by Pat Barker
‘I’ll be as unobtrusive as I can.’
Yealland nodded. ‘Good. The last thing these patients need is a sympathetic audience.’
21
__________
After lunch they went straight to the electrical room. Rivers sat on a hard chair in the corner, prepared to stay as long as necessary. The only other furniture was a small desk under the tall window, with a stack of buff-coloured files on it, the battery and the patient’s chair, rather like a dentist’s chair, except for the straps on the arms and around the foot rest. Yealland, who’d been emptying his bladder in preparation for a long session, came in, rubbing his hands. He nodded cheerfully to Rivers, but didn’t speak. Then, rather to Rivers’s surprise, he began pulling down the blinds. The blinds were the thick, efficient blinds of wartime, and after he’d finished not a chink of light from the dank, November day could get into the room. Rivers now expected him to turn on the overhead lights, but he didn’t. Instead, he left the room in darkness, except for a small circle of light round the battery. This light was reflected off his white coat and up on to his face.
Callan was brought in. He looked indifferent, or defiant, though once he was settled in the chair his eyes shifted from side to side in a way that suggested fear.
‘I am going to lock the door,’ Yealland said. He returned to stand before the patient, ostentatiously dropping the key into his top pocket. ‘You must talk before you leave me.’
All very well, Rivers thought. But Yealland had locked himself in as well as the patient. There could be no backing down.
Yealland put the pad electrode on the lumbar spines and began attaching the long pharyngeal electrode. ‘You will not leave me,’ he said, ‘until you are talking as well as you ever did. No, not a minute before.’
The straps on the chair were left unfastened. Yealland inserted a tongue depressor. Callan neither co-operated nor struggled, but simply sat with his mouth wide open and his head thrown back. Then the electrode was applied to the back of his throat. He was thrown back with such force that the leads were ripped out of the battery. Yealland removed the electrode. ‘Remember you must behave as becomes the hero I expect you to be,’ Yealland said. ‘A man who has been through so many battles should have a better control of himself.’ He fastened the straps round Callan’s wrists and feet. ‘Remember you must talk before you leave me.’
Callan was white and shaking, but it was impossible to tell how much pain he was in, since obviously he could no more scream than he could speak. Yealland applied the electrode again, continuously, but evidently with a weaker current since Callan was not thrown back. ‘Nod to me when you are ready to attempt to speak.’
It took an hour. Rivers during all that time scarcely moved. His empathy with the man in the chair kept him still, since Callan himself never moved, except once to flex the fingers of his strapped hands. At last he nodded. Immediately the electrode was removed, and after a great deal of effort Callan managed to say ‘ah’ in a sort of breathy whisper.
Yealland said, ‘Do you realize that there is already an improvement? Do you appreciate that a result has already been achieved? Small as it may seem to you, if you will consider rationally for yourself, you will believe me when I tell you that you will be talking before long.’
The electrode was applied again. Yealland started going through the sounds of the alphabet: ah, bah, cah, dah, etc., encouraging Callan to repeat the sounds after him, though only ‘ah’ was repeated. Whenever Callan said ‘ah’ on request, the electrode was momentarily removed. Whenever he substituted ‘ah’ for other sounds, the current was reapplied.
They had now been in the room an hour and a half. Callan was obviously exhausted. Despite the almost continuous application of the electric current he was actually beginning to drop off to sleep. Yealland evidently sensed he was losing his patient’s attention and unstrapped him. ‘Walk up and down,’ he said.
Callan did as he was bid, and Yealland walked beside him, encouraging him to repeat the sounds of the alphabet, though, again, only ‘ah’ was produced and that in a hoarse whisper, very far back in the throat. Callan stumbled as he walked, and Yealland supported him. Up and down they went, up and down, in and out of the circle of light around the battery.
Rebellion came at last. Callan wrenched his arm out of Yealland’s grasp and ran to the door. Evidently he’d forgotten it was locked, though he remembered at once and turned on Yealland.
Yealland said, ‘Such an idea as leaving me now is most ridiculous. You cannot leave the room. The door is locked and the key is in my pocket. You will leave me when you are cured, remember, not before. I have no doubt you are tired and discouraged, but that is not my fault; the reason is that you do not understand your condition as I do, and the time you have already spent with me is not long in comparison with the time I am prepared to stay with you. Do you understand me?’
Callan looked at Yealland. For a second the thought of striking him was clearly visible, but then Callan seemed to admit defeat. He pointed to the battery and then to his mouth, miming: Get on with it.
‘No,’ Yealland said. ‘The time for more electrical treatment has not yet come; if it had, I should give it to you. Suggestions are not wanted from you; they are not needed. When the time comes for more electricity, you will be given it whether you want it or not.’ He paused. Then added with great emphasis: ‘You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say.’
They walked up and down again, Callan still repeating ‘ah’, but making no other sound. The ‘ah’ was produced by an almost superhuman effort, the muscles of the neck in spasm, the head raised in a series of jerks. Even the torso and the arms were involved in the immense effort of pushing this sound across his lips. Rivers had to stop himself trying to make the sound for him. He was himself very tense; all the worst memories of his stammer came crowding into his mind.
Yealland said, ‘You are now ready for the next stage of treatment, which consists of the administration of strong shocks to the outside of the neck. These will be transmitted to your voice box and you will soon be able to say anything you like in a whisper.’
Callan was again placed in the chair and again strapped in. The key electrode was applied in short bursts to his neck in the region of the larynx, Yealland repeating ‘ah, bah, cah, dah’, etc. in time with the shocks. On the third repetition of the alphabet, Callan suddenly said ‘ba’. Instead of attempting the next sound, he went on repeating ‘ba’, not loudly, but venomously. ‘Bah, bah’, and then, unmistakably ‘Baaaa! Baaaaa! Baaaaaa!’
Yealland actually looked gratified. He said, ‘Are you not glad you have made such progress?’
Callan started to cry. For a while there was no other sound in the room than his sobbing. Then he wiped his eyes on the back of his hand and mimed a request for water.
‘Yes, you will have water soon. Just as soon as you can utter a word.’
Callan pushed Yealland aside and ran to the door, rattling the handle, beating on the wood with his clenched fists. Rivers couldn’t bear to go on watching. He looked down at the backs of his clasped hands.
Yealland said, ‘You will leave this room when you are speaking normally. I know you do not want the treatment suspended now you are making such progress. You are a noble fellow and these ideas which come into your mind and make you want to leave me do not represent your true self. I know you are anxious to be cured and are happy to have recovered to such an extent; now you are tired and cannot think properly, but you must make every effort to think in the manner characteristic of your true self: a hero of Mons.’
Perhaps Callan remembered, as Yealland apparently did not, that Mons had been a defeat. At any rate he went back to the chair.
‘You must utter a sound,’ Yealland said. ‘I do not care what the nature of the sound is. You will understand me when I say I shall be able to train any sound into the production of vowel sounds, then into letter sounds, and finally into words and sentences. Utter a sound when you ta
ke a deep breath, and as soon as I touch your throat.’
Callan, although he appeared to be co-operating, could make no expiratory sound.
Yealland appeared to lose patience. He clamped his hands down on to Callan’s wrists and said, ‘This has gone on long enough. I may have to use a stronger current. I do not want to hurt you, but if necessary I must.’
Rivers couldn’t tell whether the anger was acted or real, but there was no doubt about the strength of the current being applied to the neck in shock after shock. But it worked. Soon Callan was repeating ‘ah’ at a normal pitch, then other sounds, then words. At this point Yealland stopped the use of electricity, and Callan sagged forward in the chair. He looked as if he were going to fall, but the straps held him in place. ‘Go on repeating the days,’ Yealland said.
‘S-s-s-sunday. M-m-m-m-m-monday. T-t-t-t-tuesday…’
Saturday came at last.
Yealland said, ‘Remember there is no way out, except by the return of your proper voice and by that door. I have one key, you have the other. When you can talk properly, I shall open the door and you can go back to the ward.’
And so it went on, through the alphabet, the days of the week, the months of the year – the shocks sometimes mild, sometimes extremely strong – until he was speaking normally. As soon as he could say words clearly at a normal pitch, he developed a spasm or tremor – not unlike paralysis agitans – in his left arm. Yealland applied a roller electrode to the arm. The tremor then reappeared in the right arm, then the left leg, and finally the right leg, each appearance being treated with the application of the electrode. Finally the cure was pronounced complete. Callan was permitted to stand up. ‘Are you not pleased to be cured?’ Yealland asked.
Callan smiled.
‘I do not like your smile,’ Yealland said. ‘I find it most objectionable. Sit down.’
Callan sat.
‘This will not take a moment,’ Yealland said. ‘Smile.’
Callan smiled and the key electrode was applied to the side of his mouth. When he was finally permitted to stand up again, he no longer smiled.
‘Are you not pleased to be cured?’ Yealland repeated.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Nothing else?’
A fractional hesitation. Then Callan realized what was required and came smartly to the salute. ‘Thank you, sir.’
22
__________
That evening after dinner Rivers tried to work on a paper he was due to give to the Royal Society of Medicine in December. As he read through what he’d written, he became aware that he was being haunted by images. The man in the corridor at Queen Square, Yealland’s hands, Callan’s open mouth, the two figures, doctor and patient, walking up and down, in and out of the circle of light round the battery. It was unusual for Rivers to visualize as intensely as this, indeed to visualize at all, but then the whole experience, from beginning to end, had had something… hallucinatory about it.
Rivers left the typewriter and went to sit in his armchair by the fire. As soon as he abandoned the attempt to concentrate on the paper, he knew he was ill. He was sweating, his heart pounded, pulses all over his body throbbed, and he felt again that extraordinary sensation of blood squeezing through his veins. He thought he might have a slight temperature, but he never, as a matter of principle, took his own temperature or measured his pulse. There were depths of neuroticism to which he was not prepared to sink.
His confrontation with Yealland had exhausted him, for, however polite they had each been to each other, it had been a confrontation. He was too tired to go on working, but he knew if he went to bed in this state he wouldn’t sleep, even if there was no disturbance from the guns. He decided to take a turn on the Heath, fetched his greatcoat from the peg and crept downstairs. Mrs Irving was a pleasant enough woman, but she was also a very lonely woman, and inclined to air her grievances about the excessive demands of Belgian refugees. He reached the bottom of the stairs, listened a moment, then quietly let himself out of the house.
He felt his way along the dark street. Shuttered windows, like blind eyes, watched from either side. It was something new this darkness, like the deep darkness of the countryside. Even on the Heath, where normally London was spread out before you in a blaze of light, there was only darkness, and again darkness. Starlight lay on the pond, waking a dull gleam, like metal. Nothing else. He started to walk round the edge, trying to empty his mind of Queen Square, but the images floated before him like specks in the eye. Again and again he saw Callan’s face, heard his voice repeating simple words, a grotesque parody of Adam naming created things. He felt pursued. There they were, the two of them, Yealland and his patient, walking up and down inside his head. Uninvited. If this was what habitual visualizers experienced, he could only say he found it most unpleasant.
He stopped and looked at the pond. He was aware of rustling, dragging footsteps. Somebody bumped into him and muttered something, but he moved away. By the time he got back to his lodgings he felt much better, well enough to greet Mrs Irving in the hall and compliment her on a more than adequate dinner.
Back in his own rooms he went straight to bed. The sheets felt cold, so cold he again wondered if he was running a temperature, but at least the palpitations and the breathlessness had gone. He thought he might manage to sleep if the Zeppelins and the guns allowed it, and indeed he did fall asleep almost as soon as he turned off the light.
He was walking down the corridor at Queen Square, an immensely long corridor which elongated as he walked along it, like a strip of elastic at full stretch. The swing doors at the far end opened and shut, flap-flapping an unnaturally long time, like the wings of an ominous bird. Clinging to the rail, the deformed man watched him approach. The eyes swivelled to follow him. The mouth opened and out of it came the words: I am making this protest on behalf of my fellow-soldiers because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
The words echoed along the white corridor. Abruptly the dream changed. He was in the electrical room, a pharyngeal electrode in his hand, a man’s open mouth in front of him. He saw the moist, pink interior, the delicately quivering uvula, the yellowish, gramy surface of the tongue, and the tonsils, like great swollen, blue-purple eggs. He slipped the tongue depressor in, and tried to apply the electrode, but the electrode, for some reason, wouldn’t fit. He tried to force it. The man struggled and bucked beneath him, and, looking down, he saw that the object he was holding was a horse’s bit. He’d already done a lot of damage. The corners of the man’s mouth were raw, flecked with blood and foam, but still he went on, trying to force the bit into the mouth, until a cry from the patient woke him. He sat up, heart pounding, and realized he had himself cried out. For a second the dream was so real that he went on seeing the chair, the battery, the tortured mouth. Then, nothing. Gradually, his heart beat returned to normal, though when he got out of bed and went across to sit by the window the small effort made it pound again.
No raid tonight. It was ironic that on this one quiet night he should have woken himself up with a nightmare. As with all nightmares, the horror lingered. He was still inclined to accuse himself. That, he thought – self-reproach – had been the dominant affect. At first he was inclined to connect it with the quasi-sexual imagery of the dream, for the dream action had been both an accurate representation of Yealland’s treatment and uncomfortably like an oral rape. He didn’t feel, however, that the underlying conflict had been sexual.
The manifest content came from his visit to Queen Square, and was present with relatively little transformation. There was no doubt that the visit had been rife with opportunities for conflict. From the beginning he’d felt a tension between, on the one hand, his sympathy for the patients, his doubts about the quality of the treatment they were receiving, and on the other, the social and professional demands on him to be reasonably polite. As the day had gone on, this conflict had certainly deepened. Over lunch Yealland had told him about an offic
er patient of his who stammered badly, and whom Yealland had cured in – as usual – one session. Rivers – to his own amusement and exasperation – had responded to the story by beginning to stammer rather badly. And whenever he’d hesitated over a word, he’d sensed Yealland calculating the voltage. All nonsense of course. He’d been more amused by the situation than anything else, but nevertheless the worsening of his stammer did point to an underlying conflict that might well find expression in a dream.
The man in the corridor with the spinal contracture seemed to represent Sassoon, since he’d quoted the Declaration, though it was difficult to imagine anybody more physically unlike Sassoon than that deformed, pseudo-dwarf. And the expression of antagonism – that certainly didn’t correspond with anything in the real Sassoon’s attitude towards him. But then there was no reason why it should. The dream action is the creation of the dreamer. The mood of this dream, a mood so powerful he could still not shake it off, was one of the most painful self-accusation. The man’s expression need reflect no more than his feeling that Sassoon, perhaps, had grounds for antagonism.
He hadn’t been able to see the face of the second patient, and had no clear sense of who it was. The obvious candidate was Callan, since it was Callan he’d watched being treated. And Callan had been working with horses when he became mute, which might account for the bit. And yet he was fairly certain the dream patient had not been Callan.
On the wards he’d been struck by a slight facial resemblance between Callan and Prior, who had also been mute when he arrived at Craiglockhart. He remembered an incident shortly after Prior’s arrival when he’d dragged a teaspoon across the back of his throat, hoping that the choking reflex would trigger the return of speech. This did sometimes happen. He’d seen more than one patient recover his voice in that way. But he’d tried it while in a state of acute irritation with Prior, and the choking had occasioned a momentary spasm of satisfaction. Very slight, but enough to make him feel, in retrospect, discontented with his own behaviour. Mute patients did arouse exasperation, particularly, as with both Prior and Callan, when their satisfaction with their condition was hardly at all disguised. Perhaps the dream patient was a composite figure, part Callan, part Prior, the combination suggested by his application of a teaspoon to Prior’s throat and Yealland’s application of an electrode to Callan’s.