He drops the blanket around the back of an oak whose low branches span the field on one side of the wall and the grounds behind the stables on the other. Then he stands ten feet away from her undoing the buttons of his shirt. Underneath his shirt he’s wearing a white T-shirt; a spiky black tattoo is banded around his left arm just above his elbow. He loops the T-shirt over his head and then unzips his trousers and when he is down to his underwear and socks he just stands there in the cold night air looking more grown-up than he should. When Jane doesn’t move closer or move away, he comes over to her and lifts her sweater over her head. He kisses the front of her neck and under her chin, traces her collarbones with his thumbs. Then he leads her over to the blanket, lifts her skirt and runs a track of kisses up her thigh, the woods pulsing around them, a salt taste on her lips from his skin. He has a condom in his wallet and that surprises her, but when it takes him a few tries to tear it open with his teeth, he says, “Go ahead and laugh,” and she does, and everything between them slows down, becomes more intentional.
There are human experiences that we can remember, and sensations we can sometimes glean. We often lean toward or away from things because of a desire or unease.
When Blake kneels in front of Jane and Jane puts her hands in his hair, one of us goes for a walk with the children, one of us wanders into the woods to be alone, and some of us stay to watch, the poet behaving rudely even as his voice lets slip a kind of grief. Those of us present are trying to remember our own wants and needs, the ways we were loved, what acts, or what kinds of touch shaped us.
When they are finished, Blake leans over Jane to keep her warm, rubs her arm with his hand, stopping to trace her nipple with his finger. “I can get another blanket.”
She kisses him because he is a good kisser, because he is sweet, because for the last hour she has only been here; and because he is a gentleman who wants to bring her another blanket that will smell of dust and old straw, who paid for their drinks with the only ten-pound note left in a wallet that had a strip of Velcro on it.
“It’s okay, it’s late, and I have to get back to Sam.” Jane slips into her skirt. We watch her and think, Yes, it is late, late for us too. We also want release: we are tired of scattering ourselves into todays and yesterdays, tired of being in this woods now and a hundred or so years ago all at the same time. How long have we been trying to concentrate? For the last hour Jane has been aware of nothing but what it feels like when a finger trails down your spine, when a chest reverberates against yours with laughter, when a twitch turns into a tremor inside you. She has had what we want: to be wholly in one place with no thought outside of it. Though once, pushing into her, Blake called out “Helen,” and she quivered, put her mouth against his ear but remained silent.
This, we thought, is how you reinvent yourself. This is how you disappear.
Part Three
20
The summer of 1877 was the wettest anyone at the Whitmore could remember and the strain of the confinement was felt by everyone. In June the kitchens were low on meat one week and short of sugar the next. In July the Commissioners did not come by to register receipt of the patients’ complaints, and so a revolt against flock-picking ensued. The poet’s wife had visited to advise the poet that he would soon be released, and he’d upended a table, smashed a vase and was sent to the refractory ward for a week. Those who enjoyed his poetry brooded. All summer there were rumours of cholera in the village, which meant that no escorted walks were permitted, although walks under parasols had been promised. The world was topsy-turvy: the countryside was soaking wet, yet the ferns in the Whitmore’s front gallery were dying of thirst. For a fortnight the patients lined the windows, quietly seething.
In the middle of those weeks of endless rain, Superintendent Thorpe conceived of a competition that he hoped would enliven the general mood in the hospital and motivate the patients to behave. The idea was to create a series of pleasure gardens — twenty small plots to be assigned to selected patients who would be given sole care of their budding tenants. By early July the garroted vine had been dug out of the hillside by two perpetually soaked attendants, and by mid-month the plots were bordered with box and further divided by narrow gravel walkways, each gardener’s name to be painted on a zinc plate and hung from a wood post at the entrance.
We know that the assignment of a plot was deemed a privilege because the patients had to apply for one and these applications were noted, and occasionally pasted, into the casebooks. To be granted a plot one had to be well into recovery, to have gone at least a month without incident, to have demonstrated the attainment of some skill — whether pillow-making, plain sewing or fancy work, shoe repair, clockwork or upholstery. Supplicants were also required to have eaten their meals without complaint and to have made a formal application in legible lettering. Those who were deemed suicidal were prohibited from applying because the gardens were outside the walls of the airing courts and beyond the gate that led to the infirmary. The farthest plot crested the top of a grassy rise that sloped down toward a shunting river, a river those in danger of self-harm were never allowed to see.
A list of the first group of recipients was drawn up a week before Herschel slipped out of the door, followed by Leeson and N. The Superintendent had announced that the names of those selected would be posted in the day rooms of the men’s and women’s wards. This was his first mistake: the public nature of the act, the assumption that the success of the few would inspire the many.
Alfred Hale was pretending to read a newspaper in a wingback chair when the men’s list arrived. The moment it was pegged up he moved toward it. Eliza Woodward was working on a sampler by the window. She stood when the Matron swished in, abandoning the last red stitch in the A of Amen.
Both their names were on the list.
That night, someone set fire to a curtain.
Thorpe, having underestimated the strain the weeks of rain and detention had been causing, was forced to conceive of a second reward, an event that would include everyone. A second list was drawn up, dividing the patients’ names into groups of eight, and it promised a late-summer outing. Posted next to the garden plot awards, this larger notice announced “A Carriage Ride and Walking Party!” in a female attendant’s best calligraphy, under which Herschel had been requested to sketch a stand of trees in fine weather. “To exotic gardens in a magnificent wood!” the poster read. “To observe strange and wonderful plant species!” Under this last line Herschel had inexplicably drawn a toad, but by the time Thorpe saw it, the squat creature could not be removed. Three dates for the outings followed; they would go in two omnibuses lent by a friend of the Superintendent’s, so that the only cost would be for drivers. The names of the staff members assigned to lead the parties were noted in block print, though some reassignments were demanded. To quell the dissent over the garden plot allotments even further, the Superintendent consented to allow the genders to mix.
Alfred Hale liked to refer to the Whitmore as a country house. He’d suffered from a blow to the head at the hands of a thief, and there were whole weeks during his confinement when he believed he was a guest at a grand estate; that he had been invited here to play the trombone with a renowned ensemble. Because of this he had a habit of entering every door as if it were the boundary between the outside world and a great halclass="underline" he doffed his hat constantly, looked searchingly for a doorman to take it, sought coat stands that did not exist. Once, he plopped his bowler on Noble’s head because the hall porter had the misfortune to be standing inside an entry. He behaved in a similar fashion when he returned to his ward at night, saying, “Good evening, it’s delightful to be here,” before engaging in a round of handshakes with those already turned in to their beds.