The Painted Bridge (20 page)

He felt tired. He sat down on the Chesterfield in the middle of the gallery, wincing as his fingertip encountered the leather. He’d given himself a splinter while cutting plates and had tried to extract it with a scalpel tip but his flesh had closed stubbornly around it. And he’d slept badly. The talk to the Alienists’ Association was approaching fast. It loomed up at him in the night asking what he planned to say and whether it was true.

He was rattled by Mrs. Palmer’s rejection of her image and her insistence that she didn’t recognize herself in it. He hadn’t been able to forget her face or the look in her eyes—not in the photograph but by the filtered light of the dining room, gold on her hair, her skin, the shadows moving, changing with every passing minute and her face changing too, her expression as fluid and evanescent as the unscientific, beautiful light.

Lucas rose to examine the modern work. Wet collodion provided far greater detail than the old paper negatives; the exposures were much decreased. He admired a picture by Frith, each huge slab of the Cheops pyramid sharp as lump sugar. But he felt dissatisfied with the portraits. The camera was faithful in its way and yet it recorded a world that no one had ever seen. The qualities he found inspirational about the medium, the way it ordered life, flattened and clarified the world into planes of light and shade, stopped time, also frustrated him.

He stopped in front of a picture of a man propped in a chair, his eyes closed, chest bare. The man’s torso looked as vulnerable as the flesh in one of the Old Masters, his pale body contrasting with his darkened face and hands. He was slumped at right angles to the camera. It was refreshing to see a man who wasn’t standing like a statue, moustache waxed, wife clamped to arm. A man who wasn’t trying to prove he was a fine fellow.
Self-portrait as a Drowned Man
, he read, and he felt his faith strengthen again. Photographs could show the inner man,
the inner woman, display the deeper truth of human existence. It was possible.

“What kind of fellow would make an image of himself dead?” came a voice from behind. “Is that how he wants to be remembered?” Lucas turned as Maddox clapped him on the back. Maddox gestured toward the room, his eyes sweeping the walls. “There’s a damned lot of them. Quite remarkable what they can do these days.”

The old gentleman was still stooped in front of the two oak trees. He straightened his back and left, tipping his hat at them. Maddox made a quick turn about the room and flung himself down on the couch in front of a tableau of a group of women draped in wet gauze, their hair parted over their breasts. The title on the mat was
The Water Nymphs.

“You’ve got to admit it’s a thing of beauty, the female form,” Maddox sighed.

Lucas did admit it but not to Maddox. And the way he wanted to appreciate it wasn’t behind glass, posed by another man—or posed at all. Not that there were other options open to him. He stared at a picture of a foam-topped sea, two dark and distinct clouds sailing across the sky above. Something about the image didn’t convince. The line between sea and sky was confused, overlapping. In the next one, the waves were stilled and flat but the sky contained the same two sailing clouds. It had been constructed in the dark chamber.

“Do you think it’s right, to take two different photographs on two different days and splice them together? Present them as one?”

Maddox dragged his eyes away from the nymphs.

“Don’t see the harm in it if it makes a better picture.”

“Yes, but is it true? Don’t you think when you look at a photograph that you’re looking at a record of the truth?”

“Depends what you mean by truth, old man.”

Maddox looked tired too, Lucas noticed.

Lucas had seen a photograph that meant something to him. It wasn’t the Drowned Man. He puzzled over it as they walked out into a light rain and along Regent Street, racked his brain while Maddox hailed a cab.

“Grieve had a word with me the other day,” Maddox said, once they were in the cab. “Reckons you’re not pulling your weight.”

“What do you mean?”

Maddox looked out of the square of smeared glass at a couple of women hanging on to umbrellas turned out by the wind, the ribbons of their bonnets streaming.

“You know Grieve. He plays the numbers game. Makes him look good to the commissioners. He’s after fifty percent of patients discharged within a year, certified as cured. Says you’re marking too many
discharged uncured,
and keeping too many more of them in.”

St. Clair snorted in disbelief.

“Where’s the merit in discharging people when they’re still ill? Or saying they’re well when they’re not? It’s pointless. It’s dangerous.”

Maddox shrugged.

“It isn’t about patients’ welfare. It isn’t even about getting the diagnosis right. It’s about what the politicians want.”

“I know but I don’t accept it, Doxy. I can’t work like that.”

Maddox sighed.

“It’s not easy for any of us, Lucas. How’s your research coming along?”

“I’m working on it. I thought you weren’t interested.”

“I told you I’d keep an open mind. I’m not saying it doesn’t have a use—only that you’ll have to convince me.”

“I intend to. You and a lot of other people. Remember, I’m making a presentation shortly, to the Alienists. Shall I reserve you a seat?”

Over a late breakfast of coffee and kedgeree at the Pall Mall Club, talking with Maddox and some friends they encountered about the new anesthesia, smoking his pipe and wondering whether leisure was really worthwhile after all, it came to Lucas. It wasn’t any of the pictures at the exhibition. It was the girl in the window, stepping through the frame. She’d given him an idea.

Emmeline heard Catherine’s light, running footsteps and followed the sound through the open door of her sewing room. The old cedar chest was pulled out from the wall, its lid thrown back on its hinges. Catherine kneeled on the rug in front of it, still in her nightdress at midmorning, the soles of her bare feet exposed.

She sat back on her heels and held up a pair of slippers, dangled them by their straps.

“Look at these, Mother.” She ran her thumbs over the unscarred leather soles. They were for an infant too young to put its foot to the ground, never worn by the look of them. “Were they mine?”

“Probably, darling.” Emmeline sat down in her sewing chair. “Catty, I need to talk to you.”

Catherine rummaged in the chest, pulled out an embroidered baby dress, held it up by the shoulders. White and translucent in the morning light, with a long fall of skirt, it looked like a child ghost.

“Did I wear this?”

“You must have done. It’s the christening dress. You all wore it. Can you imagine Benedict, dressed in that?”

Catherine laughed. “Not really. Why do you keep it, Mother?”

“It’s a memento. Anyway”—Emmeline kept her tone light—“one day there will be babies in the family again. You might want it for your own children.”

Catherine ignored her and continued digging around in the dark interior. Emmeline had had the chest since her own childhood. It was carved over its rounded top with leaves and flowers, the inside full of
snipped curls and milk teeth and sailor suits. The polished coral rings on which the children had cut their teeth. She never opened it. Even to lift the lid, breathe in a scent so faint it seemed always on the point of vanishing, flooded her with a persistent, immovable melancholy. Keeping objects was useless, she’d belatedly come to understand. It only accentuated all that was lost.

Emmeline opened her workbag and took out a table napkin. She had set aside her lacework. Darning was all she could do at present, making connections where there were rents and tears. She resumed a line of small anchoring stitches along the side of the rip and tried to remember some detail of Catherine’s infancy.

“Your first curls are in there somewhere. You were born with a whole head of hair, you know, and so pretty.”

“Was I?”

“Yes. You still are.”

“You don’t really think that. You think I ought to be like Cousin Alice.” Catherine picked out a silver spoon with an ornately traced handle. “CVA. This must be mine.”

“It was a present from Granny. She used to feed you milk jelly with it.”

“How sickening.”

“You adored cold puddings. Junket. Egg custard. Tapioca. You used to beg for more. Such a plump little thing, you were.”

“Why do you always talk about what I used to be? I’m not six years old anymore, Mother.”

“I know you aren’t.”

“Why do you sigh?”

“I didn’t.”

“You did. You always do.”

Emmeline suppressed another that rose in her like a gale. Catherine had refused to come to the table for lunch. Complained of stomach cramps and requested soup on a tray in her bedroom. Emmeline had insisted that she take the consommé in the parlor. She wanted to see it slipping down Catherine’s throat, make sure it wasn’t lying in a puddle outside her window. She’d found a hedgehog out there the other night, eating steak.

She stole a glance at her daughter, took in the long sweep of her lashes, the sullen set of her mouth. It was difficult sometimes to remember that she was almost sixteen. A woman. Emmeline’s eyes flickered away. Catherine didn’t like to be observed—it was one of her refrains. Don’t
stare
at me, Mother. Stop
looking
at me.

Catherine was sitting back on her heels, tapping the spoon on the palm of her hand.

“I want to talk to you too, Mother.”

Emmeline felt her spirits lift.

“Oh, darling. I’m so glad. I haven’t known how to—”

“I want to go somewhere. Somewhere special.”

“Wonderful!” Emmeline restrained herself from jumping up to kiss her. “We can go anywhere you like, Catty. Call on Aunt Flo. Or go shopping. You need gloves. A dress for spring.”

“I don’t want to go shopping. I want to go to the fair.”

“The fair? What on earth for?”

“Other people go. Why shouldn’t I?”

Emmeline’s own mother would have been scandalized if she’d spoken like that to her. She didn’t feel scandalized. She felt helpless.

“Your father wouldn’t allow it.”

“What about you, Mother? Would you allow it?”

Catherine’s eyes were burning in her pale face. Emmeline didn’t understand Catherine’s resentment of her—where it came from. She’d never raised a hand to her, had only ever wanted what was best for her. She shook her head.

“I would not, Catherine. No.”

Catherine slammed down the lid of the chest and rushed from the room. Emmeline heard her footsteps again, fast and furious on the stairs, then her bedroom door banging. The key to the chest lay on the rug. Emmeline picked it up and put it back in the lock. She folded the dress and replaced it, paired the slippers and returned them to the disorderly cavern of the past. She locked the chest, inhaling the woody odor of cedar.

Sometimes she wished Catherine was a child again and that they could go back to the laughing years, when she had loved her without fear or any kind of reserve. Too much, Querios had said.

*   *   *

It rained every day after Christmas, from early in the morning and on into the afternoon. Anna was not allowed out-of-doors, even to the airing grounds—the miserable closed courtyard designated for patients’ exercise. She watched from the window as water cascaded over the rims of the gutters, dripped from the bare branches of the trees, collected in pools on the grass in front of Lake House. It made its way inside—dripping through ceilings into buckets and bowls, sending sooty splashes over the hearth tiles. It was still raining in the small hours when Anna woke with a start, a sense of urgency running through her whole body. The rain came down more quietly at night, as if it talked to itself. She lay eavesdropping on it. Thinking about her plan.

The guests came back one by one, returned by husbands, sons or fathers, clasping small bottles of cologne, lavender bags, boxes of dried fruits, but most of the scullions and housemaids stayed away. By the end of the old year, Lake House felt like an abandoned ship. The windows and doors were swollen with damp, crumbs collected around the chair legs in the dining room, and dust furred the slats of the blinds. The grates were unblackened, the water for washing in the mornings cold. Lovely went about her tasks at a run, muttering that she was expected to do the work of six.

On the first day of the new year, on Sunday morning, Talitha Batt reappeared. She sat at the head of the table in the dining room but did not take any breakfast. Miss Little and Miss Todd were on either side of her, tussling over a saucer of gooseberry jam, tugging it between them. One of them let go and the saucer flew in the air, emptied itself onto the floor. Miss Batt pushed back her chair and walked into the dayroom, her back straight and narrow as ever.

The others followed, one by one. Anna finished her tea alone at the table, feeling glad that Miss Batt was back. Talitha changed Lake House by her presence. She dignified it. And Anna could talk with her. She enjoyed her company. A yawning scullion arrived and began to drag a cloth through the jam with her foot. Anna rose from her chair and walked around the end of the table, felt the soles of her slippers stick to the floor, the stickiness pursue her into the next room.