I closed the door just as Peter re-entered from the house, somewhat sheepishly.
‘I – er – I was looking for the unguent,’ he murmured. ‘It’s gone from the pot on the dresser.’ He started hunting for his spectacles, fists curled by his sides.
‘It is gone, yes,’ I said, equally quietly, with only the slightest raise of my eyebrow, not so as he could chide me for any impertinence, for he had dismissed it as quackery when I made it the previous winter, but that hadn’t been such a wet one as this.
Eventually he found his spectacles lying on the binding primer. He picked them up carefully, but his hideous fingers were a sorry sight; it was like he was raising his glasses to his face with two cow’s udders. I thought of suggesting a butter rub, but I held my tongue, for I already knew that the pennies in the tea caddy would not last the week, and Peter would scold me if there was no butter for his toast. We settled again into a grim, clammy silence; the only sounds were the puttering and hissing of the rain in the gutters and the gas in the pipes, whispering to us of the mysteries of the city, as if our very fates were bound into it, and which we could not hope to comprehend.
At two o’clock as usual I carried Lucinda back into the house, her legs wrapped around my waist, and she folded her head into my neck. Her smooth blonde hair fell about my shoulders like a pelerine of gold lace on a gentlewoman; indeed, I was all the finer for Lucinda. I was glad to leave the workshop and get on with the household chores while she rested, for I could smell the trouble, and I did not want her to have an attack.
The first time Lucinda had a fit she was but three days old. I still had no milk at the time, for it took a few days to rise into the breast, and in her fury and hunger she cried out sharply before convulsing, all twitches and purple. ‘Hush, you angry thing,’ I admonished, and, as if to punish me for my harsh words, her body flicked itself violently out of my hands, and almost into the fire. Her tiny tongue lolled from her mouth and only the whites of her eyes were visible, and she writhed and thrust herself close to the ashes, as if the devil himself were inside her and wanted to return to the inferno whence he came. I seized her and held her close, then laid her down on the chair and pressed my body against hers as her little fists and feet pummelled and thrashed my tender belly, until she lay still again.
I was frightened; I even called for the doctor, who told me she was having a teething fit, and gave her castor-oil, and told me to submerge her up to her neck in hot water the next time she fitted. But when the convulsions persisted beyond her full mouth of teeth I did not call the doctor again, for there was a fear greater than that from which I knew my daughter was suffering. I had grown to understand that my daughter was afflicted by the same disorder that ruined my grandfather’s chances of a reasonable existence, and which saw him incarcerated in an asylum at the age of twenty-four.
I went to visit him once – old Georgie Tanner – with my mother when I was only five, just like Lucinda. I remember an old man more vividly than my grandfather, an old man crouching by his bed, tugging at his sheets, hissing, ‘Your majesty!’ at him. ‘Your majesty. Can’t be? Is’t thou?’ When we approached, he stood up with the sheets wrapped round his loins, the bones of his chest protruding out of his nightshirt, and pointed at my grandfather. ‘Ladies of the court! His Majesty King George the Third!’ He pulled a chair up for my mother, then turned to me, and clasped my hand to his chest. ‘But mark you,’ he whispered, nodding conspiratorially, ‘it is my army that shall lead the rebellion, and then I shall rule the world!’
And when I looked around me to establish the whereabouts of the rest of his army, I caught the eye of another man, lying in his bed, who turned his face towards me and said, with a mouth as dry as skin, ‘No food since 1712.’
It is possible that a five-year-old is better equipped than an adult when it comes to coping with such displays of mental peculiarity. That is not to say that insanity always turns an old fellow back into a child, but that children are of necessity constantly dancing in and out of the shadows of reason, and better at accepting displays of lunacy. Certainly my mother was more discomfited by the experience than I was, and had I not taken her as my example of how best to react in the circumstances, my sole memory of my grandfather would, doubtless, be a more pleasant one. Instead, I remember old Georgie Tanner more as she saw him: a cause for grief, smelling sour, lying inert, his rheumy eyes directed at the ceiling, and his mouth sore and dripping from the latest chemical solution intended to control his seizures.