172
I slump against the window of the train carriage, watching it all pass me by: fields gushing, houses high-pitched, clouds on fast-forward. The list of stations is reversed; someone must have forgotten to reset it. We are heading to London, it declares, as we speed to Manchester. It makes me feel disorientated in the way I get when the clocks go forwards or back. I pull my sleeves over my wrists to wipe the tears collecting at the corners of my eyes.
I had visited the capital to meet Daniel, who spent half the lunch taking calls from other, bigger artists. Then he took me to the Saatchi gallery, and introduced me to a contact. I had wanted Jaime there beside me, looking proud of me in a way that my mother used to. But we haven’t seen or spoken to one another in nearly a week. There’s a sadness swimming inside me. Life seems to be falling into the patterns of my former existence: love souring into enmity and disappointment.
Behind me, two students are discussing the Russian revolution in very earnest voices. One is explaining that Rasputin led it. I smile and reach automatically for my iPhone to text Jaime, then I catch myself. This is what I’ve missed most: not being able to share little, everyday nonsense with him. This new samskara is 173not yet an algorithm; I am scrambled, malfunctioning, in old patterns. Now my inner dialogue can no longer dance between me and him; I must split myself in two and play both halves.
Once, it felt as though he and I were against the world. Now it feels as though Jaime is one of Them. Why is he so desperate to return? We could easily survive here a little longer. Maybe I’m not important enough for him to want to linger here with me. Maybe he wants to go back to Eleanor, or fuck his flatmate. After all, I’m just a madwoman who believes in hippie shit.
He has become a plot twist for me; a character whose super-objective is a mystery. It’s hard not to look back over the last few chapters and want to screw them up and rewrite them. I misunderstood everything. That night, our first night: just a one-night stand. That moment when he looked at me with tenderness: my mistake. Where I saw depth and detail, he only intended a sketchy lightness.
I get off at Manchester Piccadilly. The platform board is winking, with journeys gone and journeys about to go. I spot salvation and suddenly my heels are clacking across the concourse and I’m leaping on to a crowded train. Heading for Liverpool.
Forty minutes later, I free myself from the commuter fug, and 174run all the way to Lord Street. I press the buzzer and say, ‘I came to see you last week. I’m not booked in, but can I come up now?’
‘We’re pretty busy,’ the voice says.
I remember how easy it was to get in when I was with Jaime. I’m troubled by superstition: that Jaime was the lucky amulet I’d been wearing around my neck, and that now the chain has broken.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘It’s urgent. I only need an hour.’
A tired reply: ‘Well, OK. Come up and let’s see what we can do.’
Upstairs, however, the girl with the white-blonde hair is smiley and welcoming. She takes me into the Reading Room, looking slightly surprised when I make a beeline for the ‘F’ section, picking out Thomas Turridge by Augustus Fate.
‘So, will this be the proper book by Fate?’ I pass it over to her. ‘Or Gwent’s imagining of it?’
She gives me a weird look.
‘Fate’s book, of course. We don’t stock fan fiction, I’m afraid.’
I smile quickly, apologetically, and she gives me a form to sign. I squint at the small print disclaimer at the bottom.
‘Um, this bit here …’ I point to it. ‘Does anyone ever die?’
‘More often than you might think,’ says the girl, and I can’t tell if the look in her eye is a warning or a tease. ‘Last week a man went into Bleak House and ended up dying of spontaneous human combustion.’ She shudders.
Surfing without him, and returning to Fate’s narrative of brimstone and fire: this feels like a glorious defiance of Jaime. For all I know, he might be returning to the real world, where I will be carried in his consciousness as no more than a memory, losing colour with every hour until I am pastel, until I am pale, until I am nothing. 175
When I sign the form, it feels like the flourish on a suicide note. But the girl just flashes the form a cursory glance and then files it away.
The Surfer Room is fuggy with other people’s essences, their CO2 forming a stale membrane. I lie down on the bed with reluctance, as though it is a dentist’s chair; as I close my eyes, my meditation mantra slips into my mind. For a moment I am released from the buzz of thought, floating, observing. A presence close by; a male voice warns me that I might feel a slight sensation as he inserts the biros into my pressure points. ‘Slight’ is a misleading description; I have to keep my fists clenched by my sides to prevent them flying up to my face. They place a mask over my mouth. The gas whispers through me and panic thrashes inside as I fight the approaching numbness – Oh, Jaime. I long to be with him now, laughing and kissing, and my mind is a white fog as I leave Gwent and stumble back into the world of Augustus Fate …
hanwell pauper and lunatic asylum, says the sign by the gates. I glance down at my long skirt, woven from cheap cloth and shaped by crinoline; beneath my bonnet, my hair is drawn back into a tight bun. I am a governess again. I did not want to enter the novel at this point in the story, following the chaotic pantomime in the church: I wanted the delicious shame of posing for Mr. Carmichael’s photos; a Saturday outing in the countryside with the children, 176followed by sweet chatter with Mr. Turridge. Fear beats in my breast as I enter the grounds and pass through the gardens, where there are two men turning over clods with their pitchforks, one singing merrily, another laughing in a wild manner. I pause in dread, but Augustus’s voice-over dictates my fate: And so Rachel, feeling lost and lonely, decided that she must see her mother.
‘Do be quiet,’ I hiss in a whisper, and a passing nurse gives me a forbidding glance.
The last time I visited, I was not permitted to see her. The superintendent himself addressed me, an alienist called Dr. Charles Wentworth. His tone was clearly intended to be kindly, soaked in compassion, but it only instilled within me a desire to slap him:
‘Your mother was painting in a group of patients when she rose to her feet and began painting on the faces of the others.’
I pictured blue streaked across a nose, hair striped green.
‘Her hysteria comes and goes, with her cycles,’ Dr. Wentworth continued, before speaking, delicately, of how a hysterectomy might be the kindest solution.
As I left on that drear September day, bereft at not seeing her, I heard distant screams echoing through the corridors and a queer trembling came over me, not knowing if they belonged to her. Today, I am led to a parlour, which serves as a recreation room. Therein I hear the tinkle of a pianoforte, notes flurried too fast and accompanied by an uneven soprano; I notice two women dancing close by; others gossiping; a few painting. Observing that my mother is sitting hunched and alone in a corner, I call to her. Suddenly I am 177wracked with guilt for my reluctance to visit her. The sensation of welling tears assails me; accompanied by the fervent urge to hold her tight and never let go. I gather my wits and sit down; she greets me with an indeterminate smile.
‘Rachel,’ she whispers, then trails off, glancing up at the ceiling.
There are weeks when she will chat merrily, and others when it seems as though she has climbed into a well and I am peering over the rim, calling down entreatments and hearing their melancholic echo.
‘You are practising embroidery,’ I observe. Her smile fades as her gaze traverses her lap; she jumps in the most peculiar manner, as though it cannot be her handiwork. Though she possesses an array of threads, she has chosen to stitch white thread on a white backdrop: an ill omen. When her mood is cheerful, she favours rainbow colours.
‘Would you like to do more painting? Dr. Wentworth has given permission for you to return to it this week …’
She looks only more cheerless. I gaze at her hands, which are reddened and coarse from her daily work of doing the laundry, and I am at a loss for words of comfort. Six years ago, when she was first brought here by my father, the alienists were confident that she would only be incarcerated for a few months before being released fully cured of her mania and her melancholy, her tendency to hear voices. Every time I pass a gallery in London and in Oxford, I am beset with anger, knowing that my mother’s efforts should be in there, that she ought to be stationed on a beach, or in a pasture, before an easel, not in this living tomb. 178
Surreptitiously, I remove a little twist of butter from my bag, which I stole from the Carmichaels’ kitchen. I rub it into her hands, and she smiles winsomely and suddenly picks up her cotton bobbin, unrolling the thread and snapping it with her teeth. This she circles around her neck, tying it at the back.
‘A pretty necklace!’ I must try to resist adopting the tone of the condescending men, as though I am addressing her as a child. Behind me, the piano flurries grow more discordant.
‘Oh! It is too tight!’
She appears to be having trouble breathing and I seek the scissors in haste, but there are none to hand – likely too dangerous a weapon to be permitted on this ward – and there is nothing I can do but lean in and bite through the cotton at her neck. When I turn, I see that the superintendent is watching me, a frown on his stern visage.
And so Dr. Wentworth’s suspicions were confirmed, Fate’s voice announces. The Carmichaels were right to fear that mother and daughter were quite as mad as each other …
I take my leave, making haste down the corridor. My mind is already anticipating the long journey back to Oxford, whereupon I must return to the Carmichaels: to Eleanor, who struts about like a queen, expecting me to play her faithful servant; to her father, who lusts after me; to her mother, who loathes me. And so I do not notice them creeping up behind me until it is too late; I am nearly at the entrance when, from both sides, hands seize me. Accompanied by two nurses, I am borne back into the office of the superintendent. 179
‘I am afraid, Rachel, that your employee has requested your incarceration, out of concern for your recent behaviour,’ he informs me, ‘and your lunacy certificate has been signed by two doctors.’
As he approaches me, his face horrifically benign, I hear Fate declaring: And so Rachel would soon find herself in a strait-waistcoat …
I hear screaming. My hands fly up over my breasts: I am convinced that I am naked. As I turn my head, the biros twist in my pressure points. The guy on the next bed is suffering some kind of fit, his mouth frothing, and I hear myself cry out again, as though ventriloquising his pain. Then I realise that the screaming is an alarm. The girl runs in, followed by Digby. Biros are frantically yanked from the man’s head – much too fast, it seems, for blood spurts out. When I reach for my biros, I force myself to withdraw them slowly. I sit up, free, but my machine begins to scream too. Digby is panicking, crying, ‘He’s going into paper arrest!’ and then he turns and cries, ‘Not you too!’ I tell them I’m fine but my voice is tiny, my throat parched.
The rest of the surfers are all lying in their little worlds of prose, oblivious. And then I see something terrible. The man is feathering: losing parts of himself, which unfurl and float away from him. I nearly vomit, assuming it is skin, but as one lands near my feet, I realise it is paper, and that his body has followed his mind too far.
180On the train home, I find a seat at the back of the carriage, and quietly weep. When I first met my Victorian mother in Fate’s book, I was angry that he had drawn on my pain for inspiration, and fearful of what was to come. But there were softer moments of consolation too: the first time I visited her at Hanwell after arriving in Thomas Turridge, I held her hand and asked for forgiveness. It is too late to do so in the real world.
A sense of calm comes over me; the tears have been cathartic. But a sadness lingers still. I’d like to be able to dip back into Thomas Turridge from time to time, to visit her, but I know that it is now too dangerous to do so. Fate is enraged by our flight from his novel; I could taste his fury in the prose. Before leaving, I caught a glimpse of the chapter’s ending: me, locked in a white room, my arms locked across my chest in a strait-waistcoat, as though laid to rest in a coffin. I could sense that he wanted to crush my soul, to grind me down to an absolute surrender. Now, I feel a greater resilience; I realise that, since leaving his world, I have become a little stronger. Hearing Fate’s voice hour after hour, day after day, made me dizzy, wore me down. It gave me an insight into my mother’s illness that I’d never had before, of how tormented she must have been, how she must have yearned to escape the chorus of those voices.
Back in my flat, I fill the kettle and wander over to my canvas. I pull the cellophane wrappers from the paints and brushes I bought in the gallery. My fingers are tingling, desperate to 181acquire calluses. I feel the threat of tears again, but I force them back and pick up a brush.
It has been a year since I last painted. I stand before the canvas for nearly an hour before I dare to dab a mark, terrified that my talent has rotted inside me. My first strokes are stilted, but then, slowly, my brush becomes firmer, more focused. I paint and paint as twilight becomes night becomes morning, and Jaime does not matter, and the past does not matter, and the Storyteller does not matter.
As the dawn rises, I can no longer fight the delicious delirium of sleep; I take a break, washing lapis lazuli from my fingers. I feel sheepish now about my temper, my angst on the train. I want to treasure my time with Jaime. I go to text him to apologise, only to find a message from him: ‘I’m sorry.’