The Ballroom

by Anna Hope

  What would they do when they found out?

  She remembered the woman with the birthmark – her mouth opening and closing around the words, they kill them. They kill the babbies in there. She could not think that was true, but she had seen women in the wards often; they would appear in the day room, heavy with a child, and the next day they would be gone.

  Or might they kill it inside her instead? She sucked in her breath, clasping her hands across her stomach. It was possible – she knew. She had known a girl at the mill who went and had it done. Who came back grey-faced and slow.

  Outside, the swallows were being thrown by the wind. Over the last few days she had seen them leaving, the skies growing emptier day by day. The family above the window had left, and now their nest, no longer a home, was just an empty clump of mud.

  How did a child grow? She imagined a small person, the size of her thumbnail, like one of those curled leaves at the start of summer, with tiny hands and tiny feet and a tiny mouth. A child made of the fields and the blue night and of him and her. She ached to tell him. It had been a month since she had seen his face.

  Was he out there now? If she thought hard enough, might he hear her? Might he come to know?

  Outside, the rain hesitated and then began to fall. Ella closed her eyes and pressed her hot belly, her cheek, against the cool touch of the glass. Perhaps she was afraid of this child, she thought, as much as she was afraid for it. And was it the fear, or the child, that was burrowing deep inside her now?

  She thought of her mother, of the stroke of her hand on her cheek. Her mother was the first thing she had loved, and since then she had tried hard not to love anything at all. But she hadn’t been able to help herself. She should have stayed safe. She had felt safe, for a moment, but it had been a moment in a wood, in a field, in a dream. There was no safety here.

  Do close your mouth, Miss Fay. The door does not only go one way.

  Would he really let her leave?

  If he did, she knew, she would have to go.

  Charles

  HE WAS COMPOSING his reply to Churchill when the rain began to fall. A few small spots on the page through his open window, blurring the words he had just written. At first there were only those few first drops – as he moved the papers to the bed, where they would stay dry – then a pause, as though the whole world were holding its breath, and Charles’s heart clenched, fearing that he might still be made to wait, and then they fell in earnest, turbid light drenching the room, turning it from grey to black.

  That night he left his window open, sitting at his desk with a small lamp burning, listening to the rain drumming in the gutters. He could think of nothing but the operation ahead. He pulled his notebook towards him and scribbled.

  The most important thing is to have access to the vas deferens. Thereafter two small incisions are made on either side of the scrotum. Then each vas deferens will come to the surface for excision. Both vas deferentia will be cut, separated and sutured to seal. On waking, Mulligan should feel pain, but not overwhelmingly so.

  He made sketches of the area – of scrotum, seminal vesicle, bladder, pubic bone, penis. He could not help but sketch the organ he had seen that day on the cricket field; it was Mulligan’s very genitals, after all, upon which he would operate, thick around the stem, the red tip engorged. Dr Sharp’s testimony stated that he performed the operation without any anaesthetic, but this would be unlikely in Mulligan’s case – the man would have to be knocked out with chloroform or ether; it would be the only way to carry it out without his knowledge. But then, in a matter of minutes, a first strike for a brave new world! And there was a peculiar poetic justice to it. Mulligan had nominated himself, had he not? That day on the scorched field, waving his penis at him. Pissing on his boots.

  He went over to his barbells and began to lift, and as he did so he thought of Mulligan, going about his business, whatever that might be – his queer, sour relationship with that girl. Perhaps he was thinking of her now. Perhaps he was touching himself, his hands on his body, on that penis, grasping himself as he lay in his bed in the ward, spilling himself with no knowledge whatsoever of what was coming. Ten minutes would be all it would take. Ten minutes, and then generation after generation of corruption would be wiped out for good.

  The thought was astonishing: clean, like a knife. Charles felt a stiffening in his loins, and he pulled at the weights, again, again, again. When he put them down, he was drenched in sweat and gasping, stripping off his shirt and splashing himself from the pitcher by the sink.

  The weather had broken. The patients would be clamouring for the dances to start again. They would dance together, Mulligan and the girl. All unknowing.

  Let them.

  Let them have their last dance. Soon the girl would be gone, and Mulligan … well, Mulligan would be a different sort of man.

  John

  HE SAT CLOSE to the front of the male lines, hardly able to stay on his bench. He had scrubbed himself in the washroom as best he could, but the linger of damp mud was still on him, its traces settled in dark lines across his palms. No fires were lit, and around him the other men were subdued, their voices low, as though damped by the weather too, as though uncertain as to what they should do in this grand, echoing room. A thick pall of smoke hung over their heads. The musicians were present on the stage, but Fuller was not amongst them.

  Outside, the rain fell. It had not ceased for five days straight, the fields a quagmire now. His last week spent slipping and sliding in mud, the sides of the grave become yellow, sickly clay, as he was watched, constantly, by a leering Brandt. Dan was a raw absence in his days, but the thought of Ella was worse. The letter had been read by Fuller. Had the bastard found the store of them, his eyes raiding the rest?

  He had heard nothing, but this only made him more uneasy. Was Ella being punished in his stead?

  His foot rattled against the floor.

  He was a fool. He had had his freedom and spent it, spent hers too – carelessly, like his father with his coins in the yard bars – had been greedy and blind, as though there would be days and days to live like that.

  But now the women were coming, their voices bouncing off the corridor outside and his blood pummelling as he scoured the crowd, but as wave after wave of women entered the ballroom and she was not amongst them, his thoughts grew wild. She had been taken downstairs. They had hurt her, somehow. Fuller was there. He was punishing her now.

  But then he looked back and there she was, and the sounds of the room around him fell away. Her face was turned, and she had not seen him yet. She moved slowly. Her hair – the last time he had seen it, loose and heavy and hanging over him – was tied in a tight knot at her neck, her gaze fixed ahead. Her hands clasped in front of her. A high colour flared in her cheeks.

  He leant forward, willing her to look towards him. But she was moving away, slipping through the crowd to the back of the room, and he was losing sight of her already. He got to his feet, so that when she looked she would see him easily, so she would know he was here.

  ‘Mr Mulligan.’ A passing attendant gave him a push. ‘Sit yourself down.’

  He sat, and the air was jagged, filled with broken glass.

  The first dance was called, and he stood again, waiting for her to make her way out of the benches towards him. But she remained where she was, eyes fixed on the floor. The musicians began to play, and the space between them was filled with moving bodies. He sat back, raked his hands through his hair.

  The next dance was called, and the next, and still she did not look up. And he knew then that something had occurred. Something he could not imagine. That she must blame him for whatever had happened to her. But now he could not help it; he had to speak with her before the night was done, so he stood, counting the steps between them.

  He stepped away from his bench. Pushing his way through the heavy press of men. Her head lifting now.

  People pushing and jostling around him, finding their partners for the next
dance. He was knocked off course and lost sight of her again, until he stood at the front of the female lines.

  ‘Ella,’ he called.

  He could not read her face.

  ‘Ella!’

  She stood then, and made her way out towards him, but when she was still two paces away she stopped, the space between them churning. He closed it, stepping forward, reaching for her hand. ‘What? Please God. What is it?’

  She looked up at him, and her face was tight and pleading. ‘Can’t you see?’ she said to him. ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘What?’

  And then, with a great rising feeling, he knew, and reached for her, pulling her close. ‘A child?’

  ‘Yes.’ She spoke against his chest, and her voice was desperate now. ‘But I am leaving this place. They’re letting me go free.’

  He lifted her face to his, but her gaze escaped. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No,’ he said to her. ‘Listen to me – you must not be sorry. You must go.’ He held her head in his hands, and when finally her eyes found his, he saw wildness in them, and fear, and hope. ‘You must go. But send me word. Send me word where you are, and when I know how to find you, I will come for you. I will come for you both.’

  Ella

  IT WAS STILL raining on the day she left, falling fast from a low-slung sky.

  She gathered her things before the other women were awake: a squashed flower, a swallow’s feather, an oak leaf and a cross of woven corn. She put the feather on the bed, then folded the cross, leaf and flower into the small stack of his letters, and put the bundle beneath her stays, where it bulged, a lump before her heart.

  She was dressed in her old work clothes; they had given them back to her last night: her black skirt, her blouse and her brown woollen shawl. They smelt of the past. Of animals and metal and the mill.

  She picked up the feather, held its hard tip between finger and thumb, and traced a line across her palm:

  Now, you must imagine, a bird with a wingspan no bigger than this, making the journey all the way across Europe, down to Africa, or even all the way to India and further east.

  She hadn’t seen Clem for over two weeks.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She looked up to see Old Germany sitting on her bed, blinking in the pale morning, pigtails fluffed up around her head from sleep.

  ‘Please, would you do something for me?’ said Ella. ‘When Clem comes back, would you give her this? She’ll understand.’

  She placed the feather in the old woman’s hand. Old Germany stared down, then lifted it, inspecting it, rubbing it this way and that across her thumb. ‘She’s not coming back,’ she said, in her small, light voice.

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the night. Creep creep. Her soul came and told me. It’s leaving soon.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ella crouched before her. ‘Where is she going?’

  ‘Out there …’ Old Germany waved the feather at the sky beyond the windows. ‘But she’s scared.’ She frowned now, eyes narrowed, as if looking at something she did not want to see. ‘It’s a long way and she’s frightened.’

  Fear coursed down Ella’s spine as she gripped the woman’s thin, gnarled hands. ‘What are you saying? What do you mean?’

  But the old lady’s face had changed. Her eyes were wide and blameless.

  ‘Here,’ she said, putting the feather in Ella’s hands again. ‘I think that you must take it back.’

  Rain splayed itself against the windows as she walked the long corridor between two nurses, and it was as though her legs were moving despite her, despite the din and jangle in her head. In the administration block, with its greenish light, they stopped. One of the nurses stood beside her while the other stepped into the doctor’s room, from which low, mumbling voices came.

  Beneath her feet, the tiled flowers, the black daisies. She had screamed when she first saw them. There was a scream in her now, but it was buried, a long way from her throat.

  The nurse appeared again. ‘There’s a van going into Bradford this morning. You can travel on it.’

  Ella nodded, mute.

  They walked down the main hallway towards the ballroom and then took a different, snaking path through corridors she had never walked before. She thought perhaps they were in the men’s quarters, that this side of the asylum belonged to them. Would he feel her if she passed close? Would he know?

  Somewhere, she thought, there must be other Ellas, ones who were not staying silent, who were screaming and banging on doors and demanding to see John. To see Clem. To know that they were well. But those other Ellas would be locked back up, and so this Ella stayed silent, walking on.

  They came to a side entrance where a van stood waiting, a delivery driver clad in a slick wet raincoat sitting up at the front.

  ‘Go on then.’ One of the nurses gave her a small push.

  The air was hard and clean and smelt of rain.

  Free.

  She did not feel how she thought she would. She did not feel as she had felt that night, amongst the fields. A great numbness had come upon her.

  ‘Have you no coat, lass?’ The driver came towards her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right. Come on. Get in the back then.’ He talked to her slowly, as if she were daft in the head. He moved around and opened the door, and she hauled herself inside, sitting down amongst sacks of grain. The van rocked as he took his seat above her, then the whip cracked and they were away. A smeared window showed the side wall of the building, huge at first, and then framed, with grey, puckly sky all around it, and then growing smaller, and smaller still. She put her hands to her belly and closed her eyes.

  Free. This small hard word that felt so cold.

  Could you live inside a word like that?

  She banged on the thin wooden board between the driver and her. The van stopped, and she heard him climb out. He opened the doors, his face rumpled with concern. Behind him, the rain had stopped, and the sky was a thin, light grey. ‘What is it, lass?’

  ‘I want to get out.’

  ‘We’re not there yet.’

  ‘I’m not going to Bradford.’

  He looked around him and scratched his head. ‘But there’s nobbut grass and moor up here.’

  ‘It’s where I’m going,’ she said.

  When she climbed out, she saw they were on a high path, with drystone walls on either side, the land stretching far in both directions. ‘This is right,’ she said, making her voice steady. ‘This is where I want to be.’

  The man looked at her, bemused, then, ‘All right then.’ He tipped his cap to her. ‘You take care.’

  The van heaved and jerked away, and when it had gone, she was quite alone. She brought her shawl around her. It was possible to see a long way – the fields and then the close, purple rise of the moor. The fields were filled with sheep, and the stones of the walls were hazed with moss. She walked to the walls and when she put her hands out to touch the moss it was soft and stained her fingertips green. It was quiet, and the air was still, but as she listened she heard the quiet was full of small, insistent sounds: the soft cropping of the sheep at the grass in the fields; the wind, which sometimes picked up and then died down again. The sound of water running, close by, and a strange sound, a sort of soft sighing, that she could only think was the earth itself. She climbed one of the walls and began to walk, finding a thin path at the edge of a field. She did not walk quickly. She did not know where she was going, only that she needed to climb; only that she wanted to be up high.

  Soon the field gave way to wilder land, but the path remained, winding a white way upwards. The tussocky grass was wet. At the side of the path were bushes where tiny berries shone in great clusters, and she picked palmfuls and ate them, and now her hands were stained with purple too. As she climbed, the path grew narrower and was sometimes difficult to follow, as it crossed rocks slippery with water, and sometimes the water was a small brook she had to find
her way across. She rinsed her hands and face and cupped water in her palm to drink, and the water smelt of the earth and the earth smelt of water, and it was good to have it in her mouth and on her skin.

  When she reached the moor top, the sun was low in the sky to her left and the wind whipped her hair around her face and there was fear in her and sadness and hope. She thought of John. Send me word. She clasped her arms around her.

  She would find somewhere. A farm. Somewhere they would need workers. She did not know how it would be. She only knew that she would live. That she would survive.

  She thought of Clem. She conjured her before her, not as she had last seen her, but before – the lightness that was in her. The bravery.

  She spoke her name out loud and wondered if Clem might feel it, might hear the sound her name made spoken in this high, free place. Then she brought the feather from her dress and held it and raised her arms. She tipped her head back, and as she did so the wind blew across the wide moor and passed through the feather, and her body hummed with it, as though she were an instrument, for the breath of some greater creature to pass through and make sing.

  Charles

  HE WAS UP before dawn. Fifty lifts on one side, fifty on the other, humming as he poured water into his bowl and soaped his face, his armpits. A tight but not unpleasant sensation seemed to have settled in his chest, the sort of feeling he would have as a child on the morning of a day at the beach – the sort of day when the pleasure of anticipation was almost too much to bear. He would need to be calm. It was the equinox, after all, a moment of balance, of poise.