“Let me walk you out.”
“Um, I think you need to get back to your mates.”
“Helen, look at me.”
She does. He is staring at her intently, one side of his mouth lifted in a nervous smile, a chop of hair hanging over his forehead in a way that probably drives his mother crazy. There is a thumbprint-sized patch of stubble on his jaw that he missed shaving, an acne scar on his chin. She can tell the ridge of his nose has been broken, probably in rugby. She wants to put her finger lightly on the bump of it.
“I’d like to see you again.”
Jane laughs. “That’s very flattering, and I mean it, but probably not a good idea.”
19
As the woman at the local records office in Moorgate enters Jane’s information into the computer, Jane has to fight her anxiety about using her real name — Helen Swindon doesn’t have a reader’s card but Jane does.
“Right, here you are,” the woman says, squinting at what must be Jane’s particulars. “I just need to see two pieces of ID.” She glances down at Jane’s driver’s licence and bank card, says, “That’s fine,” and then slides a temporary pass across the counter. Jane slips it into her pocket and the woman goes back to the Sudoku puzzle she was working on. A few minutes later after Jane has emptied her things into one of the lockers in the cloak room and checked through a window to make sure the car is all right — Sam still sleeping off his morning run through the woods in the back seat — Jane walks past the woman again.
“Don’t forget to sign in,” the woman says, tapping the metal part of a clipboard with her pencil.
Jane writes her name illegibly, a false signature that feels like the physical form of a lie, and then she walks through the nearby door and into a bright but soulless reading room. Of the eight plywood tables lined up under the windows only two are occupied: one by a woman in a fleece jacket sifting through a folder of newspaper clippings, the other by an elderly gentleman reading what appears to be a turn-of-the-century will. The whirling progress of a microfiche on the other side of a short supporting wall and the peck-peck of the archivist’s typing are the only noises in the room. Jane pulls out a banquet chair with tatty upholstery, sets her notepad down on the empty table and then takes her reader’s card up to the archivist, a woman her own age with cropped blonde hair and a small diamond nose-ring.
“How can I help?”
“I’m looking for the index for the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics.”
“Right. Have a seat and I’ll bring it over.”
The Whitmore index is bigger than Jane remembers. The Whitmore was only one of five county asylums whose archives she’d surveyed when she was writing her dissertation. It hadn’t been until she found the hospital logbook and the startling reference to “girl N—, missing” that she’d properly paid attention back then, stopped seeing what she was reading as “types” and “categories” and instead saw a specific place and a particular person. Her eyes had jumped to the next line and the next to see if N had been found, stopping in shock at Letter from G. Farrington received—the name so immediately familiar from William’s tour-guiding on the day Lily went missing that she’d had to get up and leave the room, splash her face with cold water.
By noon Jane has called up a dozen sets of files and boxes, has gone through the Commissioners’ reports, the admission books and the records of transfer for the years 1876–78. She can find no record of a woman patient at the Whitmore whose name started with the letter N, and no further references to the trio’s outing except for a cryptic set of recommendations from the Commissioners for stricter regulations in relation to supervised groundwork and permitted excursions outside the asylum’s gates. She spends the next two hours trying to decipher Medical Superintendent Thorpe’s angular scrawl and his shorthand for injuries (I), incidents of restraint (Res), or complaints by patients (Comp). She finds Herschel and Leeson noted briefly, Herschel complaining of Cons, remedied by Prs, and placed on short-term supervision; Leeson suffering from a bout of Ma—which Jane takes to be “mania”—in late July and placed under stricter observation. Bedford’s name and the electrotherapy treatments she believes he performed do not appear at all.
Within an hour we are dizzy with Jane’s work, but we focus as best we can: sit on the table, lean over the books, read what we see aloud. The boy dive-bombs loudly around the older gentleman working on the far side of the room until the theologian demands he stop. There’s panic rising in us because Jane isn’t writing much down, because we suspect this stretch of days may be all we have, our last chance to see ourselves, our last chance to grasp the shape of who we have been before Jane gives up on N and on us, before she is forced to choose a new direction.
Jane runs her finger down a list of patients attended to by the Visiting Physician and those of us who think we can imagine a sickroom, who might know what it was like to lie in a narrow cot behind gauzy curtains, scan the list, chant the names to see if the saying changes us: “Amelia Sowerby, Annie Witt, Matthew Tippings, Frederick Vine.” Most of us ignore the columns of symptoms and diseases, though Cat whispers them quietly. “Cholera, cholera, seizure, cholera, influenza.”
In the afternoon, after Jane has taken Sam to the park and walked briskly along Moorgate’s high street to unknot her back, she opens the casebook records for 1877. When she’d come up from UCL to do her research on northern asylums she’d photocopied Leeson’s pages and a handful of others — of patients who were at the Whitmore around the time of the trio’s walk in the woods — but because she’d fallen behind in her dissertation, she hadn’t read the casebooks thoroughly.
It happens now that as Jane reads through some of the casebooks she hadn’t photocopied she feels as if she is rereading them, as if they are stories about people she has come to know and can imagine, as if the jottings and spare details are the transcript of a dream. Samuel Murray, 40. Admitted: March 2, 1877. Cause of insanity: Overwork. Marital strain. She comes to the casebook of a Mr. H.J. Morley and realizes with a start that this is Herschel’s. She either hadn’t noticed it as a student, or hadn’t thought to copy it, had relied instead on the hospital logbook, Thorpe’s case report and Leeson’s more voluminous stack of notes to frame the events of the day. Now, suddenly, here he is in inky blue calligraphy: Age: 32. Admitted: May 17, 1877. Occupation: Farmer. Status: Unknown. Degree of Education: Unknown. And then in a different hand, under the notes of admission: Refuses to work farm equipment or tend field. Complains of pains in limbs, exhibits swollen digits and capillaries on face. Was found on roof of neighbouring cottage; refused to be brought down. Consistently mislays or removes various items of clothes. Claims that his wife is an impostor. Lets crops foul when they are the sole means of income. Believes he is losing power of tongue.
The daily reports over the next three months are typically cryptic: agitated one day, compliant the next, morose, found naked by attendant in greenhouse, idle, behaviour improved, found picking at walls, refuses to speak, found with sewing scissors, found without shoes in garden, treated with cold bath, improving, wants to be read to, has difficulty sleeping, will not speak, gestures to throat repeatedly, admitted to hospital at B—, returned to W—, refuses meat, agitates fellow patients, broods.