The Ballroom

by Anna Hope

  She bunched her cumbersome nightgown around her and began to crawl over the floor as quietly as she could. When she reached the top of the room, she had the strange thought she might cry out and betray herself, and bit down hard on her lip as she crawled past the sleeping nurses and on towards the toilet block, and only when she reached it did she stand, running to the last of the stalls, arriving drenched in sweat. She didn’t dare run the tap, so knelt and reached into the bowl instead, bringing out a handful of water, dashing it against her underarms and the back of her neck, until the smell of her fear was gone.

  When she climbed up on to the seat, the window was in front of her, but the hole was much smaller than she had remembered, far too small for her to crawl through. She would have to break it further. She flailed in the darkness, grabbing the flush; on its end was a wooden handle, but it was trapped in a bracket on the wall and impossible to lift out. She wrapped the material of her nightgown around her fist, and the glass smashed with a high, traitorous sound. She stopped, arm half raised, blood pummelling in her ears, but no one came, and she could hear nothing from the wards.

  She pushed the splinters out with her elbow, clearing the frame and then the ledge on the other side of the glass, then scrambled through the hole, felt cloth tearing, shards of pain. She landed on the grass and rolled.

  For a long moment she stayed there, hunched in a small, tight ball, then slowly uncurled herself. She placed her palms flat against the earth. The grass was scarce, and the ground felt crumbly and dry, but beneath the smell of hard-packed earth she could sense the rich, dark tang of the soil. No light shone from the toilet block. They had not come after her.

  As the thrum of her blood retreated, she could hear a small breeze in the leaves of the trees at the edge of the field, the close scratch of animals, the rustling night-sounds of nature all around. The light was that of twilight, and it was possible to see well and far: to the fields the men had sung in, to the dark outline of the wood, and beyond it all, the low rise of the moor. The air was sweet, and she gulped it down.

  Free. She let the word fill her.

  If she ran now, she would be miles away before anyone woke. If she ran now, she would never have to go back in there.

  But then she thought of him waiting for her.

  Would he come with her?

  Would he run too?

  She made her way along the narrow path that skirted the back of the buildings, and the earth was warm beneath the skin of her feet, the sweat cooling on her back. The air was thick, the temperature of blood.

  She reached the edge of the wood, saw the single tree, standing apart, huge in the darkness, throwing its branches to the sky, and as she stepped beneath its spreading leaves, there was a rustling, and he was there, landing quietly on the ground beside her. The bulk of him. He seemed bigger here, with nothing else around him, only the trees and the sky. And her heart slipped as she thought that perhaps she did not know him at all.

  ‘Ella.’

  The sound of her name in his mouth made the skin on her arms lift and pucker. He reached for her hands, but she pulled against him.

  ‘We are free,’ she said. ‘We can leave this place.’

  And the words seemed to beat and churn in the air between them.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. His voice was low, like a drum covered by cloth. ‘Wait a moment. Let me show you.’

  He led her to where a small, broken gate marked the edge of the wood. He went first, helping her through it, and then they were beneath the trees. She felt fear – she had been outside where she was free, where she could see far and wide for the first time in her life, and this wood was dark and close – but when they stepped forward, she saw that the wood was not truly dark, but made of silver and blue, and was not thick, but full of wide clearings, where moonlight filtered through the trees and pooled against the ground. And as they walked, the grasses were long and cool. There was no dryness here. It seemed a space apart. She thought she saw eyes, quick animal eyes in the darkness, thought she heard the beat of small wings in the air.

  They emerged before a rolling, stubbled field where corn stooks cast blue shadows on the ground and the moor rose gently behind. The moon swung high and ripe above it all, the air was heavy with the hot, sweet smell of the fields, and it felt to Ella, standing at its edge, like a new world and that she and the man beside her were the only people in it.

  ‘Please.’ He turned to her, spoke softly. ‘Stay this night with me.’

  And she was empty suddenly, and light, and the freedom was in her, was part of her, and the need to run had gone.

  ‘Here.’ He lifted her hand, placed something in it. In the moonlight she saw cornstalks twisted together, their ears fanning below. ‘At home,’ he said, ‘at the end of harvest-time, the loveliest of all the women walks across the fields. It is her task to find a grain.’

  Now, beneath this moon, nothing seemed strange to her at all. She stepped out over the field and the stubble was sharp beneath her feet, but the sharpness did not bother her. When she reached the centre, she knelt to the shaved earth, feeling with her fingers until she had lifted a fallen grain into her palm. She turned to see him come towards her. He dropped down beside her, put his thumb to the grain and closed his hand around hers, making a double fist. He put his lips to it, and she shivered, but not from any cold. Then he opened it again.

  ‘Blow,’ he said.

  And she bent and blew the grain from her palm.

  Then he dipped his face and kissed her. A long, sweet kiss. He touched the skin on her neck, brushed her lips, passed his hands over her hair.

  And she did the same, reaching up and touching his mouth. Tracing the line of it. She put her palms against his cheeks, felt the scratch of his beard. He closed his eyes, and she put her thumbs against his lids, feeling the light, living pulse of him there. She felt the creases in his forehead, the groove of his temples, put her hands in his hair, felt it rough with the blown dust of the fields.

  She was learning him, out here in this blue night. Clem had her poetry, but she had this. She was learning him by heart.

  ‘Your hair,’ he said to her. ‘Would you take it down?’

  She undid her braid, letting her hair fall, and he kissed her again, and again, every kiss an unwinding, as though he were lifting off her, layer by layer, everything she had carried, revealing someone new.

  He put his jacket on the ground, unbuttoned his waistcoat, his shirt, passed his hands beneath her nightgown, lifting it off. She was naked now but felt no shame. The warm air her only covering. The hot living breath of the earth all around.

  They turned to each other, and when they moved together she cried out, colouring the night air with her sound.

  Charles

  WHEN SHE CAME, she was kind. And clean. She lifted his head. She changed his sheets.

  She was an angel, and she had come to cleanse.

  I am sorry, he whispered to her. Forgive me.

  Will you forgive me? Can you hear?

  They moved about his bed like moths. Silent moths with mouths that opened and closed. They could not hear him. They did not speak.

  Why can’t you hear me?

  Listen to me.

  Please! Listen!

  I want to tell you what I have done.

  ‘Nothing that you don’t want.’

  I want—

  I want—

  I—

  ‘Shhh, no. Shhhh.’

  Filthy. Filthy.

  Water. I need water. Lemonade.

  Can I have some lemonade? Please?

  Please?

  But it is hot. Everything is too hot.

  Please come back.

  Please

  come

  back.

  A nurse stood at the end of Charles’s bed. Her veil was bright.

  ‘You’ve had flu.’ Her voice was a metallic clang. ‘And you’re not the only one. You’re in quarantine. You need to rest.’

  He closed his eyes as a sour w
ave of fear rinsed him. He was filled with the horror of what he might have said.

  Apparently he had been ill for a week.

  He couldn’t say how much this news disturbed him.

  ‘A particularly nasty strain,’ said Soames, standing at the end of Charles’s bed. ‘Lost five patients to it already. You take it easy, old chap.’ He reached out and patted the taut cotton of his bedsheets. ‘Lucky you’re still here.’

  Soames seemed pleasant enough. And yet. Charles thought he could detect something strained beneath his manner.

  Lucky you’re still here.

  What did he mean?

  Did he mean Charles was lucky to be alive? Or lucky to be kept on at the asylum? And if the latter, then lucky to be kept on after … what?

  He had only been drunk once, but this reminded him of that: the waking with no recollection of the preceding evening, the horror that he had said or done something appalling, which everyone had witnessed but himself.

  He could remember everything clearly up to boarding the train to Leeds, but then, little more. According to the nurse who was looking after him, he was found ‘shaking and gibbering’ on the grass in the morning.

  Shaking and gibbering. On the grass??

  Was that, then, where he had spent the night? Had he lost control of himself completely? Of his bladder? His bowels?

  Each time a nurse came to check on him, each question they asked – Would you like some water? Would you like your pillows plumping? – was infused with insidious intent, and whenever he saw two nurses speaking together, it seemed they were speaking about him.

  He thought of that thing in the park (he could not call him a man). Had he gone to the police? He had not hurt him. Or not really. He had only given him what he deserved; the thing was depraved, and its mission was corruption.

  Nothing that you don’t want.

  Why had he said it? What did he mean?

  When Charles remembered how he had raised his stick, how he had beaten him, how the man had cowered in fear, it brought on sweating fits, and when the sweating was past he was left shaking, bones clattering, rattled shingle on a beach.

  As the days passed, he began to feel a little better. When he was well enough to sit, he propped himself on pillows and asked for books to be brought from his room.

  He began to read. He re-read Tregold’s pamphlet. He read Dr Sharp’s On the Sterilization of Degenerates:

  Dr Barr, in his work, ‘Mental Defectives’, says: Let asexualization be once legalized, not as a penalty for crime, but a remedial measure preventing crime and tending to future comfort and happiness of the defective; let the practice once become common for young children immediately upon being adjudged defective by a competent authority properly appointed, and the public mind will accept it as an effective means of race preservation. It would come to be regarded, just as quarantine, as simple protection against ill.

  Charles made notes in the margin as he read, Darwin’s words echoing in his ears:

  To stem the decadence of the nation … poor relief and charity … innate want of self-control … prevented from reproducing their kind.

  The infirmary, with its clean lines, pleased him, its white sheets and its white floors and its nurses speaking softly and bringing tea and water and food. The words he read seemed to rise up with a new power in that clean, clear space. It was a cocoon, and he was a chrysalis.

  He left the infirmary on a Friday afternoon. He had been given the weekend off. He was asked if he wanted to go home, to have two days’ leave instead of the usual one, to take some time away before resuming his duties, but the thought of visiting Leeds – even passing through the station, let alone walking those streets – brought on a revulsion so strong he feared a relapse. He did not want to visit Leeds again. Not for a long time to come.

  After the high ceilings of the infirmary, his little bedroom seemed smaller than before. His sheets had been changed and a new blanket put on the bed, but otherwise all was as he had left it. His portraits on the mantel. His notes arrayed on his desk. He put his books back on the bookshelf and placed the grooved moor-stone beside them to prop them up.

  He caught his reflection in the mirror and sucked in his breath in shock. His cheeks were concave, and his moustache, which had been trimmed for him in the infirmary, looked enormous, covering half his face. His dumb-bells were on the floor beside the fireplace, and he bent to one, curling it tentatively towards his chest. It felt twice as heavy as before. He put it back and came to sit on the bed.

  Two whole days to himself. Two whole days in which he might do as he liked. What might a man do in two days? Take the train to Scotland. Hike in the Caingorms. See a Test match in Nottingham. Travel to London and visit the Wigmore Hall.

  He did not want to do any of those things. His place was here.

  Outside, he heard the clock strike six. It was a Friday. Soon, the patients would be getting ready for the dance. His violin stood in the corner, unplayed. Two weeks. When was the last time he had left it for so long?

  He wanted to be amongst people.

  He picked up his violin case and made his way downstairs.

  As he walked the length of the empty ballroom, footsteps ringing on the wood, his legs felt weak, but it was a pleasurable weakness, as though he were young again, or reborn. He made his way around the back of the stage, climbed it and then stood, looking out over the vast, empty room.

  He had forgotten how high the ceiling was. The arched windows were those of a cathedral, their brown and gold panels catching and filtering the afternoon light so it fell in warm pools on the floor. He moved so he was standing in a tunnel of golden luminescence and bent back his head, following the pictures on the glass: the sprays of bramble, the birds that seemed to flit from branch to branch. It was hallowed, magnificent. It may have been his mood, a strange mood, hollow and yet full, but he began to cry. Just a little. He wiped the tears away with his cuff.

  He made his way into the wings and brought out a seat, setting it away from the front of the stage, and sat, hands resting on his knees, filled with a sense of peace. Soon the other players filed in. They looked surprised. Lifted their hands in greeting. Enquired about his health. Complained about the weather. Loosened their ties as they took their seats. He was there and he was not. The conversation swirled around his edges.

  It was good to be here, to be amongst these people whom he knew.

  ‘We missed you,’ said Jeremy Goffin, as he took his seat.

  Charles turned. ‘Did you?’ The comment bloomed in his chest. Smiling, he reached into his case and took out his instrument, but as he did so he caught something: a look exchanged between Goffin and Johnston, the clarinettist, a small smile. A smirk.

  The players began tuning up. The scraping of the strings was sandpaper to his nerves. A few minutes of holding the violin and already his arms were aching. He gritted his teeth. Sweat broke out on his brow. He took out his handkerchief, mopped at his face.

  The patients began to arrive, first one, then two, then face after face trooping through the doors. So many. He had not thought there were so many. Hundreds of them, swarming over the floor. Where did they all come from? Were there usually so many as this? What if they came up here? Swarmed up to the stage, reaching where he sat, like vermin, like rats. He inched his chair further away from the front. Tried to concentrate on his violin, but he could not seem to get it in tune.

  Look at them.

  Grinning and gurning. Turning in circles on the floor. Jumping up and down and clapping their hands. Like children. Like stupid children. Like the idiots they are.

  The men put their instruments in their laps, waiting for the dancers to be ready to begin. The light had shifted, the sun shining through lower panels now, and the room was cast in a woozy haze. Charles searched for Mulligan, at the back, in the shadows, where the light was cool: that was where he would be.

  But Mulligan was not there.

  Charles’s eyes raked the benches. The man was
nowhere. He looked again, widening his search.

  There.

  At the front.

  Charles stared. The man was transformed. His usual countenance had gone, the stone had dissolved and he was charged with something new. Mulligan’s body was held taut, his eyes sweeping the space before him; he was looking for someone too.

  A throng of women arrived, the air pounding with their voices. Mulligan almost jumped to his feet; Charles saw the effort it took the man to hold himself back. His eyes scraped the women, following Mulligan’s gaze.

  And then he saw … the small thing, the dark thing. Fay. Ella Fay. The Irishman’s eyes were fastened on her, and he was hungry, as though he might cross the floor and devour her. And now the girl had seen him too and the man’s face had changed. Softened. He looked … happy. Yes, that was it. Happy. It painted the air with its garish hue.

  Who was he to be happy? This … man? He was not even a man. He was little more than a beast of the field.

  And the girl … this thing. She had been one to haunt the shadows too, and yet here she was, taking her time in the sun as though it were her birthright, as though she deserved it, as though this whole spectacle – the ballroom and the carvings and the paintings and the fine Burmantofts work and the brambles and the ceiling reaching up, up into hazy space and the sun falling down, down, and lighting her, lighting her – was all here for herself and this man: a backdrop to their courting, to their mating, to their sordid match. A match forged here in this room, and this room, which not too many minutes ago had seemed to be a spacious cathedral, now appeared as nothing more than a stew.

  Nausea gripped him. Before he knew what was happening he was on his feet.

  ‘Dr Fuller?’

  It was Goffin. He was staring. ‘Are you ready?’