Human Traces (19 page)

letter was delivered to Torrington House, Sonia was not there to receive it; she was sitting in Dr. Faverill's office at the asylum, where she had gone to visit Thomas. "I am most disappointed, Mrs. Prendergast, that your brother has given notice that he intends to quit his position here," said Faverill. "He will have been with us less than two years, and I can say without fear of contradiction that he has a greater flair for mad-doctoring than any man I have yet worked with." "I am sure he would be delighted to hear that." "No, no," said Faverill, twisting the beard beneath his jaw, "I am sincere. He is so modest, so inquiring. Nihil humanum sibiputo alienum esse, if you take my meaning. And he has such joyous optimism, the ebullience of youth." Sonia smiled. "He is not moody, not rash?" Faverill looked surprised. "No. Neither of those things. I have never seen a man more dedicated to his work. And the hours he labours! He has tried to conceal it from me, but no. I suffer from an inability to sleep, and frequently I walk about the asylum in the night. Occasionally I have come across him in the wards, but more often I have seen the candle burning in his window." "Ah yes. Thomas has always read a great many books. Even as a boy' Faverill nodded his head several times and pursed his lips. "Well, it is a great shame, is it not, Matilda?" Sonia looked across the fireplace to where Matilda sat opposite her; but she did not answer Faverill, appearing to be lost in thoughts of her own. "Has Miss Whitman found you a satisfactory bedroom?" said Faverill. "It is very pleasant, thank you. Are you sure it is not irregular for me to stay?" "Not at all. Perhaps the Commissioners might find it so, but the consolation for being superintendent here is that I can do whatever I wish. I am the emperor of this small realm. It is a pleasure for us we have very few voluntary visitors... And in any event, I understand the experience may be useful to you in your new life." "In 'what way?" "Your brother tells me that you plan to join him and your husband in a medical venture overseas." Sonia found herself blushing. "I he is not yet my husband." She had a superstitious dread of anticipating the longed-for event. "I beg your pardon." "No, but you are correct. We are to go to Paris and then, I think, to Germany. It is a great adventure." "Indeed. Indeed." Faverill tapped his lip with a lead pencil he had taken from the desk. Sonia looked about his book-lined room and had the sense, as her brother had before her, of some unspoken agitation in Faverill. Men of his age, she thought, eminent in their work, surrounded by the calfskin and vellum of their elders, should be sage and bon-homo us Faverill, though kindly, seemed distraught. "May I ask you something?" she said. When you spoke a moment ago, you said that being emperor here was a consolation. For what are you to be consoled?" Faverill shot a look across the room at Matilda. "It was a figure of speech. A philosophical one. I was thinking of Boethius and the De Consolatione! He smiled. "No, that is not altogether true. I suppose I had a homelier thought in mind. When I was a young doctor, there was much optimism in the air. The new asylums were embodiments of our hope. I believed as did my colleagues that we could not merely care for mad people, we could cure them. That was our article of faith. Now, thirty years later, I have cured almost no one. The most common ailments in this asylum are idiocy, which is inherited and incurable, and epilepsy which may have some source in the activity of the brain, though we know not where. Then there is general paralysis of the insane, the results of which I have observed post-mortem when the brain is horribly damaged. But we have no idea what causes it. My own suspicion is that it is somehow connected with syphilis, but we have no way of demonstrating this. And finally there is a kind of dementia, hearing voices and so on, which appears to begin in young people and to intensify. We are far from agreeing even a description, let alone a cure for that. Some forms of mania and melancholia do seem to improve, but whether that is because of hot baths and cascarilla or whether they have just run their course, I could not say. It is a damnable state of affairs." "But we will understand madness, will we not?" said Sonia. She was thinking of Jacques's poor brother. "We will cure it." Faverill stood up. "That is why I admire your brother, Mrs. Prendergast, and am so loth to see him go. He too believes there will be cures. And unlike me, he has the energy and the will to find them." "Do you no longer believe we will discover remedies?" "Not until we understand what makes us who we are. My instinct, though I am pitifully far from being able to prove it true, is that what makes us mad is almost the same thing as that which makes us human." Sonia frowned. "You mean that we are fallen? Imperfect? That God gave us the capacity to suffer more than other animals?" "Yes," said Faverill. "That is one way of explaining it. It is the price we pay for being favoured by the Almighty. Mr. Darwin might prefer to put it differently. If we were to borrow his language, we could say that when the brain one day developed the capacity that made the species Homo sapiens, it developed simultaneously a predisposition to kinds of insanity. Though since we are the only animals to have madness, you may regard what I have just said as no more than a simple tautology." "I see," said Sonia, not quite certainly. "Whether you choose to explain it in the terms of the Bible or Mr. Darwin seems to me to make almost no difference," said Faverill. There was a knock at the door. "Ah, Midwinter," said Faverill warmly. "I was explaining to your sister how much we are going to miss you." "Thank you," said Thomas. "And I shall miss you, and some of the patients." "Not all?" Thomas laughed. "By no means all. Now, Sonia, I promised you a tour of the asylum. I am going to show you some of the improvements we are making. May I, sir?" "You may take the lady where you wish, Midwinter. Though there are perhaps one or two wards which might... The gentler sex, you understand..." "Of course." As she followed Thomas out, Sonia felt a little chastened by her interview with Faverill. She did not understand what he had meant about Mr. Darwin, whose book she had only ever heard spoken of with derision. Faverill seemed to suggest that human beings were not an absolute thing, but could easily have developed into something similar but slightly different. The 'variation' that transformed them from pre-human into human entailed weaknesses that made them mad. If that tiny change had gone another way, they would not have been mad, but presumably they would not have been quite human either... Thomas led her to a small brick outbuilding. "I am going to show you my secret project," he said. "Shut the door and make sure you pull that black curtain across. Now follow me." The building was divided into two parts, the second of which they now entered. The brick walls were painted black, the floor was made of earth, but there were two electric lights, one white, one red, which Thomas switched on. "You never expected to find such modern equipment at our asylum, did you, Sonia? Electricity! Only for the darkroom, I am afraid, not yet for the poor patients. I had to spend some time persuading Dr. Faverill." "I think you are quite the teacher's pet, Thomas." "Ssh. This is my beloved Underwood. Reliable, portable, and with beautiful tapering bellows. You see? If they did not taper it would be twice the size. The real joy of it is that it takes dry plates. I put one in here like this. Shall I take a picture of you? Come outside for a moment." He posed her against the brick wall of the shed. "Smile, Sonia. Think of the great adventure you are about to begin." Sonia looked at Thomas and the expanse of the lunatic asylum behind him. He uncovered the lens and she smiled shyly into it. "Perfect! Now I just slide the cover onto the plate again, take the plate holder out of the camera and I can develop it any time I like." "Will you develop it now?" "Come on." Back inside, Sonia looked round the first room of the shed and saw that the walls were covered with photographs of the insane. Some of them looked bedraggled and retarded, some vacant and some quite rational. Sonia felt a faintly demeaning curiosity to know more about each one, and what their problem was, but Thomas called her in to watch him at work. He turned off the white light and lowered the red one, so that the square space took on an unreal glow. There were a dozen brown pharmaceutical bottles on a shelf in front of him from which he poured quantities into three dishes. "I am hopeless at all this," he said. "Pass me that book, will you? Mr. W. K. Burton. He tells me how to do it." Sonia watched in amusement as Thomas bent over one dish, then the next, the chestnut hair falling over his forehead as he occasionally re consulted Burton, before lifting the plate up to the red light, where he held it for a second. He rinsed it beneath a tap and moved it on. "This is taking a long time," said Sonia. "Sometimes I am in here half the night." "And what exactly is the point?" "I am making a reference library of the patients, so we know which one is which. They are stored in McLeish's office with their names on the back. All right, now I have to leave it under running water. Come and have a look in the other room while we wait." He pointed out various patients to her on the wall. "This is Daisy. She is a very nice girl." "And what is the matter with her?" "Nothing very much. She has spent too much time in an asylum. This poor lady on the other hand is as mad as a March hare." "Is that the diagnosis you offer to the Commissioners?" "No. I make up something more sonorous to impress them. Let's walk in the fresh air while we wait." As they made their way slowly towards the ice-house, Thomas said, "There is a famous man called Galton who takes photographs of mad people and then lays the images one on top of the other. He is trying to show that all murderers have the same shaped head, or that if you have a long jaw you are likely to be melancholic' "And that is not what you do?" "No. I do just the opposite. I use them to make the patients look like less of a type and more of an individual. When I see them in their wards, I see a sort of undifferentiated mass. But when I take a picture, I see each man and woman. And each one is in fact a human with a story. In some ways the insanity is the least important thing about them. In a photograph they are still complete, so one is not tempted to see them so much as something broken." "I see." "Though of course that makes it in some ways even worse. If each is not just an example of an illness but a man or woman, then in each one you are trying to restore something like the fullness of being human when in every case this means something slightly different. And all that without having any real cures, even for their symptoms." "No wonder Dr. Faverill seems sad." Thomas glanced at her. "Yes. Yes, I suppose he does. I do not always think of them in that individual, photographic way. It is too much to bear. When a general orders a column to attack, he does not think of each man in it. If he did, he would be lost." Sonia, put her arm through his. "If we walk back slowly, will the photograph be ready?" "Just about. The other thing I do with these pictures is show them to the patients. They are very interested in them. Some keep them by their beds. They find it comforting to think that they exist." "What do you mean?" "If you live in a world that is full of delusion, it is novel to be confronted with evidence of your existence in a solid place. Some of them do not recognise themselves. Some look as though they cannot quite place the face they are looking at. But some of them are really heartened by the evidence that they have solidly gone on, grown older, that they are still someone. They deduce that their existence must seem real to others." Back in the darkroom, Thomas turned off the running water and lifted the plate from the sink on to a towel; he then leaned it against the wall to dry. "There you are," he said. "One half-plate portrait fit to hang in any lunatic asylum in England." Sonia peered at the image. "It is horrible," she said. "No, it's not. You are beautiful. You look eighteen years old. Your eyes are full of kindness." "My dress is full of creases." "I think we should send it to Jacques." "Oh no! You must take a better one. Not with that cameo brooch Mama gave me. I had no idea how ugly it looked. And my eyes have lines at the corner!" "Nonsense. You have the skin of a child. My dearest Queenie, if you truly imagine you are more beautiful than..." Thomas tailed off because there was a hammering at the outer door of the hut. "Dr. Midwinter!" It was Miss Whitman. "Come quickly," she said. "There has been some trouble. In Room 52. Mr. Tyson is hurt and Dr. Stimpson ain't here." In the panic of the moment, her genteel speech was overwhelmed by the local idiom. They ran across the grass towards the asylum. Inside the long corridor, Miss Whitman unlocked a gate and led them down a spiral staircase into the basement. She ran ahead in the gloom and paused outside a barred iron door where she fumbled with her bunch of keys. They could hear the sound of shouting from the other side. Miss Whitman pushed open the door. Inside were about a dozen men, mostly without clothes, chained to the unplastered brick. A little light came through a half-window at the end of the room. One of the men, naked and streaked with blood, was holding a manacle, which he appeared to have wrenched from the wall, aloft in his hand. Tyson was sitting on the floor, leaning against an iron cot; he had a wound in his cheek, which was bleeding onto his uniform jacket, and his lower jaw hung down on his shoulder. Thomas turned to Miss Whitman. "Go at once to the pharmacy. Find a dressing and something to bathe the wounds. I need also some tincture of opium. Go to Dr. Faverill's office. Tell him to send three male attendants as fast as possible. Sonia! Why on earth have you followed us? Go up with Miss Whitman at once. Stay in Faverill's office." Thomas was left alone, like Daniel, though most of his lions were chained. He stared at the blood-streaked patient and began to speak calmly to him. "I am a doctor. I do not know your name but we are going to help you. Please be calm." He could not think of anything helpful to say, but he wanted his voice to soothe the other patients, all of whom were moaning and distressed. Some were pulling at their restraints. He repeated quiet platitudes while he looked about the room. The resemblance to a feral den was increased by the scattering of straw on the stone floor and the smell it gave off. As Thomas bent over to examine Tyson's injury, he looked up to