The Asylum by John Harwood Read Free Book Online

said after a pause. “Would you tell me something of yourself? You grew up on the Isle of Wight, I understand.”
    Hesitantly at first, I began to speak of the scenes I had recalled that morning, though not of my fascination with Rosina and the mirror. He listened attentively, smiling at my portrait of Aunt Vida. It struck me as I talked that, despite the loss of my mother, my childhood had been far happier than his.
    “Was your mother always an invalid?” he asked. “From childhood, I mean?”
    The question stirred a troubling memory. I had never thought of her as an invalid; as a child, I had accepted her being delicate, and needing to rest a great deal, as simply part of the order of things. And when I was told, in the first extremity of grief, that her heart had been diseased, I assumed it had always been thus. It was only years after Mama’s death that it occurred to me to put exactly this question to my aunt.
     
    We were standing, that afternoon, on the path by St Catherine’s Lighthouse, gazing out across the sea. Neither of us had spoken for some time. It was a clear, windless day, early in the spring, and I was wondering whether a faint skein of cloud along the horizon was actually the coast of France, when my aunt said, more to herself than to me, “Emily always liked this spot.”
    Aunt Vida, when preoccupied, would speak of “Emily” rather than “your mother”; she always talked more freely when we were out of doors. Though we were only about a mile and a half from the cottage, the path was rough, and very steep in places, and I could not imagine Mama negotiating it.
    “Was she stronger—her heart, I mean—when she was a girl?” I asked.
    My aunt nodded, still in her reverie. “Could walk all day then. No sign of anything wrong.”
    “So when did she . . . ?”
    “At Nettleford, after—” Her expression changed abruptly, as if a blind had fallen across her features.
    “After what, Aunt?”
    “Don’t know. Woolgathering. No good asking me. Never saw the place.”
    My aunt had scarcely known my father. She had moved to the Isle of Wight when my mother was quite small, and though Mama had spent a good deal of her time there, my father had never visited the cottage. Aunt Vida had met him on a few occasions in London, but she in turn had never been to Nettleford.
    “ Why did you never visit her at Nettleford?” She had always evaded the question, but now that I was as tall as my aunt, I felt entitled to an answer.
    “Told you before. Godfrey was too ill; didn’t want to be a nuisance. Before that, he was too busy. Asked them here several times, but he could never get away. Always worried about his patients. Would have lived longer if he’d chosen another profession, your mother said.”
    “Was he—were he and Mama happy together?”
    “Of course they were, child. Why do you ask?”
    I did not know what had prompted me to ask. I had been possessed, of late, by a strange restlessness, as if I were yearning for a place I had never seen but would recognise at once if only I could find it. I was in my sixteenth year, and on the verge of womanhood, for which my aunt, in her gruff, taciturn way, was doing her best to prepare me. Earlier on our walk, we had seen a cow giving birth to a calf, and not long after we had passed a field in which a bull-calf was attempting to mount a heifer—a common-enough sight, with so much farmland around us. I had once asked Mama about it, and she had told me that they were playing at leapfrog. I soon learnt to avert my eyes unless I was quite alone, but by the time I was thirteen, I had deduced what I supposed to be the essential facts of procreation.
    That day, however, as I was studiously ignoring the bull-calf, my aunt had abruptly said, “Mating. Same with humans. ’Spect you’ve guessed. Never cared for the idea myself.”
    I could not imagine anyone caring for the idea, but as I stood beside her, with the white bulk of the lighthouse towering above