Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (jenna bush book club txt) 📗

It’s a dog’s life. At the end of April Flush goes adventuring in the Torquay woods, gets lost, and is found again; in July he acquires ‘a kitten for a playmate! […] Think of his carrying this little white, snowball of a kitten, no larger than his head, carrying it about the room in his mouth—& playing with it for hours together!’ He’s become a charmer who ‘creeps up in his usual irresistible way, & lays his head down on my pillow’, and cocky with it:

He is fond of milk—& when any is brought to me in a cup he wont let me drink a whole half without a hint that the rest belongs to him. He waits till his turn comes, till he thinks it is come—and then if I loiter, as I do sometimes pretend to do, Mr Flush tries to take possession of the cup by main force.

Confident at home, outdoors he has ‘not, in fact, reached the point of heroism’:

if a cat stands & stares at us, we retreat prudently—if it runs our way by accident however free of hostile intention, we cry out piteously—if a stranger tries to pat our pretty head, we shrink away.

If Elizabeth, who feels rather the same about strangers herself, seems to be overinvolved with her new pet, that’s partly because her isolated life still lacks incident. But things are changing. Her letters are once again alert and intellectual. She’s ardently re-engaged with writing, and is reading widely. In July 1841 when not one but two mutual friends, Miss Mitford and John Kenyon, send her Robert Browning’s new poem, ‘Pippa Passes’, it behoves her to be tactful. But she can’t resist noting ‘an occasional manner,’ even though:

There are fine things in it—& the presence of genius, never to be denied!—At the same time it is hard .. to understand—is’nt it?—Too hard?—I think so!—And the fault of Paracelsus,—the defect in harmony, is here too. After all, Browning is a true poet—[…] and if any critics have, as your critical friend wrote to you, ‘flattered him into a wilderness & left him’ they left him alone with his genius […] the genius—the genius—it is undeniable—

All this adds up to a startling resurrection. Best of all, at long last Elizabeth is to leave Torquay. After the usual to and fro – ‘Delay—delay—delay!—[…] We cant go on at all without stopping short’ – Papa finally lets her chose where she wants to live and, desperate not to spend another winter in Devon, she decides to gamble on coming back to London – and by road. After all, the special ‘patent’ carriage her father has ordered – he will join the travellers himself at Exeter – has a bed in it, ‘and its springs are numberless’. Dr Scully has set a deadline for safe travel before the autumn closes in and so on 1 September Elizabeth, Arabella, Crow and Flush set out for home.

They arrive in Wimpole Street on the afternoon of 11 September 1841. It is ‘the loosening of chains whose iron entered into the soul’, a chance for Elizabeth to break with everything that has happened to her in Torquay: bereavement, depression, and three years of isolation and illness. ‘It was the opening of the dungeon to the captive! I looked at the chimney pots & at the smoke-issuing of this London .. all I cd see from my bed .. with the sort of exaltation & half-incredulity with which you have looked at the Alps!’ The patient is probably almost as frail as when she left London but, though still spitting a little blood, she seems to have shaken off her cough. As after the Gloucester interlude, at least some of her weakness must simply be the result of being kept virtually bedbound.

Only Flush has a bad beginning. He dislikes the Barrett men:

and, what was rather worse, he thought it necessary (being a moralist & a traveller) to express his disapprobation most loudly & tumultuously—starting up, whether by night or day, everytime he heard a footstep, throwing himself upon my shoulder & barking like a pack of hounds […] I was in despair—not so much for myself as for Papa who is not perhaps very particularly fond of dogs & most particularly, of silence.

Luckily, he calms down before Papa can ban him and decides that, like his mistress, ‘He likes London, he says, very much indeed.’ And Elizabeth settles in to the delicious task of catching up with London literary gossip. Less than a fortnight after her arrival she’s already up to speed, and is filling in Miss Mitford on the breakdown of Robert Southey the Poet Laureate’s marriage. As 1841 ends, Elizabeth is retrieving the central part of herself.

[

Tain

]

The tain of a mirror is the obstruction – traditionally a silvering – that stops the glass giving you a clear view through to the other side, and instead throws you back your own reflection. We could say that the obstruction in a two-way hospital mirror is the secrecy in which the people on one side of the glass – the staff – keep themselves in order not to be seen by the people on the other side.

The staff on the dark side of the two-way mirror can’t see their own selves at all. For them, unlike for the people they’re studying, there is no reflection, only observation. When I worked in mental healthcare units I particularly disliked using these mirrors. If a gaze must be met in order for us to encounter another person, I used to wonder, how on earth can we get to know them while we’re hiding behind blacked-out glass?

From the staff side of the glass I could see the people I’d just been working with, in the room I’d just left, as clearly as if they were on stage. Yet they weren’t acting. Actors direct their actions towards us as we sit in the darkness beyond the fourth wall of the