Walls of Silence

by Ruth Wade

  Stephen looked up as one of the lunatics came level with the end of the bed then lifted her shift to expose thighs as classically shaped and creamy as a statue’s, and pudenda. Then she squatted and urinated.

  He counted every step as he walked briskly to the ward office and the bell that would undoubtedly be the sweetest sound he’d heard all day.

  ********************************************************

  Medical notes

  EDITH POTTER

  The patient was not alert or responsive. Waxy skin. Could not or would not speak. Half-closed eyelids.

  Unable to test for memory, orientation, intelligence or psychological disturbances. Next time?

  PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

  - Non-cortical sensory system – insensitivity to pain. No response on peripheral nerves.

  - Decreased muscle tone – Hypotonia; exacerbated by lying in bed or was she like this before? Muscle strength not tested.

  - Corneal and conjunctival reflexes okay. Pupils are normal size and reactive to light. Eye movements conjugate.

  - Plantar reflex – big toe flexion, no evidence of Babinski sign.

  - No undue stiffness in neck. No meningeal inflammation?

  - Automatic nervous system seems to be functioning. No trophic changes in skin or nails; skin temp. seemed normal (though so bloody cold, what’s normal?).

  - No grip reflex.

  - No respiratory distress observed. Lungs clear.

  - Pulse shallow but normal.

  Theories?

  Easier to say what it is not – no evidence of encephalitis. No lymphadenopathy or thyroid enlargement. No definitive signs of epilepsy. No evidence of spinal shock (check if she fell violently in her seizure).

  Catatonia?? Can’t be sure without further tests – and she has to speak to me. Will she?

  Is this the best she has been or the worst since the noted decline? Can’t rely on observations in my absence. Might have to try some medical intervention. Spk Dr Johns.

  ********************************************************

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Stephen had measured every day working in the clinic as either one further away from the smells of the asylum that seemed to be permanently seared into his nostrils, or one day closer to his next visit to purgatory. And, inevitably, the following Tuesday came around sooner than he would’ve wished.

  His first shock was that Edith Potter was no longer there. Something catastrophic had obviously happened in his absence. The minute he’d seen the empty bed he’d had to steel himself from shouting out in panic and running after the attendant to ask if she had met some accident – or worse; there wasn’t one person in the asylum he wouldn’t suspect of a soundless suffocation with a pillow or a firm grip on a vulnerable carotid artery. And the staff had more reason than most.

  His second surprise was that when he finally located the asylum director in a tatty common room just off the airing court, he was with a policeman.

  ‘Ah, here he is now.’ Dr Johns waved Stephen in with a fistful of papers. ‘I’ll leave you to do the necessary.’ He left in a flurry of white coat and cigarette ash.

  Stephen felt as though he’d got to the end of a book only to find half the pages missing. The story couldn’t possibly have ended so soon. He felt confused and disorientated and not a little frightened. This must be what it was like to be in Edith Potter’s head; the thought didn’t even count as an insight. He introduced himself and shook the constable’s hand.

  ‘You’re looking like you’ve seen a ghost. It’s the uniform that does it – even to those with no call to have their heart thumping at the sight – never known anyone not to start thinking they’re a wrong ’un when they get to seeing a man in blue.’ PC Billings laughed. ‘Dr Johns has been telling me we’re fetched up here to see the same soul. She was in my village before. Fletching. And just because a body’s no longer sleeping in their cottage of a night, doesn’t mean my taking care of any business surrounding them comes to an end.’

  Stephen began to feel a little sick. What had happened to Edith Potter?

  ‘Come up here regular I do when County Court’s sitting. A tramp having away a sheep. Bit of summat and nothing – should’ve let him go but he’d made it worse for himself by sitting in the field bold as brass grilling a pan full of chops. What can you do? It’s like some people are just asking to have their collar felt. I thought it would be a kindness to be getting her away from here.’

  Stephen had to remind himself to take one or two deep breaths; he was finding reality as difficult to hold onto as a snowflake. A thought almost as bad as her demise struck him.

  ‘Edith Potter can’t have just got up and walked out; she’s in a withdrawn stupor with a limited awareness of the world around her and anyway, she’s been certified and would be classed as an escaped lunatic. If you know where she is then you have to tell me before it’s too late.’

  PC Billings pulled at his whiskers. ‘She ain’t gone far, like. And I’m not sure there’s much as can happen between here and there but as I’m acquainted with the depth of her disliking of unexplained noises and people coming up on her unawares, I reckoned she’d feel more at home having a room of her own. When I learned she was here I spoke up right off to the asylum guardians – Dr Potter for a father likely to be having some sway in these matters – but a place in the shell-shock wing has only just become vacant. I’ll be doing my part on behalf of any in need of receiving from the Police Benevolent Fund in return.’

  Stephen could’ve kissed him. Instead he started to pace up and down the small room. The adrenaline spiking his blood made his fingers itch and he rubbed them together until his hands were sticky but his thoughts calmer. He didn’t want to go through a scare like that again. But it wasn’t the policeman’s fault, it was his. He wasn’t detached enough, was investing too much – nothing less than his future career in fact – in a middle-aged woman with a fragile mind and an unknown capacity for self-destruction. He had to remember where he was: a lunatic asylum was a place where the incarcerated rarely, if ever, lived up to others’ expectations.

  He stopped in front of the window and looked out into the courtyard with its high grey walls, rows of closed and barred windows staring bleakly down. He watched as the more ambulatory and physically aware inmates shuffled around in the freezing cold, some with little more than a threadbare blanket falling off their bony shoulders. It was a particularly dispiriting approximation of exercise. A sadness at the hopelessness of their lives scratched at the back of his throat. He would do what he could to change that for at least one of them. If he was right. If she could, and would, let him in.

  He turned back, his pulse now something close to normal. Free from his fear that Edith Potter had been lost to him forever, Stephen’s need to find out as much as he could about her background took over; it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that he might not get an opportunity like this again. But he had to broach the subject carefully. PC Billings was evidently a protective type who saw it as his duty to shield a vulnerable ex-villager from any undue unpleasantness, and probing of a highly personal nature – albeit from a medical professional – might well fall into that category.

  ‘Do you know anything of the world of psychoanalysis?’

  PC Billings grinned. ‘I suppose you could be saying that. I’ve been doing a bit of reading up on it from the library – that’s another thing I’m getting around to doing when I’m here in Lewes. Slave to human nature in and out of work-time, my Mrs Billings says.’

  ‘Then I needn’t tell you the lengths a mind can go when it needs to conceal what it wants to remain hidden. In some cases the mere fact that a secret exists – particularly if it’s one from a deeply buried past – can tip a person right over the edge of sanity.’

  ‘You’re not talking about Miss Potter now, are you? She was a tad odd in her ways with people but as full as a shilling as you or me.’

  Stephen studied the grubby mark at the bottom
of the door where it had been kicked – maybe in a fit of temper – once too often.

  ‘I doubt that very much. In fact I’d hazard a guess that she’s been battling with whatever it is that has caused her condition for a very long time. Maybe since the day she was born. Is there anything you can tell me about her father?’

  ‘No, there ain’t nothing I can say I knew about him when he was alive. Not much after he was dead neither. Although the manner of his passing weren’t what you’d be wanting for your nearest and dearest – and for an enforcer of the law, most unwelcome. Except it did come to my attention about the terrible fire.’

  ‘When was that? Where? How did it start? Was it a long time ago? If so, do you think there is anyone still alive who remembers? Would the police have any record?’

  ‘Whoa up ... whoa.’

  Stephen had opened his briefcase and was scrabbling for his pad and pen. He sat down in one of the grubby and cigarette-burned armchairs. He had to remember that not everyone was as desperate to get to the heart of this case as he was. He busied himself writing the information PC Billings had given him so far on a blank sheet. It wasn’t much, but it was more than he’d known before – the name of the village for example – and he was about to be treated to what could turn out to be crucial to his understanding of what lay behind Edith Potter’s self-imposed retreat from the world. He looked up and smiled to show he was ready.

  ‘It was my wife had the idea. We was saying when we was counting our blessings at Christmas as to how sad Miss Potter’s life had been and wondering if she’d had any pleasantness come her way. Mrs Billings had remembered they’d both gone to a lantern talk and Miss Potter going all poetical about the stained-glass windows in Ely Cathedral. Upshot of which Mrs Billings suggested we should pay a visit on my next weekend off, kind of a holiday seeing as I never take her anywhere. So we borrowed my brother-in-law’s little runabout. We got to Cambridge and it was then Mrs Billings said that was where they’d lived before and as we should find out what we could about Miss Potter’s past in case it might help her future, like. We went to the library and struck lucky right off because the woman behind the counter told us she knew the old lady – that’s Dr Potter’s mother – before they fetched up to live with her. She’d heard nothing from him while he’d been abroad but then one day he returns with a suitcase, a box of papers from the university, and a scrap of a daughter about five years old. The blaze took their home and everything in it. The mother died saving the little mite.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That’s it.’ He picked up his helmet from the low table and made a move towards the door. ‘When you see her be telling her I was here, will you? I’ve to get along or Mrs Billings will be thinking my bicycle chain’s fallen off again and I don’t like her to be worrying when there ain’t no cause.’

  Stephen felt a glow that wasn’t only down to the feeling that maybe he’d just been granted the key to unlocking Edith Potter’s silence; who wouldn’t collapse eventually after a lifetime of guilt arising from a dead mother’s sacrifice? No, it was the policeman’s unabashed kindness that warmed him. It was touching too, the way he thought she would even realise he had ever visited her. There wasn’t the remotest chance that was the case of course. But then the odds hadn’t been much better on him finding out the details of the fire, come to that. He waved a sort of salute as PC Billings left the common room, and chewed at the inside of his cheek as he mulled over the exchange. It was all tied up together – he knew that much – her secret and the fire and her father and her catatonia. And it was up to him to unpeel the layers and get to the truth.

  But it would mean him going out on a limb – as all the things worth achieving in life did – because there was a possibility that she might not be a suitable subject and her psychosis might deepen to the point of total disintegration. Then he would have lost his chance because she would continue closing down all her rational functions one by one, and before long there would be no way of ever helping her divest herself of the burdensome secret she had buried in the depths of her mind. No way of reaching her ever again.

  The thought of what lay ahead for the both of them made Stephen clench every orifice he could. It wasn’t only Edith Potter’s sanity that depended on her ability to co-operate.

  *

  Stephen walked across the grounds to where the surly attendant in the hallway had told him the shell-shock wing was located. He paused for a moment and watched the asylum cat playing on the terrace with her kittens. He continued down the front path and then veered off to his right.

  A squat white building was set back beside a stand of trees. He let himself in – no locked doors here – and headed down the corridor until he got to the room with her name on a card in a brass holder. He knocked and went in.

  ‘Hello, Miss Potter. You might not remember me. My name is Stephen Maynard. I’ve come to try to find out what we can do for you, if I may.’

  He walked over to the chair under the window.

  ‘I’ll just sit here quietly if it’s all right with you; it’s a bright clear day and you’ve such a nice view. If you want me to go away at any point all you have to do is tap your finger on the blanket, and I’ll leave you in peace.’

  He sat back, slowly crossing and uncrossing his legs every few minutes. So much of psychoanalysis was a waiting game.

  ‘I do hope you can sleep in here, some people find being on their own too quiet after the pandemonium of the ward. Do you think you might feel like talking to me a little later on?’

  He looked out of the window again. One of the kittens must’ve followed him; it was bouncing around as if stalking every blade of grass. The contrast in energy between cat and woman was heart-rending. It was obvious that it was too soon to try to get through to her. Maybe the best thing was to complete the remaining clinical observations and leave. He walked over to the bed.

  ‘I’m sorry to subject you to this,’ he said gently, ‘but I have to conduct a few more tests. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  He started to run through the familiar routine of looking for symptoms and portents of increased sensibility. And he did find some; maybe the transfer into kinder surroundings was helping her to unbend a little. For his final examination, he picked up her arm and, cradling the elbow in one hand and holding the wrist in the other, he pushed her forearm away from him. Edith Potter resisted the movement with remarkable strength. It was a promising sign. A shiver of excitement rustled through him; he would ask Dr Johns if he would institute a short course of electric shock therapy to see if that would increase her sentience further. If it did, then Stephen could start the hypnosis. He tucked her arm back under the bedclothes.

  ‘I’ve some chocolate I bought at the station kiosk, would you like some? I’m going to.’

  He reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a thick slab of Fry’s, then broke off a piece and slipped it between his lips. He sucked on it noisily. In a while he snapped off another and ate that too.

  Edith Potter’s nostrils widened slightly; her fingers twitched on the blanket.

  ‘I have to go now. Thank you for allowing me to sit with you. I’ll leave the rest of the chocolate here if I may.’

  He unwrapped the bar completely and placed it within her reach on the bedside cabinet.

  ‘Too much can make you sick and I spend more than enough of my time in hospitals as it is.’

  He thought he detected the semblance of a smile but it was too fleeting to be sure. But even the possibility that there had been one was cause for hope. The next time he came down to see her there was every chance she would let him in.

  *****************************************************************

  Medical notes

  EDITH POTTER

  Patient is a little more responsive. She is either less in a catatonic state OR is choosing to repress less. One is conscious, the other subconscious: but which one?

  She has been moved to the shell-shock wing. More relaxed, quiet
er – less distractions.

  Observations

  - No speech so dysphonia, dysarthria, dysphasia and aphasia not tested. Abnormalities unlikely as policeman confirmed she had speech before.

  - Nothing appears to be organically wrong with her mental processes.

  - Grip reflex returned.

  - Positive response to pain.

  - Waxy flexibility – held posture for 5 mins.

  - Increased muscle tone with cogwheeling.

  - Oral intake must have improved although still probably minimal.

  Theories?

  Her immobility has been induced by severe mental shock. Resulting in profound anguish as though she wants to escape something she has done or something inside herself, or both. She is undoubtedly blocking and repressing memories:

  Silence = cannot / will not express unpleasant memories

  Immobility = holding back reactions to memories

  Stupor = deadening painful memories

  Her catatonia is a way of channelling her increasingly strong emotions into resistance. What emotions?

  In infants the two most likely to cause convulsions through an excess of them are FEAR and ANGER!! Is this the same for Edith? Is that why she is reverting to being a child and shutting out reality?

  Hypnosis might allow her to let go of her control over her facility of speech and, as a state of abstraction, might assist in the recovery of her repressed memories.

  NOTE: Go gently. Her strength of will to eliminate all traces of herself is formidable.