The Ballroom (27 page)

She turned on to her back and almost cried out. A figure was standing at the foot of her bed, a dark mass in the shadow of the night, and for a strange, vivid moment she thought it was him, until she heard Clem’s voice. ‘Move over,’ she hissed, ‘and let me in.’

She moved to make room, and Clem slid under the thin cover beside her. The bed was so narrow it was impossible not to touch, and as Clem wriggled to find space Ella could feel the length of her, the sharp edge of her hip jutting up against her own. ‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’ Clem whispered. ‘You’ve been with John.’

Ella could still smell him, a low, rousing animal smell. Lying here like this, she was sure Clem must be able to smell him too. She nodded into the darkness.

‘Oh.’ Clem’s hot breath touched the skin of Ella’s neck. ‘I
knew
it. I could tell.’

Beside them Old Germany moaned, and a thin spatter of words peppered the air. Both girls stiffened until she was silent again. This time, Clem spoke just on the edge of hearing. ‘Why didn’t you
tell
me?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Ella’s heart began to race. ‘I just … didn’t know how. Not out there. It’s all right now though,’ she said quickly, and then wondered if it really was.

‘Did you let him kiss you?’

His lips, tracing the skin on her arms, her legs, her stomach. Her breasts. The blue, not-quite-dark warmth of the night.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’ Clem’s voice caught in her throat. ‘And … what else? Did you do anything else?’

She had to close her eyes as the force of it rose in her, and she was liquid again; this was how it had been: as though she were able to take on different forms, become an animal, a rising swarm of feeling, as though she were herself but not herself, something beyond, and he were something other too.

But all of this was impossible to say.

She could feel Clem beside her though, breath held, hungry for the scraps.

‘Tell me, Ella,
what did you do
?’

Still Ella did not speak, but Clem seemed to understand and gasped then, her breath coming faster, as though she were struggling to catch it. ‘Oh! Did it hurt? Was there blood?’

‘I think so. I don’t know. But then …’

‘What?’ The whole length of Clem’s body was pressed up tight against Ella’s now. ‘Tell me.
What?
’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know how to say it … it was …’ She couldn’t find the words and knew, in the end, that she didn’t want to. Not pour it into words, where it might harden and set, where it could be given a name.

She felt trapped, Clem here, too close, her breath too hot, her need too strong. They both lay, breathing fast under the heavy blanket of the night air, until Clem gave a small unsatisfied sound, part anger, part hurt, and slipped away again as quietly as she had come.

Ella turned on to her side, hunched on the edge of the thin mattress, a thick black band tightening around her heart. Without Clem’s help none of it would have happened; she should have given her more. But what? How could she share something that she could not compass herself?

A
T NIGHT, HE
dreamt of rivers, of tides, of monstrous waves, and there was a man, one who menaced him, who stood in the shadows and watched. When he woke, Charles felt as though he had hardly slept at all. Sometimes, if he turned too quickly as he went about his day, he saw this shadow man, a blurred grey figure just at the edge of sight. He knew it was that
thing
from the park, showing him he was not yet clean. Not yet as pure as he might be. And he knew whatever it was that thing in the park had seen in him, he must erase it, and then the man would disappear. Thus he had a new list with a new title:

Cleanse.

1. If ragtime is redolent of depravity I will not play it. Ragtime belongs in Mazeland and Mazeland, like Louisiana, is full of swamps.

2. I will not think of the young man in Spence’s again.

3. The issue of Miss Church. I have been lax in addressing the question of her books.

4. The future of the hospital. Sterilization? Mulligan. Ella Fay.

The first item on the list was easy; at the earliest opportunity he gathered in the sheet music for the rags. Goffin may have looked a little sheepish, but there was no objection amongst the players, and later that day, crouching before his empty grate, Charles crushed the pages into balls and burnt them. It was a small blaze and did not last for long.

He ceased playing piano in the day rooms. The ridiculousness of the act struck him anew. What had he been hoping to achieve? Some sort of
therapy
? The notion was laughable; as though Mozart and Chopin and Schubert might somehow cure these people of their hereditary taint. Galton was right, Pearson was right, Churchill was right: moderation in these things was the road to ruin.

And really, Charles thought, as he went about his rounds, he owed Mulligan a debt. If it weren’t for the man’s actions on the cricket pitch, he might never have seen sense. The incontinent and the intemperate must be brought to heel. It was manifest everywhere; everywhere he saw people unable to hold themselves back. Last week, for instance, during his rounds of the women’s day rooms, he had been accosted by an old, toothless crone who wore her hair in bunches like a child.

‘Why don’t you play?’ Her voice was plaintive as she gripped him by the arm: ‘Why don’t you play for us any more?’ He had tried to prise her off, but her grip was surprisingly strong, and as she pulled him towards her he was enveloped in her mephitic stench of urine and decay.
Because you are vermin
, he wished to say.
Because you are old and useless and are not fit to live.
But he did not say this, since he himself could be temperate, he himself was a rational man. He shook her off and pulled himself up. ‘I am sorry.’ He straightened his jacket. ‘I’m afraid I no longer have the time.’ At this she began to cry, long and keening, before putting her hands over her eyes, throwing herself on the floor and fitting like a child. The nurses were soon upon her, however, and before long had her taken out and put her in the sleeves.

As Charles made to leave the room, he saw Miss Church, sitting very still, watching him, a book held open in her lap.
Miss Church
was number three on his list, but there was nothing to say they should be tackled in order. He crossed the room towards her. She seemed to shrink a little as he came near. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Church. May I ask what is it you are reading?’

‘It’s … just a novel.’ She gathered the book closer to her body.

‘May I see?’

She passed it over with visible reluctance. He felt her eyes on him as he flicked through its pages. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘My father.’

‘Indeed.’ Charles smiled, closing the book carefully. ‘I wonder, would you mind terribly if I borrowed it for a while?’

He could see her wishing to remonstrate, could see the conflicting emotions play out across her face, but he did not wait to see them resolve; instead, he thanked her, tucked the book beneath his arm and went on his way.

The next day he paid a visit to Soames’s office.

‘This was found on Miss Church’s person yesterday.’ He placed the book on the table between them, before laying out the information as plainly as he could: education had taken over Miss Church’s body; even as they spoke it was laying waste to her organs of reproduction and of sense. From his very first readings of her notes it had been clear to him: she did not belong in this environment, but in living here for so long she had become an
antisocial unit.
She needed to understand the
true realities and duties of life
; only when this occurred would she be ready to be returned to her home. In brief, it was simple:
Miss Church should be deprived of her books.

There was a pause in which the superintendent weighed the offending book in his hands and then opened it, letting it fall where it would and reading, as though in an act of bibliomancy, as though the answer might be found in its words, before looking up again.
‘
All right, Fuller,’ he said, a little sadly. ‘Consider it done.’

Charles nodded. He drew himself up to his full height, hands clasped behind his back. ‘There’s something else. You were right, sir. I’m afraid the double post is too much for me. Especially since my illness. I need to conserve my strength. Therefore, I wish to resign the post of bandmaster.’

Soames looked surprised. ‘If you’re sure, Fuller?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘Well, we cannot appoint someone else now, not when it’s …’ Soames plucked irritably at the collar of his shirt, ‘not when it’s so hot.’

Charles had thought of this: ‘May I suggest, in that case, that the dances are suspended for the remainder of the summer? It makes most sense, does it not, for everyone’s sakes, to reconvene when the heat is a little more tolerable?’

‘Indeed.’ Soames looked relieved. ‘Quite so.’

As he spoke, Charles felt as though he was shedding skins. He felt infinitely lighter as he left the sombre, dark-panelled room behind.

He avoided the other men in the corridors. His contact with the staff was almost nil. At lunchtime he sat alone, scribbling into his notebook, and then after tea took himself upstairs to carry on his reading and note-taking undisturbed.

There
would
be a paper for the Congress. But it would be a markedly different paper from the one he had set out to write.

Even if there had been time for conversation, he had begun to see how inferior most of his fellow workers were: Goffin, for instance, who had stopped him in the corridor the other day and asked him straight why it was he had cancelled the rest of the season’s dances.

‘I thought that we were all getting along rather well.’ The young man’s head was bowed, hands thrust in his pockets, shuffling his feet like a naughty schoolboy. ‘In the band, that is.’

He had put on weight, Charles noted, and a heaviness hung about his jaw. In five years’ time, in ten, his moment would be past. He would have lost whatever fleeting attractiveness he had once possessed. Was this really the young man whose comments had so wounded him?

‘I’m sorry,’ said Charles briskly, ‘but music resides in Mazeland, and I no longer dwell there. I have found my way out of the labyrinth. I have found my way home.’

Goffin stared, eyes popping, then nodded in a brief, frightened fashion before hurrying away.

Charles’s violin sat silent and unplayed in the corner of his quarters. Each night, instead of practising, he sat at his desk and wrote. He was composing a letter to Churchill:

I see now, Home Secretary, that you are right. Sterilization is the only true course. It is a service, an
inoculation for Empire
. Without it, we will be overrun. My own experience bears this out. I, too, have been cloistered in here. I have believed that if we kept our lunatics safe, apart, and well fed, that with our home farms and our dances and our sports days and our musicals and our Mozart in the day room for half an hour every Monday we might also do them good.

I see now that my thinking was all the wrong side up. In keeping them here, in treating them well, we have cosseted them. We should be another Sparta, but since we cannot in all conscience leave children on the moorside to their fate, we should do the next best thing and prevent them from ever being born. It is a simple enough operation.

And here is the beautiful thing, the magnificent thing, the thing of which I know you are abundantly aware – these people will be
better off
.

Let the poor breed fewer and more productive members of society. Think how many problems this would solve at a stroke! Poverty would be halved – there or thereabouts.

I see now, Home Secretary, that it is the only
rational course
.

He read back over what he had written; the question of poverty was a salient one, the country appeared to be teetering on the verge of collapse. Every day the headlines in
The Times
grew more alarming. The strikes were spreading – millions of men were reported to have downed tools across the south-east of England.

Medicines were in short supply. The patients were faring badly in the heat. Despite regular cups of water, many of them had the red crusty tongues of early dehydration, the death toll had risen sharply, and many amongst the oldest patients seemed to be giving up. Only yesterday, Charles had visited the storeroom for some bromide only to be told by the chemist that there was none ‘until further notice’.

‘What in God’s name can you mean?’

The man had opened his hands and shrugged. ‘The strikes, Dr Fuller, the strikes.’

The leader articles were growing increasingly alarming, yesterday’s stating the country was ‘
in imminent danger of famine
’.

The whole thing is as insanely foolish as it is wicked. The trade union leaders talk of putting an end to poverty. Are they really so hopelessly ignorant as to imagine that destroying property, stopping trade and dislocating the whole machinery of civilization is the way to benefit the poor?

Thank God for self-sufficiency. Thank God for six thousand acres and flocks of cattle.

Still, there was half the milk there had been this time last month; there was hardly any grass left on which the cows might graze.

On Friday, at the time when the dance would ordinarily have been taking place, Charles found he did not want to be in the asylum and so walked to Ilkley instead, and then up on to the moor from there.

A strange sight greeted him: the fields were blackened with people lying in the grass – whole families, it seemed, asleep in the sun, the one beside the other. As he passed through them, taking the path up on to the moor, Charles stopped, approaching a grey-haired man who was sitting a little way apart from the rest. ‘Where have you all come from?’

‘Bridlington.’ The old man looked exhausted. ‘But there’s no trains coming back to Bradford, and so we have to walk. We’re resting a while with the little’uns before carrying on.’

He seemed to be the only person awake of the twenty that Charles counted lying in that field. He was glad to get beyond them and begin his climb; there was something sinister about them, lying there in their black clothes, as though a factory floor had been shaken out. He was glad too when he reached the ridge line to see he was the only vertical figure across that great mass of moor.