Newton’s Niece. Derek Beaven
urbanity and shrieked with laughter. The sun flashed on his sharp Roman teeth.
‘For God’s sake stop laughing and get me a drink, you bastard!’
‘OK OK. I get for you. You lie on the grass. What the hell you doing in there?’ And he coughed and giggled all over again. I stretched myself on the corner of the dry lawn. ‘Eh? What was it?’
‘What’s so damn funny? I could have been killed in there.’
Seco’s eyes narrowed and his grin froze. ‘I save you, mate. You got no gratitude with you bloody toilets. I’m Secondo. I’m second son – Lucky. Lucky for you, eh?’
‘Yes. Sony. Thanks very much. Now for Christ’s sake get me a drink. Please.’
‘That’s better. Otherwise I take you back to you damn toilets and I kill you.’
While he went off to the scullery I lay back. The sun worried the prickly-watery feeling in my eyes. My chest hurt from the gas, my stomach from the retching. I shifted a bit to my side and gazed over the mass of the asylum. Against the tough heatwave-blue stood the observation tower – what else could it be, that great fat Italianate finger, widening at the top to accommodate a windowed look-out under its pinnacles? The whole thing was a celebration of imprisonment, in two colours of brick topped with its gilt pyramid of a roof. It watched over the colony of suffering as if with a magnificent eye; or perhaps was a mere deserted symbol. Either way the effect was that we all policed ourselves, uncertain whether God was really watching from above.
A thought struck me as Seco was returning with the drink.
‘Christ, Seco. Supposing some of the kids have gone in. They’ll damage themselves, poor little sods. And I’ll get the sack. Were the windows open?’ In a mixture of altruism and self-interest I leapt up, swallowed the water and dashed back into the block. A speechless boy was on the point of entering the toilets.
‘No, no, no, no, no! You go to toilet – you die!’ said Seco, slitting his own throat with his forefinger and pointing to the door to emphasise the danger. A look of terror came over the boy’s face as he turned to flee in tears.
I pushed open the door. Thanks to the open window which had allowed me to be so mysteriously oppressed by the lorry, all was well, beyond a faint bleachy smell. A teenager with a palsy was struggling to coordinate himself at the urinal.
The Tower of Bedlam
Holding the yellow canister – my passport – against my grey overalls, I stood windily at a high spot. The hazy blue of the clear half of the sky was air-brushed on to space behind the stucco of the gallery frames: no glass in these slot-thin outer arches. I’d finished the climb and was standing facing a pointed door. It was the entrance to the Art Workshop.
A surprising location: to my amazement I’d been led to the very top of the tower at which I’d stared as I lay painfully on the grass beside the children’s block, waiting for my glass of water. The ascent had started by means of a grand staircase, intended mainly for show, clinging to the inside of the tower’s walls. This had quickly given way to a series of wooden flights which led up from stage to stage. I’d waited for Polly to catch up with me at each one, but had been too impatient to enjoy the vistas over the woodlands of Surrey. There was a layer, as it were, of industrial machinery, and what looked like storage tanks for the oil-fired heating system. Finally, punctuated by a few mysterious doors, there came a spiral in which one lost track of number before emerging high up at the open gallery. In this institution the entitlement to Art Therapy, if Polly’s geography was correct, was clearly dependent more on physical fitness than on psychiatric need.
‘There! In there!’ said Polly, recovering her puff and opening the door. She pointed through the arch at what could almost be described as a bower. I peered in, past the faded timetable of classes pinned to the oak. Who would have thought that this exalted place with its lightflood of ivory and its breezy hangings of unswept gossamer would be the place? I might have wandered about fruitlessly in the shrieking maze of corridors had it not been for Polly, whom I’d met in the dining-hall; as I had on my first day in the job, swimming towards me with her outstretched arms and big wet kisses, full of the Lord’s innocence, sighing into my ear: ‘You’re my only ‘eart, darlin’. My best ‘eart.’ Kiss. Squeeze. ‘Ooh you’re my ‘eart, sweet’eart. Look at you!’ Hug. Kiss. Bristle scratch. ‘One true love (deep breath, long aspiration) hhheart.’
Polly, in her maroon slippers, with her three gypsy teeth and black beard – I didn’t know the clinical name for her condition, no more worldly-wise than a toddler – was one of the ugliest and most spiritually open beings I’d ever met. She rejoiced my heart. And she’d taken me conspiratorially to this eyrie where they ‘do pain’in’. Only she wasn’t allowed to paint. “Cos I carn pain’ nothin!’ she happily stated of the foul prohibition. ‘Nothin. Aint no use me pain’in. Cos I cam pain’ nothin. Ar, you’re my true love ‘eart, aint you, darlin. Cam pain’ nothin, me. But you. Ar, you’re my …’ Kiss. ‘Pain’ me a pitcher, darlin.’
I stood in the arch with a certain apprehension. What was I doing after all? Why was I intrigued by the mention of a woman and her images – to the extent that I should have tangled with chlorine and then made this bizarre climb? I suspected a dissociation; had I run up here in an urge physically to separate myself from an accumulation of pain? Did I expect her to inform me; to ease the intensity through some sympathetic current? Was it hope? I’d seen her before in my duties, going about like other patients. ‘Ms Jay’ didn’t appear mad. Her face was urgent, yes, but her body looked as if she were cold – as if there would be no more summers for her, nor for the missing shape she appeared to cradle sometimes, down in the straggle of her long brown hair. Sometimes too in her ceaseless drift about the place, I’d seen her pause, her lips moving privately, while the twitch of a smile hovered about them – as if she were answering the whispers of a ghostly lover standing behind her. But she hadn’t touched any chords in me – not then. And my revelation down there in the toilets had spilled too much too soon. I was resisting it; who would not indeed? So it was that something at the back of my mind drove me on all day towards what ought perhaps to have been a gentler discovery. For the forgotten and the forbidden constantly seek to be brought to light. I ventured in.
An almost untouched relic of the Arts and Crafts era, it might have been used for an interior by Holman Hunt – the Virgin’s Studio, mawkish, but a distillation of the pure. There was an arrangement of old easels, tables and stools. Certain Victorian values were enshrined here. The discreetly barred larger windows which ran all round between the oriels at the corners had stained borders with emblems. One of them was open, unhasped and swinging slightly, the only moving thing. I could see through it dark cloud-heaps gathering over the western horizon. But the studio was unoccupied.
On newspaper on a cupboard top nearest us stood a collection of crude uglinesses in clay, left by sad hands lovingly to dry. I wandered past it, uncertain what to do. In the centre someone had been sitting very recently at the main table. Brushes stood in a jar of cloudy, greenish water, and the house on the paper, with its wonky perspective, had pools of colour still wet on its lawns. Beside it was laid out a photographic print, monochrome, enlarged, clearly the source material for the work: a big, old house, in front of which was a car and a tiny family almost lost in the graining. A plastic cup of coffee stood nearly full, steaming faintly.
‘Ar, nice,’ said Polly, picking up the painting so that the greens trailed in droplets down over the bright blobs and dabs that were herbaceous borders. She put her head on one side. ‘Ar, nice.’
Behind us, on the wall of the arched entrance, one corner and much of the space had been partitioned off and labelled ‘Do Not Enter When Light Is On’. The warning light was on; but the dark-room door wasn’t closed. Perhaps that was where she was. I put my head in. The tower’s windows had been faced off with boards; in the murk I made out a sink, a photographic enlarger, and, on the bench nearest us, a white porcelain tray in whose chemical a darkening image lay. Polly pushed by me and took the thing out, dripping.
‘Tha’s