by Tessa Hadley
He didn’t like Peter playing the violin. Sometimes when Peter played, Gilbert would take Winnie out walking in the fields, or he would sit shaking his head as if he had an insect in his ears; he suggested that Peter should learn “something with a bit more life in it.” Peter, who was touchy about his playing, pretended he couldn’t understand anything Gilbert said. In the evenings Gilbert twiddled the knobs on the wireless to find swing and dance-band music; sometimes he couldn’t tune it properly and sat with his ear close to the wire mesh, frowning with ferocious absorption as he followed after the trailing ends of happy party music that came and went.
From time to time, letters still came for Vera. One afternoon Joyce saw one of them lying opened on her aunt’s dressing table. She took it out of its envelope and read across the top of the sheet of letter paper inside that it was from Appleton Mental Hospital. The Dr. Gurton that Vera took every opportunity to mention was deputy superintendent there. His letter was very short, thanking her for sending him the latest news of Gilbert’s progress, praising her for her enlightened views on the treatment of mental illness in the “therapeutic community.” Scrawled across the bottom of the sheet he had added, “I am sorry, but I do not know the novel by A. P. Herbert on divorce-law reform which you recommend.” Perhaps Dr. Gurton was trying to discourage Vera from sending him letters. Joyce had seen her aunt writing to him, covering sheet after sheet in her handsome spiky italic hand.
She didn’t tell the others. She thought that the mental hospital was worse than prison; she felt incensed against Vera for inflicting Gilbert on them. She began to keep out of his way as if whatever he had might be contaminating. It wasn’t Gilbert himself who disgusted her. He had shown her card tricks and blushed with pleasure when she couldn’t guess how they were done. But the idea of his connection to such an unimaginable place, full of an assembly of all the horrors she had ever had a glimpse of in the street, in tow after shamed mothers, or hobbling and gibbering by themselves: that was unbearable; she had to shut it out. Uncle Dick on one of his rare visits to the house said that Vera must be out of her mind, bringing Gilbert to stay where there were growing girls. Vera retorted that it was Dick who shouldn’t be allowed near growing girls. Joyce asked for a bolt to be fixed on the inside of the bathroom door.
She thought that Gilbert began to avoid contact with her too. This might be because she was going off to college every day; perhaps he thought she was too full of her superior self. Perhaps he was offended by the careful rituals of preparation she went through in the evenings, as if she required more complex maintenance than the rest of them: rinsing her delicates in the sink, mending her stockings, altering clothes, spreading the blanket on the kitchen table to press with a flatiron heated on the stove her outfit for the next day.
* * *
Ann and Gilbert hung about together, following after the geese and, as Lil called it, “bothering them.” Lil had raised the geese from little gray chicks; she used their eggs for baking and omelets, and they were supposed to be eaten at Christmas, although this year because of Kay no one had been able to contemplate asking Farmer Brookes to take them away and kill them. Joyce quailed at their loud gabblings and honkings and snapping beaks, but Ann was fearless with them; she loved them. They attacked any visitors with their wings open and their necks outstretched, hissing; the delivery men wouldn’t leave their vans until Lil had driven the geese off, flapping at them with her apron. Gus, Ann’s favorite, was the ringleader and the most vicious. She crooned to him, smoothing down his creamy fat neck, burying her hands under his wings, kissing his beak; he loved nothing better than to stand pressed dazedly up against her while she tickled him. Gilbert, in a kind of symmetry, made up to Flo. Gus and Flo slept together in the grass in the orchard, a plump heap the color of yellow cream, feathers as satisfactorily intricate as neat knitting. They always slept with one eye open; if two of them slept together, one watched right, one left.
Ann played with Gilbert as if he were another pet. He submitted patiently while she stroked the lines of his face with her fingers, pinched the lobes of his ears, nibbled his hands. They competed in Scissors, Paper, Stone and she always won, because she saw his fist first and changed hers in a fraction of a second. He traipsed round after her in obedience to sharp commands she snapped out in her bossy voice. She didn’t call him Uncle Gilbert as Vera said they should, just Gilly. Once she dressed him up in one of Lil’s dresses over his trousers, tied a bow of ribbon in his hair, and put lipstick and clip earrings on him. When Lil gave her a talking to, Gilbert said she didn’t mean any harm by it.
—You don’t know her, Lil said. She means it, all right.
Ann teased Gus and Flo, offering bits of grass and snatching them out of reach, ruffling their neck feathers the wrong way, picking up their patient pink feet. Flo didn’t mind, but Gus would lose his temper and then Gilbert laughed at him and held his beak closed if he tried to snap at them. Their wings were clipped, but they could fly high enough to then come skidding down along the surface of the rhines with their feet out, sending up a crest of water to either side; they seemed to do it for the sheer pleasure of it. That made Gilbert laugh; he sat watching them for half an hour at a time, crouched down on his haunches with his elbows on his knees. Joyce remembered that in the North she had seen men sitting out in the street like this, the miners outside their houses and on the street corners, smoking and talking with their friends. Another thing that reminded her of those men was the way he smoked Lil’s Woodbines, nursing them down to the last nub between thumb and forefinger, behind the palm of his hand. Vera got exasperated with how he mashed up his potatoes into his gravy and drank his tea out of his saucer, and how he liked to wash stripped down to his trousers at the kitchen sink, lathering and puffing and blowing. Joyce couldn’t see how he was going to last in the South, where none of these ways fitted in with how people did things.
* * *
Lil had packed his bag to go into that place. Her mam had sent the neighbors for her when Gilbert started on his rampage in the afternoon. Not that any of them had thought he was going in for more than a few days. She hadn’t thought at the time that he was sick, just angry. Gilbert had always had a temper; when he was a baby, scarcely toddling, he used to beat his head deliberately against the floor when he was crossed; he’d even crawl off the rug to where he could beat it against the bare tiles because it hurt more. And when he and Ernest fought as boys, Gilbert often came out best even though Ernest was bigger, because Ernest was slow and gentle where Gilbert was wild. He clung on like a vicious dog; she’d seen his big boot stamping down on Ernest’s head where he had him pinned on the floor, cursing him from between his clenched teeth. This fighting used to break Mam’s heart. Gilbert was her favorite, her late last baby, beautiful with his yellow curls. She’d dressed him up when he was small in a plaid tam-o’-shanter set sideways at a jaunty angle; there was a photograph of that somewhere. Not that Gilbert was angry all the time, of course. He could be a charmer, with his quick grin. Girls loved him, all the better it seemed because he was so moody; he was always going with someone, and then the girl would call round asking where he was and Mam had to lie for him, although she’d never tell a lie for anyone but Gilbert. Ivor couldn’t get on with Gilbert. He’d said he was so sharp he’d cut himself.
Something had had to be done, that afternoon. He had thrown furniture down the stairs and fired his air gun out of the window, although the window had been open and he hadn’t hit anything. They couldn’t even remember afterward what the quarrel had been about. It would have been about nothing. It would have been their dad pulling Gilbert up as usual for some little thing, picking up a comb that wasn’t his and putting it in his pocket, or making some disrespectful joke about their grandmother, or even just pushing past Dad in a hurry on the stairs. You could see what it was that made Dad pick on Gilbert. Gilbert went about life in those days with an air as if he knew better than his elders. He didn’t want to work in the mine like his dad and his brother
(not that Ernest could get work anyway, before the war). Gilbert was training as an electrician. He said, “Dad, I’ll be earning in a week what you earn in a month.”
Lil remembered packing up his shirts and washcloth and a razor (which of course they’d taken off him), laying it all out with his pen and some writing paper in the little suitcase like you would for a trip to the seaside. She did not see how he would ever be able to forgive her for this. She hadn’t been in her right mind, that winter after Ivor was killed, although she knew she had seemed all right: she hadn’t made a fuss, she’d got on with everyday life. But it should have been her they locked up and gave insulin treatment to, for being mad enough to calmly lay out her brother’s things for him to go to that place. Now she couldn’t look him in the eye.
* * *
It distressed Vera that Gilbert spent so much time asleep. He didn’t get up until late; then often during the day when they looked for him they’d find he’d slipped back into his room and into bed again. She tried to get him to take an interest in things. She got down poetry books from her shelves and read to him, and in the evenings she read from her complete set of Dickens (“my beloved Dickens” she called him). She suggested that they should go out walking and she could teach him to identify the flora and fauna of the area. She brought up topical subjects to discuss with him, collectivization in the Soviet Union, vegetarianism, the atom bomb. Gilbert wrote a beautiful painstaking round copperplate hand (they knew this from the crosswords he did, or when he kept the score at cards), but he didn’t show any interest in the diary Vera encouraged him to keep. She worried about what she called to Lil his “physical needs.” Sometimes unself-consciously he scratched or rubbed his groin, and she quickly knocked his hand away.
—He needs to be doing some hard physical work, she said to Lil. To tire himself out. Perhaps I’ll ask at the farm if they need anyone.
Gilbert began to work for Farmer Brookes. It was a muddy old farm with a dozen cows and small fields growing mangolds and hay and millet. The farmer ran it with his wife; their son worked on the docks. Gilbert helped with the milking—which was still done by hand—and put the churns out on their platform to be picked up by the lorry from the Milk Marketing Board; he fetched the cows home from the fields in the afternoons, and in June he helped with the hay harvest.
—It’s what he needs, said Vera. Outdoor physical work, wholesome and timeless, close to nature, not intellectually demanding.
Gilbert wasn’t terribly reliable. Sometimes he got up late, or wandered home early, or forgot to finish some dirty job. Luckily the farm was run on haphazard lines, and the easygoing old farmer seemed to adapt to Gilbert’s arbitrary comings and goings. Anyway, he was only paying Gilbert a few shillings.
—Don’t you think he’s happy here? Vera wondered in the kitchen, bent over the dirty saucepan she was scrubbing, burdened with worry, shedding hairpins into the dishwater. Don’t you think we did right?
—Search me, said Lil, with a closed face, cleaning eggs at the table with a wet rag.
—With his family round him instead of strangers, Vera went on. Free to come and go as he wants, working out in the fresh air, taking a new interest in life. Dr. Gurton thinks it must be doing him a world of good.
* * *
Lil had only been to visit Gilbert in the hospital once. The idea of this scalded her now, in his presence. How must he account for this? What must he think of her? She had pretended to herself that because he was ill he would not notice whether she went or not, but she was sure now that she had always known this was not true. When Gilbert was born she had just started in service; she came home on her days off and lavished all her love on him, imagining he was a baby of her own, dressing him up in his pretty white dresses, and wheeling him proudly round the streets in the old pram. For her wedding he had been a page boy in a velvet jacket, and he had sung out all by himself with “There is a green hill far away” at the moment she and Ivor were exchanging their vows (she was delighted, but Ivor was put off and muddled his responses).
She had not gone to visit Gilbert in that place again because the one time she saw him there it had been a horror; she had been visited in her dreams afterward by the little twisted man with a brown wizened face and cleft palate who had come in the room while they were waiting for Gilbert to be brought out; he had asked her for cigarettes and sworn at her when she didn’t respond to him because she didn’t understand. Everything she was afraid of in those days she had simply shut out from her thoughts. She had known they were giving Gilbert something to keep him in a stupor, because she could smell it everywhere (Mam thought that the stupor was his illness). He hadn’t said much; he told them he had asked to work in the hospital laundry because you could give yourself a decent shave there at your own pace, and he complained that the pillows were stuffed with straw and they were put to bed at seven-thirty. His voice was slurred as if his tongue were thick, and he had a bruise on his temple. When they got up to go he asked when he could come home with them, and Mam had said, Soon, as soon as he was better.
—I don’t want to miss everything, he said. I know I’ve got some catching up to do.
Mam went up there every week. Even Vera had gone more often than Lil had, though she had never been much interested in Gilbert when he was born. It was Vera who told Lil that the patients weren’t allowed knives, so they had to eat everything with a spoon. But Vera had been off in her own dreams, at that time when Gilbert was put away. With Dick gone in the navy and Peter at school, she had volunteered to work at a book collection point in a church hall where people brought their old books to be pulped and made into paper for the war effort. She said she was sorting and bundling up the books, but she was mostly feverishly reading them. She went home with armfuls more to read before she brought them back again the following week. She sometimes hardly knew who she was when you spoke to her.
Lil had said to her mother that there was nothing wrong with Gilbert. But her mother lived in fear of the doctors and wouldn’t argue with them or make any trouble when they asked her to sign papers. They said he had delusions, and that he was a danger to himself and others. And Lil allowed herself, so long as she didn’t actually have to see him, to pretend to believe all this. She was kept busy anyway thinking about other things: the children and the house and trying to take in a bit of sewing to eke out her war widow’s pension. But she knew all the time he must be wondering why his favorite sister didn’t come.
* * *
Gilbert got lovesick over a girl: Daphne, a niece of farmer Brookes’s wife. She had a job in the smelting works, but she used to cycle up from where she lived in Farmouth and visit her aunt on summer evenings.
Joyce knew Daphne. She had never spoken to her, but she had seen her, before she even knew she was Mrs. Brookes’s niece. One hot summer’s afternoon a couple of years before, she and Ann had decided not to wait at the Seamen’s Mission for their uncle but to walk the two miles home instead. The road ran past the smelting works; the workers must have been on a break, and because it was so hot they were out in the yard, the men in their vests, the girls barelegged, smoking and bantering. Joyce and Ann had put their school hats in their satchels and carried their blazers over their arms, but nonetheless they must have looked unmistakably like the nicely brought-up schoolgirls they were; they toiled past in an agony of conspicuousness, their faces set in masks of indifference to the remarks and jokes that flew after them hard as stones, about French lessons and hot stockings and getting their uniforms dirty in the grass. Daphne was the loudest of the girls in the yard, and the one who broke into the Carmen Miranda impression (“I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I like you ve-ry much”), at the top of her voice, swinging her hips and waving her arms over her head, showing the sprouting thick dark hair under her arms, making everyone laugh at her. She was only about Joyce’s age, but she was tall and big-busted, with a curved red-lipsticked mouth and a luxuriant black perm. Her eyes were small and darting: black, with a slight cast in one of them.
After that, although she avoided walking past the smelting works ever again, Joyce seemed to see Daphne often, around in Farmouth and sometimes on the road up to the farm. And always Daphne seemed to look at her with dangerous, intimate mockery, although they never spoke. The whole gist of the teasing and the danger was that it was exposing and humiliating to be still at school, and superior to be adult and free and working. Yet complicatedly what Joyce felt with a plunge of guilt whenever she saw Daphne was that there was no good reason why she should be still at school, and then at college, and why Daphne should have to be exposed to what Joyce imagined was the horror of the smelting works.
Gilbert borrowed an old bike from the farm, and every evening that Daphne didn’t appear he rode down to Farmouth to be near her. Sometimes she visited the house with some message for Gilbert from her uncle. It wasn’t clear whether she encouraged him or not. If ever anyone saw them together, Daphne would be in the lead, swaying her hips to some dance tune inside her head, and Gilbert would be traipsing after, neck bent, eyes down. She called him Geordie and laughed at the way he spoke. Vera followed the affair with great anxiety and warned Gilbert to be careful; he shook his head as if her words were a distracting buzzing.
Martin and Peter hated Daphne and were terrified of her. She called them little boys and told them how the farmers had to cut off the lambs’ “little winkies” to make them behave. They reacted to her violently, frenziedly; if she touched them they scrubbed the place with soap, and they said she smelled. She did wear a lot of scent—Chypre de Coty, which Gilbert replaced for her out of his wages from Farmer Brookes—and it was true too that if she’d cycled up from Farmouth she would be sweating, with big wet patches showing on her blouse under her arms, her face red, drops of sweat trickling down the sides of her nose. Joyce would have been humiliated and appalled at herself in that condition, but Daphne seemed to relish it, wiping her face with the back of her hand, blowing and gasping comically while she got her breath.
