“You know how when you’re dead like us, and sometimes all your words get mixed up so they come out wrong? And Phyllis or somebody else will tell you that it’s taking you a while to find your Lucy-lips?”
The infant blinked and nodded, shooting sidelong glances at the madwoman who jigged this way and that upon the grassy boards of a theatre only she could see. Marjorie went on, still in the same pointlessly low murmur.
“Well, that woman there, that’s Lucy.”
Even Phyllis seemed astonished by this.
“What, that’s wossername, old Ulysses’s daughter? ’Im ’oo wrote the racy book?” The ghost-gang’s leader had announced her questions at her normal, raucous volume-level, prompting Marjorie to give up on her own subdued tones as she answered Phyllis.
“Yes. That’s Lucia Joyce. Her dad was James Joyce, and she used to dance for him when he was writing his great book, Finnegans Wake, to give him inspiration. When he took the writer Samuel Beckett on as his assistant with the work, Lucia thought that she’d been elbowed out. She also started thinking Beckett was in love with her, and began having mental problems generally. She’s up there on the Billing Road now, at St. Andrew’s, where she’s been for a few years. They say that Beckett sometimes goes to visit her there, if he’s in the area. Her family, the ones that are alive, they play down her existence in case it should cast a shadow on her father or his works. Poor woman. It’s a shame the way that she’s been treated.”
Phyllis was regarding Marjorie suspiciously.
“Well, ’ow come you know such a lot abayt it all? I never knew you wiz a reader.”
The rotund girl peered impassively up through her glasses at her rabbit-wrapped senior officer.
“I’m not. I just keep up with all the gossip.”
Phyllis appeared satisfied by this, and after a few moments more of watching Lucia’s repetitive and oddly mesmerising act, the four of them resolved to make their way back over the broad sweep of recombined lawns and find Bill and Reggie. Pockets bulging with a hoard of the dwarf Puck’s Hats that would more than compensate for the ones stolen by the future duo, everyone agreed that it had been a very nice excursion but that there was no point in extending it now that they’d got the bounty that they’d come for, or at least a reasonable substitute. Once they’d located their two disgraced members — who it seemed that Phyllis was prepared to pre-forgive after her earlier prejudgement — they could head back up the Ultraduct to Doddridge Church and possibly take time to play on the subsided wasteland that they’d passed above when they were on their way here.
Marjorie was thinking about Lucia, thinking about Sir Malcolm Arnold and all the other inmates, past and present, of Northampton’s various asylums. John Clare, J.K. Stephen and the countless others whose names no one save for their immediate relatives and friends would ever know, all of them eventually wandering across the unmarked boundary that separated the acceptable and minor madnesses of ordinary life from the more unacceptable behaviour and opinions that were classed as lunacy. What was it like, she wondered, going mad? Were you aware that it was happening? In the first stages, did you still possess a measure of self-consciousness allowing you to notice that the world surrounding you and your responses to it were markedly different from the way they used to be? Did people fight against it, the descent into insanity? It struck her that, for a great many people, ordinary life itself was something of a surface struggle.
As they made their way along the copse’s edge, taking a slow, circuitous route back towards the jumbled madhouse buildings, they stumbled upon two women who sat talking on a weathered bench. Both living, neither of the pair seemed to detect the presence of the phantom children. From the length and colour of the grass where they were seated, Marjorie judged that the two were actually materially present in St. Crispin’s Hospital, rather than overlapping from St. Andrew’s in the mayhem of the higher world’s collapse, as both Sir Malcolm Arnold and Lucia Joyce had been. Marjorie didn’t recognise the pair, at any rate. They both seemed to be women in their middle years, one tall and somewhat gaunt, the other shorter but more fully rounded. Marjorie could see that only one of them, the lanky one, appeared to be a patient, while her friend carried a handbag and looked more as if she might be visiting. Other than this, there didn’t seem to be much you could call remarkable about them. Marjorie would have walked on if tall, good-looking John had not stopped suddenly and stared from one face to the other in amazement before making an announcement to the group in general and to Michael Warren in particular.
“Well, I’ll be blowed. I reckon that I know these two. The littler one, that’s your dad’s cousin Muriel, nipper, and I think the other one’s his and her cousin Audrey. Audrey Vernall. She went barmy just after the war. She used to play accordion in a show-band that her father managed, then one evening when her mum and dad had been out down to the Black Lion, she locked them out and sat there playing “Whispering Grass” on the piano, over and over again. Her parents had to go and sit beneath the portico of All Saints Church all night, there on the steps, and in the morning they had someone come and bring her to the hospital up here at Berry Wood. She’s been here ever since, from what I’ve heard.”
Marjorie scrutinised the taller of the seated pair more closely, in the light of John’s account. The woman, Audrey, had a strong face and a pair of large and luminously haunted eyes. She seemed to be addressing Muriel, her visitor, with some considerable urgency, her cousin’s hand gripped tight in Audrey’s long and sensitive accordionist’s fingers. Because John’s announcement had caused everyone to cease their idle chattering and pay attention to the women’s conversation, all four of the ghostly children clearly heard the words that Audrey Vernall said next, after which Phyllis and John had both looked nauseated and embarrassed, and had hurried Michael Warren off before he could hear any more.
Soon after that they found Reggie and Bill, who’d gathered a huge haul of Puck’s Hats as an act of penitence for crimes they’d not committed yet. Once Phyllis had officially forgiven them for their impending larceny, the gang ascended back up to the Ultraduct by leaping high into the ghost-seam’s thickened atmosphere and then dog-paddling up for the remainder of the distance, John and Phyllis towing Michael Warren in between them.
As they headed back along the dazzling overpass to Doddridge Church they munched upon their mad apples and Phyllis once more made them all strike up the Dead Dead Gang’s club song. Marjorie thought that Phyllis was most probably attempting to make lots of noise so everybody would forget what gaunt and wild-eyed Audrey Vernall had said to her cousin when the two of them were sitting on their bench and didn’t think they could be overheard. Marjorie, though, could not forget it. It had had a dreadful ring to it, that stark confession there amongst the rustling and eavesdropping boughs, and with her writer’s sensibilities she thought that it would make a powerful ending for at least a lengthy episode in her forthcoming Chapter Twelve: