Mrs. Biggs had finally told Clare that Jane was at Mount Hope Asylum. She herself was too frail to make the trip out right now, but would be so grateful if Clare would visit Jane. In fact she bought Clare’s ferry ticket.
The ferry docked and the older couple climbed into the cab to Mount Hope with Clare. Neither had spoken on the boat.
“You are visiting …” the woman said, clutching her bouquet.
“Yes, a friend,” Clare said. She wished she’d brought flowers too.
They rode in silence, coming after a few minutes to a long road that curved up the hill to the hospital. Lawns and gardens of clipped hedges and undeviating flowerbeds gave way to the hem of forest, which seemed to be unravelling everywhere, making way for raw fields and half finished outbuildings. The hospital’s two ugly, symmetric wings were arranged on either side of an elaborate Victorian ironwork column of terraces.
“I’ll take you to the office,” a nurse said in a thick Scottish accent. She led the way up the stairs ahead of them, stopping briefly to call down, sweeping her arm at the floors above them. “Your loved ones couldn’t be in better care. All this is new. And the physicians are the very best, up to date with the most modern practices.”
Mrs. Biggs’s old friend, Dr. Dunn, invited Clare into his office, closing the door gently behind her. He was a man of ordinary height, with pudgy hands and delicate wrists, watery blue eyes and rimless glasses. “It was good of you to come,” he said.
Clare gazed out the tall office window, which looked across to the grounds. Men slouched on benches and chairs, their faces turned to the sun. A few walked warily across the grass, or stood staring down the hill towards the river.
Dr. Dunn followed her gaze. “We have many veterans. I’m afraid the wards are overflowing. We’ll be building a veterans’ wing soon.” He unhooked his glasses from his ears and polished them with a hankie he pulled out of his suit pocket. “Eleanor has asked me to be candid with you. She is, of course, very worried. This last episode was much worse than the previous. Naturally we’re concerned the condition is deepening.”
“The condition?” Clare asked.
“Jane has a maniacal illness. I’ve known her since she was a child. It is very upsetting when these things emerge, usually, as with Jane, in adolescence. A perfectly healthy, intelligent, often highly intelligent, child becomes unfocused, agitated, obsessed with delusions, and finally unmanageable.”
“Is there a cure?” Clare said.
“This affliction comes in episodes. We have no cure.” The doctor’s eyes behind the glasses moistened and brightened. “But we are constantly improving treatment, to make the patient more comfortable,” he cleared his throat, “or perhaps simply to shorten the suffering. For instance, Jane has been responding to the hydrotherapy this week and is already much better than when she was,” he cleared his throat again, “admitted.”
He lifted his white coat from his desk chair and pulled it over his suit jacket. “She has, in fact, just finished her morning treatment.” He looked down at some notes on his desk and then at the silver watch on his wrist. “And should be back in her room by now.”
Clare followed him down the long corridor that ran the length of the wing. The dull linoleum, the pale green walls pressed in on her; she became a child, visiting her mother in the hospital in Truro.
Dr. Dunn led Clare down a corridor and through double swinging doors. “We are very pleased with the hydrotherapy facilities here. I thought you might like to see them. They’re on the way to the ward.”
He opened a heavy metal door and they stepped into moist air with a mineral smell like river stone. The room had a bank of sinks, a bed with wide canvas straps dangling from it, taps and two rectangular pools of water, dark and green. The surface shivered. Hanging from the ceiling between the lights, what looked like a metal gurney, which could move on a track.
“The patients are prescribed a series of hot and cold immersions. Of course we still treat the patients with drugs to help induce sleep. Maniacal patients can exhaust themselves to the point of death. But drugs can no more directly quell an insane delusion than they can eradicate an envy or abate an ambition.”
They met a tall red-headed nurse coming out of Jane’s room, a deep tray of wet cloths in her freckled arms.
“I’ve just finished the last wrap, doctor,” she said, dropping the tray heavily onto a wheeled cart in the hall.
“Just finished now?” He dangled his glasses from one hand and looked deliberately at his watch.
“She made a fuss in the hydro room, so we’re running late,” the nurse said, pushing the tray pointlessly to the other end of the cart. “She’s quite … relaxed at the moment.” She waved her hand at the door beckoning them to go in.
The room was small, but bright, with a partly opened window that looked out onto the grounds. The curtains lifted in the warm fall breeze. A grid of white bars divided the scene outside into neat squares, each one a framed study of lawn, conifers, gardens, and a seated figure.
Jane was propped up between pillows. Clare took her cold hand. Her lips were blue and she was shivering. She looked at Clare for a few seconds, the recognition in her eyes taking a long time to light her face. Clare was reminded of coming in from the cold as a child, her face a mask, which would take minutes to flex back into expression.
“She’s very cold, perhaps another blanket?” Clare said to Dr. Dunn, who was standing near the window.
“The re-warming process should be gradual,” he said.
“Clare!” Jane finally pressed Clare’s hand. “I’m so happy to see you.” She closed her eyes, opened them, and fixed them on Clare. “The baby wasn’t — how could it be — we never …” Her brow furrowed, then she grinned stiffly. “Your hair is getting long again,” she said through chattering teeth.
Clare pulled at the ends of her hair with her free hand. “Yes, we’ll go together again when you’re well.”
“Not to the barber.” Jane’s eyes turned to slits. “He sent me to Violet.”
“Violet?” Clare looked anxiously at Dr. Dunn, who was watching alertly, as if ready to move towards her.
“Violet took her. My baby. She wasn’t really mine. Was she?” She turned to Dr. Dunn, with a confused look.
“We’ll go somewhere else to get our hair cut, maybe in Paris,” Clare said gently.
“Yes, Paris. We’ll have such fun …” Jane was beginning to slur her words.
“I think that is about all she can handle for now,” Dr. Dunn said.
Jane’s colour had started to come back, but she had become drowsy.
“You can tell Eleanor that we are very pleased with Jane’s condition and hopeful that she will be able to come home.”
“Soon?”
“Come home … sometime.” His eyes now seemed dry, his glasses unreflective. A slow wave of comprehension, like nausea, left Clare damp at the small of her back.
“I think the cab comes for you in half an hour?” he said. “Please take a walk around the grounds, they are the finest in the Maritimes.” He motioned towards the wide terrace. “At the front you’ll find the colony farm, the stables and gardens. The farm work is very therapeutic for patients.”
Clare walked among the garden beds, planted with vivid red lilies and little silver rows of dusty miller. Across a lawn, seated on either side of a young man on a bench, the couple who had ridden the ferry. The young man’s head was bowed as if examining the woman’s hand, stroking his own. The older man sat perfectly straight, gazing at the wind-tossed treetops.
54
LEAVES BANKED ALONG the fences in the yard. Fred was sent out with Nikola and a couple other men. In the serrated wind they raked the leaves into burning piles. It had turned bitterly cold in the last week. Long skeins of geese had passed and there was a smell of snow on the air.
“If I ever get out of here I’m moving to Odessa,” Nikola said, rubbing his hands together. “I am tired of being cold.”
“What will
you do there?” Fred said.
“What I have always done, work on ships. Odessa is a great port and Russia is for the workers now.” Nikola resumed his half-hearted raking. Most of the leaves slipped through gaps in broken tines. “The only good thing that happened in this prison was Trotsky.”
Trotsky had taken charge of the situation from the moment he had arrived the spring before, holding meetings daily to explain the revolution to the unenlightened men.
“The only way,” Nikola leaned on his rake, “to change the world is if workers everywhere unite.”
A tall, blue-eyed coal miner, Babinsky, working near them, said something in Polish. Nikola turned to Fred. “He says, ‘When I get home, I’ll going to build a house for my wife and children in a thick forest and around it I will set traps. I will never go without a gun. No one will dare to come near.’”
“Won’t you let me in,” Nikola said, then translated his answer, “‘No. I don’t trust anyone.’”
“Do you know that the German officers,” Nikola jerked his thumb towards the officers’ wing, “complained to the camp commander about Trotsky. Unpatriotic! No more speeches.”
A guard shouted at the men, his words carried off by the wind. Nikola resumed his raking. “We made a protest, with over five hundred signatures. But by that time the military had decided to let Trotsky continue on to Russia. We lined the passages as he left. An improvised band played a revolutionary march. The commander’s face was so red I thought he was going to explode.”
“Looks like you may be building that house in the woods soon,” Fred said to Babinsky. “The war’s almost over.”
As they raked, Fred told them about the conversation he’d heard the day before between Morris and another guard, who was leaning against the wall of the washhouse while Fred scrubbed the long wooden planks of the communal pit toilet.
“Said in the paper this morning the Germans are talking peace,” Morris had said, offering the other guard, a bony kid named Hastie, a cigarette.
“What are they going to do with this lot?” Hastie said, blowing smoke Fred’s way.
“I guess they’ll get shipped back where they came from.”
“Good riddance,” Hastie said.
The news of the impending end of the war spread through the camp. Some of the men, like Karl, brooded. Others, especially the Poles and Ukrainians, who never had deep connections with Germany, were warily relieved. The dejection they had taken pains to conceal now showed itself, and they looked away when another man broke down into tears.
“IVREY,” FRED SAID ONE EVENING, sitting down beside the boy on his bed, where he sat rocking. “The war is almost over. This place will close and you will be able to go home.”
The boy stilled for a moment and then began again. “I had three brothers,” he said, not looking at Fred.
Fred glanced at Nikola, who was playing solitaire on his bunk.
“He got a letter, not long after we got here.” Nikola placed a card delicately. “They all died.”
“Then it is important that you are alive,” Fred said. “For your parents.”
“His parents are dead too,” Nikola said.
Fred climbed up onto his bunk and lay staring at the stained planks of the high ceiling. He reached under his pillow and pulled out a copy of Walter Scott’s The Monastery. A box of books had appeared in the crafts room, discards, he supposed, that a woman’s auxiliary had put together. He imagined the commander agreeing on the basis it might keep the men quiet and encourage them to learn English.
Inside the front cover of the book, in impeccable handwriting, blue ink, To Bertie with love, Mother. Who was Bertie? Did he grow up and leave behind the books his mother chose for him? Fred though of his own mother. Her most precious possession her family Bible, which sat on its own stand in their parlour, near the fireplace. Just before he went out the door when he left Hamilton, he’d put it in his suitcase. There had been nothing else he wanted to take. But its black weight and unopened pages, all that he had left and lost, had given him little comfort.
Fred flipped through the novel. It was an expensive edition, bound in dark red with gold lettering. Something surely Bertie’s mother would have kept in the family. He looked at the inscription again, Christmas 1914. He saw it all as clearly as if it were a postscript. Bertie never came back from the trenches. His mother couldn’t bear having this book in the house and took it to the church, probably in a box with, what? Bertie’s sweaters? Marbles? Skates? He was glad that his own mother didn’t have to grieve him. He saw her not as she was when she died, but as she was when they first came to Canada, her brilliant blue eyes and coppery hair, the small cleft on the underside of the tip of her nose. He remembered for the first time in years the smell of the spot he’d loved to bury his nose as a child, just behind her ear.
He dropped the book heavily, irritated with himself for falling into sadness. Bertie might very well be alive and well, just not fond of his mother’s taste in literature. We lose our parents but first they lose us one way or another, Fred thought.
AT THE END OF OCTOBER, some of the men came down with the flu. The first few were taken to a small room off the dormitory. After one of them died, the new cases were shipped off to a quarantined infirmary outside of town. Rumour snaked through the camp — an epidemic was taking people. Even here, in ordinary towns: children, men, women. Worry for Clare gnawed Fred.
55
THE OLYMPIC ARRIVED in Halifax, filled with men. Clare stood on the pier with her sketchbook, hoping to draw the figures of the soldiers, as Lismer had the year before when the ships were leaving with new recruits.
After a time she abandoned her drawing. It was impossible to draw the restive crowd. If the sad or sick or injured were among them, they either forgot their condition or were lost among the jubilant.
The streets of Halifax were lined these days with men waiting for trains to take them west. The bars overflowed and the streets stank of vomit and echoed with songs and shouts. Extra police patrolled the sidewalks at night to collect the drunks.
CELIA’S GLOOM SINCE Fred’s internment pervaded the house. She pouted for two days when she found he had written Clare. Eventually, she explained it away, saying, “He would need you to talk to Mr. Lismer. It only makes sense that he would have to write to you.”
THE FOLLOWING DAY Celia had been watching from the drawing room for Clare’s return from school. “Would you read it over?” Celia followed Clare into the kitchen. Clare turned and the girl thrust a letter at her. “I want to make sure it’s perfect.”
Dearest Fred,
I can’t tell you how much we miss you around here. Mother says my playing is just not up to scratch without you. And I agree. I have always been diligent about my practising but this fall it has seemed so dull playing alone compared to the great fun we had together. I’m afraid I have been very lazy.
Despite all, my hand continues to improve. Mr. Devon thinks I can take the teacher’s exam in the spring. Mother is anxious that once I have my certificate I will up and leave for the big city. At one time I thought I would do just that, but, since the tragedy our small city has endured, I don’t think I would have the heart to leave it. And there are plenty of children here to learn piano.
They say the war is ending. I am hoping I will see you soon.
Yours faithfully,
Celia
“Do you think it is acceptable to start with dearest?” Celia asked coyly.
Clare wrapped her hands around her teacup. On the street a few small snowflakes fluttered into the light of the streetlamp and flickered out as they drifted into darkness. A figure walking down the street paused in front of the house. Clare could not see the man’s face under his hat but she felt his gaze. There was something familiar about him. She had a stir of joy, thinking perhaps it was Fred, come to surprise them. But the man was shorter than Fred and had a slight limp. He turned and walked on.
Clare had written Fred a letter of her own. She’d passed
on news from the school and described what she had been working on. She told him about Mary’s plan to return to Europe to paint the battlefields. She talked of the weather and how the rebuilding was progressing in the city, how people were finally able to move out of temporary shelter and into new houses, just finished in time for winter. But she could not say that he was always just near the surface of her thoughts, how worried she was, whether he was getting enough to eat or had warm blankets now that the winter was coming on. These were the concerns of mothers, sisters, wives. Before she could write these words, there were things that would have to be said between them, things that could not be said in a letter. The only thing she had let herself risk was the ending, warmest regards.
THE NEXT DAY, Clare arrived to find her classmates at the door whooping and hugging and crying. Clare rushed up the stairs. On the door, headlines from the morning paper: Armistice Signed; War Ends at 5am! “It’s over!” she cried, unable to catch her breath. She looked around for Mary but she wasn’t with the group.
As they all ran towards the waterfront, Clare looked back over her shoulder. Mary was standing at the window of a second storey classroom, looking out over the streets, where people were running from their houses in slippers and housecoats, waving their newspapers.
Barrington Street was jammed with soldiers, workers, women and children, some bearing the scars, the missing eyes and limbs of the war and the explosion. Strangers embraced each other under a clear, cold sky. Some people collapsed, weeping on each other’s shoulders. But most, including Clare and her fellow students, were drunk with the weary joy and relief of survivors.
Eventually, cold and hungry, Clare unlinked her arm from the line of girls and set off for home. No one would return to work or school that day. The glassworks would surely be closed and Geraldine would be home. Together they would see what kind of celebration dinner they could make with what they had in the cupboard and icebox.
Dazzle Patterns Page 29
