“She doesn’t talk,” Lesley informed me. “She has a tongue like a shoe’s, hard and leathery, and all it does is sit there and shield her mouth from the laces. Not that all shoes have tongues. Take your Wellington boot, say. It doesn’t have a tongue because—”
I tuned out this font of wisdom to focus on the last one, sitting on Pretty’s other side. Dull greying hair coming loose from its thread bindings. (Perhaps hair-pins, along with ceramic dishes and pointed table-knives, were seen as dangerous?) What skin I could see was as untended as one might expect in this place, but her finger-nails were neat rather than chewed, and her hands and wrists did not indicate a life of physical labour.
“The nurses here don’t seem too bad,” I commented, in a voice low enough to ride beneath the footwear lecture. My reward was a faint twitch of the head, so I persisted. “I mean, considering the power they have, there’s not as much bullying as one might expect. Even downstairs. I mean, when I was in line for the baths there was a woman decided she didn’t want to go, and it took three of them to bring her down. But even then they only did it as hard as they had to. Not vicious, like.”
A faint shrug of the shoulders, so I kept on. “Tell me: I saw a room with some chairs and writing desks in it, at the far end of the wing. I don’t suppose they have an actual library here?” Her head began to rise and then she caught herself, to retreat back behind her loosened wisps of hair. “If not a library, maybe the nurses have books that they lend out? I certainly hope so, even if they’re just romantic novels or something. I can’t imagine not reading at all, it would drive me, well…”
I saw her pull in a breath, then slowly exhale it. She laid down her spoon and straightened in her chair, causing Lesley’s monologue to cut sharply off. And then the grey-haired woman turned her face towards me.
I was more or less ready for what she decided to reveal. That is, I had assumed there to be a reason she was hiding behind her hair—a reason beyond unreason, that is—but this…
Acid or fire? Something had taken half her features, leaving a mask of shiny scar tissue on the right side of her face. The eye was frozen half-shut, with a pale sightless cornea behind what had once been a lid. The right nostril was a shrunken hole, while the left was almost normal. The worst of the scarring ended above her lips, and although that side of her mouth was speckled with scars, I thought the muscles themselves still functioned, allowing her to eat and drink normally.
And to speak. She finished my thought for me: “Would drive you mad?”
The smile I gave her was as twofold as her own face: an acknowledgment of my poor jest, and of my sorrow for her suffering.
But that was all the exclamation of horror that I permitted to show. “Truth to tell, it might be better to pick oakum than read too many romance novels. What is oakum, anyway? Does one still pick it?”
At that moment, an enormous woman at the far end of the table rose and upended her laden plate over the head of a neighbour. The resulting uproar diverted the astonishment of our own neighbours at the grey-haired woman’s lifting of her face, and various nurses leapt forward to break up the mêlée and to shift the breakfast gathering into whatever thrilling events were on the day’s schedule.
I was returned to the office of the physician, but having been fed and watered, I was quite able to deflect Dr Rawlins’ queries. After a brief conversation with my nurse over possible treatments—which seemed primarily to be a choice between a long soak in cold water, a long soak in warm water, or talk therapy—they decided to wait a day or two and see if my memories returned on their own. In the meantime, I could be put in with the general population—with limited privileges.
Since I guessed that “privileges” meant pacing up and down the garden like the inmates I’d seen from Ronnie’s car that day, three years before, restriction was no hardship—until it stopped raining, at any rate. Or until I wished to make my escape over the wall.
I was even permitted to change my drab dressing-gown for slightly less drab day clothes—and even better, in a one-bed room with a latch on both sides.
The nurse then ushered me to the day room I had glimpsed earlier, a space now crowded with women in more or less normal clothing—although even the newer garments looked somehow dowdy. After studying the room, I thought perhaps it was a combination of their lack of makeup and jewellery, and also that their clothing all seemed too large for them, as if Bedlam had a rule against form-fitting dresses.
The women were scattered across the threadbare chairs and worn chintz sofas with a variety of occupations: needle-work, knitting (needles, apparently, not being considered as threatening as hair-pins), card games, and letter-writing (pens, similarly). One woman was reading loudly to a trio of ladies with wispy silver hair. Two women playing Mah-Jong sat beside a cluster of women with a book of crossword puzzles. An ill-tuned piano against the wall emitted pained groans from under the fingers of a dramatically positioned woman, accompanied by the harsh cries of some caged birds, the drone of a woman discussing her children with the empty chair at her side, and half a dozen ongoing conversations among the more corporeal. Three women plotted the offerings at an upcoming Musical Evening, a ward Sister cajoled women to sign up for a basket-weaving class, half a dozen retired schoolteacher types discussed a list of lecture topics, and a thin, nervous creature methodically tore illustrations from a ladies’ fashion journal and placed them tenderly in a box labelled PATIENTS COSTUME DANCE.
And this was a place where the mad were intended to recover their equanimity.
I spotted my grey-haired neighbour at the far side of the room, sitting with her right shoulder to the wall. She was either staring off into space or listening to the conversation behind her—although, as I came close enough to hear, I decided it was the former, since I did not think a discussion of the relative dreaminess of Douglas Fairbanks and Ramon Navarro was to her taste. I pulled a chair around so as to face her. She acknowledged me with a swift glance, then looked straight ahead again.
In profile, her features were attractive—no, I decided: they were beautiful. Not in the current movie-star version of up-turned nose and baby-like roundness, but a more eternal idea of noble beauty, with high cheek-bones, straight nose, firm chin, arched brow. Had her hair not been grey, I would have thought her little more than thirty.
I had been among these people for a handful of hours, but one thing I knew already: the madder the woman, the more abrupt—blunt, even—her conversation was apt to be. Well, I could be as rude as the next woman.
“What happened to your face?”
The eye that fixed on me was the blue of cornflowers. “Does it matter?”
“I think so. I mean, it’s one thing if a spurned lover threw acid at you, and quite another if you were the one doing the throwing. If nothing else, it would mean I should take care not to irritate you when you’re holding a cup of hot tea.”
The eye blinked. After a moment, her body shifted away from the wall to gaze at me more directly, even though her right eye could not give her any additional information. After a moment, her good eye narrowed. “Were you making a joke?”
“Not a very good one, I know. I shall try better next time. So what did happen to you?”
“I worked in an acid factory and the floor overseer was practicing witchcraft. So I pushed her into her vat, and got splashed.”
Good Lord. I felt myself draw back. “Really?”
“No.”
It was my turn to blink. I studied the blue eye in the elegant half of the scar-masked face, and saw a gleam of intelligence looking back. “Were you making a—” but could not finish before laughter took me. She was—and the faint crinkle beside her unblemished eye confirmed it. I held out my right hand. “Mary R—Ruth,” I told her, catching myself at the last instant.