fault. Every night in her dreams the sea entered the house, it filled the rooms, to the ceiling. She lived underwater, hearing nothing from the land but fragments, exploding.

In the days that followed, as the ice melted, she waited at the top of the cliff, lying on her stomach, hanging over the edge and watching. Looking for something, she didn’t know what, searching with her eyes, willing something to appear from the opaque waves, to emerge, float up, become whole again.

One morning, the old man was down on the shore, bent over and digging for worms, in his wading boots that came up to the tops of his legs, his stooped shoulders in his usual navy jersey, his long, white hair blowing out in the wind. He pushed his toe into the sand, explored with it. He kneeled down as if he was praying and stayed there as the
tide turned and began to run in around him. After a long time he rose, with something in his hands.

He laid the bundle, it could have been cloth, an old coat lost in the sea, waterlogged, heavy and limp at the same time, or a dead bird, a bird that fell from the sky, he laid it over his shoulder and he walked out of the sea, past the path that adults never took and up through the cut passageway.

By the time he reached the top, Anna was waiting for him at the gate, hiding. She followed him into the house; he kicked open the front door, walked straight in, water leaking from his boots with every step. There was something on his shoulder. An arm, hanging down against his back. The top of a head. Curled hair the color of sand.

The old man reached the kitchen, took off his cap and dropped it on the table. He leaned forward and as he did so the bundle on his shoulder contorted, the head rose. Antony lifted his head and looked at her, his blind eyes open, his face blue, the features thickened.

After that, there were only noises. The ship’s bell, ringing and ringing. Louisa, crying. The sound of hammering, of nails being driven into wood, slow and somber. Adult voices. Her mother’s screams, that drowned out the sea. Antony was gone. His bowl and spoon were gone, his smocks and shoes. His singing in the morning. His name was gone. They were not allowed to speak it. Erased from the air, from their mouths. From everywhere.

*   *   *

Anna lay on the narrow bed for a long time, listening to the thickening silence. As the light disappeared, she stood up and went to the window, resting her elbows on the sill. On the other side of the glass, huge broken flakes still drifted downward, obscuring the boundary between the lake and the shore, blanketing the shallow mound under the sycamores. In the whiteness, the bridge had disappeared. Nothing moved but the snow.

At the Pall Mall Club, Lucas St. Clair stood at a podium in front of the members of the Alienists’ Association. More had turned up than had been expected. The organizers had brought in extra chairs and still a line of men were standing at the back leaning on the wall. Lucas rested his hands on either side of the lecture stand and breathed in the clubroom smell of leather and beeswax, a smoldering ash log.

“Good evening, gentlemen. Some time ago, a distinguished doctor proposed that the new art and science of photography had application in the diagnosis of madness. I became interested in this idea. We all agree that we stand in grave need of tools to improve our capacity to diagnose mental distress.

“I have devoted myself to researching the theory for the last year. And I would like to propose that you join me now for the final stage of my inquiries. I have drawn my own conclusions but I do not expect that you take my word for it. I invite you to make your own experiment this evening, in this room.

“What you see on the walls here are photographic portraits of women. As you can see, all are devoid of the badges of wealth and beauty, even of industry. Any one of them might appear to be a patient. But not all of the sitters are patients. Some are inmates at private asylums. Others are healthy women of sound mind—members of my own family and household and of friends’ families and households.

“I am asking you, as experienced doctors of the mind, to assess which is which. But before you start, I want to raise a further question. Is it possible that some of the women pictured here fall into both categories?
I mean to say, is it possible that any are both inmates of asylums and in sound mind? Or vice versa?

“I have numbered each one but left them otherwise unmarked. Please note which individuals you believe to be the lunatics. And which are as sane as you and I.”

The photographs were ranged in two long lines along one wall of the stately drawing room. Anna Palmer was there, twice. Violet Valentine. Lizzie Button. Talitha Batt, in life and in death. In between were photographs of the artist, Mrs. Mallinson. Stickles. Of his mother, her face shadowed with the grief that had afflicted her since Archie was cut down. Of Beth. Sunday. Catherine Abse. The identical twins, Melissa and Melody.

Every man in the audience took up his invitation to study the portraits more closely. They got to their feet with a prolonged shifting of chair legs, some protesting that they’d come for answers not more questions, others eager to prove their faith in the technique. The atmosphere changed as they began to look at the images. A hushed tone entered the discussions as the alienists found themselves looking at people, at individuals, and as the burden they carried—the responsibility and difficulty of making judgments about a fellow human—descended on them.

Several clustered around the second, retouched picture of Anna Palmer from which she gazed out clear-skinned and clear-eyed. Others crowded around them, believing that they must be missing the image that was the key to the whole experiment. Few lingered in front of the first, unretouched image of Mrs. Palmer in which the dark scabs and bruises dominated her face.

It was an hour before they were back in their seats, comparing notes, holding sheets of paper annotated with numbers and potential conditions. After an initial quarrelsome discussion, it became clear that there was no agreement among the doctors about who was suffering from mental disease and who was not. Only on two pictures had the gentlemen been unanimous. Mrs. Anna Palmer, in the unretouched image, was a lunatic. Mrs. Anna Palmer, free of scabs and bruises, was not. They disagreed only over whether she was one woman, photographed at intervals, or two different women. They similarly disagreed on the question of the twins.

By the time Lucas took the podium again, the mood was unsettled.

“Gentlemen. I began my inquiries with a firm belief in the potential of photography to take us farther down our path of helping the sufferers of mental distress. As some of you know, I’ve staked my professional reputation on this point—no one wished for its truth more than I. But the evidence does not bear out the theory. My research shows that although the photographic portrait can bring amusement, diversion and solace to those suffering from mental disquiet—as it can to any other member of the public—the hope that it can be used as a diagnostic tool is unproven.”

A belligerent roar broke out among the bearded and black-jacketed audience; sounds of disapproval, mingled with disappointment, rose to the tobacco-colored ceiling. St. Clair waited until the hubbub died away. He felt anger too. No one could have tried harder than he to make the idea work. But it did not. The theory he had cherished for so long, had tried to uphold and enlarge, had perished. Perished on his own dining room table as surely as if it had never lived.

“Our aim tonight is not to prove one man or another right or wrong, but simply to shoulder our burden of pushing on with research, with widening our small circle of understanding of the human mind—in health and in sickness. Our quest is worthwhile and wrong turnings must lead us in the end to right ones.

“Gentlemen, I have one further point to make. I firmly believe that photography might yet prove its worth—in treatment. The discussions prompted by the images, the opportunity for patients to define themselves by them, or to contradict them, the potential for these ideas will inform my further investigations.”

Maddox was sitting in the front row. He stood up and began to applaud; one or two others followed. The noise sounded like hammering from far away. Like demolition. Lucas gathered his notes and stepped down from the podium, began to take down the photographs from the walls, starting with Mrs. Palmer. The alienists were shrugging on their coats with the help of the cloakroom attendants, their voices lively with the fact of the evening being over, with waiting carriages. Harry Grieve was there, Lucas saw with some surprise. Two of the younger alienists argued still about whether or not Lucas’s mother
was deranged, standing between the fire bowls that lit the entrance to the club. It was snowing heavily outside.

Before leaving, Lucas stopped by the book of questions in the entrance hall. On the page where a year earlier he had posed a question—
Can photographs be effective in diagnosing disorders of the mind?
—he wrote his own answer, in a neat italic hand.

Fallaces sunt rerum species.
The appearances of things are deceptive.

*   *   *

Lucas walked back to Popham Street, carrying the photographs in a portfolio under his coat. He put them down on the table in the dining room. Stickles had left out a tray of ham sandwiches, some pickled cucumbers. He climbed the stairs to the dark chamber. He’d left the collodion unstoppered, he saw. The air was full of the smell of ether. The solution was exhausted, thin and dark red. He emptied the bottle down the drain. On an impulse, he lifted the yellow shade off the lamp and turned up the wick. The dark chamber, by ordinary light, was dusty and the walls marked with black fingerprints. Rectangles of zinc—where he had patched the boards to prevent light leaking in from below—shone under his feet.