The Painted Bridge A Novel

SIX





Grace Jephcote’s brow was contracted, the gaze in her large eyes fixed. The muscles on each side of her mouth appeared rigid and her hands grasped each other under her chin, the tendons taut. She had a daisy chain on her head, slipping down her dark hair.

“What d’you think?” Lucas St. Clair said.

James Maddox picked up the photograph, brought it within inches of his face, then held it at arm’s length.

“Looks nervy. Then there’s the crown, of course. Why do they all fancy themselves as queens? I don’t know, St. Clair. Hysteria?” He dropped the picture back on the table. “I find it easier when I can see ’em in front of me.”

Lucas picked up the picture again and held it to the light still filtering through the dining room window. He blew particles of dust from the face and neck. The corners of the print displayed the fragile, curling boundaries of the collodion; the whole image appeared as if it could peel up off the paper like a layer of skin. He looked at the eyes, the dilated pupils. He’d done his best to reassure her but Mrs. Jephcote had crouched on the edge of the posing chair and scarcely drawn breath during the long exposure. She’d crossed herself again and again when it was over and hurried from the room.

“She’s suffering from religious mania, Dox. Can’t you see it? The raised, curved brows. The tension in the jaw and that terrified look in her eyes. The poor woman is possessed by some fearful vision, incited by her crackpot preacher, you won’t be surprised to learn. The daisy chain is her crown of thorns.”

“How on earth am I meant to know that?”

Lucas laid down the print again.

“By careful observation. The point is, Dox, that if you can diagnose patients, you might stand a better chance of treating them effectively. I got them to take away her Bible and set her to work in the gardens, planting beans. That was back in the summer. She’s much improved. They discharged her last week. If she stays away from the parson she might do well.”

Maddox ran a finger over his front teeth. He’d had a new one wired in, Lucas saw, filling the crater at the front of his mouth.

“Purging seems to do most of ’em a power of good,” he said. “Leeches, on occasion.”

“Women hate leeches,” Lucas said.

“Even so. She might have benefited from a cooling of the blood.”

* * *

They walked along the passageway and into the parlor, where Lucas lit both lamps, adjusted the wicks and poured whisky into two crystal tumblers. Keeping the glass with the chipped rim, he passed over the other.

“Cheers.”

“To your experiments,” Maddox said, raising his glass.

There was a tap at the door and a head wearing a red scarf appeared around the edge of it.

“I’m off now, sir, if there’s nothing more you want.”

“Good night, Stickles.”

The basement door banged as both men sat down by the fire. A dustbin lid clattered to the ground outside in the darkness, followed by a curse. Footsteps receded down the pavement. Lucas had taken on Stickles as a plain cook, which she proved not to be. Downstairs in her kitchen empire she didn’t so much cook as conduct experiments. She concocted salve from beeswax and insisted he apply it to his hands, to counter the effects of the chemicals; produced unidentifiable jams involving petals and bits of aromatic bark, or pickled nuts and root vegetables in jars, occasionally serving one up on a plate. The lumpy defeat in their shapes reminded Lucas of the preserved hearts and kidneys in the labs at university.

He lived on bread and cheese but kept Stickles on because she didn’t insist on getting the skivvy to clean the darkroom or tidy up. He stored his periodicals and case notes on the dining room table in what looked to others like random heaps but were in fact a carefully calibrated system, foolproof until some other hand interfered in it. All he asked, he told her, was that she should keep down the dust in the house and especially on the second floor. Stickles laughed. He would have to remove to the countryside, if he wanted to get away from dust. “It’s what Lunnon’s made of, sir,” she said.

The lamplighter climbed down from the post in the street outside; a round-topped rectangle of flickering light appeared across the floorboards. The heat in the sole of Lucas’s foot, the smell of singeing leather, had become impossible to ignore. He shifted his leg along the fender, emptied the last drops of whisky down his throat and got up to jerk the heavy curtain along its pole. It always got dark earlier on Sundays.

“Time you went, Dox. I’m on duty in the morning and I’ve got work to do tonight.”

“In a minute. Have a look at this.”

Maddox dug in his breast pocket and passed over a small card. It was a photograph of two girls lifting their skirts, showing bandy legs and childish pudenda. The print was amateurish, with no contrast and no detail, the flesh crudely colored with carmine. Lucas grimaced and passed it back.

“No thanks.”

“Come on, old man. Every chap enjoys looking at pictures of naked women. Especially drawn from the life.”

“I don’t disagree with that. But not when I’m thinking about work. Anyway, these aren’t women.” He exhaled and looked at his friend through the softening drift of smoke. “It’s time you found a wife.”

Maddox grunted. He was fingering his tooth again, tracing its outline, his top lip drawn up like a snarling dog. He looked like the old statue of a raving maniac, outside Bedlam. Maddox bared his teeth further, lifting his top lip on both sides.

“Got it done by a chap in Holborn. Swore it was ivory. D’you think women care, about teeth?”

“Some of them might, I suppose.”

Lucas himself had no interest in marriage. He was too busy for social life. And if he wasn’t, he would want a woman he could talk to. Not some creature who spent her energies on stitching and sketching and tinkling the piano keys. Half the female patients in his care had been driven to the edge of reason by their limited lives, in his private opinion. Human beings needed a purpose.

While Maddox entertained a string of women at his rooms at Regent’s Park, female callers at Popham Street were restricted to Lucas’s mother, on her annual visit to London from the Cotswolds, and his sister, who claimed to find the parlor more comfortable than any other in town and who if she called without her husband smoked a Turkish cigarette while Lucas puffed on his pipe.

He leased the house from a silver merchant. It was adequate and the rent reasonable. On the top floor, where other men had bedrooms for children and servants, he had his darkroom. He’d had water piped up for the purpose and although he had not bothered to install a water closet, he was particular about the long basin, the drain that carried away the spent materials. The back bedroom was for dry work, varnishing and retouching, as well as storing the plates. Whatever time he didn’t spend at his post at St. Mark’s, Lucas spent on his research. He’d agreed to give a lecture in the spring to the Alienists’ Association on photography in the diagnosis of lunatics. The members of the Association were like-minded, progressives in tune with himself and hungry for new approaches to mental disease. He had been working on his research in every spare minute, trying to take further the science that Dr. Diamond had begun.

Lucas put his glass down on the floor and rubbed his eyes with the tips of his long fingers. Most of the older generation were resistant. The superintendent of his own hospital, Sir Harry Grieve, was downright hostile. “The human eye does a better job of assessing a lunatic than a glass one ever will,” he liked to pronounce from behind his half-moons. He’d refused Lucas permission to take photographs at St. Mark’s, which forced him to seek out private asylums.

As soon as he was able to establish his research more firmly, he planned to leave St. Mark’s. With luck, he would get a superintendent’s post himself and with it the chance to build a progressive retreat. In the four years he had spent working with the insane, Lucas had come to believe that mental pain was the worst kind of pain. It was worse than bullet wounds or gangrene. More agonizing than cancers or dropsy. And there was no consensus on how to alleviate it. Blistering was an agony. Purging weakened patients and left them depleted. Cold showers could kill. The intricate variations in medicines were more articles of faith than proven treatments.

Lucas was convinced that photography could constitute a decisive break with the old ways. That it could lead to improved diagnosis, which in turn would inform better-judged treatments. But if he couldn’t even persuade Maddox of the utility of the method, what chance did he have with the medical establishment?

Evidence. It was the only way. He had to come up with the evidence. He must get back up to Lake House at the first opportunity to discuss Mrs. Button’s picture with her; he owed his subjects that much, he believed. And he wanted to meet the new patient Abse mentioned and see if she would agree to being photographed.

Maddox was dozing. His head lolled on the antimacassar and his jaw was slack. The tooth gleamed in the lamplight, whiter and larger than its intended twin. Lucas and Maddox both had posts at St. Mark’s; they had been at the same university and before that, boys at school together. The event that had bonded them more deeply than friendship, than shared history, was the one thing of which they spoke with difficulty and usually only when both were drunk. Maddox too had lost an older brother in the Crimea. George Maddox was mowed down alongside Archibald St. Clair in the slaughter at Balaclava. Lucas and James were older now than those men had been when they met their deaths. They had no right to squander even a minute of their lives.

Maddox gave a thunderous snore and Lucas nudged his shin with the toe of his boot and stood up.

“Bugger off home, Dox,” he said. “I’ve got things to do.”