The Fraud (27 page)

It was after I walked back then to the house in Pall Mall with tell-tale blood still dripping (somehow I got to my room and sent word downstairs that I was, that day, unwell) that colours suddenly began to
flash
inside my head and I could not stop them: it was as if my head had turned mad and had fireworks exploding inside of it, great explosions of bright green and red and yellow inside my head, and nothing I could do to stop them - it was more terrifying than anything that had ever happened to me, all night over and over in my head churned the details of my life, my Work and my Love, they became muddled, the colours in my head were the colours of the body of James and arms and blood and canvas and shadows and James again and a child, the children, and always somewhere underneath it all Philip tearing my Drawings: the record of our Past that had been lost.

The next morning I somehow, somehow, cleaned myself tidied myself and went downstairs - I had changed my life, yet I had only missed, as it were, a day.

Philip was walking around the dining-room in a fury, could not speak for anger; Angelica was full of gossip and explained.

In that one day that I had missed, in that day I had gone to the basement in Meard-street, Mr James Burke had sent my brother a brief note concluding their Partnership - and Mr James Burke, Art Dealer, and his wife Lydia, had suddenly left London for Europe.

‘It will be because of Lydia!’ exclaimed Angelica.

I stood very still. ‘Because of Lydia.’

‘Oh Francesca, my dear, you know nothing of the world! The wife of Mr Burke is known to have lost a great deal of money at the gambling tables, and he has been hard-pressed to pay her debts. She is too close to the Duchess of Devonshire - and everybody knows of her gambling. No doubt he has taken her away on a long Grand Tour.’

During which time, I supposed, they visited the Uffizi and the old bridge called the
Ponte Vecchio
in our home town: in Florence, where the sun sets over the river and catches the Florentine spires that reach up into the night, and the scent of lemons.

 

I had made my Decision; he had helped me to carry out that Decision; and he had gone.

 

Frantically I tried to keep painting: wild slashes of bright colour appeared on my canvases as if they had not been painted by me but of course they had been painted by me: they were the colours screaming inside my head
what have I done what have I done?
my body ached with loss: of James? of a child? of the chance to be Michel Grace? who is to say: I literally could not stand the pain,
I cannot stand the pain cut off their tails with a carving knife and nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence save breed
,
to brave him when he takes thee hence save breed save breed save breed
, I only know I could not stand such pain after giving my heart and my body and my mind so completely; I thought I was in Bristol, I saw myself whirling along the streets with my brother, I saw myself on the quays waiting for the sailing ships to bring their treasures from far-off lands and my brothers; when I tried to carry out my usual duties with my shopping basket over my arm I stood in horror as the madwoman’s voice echoed and followed me down St Martin’s Lane,
her chains she rattled with her hands and this she sigh and sing . . .

Next morning I threw the coffee pot at my brother - he gave me one of those odd looks we very occasionally shared, wiped at his jacket and left the room without saying anything - Euphemia was on her knees picking up the pieces, she looked at me from under her eyelashes, and as it was the only unsober thing I had ever, ever done in all my time as housekeeper and
confidante
of Angelica, Angelica was at once puzzled
,
worried by my uncharacteristic behaviour for I was so
reliable,
and later I heard them say, Philip and Angelica, that I was missing the children,
she is missing the children
, the voices said.

But it was when I walked in the night through the huge sleeping, creaking house of lies and slashed Philip’s painting of the Duke of Norfolk,
cut off their tails with a carving knife
, wild screaming slashing with a kitchen knife so they said, I remember but do not remember - that I was taken away; perhaps I was mad, but perhaps I was not:
before
I slashed my brother’s painting I had removed every sign from my sewing-room that I had ever
ever
harboured a desire to be an Artist like my brother - I had burned all, all my precious Paintings and the old canvases and the boards and the brushes and the paint - all in the garden at the back of the house, I told the gardener it was rubbish from my brother’s Studio and he helped me.

On the wall I left the painting of the Lilies and the green Daisy: that was all that was left of my work of all the years.

I knew what I was doing.

Madness is clever, and chooses its moments.

 

My attack of madness when I slashed the Duke of Norfolk was so sudden and so violent there was no time to enquire of more suitable places - I was taken at once to Bedlam - Bedlam bedlam bedlam bedlam BEDLAM - just to write the name now -
Bedlam -
I cannot even
. . . I cannot . . .
bedlam

 

...
the screams and the manacles and the smells and the wild, drab, loud fornication that even somebody in a tiny padded cell (a private padded cell at least: my brother insisted) could not pretend was not happening - I supposed it was padded in case I threw myself upon it - Bedlam was the most terrifying place I was ever in, in the world, so whatever I write will not describe what I know, and the sound of the shouting and the screaming and the pain
. . .

. . .
at first I too screamed, one of the tortured Souls in that place, or so it seemed, I screamed out, for the first time in my life, trying to scream out all my anger and despair and pain and loss, yet I
knew
I was screaming: it is almost unexplainable, this wild abandon of screaming aloud for the first time in my life, over and over, something about
time’s scythe and the mad farmer’s wife cutting off their tails
, words and colours and pictures that made no sense, yet made sense to me at that moment, there, in Bedlam.

The pain of it.

And yet. And yet
. . .

Also
,
the relief of it
.

I was
Grace Marshall
(not Francesca di Vecellio from Florence - a place I had never even seen), Grace Marshall wildly, passionately screaming, on and on and on not in an Italian accent either, but wild, untrammelled sound.

They put me in the Strait-Waistcoat then, the canvas and wood tightening over my chest so that I could hardly breathe, my arms in the sleeves and then tied behind me and they forced purgatives down my throat, to purge the madness they said and I fouled the mattress but still my wild, perhaps elated, screaming somehow poured out of me - part of the madness they said, and gave me laudanum, huge amounts of laudanum; when I slept I dreamed of my Father and his card games down the dark alleys and my first Chalks and my sisters with their new hooped petticoats and the disappointed face of my Mother and my brother Tobias with the red rose - I saw their faces clearly, as I had not seen them for years, and all the colours - I dreamed I think for days, doctors stood about me and several times Philip, always without Angelica, and somewhere in my mind I remembered Angelica saying of this place to which she was brought to visit for her Entertainment,
they are like lost souls
, and over and over I wondered: can I paint Pain? can I draw Love?

Finally I could see Philip’s tight, closed face in the small stinking padded cell. ‘Can I be alone with her,
Dottore
?’ The doctor bowed, and talked again, before he left, of
Hysteria.

Philip and I were, then, quite alone.

Perhaps, if he had called me Grace then, just once.

I think, if he had said something
even then
: something to show that he understood even a small portion of what had happened over the years and years, if he had - oh I do not know what I am trying to say: if he had - validated our realness? the Past? my destroyed Drawings that had been my Treasure? - perhaps I could have forgiven him, perhaps even then, in a house of the mad - while I was mad - who knows? with nobody to hear us but ourselves. Philip leaned over the bed.

‘Francesca,’ he said. ‘You must pull yourself together, Francesca, and as soon as you have done so we will find a more suitable private Sanatorium. We will find a private place. Can you hear me,
cara
? Francesca?’

I closed my eyes then, and began screaming again and Philip went away.

 

After some time I stopped.

And then I heard the noise.

The wild, riotous, forlorn, madhouse noise, a screaming crying hell: the sound of human beings who were as animals, all of us, animals not humans, crawling and stinking and yelling with irredeemable desperate pain and I was one of them, mad.

After more purgatives and cold rice or something pushed down me and more bed-fouling I stood up for the first time - you could walk in a Strait-Waistcoat - there were things crawling on me, on my head something was crawling: a flea? a cockroach?
what was crawling over me?
I had no hands to scratch or hit but as I was wildly shaking my head and my hair I at once saw there was an old long tear in one of the canvas sleeves of the Strait-Waistcoat, it had been sewn up.—I could reach the shoulder stitches with my teeth and I bit at it for hours and then I tore the hole bigger by getting myself under the bed and catching the sleeve with the leg of the bed, I managed to tear it enough so that I could see my elbow inside and the elbow could push and tear with the bed-leg and - my triumph - finally I could move one of my arms and poke it through the hole, I could push and pull it in and out, nobody seemed to notice or care, the sleeves were still tied together at the back but my arm could come out, it meant I had one hand to scratch or hit or eat if you could stand the gruel or use in the outside privy, I was filthy and stinking but I had one arm and the wood and the canvas flapped and rattled as I walked about inside the cloud of noise, the violent shouting and the desperate cries and the clanking of the chains that chained people to walls.

. . . who were we? We were everybody and we were nobody, people, human beings locked up, people who had killed somebody else, living and re-living the moment, was that the madness? or people who had slack jaws and crossed-eyes, was that the madness? or because they wanted too much to paint? or stole a jewel, or a heart, or money, how much of it was about money? or just lost people, all calling and crying and laughing until a half-quiet hour, two or three in the morning when sometimes there was a noisy silence of snores and sighs - and then somebody would scream as if they were in Poppy’s press being flattened and perhaps they were, in their heads - most patients lay on stinking straw, I was privileged I had a bed with a fouled mattress, but there were fleas, or something , inside the straw and the mattresses, and Strait-Waistcoats were nothing to fleas - I was covered in terrible, itching red weals, everybody was: it was
torture
, the great bites on everyone’s body were a torment, almost a Biblical Torment as if from Hell, as if to pay us for our Madness, which was our Sin.—The smell of urine and shit filled the building, patients drew on the walls with their own faeces as I had once drawn on the walls of Mrs Falls’ with charcoal, the markings were obscene and grotesque, and the most grotesque thing of all was the occasional Visits by Ladies - it was this social Activity that had given Angelica her knowledge of Bedlam - and if a law had been passed forbidding such visits as Miss Ffoulks had promised the fashionable ladies nevertheless still came to look at us, came to see the mad people.—They stood in the elegant hallway and stared at us, whispering behind their fans - and to the ladies’ delight there was a man who held out his open arms to them and said
I am Christ Jesus
(from whom they shrank, screeching and laughing and putting their noses behind their fans) and there was a fat, dirty woman who wept right in front of them and said
Call me Your Ladyship!
and then they were suddenly ushered away screeching loudly again as a mad manacled murderer roared and crashed from where he was chained as if he would pull the walls upon all of our heads - maybe the Director was a bad person letting the Ladies stare when perhaps it was now forbidden, I do not know, he spoke to my well-known brother the Portrait Painter in a low concerned (it seemed) voice, but to me, myself, he never spoke or asked, and the visitors still came - and so many of the Staff were evil people, more evil than the lost people on the
piazza
- the
piazza
was wild too, but different, the
piazza
had a different kind of energy and noise and freedom, here we had no privacy and no protection at all from the whims and desires of the people who were purported to be our Guardians - they really did call them
Guardians
and some of the Guardians were actually old Patients - they could do anything, to anyone, young girls (and young boys) were in the worst situation, they were stripped, sat astride, lain upon, shared; one of the Guardians hated Foreigners and pulled at me as if I was a tied-up cow and lifted my shift and laughed at me when I kicked out at him as best I could in the Strait-Waistcoat but I hid my arm, he must not see my arm, I needed my arm, I could only kick and he spat upon my face, his foul-smelling saliva dripped down my chin and always the red torturing bites of the fleas or roaches or whatever the small animals were, and no protection for anyone, anywhere.

—one day I saw that same Guardian coming back and I ran out of the door of my cell rattling and flapping in the canvas and wood of my Strait-Waistcoat and I lost myself in the sad wild pieces of humanity in the common spaces, part of the abandoned jetsam of the world of London who had not been strong enough, who thought themselves Barons or our Lord or murdered their mother, all kicking and crying all like human beasts and scratching at their flesh, as I did, the red and itching bites bleeding and as big as pennies - I tripped in my hurry to get away from that Guardian, I fell and landed in a shadowy corner in my shift and the Strait-Waistcoat , next to an old man who was chained to the wall with all the other chained men.—I had not even noticed at first in all the shadows and darkness that he was completely black, and he smelled - we all smelled but he smelled differently - and I saw that he was crying silently, not screaming like the others, tears pouring out of his eyes and down his face in stillness and silence and if he was bitten by insects or vermin as we all were, he took no heed in all the noise and wildness. I stared at the black man. I had never been so near to a black person in my life, not even to Angelica’s musician in his splendid jacket, I thought of the black servants in the white wigs that we all laughed at in Bristol, and the man calling for ‘my nigger!’ when the slave ran away in the
piazza
in Covent Garden - he took no notice of me, just silent pain in all the noise, his manacled hands and the tears pouring down his face, his skin was very dark, I found myself thinking it would be hard to find a paint quite the colour for there was a blueness there almost, in the twilight that came in from the tall high windows, and his hair was grizzled and grey.