The Darlings of the Asylum by Noel O'Reilly

Author:Noel O'Reilly [O’Reilly, Noel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

20

Over the following days, the ward was subdued. There was a great deal of talk about Peggy’s suicide. The country women believed her death was not due to her illness, but brought about by supernatural forces. I felt remorse. For weeks I had witnessed Peggy’s growing distress, and I’d been too fearful to approach her. I never once tried to help her in any way. None of us had. How could I distract myself from such morbid thoughts?

I had settled into a routine of reading the Bible to Judith Wicks, the woman known as Wall-Eye, and the group of her cronies who sat smoking with her during the recreation hour. Whenever I read a particularly gruesome passage, Judith would break into her hysterical cackle. One day, she asked me if there was a favour she could do for me in return. I was reluctant to get into her debt, but there was one thing I wanted desperately, and Judith was always on the lookout for things she could filch and trade; anything left unattended in the ward disappeared instantly. I asked her if she could get me a pencil. By the next afternoon I had my wish. I found a piece of flint in the garden with an edge keen enough to use as a pencil sharpener, and remembered where I’d seen some coarse sheets of paper lining fruit boxes.

I was filled with excitement at the prospect of being able to draw and decided to draw some of the patients: their faces and what they revealed of their character and their former lives, their hopes and fears. They were good subjects for portraits, and the crude materials at my disposal seemed fitting in the circumstances. While working alongside Ada in the garden during the day, I began to study her face and to commit her features to memory: her bone structure, the wrinkles and pouches in her skin and, most importantly, her eyes, the expression that haunted her gaze. When alone in my room, in the last hour of daylight, I sat at my cramped little desk and worked on a picture of her, the pencil scratching quickly over the rough paper. I kept a second piece of paper on the desk, on which I’d copied out some lines of Tennyson. If surprised by one of the attendants, I would put the quotations on top of my picture to hide it.

To begin with, my aim was simply to capture Ada’s likeness. But, as I drew, I recalled our chats as we worked, all that she had suffered and lost, the insights into the person she had once been. In the days that followed, I worked my way through two pencils and the third was pared down to a nub. I was truly indebted to Judith Wicks’ light fingers now. For how much longer could I depend on her? All day long, I waited for the hour when I could work on my portrait. I wanted to show Ada’s soul, to convey her sorrow and longing in her face.

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