The Painted Bridge A Novel

SEVENTEEN





Querios Abse came up the stairs with a tin of bonbons in one hand. He could hear laughter coming from the dayroom. He listened intently to the unfamiliar sound. No doubt about it, it was female gaiety. He stopped in front of the door. The guests were much reduced in numbers; a dozen of ’em had been taken home for the festivities, he explained to an imaginary magistrate at his side. He provided as well as he could for those who were left, within the constraints of the antiphlogistic diet. Believed they had almost as much enjoyment as they might have had around their own hearths.

The word hearth had a cheery, comforting sound about it, heart and earth put together. He would weave it into the next brochure. Offers all the comforts of the home hearth. More comforts than most of them had ever had at home, in his estimation.

Querios opened the door with a declamatory gesture and as he stepped through it his satisfaction drained away. Violet Valentine’s bird had escaped from its cage and was in panicked flight around the ceiling, banging against the tops of the windows and the chimney breast. Some of the women were chasing after it, pursuing it with raised hands, cooing to it, shouting with laughter as they caught at the feathers that fluttered down from the ceiling. The bird landed on the gasolier and splashed its waste onto the rug below.

The rest of the guests were grouped around the fireplace in unseemly postures, their hair stuck with ribbons and pieces of tinsel borrowed from the fir tree. Violet Valentine, seemingly unconcerned about the plight of her pet, had her legs resting on the fender, her head wreathed in mistletoe. Lizzie Button crouched next to her on a footstool with a blue tablecloth thrown around her shoulders. Makepeace occupied Talitha Batt’s wing chair. Her head was tipped back and her mouth open, he saw, with a sickening sense of apprehension. A Madeira bottle lolled at her feet.

Anna Palmer stood a little distance away from the others. She was wearing the dress that she’d arrived in, unsuitable for a vicar’s wife, although he couldn’t say why exactly. It was a blue-green material with some sort of sheen to it. Unfashionable, he suspected, but it flattered her, with its quaint lace collar hanging down in two points, the buttons leading like stepping-stones from her neck down to her narrow waist. Her eyes were swollen from weeping. Mrs. Palmer’s condition had worsened since she’d arrived, he informed the magistrate. Sometimes that was the trajectory. It couldn’t be helped. Illness was unpredictable, just as health was. Neither could be relied upon. Of course, they made every effort and he himself was always optimistic.

“I trust everyone has passed a pleasant evening?”

The laughter had ceased as he stood there, the bird catchers grown still. He gave a smile he hoped was encouraging but reproving and tucked his thumb into his watch chain, resting the weight of his hand on the blunt links. He had been called “Vicar” by his contemporaries at school. At the time, he took the nickname as a compliment to his upstanding nature. Only later did it occur to him that others saw him as self-righteous.

He felt suddenly awkward, did not know where to put the bonbons. The lid of the tin was embossed with a picture of a tree crammed with glass trinkets, sugared fruits and candles, surrounded by rosy children in their nightgowns. It mocked what he saw in front of him. The branches of the tree he’d procured at some expense looked like the bony arms of old women. A carpet of needles sprinkled around it gave off a resinous odor that reminded him of a forest. The candles on it were lit and burning low. He saw the possibility of immolation, the locked door at the other end of the room, imagined the magistrate scratching a sharp and indelible little note.

A torrent of the kind of feelings that he didn’t normally permit himself coursed through Querios. Was it his fault if these women were mad? He did his best to help them, keep them safe in Lake House, protected from censure and their own abominable desires and passions. He had never wanted to work in an asylum but had been forced to assume the mantle bequeathed by his father. It dawned on him with a startling clarity that he disliked lunatics above all other kinds of people. They were devious. Cunning. Untrustworthy. Parasites on the body of healthy society, without higher thoughts or aims other than to secure their own individual liberty.

He looked again at the tableau in front of him. Something about the Button woman’s pose on the low stool, some humbleness in it, was designed to reproach him. It was intolerable.

“Mrs. Button. Get up off that stool.”

He banged down the tin on a vacant plant stand, seized the piece of wood out of Button’s hands and flung it on the fire. There was a moment of silence broken by a hiss as the dry wood caught and flared. Mrs. Palmer ran forward, stooped in front of the leaping flames and reached one hand into the grate. She pulled out the wood and doused it with water from the holly vase on the mantelpiece. Querios flinched as she turned, afraid for a moment that she intended to empty the rest of it over his head. She brushed off the charred edges of the wood and handed it back to Button as carefully as if it was a live child. He almost laughed.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Mrs. Button is playing the Virgin Mary, sir.”

Now, he did laugh, long and loud. Tears of mirth sprang from his eyes and his breath came in wheezing gasps, preventing him from getting out his words.

“Button here hardly resembles our Lord’s mother, Mrs. Palmer. Wretched creature that she is.”

From a foot away, she spat in his face—coolly and accurately, exactly like a man might, as if she were some jack-tar rolling out of a tavern in Wapping. He groped for his handkerchief and dabbed at his eye, maintaining an expression of unconcern, for the sake of his own dignity as much as the impression on the imaginary magistrate. The Reverend was likely to visit over the festive season. It would be awkward to have to inform him that his wife was more hysterical than ever but there it was. He was always optimistic.

Violet had found the sweets. She was sucking the white, powdery sugar off the bonbons with rapid movements of her jaw and spitting glistening toffees back in the tin. Her bird, returned to her shoulder, pecked at the berries that dangled from her ears. Querios wished Talitha Batt had remained over Christmas. Miss Batt set a standard. He retrieved the tin, jammed the lid back on and rapped on it with his signet ring.

“Fanny! Bring this regrettable soirée to a close.”

He repeated the instruction, more loudly, but she didn’t so much as raise her head. He felt a spurt of anger. Quelled it. It was the season and one had to make allowances. There weren’t many females who could do Fanny Makepeace’s job. There weren’t many who wanted to try. He would leave them to it. That was it. Let them sort themselves out.

Outside in the passageway he leaned against the wall, trying to overcome the roaring in his head, the crash and thunder of it. There was no sign of when the magistrates would come and he was haunted by them. Permanently under inspection. Permanently found wanting.

Emmeline was nagging him about getting a physician to Catherine. He would not, he decided, looking at his feet, the way they were planted on the carpet, toes turned out. His mother used to scold him for walking with his toes at a quarter to three. He’d never understood why. He didn’t now. He strained after some saying about a cobbler’s children. Couldn’t remember it. He would not risk the business by letting word get out that his own daughter was unbalanced.

On the other side of the door, voices had resumed. There seemed to be some merriment again. The women were singing and he could hear the boards creaking and bowing—it sounded as if they might be dancing. He could go back to his own parlor and sit with the family, Emmeline’s sister Florence and her children, but he didn’t feel inclined.

Querios felt his way down the unlit stairs to the office. The curtains were open and the moonlight sufficient to display the objects in the room quite plainly. A lot of old junk, he thought. And none of it chosen by him. He sat down and rested his eyes on the piles of ledgers on the front of the desk, contemplated the white quills laid out on a stand next to the ink bottle.

They’d planned to leave Lake House once the old man died. When it happened, it had not after all been possible. Querios knew no other trade and even with Emmeline behind him lacked the courage to sell up, take a chance on a new life. Unable to discharge himself, he had no choice but to stay on and look after the guests, imprisoned for longer than any of them. He wondered if they saw the irony. Some did, he thought, although on the whole it passed the families by.

The cobbler’s children go barefoot. That was it. Once he remembered the homily, he couldn’t dislodge it. He caught some movement from outside out of the corner of his eye, got up and stood at the dark glass. The fox bounded toward the house with its shadow reaching ahead of it on the moonlit grass. He raised a fist, banged on the window and it swerved and carried on—toward the cottage, the peacock’s enclosure.

Bloody creature was getting bolder.