The Painted Bridge A Novel

TWENTY-NINE





“Come along, Palmer.”

Makepeace’s voice was cheery despite the early hour, the bitter cold in the corridor. She walked in front of Anna, and Lovely came behind with the corner of her apron stuffed in her mouth. It was not yet light; the bell hadn’t rung for breakfast. They walked past the treatment room, past the shower room and on, to a set of steep, curved stone steps. Anna followed Makepeace down, holding a rope slung from the wall like a banister, and arrived in a cellar, its floor scattered with straw, an old brick oven on one wall.

The room was filled with noise; a machine was running somewhere nearby. Fludd loomed out of the corner, dressed in a smith’s leather apron. Anna gasped at the sight of him. He was adjusting a strange contraption, festooned with straps and attached to a long wooden arm. It was a chair. A high-backed chair, attached to the end of a wooden beam.

“What’s happening, Lovely?” Anna’s voice was a whisper.

Lovely shook her head.

“You’ll be alright, miss,” she whispered back. “It’s the chair. It don’t kill yer.”

Makepeace cleared her throat. “This is the patient, Mr. Fludd. I think you recognize her.”

Anna met his eyes, blue and intense, as he walked toward her. She shrank against Lovely, had time to feel the soft bulk of her, breathe in her smell of sweat and lye, before the man lifted her off the ground and with one movement thrust her into the chair. She kicked at him and tried to push him away with her fists. He laughed.

“No funny business,” he said. “Not with Fludd.”

He leaned his shoulder against her chest, pinning her in the chair while he tightened a belt around her waist, strapped her legs to the legs of the chair, her chest to its high back. His hair fell forward and Anna caught a glimpse of a scar on the back of his neck—a white circle that looked like teeth marks. Fludd stood up and the machine in the distance quietened. For a moment, everything was still.

“Have a care, Mr. Fludd,” Lovely said.

Lovely, Makepeace and Fludd all stood back behind a wooden partition, and Fludd bent over a wheel. As he turned it, the chair started to move. Anna felt herself traveling around the brick walls of the cellar in a circle as if she was in an open carriage, the air cooling her face, her neck. For some slow-moving seconds, she felt nothing more than loneliness, a sense of herself in motion while the others remained stationary. The chair gathered speed, the room became round. The walls disappeared; corners, individual stones lost their solidity. She tried to grip the arms of the chair but her fingers refused.

Soon the chair was turning so fast she couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hold anything with her eyes. She tried to shout but nothing emerged; her mouth was open, she realized, her head thrown back against the chair. The air had become solid. It slammed into her, choked her, battered her body and then her mind. She was struggling to breathe. She felt nausea rising, turning her body liquid, her bones as formless as the spinning walls. She summoned the last scraps of will, tried again to scream and as she did so she felt the chair slowing. It came to a halt.

She heard Lovely crying, could feel something warm and wet on the seat. Anna was sitting in her own urine. She was sick, suddenly and violently. She half closed her eyes, waiting for the straps to be undone, the room to cease turning.

“All right, Fludd.” It was Makepeace. “Get on with it.”

The chair began to move again, in the other direction. She traveled backward. A panicked, choking wave rose in her chest but the chair turned so fast the sound was forced inward. It lodged in her head so she was the scream and the scream was she. Her head was thrown forward on her chest, the vomit gathered in her throat and choked her. She knew nothing but the impulse to fight, fight for air.

* * *

Anna was in bed. The walls were spinning around her, rotating in a way that made her sick. She reached out to still one as it passed by, saw a white hand appear in front of the blurred thistle heads of the wallpaper. The hand was moving too, it floated up to the ceiling; there was no still place. The thistles had turned to roses, green and thorny, each one different from the next.

She heard a door closing, saw a tray spinning on the chest of drawers that tumbled in space. A hot hand held her wrist. She understood; her skin no longer contained her—she had left her body and was rolling weightless around the room. Her self had been driven out of her. Anna felt a pure, detached sorrow that this was her life. Her path had been leading her here from the very beginning and she hadn’t guessed. She had walked through the days in ignorance, without fear, and each one brought her closer to this one. Life had betrayed her.

* * *

On the second day, Makepeace instructed that she be kept longer in the chair.

“Five minutes each way, Mr. Fludd.” Her voice was excited, as hard and jangling as her rings as she clapped her hands to indicate that he should commence. Anna heard herself whimpering as she was lifted into the seat. She didn’t struggle, she tried to put her hands over her eyes, to block out the cellar walls, Makepeace’s face, but Fludd grabbed her wrists, trapped them on the arms of the chair. She began to scream, but not for help. There was no help. The chair started to move.

When they lifted her out, she was lost in an impossibly large body. She couldn’t find her lips or her tongue. Her feet and her head were on each side of her and her elbows were distant and out of reach. She was cold, colder than she’d ever been in her life.

After a week of the treatment, Anna stopped trying to remember where she was or why this was happening. She opened her eyes one dusky afternoon to a small bedroom and saw two candles lit on the mantelpiece. A photograph of a woman she didn’t know. The loneliness was unbearable. She called for Louisa. For her mother. For any human soul. They were there, all of them, her mother and her sisters looking down at her from the top of the cliff and Anna was below, the tide turning and rising around her ankles. She grew silent, waded in the shallows, heard the sigh and suck of the water, knew the terrible emptiness of her open hands. Only her eye could hold the image of him as he sank. Her hands were useless.

She prayed for a sign. Anything at all. Nothing came. Nothing new. Only herself on the shore and then in the shallows. She saw the scene, the freezing water, the disappearing child, with a sense of detachment. She lived in the shallow waves, her hands trailing through the water, could experience it with her eyes closed or open, could hear the sighing waters over and under the echoes from along the corridor, feel the urgent emptiness of her hands around the cup Lovely pressed into them.

* * *

Dr. Higgins had instructed that she be purged, Makepeace announced. They were in the treatment room; Lovely had been sent out. Makepeace turned to Anna. She had rolled up her sleeves and taken off her rings. Anna closed her eyes as Makepeace took hold of her, pulling back her head and pinching her nose.

“Come on, Palmer,” she said, as she poured chalky liquid through a spout down Anna’s throat. “Open your eyes.” She jabbed at one of them with her finger. “You’re not a child, to be hiding away. Anyway …” Makepeace came closer, her face lowered over Anna’s. “There is nowhere to hide. Not now.”

Anna’s bowels turned to water; she was left shut in the bedroom with the stench, the slops freezing in the chamber pot. Next day was another kind of emetic; she vomited until she thought her insides would spill into the tin bowl, stood up with black spots dancing in front of her eyes and at once collapsed on the floor.

Days later, Makepeace arrived in her room again, early. Anna walked behind her down the wormy boards, weeping silently and unstoppably, supported by Lovely’s arm around her waist. The corridor grew narrower and darker every time she passed down it. It had once seemed long but now it was never long enough.

In the treatment room, Lovely brushed Anna’s hair—slowly, with a patient gentleness in her big hands, smoothing the tresses with her palm between each brushstroke. Anna wished the moment could last forever.

“Enough of that,” Makepeace said. “I’ll ring if you’re required.”

Lovely left the room backward; the last thing Anna saw was her broad, concerned face. Anna closed her eyes, her ears jarred by each snip of the scissors. When she opened her eyes again, it was done. Her hair lay on the floor all around, in long, dark skeins, unaware of its severance and shining in the beams of sun that fell through the window. She felt the shock in her fingers as they ran over her head from her forehead to the nape of her neck. Makepeace doused Anna’s head with water, came toward her with a bar of soap, an open razor.

“It’s for your own good.”

Her scalp, readied by shaving, was first blistered with hot irons. Later, it was frozen with crushed ice that had been packed in an India rubber cap. Anna saw herself as if from above, as if she floated over the woman she had been. She saw her own familiar body dressed in a calico nightdress, strapped to a chair in the treatment room. Saw Makepeace, pushing the ice down hard on her head, breathing heavily.

“What are you doing to me?” Anna heard herself say.

“Cooling the blood. Mr. Abse’s orders.”

The pain was sharp and jarring, as if something had come loose inside her skull.

Afterward, in the mirror at the washstand in her own room, her lips were as blue as cornflowers. Her scalp looked angry, the skin raised and red. The pain had changed. It was as solid as iron; it enveloped her from the inside of her head. She threw the towel over the mirror. The creature she saw in the glass was a stranger and the stranger frightened her.

Next, a week later, came the leeches, applied to her private places by Dr. Higgins. She was maniacal, he said, as he lifted her skirts, due to a disorder of the menses. He had renewed the certificate for her own safety. Anna didn’t protest. She couldn’t. It seemed to be someone else this was happening to while she watched from above, dispassionate and helpless. The bites oozed blood that would not cease.

* * *

After some days, she didn’t know how long she had lain there, time couldn’t be measured anymore in the old ways, they brought her out of the bedroom. Put her into the window seat in the dayroom, wrapped in a blanket. She still couldn’t speak, she discovered. She couldn’t respond to Lizzie Button’s gentle inquiries. All she could do was look into Lizzie’s brown eyes. She gazed at her for a long time until Makepeace stepped between them. Mrs. Featherstone laughed and sang to herself, tore the tassels off the edges of the curtains and scattered them on the floor like flowers. Talitha’s chair was empty, waiting for her.

Anna no longer felt sorrow. She didn’t feel anything. She was not there. She could smell sea air underneath the boiled cabbage and potatoes and feel the spray of surf sharp on her skin as she sat in the gloom of the dayroom. Eating a mouthful of herring at breakfast she tasted the whelks they boiled in seawater over driftwood fires. When the two friends quarreled, shrill and resentful, she heard the voices of children, playing.

She saw the sun on the chimney breast, over a far horizon, the water merged with the sky. The chalk shore turned pink and gold in its fiery light and she roamed it, up and down. The sky lay flattened and stilled on the sand, caught in the wet remaining lick of sea, the pink gleam of sunset brought to earth, the fire of it cooled. The sea could do that, could unify earth and sky. The sky over the earth was bereft, could not regard itself in the mirror of the sea, find itself rosily beautiful.

Not always beauty. The beach could be starkly ugly. The light muddy and neutral, overcast, the tide not in nor out and hard to know which way it traveled. The sea grumpy and recalcitrant. Sulking, midtide. It deceived, appeared to pause. Or ran away like a coward, a bully. Disappeared toward the far horizon and left everything scattered and stranded on the beach—translucent, twisted tails of weed or rope, expired jellyfish, flat with exhaustion—the sea departed as if it was a thief disturbed. Ebb tide spoke of death.

Sailors who died at sea had their tattoos cut off, the patches of skin brought back for their relatives. She heard these things as she heard the sea, without quite hearing them, as if they washed into her through her skin, soaked into her being. As if they had always been part of her and she could not rid herself of them.

Anna looked up to see if anyone else was aware of it. If anyone else knew that separate lives, separate worlds, could occur side by side, could mingle in every moment like night and day rolled into one. They were not. Miss Little and Miss Todd gazed not at each other but at her. Violet sat across the table and grinned at her with toothless gums. Lizzie Button pressed her to eat a slice of bread, to build up her strength. Put a morsel into her mouth with her own fingers. Anna pushed it out with her tongue when Lizzie turned away. Only Talitha Batt understood. And she was gone, stepped into her other life. Her real life.

In bed in the darkness, Anna prayed to Him to let her die properly. To allow her to depart her empty body. She was nothing more than a body. An irregular heartbeat. A series of painfully drawn breaths. She was a shell on the shore, the living creature inside gone. One night as she lay listening to her own breathing the hollow feeling gave way to a sense of enormity. Of a world inside herself that stretched backward and forward, that was impermeable, invulnerable. She was whole, peerless. They could do nothing at all to her, not now and not ever.

She lay holding the rough edge of the top sheet in both hands, pulled it up over her face in the darkness. Her self was contained within. The whole past was inside her, perfectly preserved, laid out in strange and awkward shapes like the world on the globe. She could turn it in her mind, fast or slow. Still it. It was always there. Even in her dreams, her world was inside her. When she was vomiting her innards into the tin bowl, it was not the least disturbed. Marriage had not enabled her to leave it behind or to forget. Nothing ever had or ever would. She could not mislay anything in her mind. She kept everything, inside, recorded for all time on a globe that spun faster and faster, whole continents of time whipping past, oceans of love, forests of regret and rocky hopes, all blurred and run together.

* * *

It was the next morning that he came. Restored to life, his flesh white against the pale sand, his eyes round and brown. He sat with his legs stretched out in front of him, festooning a sand castle with flags of weed, armoring its entrance with mussel shells. Anna could hear him breathing as he concentrated on sorting the shells, black and pink, large and small, whole and broken. The boy stood up, wandered into the shallows. His feet disappeared into the running waves. His hair blew in the wind and he laughed as the spray flew in the air, falling on him like rain. She watched as the water soaked his smock and the lace-edged waves rolled back, beckoning, sucking the ground from under him. That was her own voice, speaking to him. Calling his name. Anna heard herself laughing with delight and disbelief, and looked around.

The beach shifted, turned into a breakfast table. The rocks were loaves, the fish sprats, stranded on a platter. Button was watching her with eyes full of care. Anna looked around for the boy but he was gone. She heard herself calling his name. She was surprised.

“How do I know his name?” she asked.

Button shook her head. Her face dissolved, her teeth were made of chalk.

* * *

He came more and more. At the bottom of the cliff or the top, surrounded by flowers; sea lavender and tamarisk, samphire and saxifrage. The wind blew in his curling, fiery hair and carried away his voice. She strained to hear whether he laughed or screamed, whether it was he who cried out or the gulls gliding on the currents above. His voice and theirs mingled in the firmament. It was only above that anything was firm. That the stars were fixed in their proper places, ready to reappear each night.

There he was again, staring at the horizon. His chin pink with dribble. His legs planted in the sand. That lilt again. Running into the waves, not understanding what she understood, had always understood. His feet always wet. A governess voice. “Look at you, soaked through.” The voice was pleased, liked the daring, the darling, the not-listening wildness of the boy. His boots with their own tide running over the toes in white wavy lines. His pantaloons sodden, chafing on white thighs.

He was in the bath in front of the fire, splashing with his fists, his little penis floating upward. In the morning before it grew light she heard him singing to himself. Long stretches of song like a skein of silk unraveling from his mouth. She listened from her dark bed, puzzling over the mystery of the roses, while he talked to companions unseen, in a language unknown.

Was it him she heard or was it the sea? Its persistent silent call, its hypnotic slush and splash, its irregular rhythm. Deceptive. Sly. She eavesdropped as it talked to itself, as it murmured and cursed and lamented. Its monologue echoed the one in her head, the wish sounds, the whispers, the sighings and drawings away, rushings toward and retreats. Sometimes, occasionally, the sea rejoiced.

Anna didn’t know anymore if she remembered or imagined him. She didn’t know where he came from or where he had gone. He was there. They lit fires between the rocks, threw pods of seaweed on the flames to hear them explode, shouted with fear and laughter. The next day, he was gone. Their fires, the charred sticks, the ash, the branched, burned strands of weed, washed away. The sea was its own night. It covered things over, forced forgetting. Erasure.

And now he came in ways not as shapely as memory. He came as a feeling, a feeling she would have missed if she hadn’t been expecting him. Waiting for him. He was present in the smell of boiled milk. The sight of a round-tipped spoon or a pair of canvas shoes on the cloakroom floor. He appeared in her dreams. She was in the flint house at a round table with him on the other side in a high chair. His ears were too big for his head and his limbs pliable and pale. Clumsy.

He came as absence. Silence, where his voice had been. A morning blankness. Her bed was a ship adrift on the oak floorboards, the sea creaking and shifting all around, the wind rattling the windows, howling in the chimney. The roses obscured. Their mother, weeping in the dark. Antony.

* * *

Anna rose from the bed and felt with her toes for the slippers. The insides were cold, the leather damp. The room, the house, was silent. As she had so many times before, she pulled the blanket around her and dragged the chair to the window, looking out at the gleam of mauve on the horizon, the opalescent skies. The oak tree emerged from the dawn and waved to her, arms swaying above its fractured, anchored trunk. The bridge was there, still and waiting. Faithful.

She pressed her forehead against the glass as the birds began to sing. The loudness of their calls, the way they resounded in the air, made her think of spring.