The Painted Bridge A Novel

TWENTY-FOUR





The amber glass at the windows combined with the yellow mantles of the two lamps to create an otherworldly glow. Lucas St. Clair balanced on a wooden stool, his feet hooked on its rungs, a glass in his hands. He could relax in the darkroom. The dim, obfuscating light and the strong, sour smells released him from the obligation that he felt throughout his waking hours. The duty owed was not to his boss, Sir Harry Grieve. It wasn’t even to the patients at St. Mark’s. It was to some more demanding client—a broad notion of progress, betterment, a future that his hands must play a part in creating. Since Archie died, he’d known he must do something with his own existence. He could not waste it.

He’d returned late to Popham Street and eaten the sweating piece of Cheddar that Stickles had left out on a corner of the dining table. Decided against a baked apple studded with what looked like beetles and come upstairs to do some work. The first whisky hadn’t enabled him to leave St. Mark’s behind and he’d poured a second.

The pressure to discharge patients with a cured stamp in their file was increasing. Some were desperate to go, others wanted nothing more than to stay. That afternoon, a chap had banged his head on the wall, when Lucas told him he was discharged. The patient swore at him, shouted that he’d sleep on the bed of Father Thames before he went back to the workhouse. He was a young chap, about his own age—missing a hand, but he still managed to overturn Lucas’s desk, trying to prove himself insane. Which he wasn’t.

After that, he’d been to see Mrs. Ruth Mann in one of the women’s wards. The beds were evenly spaced; the high, iron-framed windows cast a series of rectangles of light over the polished wooden floor. Mrs. Mann lay in her bed, her face looking more like raw meat than a female countenance. She was another of Grieve’s candidates for immediate discharge back to her own family. The problem was, she did not have a family.

She peered at him through swollen eyes and reached for his hand.

“You’ve come to see me, Doctor.”

“I have, Mrs. Mann. Are you any better today?”

“You’re the doctor, aren’t you? You tell me.”

She began to laugh and stopped, lifted her hands to her face. “Ah, Doctor, it hurts. Everything hurts.”

He’d prescribed antimony to calm her mind. It would stop her hurting herself further, for the time being, but it would not cure her. She had been brought from another hospital and there too she’d made determined efforts to do away with herself—forcing stockings down her throat, rushing headlong at walls and windows and swallowing glass. He wondered, sometimes, if self-killing ought automatically to be considered a crime or whether it ought to be respected as a choice some human beings made for themselves. All human life was precious beyond measure but for some of his patients life was a deeper torture than any hellfire the church could conjure. In the hospital, there was no way to depart life with dignity. No easeful lake or obliging steam train. And there was no guarantee of any amelioration either.

“Can you help me, Doctor?”

“I can certainly try, Mrs. Mann. I am trying to get you better.”

She laughed again.

“I meant—can you help me end it. That’s all I want.”

His professional opinion was that time might cure her. Once she was past the change of life, her blood settled again, she might regain the desire to live. At the other hospital, she’d had her blood let—her neck bore the scars of repeated openings with the lancet—and been leeched, blistered. She was malnourished. She needed beef tea, port wine, egg custards. Perhaps an outing to a garden or a peaceful cathedral where her mind might expand under the soaring vaults. She was sick at heart, her husband dead and her children grown and scattered. Stickles might be able to comfort her, he had an instinct, with a cowslip brain tonic and—better—a listening ear, a few hours in a warm kitchen.

He was obliged to enter the diagnosis in the required section. He’d called it general melancholia but it was something deeper than that that ailed Ruth Mann. If Grieve had had an open mind, Lucas could have photographed her—studied her face properly and listened to its silent communication. As it was, he had to make a judgment based on hasty conversation and brief observation.

As he left her bedside and hurried on to the next, he felt frustrated by the limits to the help he could offer. Angry. He had more than a hundred patients under his care and was meant to see every one of them every day. Patients were discharged when still ill or confined beyond the time they should have been free. About half were not insane by any measure he would employ. They were debilitated by disease or hardship, driven to the edge of madness by life itself. He felt sometimes that he was not working as a doctor but as a custodian. A jailer for the people society had no use for—the old, the feeble and the brokenhearted.

* * *

Lucas stood and ran the tap at the sink, rinsing his arms up to the elbows. The talk to the Alienists’ Association was a month away, he must begin on a rough draft of the presentation. But tonight, he would put St. Mark’s out of his mind and prepare for his next visit to Lake House. He had been thinking about the girl from Regent Street, how she was in the picture and not in the picture. Shown and not shown. It was the complaint Mrs. Palmer had made—that she didn’t recognize herself. He had pointed the camera at her competently enough but what did that mean, if she did not find herself in the image?

He picked the first image he’d made of her out of the wooden plate holder, intending to score his nail through it in a cross, peel up the collodion in four neat triangles. Holding the sheet of glass in both hands, looking at Mrs. Palmer’s black face, her long, white hair falling over her shoulders down to her narrow waist, he experienced a curious sensation that he held a person between his fingertips. That it was important not to injure her. A longing came over him to see Mrs. Palmer again.

Lucas settled the plate back in the rack and set about mixing a solution of fresh collodion. Measuring out ammonium iodide, he mixed it with distilled water and watched it clump and cake in the bottom of the beaker. He liked the delicate tones of a solution higher in bromides. He added half the quantity of cadmium bromide, stirred it in with a glass rod, and held the container over a spirit lamp, keeping back from the rising fumes. Opening the collodion bottle, he trickled in the salts through a funnel. The mixture fizzed and subsided, turned cloudy inside the brown glass. He agitated the bottle and set it back on the shelf.

He had decided to alter his approach—to experiment with larger images, from close up. It would enable him to see patients more clearly and read more accurately what was exhibited on their faces. It might, he hoped, answer the question of how a person could be captured by a camera at the same time as they escaped it.

Lucas returned to his stool and drained his whisky. He sat nursing the empty glass until the church clock beyond his window chimed one. Timekeeping was the only use he had for the church; he did not resent its insistent message of the passing of the hours. He rose and left the room to prepare for bed. He would go to Lake House in the morning and request to photograph Mrs. Palmer again. He could see in every detail the picture he would make of her.

* * *

It took time to rope the carrying cases onto the seat of the cab, the stoppered bottles chinking against one another inside. The driver tried to insist that he strap the plate box on the luggage rack and looked disapproving when Lucas informed him that the box was of the greatest importance, that he would rather if necessary get rained on himself. The man thought he was a drunk, it occurred to him, as they lurched past the Angel and began the long ascent of the Hollow Way. He thought he carried his gin supply with him. He laughed and rested his head back on the worn leather. It was the first opportunity he’d had since Christmas to return to Lake House and he was impatient to arrive.

* * *

The maid’s face fell as she pulled open the great front door. She looked past him as if she expected someone else then met his eyes with an agitated expression.

“It’s not my place to ask I know, but is there any news, sir?”

“Nothing in particular. I’ve come for Mr. Abse.”

Lucas smiled at her, passed through the dim hallway into the study to wait for Abse. He walked up and down the room, underneath the ledgers and leather-bound books on the shelves, threading a path between the curios that Abse seemed to be collecting, almost falling over a bowlegged ladder. A woman was wailing somewhere in the house.

When the door at the far end of the room opened it wasn’t Abse but Makepeace who appeared. She had an air of triumph about her as she sailed toward him with one hand clutched over a ring of keys hanging from the device she always wore at her waist. It was a chatelaine. His grandmother used to have one and he’d always found it ominous. He disliked things being locked.

“Morning, Makepeace. Tell Mr. Abse I am here, would you?”

“Mr. Abse is engaged with a family matter, Dr. St. Clair.”

He felt cheered by the prospect of avoiding an encounter with Abse. The fellow used up daylight with his ponderous conversation.

“No need to trouble him, in that case. I shall set up in the Fernery. I intend to photograph Mrs. Palmer first.”

“You’re too late.”

He looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

“It is certainly not too late, Makepeace.”

She smirked. “I think you will find that it is, sir. Mrs. Palmer has absconded.”

Lucas felt as if he had walked into a lamppost.

“She can’t have.”

“I’d say the same myself but she has. She’s gone, no one knows where, and she’s taken the daughter of the house with her.”

If she wasn’t there, he couldn’t photograph her. He could not absorb it. He had thought so much about the picture he was about to make, had imagined it in such detail, that in his mind it already existed.

“She was here last time I came.”

Makepeace laughed and the buttons on her bodice rolled from side to side.

“See for yourself. I was on my way up to the guests’ rooms. We’re all at sixes and sevens. They haven’t even had their breakfast yet.”

He followed her up the elegant stairs from the ground floor, running his hand along the smooth, curved banister. Through the deserted dayroom and on across the dining room, where he consulted with patients over their photographs.

They continued—up a narrow staircase of thin and splintered treads along a low-ceilinged corridor of numbered doors, each with an observation slot at eye level. His head just cleared the bowing ceiling and the air was foul; used chamber pots stood outside some doors, discarded trays of food by others. Lucas felt a creeping sense of shame at the conditions, at the compromises involved in using a private house as an asylum. He’d never been to the patients’ sleeping quarters before. It occurred to him that he really knew very little about Lake House.

Makepeace stopped at door number 9.

“See for yourself,” she said, unlocking it and swinging it open. The door banged against the wall. She let the key fall back among its companions and jerked her head toward the interior. “Good riddance, if you ask me. But it is awful that Catherine’s missing. Poor Mrs. Abse is beside herself.”

Lucas took in a cold grate. A dormer window catching a reflected gleam of the morning’s light and a pair of worn slippers placed neatly by the bed. Just looking into the room made him feel constricted. It was a case history, he told himself. Nothing more. He could have no personal interest in her. Mrs. Palmer was not only a patient but a married woman. He would use the time to make another image of Mrs. Button or Miss Batt. The disappointment wasn’t lessened. He was flummoxed by his sense of loss. Spotting the photograph he’d made of her, on the mantelpiece, he ducked inside the room, picked it up, and took it to the window.

The black fronds of the fern she held were turning rusty brown. He hadn’t washed the print for long enough. A fingerprint had bloomed in one corner. His own thumb made an illiterate signature on his work. The image intended to arrest time had changed even since he had presented it to her.

The picture looked different, in other ways. Her eyes, the direct appeal they made, announced her desperation to be free, he could see now. Her face was alive with unexpressed emotions that he hadn’t been able to interpret but looked like a plea for help. He stopped, arrested by a thought that hadn’t occurred to him before but suddenly seemed obvious. Perhaps it was not only the photograph that might alter. The viewer could change too.

As he went to replace the photograph on the mantelpiece, a scream came from outside the door followed by a heavy thump, a rattling of metal as if someone had hurled a handful of coins at the floor. He put back the photograph, took a last glance around the room, and stepped out into the corridor.

Makepeace lay in a heap by the door to the next room, keys scattered all around her on the boards. Her skirts had risen to show men’s socks emerging from the tops of her Adelaide boots and a pair of thick white calves. She was moaning and his first thought was that her heart had failed. He kneeled beside her and felt for the pulse in her wrist. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

“Not me, you fool,” she said, her voice choked and harsh. “It’s Talitha. Help her, Doctor. Help her.”

He got to his feet with a sense of dread and put his eye to the observation slot.