Sitting on the floor beside Jane’s bed, head bent in concentration, Cat can see herself in sea-green satin, can remember her lips on John Hopper’s in an alcove behind the fern. John, sitting beside her, is aware suddenly of his own former body: his hair stubbly but growing back after another enforced shaving. The two of them side by side as Jane goes on dreaming and we go on remembering the ball. The shape that is Cat whispers to the shape that is John, “How did you guess your name?”
We gather that we knew some of the guests personally, and others by reputation: the Magistrate and Commissioners existing in name only, as was the case with most of the local businessmen and their wives. The poet knew George Farrington because the week before the ball the Superintendent had placed a slim red volume of Farrington’s poetry into his hands, suggesting that he might find it interesting. “The book,” the Superintendent had said earnestly, sliding it across his desk, “exudes a quality of liminal thought of the sort presently admired in literary circles …” This statement was, of course, pure condescension — the Superintendent thoughtlessly implying that due to his incarceration, the poet had no access to the pulse of current conventions. Sensing his mistake, he tried again. “It’s simply that as a fellow wordsmith I thought you might feel a kinship with the man and his work.” The poet, however, found Farrington’s work banal, bordering on trifling, and he barely gave it a second read, though he prided himself on being open-minded. His own offerings had, in their infancy, been widely misunderstood and even mocked in the pages of some of the better magazines. When he’d still been free — which was how the poet termed the period of time before his marriage to the succubus — he’d often been chastised by his friends for continuing to write when the evidence against his having talent weighed so plentifully against him.
It was The B—, an upstart magazine favoured by the new generation of writers, that changed the course of things. Upon the publication of his second book the editors of the magazine had sought out and reviewed his first, which most of their brethren had blighted. It was found, in the eyes of the new reviewer, to be “a marvel,” “a heralding cry of the new age.” Suddenly the poet was lauded, and just as suddenly he was married to a woman of society who had tricked him into the union through false claims of pregnancy. Within weeks he stopped being able to write at home, and then, after months in a pensione in a country he remembers only as ripe with oranges that bled when you ate them and with women whose nipples were dark as mud, he stopped being able to write at all.
Standing by the window in Jane’s room as the ball unfolds around us, the poet remembers his wife articulating the situation to the Superintendent on the day he was committed: “Imagine, sir, that there are strings that connect us to the world. It’s as if my husband’s are slowly being plucked away.”
When the ball was formally underway, George Farrington asked the Superintendent about the poet. They were standing at the far end of the room near the French balcony doors, George stroking with one finger the arc of a scar hidden by his moustache.
“I have some interest in poetry,” George explained, and the Superintendent smiled.
“My wife and I are familiar with your work, Mr. Farrington — botanical and poetical — though I fear I am not qualified to discuss either. I enjoyed the lake sonnets tremendously.”
“Has he continued to write?” Farrington asked, glancing around the room as if he expected to recognize the poet’s visage.
“He engages in the odd recitation, and occasionally we find a stanza or two pencilled on paper in the art room. Sometimes there are snatches of verse in the letters he sends to his sister.”
“And is he much recovered?”
“He is improving, though he still has the habit of sitting for hours staring at objects, at blades of grass or pieces of fluff cast off by the hens. He fancies that he has an army that inhabits an underground city. A city he spends, I dare say, much of his time ‘visiting.’ ”
“And his wife, the Countess? How does she fare?”
“She comes once a month to visit. You’ll see her there by the tall windows in the crimson dress. He wants nothing to do with her.”
Farrington found the poet’s wife staring out the window at the airing courts. He bowed as she glanced over her shoulder at him — a quick flash of dark eyes and high cheekbones, a slight equatorial earthiness to her skin.
“The poet’s wife as an object worthy of attention?” she asked. “It will get you no closer to him, Mr. Farrington. I have, you see, no access.”
George tilted his head. “I beg your pardon. Are we acquainted?”
“The world feels oppressively small some days, does it not?” She faced him directly, gave him a formal curtsey and then glanced around the room. “Is it what you expected, Mr. Farrington? The madhouse?”
“I came without presumptions.”
She put her arm through his and turned him toward the crowd. A gentleman in a double-breasted green jacket and a woman with thick lace cuffs and a wide collar waltzed by. They were followed by a dapper gentleman with long side-whiskers and a white cravat, and a plump woman in a tulle gown. “One of those two men jumped off a bridge and one of the women set fire to her house. The other man is the local draper and the other woman is the Superintendent’s niece. Dare I ask whom you perceive to be whom?”
George shifted uncomfortably and tried to retract his arm without revealing his distaste to anyone who might be watching. “I just wanted to say how much I admire your husband’s poetry.” He disengaged his arm stiffly and bowed again.
“As a poet yourself?”
George hesitated. “Yes.”
“Do you know what they say in here, Mr. Farrington?” She levelled her eyes at him and he stepped back, ready to take his leave.
“I do not.”
“That we’re the mad ones — the ones outside. That it’s our actions, our slights, strategies and resentments that are so unreasonable.”
“And is that what you believe, Countess?”
She smiled at him for the first time, but the expression dropped away as quickly as it had taken shape. “He’s over by the pianoforte. He was here skulking around the curtains when you first presented yourself.” She lifted her wrist and her fingers fell in the direction of a short, balding man in a cream-coloured jacket standing in front of the piano and within hearing range. “He’s in a mood. Mind he doesn’t bite.”
By the time the windows were opened a little while later to let in some air, Leeson was waltzing with a commissioner’s wife and Hale had put away his trombone to stand at the punch bowl next to the red-haired girl from the laundry who had stolen into the chapel with him once for a lusty half hour. Herschel had excused himself to one of the chairs along the wall and was seething at a perceived slight — a glare — received at quite some distance from the Matron. N was fiddling with the ribbons she’d braided into her hair, feeling common compared to the wives of the local businessmen, the robust sisters of the wealthier patients, the pink-cheeked daughters of lawyers and doctors and bankers. She’d been asked to dance numerous times, and had laughed through a catastrophic quadrille with Herschel, only to be told by the Superintendent as they partnered for the schottische that she danced quite commendably. For that she tripped purposefully and stepped on his toe. When they were finished he escorted her off the floor, only to find Farrington waiting for him.