The Ballroom (10 page)

The visitors’ room was a large, sparsely furnished hall just off the main administration block, and Charles always made sure to pack his notebook and pencils for these sessions; from his desk at the top of the room he had a fine view of the proceedings and was able to make copious drawings and notes. Most of the patients received visitors only rarely, and they were a sorry sight in the main, rigged up in whatever patched and over-mended black stuff constituted their Sunday best: Tredgold’s Chronic Paupers to a woman and man. Sometimes they would bring small presents – a homemade cake perhaps, or if they were religious, an improving pamphlet might be passed over the table – but mostly they sat mute. Often, it was difficult to differentiate the lunatic from the visitor, but whether it was poverty or feeble-mindedness that had marked them both it was difficult to tell.

Here for instance was a young woman of twenty-five, a chronic patient – hair cropped short to her head to stop her plucking at it but still sporting scabbed patches where she had managed to pull out the shorter lengths. Opposite her sat a woman – her sister? – who looked to be of a similar age; the sister’s hair, though lank and greasy, was long and at least seemed to be in place. A scruffy child played silently on the floor while the women whispered to each other. Charles estimated the depth of their respective brows as he sketched them quickly in the margins of his book. Pearson had been fascinated with the depth of the brow – had always insisted the measurement denoted the mental capacity therein.

His eye fell next on one of the female acutes – a handsome woman of forty or so. He had been her admitting doctor and could well remember the particulars of the case: ten children and the last an idiot. She had been driven mad by the boy’s appearance and tried to murder him. The courts had ruled that she had not been in her right mind, and she had escaped gaol, being sent to the asylum instead. Charles was glad of it – after a month of sleep, food and time away from work and offspring, the woman looked rested and fed; well enough to return to her family. But what would be the consequence when she was released? More children? Her husband sat opposite her now, an anxious, fretful-looking man. Here was an instance in which Tredgold’s view might have some traction. If there were some ready method of birth control … he was sure that the women themselves might queue up to take it.

He cast his eyes further around the room; in the far corner, conspicuous amongst the mass of grey and brown and black, sat a family group of strikingly fair colouring: the father a tall, scholarly-looking man, the son stouter, fuller-figured. Charles recognized the young woman before them, a certain Miss Clemency Church, a young female acute. A private patient, as was obvious from her own clothes, today a rather fetching dress of pale spring green.

The father’s low voice was sonorous and carrying, and it was impossible not to catch snippets of what he said. Talk of a school, the weather, and then, in lower tones, of a visit to a mother’s grave. Miss Church nodded now and again, in a listless sort of way, but in the main did not move, hands folded in her lap and head bowed. The brother appeared restive, uncomfortable, twisting in his chair. A small stack of books lay on the table between them.

Charles began to draw, rendering Miss Church’s posture in quick, simple lines. An undeniably attractive specimen: the hairline high and clear, the pale green of her dress complementing the colour of her eyes. Scandinavian. Must be. Somewhere along the line.

The brother was speaking now, his voice a harsher version of the father’s. There was a high scraping of chair legs, and Charles looked up in time to see that Miss Church was standing, arms windmilling in the air.
‘
Alone!’ he heard her say. ‘Just
leave me alone
!’

He scrambled to his feet, but two nurses were there, and before he could cover the ground, they had grabbed Miss Church by either arm and pulled them behind her back. The brother was standing now too, shouting, jabbing his finger in his sister’s face. ‘You’ jab, ‘ungrateful’ jab, ‘little’ jab, ‘
bitch.
’

‘All right over here?’ said Charles as he reached them. He tried to make his voice low and reasonable.

‘All right?’ The young man’s face was puce. ‘No, I should think we’re just about not all right.’

‘Enough, William.’ The father placed an arm on his son’s.

William turned away, ruffling his hands through his fair hair until it stood on end.

‘Put Miss Church back in her chair,’ said Charles.

The nurses did so, and the father shook his head, as though his daughter’s behaviour saddened but did not surprise him. ‘Come along, William,’ he said. The pair of them threaded their way through the tables of staring faces, the son going first, the father more slowly, with the loping gait of a wounded lion.

‘Now, now, Miss Church,’ said Charles, taking the chair recently vacated by her father. ‘What’s this?’ High colour flushed the girl’s cheeks and she was breathing fast. ‘You seem upset.’

‘I’m not upset.’ Her face was defiant.

Charles checked his watch. There were still some minutes left of the visiting hour. ‘Make sure she doesn’t move,’ he ordered the nurses, before hurrying out. Thankfully, both father and brother were still in the visitors’ waiting room, buttoning their coats to leave. ‘Mr Church?’ he called over to them.

The man’s head was large, the wavy, silver-gold hair swept up and off the brow. In his youth, no doubt, he would have sported the same fine colouring as his daughter and son. ‘Yes?’ His tone was weary but not unkind.

‘Are you … quite well, sir?’

The brother was still spitting. ‘Quite well? Of course he’s not bloody
well.
Did you
see
that little charade in there?’

‘William.’ The father, sighing, put up his hand. ‘Please.’

‘Who are you anyway?’ William turned to Charles. ‘I’ve not seen your face here before.’

Something in the young man made Charles queasy: the ruddy skin stretched tight across the flesh, as though he were a sausage roasting on a spit.

‘Fuller,’ said Charles, holding out his hand. ‘Dr Fuller. I’ve recently been given the job of—’

But William didn’t wait to hear the rest, turning and pacing off down the corridor, muttering to himself about ‘twenty shillings a week for
this
’.

‘Forgive my son.’ The father spoke again in that same low, unhurried voice. ‘He does tend to get rather exercised by his sister’s position. You’ll understand? It is only, I believe, from an excess of love. A desire we all share to have our Clemency back with us.’

‘Of course,’ said Charles, inclining his head.

The father put out his hand. ‘Horace Church.’

‘Dr Charles Fuller. How do you do.’

‘I’m glad to meet you, Dr Fuller.’ The man hesitated. ‘I wonder … if you might tell me … I’m rather keen to know how Clemency appears during the week?’

As he spoke, Charles watched that great head of his, the deep brow.

‘In what way, sir?’

‘Is she ever cheerful? Anything about her behaviour that might bring me hope?’

He thought of the young woman’s face in the day room when he played the piano, a pale petal reaching for the light. ‘She … seems to like music, sir.’

‘Oh?’ He passed his palm over his forehead, his face suddenly weary.

‘She seems to enjoy the piano. And her books, of course.’

The father nodded. ‘Well. You seem a good sort of chap, Doctor. I’d appreciate it very much if you could keep an eye on her for me.’

‘Yes, sir, indeed. I’ll make sure to tell you if she seems happy and well.’

The tentative joy on the older man’s face was almost too much for Charles to bear.

The case captured his imagination. The girl carried a mystery, a contradiction. The two halves of her did not fit: her outward grace contrasted sharply with her outburst in the visitors’ room. Then there was the obvious antipathy between the brother and herself, and another thing too – the family was a clear cut above the vast majority of those who had patients in the asylum. The brother had spat out the fact that they paid
twenty shillings a week
to keep Miss Church there – the amount any private patient must pay. There were plenty of private patients at Sharston, but most of them were the sorts of people that families wanted to forget. Miss Church was far from amongst their number.

But she was obviously not well – the scars on her wrists were testimony to that, scars she took pains to hide but which showed whenever she raised her arms, not the large marks of a single suicide attempt, but the livid crosshatching of multiple cuttings. And yet she appeared to be in full possession of her faculties.

Why had she not been admitted to a private asylum? And why, when she had been at Sharston for as long as she had, was she still in the acute wards?

Charles took himself to the library at the earliest opportunity. It was the following Friday afternoon, an hour before the dance, while the patients were taking an early tea, and he had an hour to himself until he was required on stage.

The library, like the visitors’ room, was in the main body of the asylum – a medium-sized room in which the casebooks and a selection of medical texts were kept. He asked the librarian for the casebook for both males and females for the previous year.

The male volume he set to one side, but he propped the female casebook on the stand, turning the pages until he reached Miss Church’s photograph and notes. When he reached her page, he drew in his breath. It showed a wild thing, dangerously thin, the bones of her cheeks protruding so far it was possible to see the shape of the skull beneath. The sharp line of the collarbone jutted from beneath her dress. The hands, which the photographer had presumably asked her to show to the camera, were held in front of her chest and bandaged so they looked like hooves. But the gaze – the gaze chilled him. She was staring straight down the lens of the camera with those pale eyes – eyes that dared the observer to look away.

He tried to read her notes but found it hard to concentrate. All he could sense were those eyes, so he took out his handkerchief and covered them up.

Here were interviews, one each with the father and the brother, William, giving the particulars of the case. As was usual, the father – the headmaster of a boys’ school not far away – was questioned about any previous illness in the family, and there was a brief relation of the nervous illness of his wife, the girl’s mother, now dead. According to the interview, she had been subject to ‘nerves and fits’ but never hospitalized. She died young, a suicide, at thirty, when the girl was seven years old.

As Charles read, he felt the pleasurable sensation of pieces of a puzzle slotting into place. So the neuropathic taint had passed down the female line, the mother the transmitter of infection. Nothing the helpless father or brother might have done to prevent it. Nothing, in fact, the girl herself could have done to escape her fate. He sharpened his pencil and wrote: ‘Contagion from womb to womb, the very essence of hysteria.
Hystera
= uterus – from the Greek.’

It made perfect sense: she was one of the few patients of the middle classes – and displaying a typically middle-class disease. It was a strange fact, but the working classes tended not to be hysterics; with them the strain of madness was pushed underground, becoming something deeper, stranger, harder to root out – delusional, fantastical. A woman from the working classes displaying a hysteric illness would be laughed at.

Underneath, he wrote: ‘Is it too late for Miss Church?’

He thought again of her face in the day room – her face upturned, a book held open on her lap.

A
book.
Yes, she was always with a book.

He bent and scribbled:

One thing strikes me immediately – chief amongst the many qualities the young woman possesses is her love of reading. She is allowed a book at all times. Her father even left her a pile of them when he came for his last disastrous visit. Presumably this is a regular event.

Unlike music, excessive reading has been shown to be dangerous for the female mind. It was taught in our earliest lectures: the male cell is essentially katabolic: active and energetic; and female cells are anabolic: there to conserve energy and support life. While a little light reading is fine, breakdown follows when woman goes against her nature. Perhaps it would serve Miss Church to have a break from her books?

Closing the page on Miss Church for now, he reached for the male casebook, and as he slid it towards him over the table he felt a release of saliva in his mouth, as though anticipating a long-deferred treat. He flicked through its pages slowly, holding his breath until he found what he was looking for:
Mulligan.

The man stared out from the page, chin level, with that veiled, impenetrable gaze. The skull was perfectly formed, the brow deep and true. Three inches perhaps? A beard of around two weeks’ growth shaded the contours of the chin but did nothing to obscure the startlingly fine face, which would have been almost excessive were it not held in check by the austere line of the jaw.

‘Pearson:’ Charles wrote, ‘the link between physical prowess and mental.’

Pearson had made much of this in his lectures, stating the finest judges and lawyers would undoubtedly make fine athletes too. But did the equation ever work the other way about? Might this fine specimen carry an innate intelligence within?

Quickly, Charles noted the particulars of the case: Mulligan had been admitted from the Bradford workhouse, the admitting interview having been conducted with a warder there who stated he was a ‘good worker’ and ‘quiet’. Indeed, he had ‘hardly spoken two words since being there’. Before the workhouse, as far as anyone could make out, he had come to England from Ireland, held various jobs, and had a wife and child, but had seemingly lost both job and wife upon the death of his daughter.

Charles paused. So Mulligan had lost a child. It was sad, certainly, but odd it should have caused his life to unravel. Children died all the time, especially Irish ones, and there always seemed to be plenty more where they came from.