by Carl Nixon
Come five o’clock, Elizabeth leaves the room as silently as she entered it, locking the door behind her. Not a single word has been said all day. As to what she has seen … well, it is hardly a revelation that her patient eats from tins, dozes, stokes the fire and stares out the window.
‘So, any luck?’ asks Martin Templeton, who has swapped his newspaper for a greasy square of tarpaulin on the floor, on which is lying what appear to be parts of an engine. His hands are black with grease.
‘He spends a lot of time just looking out the window.’
‘Probably thanking his lucky stars he’s home again.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Anyway, you’re doing a great job.’
But Elizabeth is not at all sure. As she rides the tram home that evening, she looks out at the weatherboard suburbs. The closer the tram gets to the centre of Mansfield the more crowded it becomes. Soon all the seats are taken. People are swaying and jolting, shoulder to shoulder in the aisle, and Elizabeth is hemmed in. Looking around at the blank faces and tired eyes, she ponders the fact that, as she has heard said many times, it is indeed possible to be alone in a crowd. It can, however, be equally lonely in a room with just one other person.
sixteen
Mrs Blackwell was wrong.
It was not a piece of metal that pierced her husband’s skull; neither a bullet nor a fragment of shell. Fractured steel did not wipe away Paul Blackwell’s memory of his life as efficiently as a schoolteacher erasing the day’s lessons from a blackboard. The doctors in England had filled in the details of what happened by relying on what was probable, but without regard for the almost infinite variations and random cruel jests that reality is always throwing up, especially in wartime.
It was a bone.
The bone was similar in appearance to the fossilised remains that Paul Blackwell once collected so avidly. Except, this was no splinter of ammonite left high and dry halfway up a limestone cliff, no shard of Tyrannosaurus rex rib or tooth of a marine reptile. The truth was that the bone that pierced Paul Blackwell’s skull was the splintered femur from the right leg of another soldier.
The incident happened in a trench in France (exact geography is irrelevant; one trench looked pretty much the same as another all the way from the Swiss border to the North Sea coast of Belgium). Paul was standing a short way off from his platoon, a map in his hand. They had orders to relieve another platoon in the forward trenches but were lost among the labyrinth. The day was so cold that the mud was frozen in clumps and the tread on his boots failed to make any impression. He was wearing a heavy coat and good leather gloves with wool linings that his wife had sent him. Even so, he was freezing. He was arguing with his sergeant about their exact location, aware that he was probably wrong but unwilling to back down.
The calico-tearing sound of a shell from German artillery.
Paul had time to think, God, that one’s close.
Light-flame-heat-pain.
A volcano erupted from the floor of the trench. There was a searing white flash, and a sulphuric blast from the hell’s mouth that had opened up where his men had until a second ago been huddled.
The femur is the largest and strongest bone in the human body. The fragment that struck Paul Blackwell was 8 inches long and travelled at an average velocity of 150 feet per second, across 12 feet (do you remember the formula?) to where he was standing. The bone did not spin end over end but flew like a gory arrow. The sharpest, most tapered end entered through the right side of Paul’s head, just in front of his ear. It lodged there, projecting some 5 inches.
The impact felt like a heavy slap to the side of the head. The type of slap his father used to administer for minor misdemeanours. Don’t snivel, little man. Act your age. Admit you’ve done something wrong and take the consequences.
He tried to open his mouth to scream and may have made a sound but it was lost in the detonation of another shell that fell close to the first. He seemed to be flying through the air, his body flung backwards. It was strange having no control. He glimpsed the grey clouds above him before he came to a jarring halt, crumpling into the sodden wall of the trench, somehow 20 feet from where he’d been standing, and slid down onto the boards. He lay there for a moment unable to breathe, limp, sharp pain in his chest and in his leg. The earth above him shuddered and groaned and collapsed on top of him. Everything went black.
seventeen
At this point the story will be frustrating certain readers.
‘Impossible!’ or ‘Isn’t this supposed to be based on a true story?’
Perhaps you have already drawn back the book, set to lob it towards the far wall. No doubt there are other much more credible narratives stacked upon your bedside table. Or perhaps you prefer your books to be more explicitly incredible — strange planets, or goblins and dragons.
I understand. It is an entirely valid position to take. How can a man have an object — be it bone, shell fragment or bullet — enter his brain at such speed, to such a depth, in such circumstances, and yet survive? The chances are too small to be remotely probable. And if he did live for a short while, the infection that would inevitably follow such a wound when antiseptic treatments were still in their infancy — penicillin would not even be discovered for another decade — would have finished him off. During the Great War, tens of thousands of men died from blood poisoning.
Perhaps some earnest book reviewer is scribbling in the margin of his or her uncorrected proof copy, ‘Too much suspension of disbelief required.’
Wait. Please. Just a moment.
Consider the case of one Phineas P. Gage. He was born in 1823 in New Hampshire, USA. At the age of twenty-five, while foreman of a work gang blasting rock for a railway company in Vermont, Mr Gage was tamping down blasting powder with an iron bar 3 feet 7 inches in length into a hole bored into rock. The powder exploded prematurely. It was a known risk if not enough sand was mixed with the gunpowder.
The resulting explosion fired the tamping iron some 80 feet through the air, but not before it had passed directly and completely through the skull of Mr Gage. The bar entered through his left cheek just below the eye socket and passed out the top of his skull. Worn smooth through use, the iron bar was an inch and a quarter in diameter and had been custom-made by a blacksmith to taper at one end to a quarter-inch leading point, almost exactly like a spear.
It is a historical fact that Phineas Gage was walking and talking within minutes of the accident. He chatted about the event with the small-town doctor who first examined him. This doctor was to be the first of many marvelling medics. After a surprisingly brief illness of only three months, Mr Gage returned to paid employment. Years later he was a stage coach driver in Chile on the Valparaiso to Santiago route.
There are two known portraits of Mr Gage taken in later life. In both he is wearing his finest jacket and waistcoat, thick dark hair combed to one side, proudly holding a tamping iron — the tamping iron.
The Vermont doctor’s name was Williams. He must have wondered what he would find when, less than half an hour after the explosion, he carefully cleaned away the blood and matted hair, the fragments of bone, and gently probed beneath his patient’s cranium with his fingers. The Mansfield Museum has the words ‘Lo, these are parts of His ways, but how little a portion is heard of Him’ carved in stone above the main entrance. To Dr Williams these words from the Book of Job could equally have been stamped upon the exposed grey matter he saw that summer day in 1848, pulsing in the shaft of sunlight coming through his surgery window.
These days the brain is mapped and its regions charted and plumbed. As with nearly everything else in the natural world, science is well on the way to removing the mystery and wonder of the unknown through continuing research on the organ of thought. This isn’t a complaint, just an observation.
Scientists can ask a patient a question and watch in real time on a colour monitor those regions of her brain that light up in response. They can see what cogs and wheels inside us turn w
hen we cry and laugh. They know which springs go slack when we despair and take to our beds.
Those same scientists could explain that the bone that hit Paul Blackwell undoubtedly pierced his temporal lobe: the seat of memory. Seen in a diagram, the temporal lobe resembles nothing so much as one of those hats favoured by Canadian males whose work or lifestyle choices take them into the great outdoors: the hat with the flaps that hang down over the wearer’s ears, turning him into some type of hound. The temporal lobes are similar in design to those flaps, but angled slightly forward.
The brain is almost infinitely complex. Having had his temporal lobe damaged by the splintered bone, the outcome for Paul Blackwell was far from determined. Charles S. Sherrington, an early explorer of the brain’s wonders, described it as ‘an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern’. At the time, a spinning loom was the height of mechanical sophistication. Born into this age, Sherrington might have described the brain as being similar to the world’s most powerful computer. Stab a computer randomly with a screwdriver and the exact results would be far from certain.
If the bone had been blunt, Paul’s temporal lobe could have been almost entirely crushed. If the damage had been a fraction to the right or the left … who knows? He could have ended up in a similar state to the man from the medical case studies who lost the ability to store information in long-term memory. Like Paul Blackwell, he remembered nothing of his past. But, what’s more, that man could remember nothing at all for longer than fifteen minutes.
Another man from the medical literature — look it up yourself, it’s all true — let’s call him Patient B, remembered everything up until the day when he was twenty-three and fell from a ladder, hitting his head against one of the cobbled streets of Edinburgh. From that day on every time Patient B fell asleep the events of the preceding day were lost. Sleep bleached the accumulated words from each day’s mental diary so they grew fainter and fainter until sometime before dawn they vanished. With no fresh pages added to the story of his life, Patient B was in his own mind forever twenty-three. Every day was the day after he fell and hit his head.
How alarming it must have been to look in the mirror and see a man of sixty looking back, when you expected to see the face of someone who was little more than a teenager. Instead Patient B discovered a stranger, lined and stained, greyed by experience he did not recall.
‘Where’s Lucy?’ he asked on his sixtieth birthday, as he did almost every day. ‘Where’s my little girl?’
By this time, Lucy was aged thirty-seven and had children of her own. She was not there on her father’s birthday. He did not recognise her anyway. Even when Lucy explained the situation to him (yet again), he refused to believe that she was his daughter. He would not listen to what he called ‘some strange woman’s loony story’.
In a way, Paul Blackwell’s injury produced a result diagonally opposite to Patient B’s, although both sustained damage to their temporal lobes. While Patient B remembered nothing from after his accident, not for more than a day anyway, Paul remembers nothing of his old life. However he recalls very well everything from the moment he awoke buried in earth, surrounded by the scattered remains of his men.
Who was the more cursed is hard to argue.
eighteen
On the second day working for her new employer, Elizabeth returns to Woodbridge by means of the tram and her own two feet. Once again, Martin Templeton sits outside the bedroom door with his newspaper while Elizabeth sits inside the room with Paul Blackwell. She has resolved not to speak, not so much as a greeting until he acknowledges her.
It is as it was the day before. He gazes at the flames and stares out the window, feeds the fire, eats from a tin. The first thing Elizabeth does is empty his bedpan. Apart from that the only other time she leaves the room is to eat lunch. Today Mrs Booker serves mutton hash.
By early afternoon, when her patient sleeps, or gives the appearance of doing so, Elizabeth finds her chin beginning to sag and her eyes to close of their own accord. Of course it is the heat. She is sorely tempted to open a window but does not want to make such a proprietary claim on her patient’s space. In an effort to rouse herself she stands and goes to the bookcase. Head tilted to the side in the manner of one of the birds in the trees outside the bedroom window, she scans the shelves. Elizabeth is disappointed. She had been hoping for a romance novel.
Although she is not a fanciful woman by nature, fiction featuring a headstrong female protagonist and a complicated romance has always appealed to her. Pride and Prejudice has long been her favourite book, and although she finds modern variations are not nearly as well written, they follow a similar pattern. There is something very satisfying about a woman meeting a seemingly unlikeable but undeniably charismatic, mysterious and often wealthy man. Misunderstanding and unforeseen complications ensue until they are both free to declare their love and to be married.
Unfortunately there seems to be nothing of that nature on Paul Blackwell’s shelves. This is a man’s collection. As far as she can see, there is no fiction at all. The books seem to be mostly about geology, archaeology and anthropology. The Rituals and Rites of the North American Indians nestles up to The Stone-Age World of the Maori, which in turn keeps company with The British Museum’s Compendium of the Jurassic Epoch.
Elizabeth’s eyes stumble over a name written vertically up the spine of one of the books — P. Blackwell. She slips it free. The title is embossed on the cover in gold lettering: Recent Developments in Dating the Fossil Record. Still standing, she begins to read.
The rest of the afternoon is spent wading through Paul Blackwell’s book. It is heavy going but she perseveres because she feels as though the text were a clue to the personality of the man in front of her. His argument is very technical and the sentences sometimes stretch so far as to be positively labyrinthine.
When she finally closes the book, all Elizabeth has is a list of adjectives to describe its author: orderly, thorough, undoubtedly intelligent, educated and serious (there is not the smallest sprinkling of levity in the whole thing). She sighs and replaces the book on the shelf. It is almost five o’clock so she slips from the room. Paul Blackwell does not stir. Martin Templeton is still on duty in the hallway.
‘Another good day then.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Same time tomorrow?’
‘Yes. I’ll see you then.’
Before Elizabeth leaves the house for the day, she wanders about the ground floor. Mrs Blackwell seems to spend most of her waking hours in the library and Elizabeth has no fear of being interrupted, unless it is by Merry or Mrs Booker or one of the two permanent gardeners who work at Woodbridge, although she has never seen either of those men inside the house. She fancies that she is playing detective, searching for further clues to her patient’s past, but also acknowledges that perhaps she is just being what her mother would call a nosey parker.
The first room she enters is a very large formal dining room with a table that can seat — she counts the chairs — twenty. At the end of the room is a fireplace, tiled in green and black, the grate neatly stacked with kindling. Woodbridge has no fewer than six chimneys poking above its snaggletooth roofline. As well as the dining room and the kitchen, with the pantry and the scullery beyond, the ground floor comprises the library where she first met Mrs Blackwell, a drawing room and a ballroom with a lustrous wooden floor.
Next to the ballroom she discovers a music room with a piano. Elizabeth runs her hand over the rows of black and white keys. They are slightly dusty. She imagines the younger Paul Blackwell studiously and seriously practising at this instrument. It is probably just because of what Mrs Booker told her yesterday, but in her imagination Paul is a lonely figure. She feels sorry for him, with only tutors and servants for company in this big house. Or is she just being fanciful? What would the daughter of a stevedore know about what goes on in a house like this? She gently closes the piano lid. The whole day has turned out to b
e very unsatisfactory and she is beginning to doubt the wisdom of accepting Mrs Blackwell’s offer.
Even though she will have to hurry to catch the last tram back into town, she stops for a moment at the main entrance to inspect the family portraits. They run in chronological order from left to right, starting with the grandfather. He appears to have been about sixty when his portrait was painted. The man’s furrowed brow, his jutting jaw and slightly narrowed eyes staring into the middle distance are the definition of stoic. Attached to the inner edge of the heavy frame is a small brass plate on which is engraved the name Randolph J. Blackwell.
She wonders if there was ever a portrait of old Randolph’s wife, Paul’s grandmother? Its absence is interesting. If the woman had died young it would be all the more likely that there would be a painting of her. The lack of one suggests a scandal or at least a falling out. She will ask Mrs Booker tomorrow. The ruddy-faced cook is sure to have the story.
Next in line are Paul’s parents, first the father and then the mother, each in their own frame; Charles and Victoria Blackwell, according to the name plates. Charles inherited his own father’s craggy and brooding brow. His hair is dark and thick. In contrast his wife is pale and thin. She seems somehow distant. Her expression suggests that the whole business of having her portrait painted bored her profoundly.
Paul and Mrs Blackwell share a frame. As with the photograph she saw on her first visit to the house, there is almost no resemblance to the man upstairs. In the portrait he is slightly plump, but still undeniably handsome, with brown eyes and dark wavy hair. His cheeks and his lips are full. Paul sits in chair that has an ornately carved back and legs, while his wife stands behind his right shoulder. Mrs Blackwell looks, perhaps ten years younger. Her hand is on Paul’s shoulder and the hint of a satisfied smile lingers in the corners of her lips. In an act that seems to Elizabeth more one of ownership than affection, Paul’s right arm is folded across his chest so that his hand is resting on his wife’s. The brass plate is engraved Paul Edward Blackwell and Margaret Blackwell.