The Drowner Page 4

  He accepted the theatre’s adaptation of his childhood nickname to his performances. So what? These days whenever a play’s words contradicted his portrayal, Ham Lloyd simply ignored them. Playing Shylock as a mad King he could lop a good fifteen minutes off The Merchant of Venice. Playing him as a put-upon Danish prince he could add ten.

  Alternating his many mangled versions of Shakespeare with teary melodrama had brought him prosperity and fame. It was hard to ignore him. He was still a handsome devil. His popularity and stage presence were enhanced by his stockiness, the cascading red hair, the pugnacious chest and stomach, the piercing blue-eyed gaze locking on Will’s the second they met. And, on this over-strung day, a stomachy metallic breath sharp enough to make Will’s eyes sting.

  Their first meeting, and when Will arrives for Sunday lunch at Hammond Lloyd’s rooms at the Grand Hotel, Ham, countrified in paisley cravat, hacking jacket and moon-coloured moleskins, is already on his second bottle of claret. They haven’t scoffed their first oyster before Ham, in the middle of a scandalous anecdote about a famous actress, scrapes back his chair, rises from the table and, unbuttoning his flies as he goes, and still loudly addressing them, saunters out to the balcony and urinates into the street below.

  Buttoning his pants as he returns to the table. ‘I’m a bloody bad boy of course,’ he says to Will.

  Oysters slide down gullets.

  She sips champagne. She says, ‘Oh, Father.’

  As Hammond Lloyd’s snores shake the suite, Will restlessly wanders the rooms. Photographs in silver frames sit on the sideboard, the tables, on every surface: Ham and pretty actresses in and out of costume, adoring each other. The younger actor is fuller-lipped, willowy, rakishly gaunt, somehow taller. He looks as if he could be the current Ham’s son.

  But there are no children other than Angelica, who now seems to be humming some tune high in her head while uttering no sound. This is unknown country to Will. Every look of hers is cryptic, her conversation is convivial but clipped. It’s as if they share some secret, but he has no idea what it is. He needs more clues to her mood than her perching on the edge of the sofa riffling through Punch and nipping at the occasional strawberry.

  He swallows a champagne belch. ‘He knows all these famous beauties?’

  ‘He doesn’t miss a leading lady.’

  ‘Ah, your mother?’

  ‘She is away.’

  She doesn’t elaborate. Shortly, in a thin voice, she sits forward and says, ‘One of my jobs as a child was to make soda water.’ She had to charge and fill the gasogene on the sideboard at home. One day she went to fill the big silver, wire-covered gasogene and was surprised to find it flat and almost full.

  ‘I squirted some into a glass and discovered it was gin.’

  She tipped in the powders, anyway: the bicarbonate of soda and tartaric acid from their blue and white folders. And some extra. ‘Maybe I thought I was turning it back into water.’ Her voice is still without emotion. ‘It charged and charged.’ It was fortunate that in returning to this hiding place, her mother cut only her hands in the explosion.

  Telling the story seems to agitate her, for she gets up suddenly and purposefully from the sofa. As she does so he reaches out and spontaneously clasps her hands—as if they were the ones injured, and recently—in his.

  His gesture makes her smile, an enigmatic smile that he will remember as a defining moment. As the first stage.

  The wine fumes, the background cacophony of phlegmy snores. Ham’s offstage presence further defines the moment for Will as Angelica takes his hands in turn and cups them firmly on her breasts.

  At dusk when Hammond Lloyd reappears, sluiced and crisp and smelling of cologne, he brings Angelica a red rose in a champagne flute. It’s a little ceremony for everyone’s benefit. He gives a contrite bow and shows his teeth.

  ‘For you, dearest.’

  ‘Sweet!’ she says.

  He gives Will a sidelong glance. ‘Sit down, dear boy. You’re meandering round and round like a turd in a jerry.’

  And then she is perching on her father’s knee, ruffling his hair, splattering his cheeks with giggly kisses. Within seconds they are singing and dancing some music-hall routine together.

  He applauds dutifully, and gives them an uncertain smile. All this is new to him.

  His hairless legs hung over the front of the bath. His calf muscles were like fists. After a strenuous performance, or to ward off a chill, he liked to put his feet over the rim into a bowl of hot mustard water. For a prolonged wallow, he kept an extra jug of hot water alongside.

  White as snow, pinkening only as he extended northwards.

  He lay back, soaking luxuriously. ‘ “The Oxford hipbath.” ’ He recited the advertiser’s slogan, as always, putting on the northern High Street shopkeeper’s voice he found amusing, and rewarded her with, ‘ “Mankind’s special choice for saddle stiffness after hunting.” ’

  She laughed. Her job to draw his bath, bring him the bowl of mustard water, the extra jug. Hear his lines. Laugh at his clever accents.

  The water just reached his waist. ‘Pour it in there, Little Root. And a little there, too.’

  Just like his dresser.

  The time, furious with him, she kept the filled hipbath outside all night. It was a heavy frost, mid-winter. Hungover next morning, he plonked down on a sheet of thick ice which broke in the middle under his wide arse. Showed no reaction. Sharp points and jagged edges sticking all round the sides of the tub like chevaux-de-frise. Even the sponge a mass of spikes which he had to thaw in his hands.

  Not allowing himself the smallest gasp or teeth-chatter as he rinsed and sluiced and soaped, his control as icy as the floating pieces he scooped from between his thighs and passed to her.

  Acting the stoic. Cold and noble and already purpling on lips and nose and fingertips.

  She broke first, laughed, brought him a warm towel.

  ‘Of course I will need a massage,’ he said.

  Standing up like Jack Frost, all mottled blue and ice in his orange hairs.

  That warm grassy day of her particular question.

  Kate’s blouse slipping off her shoulder when it was her turn to carry the picnic basket. The boater sliding back on her head, and her hair fluffing forward as they climbed the hill from Bath.

  The question burning in her mind all the way. She, above all, had to know. Finally asking it when they stopped for a breather and a sip of cider in a field near Batheaston.

  Kate’s hair fluffing out more as she shook her head. Kate Cowan of her childhood, friend for ever, yet her demeanour suddenly a stranger’s. Affecting an indignant Ophelia-like disarray.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said.

  Her cheeks pinkening from heat or embarrassment. Her eyes and the line of her jaw evasive. ‘How on earth could you think it?’ And then the hot-air balloon scudding over their heads and changing the subject.

  About twenty feet off the ground, and dropping fast, hitting a hedge, bouncing up again, and then coming down in the next field. Bucking and flipping in the wind, inflating and contracting like a giant jellyfish, a Portuguese man-o’war.

  Kate reaching it first. Sworls of colour twisting around its surface. The basket ploughing into the soil as it was pulled and jolted along. Both of them holding it with great difficulty, because it resisted like a heavy, fighting fish. Tying it to a tree.

  Panting and tense about what they would find. And there being no one. An open clasp-knife lying there, apparently used to sever the guy-ropes—one cut through and another gashed in several places. Half an inch of rapidly melting snow in the basket. Imagining the balloon having risen to high altitudes before coming down. And being dragged across rocks—it was grazed and one or two ropes had sheared off. A strong marine smell hung over it. Shingles and shells were trapped in the wickerwork. The balloon had been swept along the seashore and dipped into the ocean. It had been everywhere.

  A woman’s silk scarf tied to a guy-rope, and a visiti
ng card for one L. GOUBERT, MEMBRE D’ACADEMIE D’AEROSTATION MÉTÉOROLOGIE, ET FABRICANT DE VANNERIE EN TOUS GENRE.’

  ‘The scarf—like a knight’s favour,’ Kate said.

  The picnic now seeming inappropriate. The balloon bobbing and straining to be free, a live thing again. But neither of them turning around. Eyes straight ahead so as not to chance spotting the crumpled body of a dead balloonist on tree-crown or rooftop. Neither of them speaking.

  Kate leaving her the picnic basket to carry back. Kate weeping silently all the way.

  Kate was understudying Ophelia. Although she hadn’t been called on so far during the season. But Ophelia.

  The thing was, she still saw Kate as Peablossom. So did he.

  Another thing he’d said of fragility: ‘Oh, isn’t that an attractive quality?’

  She had envied fragility ever since. Even in her pubescent Moth days she had never been fragile herself. But she doesn’t feel generous. He was getting too long in the tooth for Hamlet.

  And then, parting at the bridge, Kate’s eyes fierce, her voice rising from some deep place suddenly crying, ‘Yes.’

  Waves of strange air roared between them. A barrier of meaty, intestinal air forming for ever. Black rain in the eyes. Taste of blood in the mouth.

  ‘Yes, yes!’

  Whenever she thinks of the asylum she sees a white owl and a game of cricket.

  A white owl nests in a tree by the asylum gates. The path from the gates, running through an avenue of beech and oak and across a dark lawn to the buildings, is called Owl Walk. Lichened stone walls loom at its far end, then barred lunatic wards, ventilation towers, high iron railings. Behind the buildings lie the asylum’s mortuary and cemetery and a neo-Gothic chapel rising from scraggy firs. Rooks rake the cemetery lawn for twigs.

  The cricket oval for asylum officers is next to the graveyard. A cricket match always seems to be ending. As the last batsmen walk off the field to polite handclaps, a low hum sounds across the wicket. Male patients have been standing listlessly along the boundary, and now, humming, they drift together across the field like the tributaries of a river until they converge at the officers’ wicker tea basket. Owls’ horns of stiff hair poking out. Crooning, they hoist the big basket on their shoulders and carry it up the avenue of oaks like bearers in a safari.

  You can tell the inmates by their smell and jagged haircuts. The smell permeating their clothing. Sweet and stuffy but not unpleasant. Men going slipslop over the linoleum. Women in one-piece serge crying like babies, Unh, unh, unh.

  Her mother is above all this. She pats her hair, pulls her top lip over her teeth and talks of moving to new quarters. A section called The Annexe for the Less Lunatic. She is looking forward to it.

  ‘Villas, really,’ she says.

  Some of the less lunatic work in the officers’ houses and gardens and cook and help with the officers’ children. If they refrain from venting emotions in letters to the Queen, the Prime Minister, the Commissioners in Lunacy and the Home Secretary, they are also allowed to attend the annual amateur dramatic evening in the recreation hall. Nothing too dramatically extreme. J.M. Barrie’s Quality Street and Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray have been successfully staged, and a lecture entitled Land of the Midnight Sun, featuring a lavish diorama of dissolving views of Lapland.

  Another twilight world: the four circles of lunacy.

  The slightly more lunatic work on the asylum’s farm, in the laundry and cookhouses: simple country folk with their flyaway hair, stutters and shabby clothes. The majority, the generally lunatic—the cinder-eaters and Virgin Marys and Princes of Wales—shuffle through the wards and exercise yards, under one delusion or another.

  Then there is the outer circle, the violent insane. Unvisited, half-starved for safety reasons. Bony arms honed down by a diet of thin soup. Reaching out between the bars of padded cells as she goes past.

  The smell of boiled cabbage. The sound of a fit. The mortuary rooks flopping down from their nests.

  But an asylum has its art as well. No madhouse daubings—subdued shades and muffling textures representing frankness and reason. In the administration wing, huge curved curtains of cream unbleached calico waft her down a corridor into the superintendent’s office. On his walls, severe but charming engraved ovals of a man and a woman in disordered dress, twigs in their hair and arms yearning diagonally. The same be-twigged couple featuring in a dozen coloured presentations and certificates for meritorious nursing conduct for those Attendant Upon the Insane. As well, photographs of some of the more fashionably dressed and better composed lunatics on visiting days.

  Dr Curthoys allows relatives of the less lunatic to bring fruit or cake.

  Neolithic skulls and a mounted cricket ball sit on his desk. The superintendent is an amateur archaeologist and phrenologist with an enthusiasm for digging into the local bell-barrows.

  ‘Are we staying at the Red Lion?’ he inquires. Asylum visitors customarily stay at the Red Lion, in the quaint Georgian marketplace beyond the walls. He gives a chuckle. ‘You know a local martyr was publicly burned to death outside the inn in the sixteenth century for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation?’

  He can keep his historic tidbits. ‘I suppose they thought he was mad,’ she says.

  Dr Curthoys is also a great believer in hydrotherapy. Her mother’s treatment regularly includes the Lunatics’ Douche. Dr Curthoys explains to Angelica that the douche relieves congestion of the brain, firstly by causing a shock to the whole nervous system, and secondly by causing a reaction and increased supply of blood to the vessels of the skin of the scalp and face, ‘by which the brain inside is relieved’.

  He hoists a skull in his hand to demonstrate. Taps it with a pencil. Pokes it through a Neolithic eye socket to where her congested brain would be.

  Depending on her mother’s delusional state, he explains, the treatment is intensified by putting her feet into hot water, ‘and sometimes the lower half of the body’.

  ‘We are also experimenting with galvanic baths and the latest electrical treatments.’

  The calico curtains are quite calming.

  ‘I see.’

  But then their very colour and texture turns up in a straitjacket.

  Two mongoloid girls squat on the floor holding hands, and an old deaf woman with a white beard calls a bedstead Mama. In her mother’s new ward the air feels used and hot.

  ‘You must excuse my appearance,’ her mother whispers. ‘Ham and I had a reception to attend at the Garrick. Irving was in great form and the champagne flowed interminably.’

  A new attendant, ajangle with whistles and keys, is on duty. When he moves between her and the windowsill her mother begins to tremble. He sets his feet firmly in position, rocks back and forth, watching for batsman’s error, anticipating a catch. He is a dark, long-armed Yorkshireman employed for his skills as a fast bowler. He knows her weakness. She is compelled to brush invisible crumbs off any flat surface and carry them to the windowsill. It is important that her room have unimpeded access to a windowsill or equivalent for the disposal of crumbs. But the fieldsman is a rock. Nothing can get past him.

  Standing patiently with a small cupped hand of air-crumbs. Standing alone, small half-stranger. One side of her face has begun to droop and she smells damp and coppery.

  On her way there from the Red Lion one Saturday afternoon Angelica passed two distraught women, smartly turned out, London-looking. ‘We have seen a body!’ they cried. ‘A face staring up!’

  Out for a country ramble, the women had seen a face in Watson’s Pond. Both burbling about open eyes, yawning mouth, an escaped lunatic.

  ‘A woman?’ she shouted at them. ‘In the pond? Tell me!’

  She felt tousled, hot and frightening. White owls were a presage of death.

  They stared at her, quivered, moved away. Not another one.

  ‘A man!’

  She took a deep breath and actually felt her roaring blood lurch and slow in her skull,
her temperature fall. She strode through the asylum gates, down Owl Walk. Things sharply registered: acorns plopping down, lichen fading on stone, ivy inching up walls, weeds pushing through paving cracks, rust blossoming on bars, cinders anticipating their excruciating crunch underfoot. Rooks flopped like blacksmiths’ aprons.

  Willow stolidly cracked leather and sane hands clapped softly. Lunatics stood sighing around the boundary.

  I will not allow myself to feel like that again.

  And, later:

  The second she doesn’t know me any more, I am going.

  At first Will sees her as the sum of her components and mannerisms. Her suffusing sexual elements. Touching him, then flicking out of reach. She is the hand on his naked wrist, the head dipping on his shoulder, the flyaway glance. The light, cool fingers on his burning neck.

  The contrast of her solemn physical poise and careless sense of dress: thrown-on garments, bits of miscellaneous costume. Pale skin pinkening when she’s flustered. Sometimes her stature and demeanour awe him: as heroic as Joan of Arc. So at night, alone, he squirms like any amphibian, driven by stark glands and instinct. He could grab this high-breasted paragon to him, suck her skin, bite her nape, grip like a bullfrog.

  Never mind the predatory eels noting his distraction and striking from below.

  And then she blinks, changes gear, a shadow passes across her face and she becomes various idiosyncrasies jammed together. A sudden sullen angle to her lips. Something to do with reckless self. Some secret nearly sly simmers in the eyes more green than grey.

  He has two relevant dreams of her. In one they are out walking with a vicar and a prostitute. The vicar is egg-headed, whey-faced. The prostitute wears stained shirtsleeves like a butcher; blood runs from her split lips. This motley hackneyed pair walk arm-in-arm.