The Spaces in Between

by Collin Van Reenan

  While all this was going on, I tried, between caring for my other patients, to assemble all the papers I could find concerning Dr S.– H.–’s published research. There wasn’t much, and nothing specifically relating to Nicholas’s ordeal. The general tenor, though, was towards influencing the subconscious mind, the parts that only intrude on consciousness when we are asleep or are somehow induced to override the usual responses of the perceptive half of the brain. To this end, she relied at first on previous experiments using drugs such as sodium pentothal, and then, following the lead of the CIA, hallucinogens. Hypnotism, for all its reputation in the popular imagination, played a very small part. Mesmerism, and then hypnotism, are surrounded by myths. At least one in five people cannot be hypnotised, and even those susceptible and who can be put into a deep, trance-like state cannot be persuaded to perform any act that they would refuse to do when awake. Programming people to commit crimes or assassinations at a given command remains, at least at the time of writing this, a fiction.

  That is not to say that hypnosis does not exist as a useful weapon for the psychiatrist or hypnotherapist, and there is some evidence that Madame Lili practised it on Nicholas, primarily to relax him and make his mind more receptive to suggestion when the drugs began to take effect, and perhaps allow her to control the ‘trip’ to some extent. Several times in his account, Nicholas states that, while holding his bare arms with her damp gloves, Madame Lili spoke to him softly but firmly: ‘Look at me, Nicholas. Listen to me, Nicholas. Listen to my voice…’ These are classic prompts used in hypnosis ever since Anton Mesmer began practising it on his subjects. It says something for Madame Lili’s skill that she was able to have such a marked effect on Nicholas, because he is one of the twenty per cent of people who do not normally respond to hypnotism. I know this because I tried to treat him with hypnotherapy myself, with little useful result.

  Meanwhile, we kept Nicholas in the dark until some concrete evidence turned up.

  Such evidence was slow in coming. There were, of course, bits and pieces dribbling in. For example, I managed to obtain Nicholas’s medical records from his short stay in hospital. They mentioned only what we already knew: ‘A contusion was present on the right malar bone with resultant oedema and discoloration.’ In other words, a swollen, bruised cheekbone. This matched Nicholas’s description of the blow that had felled him before he was finally injected.

  More disappointing was the toxicology report, which listed only that ‘a substance known to be hallucinogenic was found in high quantities in the blood’, and was specific neither in the name of the drug nor in the actual amount. It seems that, having found traces of drugs in Nicholas’s blood, the hospital doctors had believed that the origin of his symptoms had been ascertained, and the police had considered this an acceptable explanation for his being found unconscious in a public place. In short, they believed that they were dealing with a ‘junkie’, and that was the end of any credibility his story might once have had. No one thought to submit him to a psychiatric evaluation.

  Eventually, my father succeeded in getting permission to visit the House itself, which was undergoing redecoration prior to being re-let. Again I judged it better not to tell Nicholas of our intended visit, and spent an afternoon with my father examining the House and grounds.

  It was very much as Nicholas had described it, and his detail had been so accurate that I actually felt I recognised certain parts, particularly the great entrance hall with its dual staircases.

  We visited on a bright sunny day, which showed the huge stained glass windows at their best, and the House appeared cheery and bright. But the sky clouded over after a while and then things took on quite a different aspect. The windowless corridors became gloomy and oppressive, and I could well imagine how eerie they must have seemed at night, lit only by a handful of oil lamps.

  My father was particularly interested to see if he could find evidence of what he called ‘electronic trickery’ or hidden microphones, but found nothing except some wires leading to Nicholas’s bedroom and study.

  Although the use of electricity was formally not allowed in the main parts of the House, there was some evidence of its use in the staff bedrooms under the roof: a television aerial connection lead hung from one wall, and adaptor plugs were found, of the sort used for hairdryers. Here and there, items of discarded make-up were in evidence, but little else.

  I was particularly interested in the room used by ‘Dr Voikin’ as his surgery, but there the clean-up had been very thorough and no drugs or syringes were found.

  When I rejoined my father in the library, he was debating whether it was worthwhile collecting any fingerprints from various parts of the House in the vain hope that any of the previous occupants might be on file at the Criminal Records Office. He decided against such an arduous and probably unproductive approach. He did, however, spend a considerable time walking the grounds or, more specifically, the boundaries, to see if there were any places where an outsider could gain access. Satisfied that the garden was secure, he joined me for a last look at the House from a distance, to see if there was any chance of a hidden room concealed in the roofline or any access points to the cellars.

  At a nearby café, we sat and looked at each other, unable to draw any solid conclusions from our visit. I was glad that we had taken the trouble, though, because it enabled me to form some small idea of the closed and isolated atmosphere of the House and how uncannily remote it felt, even though it was just a couple of miles from the centre of Paris.

  We drank our coffee in silence, my thoughts concentrated on how I could best ‘sell’ our theory to Nicholas, because, in spite of some compelling evidence, theory it still was.

  On our return to Rueil-Malmaison, I called Nicholas, invited him to dinner at my parents’ house and then drew up a set of notes, anticipating his questions.

  After dinner, we – my father and I – took Nicholas into the study and, over drinks, told him that we had a theory. Nicholas was not surprised; he had suspected that I had news for him and, in spite of his stolid and relaxed appearance, I could see that he was seething with expectation.

  Slowly and methodically, my father put our case to him. He readily agreed to my father’s request not to interrupt until we had fully expounded our version of events, concentrating on the two main causes of Nicholas’s anxiety: what exactly had taken place at the House, and why had it happened to him? Answer those two questions successfully, we reasoned, and the rest would more or less fall into place.

  I observed Nicholas as my father set things out point by point. I could see that he had confidence in my father and that he appreciated it when he stopped and went back over areas that were based more on conjecture than fact. Both men were concentrating hard, my father to explain and Nicholas to understand. I sat, observed, and topped up their drinks. I knew better than to think that Nicholas would give much away, yet I felt somehow that he wasn’t in disagreement. Naturally, he identified himself as the victim, and so it was essential for his mental wellbeing that we should be able to answer the ‘why me?’ question.

  I could see that my theory of how the hallucinatory drugs were administered through the skin made perfect sense to him, and my ideas concerning Madame Lili’s hypnotic and suggestive methods, and the way they could precondition him to see or experience certain things, satisfied his need to understand.

  As my father’s explanation drew to its conclusion, I was careful to add that, while we believed our deductions to be true, they were not the whole truth, but rather a framework to add future findings on and to allow us to analyse any such new information.

  Finally, my father moved to what did not happen or, in other words, the parts of the plot that seemed to have gone wrong. He suggested to Nicholas that he was not supposed to have witnessed the departure of the house staff; that whatever sedative he had been given after that awful ‘danse macabre’ of the skeletons had not been given in sufficient quantity to keep him unconscious while everyone left the pre
mises; that Serge had struck him in a fit of panic rather than malice; that, while Madame Lili was clearly cold and dispassionate, the same might not have been true for her sister, Natalya. My father ventured that Natalie might well have fallen in love with Nicholas and thereby jeopardised the whole experiment.

  As far as the pregnancy was concerned, he considered it pure fantasy invented only to heighten Nicholas’s growing concern. It would have been very hard to tell that Natalie was pregnant after only three weeks. My father concluded with a passionate description of this ‘monstrous deception’ practised on a young man who was a hapless victim of very wicked people in pursuit of a despicable political aim.

  After his heartfelt finale, my father sat back and took a sip of his brandy. The room fell oppressively silent. Nicholas, holding his own glass cupped in his hands, stared at the floor with unseeing eyes while no doubt his brain frantically computed all this new knowledge.

  After what seemed an age, he looked up and asked the one question I was dreading.

  ‘And what about Tatiana?’

  Tatiana, I knew very well, was the weakest point in our theory. I could not explain her in any way that I felt would satisfy Nicholas.

  At first, I had considered her as part of the whole deception – another occupant of the House whose role it was to confuse Nicholas and to bring a certain supernatural element to the plot and, perhaps, induce him to think he was losing his sanity. Equally she could, I thought, be an illusion planted in his mind by Madame Lili in the same way that she caused Nicholas to ‘see’ ‘the monochromes’, as he called them. But, even as I formulated that idea, I was forced to dismiss it. Tatiana was too real to Nicholas for me to ever convince him that she was an illusion. In a House full of deception and treachery, where nothing was as it seemed, she was the one person he felt he could rely on and indeed the only person who had stood by him during that dreadful night when he lay paralysed on the floor.

  It seemed then increasingly clear that Tatiana was not part of the deception. Her rare appearance when others were present had caused chaos, with both Serge and Anya searching the House and grounds and Madame Lili constantly interrogating Nicholas. My father had found no way for someone to enter the grounds from outside, so who was she really? Where did she come from and where did she go?

  The best I could do was to tell Nicholas that our enquiries were far from complete and that I was confident that Tatiana’s presence in the House would eventually be explained.

  It never was.*

  * But see Epilogue.

  Epilogue

  ‘It is far harder to kill a phantom than reality.’

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  During the years since Nicholas wrote his harrowing account of what took place inside the House in those months of 1968, information about it has dropped to a bare trickle and nothing has come to light of an importance likely to resolve the mystery completely.

  My father continued to study the various problems until his death in 1996, sadly with no major breakthrough. I believe he considered his inability to solve this case as the one great failure of his police career.

  Private detectives employed by Nicholas abroad have contributed snippets of information here and there, basically confirming some of our conjectures about the identity of Madame Lili and her whereabouts in East Germany; but when the Wall came down in 1989 she was long gone and has not, to my knowledge, surfaced since, nor have any scientific papers concerning her methods and findings appeared in any international scientific journals for many years.

  There was some excitement in 1991 when the detectives announced that they thought they had located Ulrika S.– H.–’s sister, ‘Natalya’ according to our hypothesis. A blurry snapshot was obtained showing a rather dowdy-looking woman leading two children down a street in one of the poorer districts of Vienna. Nicholas studied it for some time before coming to the conclusion that he could not be sure she was anyone he knew.

  With the passing years, the trail has gone cold, and with it our chances of a definitive solution.

  A theory must always be provisional. It may be possible for most results to agree with a hypothesis, but it takes only one contradiction to destroy it. It should, if a tenable theory, make predictions that may be tested in the fullness of time and, while there are many loose ends still, I am confident that overall what we have postulated is reasonably close to an explanation that Nicholas can accept.

  The underlying dichotomy in Nicholas’s character is that he is at once a romantic and a pragmatist. He finds it difficult to accept anything that cannot be proven to his satisfaction, and yet he faces a situation which can never be decisively resolved. He is most anxious that his sanity should not be called into question. Understandably, he is also very sensitive about any aspect of his experience in the House that might tend to suggest a supernatural origin, yet is frustrated that he often cannot find a logical explanation.

  That said, there was a very marked improvement in both his mental and physical health after he had had time to digest our theory, and I believe that this demonstrates that he was, to a certain extent, convinced by it.

  I say ‘to a certain extent’ because our explanation had the unfortunate effect of changing the question; it ceased to be ‘Why me?’ or even ‘What was the meaning of it all?’ and became less subjective. The question then for Nicholas became: ‘Who or what was Tatiana?’ Was she a figment of his imagination, planted there by Madame Lili, or was she a total interloper – an outsider who was unconnected with the scheme, an anomaly without explanation? There is also a third question that Nicholas avoids at all costs: was she a ghost, a spirit, a supernatural entity? To admit such a possibility, Nicholas instinctively feels, is the path to madness.

  At the same time, while he was eventually prepared to accept the dissembling and betrayal of all the other denizens of the House, he could not bring himself to believe it of Tatiana. In his eyes she could never be like them; she was genuine, she was real, she did not deceive him, lie to him, ill-treat him or abuse him. She was his only true friend, who stayed with him to the bitter end. All these qualities, together with her artlessness and natural youthful beauty, were enough to make him fall in love with her – in retrospect. She was the only source of genuine affection in his life, excepting of course myself and my family, the only retrievable decent person in the whole of his ‘unsettling experience’, and he wasn’t about to let go of her.

  This became evident to me very soon after we had presented him with our theory. My father, always the practical policeman, thought that, once we had presented Nicholas with a compelling explanation, he would be released from his psychological burden and move on. To an extent, that is what happened, but my months of being with him, talking to him and treating him, gave me a deeper insight, and, though he tried to conceal it, I knew that any theory, no matter how plausible, that did not include and explain Tatiana was not going to be sufficient for his total recovery.

  In the months and years that followed, I tried to formulate a theory that unified all the phenomena of the House. Slowly, very slowly, it seemed finally to be coming together.

  Nevertheless, I had been retired for nearly a year when, after much hesitation, I felt able to call Nicholas and ask him to meet me.

  We lunched in Rueil-Malmaison, outside at the small café opposite the church containing the tomb of the Empress Joséphine, her son Eugène and her daughter Hortense. Nicholas looked smart and well-groomed as usual, his boyish good looks now tempered by lines on his face and a definite greying of his hair around the temples. He appeared relaxed and carefree, smiling and joking, in an act, I was sure, put on for my benefit. We were no longer doctor and patient, but old friends at ease with each other.

  We ate well and I kept our conversation on a casual basis. It was evident though that Nicholas was anticipating a more serious reason for my wanting to see him, and I thought it sensible to come to the point as soon as possible.

  The meal finished and the wine bottle empty, we lef
t the Beauharnais café and crossed the square towards Rue Jean le Coz and strolled up the narrow street in the direction of the Parc de Beaupréau. This park is one of my favourite places locally. Joséphine purchased the land to extend the grounds of the Château de Malmaison, where she and Napoléon lived together, and her garden there began at the far end of the park.

  We chose a bench seat looking out across the small lake, quite private and warm in the sunlight. Nicholas stared down at the grass, waiting patiently.

  ‘Well, Marie-Claire?’ he said without looking up. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘What is on my mind, Nicholas, is what is on your mind. I’m your doctor, remember, or…at least I used to be, and I’m still trying to look after you.’

  He turned towards me suddenly and said, straight-faced, ‘You know, I should have married you; if you would have had me, of course.’

  He must have seen the astonishment in my face, because he laughed to hide his embarrassment and tried to pass it off as a joke. In all the time I had known this man, he had never said or done anything that suggested the remotest hint of attraction, and the thought that he might have felt or might still feel any physical attraction for me had never crossed my mind. I must have blushed, and a look of panic came into his eyes.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Marie-Claire, I didn’t mean to embarrass you; I just wanted you to know how much I’ve appreciated what you and your family have done for me over all these years… I would be dead if it weren’t for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Nico, but…look, never mind all that. I want to tell you something I think is very important…’