The Travellers and Other Stories (13 page)

Violet sat silently, taking neat bites out of her bread and drinking from her cup. She looked up and down the rows of other women but seemed to find nothing of any interest until on this particular evening her eyes fell upon a large bowl in the centre of the table. She became agitated and began smoothing her hair in an urgent, panic-stricken fashion. She rose from her chair and before I could stop her, she reached forward and picked up the bowl and placed it very carefully on her head, in the manner of a crown, or a hat, or some other kind of headpiece. I was about to go to her when Dr. de Vitre entered the hall. He saw our new arrival at once, standing in front of her chair wearing the bowl on her head. He approached swiftly from the far end of the hall, growing steadily larger in his flapping black coat as he came lumbering towards us. Violet smiled at him as he came near her. She has a very sweet, expectant smile.

She was still smiling at him when he put his hand gently on her arm.

The doctor is at all times very gentle and kind with the women. We are all under strict instructions to behave with the utmost kindness towards them. ‘Love,' he is fond of saying, ‘is a great improver of the idiot.'

Dr. de Vitre is not like other men. He is kind and gentle and devoted to the women here and I know he will never leave us.

For a brief moment, the two of them stood smiling at each other, Violet and the doctor, his huge hand resting on her arm and her looking up at him with her lips parted in that hopeful smile. But when he made to remove the object from her head, she jerked away from him and the bowl clattered onto the table and from there onto the wooden floor where it broke into a thousand glittering pieces. She flew at him then like a cat and bit his hand, on the soft fleshy part below the thumb. Sucking at his wound, he said to me between his teeth, ‘Take her upstairs. Stay with her. Do not leave her until she is calm.'

I stayed with her all night. First I coaxed her into a nightgown, and then I brushed her hair for a long time, over and over, which seemed to soothe her. Eventually she slept and I watched her till dawn from my chair, wondering if she suffered in her sleep, if her dreams were mad.

The doctor has a great interest in the dreams of the poor creatures here. Sometimes I can hear him prowling about in the galleries in the dark, as if his patients will reveal to him out of their sleep the obscure sources of their lunacy.

Once I heard Dr. Smail, our visiting surgeon, express the belief that our miserable weather is partly to blame, that women are particularly susceptible to the melancholy effects of the rain. Dr. de Vitre laughed uproariously at this suggestion, causing the visiting surgeon to blush. ‘If that were the case, Smail, the entire female population of Lancashire would be as mad as hatters. Every single one. Mad as a hatter.'

The day after the bowl incident I went upstairs as usual shortly after half past eight in the morning to check that the women were clean and dressed in their bedrooms before being taken off to the needlework room. I decided to go to Violet last, and to spend a little time sitting with her, perhaps brushing her hair. When I unlocked the door, I did not see her at first. There was Edith, trying to dig one of her holes by the window. Violet's gown lay across her bed, torn from top to bottom. Then I saw her in the corner, and then the door to Dr. de Vitre's study must have opened, because as I stood in the doorway looking at Violet Bowl, the horrible brown clock on the mantlepiece down there began to strike the hours.

Seven, eight, nine. The same bright note as that other clock. A sudden heat in my throat, a sharp freezing below my heart. The end of time. I closed my eyes against the silvery chimes of the clock, and the sight of Violet Bowl.

I woke on the leather couch in Dr. de Vitre's study and saw the shape of his dark back at his desk. He turned. I raised myself but he put out his hand. He told me to rest. He said the sitting up all night with Violet Bowl had made me ill.

I lay there for a while. I'd never seen the Gillow cabinet up close before, with all the old means of restraint inside, a kind of private museum the doctor shows to our many visitors, the cuffs and leg braces and cunningly made jackets all there behind the glass. There are little bottles too, Dr. Hunter's green insane powders, and his patent Brazil salts.

I stared out of the window at the vast white sky, the sweep of the path, the gardens, the dark bulk of the cedars. Off to the side, the beginning of the greenhouses, the cemetery beyond. The doctor is very proud of the grounds, and rightly so. We have made considerable progress in cultivating, planting, and laying out the rough moorland surrounding us.

He continued to write for a while at his desk, and then he brought me some tea.

I asked him if he thought Violet might have a chance of recovery.

He is reluctant, these days, to talk of effecting a cure. He seems to think lunacy an illness that can never be cured in the manner of some bodily sickness. But he is always hopeful of what he calls recovery, by which he means being able to leave this place and resume a life outside.

‘Well?' I said.

He pushed out his lips and drew one of his big hands across the back of his neck and then, as always, replied in a stream of rapid, repeated words. ‘I think she has been too long, too long in the same condition. Early intervention is the key. Early intervention. That is the secret. In Violet's case I believe there has been a festering.'

I finished my tea and he asked me if I felt better.

‘Yes. A little. Thank you.' I said.

There was a silence between us. He is a good man, the doctor. He is wedded to this place. He says he will never leave it. I have heard him tell Dr. Smail. He says the only way he will leave it will be ‘in a box'.

‘What happened?' he asked gently, the same soft, urging way he speaks to his patients.

‘She had taken off her clothes. Her bedsheet was torn and wound about her head in pieces. It hung down her back onto the floor.' He frowned.

‘How did she seem to you?'

‘Seem?' I said.

He leaned forward in his chair. I heard it creak beneath his weight. He nodded.

‘Beautiful,' I said. ‘Like a bride.'

The morning Mr. Dickens came with his friend Mr. Collins, Violet Bowl escaped. I do not know how it happened, but when I came upstairs following their arrival, the door to her bedroom was open. Edith was digging happily, Charlotte lay quietly on her bed, plucking at some invisible annoyance, but Violet was gone, and when I attempted to open the door to its full extent, I found I could not. There was some soft obstruction beneath the door and when I stooped to look I saw that it was Violet's torn nightgown.

I looked in all the bedrooms, in the needlework room, in the dining hall. I searched the kitchen, the laundry and the drying yard but she was nowhere to be found. I went into the garden and made my way down the path towards the cemetery. Dr. de Vitre and his party of visitors were approaching from the opposite direction, and there on the lawn, against the black trunk of one of the cedars, was Violet.

She was very, very pale, white and naked but for the thing she had contrived to cloak about her head and shoulders, a sort of drooping grey caul, the end of which trailed for several yards across the grass and lapped against the tree in a bundle of trapped leaves and twigs. It was, I could see then, a length of garden netting of the sort that hangs in some of the greenhouses to support the heavy fruit. The netting was glazed here and there with cobwebs, and in the light from the white sky, it shimmered.

She began to move towards the men. Dr. de Vitre stroked the back of his neck in the usual way but seemed unsure of what to do. He watched Violet with a kind of grave curiosity. Reverend Danby stared at his shoes and Mr. Collins seemed to struggle with the suppression of a lecherous smirk. Mr. Dickens also seemed rather taken with her, and was smiling when she came up to him, very close, and touched his beard and called him Albert. He continued to smile at her, though rather nervously, and she, more confidently, smiled back. He looked sideways at Dr. de Vitre who merely raised his heavy chin with a nod of assent. Mr. Dickens offered Violet his arm, and she took it. Her eyes did not leave his face. She looked as if she would cling to its promise for ever.

They all proceeded slowly back towards the main building, Dr. de Vitre in front with the Reverend Danby, then Violet on Mr. Dickens' arm, Mr. Collins bringing up the rear behind the swish of the garden netting. A ripe, peachy scent escaped, then died beneath the odour of rotting leaves. Mr. Dickens passed a few inches from me on the path. ‘Be careful,' I whispered. ‘If you leave her now, she will bite.'

He turned sharply and looked at me, haughty and at the same time bewildered, as if he took me for one of the patients out for a ramble in the damp grass of the grounds.

I followed them into the house and stood in the hallway, listening to the rustle of leaves and twigs on the wooden floor as they made their way up towards Violet's bedroom. I heard the doctor call to one of the attendants, a brief murmuring of voices as the gentlemen took their leave.

A loud, protesting squeal of pain.

In a little while, they all came downstairs. I did not move, only stood at the tall window in the hallway and watched the rapid drizzle moving in from the moor. I wasn't aware of Dr. de Vitre speaking when he first addressed me. When he spoke again, though, I knew it was for a second time and I heard like an echo the soft whispering sound of my own name.

‘Miss Havisham,' he said. ‘Our visitors are leaving now.' I must have looked at Mr. Dickens with something like loathing then, for he could not keep my gaze, and turned away, nursing his bandaged hand. My throat hot and dry, I climbed the staircase, up towards the tranquility of the galleries, to where the lunatics are.

UGLY SISTER

THERE HAD BEEN
an understanding between the two sisters that they would take it in turns.

They'd been doing it for a long time now, ever since they'd found themselves deserted by their husbands, simultaneously single again and living together in the white house up on the cliff above the town with Sylvia's little girl, Grace.

It seemed they'd always known who should be hanging back, who should be allowed to put herself forward. The first summer, there had been the American on the beach at St. David's. He'd been Sylvia's and Hazel had obliged by taking Grace off for an ice-cream and then for a walk all the way to the cathedral. After that there'd been Hazel's little adventure with the man on the bus after Christmas shopping in Cardiff. He'd been hers, there'd been no question. And then, most recently, there'd been the red-haired soap powder salesman one Saturday afternoon in Oxwich who'd been Sylvia's, but then hadn't, as it turned out. Sylvia had wanted him too much, that was the trouble, she'd been completely carried away and had frightened him off.

As children, as girls, they'd always shared possessions by taking it in turns with the better things. The red tricycle, the roller skates. Later, a particular pair of silvery Van Dal heels. Boys they'd never had to share in those days, there were always plenty around in the town and the two of them had been popular enough, attractive in a tall, lean way, and it was not at all surprising that marriage had come along and separated them for a time.

But now, somehow, their circumstances—living together in Sylvia's white house up on the cliff, marooned by their husbands—had seemed to make them into a pair, an oddity. It was as if there'd been the same problem with the two of them, something sisterly that had made the husbands go. Some defect which had particularly to do with them. The two sisters, living together, did not seem to invite the approach of men.

The episode with the soap powder salesman had been unfortunate. He had seemed so keen to begin with, had invited Sylvia to choose herself a present from the promotional samples in the boot of his car. She had picked out a Fairy Liquid apron and a pair of
Pure Honey
stockings, and Hazel had been all set to make herself scarce, to invent some errand she needed to do with Grace. But then he'd looked at his watch and said, well, he must be going now, that it had been nice to meet them, that he hoped Sylvia would enjoy wearing the apron and the stockings. Hazel knew that Sylvia had let her hopes get very high that time, that her sister thought something lasting might have resulted from the meeting. It was a shame for her that nothing had come of it, nothing at all.

Hazel had wondered how the next one would come to them, the next one, who would be hers. Every day, she was prepared, because there was always the possibility of something happening. She pummiced the flaky skin on her heels, Immacced her long, lean legs. Dressed herself carefully—black slacks and a close-fitting sweater in something soft, mohair or lambswool. By eight in the morning she was always softly powdered and sweetly perfumed.

And then he had come to them, the dark-haired stranger, the collector of wind-tolerant seaside plants, like a gift.

The sisters had finished preparing the house for Grace's birthday party. They were sitting together at the bay window looking down onto the road when they saw him coming towards them. Slowly in a black car, a map spread out across the steering wheel. Lost, clearly, and in need of assistance. Should Hazel go out to him? Put on her coat and position herself by the gate to help him when he passed? Hazel thought that she should. She turned in her chair, rose to go, and then she saw her sister.

Sylvia sat, lips parted, leaning forward, one hand gently patting and lifting the back of her hair where it curved under against her neck. Hazel felt the memory of the other one come creeping out of the wallpaper, the salesman who had never followed through with what he'd seemed to be offering. Hazel saw the set of her sister's jaw and knew that Sylvia had no intention of hanging back, that she would not be waiting her turn. Hazel had the feeling that this one had already been stolen from her.