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No Return

The last entry in Juliette’s dream diary was made on September 4, 1782. Aside from some of the more lurid sexual dreams of late August, it’s the most intense of the entries, partly because the reader gets the impression that Juliette isn’t describing a dream at all.

In this final dream, she returns to the House on Henrietta Street after visiting ‘the home of a friend’ (Emily?) to find the House empty. It’s evening, but there are no other women in the salon. Most of the salon’s furnishings have also vanished: there are spaces where the pianoforte and the chaise-longues used to be, pale squares on the walls where many of Scarlette’s paintings have been taken down. The House feels empty, a hollow shell. But there’s the ever-present smell of smoke, light from both the burning candles and the oil lamps. Juliette thinks nothing of the emptiness. She simply heads up the stairs towards her room.

It’s while she’s in her room that things start to change. The chamber makes her feel uneasy, and at first Juliette isn’t sure why. None of her own effects are missing, though the room’s in half-darkness. Scarlette’s glass totem rests on a chair. A single lamp burns above the looking glass. In fact, Juliette feels as though there are too many effects in the room. The furnishings are so familiar to her, though, that she has difficulty noticing what’s supposed to be there and what isn’t.

It’s then – with amazingly little surprise – that she realises. The room is full of apes. What she took to be furnishings are living creatures, but the apes seem so familiar to her that she simply didn’t spot them until now. They were just part of the room, a part which she never normally notices and which seems to hover at the edge of her vision. The apes tell her, though not with language, that she willed them here simply by her understanding. As a result, they’re now part of that understanding.

It’s the description of the apes that makes the entry so intense. She doesn’t describe them as horrors here, but as ordinary elements of her life, and in the later paragraphs there’s a sense of almost shocking intimacy as she goes about her daily routine (brushing her hair, undressing, examining herself in the looking glass) while the apes surround her. She’s come to accept them, as if her experiences in the Black House have inured her to their presence.

There are certain noteworthy features to this story. For one thing, the description of the ‘empty House’ may be literally true. The pianoforte had been taken by debt collectors by September, and when some of the House’s women left Scarlette’s employ they took with them a number of small furnishings which may or may not have actually belonged to them. Business was so lacking by this time that many of the women weren’t even bothering to stay there in the evenings. In many ways Juliette’s account could be factual, although the suggestion of the apes being in her room without harming her…

Perhaps more importantly, the suggestion of the apes being at the threshold of her consciousness, of them being as much a psychological phenomenon as a biological one, was very much in line with the Doctor’s own discoveries. Had Juliette really understood the truth?

The Doctor and Scarlette were still absent at this time, so nobody would have been present at the House to oversee the other women. The consequences of this became clear on the afternoon of September 5, when those women who’d remained behind – six of them, the journals record, although only Rebecca, Lisa-Beth and Katya are named – all met in the sparse, half-stripped salon to make a final decision on the future of the seraglio. It was a meeting they probably wouldn’t have dared to hold if Scarlette had been in London.

The question posed at the meeting was simply this: should the House continue to do business? It was no good carrying on this way, some of the women argued, if Scarlette was going to spend all her time helping the Doctor with his experiments. The House should make a decision as a whole.