The Journal of Dora Damage(4)

He wasn’t mad, even a five-year-old could tell that. He was just unlucky, for men don’t often get locked up, not for madness, even though there are more mad men than women. Madness is a female word. ‘It’s a madness’ they say, like it’s a governess, or a seamstress, or a murderess. There’s no male equivalent, no such word as ‘madner’. I should start saying it, but then they might lock me up. Peter took me to see Hamlet at the Royal in our courting days, and when I saw Ophelia, I knew she wasn’t mad. I wanted to cry out that madness isn’t this pretty, with flowers entwined in her hair and ivy between her toes. It was Hamlet who was mad, carrying on to himself like that, and Claudius too, but who’s brave enough to lock up a king and a prince? I wanted to tell the whole theatre, but they would have told me I was stirred by the heat, and that the gas-lights were hurting my head, which they probably were.

Lucinda wasn’t mad either, but with the Falling Sickness one still had to be careful. We led a peaceful life, owing to the delicacy of her condition: she accompanied me each morning as I sewed and folded in the workshop; in the afternoons she helped me with the chores, and in the evenings we read books, made up fanciful stories, sang, or played the old cottage piano. In the winter, we nestled by the fire and sewed leaves of paper together to make simple, tiny books, bound with scraps of leather or cloth from the workshop; in the summer, we sat in our patch of a garden and sewed real leaves together, and then we placed our leaf-books under the spindly bushes for the fairies. I kept my anxieties away from Peter, as it was not right to trouble him with women’s worries; but I also kept them away from the medical profession. I have many regrets, but that is still not one of them.

We liked being helpful to the bookbinders, Lucinda and I, for the sewing and folding was not hard. Occasionally I was privy to the books themselves, and had made several, not unheeded, suggestions for the casing design. I had enjoyed reading them: the legislative proposals, the academic theses, the histories, the memoirs of notables, and the primers for success in commerce (but Peter kept the medical anatomies away from me). I found them more edifying and provocative than the popular romances my sex was encouraged to read. Reading was my happiness: my father had described me to Peter’s father, William Damage, as ‘bookish’ when our engagement was made, and while I knew he had not meant it entirely as a compliment, it boded well for my match with my father’s apprentice bookbinder.

Surely one could forgive the daughter of a bookbinder for her love of books? But my father took no responsibility for my passion; he blamed my mother, who had been a governess before their match. She had, in his opinion, made the grave error of rearing me in the fashion of her superior charges, thereby expanding my intellect beyond the material station of any husband his income was capable of attracting. I would, he was convinced, remain not only a spinster, but entirely friendless, as I would be the intellectual, if not economic, superior of women of my own society. So I learnt the expediency of placing bell-jars, as it were, over my love of books, philosophy, politics and art, unmoveable as they were from the mantelpiece of my life, and I allowed them to become soot-blackened with neglect.

While Lucinda slept, I took the plants off the windowsills, shook out the muslin soot-stoppers, and washed the windows with cold tea – which would let in as much of the day’s meagre light as possible, save our candles, and bring more cheer to the dim, north-facing room – and then I cleaned the lamps. I scattered yesterday’s tea-leaves over the carpets, then swept them up again with the dust, and put them in the range to burn. My neighbours might have snubbed me for not washing the floor, but I was ever fearful of adding to the damp throughout the property and aggravating Peter’s condition, so on my knees I worked only on the worst areas, scrubbing, wiping and drying in one motion. I swept black beetles, spiders and silverfish out of the corners of the kitchen, then I went down to the room where Peter made up his paste, next to the coal-cellar, and pulled some more water from the tap. I scrubbed the pans with sand, and set about cleaning the range, as the laundry dangled on my head from the clothes-horse on the grimy ceiling. Each time I turned my head, a damp trouser leg or shirt sleeve would slap my cheeks, as if a ghost were demanding intimacy with me. A lethargy set in as I toiled, and with it the familiar quiet anger, that this was my life, these were the walls of my existence, and the confines of my hopes.

It was not as if I were a particularly good house-keeper. For all my diligence, the house was never clean enough; I always fell short. My mother had been a veritable army general in the way she kept first our house in Hastings and then our So-ho tenement impeccably clean, but for me, I fear, it was a war I seldom won, and even if I were to wave a white flag of defeat, it would not be white at all, but a dingy grey flag, so no one would understand that I was surrendering. I spent the first years of our marriage waiting for Peter to realise that I did not wear a halo with regard to house-keeping; when he finally became aware of this, I felt continuously guilty for disappointing him so. If we were ever to have tipped one hundred pounds a year we could have considered employing a young maid-of-all-work in her first employ, but every year we never made it. We used to make do with a charwoman once a fortnight who helped with the heavy work and laundry, but now we could not even run to that. It was Peter’s highest aspiration; not because he thought to ease the burden on me, but because it would have been proof of a certain gaining of station.