The Ballroom

by Anna Hope

  A young attendant tapped him on the shoulder and gave the news, ‘The superintendent wishes to see you now,’ and he was forced to break off in the middle of the Adagio of the C major, K545.

  A queasy feeling assailed him as he hurried down the long main corridor, unlocking and locking doors as he went. He knew what this was about: it was about that girl. He should have gone after her. It had made him look weak. To have such a breach of security on his watch was not good.

  As he approached the superintendent’s door, Charles took a couple of deep breaths before rapping on the wood with what he hoped was a confident tone.

  ‘Come!’ The superintendent’s voice was muffled by the heavy door. ‘Ah … Fuller.’ Soames was seated behind his desk. ‘Sit down.’

  Charles felt the man’s eyes on him as he crossed the room.

  ‘All well, Fuller?’

  ‘Very well, sir,’ said Charles, taking his seat.

  ‘Good, good.’ Soames’s black-rimmed spectacles, perched as they were on the tip of his nose, gave the impression that he might be looking at him with multiple eyes. There was, in fact, something distinctly spidery about the man, tall and thin-limbed as he was; he rarely moved from this office, set at the centre of this web of corridors, but he missed nothing that occurred beneath his care. The superintendent gave a brief nod. ‘We have more music in the day rooms now, I hear?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ve just come from the piano, in fact.’

  ‘Indeed? And how goes the new regime?’

  ‘Ah. Well …’ Charles tried his best to make his voice light. ‘I believe the patients seem to like it. I’ve … experimented a little with the different composers. It’s almost becoming a … prescription, if you like.’

  ‘I see.’ A brief twitch of the lips that could almost have been a smile. ‘And whom do they like the best?’

  ‘Well, it rather depends.’ Charles leant forward. ‘I tend to favour Mozart for the epileptics. Or Bach. They seem to appreciate the order it brings and, then … Chopin, Schubert, the impromptus – for … well, for their … beauty, I suppose.’

  ‘Beauty?’ Soames raised an eyebrow.

  Charles’s blood quickened. He decided to brazen it out. ‘Yes, sir. I find them the most beautiful of all the music for solo piano.’

  Soames made a non-committal noise. ‘And the orchestra?’ he said. ‘Not too much for you? We can always find someone else to take up the strain.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Charles laughed. He had meant for it to sound easy, but it came out instead as a congested bark. ‘Not at all. Coming along well, sir. We have a viola now and a trumpet, so as of last week we are a full complement at last.’

  ‘Very good.’ Soames leant back in his chair, index fingers steepled beneath his chin. ‘How long have you been with us now, Fuller?’

  ‘Five years, sir.’

  ‘Five years.’ Soames sounded thoughtful.

  ‘Sir …’ Charles fretted his fingers together. ‘About the girl. I’m terribly sorry, I should have seen the signs, but she has been sent downstairs now and I believe—’

  The superintendent held up his hand. ‘Did I ask you to speak, Fuller?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  A heavy silence filled the room.

  ‘Tell me, Fuller. How did the girl appear to you?’

  ‘I – she …’

  She had smelt of engine grease, urine and wool. His only thought while taking her pulse had been to wish the interview were over soon.

  ‘Her notes were scant. Birth date approximate. Family, but estranged.’

  Soames nodded. ‘And physically?’

  ‘Physically she was … below par.’

  Well below par. He had expected one of the lower examples of the female, but she was quite a sight: eyes so swollen as to be almost deformed, skin pink and stretched above and below the eyeball, the conjunctiva inflamed and weeping, the edges crusted and yellow. Below them was an open wound, recently made, a punch to the upper cheek, which had split the skin.

  ‘Here’s the thing, Fuller.’ Soames’s eyes met Charles’s. ‘We don’t want any more escapees. Diminishes our reputation. Scares the villagers. You understand? We cannot be seen to be … out of control.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Absolutely. Quite so.’

  ‘I hope your recent promotion will not be found to have been too presumptuous. Can’t have you taking your eye off the ball.’

  Charles nodded and shifted in his seat. ‘I do see, sir. And I sincerely hope not.’

  ‘Very good, Fuller.’ Soames lifted his hand in dismissal. ‘That will be all.’

  Charles stood. Took a few jellied steps towards the door, then hesitated. It was rare enough to have an audience with the superintendent. Who could say when the next one might be? ‘Sir?’ He turned back.

  Soames looked up as though surprised to find him still standing there. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I know you will be aware, sir, of the Feeble-Minded Control Bill the government hopes to introduce this coming year.’

  Soames gave a small inclination of the head. ‘If I weren’t, Dr Fuller, I think I might come within its remit.’

  Charles felt himself colour. ‘Of course, sir, I didn’t mean to suggest—’

  ‘Never mind, Fuller.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you. Well, I’m sure you’re also aware of the existence of the Eugenics Education Society.’

  ‘Indeed I am.’

  ‘Well, sir, I am a member and receive their quarterly review.’

  A flicker of irritation crossed Soames’s face. ‘Where is this heading, Fuller?’

  ‘There is to be a Congress, sir, next summer, in London.’ Charles reached into his pocket, taking out the small piece of paper he had been carrying around for the last week, straightening it, laying it on the superintendent’s desk. ‘And, I … well … I had the idea that I might write a paper.’

  The superintendent leant forward, peering down at the advertisement on the desk.

  Call For Papers

  First International Eugenics Congress

  Subjects of Wide Importance and Permanent Interest.

  ‘I thought I might use my new programme of music in the wards – trace its beneficial effect on the patients, so to speak. I thought, sir, with your permission I might—’

  ‘Fuller?’ The superintendent stared back up through his lenses.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘You may have time for idle musings on the very best manner in which to improve the lot of our patients, but I for one am too busy to countenance such diversions. May I remind you that you are not a man of leisure? If there are any further slips such as this last, then I will be forced to reconsider your position. At the very least I should be forced to conclude that the extra musical duties you seem so keen to perform and write about are detrimental to your role. So, please, no more talk of papers or congresses.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

  ‘And now.’ Soames swept his hand before him in the direction of the door.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Charles, when he had crossed the floor, but this time Soames did not look up.

  Ella

  ONLY HER LEGS were free. Those and her voice. At first she had kicked the door and shouted so hard she ripped her throat, before she slumped, head between her knees. Cold rose from the stone beneath her. A thin grey blanket was folded beside her, but with her arms tied like this there was no way of opening it out.

  A sound came, as though someone was throwing themselves up against something soft, over and over again. Voices too, distant and thin like ghosts. On the way here there had been other doors, each with round holes in them, so other people must be here too, locked in their own damp cells. Was this where they had brought the old woman with the shawl? Was she down here now, rocking her woollen, holey baby to sleep?

  Then, behind everything else came a deeper sound, a clanking, as though the building were a machine and she was near the heart of it: close to the workings, the grinding of its gears. She put her head
back against the stone chill of the wall.

  She had failed. For a brief green moment she had thought she was free, but she had failed.

  Yesterday.

  Was it only yesterday?

  Ten o’clock in the morning. Spinning room number four, five floors up above Lumb Lane. A morning like every other in the twelve years she had worked there. They had just had their break, and her mouth was sour with the taste of tea and mash. She must have fallen asleep, because she was woken with the smack of the alley strap across her back.

  ‘Watch yer bleeding thread,’ the overlooker screamed in her ear.

  Panic flashed through her. Fifty machines clattered. It could only have been a second.

  ‘Next time,’ the man’s lips said. ‘Next bloody time.’ Then he moved off with his strap down the row.

  She tried to concentrate, but the threads thinned and blurred before her eyes. She could feel her head going again, nodding, as if she was a puppet someone was forgetting to hold up. Dangerous. It was dangerous to fall asleep. There was the sickly, animal smell of the wool. The scorched metal of the machines. Her eyes swollen and stinging from the lint.

  She wished for air, but the windows were closed, clouded and mottled, and there was no way to see the sky.

  She had asked once, on her first day there, when she was small and frightened and eight.

  Why are the windows all covered up?

  And one of the older girls who was showing her what to do – how to scurry on the slippery floor beneath the looms and tie the threads together and tuck your plaits in so your scalp didn’t get pulled off – had laughed and clouted her on the back of the head. Why d’you think? You’re not here to admire the view.

  So the windows were clouded in spinning room four, but there was nothing new in that. And the noise. She sometimes thought that was what the place made: noise and cloth, but mostly noise; so much it drowned your thoughts, so much you heard it ringing and buzzing in your ears all the way through your day off.

  But yesterday morning Ella had looked around the room. Seen the children, with their pinched, frightened looks. Seen the older women, hunched over like half-empty sacks. The young ones steadying themselves against their frames as though offering themselves up in the din and the lint to the gods of spinning and metal and wool. She saw the life that was in them passing into the machines, as they gave themselves away in spinning room four. For what? For fifteen shillings at the end of the week and only all of the days to come while everything leached from you and falling asleep and getting beaten for it and the windows so clouded you could never see the sky.

  She wanted to see the sky.

  So yesterday, the same as every other day, but not the same any more, Ella slid a skep of empty bobbins out from under her feet, picked one up and launched it at the window beside her. The clouded glass shattered, and she stood, gasping – giddy with the cold slap of air. She could see the horizon beyond. The dark, crouched promise of the moor.

  She turned, walking down the centre of that long room, past the gawping faces, past the machinery still going, going, heart racing, through the lint snowing around her head, and when she got to the door she began to run, down five flights of stairs, out into the yard, away from the gate, through the scrubby grass, and out the back way on to Lumb Lane. The day was bright and clear and cold. The street empty. The sweat drying on her face.

  She lifted her brown, oily hands to the sky, as though seeing them in a dream.

  Had she thought they would not come after her? They came though. Of course they came. Feet pounding on the metal stairs.

  They called her mad when they dragged her off the street. Jim Christy, the pennyhoil man; Sam Bishop, the overlooker. Called her mad when they took her into a small room by the gate of the mill and she had screamed and kicked and spat. ‘What did you want to do that for, you mad bitch?’ And they might have been right, since she knew she had reached a point when she could stop, but then she was past it, way past it, and had become the screaming, become the kicking, become the spitting: a river that had burst its banks. She had hurt them, she knew that, could tell from the sounds they had made. Until a punch split her cheek and silenced her, and there was only the raw red beating of her blood. Until they chained her to a pipe and left her there.

  But the feeling part of her was far away by then.

  Then the men in uniforms came.

  The light from the window turned on the ceiling, and the small room grew darker. Sounds faded as the night took hold. Fear crouched beside her in the darkness, ready to crawl into her lap.

  She jostled herself to sitting. Rubbed her arms on the wall behind her so the pain might keep her awake.

  She was here. Arms tied behind her back. Only the clothes she sat in left. There was a room in a house on a street in Bradford, with four narrow beds and a window over a yard; there was a change of clothes there, in that room she had slept in for the last year but which meant nothing to her. She would never go back there now.

  She felt a power in her then. The same feeling she had in the mill, but now it took root, lifting her spine. It was dark, she was alone, but her blood was beating; she was alive. She would study it, this place, this asylum. She would hide inside herself. She would seem to be good. And then she would escape. Properly, this time. A way they wouldn’t expect.

  Be good.

  That was what her mother used to say to her – be good – pressing Ella’s face into her chest so she couldn’t breathe.

  She knew about being good. Had known it since she was small. Being good was surviving. It was watching while your mother was beaten and staying quiet so you wouldn’t be next. Tucking in your plaits and shutting up and working hard.

  Being good was outside only. It didn’t matter about the inside. That was something they could never know.

  Charles

  IT WAS PAST seven before he had finished his rounds, and as he made his way outside, night had fallen, blustery and cold. The family of rooks that made their home in the bell tower, disturbed by the weather, circled and called above his head. The wind had picked up and rain fell in small squally blasts. He was aware of a frayed, hangnail feeling as he set off across the damp grass. It had hung about him all day. He was glad to reach the low stone building that made up the male staff quarters. Inside, all was dark – it was a peculiarity of the asylum that there was no electricity, the junior attendants taking it in turns to light the gas. Often these buildings were the last to be lit. Charles groped his way down the murky corridor to his room, which was darker still. Closing the door behind him he fumbled for a match, striking and holding it to the gas sconce on the wall.

  He breathed out as yellow light lapped on to familiar things: the mantelpiece with his charcoal sketches of the patients, a few small volumes of poetry, his desk, where his papers were stacked in a neat pile, the violin and music stand in the corner by the washbasin. He was in the process of transposing the aria from the Goldberg Variations from piano to solo violin, and the music, half finished, was laid out on the stand.

  He shrugged off his rain-spattered jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. His fire, at least, had been lit for him and a good poke and a few lumps of coal roused it nicely. Easing his feet gratefully from his shoes, he unbuttoned his collar, laying it also over the back of his chair.

  At the corner of his desk was a heavy palm-sized stone, grooved with markings, with a small depression at its centre – a relic of one of his walks on Rombald’s Moor, that swathe of land whose heights lay due west of here, named for a giant whose path across it was said to have left great granite stones in its wake. He picked it up, letting its cool weight possess his palm, feeling the pressures of the day disperse. Perspective. That was what was needed. He had spoken too early. He would have to be more careful in future.

  Sounds came from the room adjacent: the opening and shutting of a door and then muffled music. Charles smiled; Jeremy Goffin, practising his trumpet with the silencer in. It would be orchestra pract
ice tomorrow night, and Jeremy was a charming new addition to the band, a young assistant from the Midlands, burly, built for the sports field and the restraint of troublesome patients, but with the sweetest and most disarming of smiles. Not, perhaps, the best of musicians, but Charles had made room for him nonetheless. A trumpet was rousing. Good for morale.

  By now, with his five years of service and his promotion through the ranks, Charles could have chosen to ‘live out’, finding lodgings in the village, as many of the married men did, but, not being married, he saw no point in this. His hours were long and the Barracks, as the male staff accommodation was known, were only a short evening stagger over the grass. No call to waste money on rent when he was more than provided for here. Besides, he liked the room’s monkish charms, the excellent views of the sunset from its westerly aspect over the moor.

  He cast a glance to the window, where the wind, fiercer now, threw itself against the glass. Sometimes, on rough nights like this, with the wind blowing and the moor so close, the asylum could feel like a place out of time, a place where the old gods might yet hold sway, but tonight, tucked here, with the sounds of Goffin next door, and his fire burning happily now, Charles was content.

  Five years since he had first seen this room, five years since he had paced its limits – the whole not more than ten steps long and five steps wide. But what he had felt that first day was not confinement but liberation. He had escaped.

  As escapes went, it had been a narrow one; after four years of medical school, he had barely scraped his final exams, not nearly enough of a pass to take up the place at Barts his father had worked so hard to secure. He had been summoned home to Yorkshire.

  The reckoning had come in the drawing room after supper once his tearful mother had taken her leave. His father stood before the polished fireplace. Charles, sitting before him, felt twelve again, his mouth tacky, lacking spit.

  ‘How has this occurred?’ His father’s jaw was clenched, hands clasped behind his back.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Pathetic. But it was the best he could come up with by way of reply.