A torrent of the kind of feelings that he didn’t normally permit himself coursed through Querios. Was it his fault if these women were mad? He did his best to help them, keep them safe in Lake House, protected from censure and their own abominable desires and passions. He had never wanted to work in an asylum but had been forced to assume the mantle bequeathed by his father. It dawned on him with a startling clarity that he disliked lunatics above all other kinds of people. They were devious. Cunning. Untrustworthy. Parasites on the body of healthy society, without higher thoughts or aims other than to secure their own individual liberty.
He looked again at the tableau in front of him. Something about the Button woman’s pose on the low stool, some humbleness in it, was designed to reproach him. It was intolerable.
“Mrs. Button. Get up off that stool.”
He banged down the tin on a vacant plant stand, seized the piece of wood out of Button’s hands and flung it on the fire. There was a moment of silence broken by a hiss as the dry wood caught and flared. Mrs. Palmer ran forward, stooped in front of the leaping flames and reached one hand into the grate. She pulled out the wood and doused it with water from the holly vase on the mantelpiece. Querios flinched as she turned, afraid for a moment that she intended to empty the rest of it over his head. She brushed off the charred edges of the wood and handed it back to Button as carefully as if it was a live child. He almost laughed.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Mrs. Button is playing the Virgin Mary, sir.”
Now, he did laugh, long and loud. Tears of mirth sprang from his eyes and his breath came in wheezing gasps, preventing him from getting out his words.
“Button here hardly resembles our Lord’s mother, Mrs. Palmer. Wretched creature that she is.”
From a foot away, she spat in his face—coolly and accurately, exactly like a man might, as if she were some jack-tar rolling out of a tavern in Wapping. He groped for his handkerchief and dabbed at his eye, maintaining an expression of unconcern, for the sake of his own dignity as much as the impression on the imaginary magistrate. The Reverend was likely to visit over the festive season. It would be awkward to have to inform him that his wife was more hysterical than ever but there it was. He was always optimistic.
Violet had found the sweets. She was sucking the white, powdery sugar off the bonbons with rapid movements of her jaw and spitting glistening toffees back in the tin. Her bird, returned to her shoulder, pecked at the berries that dangled from her ears. Querios wished Talitha Batt had remained over Christmas. Miss Batt set a standard. He retrieved the tin, jammed the lid back on and rapped on it with his signet ring.
“Fanny! Bring this regrettable soirée to a close.”
He repeated the instruction, more loudly, but she didn’t so much as raise her head. He felt a spurt of anger. Quelled it. It was the season and one had to make allowances. There weren’t many females who could do Fanny Makepeace’s job. There weren’t many who wanted to try. He would leave them to it. That was it. Let them sort themselves out.
Outside in the passageway he leaned against the wall, trying to overcome the roaring in his head, the crash and thunder of it. There was no sign of when the magistrates would come and he was haunted by them. Permanently under inspection. Permanently found wanting.
Emmeline was nagging him about getting a physician to Catherine. He would not, he decided, looking at his feet, the way they were planted on the carpet, toes turned out. His mother used to scold him for walking with his toes at a quarter to three. He’d never understood why. He didn’t now. He strained after some saying about a cobbler’s children. Couldn’t remember it. He would not risk the business by letting word get out that his own daughter was unbalanced.
On the other side of the door, voices had resumed. There seemed to be some merriment again. The women were singing and he could hear the boards creaking and bowing—it sounded as if they might be dancing. He could go back to his own parlor and sit with the family, Emmeline’s sister Florence and her children, but he didn’t feel inclined.
Querios felt his way down the unlit stairs to the office. The curtains were open and the moonlight sufficient to display the objects in the room quite plainly. A lot of old junk, he thought. And none of it chosen by him. He sat down and rested his eyes on the piles of ledgers on the front of the desk, contemplated the white quills laid out on a stand next to the ink bottle.
They’d planned to leave Lake House once the old man died. When it happened, it had not after all been possible. Querios knew no other trade and even with Emmeline behind him lacked the courage to sell up, take a chance on a new life. Unable to discharge himself, he had no choice but to stay on and look after the guests, imprisoned for longer than any of them. He wondered if they saw the irony. Some did, he thought, although on the whole it passed the families by.
The cobbler’s children go barefoot. That was it. Once he remembered the homily, he couldn’t dislodge it. He caught some movement from outside out of the corner of his eye, got up and stood at the dark glass. The fox bounded toward the house with its shadow reaching ahead of it on the moonlit grass. He raised a fist, banged on the window and it swerved and carried on—toward the cottage, the peacock’s enclosure.
Bloody creature was getting bolder.
EIGHTEEN
Lucas St. Clair bought a bag of hazelnuts from a boy with his feet wrapped in bundles of pudding cloth and told him to keep the change. Regent Street curved away in front of him, alive with people. He would have liked to seize the beauty of the moment but the exposure would be too long. By the time they’d left their mark on the plate, the women in their colorful shawls and cloaks would appear to be wraiths; the strolling men, specters.
He continued on his way, eating as he went. He wasn’t due at Vigo Street, at the gallery, until eleven, but it was hard to rid himself of the permanent sense of hurry with which he lived. Lucas couldn’t remember the last time he had taken a morning off but he was fulfilling his resolution for the new year—to get out for at least a couple of hours on Saturdays and do something that was not work.
Some of the shops still had Christmas fir trees over their doorways; others displayed curling branches of pine and laurel in their windows. New photography studios were opening everywhere. At the point where the wide street swerved toward Piccadilly, he stopped in front of one. The p had come off the painted sign outside; it advertised hotography. He found himself looking at an image in the window of a girl wearing a dress tied with a satin sash. She was aged about ten and had been pictured stepping through a huge, ornately carved frame as big as she was, passing through it as if it was a doorway. She was half in the frame, half out of it, in the act of escaping it even as it captured her. The picture was a jest at photography’s expense. He stared at it, throwing nuts into his mouth from the palm of his hand until he’d emptied the bag.
* * *
At the gallery, there were too many pictures. Landscapes sat shoulder to shoulder with still lifes; portraits jostled Eastern antiquities for space. They hung five or six deep around the walls of the long room, with more propped against the skirting boards. The profusion irritated Lucas; it suggested that the merit of photographs lay in their existing at all, that no selection procedures were appropriate.
Maddox hadn’t arrived. The only other visitor was an elderly man, baby-faced with a bald head and ebullient salt-and-pepper whiskers framing his face. He walked around the room stooped forward with his hands linked behind his back and his nose pointed at the pictures.
The early photographs were grouped together. Mr. Fox Talbot had supplied both the calotype negative and the print for his study of an oak tree in winter. They hung side by side, the eerie beauty of the paper negative perfectly matched by the delicate fascination of the positive.
The old gentleman had appeared beside him.
“Wonderful work, isn’t it, sir?” Lucas said.
The man nodded. “I’m glad you think so.”
Lucas wandered on. Was it F
ox Talbot himself? Just to think about Fox Talbot, his persistent experiments with silver and salts, his lace and leaves offered up to the sun in the Wiltshire countryside, made him cheerful. Fox Talbot was part of the magical quality of photography, its human alchemy. He had assisted at the birth of the medium; it was up to the next generation to develop the uses to which it could be put.
As schoolboys, Lucas and his friends had coated pieces of paper with silver nitrate, held them up to the classroom window with their hands in front of them, watched the outlines of their fingers take shape like white gloves as the surrounding paper turned black and dense. The image was fugitive; like childhood afternoons, their hands quickly disappeared, darkened to nothingness. He’d found it entrancing—the apparition of a negative shadow, a faithful record. Its subtle vanishing. His father, when he informed him of his desire to become a photographer, had let him know it was out of the question. Lucas had put aside his passion and concentrated on his medical studies.
After Archie died it didn’t seem to matter anymore what his father or anyone else thought. The smudgy picture of Archie that Lucas had made with a pinhole camera on the day he left for the Crimea was the only image of him they had. It became his mother’s most precious possession, carried with her everywhere in a locket. That was when he’d taken up photography again—seriously.
He felt tired. He sat down on the Chesterfield in the middle of the gallery, wincing as his fingertip encountered the leather. He’d given himself a splinter while cutting plates and had tried to extract it with a scalpel tip but his flesh had closed stubbornly around it. And he’d slept badly. The talk to the Alienists’ Association was approaching fast. It loomed up at him in the night asking what he planned to say and whether it was true.
He was rattled by Mrs. Palmer’s rejection of her image and her insistence that she didn’t recognize herself in it. He hadn’t been able to forget her face or the look in her eyes—not in the photograph but by the filtered light of the dining room, gold on her hair, her skin, the shadows moving, changing with every passing minute and her face changing too, her expression as fluid and evanescent as the unscientific, beautiful light.
Lucas rose to examine the modern work. Wet collodion provided far greater detail than the old paper negatives; the exposures were much decreased. He admired a picture by Frith, each huge slab of the Cheops pyramid sharp as lump sugar. But he felt dissatisfied with the portraits. The camera was faithful in its way and yet it recorded a world that no one had ever seen. The qualities he found inspirational about the medium, the way it ordered life, flattened and clarified the world into planes of light and shade, stopped time, also frustrated him.
He stopped in front of a picture of a man propped in a chair, his eyes closed, chest bare. The man’s torso looked as vulnerable as the flesh in one of the Old Masters, his pale body contrasting with his darkened face and hands. He was slumped at right angles to the camera. It was refreshing to see a man who wasn’t standing like a statue, moustache waxed, wife clamped to arm. A man who wasn’t trying to prove he was a fine fellow. Self-portrait as a Drowned Man, he read, and he felt his faith strengthen again. Photographs could show the inner man, the inner woman, display the deeper truth of human existence. It was possible.
“What kind of fellow would make an image of himself dead?” came a voice from behind. “Is that how he wants to be remembered?” Lucas turned as Maddox clapped him on the back. Maddox gestured toward the room, his eyes sweeping the walls. “There’s a damned lot of them. Quite remarkable what they can do these days.”
The old gentleman was still stooped in front of the two oak trees. He straightened his back and left, tipping his hat at them. Maddox made a quick turn about the room and flung himself down on the couch in front of a tableau of a group of women draped in wet gauze, their hair parted over their breasts. The title on the mat was The Water Nymphs.
“You’ve got to admit it’s a thing of beauty, the female form,” Maddox sighed.
Lucas did admit it but not to Maddox. And the way he wanted to appreciate it wasn’t behind glass, posed by another man—or posed at all. Not that there were other options open to him. He stared at a picture of a foam-topped sea, two dark and distinct clouds sailing across the sky above. Something about the image didn’t convince. The line between sea and sky was confused, overlapping. In the next one, the waves were stilled and flat but the sky contained the same two sailing clouds. It had been constructed in the dark chamber.
“Do you think it’s right, to take two different photographs on two different days and splice them together? Present them as one?”
Maddox dragged his eyes away from the nymphs.
“Don’t see the harm in it if it makes a better picture.”
“Yes, but is it true? Don’t you think when you look at a photograph that you’re looking at a record of the truth?”
“Depends what you mean by truth, old man.”
Maddox looked tired too, Lucas noticed.
Lucas had seen a photograph that meant something to him. It wasn’t the Drowned Man. He puzzled over it as they walked out into a light rain and along Regent Street, racked his brain while Maddox hailed a cab.
“Grieve had a word with me the other day,” Maddox said, once they were in the cab. “Reckons you’re not pulling your weight.”
“What do you mean?”
Maddox looked out of the square of smeared glass at a couple of women hanging on to umbrellas turned out by the wind, the ribbons of their bonnets streaming.
“You know Grieve. He plays the numbers game. Makes him look good to the commissioners. He’s after fifty percent of patients discharged within a year, certified as cured. Says you’re marking too many discharged uncured, and keeping too many more of them in.”
St. Clair snorted in disbelief.
“Where’s the merit in discharging people when they’re still ill? Or saying they’re well when they’re not? It’s pointless. It’s dangerous.”
Maddox shrugged.
“It isn’t about patients’ welfare. It isn’t even about getting the diagnosis right. It’s about what the politicians want.”
“I know but I don’t accept it, Doxy. I can’t work like that.”
Maddox sighed.
“It’s not easy for any of us, Lucas. How’s your research coming along?”
“I’m working on it. I thought you weren’t interested.”
“I told you I’d keep an open mind. I’m not saying it doesn’t have a use—only that you’ll have to convince me.”
“I intend to. You and a lot of other people. Remember, I’m making a presentation shortly, to the Alienists. Shall I reserve you a seat?”
Over a late breakfast of coffee and kedgeree at the Pall Mall Club, talking with Maddox and some friends they encountered about the new anesthesia, smoking his pipe and wondering whether leisure was really worthwhile after all, it came to Lucas. It wasn’t any of the pictures at the exhibition. It was the girl in the window, stepping through the frame. She’d given him an idea.
NINETEEN
Emmeline heard Catherine’s light, running footsteps and followed the sound through the open door of her sewing room. The old cedar chest was pulled out from the wall, its lid thrown back on its hinges. Catherine kneeled on the rug in front of it, still in her nightdress at midmorning, the soles of her bare feet exposed.
She sat back on her heels and held up a pair of slippers, dangled them by their straps.
“Look at these, Mother.” She ran her thumbs over the unscarred leather soles. They were for an infant too young to put its foot to the ground, never worn by the look of them. “Were they mine?”
“Probably, darling.” Emmeline sat down in her sewing chair. “Catty, I need to talk to you.”
Catherine rummaged in the chest, pulled out an embroidered baby dress, held it up by the shoulders. White and translucent in the morning light, with a long fall of skirt, it looked like a child ghost.
“Did I wear this?”
> “You must have done. It’s the christening dress. You all wore it. Can you imagine Benedict, dressed in that?”
Catherine laughed. “Not really. Why do you keep it, Mother?”
“It’s a memento. Anyway”—Emmeline kept her tone light—“one day there will be babies in the family again. You might want it for your own children.”
Catherine ignored her and continued digging around in the dark interior. Emmeline had had the chest since her own childhood. It was carved over its rounded top with leaves and flowers, the inside full of snipped curls and milk teeth and sailor suits. The polished coral rings on which the children had cut their teeth. She never opened it. Even to lift the lid, breathe in a scent so faint it seemed always on the point of vanishing, flooded her with a persistent, immovable melancholy. Keeping objects was useless, she’d belatedly come to understand. It only accentuated all that was lost.
Emmeline opened her workbag and took out a table napkin. She had set aside her lacework. Darning was all she could do at present, making connections where there were rents and tears. She resumed a line of small anchoring stitches along the side of the rip and tried to remember some detail of Catherine’s infancy.
“Your first curls are in there somewhere. You were born with a whole head of hair, you know, and so pretty.”
“Was I?”
“Yes. You still are.”
“You don’t really think that. You think I ought to be like Cousin Alice.” Catherine picked out a silver spoon with an ornately traced handle. “CVA. This must be mine.”
“It was a present from Granny. She used to feed you milk jelly with it.”
“How sickening.”
“You adored cold puddings. Junket. Egg custard. Tapioca. You used to beg for more. Such a plump little thing, you were.”
“Why do you always talk about what I used to be? I’m not six years old anymore, Mother.”
“I know you aren’t.”
“Why do you sigh?”
The Painted Bridge Page 14
