The World Before Us (25 page)

“And is that what you believe, Countess?”

She smiled at him for the first time, but the expression dropped away as quickly as it had taken shape. “He’s over by the pianoforte. He was here skulking around the curtains when you first presented yourself.” She lifted her wrist and her fingers fell in the direction of a short, balding man in a cream-coloured jacket standing in front of the piano and within hearing range. “He’s in a mood. Mind he doesn’t bite.”

By the time the windows were opened a little while later to let in some air, Leeson was waltzing with a commissioner’s wife and Hale had put away his trombone to stand at the punch bowl next to the red-haired girl from the laundry who had stolen into the chapel with him once for a lusty half hour. Herschel had excused himself to one of the chairs along the wall and was seething at a perceived slight—a glare—received at quite some distance from the Matron. N was fiddling with the ribbons she’d braided into her hair, feeling common compared to the wives of the local businessmen, the robust sisters of the wealthier patients, the pink-cheeked daughters of lawyers and doctors and bankers. She’d been asked to dance numerous times, and had laughed through a catastrophic
quadrille with Herschel, only to be told by the Superintendent as they partnered for the
schottische
that she danced quite commendably. For that she tripped purposefully and stepped on his toe. When they were finished he escorted her off the floor, only to find Farrington waiting for him.

“Superintendent Thorpe.” Farrington bowed at the girl and just as quickly dismissed her. “I beg your pardon, there’s a matter that I believe might merit your attention.”

“Of course.”

Farrington bowed again at the girl, this time regarding her more fully, her face uncomplicated in its youth, pleasing and open. He gestured toward the back of the hall and said to the Superintendent, “Please, this way.”

Farrington led Dr. Thorpe along the wall. With the slightest nod of his head the Superintendent soon brought Bream and Ockley into step behind him; he would need their assistance if anything unsuitable was occurring. He had his list of suspects already, and as he strode through the ballroom he mentally noted those of the troublemakers he could and couldn’t see present: Hopper was by the grated fire, Hale by the punch bowl, Leeson sniffing around a woman in a blue-ribboned dress, albeit at an acceptable distance, Greevy sprawled miserably in a chair. He couldn’t see Herschel anywhere.

“Through here.” Farrington opened the panelled door to the patients’ library and together he and the Superintendent entered the room, along with Bream, Ockley and, because she’d tacked on behind them, N. The library was dark save for the corner, which was lit by a short candelabrum gripped firmly in Herschel’s hand. The poet stood behind Herschel, his eyes closed as if in a trance, in mid-recitation: “… and enter the ground/to find ourselves/dwelling in the city beneath it,/our bodies bald, backs clean/wings grown within us …”

Gathered in the room were seven or eight individuals, including
Commissioner Mullan and his wife. The Countess was standing behind Mrs. Mullan in the shadows.

“And feign again/the kiss of sun,/and wander farther from it …”

In the candlelight the poet appeared as little more than a soft-lit face with half-moons under his eyes and a waxy sheen on his forehead, but his voice and the words were magnetic, some thoughts solidly said and others whispered as if secreted from his mouth to the ears of those closest. Those listening were mesmerized, and even Herschel, who normally could not keep still, was standing fixedly beside the poet, his fist gripping the centre of the candelabrum, though his eyes darted from face to face as if he expected an attack.

The poem, dark and otherworldly, made only a kind of half-sense—talking rats, kings who ate shoes, flowers that bloomed only when you looked away from them—but as those present allowed the words to wash over them, the work started to take on a fuller meaning. It was like listening to the most dysfunctional of the patients: their words took on weight if you dropped your notions of what was acceptable or logical.

Just when the poem was about to reach its peak, just when the gates between the upper garden and the underworld had been bashed by those above in order to bind the two worlds forever, Ockley coughed noisily into his hand—perhaps out of spite. The poet opened his eyes, saw that he was not alone, and stopped speaking. For a second or two his gaze settled on the face of each person present, as if to see with whom he’d been intimate, and then without a word he fled past all of them out of the room.

His words, as some of us remember them—and as the poet standing watch beside Jane’s bed recites them—seemed like a dark art. For some of us, listening to him was like being pricked repeatedly with a pin—the sensation a discomfort radiating out from its point of entry. A poem of nerve ends, of images that stitched you up in a zigzag pattern and then scissored you open again.

If George Farrington had been less obsessed with the scraps of the poet’s new work, he might have remembered N standing behind him in the library, remembered that he and she had danced in the same quadrille earlier in the evening, and that during the course of the dance he’d had cause to move past her a few times, her gloved hand settling briefly in his, the delicate bones of her fingers palpable under his thumb.

Instead he was preoccupied with whether or not the poet had set his work down on paper, and if he had, how it might be recovered and sent to a publisher, previewed perhaps in a magazine, delivered to readers who had been waiting for a new title to appear. As he discussed these matters with Thorpe, Farrington became aware of the Countess’s eyes on him, how she was glaring at him from her place at the window with a gaze so unrelenting that he eventually begged his mother to go over and distract her.

The limits of our attention being what they are, only small strains of the evening remain with us: Herschel obsessing about the Matron, who was watching Hale—puffed up at being in the orchestra—to make sure he didn’t harass the red-haired girl from the laundry. Leeson at the long drinks table watching the Commissioners from a distance; Wick obsessing over who had been rifling through his personal things: someone had taken two cigars from a mahogany box under his bed and his book on
The Systems of Chemical Philosophy
. Old man Greevy watching Leeson stare idly as the gentleman with the boutonnière, who was a head taller than any other man in the room, walked over to join in the Commissioners’ conversation. The old man mumbling, “That one is master of the estate at Inglewood, I’ve a nephew works for him.” A room that is
filled with people stuck in the web of their own complicated narratives: Leeson turning his attention to N as she wavered there, to the shine of her ribbons as she left the drinks table for a chair, catching glimpses of her between other bodies as she slipped her feet out of her shoes to flex them under the blossom-pink folds of her skirt.

This is our problem with time and its knots and bows: our impressions are muddled, and as Jane is sleeping we say, “The night sky was B minor,” “My feet felt pink,” “The music was punch,” “The panelled room was a woods I felt at home in.”

Yes, we would like to remember exactly, to whisper to Jane that this or that transpired, to slide one piece of the puzzle into the next, to assure ourselves that the conversations we eavesdropped on, the sprung looks between people, actually occurred. We would like to bring together hardwood floors and medallion ceilings and window-glanced sky, would like to say with surety that Hale played well and Hopper was kissed, that Wick was vindicated and that N wished, because of Bream’s groping advances, that she was elsewhere.

But there are only a few things we all agree on: that Leeson at one point noted the man he would later recognize as Farrington, that Farrington was watching the poet, and that the poet—like us—was watching the ghostly figures of his invented world.

16

Leeson had been walking in the woods around the lake for almost an hour, but he’d had to double back when the ground became too quaggy as his shoes were already the better part of ruined. He was, by this juncture, lost. He had been looking for N in the forest, accidentally coming out past the Farrington estate house when he’d meant to retrace—
exactly
—their steps from the month before.

For weeks now he’d been trying, from his ward-confinement at the Whitmore, to deduce what had happened on the walk up to the Farringtons’ house. He’d been asked numerous times by Superintendent Thorpe where the girl had gone—only to have the good doctor suddenly drop the topic a week ago. Today, during the four hours it had taken him to retrace the route to the estate, he’d rehearsed the events of that August afternoon, reciting the facts as he had to Thorpe: the door was left unlocked, Herschel had walked out, Leeson had followed, then the girl. It had been the three of them in the woods, and then it was just him and Herschel taking tea in the house of the gentleman he recognized from the ball.

After the trio’s excursion, Leeson’s privileges had been revoked and
he had been under constant threat of transfer back to a less convivial institution. These threats had been most disconcerting in the first two weeks after their adventure, though their power waned once he was given leave to go as far as the airing courts. At the end of the third week, having been on his best behaviour, he had been allowed to return to morning duty in the greenhouse, where he was given the responsibility of refilling the watering cans. He’d passed time in the afternoons playing a game he called “evens and odds,” jotting down figures in his notebook: evens meaning that the girl was still in the woods and odds that she was elsewhere and he’d never find her. According to his calculations the lace doily on the day-room table had five hundred and eighty holes, the wood planks in the ward corridor amounted to one thousand and forty; there were fifty-eight patients in the men’s wards and forty-eight in the women’s; there were two balding attendants; the rug had twenty knotted sections of tassels, the first grouping consisting of three hundred and sixty strands. The cutlery was five—odds—and the number of the confraternity at his breakfast table evens every morning except Sunday, when Professor Wick ruined it by plopping himself down and knocking over a singular cup of tea. The tomato plants, shrivelling in their beds later that morning, were even, which was a small consolation; the cards in the games room even; the magpies odds one Monday and a subsequent Friday, and evens the rest of the week. And so it went in favour of his finding her, somewhere, he decided, between the pollarded oaks and the estate itself.

Leeson’s second escape had been well orchestrated. On his last day of greenhouse duty, the attendant Bream had appeared on the other side of the glass with a wheelbarrow. He’d rubbed his thick neck with one dirty hand while pointing to the gatehouse with the other.
You’re to weed along the walk
. He’d waited to see if Leeson would obey and how quickly,
because he was known for enjoying the task of
inspiring
complicity as much as he was known for the clotted stupidity of his preposterously slow thinking.

After an hour Bream handed Leeson off to Noble so that he could go and skulk around the Superintendent’s garden. It fanned out in a V shape between the gentlemen’s airing court and the ladies’, and if one stood on the mound under the flagging pear tree one could sometimes observe the women circling the lawn under their parasols. Noble watched his charge half-heartedly from the wall of the gatehouse where he was having a smoke. Leeson saw them then: the hall porter’s keys which dangled off a large hoop from his belt—keys that Leeson knew he hung on the back of the door in his quarters when he went to bed. It followed that if a search party was to be mounted, if he and Herschel—or whoever else might be willing to be counted in their number—were to escape to find N, the keys would need to be pilfered or something would need to be bartered—though Leeson couldn’t think of what he had to offer Noble that might earn him a half a day’s grace.

Before Leeson’s first “day out” there had been talk that suggested he might soon be ready for release, though Leeson suspected this had more to do with his letters of complaint to the Commissioners about Bedford’s shock treatments and less to do with being cured. The Superintendent’s refusal to look for N and Leeson’s irate reaction to his confinement—a total of three incidents that twice involved restraints—soon put a stop to Thorpe’s talk of Leeson being allowed to “return home.” This suited Leeson perfectly, for “home” had become a remote idea, a stuffy and enclosed particularity that had started to lose the draw it once held for him. Still, if he wanted to venture out again, if he wanted to become the kind of patient who could come and go more freely, he would need to be “better.” Any progress he made after that revelation was, of course, a ruse—actions undertaken in order to gain back his privileges. The more he focused on the questions Dr. Thorpe lobbed at him and on the responses
of the others in Thorpe’s care, the greater his insight into how to fool the doctor into thinking he was making progress.