‘I can’t believe it worked.’
‘Nor can I.’
She was giddy with excitement. We didn’t know how to celebrate so in the end we just high-fived.
‘Okay, we better start looking.’
We didn’t have much time and our task was daunting. Admissions files were categorised by date, but then some records were filed under the resident doctor’s name and others still were filed under the patient’s name. It was basically a mess. We agreed to begin at opposite ends of the room. I was searching the dates – mid-1920s onwards – and Martha was searching for Carlisle. We hardly spoke, apart from the occasional ‘I still can’t believe you did that’ coming from me. I was pleasantly surprised by how much she wanted to help me. Or perhaps that was conceited. If what she said turned out to be the case and she had found herself in possession of Opaline’s book, then it made sense that she had her own connection to this intriguing woman. After all, as I’d told her on the bus, you didn’t need a qualification on paper to make a big discovery. Knowing my luck, she’d probably find the manuscript before me. The thought hit me like a sucker punch. I looked across at her and watched as her fingertips picked their way through the hanging manila files. Had I been played all along? Was she using me?
‘Henry. What are you doing?’
‘What?’
‘We don’t have much time,’ she said.
‘Right. Yes. Sorry.’
I pulled open another drawer and flicked through the files. They were all too recent. We were about to meet at the middle filing cabinet when I heard footsteps coming quickly down the hall.
‘Shit!’
‘Stall her,’ Martha said.
I didn’t think, I simply did what she said and met the woman just outside the doorway.
‘I’ve been on to the department, and they’ve never heard of a Dr Field. In fact, they said there was no spot-check arranged. So now, would you care to tell me who you are and what you’re doing here?’
‘I would like to tell you, Mrs Hughes. But if I did, I’d have to kill you.’
‘Excuse me?’
Jesus, what was I saying?
‘Candid camera,’ Martha smiled, coming out of the room. ‘See, I have a camera in my bag,’ she explained, pointing to what looked like a badge on her rucksack.
‘I don’t—’
‘Oh, you’ve been such a good sport, hasn’t she, Henry?’
‘Yes, yes, absolutely,’ I said. ‘Thanks for taking part.’
‘Oh, I—’
‘Someone will be in touch shortly. Of course we’ll need your consent before we can use the footage on our show, but there’s a two hundred euro fee so just have a think about it, okay?’
Martha took my arm and we half-ran down the stairs. We kept running until we reached the bus stop and I had to bend down with my hands on my knees for a good ten minutes, trying to get my breath back. She was still laughing when I looked up.
‘You should be on stage. Honestly, how do you improvise like that?’
‘I don’t know, maybe Madame Bowden’s rubbing off on me.’
The bus pulled in and we got back into the very same seats that we’d had on the way out.
‘Well, that was an experience. Pity we didn’t find the file,’ I said.
‘Oh, but we did.’
She pulled a folder out from her backpack and handed it to me. I was speechless.
Chapter Forty-Six
OPALINE
Connacht District Lunatic Asylum, 1941
A war has been raging overhead, or at least that was what I was told. At St Agnes’s, all remained deathly still. The place was like a vacuum, sucking life away from the people who were trapped within. Food was scarce; we subsisted on vegetables that grew stunted and undernourished in the dry ground outside. I became numb over the years, unsure when that set in, like rot. My skin would itch and flake and I would scratch until I bled, just to feel something. Eventually, I felt nothing.
Our numbers shrank. The appetite for reforming women had dulled somewhat since a madman decided to reform Germany. War made everyone question the status quo. It appeared to me that men in particular seem to need a war to find meaning in what they already have. To feel that heady sway on the verge of losing everything before waking up and stepping back from the brink. Why was that?
I had become a competent seamstress thanks to Mary’s instruction and it was the only thing that gave my day any semblance of order. I began stitching words from Emily Bront?’s story of Wrenville Hall into my skirt. At first it was something I did to amuse myself, but then it became a way of remembering that I did have a life before this place. Some sections of the manuscript came clearly and intact, but I knew there was no way I could remember it by heart. The joints in my fingers ached as I strained to make my stitches as tiny as possible.
I have devoted an entire lifetime to escaping the confines of this wretched place, only to find myself further entangled in its gnarled roots and oppressed by its looming towers.
Only two nurses remained. Two more than necessary, in my opinion. The only one who did anything worthwhile was Daisy, a young local girl who thought a job in this place was a step up in life. God bless the child. She was innocence personified, yet no stranger to hardship. I concluded that she was the only beauty left in the world, and for her part, she never made me feel like a hideous, frightful woman to be feared. She said she enjoyed the place, that it was quieter than the racket of living with four brothers at home. We shared a strong dislike for brothers.
One bright morning, I heard shouting and laughter and footsteps rushing along the corridor. Daisy ran into my room; I was lying prone on my bed, my head empty of thoughts. At least I stopped calling them thoughts. All I had then were images of a past life that may or may not have happened. Did I have a child?
‘I have a letter for you!’ she said, as though it were the most wonderful thing to have ever happened, and she ran off again, zig-zagging like a spring lamb. I lifted myself off the pillow and looked out through the bars on my window. The frost had created beautiful patterns on the glass. I became aware of a letter in my hand. From Jane, of course. Dear Jane, she had never given up on me. Even though I rarely replied, if ever, she was not going to abandon our friendship.
I read it in the haphazard way my eyes worked then, reading up and down rather than side to side: Your mother has passed away.
My mother has passed away, I repeated internally. I was an orphan, I realised, in some abstract way. Childless. Motherless. The world at war. My eyes began to blink.
And suddenly, I was awake.
In all the years of my incarceration, my mother never once came to visit, never wrote. I excused her behaviour because I knew she was under Lyndon’s influence and, even if by some miracle she had refused to believe his version of events, she would never openly defy him. Yet she was my mother. How could she abandon me in a way Jane could not? Her own daughter. Why hadn’t she helped? In fact, she was the only one who could have overruled my brother. Why didn’t my mother love me enough to risk everything? Those thoughts would forever haunt me. It was true that I had been closer to my father, and my mother was never affectionate towards me. But I had to assume that there was some love there. Not enough, clearly.