by Anna Vaught
Violet, enough of those digs at me. At Sam.
I am sorry; I should not make that frayed old joke. Not-joke. I make it to you, Lucia, here, through the walls, about the Irishman and about the waiting she will do, as happens in that godawful play of his—though I do see in it a helpful metaphor for this place. Her father is gone, but Nora, Mother, will come; Oh yes, she says, she will come, she will come, though I don’t know how, and it will be changed and He, Sam Beckett, will come and I will leave here and speak French and eat olives and good bread and sausage and drink wine and my sleep will be natural, there in the streets and in the long grass. Me, dancing. Oh yes. Then I’m so strong. And there will be trains to glide away and Giorgio will come and Mother—but of course, oh yes, yes, she is dead—and the ghost of Father to thank me again and again for The Wake—Lucy Light, Muse, I, always! The Irishman will leave his Frenchwoman and He will love only me and see that He was wrong; it wasn’t just my father, genius and the sun to orbit. Ah no, I think Lucia would say in that thick voice of hers. Not like one of us, one of ours is it? Voice dipping and sweeping low, gutturals like furrows, but still the cast in her eye spellbinding. Did you know that St Lucy, for whom she was named, is the patron saint of the blind?
I was taking notes, all right, but I said to her, I shouted at her: Shut up, shut up. You are laughing at me, my Lady, and I will cry and scream, because who would not. I hate you now. Doing my voice, hearing you pretend to be me, recite the things I said or want to say!
But she’s right. She shouts now: You’ve got to get this out, dear girl, if you’re to have a chance at freedom—and oh yes, she’s right.
Violet continues. God, I am coming to love her now. She says: Lucia, I have seen many things. Once, in the crepuscular hour, I swear I saw you, Lucia/Lucy with wings, gliding like an angel. I think I have that right. Lux. Light. But you, as I, have been in darkness. And anyway, we’re lunatics: you’re a walled-up martyr to your family and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. Drenched in phenothiazines, the new things. Sedated, hypnotised, trying to scream at the bars and the faked-freedom open doors on the lifts, but unable to because they stopped it up, that proper wail. I heard on the grapevine that people are starting to witter about you, even write about you. Say that you’ve had the celebrity treatment because you hobnobbed with Jung and some say you’re schizophrenic and others that you’re just hopelessly sad, locked in: lost.
I say: I am coming to love you and writing this down, but shut up shut up shut up because its pain is almost intolerable.
Violet is in tears as she thinks about her father and the outside world and the loves that died. She cries: And I am not a bride and so my father is not there and really I was telling only about what I can see here, through the ochre bars, and they are lime trees and I know that, under their leaves, life clings tenaciously in the ladybird larvae in their shade and so the leaves are sticky and the little life is hidden there, baby bigger than its mother, its father, then smaller again and pretty, so tiny, but diminished in size as it grows in strength and stature, as I am myself diminished, and never was a big thing to them, or Father or Mother, the man I shot. I will die here. I know it now. It is my forever. But Lucia, do you want it to be your forever, too?
Oh dear girl; dear sweet girl. I am rambling. Apologies to all. Am I worthy of staying the Honourable?
I do wonder, Violet. And the thought of St Andrew’s being my forever, now what choice do I have? That is what I say. I, Lucia.
She smiles at me, wry old bird and laughs: And yet. And yet. I see possibilities, even now.
You know, Lucia, that I can hear you muttering sometimes? You say, Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui lætificat juventutem meam and I think, Psalms. Then I think, is she just finishing the line in Ulysses or is she going somewhere, hands outstretched to our God? You cry for your daddy, say that he is the light, that you are his wonder child. Momentarily, he warms any memory of your destitution; I hate to hear it, that sorrow. And I wonder: would he have allowed this? I’ve been a bit disappointed in fathers. In families, I must say.
As for me, my coat is desiccated, but warm. I am sure they have disinfected it. Do they think I have lice? Am unclean, to be shovelled off? Boiled up, even?
Oh God, she’s off again:
Footfalls.
Sometimes I think I am being buried—under smells that I did not make and were pressed upon me and on my clothes by others.
The sheets are stretched linen, like corpse skin, brushed by imaginary lavender; really-there hard carbolic. But my imagination is deft and clever, for living in this country in our heads is how we survive. I am looking at the building now and I can tell and feel the old moss of walls, clover and summer sweet; a beautiful green summer world to go tumbling in, but so long ago now, in Ireland and my home. Oh: I can feel the soft places behind the sand dunes in France and the pretty foliage in London parks. I can feel the shape of a gentle breeze bringing the wide world in—such bold corn and wheat in the antiseptic corridor, oh and I know, as they cannot, that the pills, so elaborate, of morning and evening are like little buds and buttons in autumn; or pebbles on a summer beach; red pyracantha for the winter birds: the winter song of the robin, for sure, as he rattled once outside my window at home in Ireland.
As we make our way inside, a nurse goes down the corridor. Time for the drugs. She has jangling keys, later. There are some tough tools in this place. Time for your medicine she says to one who dribbles and maffles so. It’s Miss Drool, who gets on my nerves: cannot abide madfolk. And I put my hand out to Violet and say: I am sorry, Violet. What’s happened to us. And what will have happened to those other women you mentioned, women of the not so distant past.
And she says, Oh Lucy Light, I am sorry too and sorry that I reach this pitch and the words come and they come, like a big knife, a cleaver, coming down; Abraham and Isaac: sacrifice your child for me like the page in my Bible, always open on my desk; evidence, that was. Violet is mad they said—the cleaver; the child; the father; the God—and look, this was her idea: Il Duce, glamour and badness, crucify him and come at him deft and young with a cleaver and they said I had no plan and bound me over and took me away and I am here and it is my forever and the whole world is dirty. Rot.
Was Lucia, were you, sacrificed, too?
I’m sorry. I must calm down. I am sometimes mute for long periods (Lucia you are too, I know) and so when the words come, it is like a torrent. I think maybe I sound a bit like an echo of Joyce, although I’m a simpleton, not the genius he was, yes? You think? We could have met, you know, at Howth, my fellow countryman and I, all those years blown back. He wasn’t an aristocrat of course, however well he might have written.
To this I say, Enough Lady Gibson.
Ah, God love you, Lucia, dear, dear girl. Do you know that I heard you muttering the other week; half sibilating, half singing: Will you miss me more and more as the winding weeks wing by? I think (you see, I read, I read), that this is from Finnegans Wake but that you’ve changed it. Why? Are you not allowed to speak it? Has someone forbidden you? Or do you not remember it right? You drag on your Lucky Strikes: I will wear a rose in my hair! Yes, a flower of the mountain and visit the azure houses... with their gentian gardens... I don’t think that’s how it went. Ulysses, this. Drawing to its close. But hard to tell.
That’s enough about me, Lady Gibson. Enough of the Joyce family analysis.
And what of me, of my story?
Well now, I am history!
In 1932, when I had been here five years, a song came on the radio. I always had my little radio and my books and papers. I always kept abreast of current affairs knowing that if I didn’t, I’d as well be dead. And as I was saying, I heard Flanagan and Allen singing Underneath the Arches. Oh, how lovely. And there, in the song, was a spoken piece:
Do you remember when we first sang it? says Allen.
Yes, Ches. We used to sit on a seat with the Thames Embankment beh
ind us. You had a newspaper and read the headlines.
And they read. Gertrude Ederle, eighteen-year-old American. First woman to swim the Channel… Ashes for England after fourteen years… Irish woman, Violet Gibson, shoots Mussolini in the nose.
Ah, I was history, recorded history as, downstairs, my notes were updated and they wrote dangerous, suicidal or persecution complex, the last of which arose because I was angry at being detained in a mental hospital with all the shufflers. Ha! I know I am not always the kindest, but you would have to agree that not everyone is immortalised in a song. I turned up the radio, over the rattling of the drug trolley doing its rounds over uneven parquet floors, and got detention.
Violet Gibson shoots Mussolini in the nose.
The injured man forgave me, of course, old crone. Worthy only of his pity. Il Duce. 1926. I heard he wanted to be crucified by a pretty girl, a pretty end for a master, a martyr; got off on it, they said, in language I would not use. It was a passion narrative. Edgardo Sulis: that was it. Described the Duce’s parents as Mary and Joseph in regard to Christ. And the children in some schools across Italy were forced to learn their parody creed. I heard it as I prayed and thought that Christ wept; Mary, too.
I believe in the high Duce—maker of the Blackshirts—and in Jesus Christ his only protector—Our Saviour was conceived by a good teacher and an industrious blacksmith and on and on and He is seated at the right hand of our sovereign—from there he has to come and judge Bolshevism and on and on and I believe in the wise laws... the... the... the resurrection of Italy—the eternal force. Amen.
All I did was graze his nose and they bound me up, poor shot, and that cell, at the prison in Rome, was damp and endless; the rats screamed and came for my old feet and then they hurt me and I said But you always knew it was me and they, though I’m not sure who, spat in my face and kicked me and I was bloodied and wet and asleep, which then was natural. And they bound me again and brought me here, to a third country, my forever home. I am not saying I was all good and sometimes I did tell lies and make bad confession. But I did not blaspheme. I did not dirty the Passion nor the Creed. I did not spit on the Psalms, either.
Nurse Archer calls to us: Lady Gibson, Miss Joyce, it is rest time dears, but there is no dear in her voice; it says, really, baggage and curse—and I don’t like it anyway: too familiar. Rest is what a child does, when it’s overwrought—yet just for a moment I know I will try, from my unnatural sleep, to come up shiny and bathed, wash up clean from the pretty water; and there will be love and friends and a new dress and the church walk and father will be there and sure he will look at me for then I am the pretty, pretty thing. I do dream about such. I know Violet does, too.
Lady Gibson, Miss Joyce, I quite clearly told you it was BEDTIME, dears. Do you hear me? Please do as you are asked.
Who does she think she is? Perhaps I’ll pull rank, says Violet, then: Lucia, dear dear girl, you are the only one here who would understand me.
Doctor Griffith has allowed us to sit together in a corner of the day room (the parlour they call it; more homely, I gather). It was the quiet time of day before wash and bed when we were supposed to be calm and exchange greetings with the others; to pick up one of the books there or do a jigsaw—but tonight we could just sit. A tear rolled down my cheek because that was all we had to do, friends. Violet told me. About her bed and her past; how she would play with her dolls house and imagine she inhabited it and was safe in Lilliput. How, when she looked at the clean, plain blankets on her hospital bed, she would think of these other things. She said, You know, tonight I was looking at the blankets on my bed and then I saw the counterpane of childhood there. My rocking horse in a corner; the gabled dolls’ house with the porcelain blancmanges and plates of ham and salad, shiny and always perfect. And the tiny people, busy and at home in beds and drawers and on the stairs and happy wherever they were which was where I had put them. Can you imagine? Blancmange and legs of ham and salad for breakfast, if you wanted! Did you have such things, girl?
I said, No, my life was so wandering, a dolls’ house would have been too big. I remember books, a little bag of stuffed and quilted things; bracelets. That is all.
And on Violet goes, pressing my hand: But I was saying, the counterpane on the high gabled iron bed, with lavender bags from my mother hung at each apex, each nadir. So pretty. On the counterpane of childhood, I could trace loops and countries; I imagined the grouping hoops like wedding bands, double wedding bands, true love. It was my country of hope, not the tree of you didn’t, a flower of you weren’t, you sang when you shouldn’t, you are, you will be, dirty old rat-bitten crone. La la la. The rings had little bells, such sweet bells and violets, my name, my friends cupping and cradling the bells and so I would lounge in this country and it was big, beyond anything our eyes can see. And then the universe was not malicious; it was at worst benign, maybe laughing and with us, not at us, life, death and other tuppenny aches. The fuss, the bother and trouble. So, I was looking at my bed, tonight, St Andrew’s not the garden in Ireland (oh but of course you knew) and seeing a counterpane above the boiled grey blankets, felted with the hard wash and the stretched linen corpse sheets. I hate them beyond expression and into silence.
But I am being bad. I promised to be a good girl.
You know, they could have hanged me, out there, in there; instead this incarceration and boiled wool beds and corpse linen. But Il Duce, grazed by my bullets, he thought he would live forever. I thought of Ozymandias, trunkless legs lost to sand and a wind-blown inscription,
They hung the man up by his heels, the man I shot; he never expected that. They never do, you know!
Lucia, dear girl, dear silly girl, let us talk about you. I have heard whispers from the walls. I am not supposed to know. It’s said that you have been rubbed out. Your letters gone; records destroyed, gone to dust. Burnings. Everyone has forgotten, you poor thing. You had no gun. It is not right. I want to give something to you.
I wonder what. Who loves me, really? I think she’s come to the same pass.
And then Violet says, Ah, but we will fly: I have a plan. A sort of trip for mad women like us. I want to save you.
Save you.
Saving Lucia. I like the ring of that.
And that phrase of hers, it awakens something in me; I cry at its tenderness and my words to her come in a jumble: Father said my body would not could not dance. He was a genius, I know, they say, they know. He said I was good, I wanted ballet, but my body was stiff and cold; I couldn’t do. So he said; so he told them. I left. Draw, write. The Wake. Tried to draw pretty things for his Pomes Penyeach. I was good at lettrines, don’t you know? The talk between us, it wasn’t so much, just knowing: nods and sighs, a sort of argot. But not so much. I murmured and said I wanted something that was mine but he wanted to look after me. Moulding. Mother did not come again—not after the first time. She forgot me after France, after Ivry, after the first time in the straitjacket. There were men, before, there was Him. Sam. You know who I mean, clever lady. He was also a genius. Left, too. He saw the world for what it was: bad tallow and ashes. But did you know him, in Ireland, or was He gone to Paris then?
That was all a jabber but, as Violet said before, it had to come out.
Violet says, Girl, speak roundly, speak softly: speak like a lady, please!
And:
It is not fair, what they have done. Lucia Joyce, they made you not exist, out there. If I were not here, it would go on. But I am here. I cannot help everyone, but…
Again, I feel like a door has opened. I haven’t been able to speak, poisoned by loneliness and out in a gush. And I haven’t been able to cry. Violet says it’s the same for her, because there is no cry left.
Now it’s almost nightfall and tomorrow, there will be a morning. In a lunatic asylum, time shifts and slides; here are elisions and confusions, but you know it’s the middle of the day because it’s tapi
oca, and tapioca is a lunch pudding. I swear they’ve taken the clocks down and of course some of these crazies don’t even notice the appearance of the tapioca. As I told you at the beginning, divisions of time cease to have meaning. But to be aware, if you can, feels like a tiny piece of freedom.
Violet whispers: Lucia, I think that you are clever; incandescent, really. It is a torment. Jigsaws, crochet, little walks. We both dodge those things. Yes, I think you are terribly clever and that you have been cast out and made to stop what made you stridently, ragingly alive. We push our collars up, against the cold, and we go Outside. They must be letting us, because this isn’t really allowed, mad with mad. You’re in full view of the nurse now. Someone is supposed to be with me, at all times, because I am on suicide watch. And of course, I am a killer. A bad shot, but still a killer. So they are watching. Through a squint, or perhaps I have misunderstood the dimensions of this world and I am in a panopticon.
On, Lucia.
They’d not locked the doors yet and we sneak out in the purple twilight.
I extend a hand and the passerines come and the air is lyrical with rushed beauty. Small miracle: a nuthatch. Seemed like that tiny bird whispered to her. Passerines, she and I.
Back in. Before they see.
One day, because this is our forever place, she and I will be under the sod, near each other; there’s no way around it. Northamptonshire is not a place I know; I have never seen it. But we have things we both know, in this hard barren place of boiled wool and no-hope where we have been left. You, my darling, are a mountain in that small body, old before young, screaming poetry, talking about Giottos and I wail with The Wake and the dancing vocabulary which was once precious.
Violet says, like a prayer, an invocation, Come to us, passerines. Soon enough, we will come with you.
Oh yes. We rush inside, excited.
Where are Violet and Lucia, Nurse Archer? Are they accounted for? It’s not exactly scientific, but at my desk just now I thought... I sensed a disturbance
