In the mid-nineteenth century, they continued as we started on our scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, a wealthy gentleman without partner or children lived in the house next door. For some reason, perhaps out of a desire for company, he decided to turn it into an asylum. He brought in a whole staff of doctors and nurses and opened his doors to the troubled. He would interview prospective patients himself, and offer a discount when moved by someone who was unable to afford the fees.
A great recreation hall was built, seventy feet long and thirty feet wide, Sam told us, where the doctors put on dances and theatricals. A bakehouse and joiner’s shop soon followed. Days were filled with all sorts of activities, patients given small patches of land on which they could play Creator. Even those with severe concentration problems usually managed to raise something from the soil.
‘In fact, they even had their own monogrammed china,’ Pam said, gesturing towards our plates.
With a fork I pushed aside my remaining food until a dark blue seal came into view: CLOCK AND WATCHMAKERS’ ASYLUM.
Jane shoved away her plate and leaned back in her chair. In order to compensate for her rudeness I kept eating though I wasn’t used to large breakfasts and felt increasingly full. Just as Pam was starting to tell us about the dejected Welshman who had planted a hazel tree that still flourished to this day despite creating a digression in the garden, Jane turned to me and said, as if the women weren’t there, ‘Marie, I’d like to return to London.’
‘Now?’
‘Yeah, I don’t want to stay in this town for another hour.’
‘But we haven’t seen anything.’
She shrugged. ‘You can stay if you want but I’m leaving. I don’t like the vibe.’
‘What vibe?’
‘I’m not going to stay another night, here or anywhere. You can.’
‘Well no, not if you don’t… ’
Pam rose from her seat and began to clear the table. Sam remained seated, staring uncomfortably downwards.
‘You can stay,’ Jane repeated. ‘But I’m leaving.’
‘No, no, I’ll come with you… ’
We excused ourselves from the table, or rather, I excused us both, and climbed up to our room. Faded in the daylight, the floral print looked less zealous and oppressive. It was a shame to be leaving.
‘Are you sure?’ I ventured one last time.
‘You can stay but I’m out of here. These women seem nice enough but I know when to read the signs. It’s like when the pilot says, “The weather at departure is stormy and the weather at our destination is stormy and we wish you a very safe flight.”’
For some reason I started laughing, which seemed to push Jane further towards the edge, and I had to bite my lip as I folded my clothes into a bag. Before zipping up her toiletries case, Jane grabbed the remaining tea bags from the tray and threw them in.
Despite the awkward turn of events, the women shook our hands warmly and told us to please return, mentioning that their home looked especially nice in summer. Jane mumbled something incoherent, I said thank you a couple of times, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief, no doubt, once the door closed behind us.
As we wound our way back to the train station, circling the town centre one final time, I caught sight of the spires of the cathedral in the distance, now a hulking, majestic reproach.
The train hurtled past a cluster of industrial buildings only a shade darker than the sky. I thought of the patient returned to his asylum, and imagined the sound of different bells jangling in and out of tune, and of clocks attempting to realign their ticks and their tocks, preferring to imagine only non-human sounds, exercises in futility like trying to light a cigarette without cupping it from the wind. I wished we hadn’t sent him back. Next to me Jane thumbed through a magazine, occasionally humming a tune to herself, one I didn’t recognise, and only once did she look up, to show me a picture of a woollen black cape, saying they were coming back into fashion that winter. When we reached Euston station she asked whether I’d mind bringing her bag home and promptly jumped on a bus to Camden to go check on Lucian.
A moth flew past my face almost as soon as I entered the flat, safe, so far, from the deadly strips lying in wait. I clutched half-heartedly at the air, aware it’d already flown off, and headed to my room, where my landscapes were waiting in the dark.
Eight
The sky that Sunday was marine blue in its upper regions, crossed by boatmen in white, and an empty waveless grey further down, as if the sun were uncertain what to give the last of November. As I walked the side streets of Pimlico I was struck by the emptiness of my path. I knew that part of town on weekdays and now saw that much of its life would withdraw come the weekend. Yet the place wasn’t entirely empty, I soon discovered, for there ahead of me was a tramp kneeling on his blanket, a large red-and-green checked affair that occupied most of the pavement. I felt I was crossing someone’s living room and intruding on a moment of privacy; he sat very still, a soiled paperback in one hand while the other gripped the neck of a large bottle of Lucozade. He didn’t look up when I walked past, his head more or less at the height of my thigh, and I made sure not to step on the frayed edges of his blanket though from what I could see they were used to being trodden on. At his side a handsome bull terrier, some kind of Staffordshire and American pit mix, was sprawled out at half-mast alert, drowsy but attentive. In the tenuous light the broad curvature of its head looked especially soft and I longed to stop and run my hand over its fur but my instincts told me to keep walking.
Once by the river I slowed my pace and breathed in the heady mix of Thames air and car exhaust, the traffic moving more in time with the water than on weekdays. There was no hurry so I could wander; Daniel and I hadn’t set an hour. He had begun working at his Tate most weekends, a decision that so far had benefited both his finances and his writing, he said, since the relatively empty rooms allowed him space and time to think outside the confines of his home, and had he gone to a library he wouldn’t be making the extra cash.
It’d been years since I’d visited Tate Britain and as I walked beneath the row of bare chestnut trees that ran parallel to the river, every now and then stopping to take in the view of the few barges napping on the muddy Thames, I tried to remember which Pre-Raphaelites were in the collection, probably most of its finest specimens, but after a few minutes of envisioning pale knights and expressionless beauties, in my mind all with the same porcelain face, draped in medieval colours, I started to think about how strange it would be to see Daniel in their midst, and how his own irregular geometry might jar with the paintings around him, and from his lameness my thoughts shot back to the major story of his life, one he rarely mentioned, not his marriage, not his poems, not his catalogue of poet friends in other countries, but the one he told me shortly after we met.
It had begun with a headache, he said, one of those headaches that stamps out nearly every impulse and emotion, the pulse of an imp inside your brain. The headache arrived with the morning post, half a dozen envelopes scattered on the floor, nothing of interest a tiny voice told him, yet he bent down to gather them all the same. Just as he reached for the final item, an electricity bill, he felt a bolt of pain behind his right eye. He stood up, straightened his back and dropped his shoulders, but the pain was still there.
He placed the envelopes on his desk and got back into bed. He would wait for the headache to pass. After an hour, he called in sick to work and took two aspirins; a few hours later, he took two more and began to sense that something heavy and impenetrable had sprung up around his head, a complex fortification that pressed into his temples. He tried sitting up, lying down, one pillow, four, reclining at a ninety-degree angle, or at 130. As the afternoon stiffened around him, Daniel said, he imagined an immense ship sailing towards him, a ship carrying all the headaches he’d ever had in his life, closer and closer until its keel grazed the top of his head.