The Virgin and the Whale

by Carl Nixon

  When all the questions are exhausted, the lawyer with the egg-stained lapel asks if Lucky has anything he would like to say.

  Lucky stands. ‘Yes. I’d like to tell you a story.’

  Apart from a few clarifications and interjections Mr Burfoot has been largely silent up until this point. Now he looks as though he has accidentally swallowed a spider. This is not what he and Lucky had talked about earlier. He clears his throat in warning, and then once again, but his client continues talking.

  ‘Once there was a man who could not remember who he was. He really did want to remember. He tried very hard because he wanted more than anything else to know who he really was. But no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t remember. It was simply impossible.

  ‘People kept on telling the man who they thought he was. They told him that he had a name and a house and a wife. They told him how he should behave and what he should be like. All the time they pointed out things and places they believed he should be familiar with and showed him photographs of people that they said he should know. Eventually they became frustrated with him and began to insist that he remember. The man felt as though he were letting them down. He also became frustrated and angry. In the end he just wanted to be left alone.’

  Lucky pauses. He looks the three men in the eye one at a time. Only Dr Parkinson cannot hold his gaze.

  ‘Everybody wants me to return to being who I was. It is impossible. That person is as dead as if he had been killed in the war. The only hope that I have is if I am allowed to start again, to become somebody new. Thank you for listening to my story.’

  fifty-one

  In a story less faithful to the historical facts the members of the panel would have made an immediate decision. Perhaps they would have adjourned to another room close by. Imagine the palpable tension while everyone waited for the outcome.

  But it can be a banal world, unsuited to gripping narration.

  The three men shake hands outside the town hall and agree to have their written conclusions submitted within two weeks. The lawyer with the tempera lapel catches the evening train north. The French professor of art theory returns to his lodgings close to the university where the first thing he does is check with his landlady if any mail has arrived. Apart from a shrill telegram from his estranged mother, who lives in Biarritz with her third husband, there is nothing.

  Among their many other professional and personal duties, both find the time to prepare written reports. These — and the report of Dr Parkinson — are duly typed up by secretaries beneath the official letterheads of their respective institutions and mailed to Magistrate Laws. He in turn forwards copies of the letters to Burfoot, Clarke and Small and to the Blackwell family solicitors.

  It is not a unanimous decision. There is no prize for guessing that it is Dr Parkinson who continues to argue that Paul Blackwell is suff ering from a severe form of mental illness brought about by his wartime experiences. The doctor repeats his earlier diagnosis of schizophrenia. At fifteen pages, his report is more than twice as long as the other two combined. Dr Parkinson concludes by stating that it is his professional opinion that Mr Blackwell would benefit greatly from the continuation of his treatment at Sunnyside, the positive therapeutic results of which are, according to the good doctor, already much in evidence.

  Perhaps a factor in Lucky’s favour was that both Mr Pottinger and Professor Duvauchelle had witnessed the results of war. The Frenchman had a brother who for six months in early 1915 had been a patient in a Paris hospital set aside entirely for the treatment of wounded soldiers. It had been that traumatic experience which had, in great part, led to his decision to emigrate to Mansfield.

  In the days when he still had a head of dark curly hair, Mr Pottinger spent eighteen months as an army scout in South Africa during the Boer War.

  They say that travel broadens the mind. Perhaps it is true that it also broadens the definition of mind.

  The final score: two to one in Lucky’s favour.

  In his brief summary of the panel’s decision, Magistrate Laws writes that he believes its members have come to the right decision. Lucky is to be released from Sunnyside that very day.

  I quote from that summary:

  Beyond his possibly irreversible loss of memory, a majority of the panel have concluded that they have neither seen nor heard any evidence Mr Blackwell, or ‘Lucky’ as he now prefers to be called, suffers from any known mental illness beyond the considerable emotional strain that a person finding himself in such an unprecedented situation could reasonably be expected to experience. As a returned serviceman and one who has been badly wounded in the course of his duty, we must acknowledge that we all owe him a collective debt of gratitude and wish him well for his future.

  fifty-two

  Let us select a day at random; say, for the sake of symmetry, one in the month of May. It is 1925, six years after our story began with Elizabeth walking to work.

  Mid-afternoon, and a family of five stroll through the Botanic Gardens: a man, a woman and their three children.

  Lucky walks slowly. He has been having a little trouble with his balance again. Sometimes he feels as if the ground were shifting beneath his feet, as though he were walking on an active fault line. His hair is still slightly longer than is fashionable but his beard is neatly trimmed. For the rest of his life Lucky will be slim but his face could no longer be described as gaunt. He has developed a keen interest in new styles of architecture and is attending lectures on the subject at the university. He is fascinated by the recent work of the Frenchman known as Le Corbusier. He reads widely: politics, economics, psychology, photography and modern art.

  Elizabeth walks next to him. Watch as he makes a joke and she laughs.

  Jack runs ahead. He is ten now, an active and inquisitive boy who enjoys science and loves watching the airplanes that occasionally fly over Mansfield going to and from the new aerodrome in the west of town.

  ‘Come on, Mickey,’ calls Jack good-naturedly as he starts to run towards the pond. ‘First one to touch the water is the winner.’

  Jack’s half-brother Michael is only four. Of course, he worships every hair on Jack’s head. The younger boy squeals and sets off in pursuit. It is uncertain whether his reaction is because of the excitement of the race itself or the injustice of his older brother’s head start. Most likely it is a combination of both. ‘Wait for me!’ he yells.

  Elizabeth is pushing a black perambulator in which sleeps her and Lucky’s daughter. They have named her Katherine and she is eight months old; plump, as if butter fed.

  If we cast our gaze wider than this small group, over the gardens, the winding rivers, the roofs and the spires, nothing major seems to have changed in Mansfield. But scratch below that surface and it is evident that the mortar that has held together the old order for so long has begun to crumble. They do say that it takes a great fire to forge metal into something new. It is the 1920s, the post-war years, the modern era. You can see signs of change everywhere if you look hard enough. It is there, in the unrestrained drape of the changing fashions, the women’s short hairstyles. New businesses are springing up. New inventions. New social movements and endeavours. There has been a decisive change of government. Optimism hangs in the air, almost as tangible as the swing and jazz coming out of the wirelesses. The people of Mansfield have embraced fresh ways of thinking about themselves, their city and even their nation’s place in this rearranged world.

  The Blackwells’ divorce was just another change among many. Even so, the dissolution of a marriage was still a novelty, especially among those families who were wealthy and well connected. There’s no denying that for at least a time tongues wagged.

  Although Lucky may consider himself a different person from Paul Blackwell, it is fortunate that the law does not; he is still heir to the Blackwell fortune. This is despite the fact that he has officially changed his name. He is now Lucky Newman. His little joke.

  Mr and Mrs Newman do not live at Woodbrid
ge. At the time of the divorce settlement Lucky said that the house had too many bad memories for him. (No one present missed the irony of that.) He said that he wanted to make what he called ‘a fresh start’. Lucky and Elizabeth have had a villa built on the hills in the south of Mansfield, at the end of the tram line. They could have afforded something much grander, but the scale of their wishes is modest. Neither of them feels the need for a mansion or servants. The house faces north and is sunny, warm and homely. When Elizabeth stands beneath the purple wisteria that she planted herself and which by 1925 has grown up along the front of the verandah, she can see all the way from the ocean in the east to the mountain range in the west. There is a wide lawn on which the children play. The local schools are considered very good.

  Throughout their life together neither Lucky nor Elizabeth falls into the trap of ever wanting more than this.

  And so they live together happily.

  fifty-three

  I almost wrote ever after.

  As if by ending the story at that point the moment would be preserved forever and their happiness stretch out day after day, unchanged for the rest of Lucky and Elizabeth’s lives. In the worst offending stories, this moment where everything seems perfect often comes just after the first kiss, but before the wedding (this makes perfect sense for anyone who’s ever had to plan a wedding).

  The truth is that ever after is just another storyteller’s device.

  Life goes on and everything changes. We are constantly being dealt new cards. They can bring fortune or, just as easily, misfortune. Comedy or tragedy, either — or both — can appear with the flick of the dealer’s wrist, in the blink of an eye.

  In the interests of telling the truth, here’s what happened in the years that followed that happy May day in 1925.

  Lucky’s first wife kept both the name Blackwell and a lifetime interest in Woodbridge. Lucky was certainly more generous than was required by the marriage laws of the day and bore his forgotten wife no ill will. Mrs Blackwell relinquished the family name only when, in the summer of 1931, she married an admiral whose name was Toogood. He was a widower and brought with him to the marriage four daughters, all as pretty and as reserved as china dolls. The girls spoke quietly and respectfully and knew which fork to use for a shrimp entrée.

  The admiral and his daughters moved into Woodbridge’s empty rooms. Their light footsteps and the sound of piano and cello practice hung in the hallways, along with the tobacco smoke from the pipe that Admiral Toogood habitually had clamped between his teeth. In time a family portrait was commissioned for the now barren foyer. All in all, Mrs Blackwell found her new life very satisfactory.

  Not unexpectedly, Jack grew up. At high school he was a bright and conscientious student. He gained his pilot’s licence at the age of nineteen and began working for a small airline that specialised in scenic flights over the mountains and fiords of the deep south. Mathematics, however, was against Jack.

  1915 + 24 = 1939

  At the first opportunity Jack enlisted in the air force. He served in the Pacific as a pilot, flying spotting missions. His job was to look for Japanese ships, or for submarines resting on the surface like slim grey whales. Jack was last seen climbing into his Sunderland flying boat with his co-pilot and lifting off from the flat blue of a lagoon on the east side of Stirling Island, which is part of the Solomons group. It was 22 December 1943. The plane rose into the air, water dripping from its pontoons and banked sharply back over the beach and the tangled jungle beyond. The shirtless soldiers on the sand saw Jack give a cheery wave before the plane levelled out and headed north-east.

  The wreckage was found two weeks later, and even then only by chance. Jack’s Sunderland had crashed and broken in two in shallow water close to a tiny unnamed atoll about 30 miles from where he had taken off. The two halves of the plane lay among the coral, beneath 10 feet of water so clear you could call it invisible.

  Both Jack’s body and that of his co-pilot were retrieved and buried in the sandy soil of the island, their graves marked by crosses of faded driftwood. It was never determined if the plane was shot down or if it simply succumbed to mechanical failure.

  Katherine (the baby in the perambulator) grew up to become a nurse just like her mother. She specialised in theatre work, assisting during operations with such skill that she often had the right piece of equipment ready before the surgeon even realised that he needed it. Katherine was known for her good nature, her hard work and her brand of pragmatic compassion.

  Not surprisingly, Katherine Newman married a surgeon, a man she met for the first time, perhaps inauspiciously, over an open bowel. They were a good match. She had her first child in 1953, at the then relatively late age of twenty-nine. Three more babies followed. In keeping with Katherine’s methodical nature, her children arrived — boy, girl, boy, girl — with no more than fifteen months between any of them.

  And what of Michael Newman — MN? Perhaps you have already deduced that he was the man who, in his last years, decided that he did not want his parents’ story to be forgotten. He contacted a local writer, a novelist and a playwright, and said, ‘My mother fell deeply in love with a man who had no memory.’

  Michael turned twenty in 1941. If mathematics was also against him, improvements in the science of cardiology were not. When being assessed for suitability as a possible offering to the gods of velocity (now more worshipped and stronger than ever), it was discovered that Michael suffered from arrhythmia. That fortunate/unfortunate heart condition meant that he served the remaining years of the war behind a desk at the Defence Department in the capital.

  In 1947, still mourning the death of his beloved older brother, Michael enrolled to study engineering at the Mansfield University. He chose that discipline, he said, because he wanted to make a practical contribution. In his own words, ‘After so many years of things being destroyed, I wanted to help build something.’ He graduated with honours and spent most of his life employed by the Mansfield City Council designing bridges and roads.

  The army doctor who had diagnosed his heart condition in 1939 told Michael confidently that his heart would not allow him to live beyond middle age.

  ‘Fifty, tops,’ the man had said breezily. ‘If I were you, I’d make the most of things while you still can.’

  As it was, Michael not only outlived the doctor by twenty-seven years but also lived longer than most other people of his generation. He died within a month of his wife, in 2011, aged ninety-three. They had been married for sixty-three years. He had enjoyed his professional life and had been much respected by others in his field. There is even a small suburban park named after him: a patch of green with swings and a slide.

  Michael Newman is survived by three children, seven grandchildren and one great-granddaughter. It can truthfully be said that he took that army doctor’s advice — he ‘made the most of things’.

  fifty-four

  By the age of fifty-three Elizabeth has lost a husband and a son in two separate wars. You may not want to know this, but by the time Jack died she had also buried Lucky. His health had always been subject to inexplicable ups and downs. He bore these stoically, rarely complaining. On the whole Lucky was thankful for his life, for Elizabeth, the children, the years spent in the sun-filled house on the hill. A tremble in his hand or an unexplained fever, bouts of fatigue, even the headaches that came later, well, he considered these a small price to pay for everything that he had been given. Swings and roundabouts.

  Lucky died in his own bed after a short illness in 1936. He was forty-nine. Whether his relatively early death was caused by his head injury is impossible to say, although we can speculate that, like Phineas Gage’s demise at the age of only thirty-seven, it was most likely a factor. His death certificate gave the official cause of death as pneumonia.

  In the week before he died, Lucky often lay with his head turned to look out the window. He had a view of the frilled top of the jacaranda tree that grew on the edge of the lawn, and beyond to the
sky above Mansfield. It was January, and warm enough to leave the window in his room open.

  Elizabeth tended him day and night; once a nurse always a nurse. Often she simply sat holding his hand. Of course she told him stories.

  ‘Do you remember the time that Jack …?’

  ‘Michael came home from school that December and said …’

  ‘The first time that I saw you, you were crouching by a roaring fire. You looked so wild.’

  I have reconsidered.

  I do want to finish this story on that bright autumn day in 1925 when Elizabeth and Lucky and their children are walking through the Mansfield Botanic Gardens. On a day they are all together, happy and relatively healthy.

  See them as they pass along an avenue of tall trees. The leaves are orange and yellow and red but very few have yet fallen; the air is still as glass. Lucky is strong enough to make a father’s sudden grab and swing Michael high into the air. The boy squeals gleefully. When Lucky lowers him to the ground the two brothers run ahead through shafts and patches of sunlight and shadow.

  The family walks on: past the enormous glass dome of the conservatory, which to Jack’s dismay is shut for minor repairs; through the rose garden, laid out like a labyrinth with a bronze sundial at its centre; over the wide lawn to stand beneath a tall purple beech. Hundreds of discarded, brittle and transparent cicada shells cling to the bark on the trunk. For ten minutes the children delight in pulling them free. The group moves on in a ragged line and finally arrives at the museum and the skeleton of the blue whale. Of course, the two boys have seen the whale before but they are still young enough that the bones make them ooh and aah.