The Painted Bridge

by Wendy Wallace

  * * *

  On the second day, Makepeace instructed that she be kept longer in the chair.

  “Five minutes each way, Mr. Fludd.” Her voice was excited, as hard and jangling as her rings as she clapped her hands to indicate that he should commence. Anna heard herself whimpering as she was lifted into the seat. She didn’t struggle, she tried to put her hands over her eyes, to block out the cellar walls, Makepeace’s face, but Fludd grabbed her wrists, trapped them on the arms of the chair. She began to scream, but not for help. There was no help. The chair started to move.

  When they lifted her out, she was lost in an impossibly large body. She couldn’t find her lips or her tongue. Her feet and her head were on each side of her and her elbows were distant and out of reach. She was cold, colder than she’d ever been in her life.

  After a week of the treatment, Anna stopped trying to remember where she was or why this was happening. She opened her eyes one dusky afternoon to a small bedroom and saw two candles lit on the mantelpiece. A photograph of a woman she didn’t know. The loneliness was unbearable. She called for Louisa. For her mother. For any human soul. They were there, all of them, her mother and her sisters looking down at her from the top of the cliff and Anna was below, the tide turning and rising around her ankles. She grew silent, waded in the shallows, heard the sigh and suck of the water, knew the terrible emptiness of her open hands. Only her eye could hold the image of him as he sank. Her hands were useless.

  She prayed for a sign. Anything at all. Nothing came. Nothing new. Only herself on the shore and then in the shallows. She saw the scene, the freezing water, the disappearing child, with a sense of detachment. She lived in the shallow waves, her hands trailing through the water, could experience it with her eyes closed or open, could hear the sighing waters over and under the echoes from along the corridor, feel the urgent emptiness of her hands around the cup Lovely pressed into them.

  * * *

  Dr. Higgins had instructed that she be purged, Makepeace announced. They were in the treatment room; Lovely had been sent out. Makepeace turned to Anna. She had rolled up her sleeves and taken off her rings. Anna closed her eyes as Makepeace took hold of her, pulling back her head and pinching her nose.

  “Come on, Palmer,” she said, as she poured chalky liquid through a spout down Anna’s throat. “Open your eyes.” She jabbed at one of them with her finger. “You’re not a child, to be hiding away. Anyway …” Makepeace came closer, her face lowered over Anna’s. “There is nowhere to hide. Not now.”

  Anna’s bowels turned to water; she was left shut in the bedroom with the stench, the slops freezing in the chamber pot. Next day was another kind of emetic; she vomited until she thought her insides would spill into the tin bowl, stood up with black spots dancing in front of her eyes and at once collapsed on the floor.

  Days later, Makepeace arrived in her room again, early. Anna walked behind her down the wormy boards, weeping silently and unstoppably, supported by Lovely’s arm around her waist. The corridor grew narrower and darker every time she passed down it. It had once seemed long but now it was never long enough.

  In the treatment room, Lovely brushed Anna’s hair—slowly, with a patient gentleness in her big hands, smoothing the tresses with her palm between each brushstroke. Anna wished the moment could last forever.

  “Enough of that,” Makepeace said. “I’ll ring if you’re required.”

  Lovely left the room backward; the last thing Anna saw was her broad, concerned face. Anna closed her eyes, her ears jarred by each snip of the scissors. When she opened her eyes again, it was done. Her hair lay on the floor all around, in long, dark skeins, unaware of its severance and shining in the beams of sun that fell through the window. She felt the shock in her fingers as they ran over her head from her forehead to the nape of her neck. Makepeace doused Anna’s head with water, came toward her with a bar of soap, an open razor.

  “It’s for your own good.”

  Her scalp, readied by shaving, was first blistered with hot irons. Later, it was frozen with crushed ice that had been packed in an India rubber cap. Anna saw herself as if from above, as if she floated over the woman she had been. She saw her own familiar body dressed in a calico nightdress, strapped to a chair in the treatment room. Saw Makepeace, pushing the ice down hard on her head, breathing heavily.

  “What are you doing to me?” Anna heard herself say.

  “Cooling the blood. Mr. Abse’s orders.”

  The pain was sharp and jarring, as if something had come loose inside her skull.

  Afterward, in the mirror at the washstand in her own room, her lips were as blue as cornflowers. Her scalp looked angry, the skin raised and red. The pain had changed. It was as solid as iron; it enveloped her from the inside of her head. She threw the towel over the mirror. The creature she saw in the glass was a stranger and the stranger frightened her.

  Next, a week later, came the leeches, applied to her private places by Dr. Higgins. She was maniacal, he said, as he lifted her skirts, due to a disorder of the menses. He had renewed the certificate for her own safety. Anna didn’t protest. She couldn’t. It seemed to be someone else this was happening to while she watched from above, dispassionate and helpless. The bites oozed blood that would not cease.

  * * *

  After some days, she didn’t know how long she had lain there, time couldn’t be measured anymore in the old ways, they brought her out of the bedroom. Put her into the window seat in the dayroom, wrapped in a blanket. She still couldn’t speak, she discovered. She couldn’t respond to Lizzie Button’s gentle inquiries. All she could do was look into Lizzie’s brown eyes. She gazed at her for a long time until Makepeace stepped between them. Mrs. Featherstone laughed and sang to herself, tore the tassels off the edges of the curtains and scattered them on the floor like flowers. Talitha’s chair was empty, waiting for her.

  Anna no longer felt sorrow. She didn’t feel anything. She was not there. She could smell sea air underneath the boiled cabbage and potatoes and feel the spray of surf sharp on her skin as she sat in the gloom of the dayroom. Eating a mouthful of herring at breakfast she tasted the whelks they boiled in seawater over driftwood fires. When the two friends quarreled, shrill and resentful, she heard the voices of children, playing.

  She saw the sun on the chimney breast, over a far horizon, the water merged with the sky. The chalk shore turned pink and gold in its fiery light and she roamed it, up and down. The sky lay flattened and stilled on the sand, caught in the wet remaining lick of sea, the pink gleam of sunset brought to earth, the fire of it cooled. The sea could do that, could unify earth and sky. The sky over the earth was bereft, could not regard itself in the mirror of the sea, find itself rosily beautiful.

  Not always beauty. The beach could be starkly ugly. The light muddy and neutral, overcast, the tide not in nor out and hard to know which way it traveled. The sea grumpy and recalcitrant. Sulking, midtide. It deceived, appeared to pause. Or ran away like a coward, a bully. Disappeared toward the far horizon and left everything scattered and stranded on the beach—translucent, twisted tails of weed or rope, expired jellyfish, flat with exhaustion—the sea departed as if it was a thief disturbed. Ebb tide spoke of death.

  Sailors who died at sea had their tattoos cut off, the patches of skin brought back for their relatives. She heard these things as she heard the sea, without quite hearing them, as if they washed into her through her skin, soaked into her being. As if they had always been part of her and she could not rid herself of them.

  Anna looked up to see if anyone else was aware of it. If anyone else knew that separate lives, separate worlds, could occur side by side, could mingle in every moment like night and day rolled into one. They were not. Miss Little and Miss Todd gazed not at each other but at her. Violet sat across the table and grinned at her with toothless gums. Lizzie Button pressed her to eat a slice of bread, to build up her strength. Put a morsel into her mouth with her own fingers. Anna pushed it out with her tongue wh
en Lizzie turned away. Only Talitha Batt understood. And she was gone, stepped into her other life. Her real life.

  In bed in the darkness, Anna prayed to Him to let her die properly. To allow her to depart her empty body. She was nothing more than a body. An irregular heartbeat. A series of painfully drawn breaths. She was a shell on the shore, the living creature inside gone. One night as she lay listening to her own breathing the hollow feeling gave way to a sense of enormity. Of a world inside herself that stretched backward and forward, that was impermeable, invulnerable. She was whole, peerless. They could do nothing at all to her, not now and not ever.

  She lay holding the rough edge of the top sheet in both hands, pulled it up over her face in the darkness. Her self was contained within. The whole past was inside her, perfectly preserved, laid out in strange and awkward shapes like the world on the globe. She could turn it in her mind, fast or slow. Still it. It was always there. Even in her dreams, her world was inside her. When she was vomiting her innards into the tin bowl, it was not the least disturbed. Marriage had not enabled her to leave it behind or to forget. Nothing ever had or ever would. She could not mislay anything in her mind. She kept everything, inside, recorded for all time on a globe that spun faster and faster, whole continents of time whipping past, oceans of love, forests of regret and rocky hopes, all blurred and run together.

  * * *

  It was the next morning that he came. Restored to life, his flesh white against the pale sand, his eyes round and brown. He sat with his legs stretched out in front of him, festooning a sand castle with flags of weed, armoring its entrance with mussel shells. Anna could hear him breathing as he concentrated on sorting the shells, black and pink, large and small, whole and broken. The boy stood up, wandered into the shallows. His feet disappeared into the running waves. His hair blew in the wind and he laughed as the spray flew in the air, falling on him like rain. She watched as the water soaked his smock and the lace-edged waves rolled back, beckoning, sucking the ground from under him. That was her own voice, speaking to him. Calling his name. Anna heard herself laughing with delight and disbelief, and looked around.

  The beach shifted, turned into a breakfast table. The rocks were loaves, the fish sprats, stranded on a platter. Button was watching her with eyes full of care. Anna looked around for the boy but he was gone. She heard herself calling his name. She was surprised.

  “How do I know his name?” she asked.

  Button shook her head. Her face dissolved, her teeth were made of chalk.

  * * *

  He came more and more. At the bottom of the cliff or the top, surrounded by flowers; sea lavender and tamarisk, samphire and saxifrage. The wind blew in his curling, fiery hair and carried away his voice. She strained to hear whether he laughed or screamed, whether it was he who cried out or the gulls gliding on the currents above. His voice and theirs mingled in the firmament. It was only above that anything was firm. That the stars were fixed in their proper places, ready to reappear each night.

  There he was again, staring at the horizon. His chin pink with dribble. His legs planted in the sand. That lilt again. Running into the waves, not understanding what she understood, had always understood. His feet always wet. A governess voice. “Look at you, soaked through.” The voice was pleased, liked the daring, the darling, the not-listening wildness of the boy. His boots with their own tide running over the toes in white wavy lines. His pantaloons sodden, chafing on white thighs.

  He was in the bath in front of the fire, splashing with his fists, his little penis floating upward. In the morning before it grew light she heard him singing to himself. Long stretches of song like a skein of silk unraveling from his mouth. She listened from her dark bed, puzzling over the mystery of the roses, while he talked to companions unseen, in a language unknown.

  Was it him she heard or was it the sea? Its persistent silent call, its hypnotic slush and splash, its irregular rhythm. Deceptive. Sly. She eavesdropped as it talked to itself, as it murmured and cursed and lamented. Its monologue echoed the one in her head, the wish sounds, the whispers, the sighings and drawings away, rushings toward and retreats. Sometimes, occasionally, the sea rejoiced.

  Anna didn’t know anymore if she remembered or imagined him. She didn’t know where he came from or where he had gone. He was there. They lit fires between the rocks, threw pods of seaweed on the flames to hear them explode, shouted with fear and laughter. The next day, he was gone. Their fires, the charred sticks, the ash, the branched, burned strands of weed, washed away. The sea was its own night. It covered things over, forced forgetting. Erasure.

  And now he came in ways not as shapely as memory. He came as a feeling, a feeling she would have missed if she hadn’t been expecting him. Waiting for him. He was present in the smell of boiled milk. The sight of a round-tipped spoon or a pair of canvas shoes on the cloakroom floor. He appeared in her dreams. She was in the flint house at a round table with him on the other side in a high chair. His ears were too big for his head and his limbs pliable and pale. Clumsy.

  He came as absence. Silence, where his voice had been. A morning blankness. Her bed was a ship adrift on the oak floorboards, the sea creaking and shifting all around, the wind rattling the windows, howling in the chimney. The roses obscured. Their mother, weeping in the dark. Antony.

  * * *

  Anna rose from the bed and felt with her toes for the slippers. The insides were cold, the leather damp. The room, the house, was silent. As she had so many times before, she pulled the blanket around her and dragged the chair to the window, looking out at the gleam of mauve on the horizon, the opalescent skies. The oak tree emerged from the dawn and waved to her, arms swaying above its fractured, anchored trunk. The bridge was there, still and waiting. Faithful.

  She pressed her forehead against the glass as the birds began to sing. The loudness of their calls, the way they resounded in the air, made her think of spring.

  THIRTY

  The morning sun poured through the long, dusty windows, its abundance a reminder of grander, more expansive times. Vincent Palmer felt in his pocket and gripped the sovereigns between his fingers. He found the feel of money in his hands uniquely reassuring, despite the imperative not to lay up treasures on earth. He supposed money was the reason behind Abse’s letter.

  The maid nodded at the only empty chair and left without a word, as uninviting from the back as from the front. Vincent dusted his handkerchief over the seat and arranged himself in an attitude of relaxed alertness, his silver-topped cane standing between his knees, moustache newly blackened with a comb-in Colombian preparation. It was the day after Ash Wednesday and in the interests of humility he hadn’t entirely erased the ashy cross from his forehead.

  He wondered again why the fellow had written. If Abse intended to pronounce Anna cured, Vincent wouldn’t stand for it. Even if Anna was restored to rationality, which he doubted, he couldn’t risk returning her to the Vicarage before he had dealt with Maud, dispatched her and the boy back to Ireland. He would have to be firmer with Maud this time and make clear that it was to be a permanent move. There would be a better climate for the lad away from the noisome streets and morals of London. Unadulterated milk, bread, et cetera. He’d write, visit once a year if he could.

  “‘A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband,’” he said aloud, as the door opened. “‘But she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones.’ Good morning.”

  The entire household appeared to have lost the power of speech. Abse glanced at him as if his presence was no more than he expected and headed straight for his desk. Vincent didn’t rise from the chair. He had to maintain God’s dignity in his dealings with the world. He projected his voice across the acreage of frayed Persian rug.

  “Bless you, Dr. Abse, for caring for the vulnerable on this earth. ‘The righteous shall flourish as a branch.’ How is my poor, dear wife?”

  “It’s Mister. Not Doctor. I expected you before now, Reverend. Didn’t you get my message?” />
  “I received your note. I have been too occupied with the parish to travel out of London. I hope Mrs. Palmer is improving?”

  Abse left his desk to stand in front of Vincent. His fists were clenching and reclenching and his hair, which he always wore coaxed up the sides of his head, was brushed downward. He looked older, Vincent noted with satisfaction.

  “We run a quiet house, Reverend, for quiet patients. As I said in my letter, your wife will be better suited elsewhere.”

  “What are you trying to say, sir?”

  Abse began to mither on about mania and a regrettable chain of events. Something about his own daughter, a foolhardy escape. The instrument, what was more, of a fatal incident. A clock in a far corner suggested that it was four-twenty. It wasn’t later than ten. Vincent had departed early, intending to travel from Lake House straight to Sebastopol Street and discuss travel arrangements with Maud. She had written again to the Vicarage, the envelope reeking of violets. As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion.

  Vincent used his pulpit voice to halt Abse midflow.

  “I can hardly be blamed, sir, if an errant daughter takes it into her head to elope. I don’t want the inconvenience of finding another establishment. My wife needs correction for her disturbed ideas but she is not a drooling idiot like some of the ones I saw here on my first visit. She is, after all, Mrs. Vincent Palmer. It takes a great deal to anger me but you, sir, risk doing just that.”

  “And I, Reverend, would be grateful if you’d settle your account with us,” Abse said. “And take your wife away with you today.”

  Before the words were out of his mouth, the door burst open and a pitiful creature entered the room. The face was battered, the skin scabbed. At the sight of the head, Vincent flinched. He had the impression of a convict, bound for Australia.