Jacqueline Doyle

Vivienne’s Key

Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot died of a suspicious overdose of heart medication after being involuntarily incarcerated in a mental asylum for almost ten years. Before she was committed, she wore an actual key to a deed box around her neck. She had high hopes for the posterity of her writing, which she left to the Bodleian Library. T.S. Eliot’s widow Valerie holds the copyrights.

Jug Jug to dirty ears. They’ve cut out your tongue but you’ve stitched together another one. London Bridge is falling down, falling down. Ashes. Ashes. You wear a key around your neck and you don’t let anyone touch it. No one can unlock your words but you. Your nerves are bad tonight. Bad. He’s left you in rat’s alley where the dead men count their bones and the women won’t stay dead. Who is she, that screaming banshee who returns in the darkness, blood thick between her legs, foul, viscous, defiling? You bundle up the sheets. Scrub blood stains in secret. Out, out damned spot. Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie. They locked Nerval in a madhouse when they found him walking a lobster on a ribbon in the Palais Royal. It does not bark, he said, it knows the secrets of the sea. You walked a terrier on a leash. Tom was angry when it barked on the stage. Naughty Vivienne, so long ago. Hieronymo’s mad againe. You tried to escape after they locked you up but couldn’t. How many years. Does no one hear you? Will more heart medicine cure a broken heart? What happened to the key you wore on a chain around your neck? You press your hand against your chest where the key once was. Your heart flutters. As you doze off for the last time you remember a locket shaped like a heart that you wore when you were a little girl and a gold wedding ring that made you so happy once and you know the key is important but you can’t remember what it unlocks.