Westward, Cornwall, 1948
Jonathan never took me to Paris. For a while I thought we were there. I could see the Tour Eiffel glittering in the purple night. I could feel his hand in mine as we walked the Champs Elysées. We were far away from Winterbourne, in glorious Paris, but of course that was not true. I drifted in and out of reveries, punctuated by brutal, white-hot pain, needles, voices, fastenings, and my limbs flailed as I tried to fight them off.
I missed my foliage at Winterbourne and wanted to go back. I decided to imagine it on the wall in my new, empty room, painting it diligently in my mind.
They told me what had happened. I didn’t believe it at first. Jonathan drove you to us, they explained. Not to Paris, never to Paris. We arrived at this place of doctors and medicines, a place where I am called ‘dear’ and spoken to like a child.
The Priory of St Josephine’s is a hospital, they say. I do not need a hospital. I need Jonathan. But when I protest, they think I am mad. When I cry, I am hysterical. I cannot win, happy or sad, frightened or resigned, once they have decided I am mad. Even when I tell them that I killed a girl, they say I am mad. I am too mad to confess, too mad to be trusted. I tell them that that is what brought me here: my guilt over Ginny Pettifer, my murderous heart that I tried to hide and tried to heal. I thought that if I loved enough, if I tried to do the right thing, then my heart would mend itself. But it wasn’t to be. In the end, I am mad. And it is possible, of course, that they are right.
They try peculiar machines on me. Some of them hurt. The one I like best is a drug that floats me to faraway places, sideways, like driftwood on the sea. I used to see things floating from my bedroom window at Winterbourne, floating on the water.
*
In July, I give birth to a girl. She is the light of my life, the softest thing, the sweetest thing, and her head smells to me of the purest joy I have ever known. I call her Sarah. She has Jonathan’s eyes, blue and bright. When I look at her, I see him and wonder.
I know I cannot keep her. They have told me so. Each day I stare out of the window and wish for Jonathan to come and claim us. But he does not come.
She is the last person I will ever love. On the morning they come to take her away, I dress her carefully, gently, wrapping her in a blanket, touching her nose with mine and kissing her downy cheek. Her fingers are tiny and perfect. I hope she has a happy life. I hope she loves fiercely and is fiercely loved in return. I hope one day she has children of her own and she keeps them closer to her than her own skin.
After she is gone, I am only half alive.
I breathe, I sleep, but I am only half alive.
It won’t be long now.
I am ready.
In dreams, I visit Winterbourne. I see a woman there, myself, Alice Miller, sitting on her bed and looking at the little painting of the cottage on the wall.
Beyond, through the window, just out of reach, is her daughter. Her daughter is waiting, her beginning and her end, a girl she knew for the shortest of times and yet also for ever, a candlelit part of her that will never know the dark.
I touch the woman’s neck and feel the life go out of her.
I feel her heart stop. I make it happen.
The heart that was mine, I stop; it goes cold, goes hard, no longer lives.