by Anna Vaught
Actually dear, I did put that in the letter. It wasn’t really that hard, smiles the assassin.
We walk on. We’re beyond the gates. They haven’t seen us! Where next?
8
By means of the handsome new building, all patients who are recoverable are spared the distressing experience of being brought into contact with chronic cases, thereby lessening the danger of becoming permanently deranged.
Material circulated at the opening ceremony of the new reception hospital building, St Andrew’s, October, 1927
I, Lucia, am writing, still; you are reading, still. I am so glad. Tell me, can you begin to see her, Violet, as she was? She’ll be here. Here. With us. Dancing and storytelling. Not there, on the opening day of the new facilities, I’ve noted above. Violet was not invited: she was one of the chronic cases. And I, well now I don’t know that was right. When they opened the impressive new fingers of our mental hospital, they only wheeled out the ones who could chat nicely. Those patients who accepted their insanity and were compliant. So Violet was not there for the public to regard. As I said, I don’t know that was right. Besides being fascinating, who else had shot Mussolini and made history? Still, I see they might not want her over tea and cakes, fairly wittering about saints and guns and martyrdom. Bet Miss Drool was there, snaffling up the Jaffa cakes, new that year! Then, I was in Paris, dancing. But it was short lived. Though I’ve noticed that Jaffa cakes made it through, without cessation.
Enough on me. Here, Violet is welcome, as she has welcomed us. Violet and her friends look back upon a life, into which she has invited them. Violet was born into a finery and a loneliness. It is an honour to receive this invitation from her. She begins to describe Dublin, 1886:
When I was a child, we were many, at a beautiful house on Merrion Square in Dublin. Father would be out and about doing his politics; writing his speeches as I tried to mill around his knees, shooed off. But he was a devoted father, you know. Modern; kind. So look, there’s Mother: she is pretty, isn’t she? And near her, my siblings, Harry, Elsie, Edward, Victor, Frances, Vizie—that’s me, Violet—and Constance. In the end, in decrepitude or in distress, it was to Constance that my care fell; it was desperately hard on her, I know that. But when I was left here, at the asylum, for all my life, and as I have always understood it—ladies, I do not miss much although I am supposed to—I could have been let out; my case had been let go and yet here I was. Oh, that anger scarified everything. It came down to this. They were kind, family, but you see it makes me tremble when I think of it. It was my fear, you see.
But they did not want me.
No-one wanted me.
Hold her, poor thing, I sob. Oh, I. I don’t mean to cry so readily, but the abandonment is so familiar. I suggest one feels it like nausea, or a stab in the viscera. Blanche is nodding her head. To her, the riches of Violet’s family home would be some unknown world, but also to her, Violet’s pain, and mine, are proverbial, familiar.
Abandonment, says Blanche: Oh yes. L’abandon. This I know. All those women in the Salpêtrière, well, we were exhibits. I never had a visitor, but yet I had all of clever and fashionable Paris to look at me. I heard one of the girls, once. She’d been a school teacher, before her fall, and she was talking to another about the Bedlam of which you spoke, Violet. The teacher said that Bedlam was as opulent as Versailles; that tourists would visit it after they had seen the finery of London. They would go to the zoo and to Westminster Abbey. And that once upon a time—only, I think, a hundred years before I was born—thousands of free people went into the hospital and watched the mad within. Looked at their antics and rages; sometimes, this teacher, said, they would even provoke them, because we are interesting, aren’t we? I am part of their world, these looked-at men and women.
So, all Paris came, Charcot said it; brayed it. He was so proud. They came to look and to learn. Did they learn a moral lesson? Did the spectators at Bedlam? I am not sure, but in Paris I could never help thinking that the men looked at my breast riding up, just as Brouillet painted me. They were all there. But no-one really came to see me. I was an exhibit and they were not my friends. I was marchandise... I think the word is commodity? Goods to be laid down and consumed. Augustine, who escaped, before me. And did I do wrong if I kept myself well, my skin as clear as I could, rubbing it with a little oil from our meals, combing my hair and tidying my blouse into a curlicue line? Should I be... should I be ashamed?
Violet comforts her: That, dear girl, is called pride. Survival. I had no upper teeth; I had lost a breast; they thought me insane! My heart was weak and, for all my years, a tempestuous digestion rumbled away so that I was always in pain. Couldn’t even compete in the race for old women at the asylum jamboree! I had no gorgeousness to use, for my survival. But I was whole. Yes, like you, I was whole and my thoughts were my own: that is a thing of beauty. If you think you played into their hands, Blanche, then take my hand now. Yes, Miss Blanche, and know that you did not. I have read about you. I told you: I read everything and my requests for books were never denied. You will, I think, always be known and an enigma you will be, keeping them wondering. Did she pretend? Did she comply? What of all those many other women photographed for Charcot’s catalogues, in spasm and delirium? I think these might be questions mostly asked by men; I am sorry if that is very black and white of me! But even so! My thought is that you were—and here you are—a beauty of power and intelligence and that you survived. I have found out about your past and I heard your song in my heart; I know you were confined, before and within the Salpêtrière; I know how your father punished you and how death never went away, not after the times you saw madness and fits and cried to escape when he wrested you into the coffin in his workshop and you smelled wax and sawdust and the cold, abstracted smell of the deceased body surrounded by arrogant lilies. But now, you are not alone, you are no-one’s hysterical showpiece or study—and I promise we’ll discuss further company later; imagination has magic in its heart, don’t you know? And I promise: we tell your story and Lucia writes it down and it is saved so that you have a name and a life.
Now, when we visit the places of my life, and yours, we have a choice. I shall lead to these places, but do not let me be too dominant, even if, as you say, Bertha, I have taken the role of chairwoman. But the choice of which I speak. I mean, whether to spectate, or to participate. Or a little of both? I suggest we improvise here, but let’s first be in Dublin, when I was little. Yes?
Silent assent.
Had we but all the world and time...
Ah now, Merrion Square, Dublin. The Gibson residence.
Bertha suggests: Shall we creep up to the window and peer in?—and this is what she begins to do; what we all do.
Oh this room. In it, Mother would defer to the governess and we children did what we should. But I know my young siblings were much better behaved than I. Can you see them, my friends, through that window there? What a snug house; the fire is lit, all arranged just so. The room is rich in antimacassars and we are properly attired. Do you see that little girl, to one side, though? There by the bookshelf. See what she did? Crept along, shifting the tiny pine stool she was sitting on, and reached out to the bookshelves.
There. The bottom shelf where the biggest books are.
See her nimble fingers?
Says Blanche: Is she tearing at the covers and the edges of pages? I think the book she is nibbling at is an atlas! I saw one in Charcot’s office. He let me handle it, but I don’t know if it was for kindness, because it contained worlds I could never enter.
Yes, my darling girl. I was so full of rage and felt the world was so far away from me. It’s not that we could not travel for we had the means, but I thought the whole world circumscribed. I sound spoilt! Not so far from Merrion Square were the slums of Liffey or the North side. Lucia’s father wrote of those in Dubliners, you know. But we’re not speaking of men right now, no disrespect to your daddy
, Lucia, dear girl. Now, I am not sure if I was supposed to know of those, those places of squalor, a proper little girl thinking of dirt-floored hovels and myriad bodies to a room. Of murders, arrests. Ironic, then—dear Mother, dear Governess!—that I became England’s most dangerous woman for a time.
As I was saying. Outside. Understanding what it was to be poor, or live in a dirty huddle, to be drunk or insane. Oh no, we girls were prepared for a circuit of balls and lunches. Presented in our crimson dining room to my parents’ esteemed guests and escorted out, having done well. Did they never, for a moment think that this way, for us, our sex, madness lies? Such an ingrate am I! Our house was a cornucopia. Look at it! Look at the upper rooms. To get to them, you’d swish up the broad sweep. We had china from Dresden, beautiful tapestries, Carrara marble. We acquired troves of beautiful things and my father contrived arches so that visitors could regard them properly. Once, I broke a vase and cried for days. I had undone the fabric of the house and it was intolerable. But after that I thought differently. I wanted to tear, and so I am nibbling at those books. Because it didn’t matter where we went, always my life felt planned.
Marry well. Preserve your family’s Anglo-Protestant respectability.
If you don’t marry, then it’s your job to stay home and look after your parents.
Read, but not too much because you don’t want to get all difficult and not have a man love you. Education up to your teens. Needlework. Always loathed it. What it symbolised. Subjugation. Now, you saw me cough there? I was a sickly sort of child, not able to sport like my sisters, too often in bed with a great weight pressing on my chest. It was a limiting time, true, but it also meant that I could rebel and it not be understood it was I. Like the twilight when all my siblings were purposefully engaged and I crept down from the world of sickbed and vitamin tonics—strangely reminiscent now of St Andrew’s, though without palpable locks, limits you could touch and sticky lino—I saw the needlework baskets and I threw them over and rent at their threads and materials with the scissors, then my hands, then teeth. Spent, unseen, crept back up.
And I, Lucia, cannot help it. At the mention of the womanly tasks that enraged Violet, even as a child, and Florence Nightingale as Violet has described, I howl: Ugh, the work of the asylum! The little jolly crafts, the insistence on making a pretty sampler, or drawing sometimes but only in certain colours. Yes, the stitches that drove Florence Nightingale mad! I wanted to scream poetry, but that was not allowed.
Violet goes on (I know they all understand what I caterwauled): Ha. Strange that no-one was blamed and no-one punished for the wreckage of the sewing baskets. It couldn’t be me, sickabed; for it to be one of my well-tempered siblings, all lovely around the well-tempered clavier, unthinkable.
Look into this expensively furnished room.
And as you see, I, she, also shuffled the stool and nibbled at the atlas.
Let’s get closer to the window. She’s me, that frowsty little thing. Not the full shilling! She’s seen things and her imagination is unconfined. The others, if they see us, will turn away; little Violet will not. Look, Bertha, she’s smiling at you. Blanche: dear girls, extend a hand to her. See how she stretches out and she knows that your eyes are aflame; she recognises your intelligence. At this stage, the old crone is pretty, like you. Lucia: dance for her, just a little. Like you did in Les Six dancing troupe before, you know, it all stopped.
I stretch and turn. I am more limber than I thought and, as I pivot and whirl, I think I will dance more for you... Yes. Here I am. Look at us, little Violet. Don’t be afraid. Hold fast. You will find friends, we promise. Keep reading, thinking, find your faith. Best not to tear up the needlework again, but we won’t tell. Think rebellion if you can’t do rebellion. Thinking is its own freedom. You are not, are not ever, a monster. You are a beautiful and spirited little girl and we will tell this story for you. Find your own ways to rebel.
Oh, thank you, thank you! says child Violet, as her mother sweeps in and draws the drapes on this fine room, in which a lonely child sits, with her heart beating faster now.
And Violet the incarcerated old lady draws us in, her friends, and says: Look, look. Come and peek inside the hallway, through this side window, there. My brothers learned to shoot. I, of course, did not. But I watched and learned from them. Look at the hallway, its decorations. Muskets. Pretty guns, those less pretty: blunderbusses; pistols. Again, the invalid child does not go wandering; that is the accepted truth. But when father is speech writing and Violet’s governess discharged to a little of her own time, Mother corresponding with Nancy Astor at Cliveden (splendid place!) about the latest jives for Christian Scientists, then the little child creeps about the house. They believe that the sickabed is upstairs, drowsy, under a cold compress and the influence (they thought) of Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup—morphine, codeine and cannabis indica—you all know, as mad women, how it is to be sedated; how the opioids fall through your soul and your thought is in a fog and you fight through and try and try to come up for air. Through the screams, stenches of carbolic; that squeak of idiots’ feet on urine-stained lino. You try to rattle at the keyed door, the bars, the polite jigsaws of the mad women caged, freely, in the parlours. Well, even now, I might say that this little girl has had a first glimpse of hellish things.
How well you know our lives, then, my dear friend! This, Blanche. And how sorry I feel for this little girl.
Bertha is meditative, then nods and adds: I’d often wondered if the medicine they gave me for all my physical maladies... if it gave rise to the hallucinations I had. I was suffering and confused, it is true. But was I truly mad, or just in crisis, screaming and stuffed full of morphine, to which I had become a slave? It was not a conversation I could have had. Would they, however great their skill, not have said Regard the hysteric and her delusion! But all those times I could not speak out, then my will crystallised. When I get out of this, here, Dr Breuer’s polite company, or the sanatoriums with their pretty gardens, I shall do things. Big things. That is what I thought.
And Bertha, says Violet, oh you did. Part of what we can do for you is to show you how it mattered and to listen to your story as if we were there. But now, imagine the child, I, little Violet. Well now, the child would open both eyes wide and go downstairs to the gun cabinet that was in our hallway. Because she had spat out Mrs Winslow’s patent remedy that was supposed to tranquilise her, and down she would go. She learned about guns. Take notes: now, the Lebel revolver was also known as the Modèle 1892, solid frame, cylinder on a separate frame, and swinging to the right for manual reloading. Please remember this. There were no Lebels in this hallway in Dublin, but there was a small, curious girl slipping her fingers around many handsome armaments—and, as I said, learning. And when I grew up, well I knew what to purchase. My Lebel is gone now; sequestered in Rome, evidence destroyed, I don’t know. But I had another. There. And three more. Take them. You will have use.
Let’s go somewhere else now. Would you like to see some really crazy things? We might meet the Christian Scientists and the Theosophists. Madame Blavatsky of the latter is one hell of a sight and Mary Baker Eddy of the former banged her head on a New Hampshire pavement, saw the divine light, got the healing power and, along the way, became the richest woman in America. Mother was a great fan of Christian Science. Loved all the self-absorption and making like Mrs Astor at Cliveden. It was big with the aristos, I think, and Nancy was a disciple, you know, leaving Bibles about the place with marked passages; those bits that fitted with the theory and would surely win others over to the rightness of things; those visiting aristocrats with time on their hands. And both she and Mother came to believe that illness was an illusion. I felt that made them more focused on their own ailments, but I would not contradict Mother. Instead, as you saw, I nibbled at books and, in so doing, made little tears at the fabric of our lives.
Oh, I am tired. I think just one of these sages would be enough for
today, though.
I am weary too, yet feel so very alive.
And these women were considered sane? This, says Blanche, makes no more sense than my father enclosing me in a coffin to teach me goodness. That taught me only to scream at teak oil and the stink of lilies. These aristocrats! Well, people. It is funny to see who they judge to be sane and who they... they bury.
I see Violet smile, although it is tear-stained: Well quite. But come on. Huddle up and concentrate. We need to get to Grosvenor Square, London. Just in a sweep of the street—and you need not record it, Lucia—I want just to glance the old house in Mayfair, our London residence for years, and then, for fun, let us pop to visit Madame Helena Blavatsky in Holland Park. She was the loony I was telling you about, Lucia! Girls: well-to-do London loved her type of madness! It is years since I’ve wandered round Kensington. We won’t be spectators, this time, looking in on a young Violet. Let’s go in. I feel like participating directly, because when I was a child, I only caught snatches of what happened through a crack in the door. Come one, come all, my lunatics! I never got to go to a séance, I was too young, but of course I heard all about that and read all Blavatsky’s writings, God help me. I was in search of an open door, a promised land. This was not it, but please let me look for one last time.
I had had little fun for decades, but now I was imagining, like my old friend here, a riot and some proper trouble. I thought of Daddy and Finnegans Wake and a line I loved—though I may have it wrong—just walked into my head; there will be a lifetime of this, you know. It said, Bite my laughters, drink my tears… spill me swooning, and I added: Why should we care what our thwarters think?
Then I said it again, aloud. I pleased them all, especially her: Good girl, says Violet and, this time, she’s agreeing with me, not blabbing about Daddy’s wordiness.
