John Harwood: The Asylum

“Georgina! What are you doing?”

“I was only playing at charades, Mama,” I said lamely. I was not sure what charades were, but I knew that they involved pretending to be other people.

“But you were shouting at your own reflection, and calling it Rosina; you said you might have died.”

“She is only someone I made up, Mama; it was just a story I was telling myself.”

“Georgina,” she said, kneeling down, taking me gently but firmly by the shoulders, and turning me to face her, “I am not angry, but you must tell me the truth. This—what you were doing with the mirror—is not good for you. And what is this about dying? Is it to do with your falling off the wall yesterday?”

“Yes, Mama,” I confessed, and to turn my guilty thoughts away from the cliff, I proceeded to tell her all about Rosina, and how the idea of a sister had come to me from the mirror, and that Rosina was the bold and reckless one who had dared me to climb the wall, aware as I spoke that my mother was regarding me with deepening anxiety, until my voice trailed off altogether.

“But why did you name her Rosina?” she asked. There was a note of fear in her voice that I had never heard before.

“I don’t know, Mama,” I said helplessly. “It just—came to me.”

“I see,” she said, and was silent for a little. “Now, Georgina, you must not play this—this game anymore; it is bad for you, as I said. We need not trouble Aunt Vida, but I know that she would say the same. I shall ask Mr. Noakes to take away the mirror when he comes on Saturday, but meanwhile you must promise me not to do it again. If you are tempted, come and tell me; I promise I will not be cross. And if you are lonely, we must find you playmates; it will be much better for you to have real friends than—”

She did not finish the sentence. I did not think I had been lonely, but I agreed that I should like some real friends, and said that I felt well enough to come and do my lessons. Despite my promise, I tried once more to summon Rosina before the mirror was removed, but all I saw was myself, pale and uneasy, with a bruise upon my forehead. And though she pressed me no further, I was aware, for some time afterward, of my mother’s anxious scrutiny.

Though I kept well away from the edge after that, I soon forgot about Rosina, and even the terror on the cliff-face diminished in memory until it seemed no more than the shadow of a bad dream. But alone in the infirmary at Tregannon House—where I found myself sitting up again, with no recollection of having done so—it was my mother’s reaction that came back to haunt me. Why had she been so alarmed? Had she thought Rosina was some sort of ghost? Could I have had a sister who had died? No; she would surely have told me.

Madness in the blood, however, was a very different matter. Of course she would have kept it from me, even if—perhaps especially if—she had feared that my fascination with the mirror was the first sign of its coming out in me.

Apart from Aunt Vida, the only relation I had ever met was her elder brother, my great-uncle Josiah, who used to come to us every two or three years for a week in September. He was younger than my aunt but looked much, much older: completely bald, except for a thin fringe of white hair at the back of his skull, and so stooped over that I used to think he must be a hunchback. He had a white moustache, and a narrow, projecting jaw, which, with his stooped, wiry figure, gave him a distinctly simian air. He wore thick-lensed spectacles and used a magnifying glass for close work. His manner was always courteous, though very reserved; you could sit with him for a whole evening and realise at the end of it that he had scarcely uttered a word. There was—or so I felt as a child—a benign air about his silence; he would sometimes look up over his spectacles and smile faintly at me, but by the time I went to live with him, I cannot have been anything more than a familiar blur.

My mother’s father, George Radford, who had worked all his life at the Treasury, was the youngest of the three. Mama had talked quite freely—or so it seemed when I was small—about growing up in Clapham, telling me all about her brothers, Edgar and Jack (Mama had been the youngest by six years), and how handsome they had looked in their dress uniforms when they came to visit, tramping about the house in a great clatter of spurs and sabers, until they decided to go out to New South Wales and make their fortunes, and how Grandmama (whose name was Louisa) had missed them so much that she had gone to live in New South Wales, too. Mama had stayed in Clapham with Grandpapa, who had died soon after she married my father.

Mama herself had died before I came to realise that she only ever talked about her father or her brothers, repeating the same few comic stories about the scrapes they used to get into, whilst revealing almost nothing about herself. But from the caustic snippets Aunt Vida let fall in later years, I pieced together a very different version. Louisa Radford had been a vain, foolish woman who had led her husband a dog’s life (“poor George never had much backbone”) and doted slavishly on her sons, no matter how badly they behaved, to the exclusion of her daughter. Mama had been George’s favorite, and Louisa had resented her for it; my mother once told Aunt Vida that if she could have had one magical wish, it would have been for the power of making herself invisible whenever she chose.

Why Edgar and Jack had gone to Australia, my aunt professed not to know, beyond hinting that they had left the army under some sort of cloud. Louisa insisted upon following them (“no more than they deserved”); but my mother refused to accompany her, and my grandfather George, taking courage from his daughter’s example, had refused to go either, and so the family split in two. According to Aunt Vida, Louisa had never written to my mother again.

The only likeness my mother had kept was a miniature of her own grandmother—her father’s mother, whom she had never known—it showed a fair, pretty young woman with her hair elaborately curled, but gave no sense of her personality. The miniature lived in Mama’s jewel box, along with a wonderful array of rings, pendants, beads, bracelets, necklaces, and earrings—nothing of any value, she said, but to me a treasure-trove. Her one truly precious possession was the brooch her father had given her when she came of age; she discovered after he died that he had paid a hundred pounds for it, far more than he could really afford. It was a dragonfly in silver and gold, less than two inches across, with rubies for eyes and a larger ruby, surrounded by clusters of tiny diamonds, set into each of its four wings. There were even smaller diamonds studded along its slender tail; its delicate legs and feelers were made of pure gold, and when Mama pinned it on her dress, the long gold pin was completely hidden; the dragonfly seemed to have settled upon her breast.

About my father I knew even less. I had never seen a picture of him, either, and I had only the vaguest idea of what he might have looked like: bearded—but so were most men—with brown hair—like most men; tall, but not especially tall; handsome, but not in any particular way. As a child, I had simply accepted whatever Mama had told me, which was mostly about their life in London when they were first married, and especially about his work amongst the poor of Clerkenwell, and what a good and kind and conscientious doctor he had been, but somehow these conversations had left me with very little impression of him. Papa’s parents had died, she said, before she had met him, and if he had had brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts, she had never mentioned them. For all I knew to the contrary, his entire family might have been locked up in Bedlam.