The Painted Bridge A Novel

THREE





A dozen or more women were gathered around a long table, roughly laid for breakfast. Lovely gave Anna a little push, pointed at a chair at the far end, a spoon and tin mug positioned on the oilcloth. As she sat down, the woman in the next seat looked up from a piece of wood wrapped in a scrap of white shawl, on her lap. She wore a print dress and her hair was cropped like a boy’s, with tufts sticking out over her ears. Her brown eyes were intense, searching, as she looked at Anna.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I tried my best.”

“I’m sorry but you’re mistaken. We have never met.”

The woman’s expression changed; Anna thought for a moment she was going to strike her.

“You were always a heartless creature, Ma Button. I saw it in your eyes, the first time I ever met you. I knew then what you were.”

Anna took a sip of water from the mug, rolled its iron taste around her mouth. An old woman opposite was collecting bread crumbs in the corner of a handkerchief; farther down the table, another one called for her mother. The air was thick with the taint of unwashed clothes and untreated hair.

On the far wall was a large fireplace in a marble surround. Next to it, a collection of portraits hung in two lines, some singly, others in pairs, all on long, fine strings attached to picture hooks on the rail above. Their arrangement on the wall was purposeful, had a pattern and order at odds with the rest of the room.

“The tea will be here soon,” her neighbor said in a different, lighter voice. “I expect you’ll be glad of it on such a cold morning. How d’you do anyway, I’m Mrs. Lizzie Button.”

She shifted the bundle on her lap and held out a hand. Anna felt an impulse to grasp it, beg the woman to tell her what this place was, who these others were. Why they’d taken her cloak and boots, by the time she awoke. How she could escape. Checking the urge, she fixed her eyes on the wall in front of her and made her face expressionless. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—utter a word to any of them. She must keep herself separate, prove that she wasn’t one of them, that she didn’t belong here and never would.

Lizzie Button was undeterred. She carried on talking, between mouthfuls of herring. The tea was strong but never hot enough. She longed for a cup of coffee, they all did, and there was plenty wanted something stronger. All you got was a glass of beer once in a blue moon. Not that she took a drop herself. The fare was unappetizing right enough but the young lady ought to eat something if only to keep up her strength. She would need all of her strength in this place, especially if they decided to try to cure her. Mrs. Button yelped with laughter then started to cry again, dragging a handkerchief from her cuff, sniffing.

The woman turned to Anna and grabbed her hands, squeezing her fingers with unnatural strength.

“Let me see them,” she said, her voice charged. “My angels. Just once, Ma. I’m begging you.”

Anna shook herself free as a maid arrived with cakes, tipped upside-down from the tin and heaped on a platter. A hum rose over the table, hands reaching in from all sides. The plate emptied and a scuffle broke out at the other end of the room. As Makepeace’s clipping, approaching heels made themselves heard above the din, coming from along the corridor, the women fell silent. They rose one by one and formed a line by the wall, holding the cakes like robins’ eggs in cupped hands, then began to file out of the door.

Anna felt someone looking at her. A woman stood at the end of a sideboard, stacking side plates like a deck of brittle cards. She was dark-haired, with a pleated white ruff around the neck of her dress, pushing up under her chin. Her face was dusted white, with black arched brows high over her eyes and reddened lips. She looked like an elderly doll.

The woman picked up a small brush and pan and began sweeping the table, flicking shards of eggshell, fish bones, and cake crumbs into the pan, the bristles making light, stroking sounds on the oilcloth.

“You’ll grow accustomed to the routine, Mrs. Palmer,” she said, in a gentle, cultivated voice. “Mr. Abse leads prayers in the dayroom after breakfast. Some of us take the air at ten-thirty in what they call the airing grounds. It’s a courtyard, behind the house. After that, we occupy ourselves with handwork till luncheon. Mrs. Makepeace will provide you with silks. It’s the same every day, except Sunday. Then there’s no sewing. The time passes somehow. If I can help you with anything, let me know. My name is Talitha Batt.”

Anna wanted to ask the woman how she knew to address her as Mrs. Palmer, how long she had been here, who Abse really was. She opened her mouth to speak then again quelled the impulse to respond to a lunatic. Turning her head away, she surveyed the room, the oversize sideboard running along the wall opposite the windows, the mismatched chairs around the table.

Anna found herself looking again at the pictures on the wall and got up to examine them more closely. They were photographs, she discovered to her surprise, oddly modern in this old place. Each one was six or seven inches tall and four or five wide, cut into an oval shape and pasted on card. Photographs of women. Every one of them was alone, pictured against a plain background that made them seem as if they might have been anywhere or nowhere. Some looked afraid, others angry. Amused. Some seemed to have retreated inside themselves and their expressions gave away nothing at all.

An old country woman caught her attention. She had a spotted scarf tied around her neck and was clasping a pigeon against her breast; bird and woman looked out with the same brightness of eye. Studying the face, the white hair springing out from under the edges of a man’s cap, she recognized the woman who’d been sitting opposite her at the table. She could see her more clearly in the photograph than she had with her own eyes.

“Mrs. Valentine. Violet Valentine. A good likeness, don’t you think?”

Anna felt a hand on her arm and turned to see Makepeace beside her. Her gaze was neutral, unyielding, and she wore the same dark dress as on the previous day but with the addition of a small cameo hanging from a ribbon around her neck. Anna shrugged off her hand and stepped back. Makepeace had shoved her into the room with the strength of a kicking horse; she intended from now on to stay out of her reach.

“Did you want something, Mrs. Makepeace?”

“If you’d care to follow me, Mrs. Palmer.”

Anna glanced around the room, empty now. She had no option but to walk behind Makepeace, past the staircase to the bedrooms, past a room where a maid on her knees sorted through a heap of dresses all made from the same sprigged cotton as Mrs. Button’s. The sound of rain pounding on a tin roof was coming from farther along the corridor. It was peculiar, that rain should fall indoors. It wasn’t raining outside. She strained her ears and clearly heard the echoing splash of water hitting tin.

“What’s that?”

“What is what, Mrs. Palmer?”

“That sound.”

Makepeace stopped in front of a door and selected a key from a silver contraption at her waist.

“I don’t hear anything. Come in and sit down.”

Makepeace held open the door, then closed it behind them so that only the crackling of a fire could be heard.

The room smelled of something familiar. Anna breathed in deeply, inhaled a bitter aroma that cheered her before she knew what it was. Coffee. Just to smell it made her feel hopeful. The situation was about to be resolved. Makepeace had brought her here to apologize for the mistake, to inform her that a cab waited for her outside in the driveway and that she was free to leave. Anna ignored the chair Makepeace pulled out for her on one side of a table.

“I’d like my cloak, Mrs. Makepeace. My boots. I need to return to London this morning.”

“Be seated.”

At the tone of her voice, Anna felt the hope drain away. She sat down, keeping her eyes on her lap. The ring on her finger seemed to belong to another woman, in another life. It was in the shape of a snake, curled around her finger, gold, studded with tiny turquoise stones. Vincent had said he feared it might be blasphemous and urged her to select a plain band. “Remember the serpent, Anna, more subtil than any beast of the field.” It was only when the jeweler pointed out that the Queen had one similar that he’d agreed to her choice.

“There was general hysteria this morning.”

“Was there?”

“Yours, Mrs. Palmer. It spread along the corridor, to the other guests.”

“I wasn’t in the least hysterical. I was calling for help.”

“You’ve been entrusted to our care.”

“I don’t need care, thank you, Mrs. Makepeace. All I want is to be allowed to go. I’ve written to my husband and my sister to arrange it.”

Anna reached into her bodice and pulled out the envelopes. They looked porous by the light of day, inadequate vessels for her hopes. The wax seal was soft from the warmth of her body, too substantial for the flimsy paper.

“I need to post my letters, urgently.”

Makepeace glanced at the window.

“I will deal with your correspondence,” she said.

“I’d prefer to do it myself.”

“There is no post box inside Lake House, Mrs. Palmer.”

“I can walk. There must be one nearby.”

Makepeace seemed to suppress a smile.

“Guests do not leave the grounds,” she said. “The cost of stamps will be added to your bill.”

Vincent was paying for her to be here. The light coming through the window lost what tinge of sun it held as Anna looked again at Makepeace—at her doughy face, the brown tide mark across the top of her forehead where she dyed her hair. Makepeace used a mirror, Anna thought, had an opinion about what she saw there. She was a woman like other women, with desires and fears and vanities. She would appeal to her humanity.

“Mrs. Makepeace, I went to try to help the survivors of a shipwreck, after the hurricane. It was a reasonable thing to do. A good thing, some might believe. My husband doesn’t come from a maritime family, as I do. He never set eyes on the sea until he was an adult man.” She gave a small laugh and forced herself to meet the woman’s eyes. “It is understandable that he could misinterpret my state of mind. But surely you can see for yourself that there’s nothing wrong with me?”

Makepeace’s mouth remained set.

“It is not just your husband who is concerned for you, Mrs. Palmer. Two doctors confirmed his view.”

Anna pressed the letters to her chest, feeling her spirits lift like a hot air balloon.

“I haven’t seen any doctors. It’s all a mistake, Mrs. Makepeace, just as I thought. You’ve no right to detain me.”

“They signed the certificate, after their interview with you.”

The two women’s eyes met again and this time it was Anna’s that slid away as she remembered the visitors who came to the house some days after her return from the coast. It was late afternoon; Vincent had asked her to join them in the study. He poured her a glass of sherry from the decanter, invited her to tell the two men, old friends of his from the university, about her mission of mercy. He’d understood, she thought. At last.

She’d set about explaining the tragedy to the men. Most of the survivors had already gone by the time she reached the Welsh harbortown, sailed for their far-flung homelands on a Cuban clipper. Only the worst-injured remained, living off brandy from salvaged barrels, sleeping under sheepskins in the cottages of the fishermen. They had lost everything. Comrades. Possessions. Eyes or limbs or teeth, in the darkness, in the water. The captain bit off his own tongue before he drowned. Farther down the coast, corpses were still washing in on the tide.

Relief had made Anna voluble. She took another sip of the sherry and continued. The sailors were wiry, hardy men, Vincent’s trousers were too large around the middle for them, his shirts too broad in the neck. She told Vincent’s companions about the first mate’s hands, the size of shovels. The way he held his lacerated fingers in front of him as if they weren’t part of him and demonstrated how he’d grasped at the rocks and been swept back by the waves time and time again until finally he managed to get a hold.

The sight of his injuries had turned her stomach; there was a smell in the room like rotting meat. When she held out the silver watch, the first mate turned away.

“I didn’t have a chance to clean it,” she’d explained. “It only needs winding.”

He let loose a torrent of words in his own, throaty language and looked at her with eyes that seemed to see something other than her or the humble room. She’d left the watch on the locker among the grains of spilled sugar and strands of tobacco. It only occurred to her afterward that he didn’t want it. Not because it was tarnished but because it was charity.

She fell silent. Looked at the men, hungry for some explanation of how God could allow such suffering. One adjusted his bow tie; the other stifled a yawn.

“Tell them why you went, Anna,” Vincent said, drumming his own, intact fingers on the desk. “Explain what you believed you were doing.”

So she told them, how she’d read in the newspaper about the wrecked ship, the boy brought out of the waves still breathing. And that as she read she felt certain she was called to play a part, could offer some help. Vincent might perhaps have explained that she came from a seafaring family, that her own father lost his life in just such a tragedy. If, as a woman, she was able to make any contribution to society, she’d always prayed that it should be in assistance to sailors. The men made notes, nodding and glancing at each other.

“Is that everything you wish to impart, Anna?” Vincent said. “Nothing more? About the strange things you’ve seen?”

“I think we’ve heard enough,” the one in the bow tie said, getting out of his chair and tugging on his fingers, making the joints crack into the silence that had descended in the study. The bells of All Hallows sounded outside as they rose and made their good-byes.

* * *

Vincent had betrayed her. Anna felt as shaken as if she’d slipped and fallen in the street. She struggled to compose herself, to meet Makepeace’s look of satisfaction.

“In that case,” she said, “I must see another doctor. An independent one whose opinion is impartial.”

“You’ll be seeing Dr. Higgins, Mrs. Palmer. All our guests do.”

“When? How soon can I meet him?”

“Next time he comes to Lake House. By then, we can hope for an improvement in your state of mind.”

“I don’t need improvement. There is nothing wrong with my mind.”

Makepeace smiled properly for the first time and reached out her hand.

“You are hardly in a position to be the judge of that.” She took the letters from Anna, dropped them into a drawer on the far side of the table and closed it. “Now, if you would care to rejoin the other guests, you can start to acquaint yourself with everyone.”