The Ballroom (26 page)

Will you forgive me? Can you hear?

They moved about his bed like moths. Silent moths with mouths that opened and closed. They could not hear him. They did not speak.

Why can’t you hear me?

Listen to me.

Please! Listen!

I want to tell you what I have done.

‘
Nothing that you don’t want.
’

I want—

I want—

I—

‘Shhh, no. Shhhh.’

Filthy. Filthy.

Water. I need water. Lemonade.

Can I have some lemonade? Please?

Please?

But it is hot. Everything is too hot.

Please come back.

Please

A nurse stood at the end of Charles’s bed. Her veil was bright.

‘You’ve had flu.’ Her voice was a metallic clang. ‘And you’re not the only one. You’re in quarantine. You need to rest.’

He closed his eyes as a sour wave of fear rinsed him. He was filled with the horror of what he might have said.

Apparently he had been ill for a week.

He couldn’t say how much this news disturbed him.

‘A particularly nasty strain,’ said Soames, standing at the end of Charles’s bed. ‘Lost five patients to it already. You take it easy, old chap.’ He reached out and patted the taut cotton of his bedsheets. ‘Lucky you’re still here.’

Soames seemed pleasant enough. And yet. Charles thought he could detect something strained beneath his manner.

Lucky you’re still here.

What did he mean?

Did he mean Charles was lucky to be alive? Or lucky to be kept on at the asylum? And if the latter, then lucky to be kept on after … what?

He had only been drunk once, but this reminded him of that: the waking with no recollection of the preceding evening, the horror that he had said or done something appalling, which everyone had witnessed but himself.

He could remember everything clearly up to boarding the train to Leeds, but then, little more. According to the nurse who was looking after him, he was found ‘shaking and gibbering’ on the grass in the morning.

Shaking and gibbering. On the grass??

Was that, then, where he had spent the night? Had he lost control of himself completely? Of his bladder? His bowels?

Each time a nurse came to check on him, each question they asked –
Would you like some water? Would you like your pillows plumping? –
was infused with insidious intent, and whenever he saw two nurses speaking together, it seemed they were speaking about him.

He thought of that
thing
in the park (he could not call him a man). Had he gone to the police? He had not hurt him. Or not really. He had only given him what he deserved; the thing was depraved, and its mission was corruption.

Nothing that you don’t want.

Why had he said it? What did he mean?

When Charles remembered how he had raised his stick, how he had beaten him, how the man had cowered in fear, it brought on sweating fits, and when the sweating was past he was left shaking, bones clattering, rattled shingle on a beach.

As the days passed, he began to feel a little better. When he was well enough to sit, he propped himself on pillows and asked for books to be brought from his room.

He began to read. He re-read Tregold’s pamphlet. He read Dr Sharp’s
On the Sterilization of Degenerates
:

Dr Barr, in his work, ‘Mental Defectives’, says: Let asexualization be once legalized, not as a penalty for crime, but a remedial measure preventing crime and tending to future comfort and happiness of the defective; let the practice once become common for young children immediately upon being adjudged defective by a competent authority properly appointed, and the public mind will accept it as an effective means of race preservation. It would come to be regarded, just as quarantine, as simple protection against ill.

Charles made notes in the margin as he read, Darwin’s words echoing in his ears:

To stem the decadence of the nation … poor relief and charity … innate want of self-control … prevented from reproducing their kind.

The infirmary, with its clean lines, pleased him, its white sheets and its white floors and its nurses speaking softly and bringing tea and water and food. The words he read seemed to rise up with a new power in that clean, clear space. It was a cocoon, and he was a chrysalis.

He left the infirmary on a Friday afternoon. He had been given the weekend off. He was asked if he wanted to go home, to have two days’ leave instead of the usual one, to take some time away before resuming his duties, but the thought of visiting Leeds – even passing through the station, let alone walking those streets – brought on a revulsion so strong he feared a relapse. He did not want to visit Leeds again. Not for a long time to come.

After the high ceilings of the infirmary, his little bedroom seemed smaller than before. His sheets had been changed and a new blanket put on the bed, but otherwise all was as he had left it. His portraits on the mantel. His notes arrayed on his desk. He put his books back on the bookshelf and placed the grooved moor-stone beside them to prop them up.

He caught his reflection in the mirror and sucked in his breath in shock. His cheeks were concave, and his moustache, which had been trimmed for him in the infirmary, looked enormous, covering half his face. His dumb-bells were on the floor beside the fireplace, and he bent to one, curling it tentatively towards his chest. It felt twice as heavy as before. He put it back and came to sit on the bed.

Two whole days to himself. Two whole days in which he might do as he liked. What might a man do in two days? Take the train to Scotland. Hike in the Caingorms. See a Test match in Nottingham. Travel to London and visit the Wigmore Hall.

He did not want to do any of those things. His place was here.

Outside, he heard the clock strike six. It was a Friday. Soon, the patients would be getting ready for the dance. His violin stood in the corner, unplayed. Two weeks. When was the last time he had left it for so long?

He wanted to be amongst people.

He picked up his violin case and made his way downstairs.

As he walked the length of the empty ballroom, footsteps ringing on the wood, his legs felt weak, but it was a pleasurable weakness, as though he were young again, or reborn. He made his way around the back of the stage, climbed it and then stood, looking out over the vast, empty room.

He had forgotten how high the ceiling was. The arched windows were those of a cathedral, their brown and gold panels catching and filtering the afternoon light so it fell in warm pools on the floor. He moved so he was standing in a tunnel of golden luminescence and bent back his head, following the pictures on the glass: the sprays of bramble, the birds that seemed to flit from branch to branch. It was hallowed, magnificent. It may have been his mood, a strange mood, hollow and yet full, but he began to cry. Just a little. He wiped the tears away with his cuff.

He made his way into the wings and brought out a seat, setting it away from the front of the stage, and sat, hands resting on his knees, filled with a sense of peace. Soon the other players filed in. They looked surprised. Lifted their hands in greeting. Enquired about his health. Complained about the weather. Loosened their ties as they took their seats. He was there and he was not. The conversation swirled around his edges.

It was good to be here, to be amongst these people whom he knew.

‘We missed you,’ said Jeremy Goffin, as he took his seat.

Charles turned. ‘Did you?’ The comment bloomed in his chest. Smiling, he reached into his case and took out his instrument, but as he did so he caught something: a look exchanged between Goffin and Johnston, the clarinettist, a small smile. A
smirk.

The players began tuning up. The scraping of the strings was sandpaper to his nerves. A few minutes of holding the violin and already his arms were aching. He gritted his teeth. Sweat broke out on his brow. He took out his handkerchief, mopped at his face.

The patients began to arrive, first one, then two, then face after face trooping through the doors. So many. He had not thought there were so many. Hundreds of them, swarming over the floor. Where did they all come from? Were there usually so many as this? What if they came up here? Swarmed up to the stage, reaching where he sat, like vermin, like rats. He inched his chair further away from the front. Tried to concentrate on his violin, but he could not seem to get it in tune.

Look at them.

Grinning and gurning. Turning in circles on the floor. Jumping up and down and clapping their hands. Like children. Like stupid children. Like the idiots they are.

The men put their instruments in their laps, waiting for the dancers to be ready to begin. The light had shifted, the sun shining through lower panels now, and the room was cast in a woozy haze. Charles searched for Mulligan, at the back, in the shadows, where the light was cool: that was where he would be.

But Mulligan was not there.

Charles’s eyes raked the benches. The man was nowhere. He looked again, widening his search.

There.

At the front.

Charles stared. The man was transformed. His usual countenance had gone, the stone had dissolved and he was charged with something new. Mulligan’s body was held taut, his eyes sweeping the space before him; he was looking for someone too.

A throng of women arrived, the air pounding with their voices. Mulligan almost jumped to his feet; Charles saw the effort it took the man to hold himself back. His eyes scraped the women, following Mulligan’s gaze.

And then he saw … the small thing, the dark thing. Fay. Ella Fay. The Irishman’s eyes were fastened on her, and he was hungry, as though he might cross the floor and devour her. And now the girl had seen him too and the man’s face had changed. Softened. He looked … happy. Yes, that was it. Happy. It painted the air with its garish hue.

Who was he to be happy? This … man? He was not even a man. He was little more than a beast of the field.

And the girl … this
thing
. She had been one to haunt the shadows too, and yet here she was, taking her time in the sun as though it were her birthright, as though she deserved it, as though this whole spectacle – the ballroom and the carvings and the paintings and the fine Burmantofts work and the brambles and the ceiling reaching up, up into hazy space and the sun falling down, down, and lighting her,
lighting her
– was all here for herself and this man: a backdrop to their courting, to their
mating
, to their sordid match. A match forged here in this room, and this room, which not too many minutes ago had seemed to be a spacious cathedral, now appeared as nothing more than a stew.

Nausea gripped him. Before he knew what was happening he was on his feet.

‘Dr Fuller?’

It was Goffin. He was staring. ‘Are you ready?’

‘For what?’

Down on the floor the patients were paired up and they too were looking up at the stage, waiting for the music to begin.

‘It’s time for the waltz,’ said Goffin. ‘Are you sure you’re feeling well?’

‘I’m sorry.’ The tide of sweat broke again. ‘I am sorry. I am … not myself.’

He could not stay. Not in this rank, corrupted place.

He hurried away from the ballroom, down the endless corridors, out of the front entrance, stumbling over the grass to the Barracks, and once in his room, he locked the door and hunched over the chamberpot, put his fingers down his throat and vomited, again and again.

S
HE MOVED SLOWLY
, deliberately . As she dragged twisted cloth from the machines, she looked at her hands. Ordinary hands, rough hands, but they had not felt ordinary or rough that night. They had known where to go. How to travel across his skin. To read him. To understand.

And her own body – she had not thought she was capable of pleasure like that. Ella stared down at herself, encased in the heavy, black asylum uniform, and it was as though she carried a miracle beneath her clothes.

She looked up and jumped. Clem’s eyes were following her from across the room. Ella bent to gather up a rope of clothes and haul it out of the washing drum, as Clem crossed the floor towards her.

‘Here.’ Clem leant in and took the other side, helping her to unravel the knot. Ella kept her eyes down but felt Clem’s gaze spidering over her skin.

‘You look different,’ said Clem.

‘How?’ Ella risked a glance up. Could Clem see? Perhaps she could. Perhaps she could see right through her. Perhaps if you were to open her up then John would be there, tattooed across her insides, just like Dan Riley had his women on his arms.

Clem’s eyes narrowed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, then she lifted a sheet free from the tangle and cracked it open between her hands.

At dinner they sat in silence, but every time Ella looked up, Clem was still watching, an odd look on her face. At first it was laced with humour, but as the meal went on it grew harder, and the air between them became twined and tight. ‘You’re going to tell me,’ said Clem eventually. ‘You know that, don’t you? Whatever it is, I have to know.’

Ella felt a low panic in her gut; she couldn’t speak of it. Not yet.

In the afternoon, sitting in the day room, it was harder to avoid Clem’s accusing gaze, and so she closed her eyes and pretended to doze. It was so hot she slipped easily into sleep, not waking until the afternoon was almost past and it was time to eat. But at night, she lay awake long after everyone else was asleep. It felt safest to think of him then: the salt of his skin, the rake of his beard on her cheek. The places that his mouth had touched. She had not known what a hunger she had to be touched. His body – at first she had been shy of it, but then it was as though she were no longer there and something other than her was moving her hands, her fingers; someone who knew how to give pleasure, someone who knew how to take it.