The Dome

by Katherine Mezzacappa

part 1

Norfolk, England, 2006

I am told that this place where I am living now is one of the last of its kind. One after the other, these Victorian asylums have been closed and sold off to developers; the people who lived in them have been delivered up to something called ‘care in the community.’ Clip-board man told me, in a rare rush of words — for he usually speaks only to prompt me to do so — that, for some of the staff of these hospitals, the transition has been almost as fraught as for those they cared for; they, too, have become institutionalised. This place has survived until now because it takes the most challenging cases; it has become what Clip-board man calls a ‘centre of excellence,’ an oddly dissonant term to use for this collection of Victorian patterned brick.

There is a library here. Clip-board man took me there — everything I do is supervised — on my first foray out of this room. I have brought back with me an etymological dictionary published before World War I. The first thing I looked up in its tissue-like pages was the word ‘asylum.’ It means an inviolate place, a place of safety. The people of the Dome cannot reach me here — unless, and it occurs to me that this is a real possibility — they, too, are brought here as patients.

* * *

I should explain that the Dome is not a building nor even a specific place. It was months before I realised its members called it that because the word really means ‘house,’ a corruption of domus. Later, much later, I hazarded asking where the Dome was.

My companion waved an arm in the general direction of the derelict church through the minibus window. ‘It’s here, everywhere.’

Let me try to explain; I don’t know how familiar you are with cults.

The only women of the Dome I was allowed to see were those aged fifty and above, and the eldest living girl was not more than ten years old. Their young men I first saw harvesting wheat with long scythes in large, silent teams, dressed in old ‘good’ clothes: suit trousers gone shiny and long parted from their jackets, palely striped collarless shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Dressed this way and using hand-tools, they resemble the Amish, but they have not eschewed other benefits of modern life like, for instance, travelling by minibus.

Should you pause to watch these men at work, they’ll stop, one by one, and watch you. Then, one will detach himself from the group and come and ask you what you’re doing there. In my case I just said it was because I was interested in their community.This is how it always starts; they respond to interest with interest. Unlike other cults, they don’t go canvassing for members.

‘There was a wedding here yesterday,’ one of them told me. Like the others, he was fitter and stronger than I am; I’m taller than most men, but slenderer. My wife once said, when she still loved me, that I don’t quite know what to do with my long, spindly limbs.

‘Hilda, your mother’s cousin,’ he added. Hilda I hadn’t seen for years. How old would she be now? I did a rough calculation: at least sixty-seven. I wondered about her bridegroom. Her first husband had been packed into Norfolk clay at least twenty years ago; I cannot remember him.

‘Go and have a look,’ he said, indicating the little church standing in its graveyard two fields away, muffled by yew. I thanked him and walked off in its direction, feeling their eyes on my back and being careful to skirt the corn.

On reaching the little flint-built church, I saw that it was really not much more than a chapel or oratory, the sort you might find in a city cemetery. Oddly, its entrance was not at ground level but up four or five steps, crumbling and overgrown. Couldn’t someone at least have sprayed some weed-killer over them, in honour of this elderly bride’s poor stumbling feet?

The panels of the door were bleached and warped as timber long tossed by the tide, greenish rot encroaching at its foot. I pushed it open, expecting — despite this unpromising exterior — the usual English church mixture of mustiness and polish: a Victorian tiled floor perhaps, some damaged brasses, poppyheaded pews, kneelers, neat piles of hymnals and a flyblown display of photographs of smiling Africans, members of a sister parish that they would never meet.

Instead, a scene of utter desolation: crumbling masonry, a denuded altar table covered in bird-shit, crevices of light in the roof, some broken stacking chairs against the walls, and whatever was strewn across the floor crunching under my feet. I fled.

Knowing I looked ridiculous, I nevertheless kept a field’s breadth between them and me, struggling over barbed wire fences that plucked at my clothes, tumbling into mud, whilst those scythers swivelled and followed my haphazard progress. I saw them do this out of the corner of my eye, for I didn’t dare give them any indication by the tilt of my head that I noticed them.

By the time I reached my car, I was sweating, though the September afternoon was mild. There was a panicky moment in which I couldn’t find my car keys, my dancing desperation could have been observed from three fields away. Finally, my frantic fumblings produced a faint rattle. My jacket pocket had given way. My wife had always complained that I stuffed too much into pockets. I think, absurd as it sounds, that this was one of those minor irritations that led her to kill our marriage.

Almost weeping with relief, I winched the keys out from where they lay within the lining of the jacket. There was another cold moment when I couldn’t manage to turn the ignition; for some long seconds I convinced myself the battery was dead.

Back at my lodgings in Aylsham, my landlady looked searchingly at me but contented herself with: ‘It’s a messy business this bird-watching.’ I smiled briefly, saying nothing, and fled to my room as soon as I’d eaten, to ring my mother.

‘I didn’t hear from Hilda at Christmas,’ she told me. ‘She was on her own, of course. Her daughter moved up to Ilford about ten years ago. We’d thought she’d never leave her Mum, but what’s there to do down there? You can have Hilda’s address if you like,’ she added doubtfully. ‘I still don’t understand what you’re doing there.’

‘Doctor’s orders,’ I said. Afterwards, I looked up the church in my Pevsner for Northeast Norfolk and Norwich, half-expecting it wouldn’t be there, that I had imagined it:

Emmington. St. Wilgefortis. Village disappeared at Black Death. Late Norman nave, one S window with a just-pointed head but a round-headed rere-arch. Chancel of C13 with one lancet in each wall. W bell-turret on the ridge, timber substructure medieval. Restored almost to extinction 1866. Monument: John Chittleborough + 1714.

Wilgefortis? A massive Catholic database in Sacramento, California, provided this explanation:

The curious story of Wilgefortis, (Uncumber; Liberata), who never existed, is simply an erroneous explanation of the crucifixes of the C12 and earlier which depicted Christ fully clothed and bearded... according to legend, Wilgefortis was daughter to a pagan king of Portugal; her father wanted her to marry the king of Sicily, but she had taken a vow of virginity (some sources suggest Wilgefortis is a corruption of vierge forte). She prayed to become unattractive: she miraculously grew a beard and her suitor withdrew.

Her father had her crucified: on the cross she prayed that all those who remembered her should be liberated from all encumbrances and troubles. Images of her were to be found at Worstead, Norwich and Boxford (Norfolk), despoiled in the reign of Edward VI...

There then followed a characteristically pithy comment from Thomas More concerning the custom of offering oats to her image:

Whereof I cannot perceive the reason, but if it be because she should provide a horse for an evil husband to ride to the devil upon, for that is the thing that she is sought for, insomuch that women have therefore changed her name and instead of St. Wilgeforte call her St. Uncumber, because they reckon that for a peck of oats, she will not fail to uncumber them of their husbands.

Nowhere, I think is more desolate than a seaside town out of season. I know though why Mundesley had appealed to Hilda — it was the scene of so many childhood holidays, and the chance to exchange a terraced house in crowded Tottenham, with next door’s radio audible through the sitting-room wall, for life in a bungalow.

16 Clunch Road was one of a string of lonely squat houses, huddled down against the elements, spattered along this coastal road without plan or design. Glass porches or verandas had erupted on most of their façades, providing places to sit when going out into the naked strips of garden seemed too exposing, too public. In Hilda’s porch I saw a flurry of unopened envelopes, mainly junk mail, and several issues of Reader’s Digest magazine. A pair of dusty Wellington boots lay on their sides, and I remembered Hilda saying to my seven-year old self: ‘That way, if the mice get in, they’ll be able to get out again.’

I couldn’t see much else. Hilda had net curtains; they even hung across the French windows. The back of the house gave onto a cracked, overgrown patio, some tangled, sprawling rosebushes, and a greenhouse where bloated, split and mildewed tomatoes weighed heavy on their stalks.

Next door, the woman in sweatshirt and trainers with the tangled hair looked at me unsmilingly. A smell of Brussels sprouts and elderly meat clung about her.

‘Hilda? Not seen her for ages. My Leanne saw her go with her sons. They wouldn’t speak to her. Just looked through her when she said ‘hello.’ I wouldn’t have thought Hilda would have brought them up to have no manners. She was always so polite.’

‘When was this, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Who wants to know? You family?’

‘Well, yes, but not close. Hilda’s a sort of aunt.’

‘You’d best come in, then.’

Her front room was as disorderly as I remembered Hilda’s to be neat. She nudged a pile of newspapers to one side on a fake leather settee. I sat on its edge.

‘Cuppa tea?’

I said yes automatically and then wished I hadn’t.

‘No milk, thank you.’ I normally take it, but thought I’d better minimise the risks. In the flotsam on the chair opposite, a half-eaten sandwich was stiffening on a plate. The rays of sun that lay across the carpet highlighted a fine mesh of hairs, dust and crumbs. The dark brocade curtains looked as though they were seldom moved; they sagged where their hooks were missing.

I stared into my oily tea. It wasn’t warm; it felt viscous on my tongue.

‘It would need a lot doing to it, of course. Can’t have been touched since she moved in. Needs rewiring, then central heating put in. Those metal window frames are getting rusty; they were never much good so close to the sea. She didn’t have much stuff, of course, but Leanne’s boyfriend knows someone who’ll take it away for free. He’s like that, likes to do favours for people. Anyway, it’d be like keeping it in the family, wouldn’t it? I mean, Hilda knew Leanne from when she was a baby. You wouldn’t need to bother about solicitor’s fees and all that, would you?’

On my feet, the half-drunk tea on the floor, I said sharply: ‘My aunt’s not dead yet.’

I knew Leanne’s mother would be watching me from the mildewed kitchen window, but that she’d only see the top of my head over the listing fence panels. In Tottenham, there’d always been a spare key in the toolbox in the hut in the back yard, so I gave the door of Hilda’s garden shed a shove, and a rusted hinge gave way.

Inside were some faded plastic children’s toys. Perhaps Hilda really had befriended Leanne? A rusting bicycle with flaccid tyres was propped against one wall, alongside trays of daffodil bulbs that had sprouted palely and uselessly in the half dark. There was also a blue metal toolbox; I found the keys lying in a tray of nails.

The house smelt damp. It had new occupants. I found their droppings first on the nibbled copy of the Daily Mail on the silly occasional table in the sitting room, a Saturday edition from the previous May. Beside it sat a tea cup in its saucer, flowering with mould.

In the bathroom the doll in the crocheted crinoline covering the spare toilet roll put her plastic arms out to me imploringly. The mice had laid waste to her skirts and their contents; one of them lay in the bath, its flesh dry and split. The products on the glass shelf testified to an inescapably elderly toilette: hair rinses, shrink-wrapped lavender soaps, a third-used bottle of Eau de Cologne, and a denture cleaning solution. I pocketed a brown bottle of capsules prescribed in April.

The Camberwick bedspread had been pulled straight and smooth. I traced my finger a moment along the velveteen grooves of its pink surface; I think this is something I may have done as a child. The sheets underneath felt damp, the intervening blankets synthetically harsh. A slight indent on the pillow contained one grey hair.

Hanging inside the wardrobe was what my mother would call ‘a good winter coat,’ some beige polyester blouses, checked skirts with elasticated waistbands. Hilda’s two hairbrushes lay face to face in a chaste missionary position on top of the chest of drawers. Her smalls, along with her surgically pinkish-brown tights in little bags, lay undisturbed inside, kept faintly fragrant with lavender bags. I thought: no-one else was meant to see these things.

Yet the bureau downstairs had been arranged as though Hilda anticipated someone else settling her affairs. The sweeping copper-plate of her birth and marriage certificates lay alongside the daisy-wheel printed card that identified Hilda’s right to whatever resources the National Health Service could offer her, via her access to a GP.

‘They all look a bit like that ’round here,’ said the boy at the newsagents-cum-grocer’s. He wasn’t discourteous, just bored and uninterested. How, anyway, do you describe a woman you have’t seen in decades, of whom you don’t have a photograph?

I had to wait days before I could get to see her doctor. The first time I couldn’t get past an officious receptionist. ‘Doctor cannot possibly discuss confidential patient matters with anyone other than notified next of kin.’

The queue behind me was growing restive. I was conscious of a mother with a struggling baby, repeating to the child: ‘Just be patient, it’ll only be a minute!’ I hate a scene, so I left. The next day I saw a different receptionist and feigned illness to get an appointment.

‘I’ll put you in with Dr. Munday at 11.’

‘No, not Dr. Munday. It has to be Dr. Wilson. I like the name,’ I said, and smiled madly at her. She looked away quickly, back to her screen. ‘3:30,’ she said, refusing to look up.

Proceed to part 2...