The Ballroom (14 page)

Once she was reading, Clem never looked up; she had disappeared as surely as though a hole had appeared and she had crawled through it, and watching her, Ella thought she would have liked to disappear too. She read Clem’s face instead, imagining it was possible to tell what the story was like that, from the way Clem bit at the edges of her nails or the skin around them. The way she turned the pages fast or slowed down, eyes moving fearfully, almost as though she didn’t want to reach the end.

One afternoon, when Clem was close to the end of her book, Ella saw silent tears standing on her cheeks. ‘What is it?’

Clem rubbed at her face with her cuff and gave a quick, rueful smile. ‘It’s just so sad. It’s the umpteenth time I’ve read it, and I always think it will have a different ending. But it never does.’

‘Why, what happens?’

‘Oh … she loves the wrong man. Or the right man, at the wrong time. He persuades her to marry him, and then leaves her. And at the end she’s lying there, lying like a … a sacrifice, and … she doesn’t seem to mind.’ She stared at the book in her hands. ‘When I go to university,’ she said, ‘if I write an essay about it, then I’ll talk about the ending. How I want it to be different. But how it’s still the right ending after all.’

Clem was silent for a whole length of the yard, then, ‘Have you ever wanted to get married?’ she said, tucking the book under her arm.

Ella gave a small, shocked laugh. ‘No.’

‘Why? Did no one ever ask you?’

She shook her head.

Clem put her head on one side. ‘Well, I can understand not wanting to get married, but not that you’ve never been asked. You’re such a striking-looking person. Especially now your eyes have cleared up.’

You’re such a striking-looking person.

‘What about you? Did anyone ask you?’ said Ella.

‘Once,’ said Clem.

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said no.’ Clem’s nose wrinkled. ‘Even if I’d wanted to get married, I didn’t love him. I didn’t even like him. And he was old.’

‘How old?’

Clem shrugged. ‘A teacher at my father’s school. He was young when I was a child. He saw me grow up. He used to take me out for walks, just after my mother died. And my father used to let him.’ She grasped the book against her chest. ‘One evening, when I was seventeen, he came to our house for supper. We all sat around the table – my father, my brother and he and I – and all the men kept looking at me and smiling between each other. I remember my brother’s face. How pink it was. He had been drinking wine, and I thought he looked like a pig.

‘The next day, my father called me into his study. He told me that the teacher had approached him, that he was a good man. But I knew different … he had cruelty in him. I had seen him hitting the children if I ever visited the school. And when I was a child, when we walked together …’

Clem broke off, something frayed and dangerous hovering at the edges of her words. ‘Well, I knew if I married him I would be unhappy.’

‘Did you tell your father that?’

‘I tried. He didn’t listen. I think he was glad to get me off his hands. I think he thought no one would want to marry me because of the way I am.’

‘Why? What way are you?’

‘Oh. All wrong,’ said Clem with a brief smile. ‘I’m all wrong.’

Ella stared over at her. Clem was tall and fair. She knew how to dance and play the piano. She had a mouth that turned up at the sides and seemed to be made for smiling. If she was all wrong, then what was anyone else? ‘What did you do?’ she said.

‘I stopped eating,’ said Clem, a tinge of pride to her voice. ‘For weeks. Till they thought I would die. Till I thought I might die. I don’t remember much about it. That’s when they brought me in here. They fed me from the tube. They gave me the tube every day.’

She remembered then how Clem had talked of the tube that first morning, the dullness in her voice. Her voice wasn’t dull now though – it was fierce and alight.

‘Twice a day they would come in. Four, five, six nurses and two doctors. One pushed my hands down at my hips. Two opened my mouth with a gag. The doctor held up the red rubber tube. I fought then. Struggled and fought, but they forced it down. I got fat. They gave me milk and eggs. I couldn’t taste it properly, but I could feel it.’ She grimaced. ‘Lying in my stomach afterwards. I used to make myself sick to get it all out. But then they started staying with me. They would stay for an hour after the treatment, and if I tried to vomit they would hold me down again. So in the end I stopped.’

She fell silent. Ella remembered her words in the laundry.

There are three ways out of here. You can die … You can escape … Or you can convince them you’re sane enough to leave.

‘So …
why
?’ said Ella. ‘Why do you stay here?’

Clem turned to her. ‘I’ve been thinking about that since you asked me. And it’s because I’m only here while I think of what I’m going to do. I’ll get out one day soon, and I’ll get to university. But I’ll stay for now. And it will be better than being at home or being married to … that
man.
Have you heard of the women in Holloway?’

‘No.’

‘Well, they’re behind bars too. Being fed with tubes. And whenever it gets bad in here, I think of them. Locked up too, because they want something else, something more. And I think, if they can stand it, I can. I’ll stay here and belong to myself. Not to my father, or brother, or any man. So that’s what I do, I stay. And my family pay to keep me here, and I get my own clothes, and I have my books, and every time that they let me out, I make cuts on my wrists so they’ll send me back.’

Clem rolled up her sleeves, so that what had been hidden before was displayed, a livid badge of courage.

‘I have a razor,’ she said. ‘I took it from my father’s house. I keep it sewn in here.’ She gestured to her sleeve as she rolled it back down. ‘No one knows. Except you.’ The look on her face was half pleading, half proud. ‘My father thinks I’ll break. But I won’t break. And now you’re here,’ Clem was smiling now, ‘I can bear it even more.’

That night, when the ward was quiet, Ella slipped from her bed.

Behind was the window, stretching to the floor. She knelt on the cold tiles, reaching out and feeling for the edge – the place where glass met frame, imagining levering it open, the warm smell of the night outside, stepping out and on to the grass.

She could see herself reflected in its tiny panes, her hair dark and straight in the middle, so that the line of the parting was a sharp slash of white; her eyes large and serious-looking. Clem was right about one thing though: they had cleared up. For the first time she could remember there was no sign of the swelling, and they hadn’t itched for weeks.

She touched her fingertips gently to her lids, then moved her finger down to her mouth and ran it along her lips, which were set in a tight line.

She passed her hands lower, cupping her breasts. She brushed them with her thumbs, feeling herself stiffen beneath the rough fabric of her nightgown.

If she had been touched before, she had carried bruises afterwards. At home, in that house her mother died in, she had always felt like one of those last fents of cloth that were left over, that fitted nowhere, were just chucked and left to fray. As a child at work, if she had not tied the broken ends of the thread fast enough, she had been beaten with the alley strap, the thick brown leather paddle the overlookers slapped to clear the ways of lint. Her mother though – her mother had touched her gently. Had stroked her hair. She could remember it, just.

She whispered her name to the girl in the glass.

‘
Ella
.’

It sounded odd. She wasn’t sure it matched the person before her.

The ward was quiet for once, only the small soft sounds of women snoring or turning in their sleep. She thought of Clem. The look on her face when she had shown her scars, the secret she had shared. Ella felt the knowledge of that razor inside her, a small, silver hidden weight.

‘
Now you’re here too, I can bear it even more.
’

It was the first time anyone had ever said they needed her. A strange new warmth had filled her when Clem had spoken. And yet she was not sure she wanted to be needed. Not in here.

Beyond the glass, the moon lay on its side, half full and yellow. An unseen bird called across the darkness.

On the other side of these buildings were the men. He would be there.

John.

Was he sleeping? Or awake like her? What had brought him here, with his secrets and his silences? Last Friday, when they danced together, something had felt different, a crack in the shell of him – almost as though he were readying himself to speak.

You’re such a striking-looking person.

Was it true? She loosed her hair and let it fall over her shoulders, where it lay, heavy and dark. There was too much of it, too much for working at least, and she had only ever worn it pulled into the same tight braid down her back. The girls at the mill wore theirs pinned up, had sometimes put coloured ribbons in it, or come to work of a morning with it tied in damp rags so it would curl. She had never done any of that. She lifted it now and plaited it, but more loosely, so it was not so tight. It didn’t look right though, and so she did it again, looser still, till strands of it framed the pale round of her face.

There was an odd feeling in her stomach, as though a fish was trapped in there, flapping away.

H
OW GLORIOUS THIS
weather was at the beginning of May! One sweetly warm day following the other, and in each a new and pleasurable change to observe in the landscape. And how verdant everything seemed, as though the very sap were singing – as though the season had progressed from winter to summer in one heady leap.

It was a Friday and Charles had risen early as was his wont (as was almost, he thought, his
duty
when the mornings were as light and beautiful as this), and it was not yet seven o’clock as he walked down the main, raked driveway. Turning to the right, he found himself on a path that wound through wild grasses thick with cow parsley and thistles and led to an old iron gate, rusting at its hinges. He passed through it into a thick belt of woodland. Outside, all was light and song, but inside the world was a dense, deep green.

It was a pleasing size this wood, and a favourite haunt of his; not small enough to see the edge when one was standing in it, and not large enough to have a name. No patients were allowed inside, and no other staff seemed to take their walks in here, so it was rare he did not have it to himself. After a few minutes he came to a clearing, where he perched himself on an inviting-looking log to pack his pipe.

There was such a great deal to look forward to, not the least of which was the Coronation in not so very many weeks; amongst other celebrations a special Sports Day was planned: a fancy-dress afternoon of revels capped by a tug of war, in which the attendants and doctors were to pull against the men. Goffin had been put in charge of picking the team, and there had been some amusing discussions already in the staffroom as to what costumes they might find for the job. Charles had a small, burgeoning hope he would be chosen to be amongst their number. He believed he was growing fitter by the day.

He stood now and stretched, lighting his pipe, moving through dappled sunlight as he walked, the sweet smell of tobacco trailing in the air.

His dumb-bells had arrived just last week. They were there when he stopped off at the porter’s office to check his mail.

‘Ah, Dr Fuller,’ said the porter, pointing to a large cardboard box behind his desk. ‘A parcel came for you today.’

At first, Charles had no idea what might be inside, since it had been weeks since he had ordered them, but then, remembering, he made his way over to the box and tried to lift it. It was quite impossible to raise from the floor. He tried again but could feel himself growing flustered and straightened up. ‘I wonder if you wouldn’t mind sending them to my room?’

‘Yes, sir, right away.’

By the time he had finished his rounds the parcel was waiting outside his door. He pushed it over the threshold with the side of his foot, opened the box and peered inside. They looked rather terrifying, crouching there. The first pair was easy enough to lift – once – but the second needed both hands to manoeuvre out.

Rooting further, Charles saw, tucked into the bottom of the box, a helpful note showing a stick man curling the weights up towards his arm. The stick man’s biceps bulged alarmingly, making him look like a picture Charles had once seen of a snake swallowing a rat. He shrugged off his jacket and waistcoat and took the piece of paper and the smaller of the two pairs over towards the mirror. Positioning himself in front of the glass he began to lift, tentatively at first:

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

His arm hardly bulged, but it burnt rather pleasantly when he put the weight down. After a moment he bent and lifted again – ten on each side this time. Beneath the tiredness of his limbs he had felt something stirring. Something formless as yet, but exciting nonetheless. Strength. Will. Since then, he had got up to twenty. Perhaps he might pull in this tug of war after all!

At the edge of the wood he emerged into bright sunlight, making for the Home Farm, where the first crops were showing themselves properly in the raked vegetable beds, lambs were in the fields, and all around the cow sheds was the sweet smell of grass and dung and milk. The treble chattering of small birds surrounded him, and, somewhere nearby, a wood pigeon sallied bass notes with a low, insistent coo. Faintly, very faintly at first, Charles heard music, so vivid and clear that it was a moment before he understood it was coming from his inner ear. It grew, and he recognized it, unmistakeable, those first fizzing bars of the final movement of Beethoven’s Sixth, that delicious melody passed between strings and wind, music that seemed to rise from the ground drenched in cuckoo spit and dew.

‘Da
da
da! Da
da
da! Da
da
-da
da
-da
da
!’