The Ballroom (4 page)

Soames gave a small inclination of the head. ‘If I weren’t, Dr Fuller, I think I might come within its remit.’

Charles felt himself colour. ‘Of course, sir, I didn’t mean to suggest—’

‘Never mind, Fuller.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you. Well, I’m sure you’re also aware of the existence of the Eugenics Education Society.’

‘Indeed I am.’

‘Well, sir, I am a member and receive their quarterly review.’

A flicker of irritation crossed Soames’s face. ‘Where is this heading, Fuller?’

‘There is to be a Congress, sir, next summer, in London.’ Charles reached into his pocket, taking out the small piece of paper he had been carrying around for the last week, straightening it, laying it on the superintendent’s desk. ‘And, I … well … I had the idea that I might write a paper.’

The superintendent leant forward, peering down at the advertisement on the desk.

‘I thought I might use my new programme of music in the wards – trace its beneficial effect on the patients, so to speak. I thought, sir, with your permission I might—’

‘Fuller?’ The superintendent stared back up through his lenses.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘
You
may have time for idle musings on the very best manner in which to improve the lot of our patients, but I for one am too busy to countenance such diversions. May I remind you that you are not a man of leisure? If there are any further slips such as this last, then I will be forced to reconsider your position. At the very least I should be forced to conclude that the extra musical duties you seem so keen to perform and write about are detrimental to your role. So, please, no more talk of papers or congresses.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

‘And now.’ Soames swept his hand before him in the direction of the door.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Charles, when he had crossed the floor, but this time Soames did not look up.

O
NLY HER LEGS
were free. Those and her voice. At first she had kicked the door and shouted so hard she ripped her throat, before she slumped, head between her knees. Cold rose from the stone beneath her. A thin grey blanket was folded beside her, but with her arms tied like this there was no way of opening it out.

A sound came, as though someone was throwing themselves up against something soft, over and over again. Voices too, distant and thin like ghosts. On the way here there had been other doors, each with round holes in them, so other people must be here too, locked in their own damp cells. Was this where they had brought the old woman with the shawl? Was she down here now, rocking her woollen, holey baby to sleep?

Then, behind everything else came a deeper sound, a clanking, as though the building were a machine and she was near the heart of it: close to the workings, the grinding of its gears. She put her head back against the stone chill of the wall.

She had failed. For a brief green moment she had thought she was free, but she had failed.

Yesterday.

Was it only yesterday?

Ten o’clock in the morning. Spinning room number four, five floors up above Lumb Lane. A morning like every other in the twelve years she had worked there. They had just had their break, and her mouth was sour with the taste of tea and mash. She must have fallen asleep, because she was woken with the smack of the alley strap across her back.

‘Watch yer bleeding thread,’ the overlooker screamed in her ear.

Panic flashed through her. Fifty machines clattered. It could only have been a second.

‘Next time,’ the man’s lips said. ‘Next bloody time.’ Then he moved off with his strap down the row.

She tried to concentrate, but the threads thinned and blurred before her eyes. She could feel her head going again, nodding, as if she was a puppet someone was forgetting to hold up. Dangerous. It was dangerous to fall asleep. There was the sickly, animal smell of the wool. The scorched metal of the machines. Her eyes swollen and stinging from the lint.

She wished for air, but the windows were closed, clouded and mottled, and there was no way to see the sky.

She had asked once, on her first day there, when she was small and frightened and eight.

Why are the windows all covered up?

And one of the older girls who was showing her what to do – how to scurry on the slippery floor beneath the looms and tie the threads together and tuck your plaits in so your scalp didn’t get pulled off – had laughed and clouted her on the back of the head.
Why d’you think? You’re not here to admire the view.

So the windows were clouded in spinning room four, but there was nothing new in that. And the noise. She sometimes thought that was what the place made: noise and cloth, but mostly noise; so much it drowned your thoughts, so much you heard it ringing and buzzing in your ears all the way through your day off.

But yesterday morning Ella had looked around the room. Seen the children, with their pinched, frightened looks. Seen the older women, hunched over like half-empty sacks. The young ones steadying themselves against their frames as though offering themselves up in the din and the lint to the gods of spinning and metal and wool. She saw the life that was in them passing into the machines, as they gave themselves away in spinning room four. For what? For fifteen shillings at the end of the week and only all of the days to come while everything leached from you and falling asleep and getting beaten for it and the windows so clouded you could never see the sky.

She wanted to see the sky.

So yesterday, the same as every other day, but not the same any more, Ella slid a skep of empty bobbins out from under her feet, picked one up and launched it at the window beside her. The clouded glass shattered, and she stood, gasping – giddy with the cold slap of air. She could see the horizon beyond. The dark, crouched promise of the moor.

She turned, walking down the centre of that long room, past the gawping faces, past the machinery still going, going, heart racing, through the lint snowing around her head, and when she got to the door she began to run, down five flights of stairs, out into the yard, away from the gate, through the scrubby grass, and out the back way on to Lumb Lane. The day was bright and clear and cold. The street empty. The sweat drying on her face.

She lifted her brown, oily hands to the sky, as though seeing them in a dream.

Had she thought they would not come after her? They came though. Of course they came. Feet pounding on the metal stairs.

They called her mad when they dragged her off the street. Jim Christy, the pennyhoil man; Sam Bishop, the overlooker. Called her mad when they took her into a small room by the gate of the mill and she had screamed and kicked and spat. ‘What did you want to do that for, you mad bitch?’ And they might have been right, since she knew she had reached a point when she could stop, but then she was past it, way past it, and had become the screaming, become the kicking, become the spitting: a river that had burst its banks. She had hurt them, she knew that, could tell from the sounds they had made. Until a punch split her cheek and silenced her, and there was only the raw red beating of her blood. Until they chained her to a pipe and left her there.

But the feeling part of her was far away by then.

Then the men in uniforms came.

The light from the window turned on the ceiling, and the small room grew darker. Sounds faded as the night took hold. Fear crouched beside her in the darkness, ready to crawl into her lap.

She jostled herself to sitting. Rubbed her arms on the wall behind her so the pain might keep her awake.

She was here. Arms tied behind her back. Only the clothes she sat in left. There was a room in a house on a street in Bradford, with four narrow beds and a window over a yard; there was a change of clothes there, in that room she had slept in for the last year but which meant nothing to her. She would never go back there now.

She felt a power in her then. The same feeling she had in the mill, but now it took root, lifting her spine. It was dark, she was alone, but her blood was beating; she was alive. She would study it, this place, this asylum. She would hide inside herself. She would seem to be good. And then she would escape. Properly, this time. A way they wouldn’t expect.

Be good.

That was what her mother used to say to her –
be good –
pressing Ella’s face into her chest so she couldn’t breathe.

She knew about being good. Had known it since she was small. Being good was surviving. It was watching while your mother was beaten and staying quiet so you wouldn’t be next. Tucking in your plaits and shutting up and working hard.

Being good was outside only. It didn’t matter about the inside. That was something they could never know.

I
T WAS PAST
seven before he had finished his rounds, and as he made his way outside, night had fallen, blustery and cold. The family of rooks that made their home in the bell tower, disturbed by the weather, circled and called above his head. The wind had picked up and rain fell in small squally blasts. He was aware of a frayed, hangnail feeling as he set off across the damp grass. It had hung about him all day. He was glad to reach the low stone building that made up the male staff quarters. Inside, all was dark – it was a peculiarity of the asylum that there was no electricity, the junior attendants taking it in turns to light the gas. Often these buildings were the last to be lit. Charles groped his way down the murky corridor to his room, which was darker still. Closing the door behind him he fumbled for a match, striking and holding it to the gas sconce on the wall.

He breathed out as yellow light lapped on to familiar things: the mantelpiece with his charcoal sketches of the patients, a few small volumes of poetry, his desk, where his papers were stacked in a neat pile, the violin and music stand in the corner by the washbasin. He was in the process of transposing the aria from the
Goldberg Variations
from piano to solo violin, and the music, half finished, was laid out on the stand.

He shrugged off his rain-spattered jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. His fire, at least, had been lit for him and a good poke and a few lumps of coal roused it nicely. Easing his feet gratefully from his shoes, he unbuttoned his collar, laying it also over the back of his chair.

At the corner of his desk was a heavy palm-sized stone, grooved with markings, with a small depression at its centre – a relic of one of his walks on Rombald’s Moor, that swathe of land whose heights lay due west of here, named for a giant whose path across it was said to have left great granite stones in its wake. He picked it up, letting its cool weight possess his palm, feeling the pressures of the day disperse.
Perspective.
That was what was needed. He had spoken too early. He would have to be more careful in future.

Sounds came from the room adjacent: the opening and shutting of a door and then muffled music. Charles smiled; Jeremy Goffin, practising his trumpet with the silencer in. It would be orchestra practice tomorrow night, and Jeremy was a charming new addition to the band, a young assistant from the Midlands, burly, built for the sports field and the restraint of troublesome patients, but with the sweetest and most disarming of smiles. Not, perhaps, the best of musicians, but Charles had made room for him nonetheless. A trumpet was rousing. Good for morale.

By now, with his five years of service and his promotion through the ranks, Charles could have chosen to ‘live out’, finding lodgings in the village, as many of the married men did, but, not being married, he saw no point in this. His hours were long and the Barracks, as the male staff accommodation was known, were only a short evening stagger over the grass. No call to waste money on rent when he was more than provided for here. Besides, he liked the room’s monkish charms, the excellent views of the sunset from its westerly aspect over the moor.

He cast a glance to the window, where the wind, fiercer now, threw itself against the glass. Sometimes, on rough nights like this, with the wind blowing and the moor so close, the asylum could feel like a place out of time, a place where the old gods might yet hold sway, but tonight, tucked here, with the sounds of Goffin next door, and his fire burning happily now, Charles was content.

Five years since he had first seen this room, five years since he had paced its limits – the whole not more than ten steps long and five steps wide. But what he had felt that first day was not confinement but liberation. He had
escaped.

As escapes went, it had been a narrow one; after four years of medical school, he had barely scraped his final exams, not nearly enough of a pass to take up the place at Barts his father had worked so hard to secure. He had been summoned home to Yorkshire.

The reckoning had come in the drawing room after supper once his tearful mother had taken her leave. His father stood before the polished fireplace. Charles, sitting before him, felt twelve again, his mouth tacky, lacking spit.

‘How has this occurred?’ His father’s jaw was clenched, hands clasped behind his back.

‘I don’t know.’ Pathetic. But it was the best he could come up with by way of reply.

But he did know.

Boredom. He had been bored. By turgid, indigestible tracts of information delivered by desiccated lecturers with half of the students asleep by the end. Lectures he skipped in favour of music practice or lunchtime concerts at the Wigmore Hall. Only Karl Pearson had interested him. Pearson, who stood at the front of the lecture theatre and studied his pupils like a hawk, who spoke of Malthus. Population. Empire. Disease. Charles still remembered the question Pearson had posed to the room:
I ask you, gentlemen, to consider, do we not take more care in breeding our animals than we do in breeding our men?

During his lectures, Pearson spoke of many things, but alongside the danger of the inferior man he spoke of the superior man and of the need for these superior men to
populate the world
, and Charles’s seat, over the months, had drawn ever closer to the front, so by the time the lecture series had finished he had an inviolate place towards the middle of the second row. Sitting there, listening to Pearson talk, it had seemed inevitable that he too would become one of these superior men; just by sitting close to him it would occur.