part of the country. Partly as a result of your essay and the attention it has received, I have been able to persuade the Committee to open a Female Convalescent Home, to be established in Flushing where the patients will have opportunity to enjoy and indeed rehearse the amenities of Falmouth while remaining visible and, one might say, secure on the outskirts of a village. Crosswyn does not say so, but he is thinking that Falmouth town offers too many means of escape from exactly the normal life to which the patients are to be returned. Ships bound for blue water, bars, an endless procession of sailors with money in their pockets and fire in their bellies. The stone walls of the docks, dropping fifty feet into cold water, and the dark cliffs on Pendennis Point and over Castle Beach. Mineshafts hidden in the woods under brambles and bluebells, trains rounding a winding track twice an hour until well after dusk, and enough people lost or wandering, in the wrong country or county or continent, that no-one notices another stranger. But there’s one road to Flushing village, a settlement mostly of those who have made their money and retreated from Falmouth to live in peaceful gentility, and Crosswyn’s right that Flushing is a better place to relearn the ways of respectable sanity. We require a Medical Director and I am delighted that the Committee authorises me to make haste to offer you the position. I do not doubt that you have received several offers since the publication of your essay but I venture to hope that your connections in this county may favour us. Whether Ally is the best person to teach these ways is, as neither Annie nor Aunt Mary could resist suggesting, a different matter. Are you quite sure such a position will really suit you, darling? Only you have made such progress with your health this spring, we would not like to see you unwell again as you were at Christmas. It is my work, she told Aunt Mary. It is what I do, thinking about madness. And it was not my work at the asylum that made me ill. Aunt Mary did not point out that if Ally had not had to leave the asylum she would not have been in Manchester in the first place. Annie was more direct: Al, it’s the last place you should be. Come and work with me. Join our practice. Deliver some babies. Set the children’s broken bones, visit their mumps and measles and see their mothers through bronchitis in the winter. Look after the neurasthenic girls if you really must. Let some kindly man prepare farmers’ wives to go back to their kitchens and servant girls back to their work. Ally remembered Mary Vincent and shook her head. No, Annie, thank you. Of course I will miss you greatly but my life is in Cornwall now and I have chosen my work. Who better to help such patients than someone who has strayed near their path herself? And we all, really, have personal reasons for what we do, however we dress our desires and motivations in the language of our profession. You keep happy families happy and I attend sick minds. Come and visit, if you want to see how I do.
The line runs beside the River Exe, flowing wide and fast. Fir trees mass, protecting a gentleman’s residence of the last century from the noise of the train and passengers’ curious gaze. The gentleman’s lawns, punctuated by flights of shallow stone steps and bits of statuary, roll down to the river, where he has a Palladian boathouse and swans. Ally tucks the letter back into her bag. The edges of Exeter begin, and the grey stone cathedral raised high over the redbrick terraces and tiled roofs. She will go back to Truro Cathedral, she thinks, and see how it is coming along. It is a rare thing, to see a cathedral built.
There is another letter in her bag, one written a few days ago amid the business of packing and preparation and not posted. It is better, she decided, to maintain contact with Mamma and Papa, for them to know her address. Otherwise they become monsters in her head, wolves and ogres from whom she must hide as prey from a predator. They are not gods, not embodiments of power, but haunted beings like herself. She does not wish to be prey. She does not wish to go in fear. Dear Mamma and Papa, I write to tell you that I am returning to Cornwall to take up a salaried position as Medical Director of the Truro Asylum Female Convalescent home. She devoted some thought, some uncertainty, to ‘salaried.’ See, Mamma, I have paid work at last, I am independent of you and of the scholarship committee and of Uncle James and even, since it concerns you, of my husband. See, Mamma, the world judges me worth the air I breathe, the food I eat, the roof under which I shelter. But these proofs suggest that Ally accepts Mamma’s logic, that even now she hopes to appease. She wants both to triumph over Mamma according to Mamma’s own rules and to deny Mamma’s understanding of the world. It is one of the reasons why the letter has not been posted. I am sorry for the distress and inconvenience at Christmastime. No, don’t apologise. Mamma will hear an acceptance of culpability rather than the wish that things had been different, that Ally had been braver earlier. I do not expect that we will meet again soon (don’t come, don’t come to get me, not by word or thought or deed) but when we do (don’t be angry with me, don’t read this letter as further evidence of my madness) I hope it will be under happier circumstances (I hope that if I avoid you for long enough you will learn to treat me as a civilised adult. I hope
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