John Harwood - The Asylum

“And of course the house—the original part, where I grew up—was built nearly eight hundred years ago. Nobody lives there anymore. I would find it oppressive, even now; to a small boy it was profoundly so.”

I shuddered, imagining lunatics shrieking and clashing their chains in the night.

“Oh, it was not the patients,” he said, seeming to read my thought. “They were never kept in the old house. The voluntary patients have always lived in the middle wing, where we are now—it was added early in the seventeenth century—and those confined under a certificate are all in the new building, farthest away from the original house. No, it was—well, I suffered very badly from night terrors, and the housekeeper we had then—Mrs. Blazeby, her name was—used to play upon my fears, telling me bloodcurdling stories of ghosts until I did not know whether I was more afraid of falling asleep or staying awake. A house as old as that is never entirely still, even in the dead of night, with a myriad of tiny creatures gnawing away at the fabric, not to mention—”

He stopped abruptly, colouring.

“I do beg your pardon, Miss Ferrars—most inconsiderate of me.”

“You needn’t apologise; I am not afraid of mice, or rats, if that is what you mean. But did you ever—have you ever seen a ghost?”

His reply was forestalled by Bella coming to remove the luncheon tray. The sight of her evidently reminded him of something; he started and drew out his watch.

“I am terribly sorry, Miss Ferrars, but I have a duty to attend to; I had quite forgotten. It will take me about half an hour; but if you are not too tired, would you care to remain here by the fire? Then we could continue our conversation; Bella will fetch you anything you need.”

I agreed at once, delighted by the prospect. Frederic hastened away, glancing over his shoulder as if to reassure himself that I had not vanished the instant his back was turned. Bella, who seemed to be trying to repress a smile, followed him out.

As I watched them leave, I was overtaken by a sense of absolute unreality. It was exactly like the moment in a dream where you realise that you are dreaming, an instant before you wake. So vivid was the sensation that I held my breath, waiting for the room to dissolve, expecting to wake in my bed at Gresham’s Yard, or—please God—in my room at the cottage, with my aunt and my mother talking quietly at the far end of the hall.

The smoke-stained walls did not dissolve; the watery light at the window did not fade; the soft creak and trickle of the coals went on. And yet my perception had changed as profoundly as if I had indeed woken to the sound of retreating footsteps. My breath came freely; I no longer felt as if I had swallowed a mass of frozen lead. Warmed by Frederic’s evident belief in me, I felt sure that the telegram was, after all, a mistake. I had never been left alone with any young man, let alone one so agreeable. It would be hard, I thought, to imagine two more different upbringings, and yet our conversation had flowed so freely; I could not help feeling that there was an affinity between us and that he was drawn to me as I felt drawn to him. He had been so open, so candid—and it was surely not just professional concern that made his colour change so frequently . . .

I realised with a start that I had almost forgotten I was in a lunatic asylum, waiting not just for Frederic but for Dr. Straker to return from London. The thought of Dr. Straker struck me like a dash of cold water. Why had he been so willing to believe that I was not Georgina Ferrars, even before the telegram had come?

It was now Saturday afternoon; Dr. Straker was due back on Monday. There was really no reason to doubt that he would release me—Frederic, for one thing, evidently admired him above all men—but all the same, just supposing something had gone wrong at Gresham’s Yard . . .

Frederic was the heir; he must have some authority here. When he came back, I would tell him I wished to leave at once, and ask him to lend me the fare home—which would give me an excuse to write to him. Of course he might refuse me, but I would be no worse off if he did. He might even offer to escort me back to London.

Imagining that prospect, I leant forward and stirred the coals, enjoying the warmth on my face and thinking how absurd my suspicions about madness in my family would seem to Frederic. The nearest I had come to acute melancholia was, I supposed, my grief for my mother, but I could not recall the actual emotion, only a vision of myself weeping, and of my aunt’s dry, stricken face as she sat beside me on my bed, awkwardly patting my shoulder; and how could this be a true recollection when I seemed to be looking down upon the two of us from somewhere near the ceiling?

There was also the time I remembered as “the estrangement,” for want of any better description. It came on so gradually that I could not say when it had begun; only that I became aware of it in the autumn, a few months after my aunt’s passionate outburst on the subject of Nettleford. It was as if an invisible film had come between me and the world; or as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope, except that instead of the people around me appearing physically smaller, it was my feeling for them that had grown distant and remote. The lines, “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?” were often in my mind.

I was not unhappy, at least not consciously so, only detached from everything and everyone around me. If anybody had asked me, I would have insisted that I did not love my aunt any less, but my heart was unmoved by the sight of her; I seemed to have lost the power of feeling. I sensed that she was uneasy about me, but I was afraid of hurting her, and there seemed to be some inward prohibition against speaking of it. And so, all that winter, I insisted that nothing was amiss; I was not even aware that my heart was slowly reawakening until the day, early in the following spring, when I realised I was my old self again.

It was then, for my sixteenth birthday, that Aunt Vida had given me the writing case, along with a journal in a slipcover bound in the same blue leather. “Think you should keep a diary. Never got into the habit myself. Often wished I had. Try to write something every day.”

I wondered if she was inviting me to speak of the estrangement, but still the strange prohibition kept me silent, and as a sort of recompense I began my journal that very night. I had never corresponded with anyone, apart from dutiful letters to my uncle, and I found the act of setting down my most intimate thoughts both unsettling and compelling. Until then, I had seldom remembered my dreams, but the more assiduously I recorded them, the more frequent and vivid they became. There was one in particular that recurred several times, in which I was moving from room to room, searching for my mother. There was no one else in the house, and the echoes of my footsteps sounded unnaturally loud. The dream always began on the ground floor, but as it went on, I realised, with a growing sense of foreboding, that every surface was covered in a layer of fine white dust. Sometimes the thought, But Mama is dead! would flash across my mind, followed an instant later by the realisation that I was dreaming; but in at least one such dream I continued on up the stairs, with the dust growing thicker at every step, until it rose up in a great choking cloud and I woke with a cry of horror.

A coal burst with a sharp crack and a shower of sparks. My writing case and brooch! “We’re all honest girls here, miss.” I remembered, with another stab of apprehension, Dr. Straker saying that I—or Lucy Ashton—had given my address as the Royal Hotel in Plymouth. Could I have left them there? Perhaps, now that I was calmer, I would begin to recall something of those missing weeks. I summoned all of my concentration, but still nothing would come, only a jumble of grey, featureless autumn days in my uncle’s shop, and then, with no perceptible interval, my awakening here in the infirmary.