The Lines We Leave Behind

by Graham, Eliza

  I don’t think it will be difficult.

  ‘How much longer will it be?’ I ask Dr Rosenstein next morning. ‘Until I can see my son?’

  ‘I’ve written to your solicitor. He has written back to me and confirmed that he is delighted to hear of your recovered memory and is investigating the best way to return you to normal life and give you access to your son.’

  ‘Access? I don’t want access. David should live with me.’

  ‘I know. On the positive side, I would imagine we are talking days, a week at most until you leave us. When you’re off the drugs completely.’ Dr Rosenstein scribbles notes on her pad. ‘I don’t want you to be struggling when you leave, Maud, I want you to walk out of here ready for resuming normal life, for regaining your child, for finding some work you can enjoy.’ There’s a note of something that sounds like a warning in her voice. She lays down the pen. ‘I should tell you that there has been some interest in you.’

  ‘Interest?’

  ‘I have been reminded that you are bound by the Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘Who reminded you?’

  ‘The director.’

  I’ve only met the director once, a week or so after I was first admitted, and such was my state I can barely remember the encounter. The director sees some patients himself, eminent ones, Jim has told me: judges, politicians and generals, those types. Not that we’ve had any of those for a while.

  ‘I’ve been careful in what I said.’ But I probably wasn’t careful enough. The pieces could be put back together.

  Dr Rosenstein looks down at her hands. ‘I have never written down anything that might cause problems for you.’

  ‘So why’s the director so anxious?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  A tiny curl of suspicion loops around my guts. ‘It’s him.’

  She looks up at me.

  ‘Robert. Somehow he’s found out that I’m starting to remember.’

  ‘But how?’ She gives me her most reassuring smile. ‘Nobody here talks to your husband.’

  ‘Not even the director?’

  ‘He hasn’t been involved in your case. Your solicitor arranged for your transfer from the original . . . hospital where you were placed by your husband.’ Her lips curl slightly at the mention of that institution. ‘Your husband signed the paperwork, but never came here himself. We need to proceed with caution so that . . . people aren’t anxious about what you might say. For that reason, I’m going to be vague about the true state of your recovered memory. I can’t lie, of course. But I may not write everything in my notes.’

  When we’ve finished she opens the door for me. Ingrams isn’t there. ‘I don’t think you need escorting any more, Maud,’ she says, smiling. So I’m free to go out to the gardens alone to check on the doves. There are more empty beer bottles by the wall. More worryingly, someone has knocked over the bird bath. The plinth is broken. I go back into the house to find Ingrams, who will know how we can report this. He brings a tray and watering can out, so we can set up a temporary water station for the birds. ‘This won’t take much to fix,’ he says. ‘A bit of mortar. I’ll speak to the gardener. Don’t you worry about it, Maud.’

  ‘It’s those boys,’ I say. ‘How did they get in, though?’

  He shakes his head and I see that he’s worried. ‘The gates are secure and they couldn’t climb the walls. They’re too high.’

  ‘But it must be someone from outside?’ The green-baize-door people are never in this part of the garden. Poor souls, most of them wouldn’t possess the energy necessary for vandalism.

  Ingrams is eyeing the wall. As far as I remember from the few occasions I’ve been driven out of Woodlands, the lane behind it has a ditch, so that the climb up to the wall is even more difficult than it would be this side. Difficult, but not impossible. The wall is supposed to keep us in, though, not others out.

  We are working hard with your solicitor, darling [Mama writes]. We do not know about your wartime work – you only ever told us you’d been working in Signals in Cairo, and we had no idea that you and Robert had been involved in something more active. I know you can’t say more about it and we won’t ask for details. We are having trouble tracking him down and his solicitor does not seem able to provide us with the information we need. Of course, we can apply to the courts if necessary. Just a few more days and you’ll be out of Woodlands yourself. We cannot wait to have you home. Robert sent us your things at the time of the divorce and your father took them out of storage. I found the sweetest toy rabbit in your handbag. Your baby will love it, I know.

  ‘I took my last medication yesterday,’ I tell Dr Rosenstein.

  ‘How do you feel now?’

  ‘Fine. Perhaps a little more on edge, a little more aware of what’s around me. But that’s natural, isn’t it?’

  I know I will have a battle on my hands with Robert and I want to be prepared. Adrenaline is your friend – use it. He taught me to be courageous in mind and body and I’m going to turn those attributes against him now.

  Dr Rosenstein is pulling paperwork out of files. ‘We thought Friday after lunch for your parents to come and collect you. They have quite a drive, don’t they?’ She peers at me. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She waits.

  ‘My doves. Well, not really my doves. I’m just wondering who will look after them.’

  She puts down her pen. ‘I remember the patient who looked after them before you did, Maud. She went home. She worried too that the birds would be neglected after her departure, but we have gardeners and they’ll look after them. And I am sure that another patient will be happy to take on their care. They are such beautiful birds.’ She stops, sniffing.

  I’ve been noticing the smell, too, for the last five minutes, but it hasn’t bothered me until now. Something’s burning in the garden. A bonfire? But the scent reaching us isn’t that of dead leaves. It’s wood. And something else.

  All the hair on the back of my neck stands on end. Dr Rosenstein stands up and goes to the door, calling for Ingrams.

  She opens the door to the garden. Ingrams is running across from the house. I see where they’re looking. The dovecot is on fire. Doves fly, wings in flames, trying to free themselves, only to crash to the grass. Some of them scream. I haven’t heard sounds like that before. There’s a smell of burning feathers. A plane’s on fire, men writhing inside it. I’m trying to reach them, running across the lawn. Ingrams and Dr Rosenstein are calling. They can’t catch me. Nobody ever could at school, either. Another dove tumbles to the ground, flapping burning wings. I stop and turn, scooping up the bird. Its feathers feel hot in my hands. It trembles and emits a sound I can’t describe. The hen dove who hatched the eggs.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I wring her neck and feel something break inside me.

  The youth is still standing, matches and an old newspaper in his hands by the dovecot. He says something to me.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He watches Ingrams as he runs towards us, making sure there’s still time for him to climb up the stepladder and over the wall. ‘Does it remind you of your friends in Croatia?’

  I freeze.

  ‘It was your fault they all died, Amber.’ The youth recites the words rapidly, as though he has learnt a complex script by heart and wants to get it over and done with. ‘The militia men pulled out Naomi’s teeth,’ he tells me in the same stilted way, reaching for the stepladder. ‘And your friend Ana and her younger son – not all those shot by the Partisans died immediately. Some were buried alive.’

  I spy an unattended spade and barely break stride to pick it up. I have the pleasure of seeing the youth’s face as I approach.

  Ingrams has reached us, holding up his hands, calling to me.

  ‘Who told you those things?’

  ‘Nobody, I didn’t mean . . . I just . . . I’m sorry about the doves, miss.’ He’s backing away, stumbling over the stepladder, back to the wall. He can’t understand the Serbo-Cr
oat words I use as I raise the spade above my head and bring it down on him. But he knows he’s being punished and deserves it. He drops the ladder. His hands go to his head and he cowers as I tell him he deserves to die for what he has done. He shouts that it’s only fucking birds, I’m a loony, deserve to be locked up here with the others.

  The youth has a gash on his shoulder. He puts his hand to the blood and looks from it to me. Ingrams is here now. ‘Put down the spade, Amber.’ He says it gently. I’m about to do what he wants when yet another dove flutters down from the dovecot. Its wings have been singed and it will never fly again. Prey for a fox. I strike off its head with one stroke.

  ‘I’m going to kill you,’ I tell the youth. ‘I’m going to find a knife and stick it into your cowardly belly.’

  ‘Amber,’ Ingrams says again. ‘Think, Amber.’

  ‘He deserves to die.’

  ‘Nobody deserves that, Amber.’

  I close my eyes.

  ‘Drop the spade.’

  I throw it down beside the dead bird. ‘That’s it,’ I tell Ingrams. ‘It’s all over now for me.’

  ‘It’s not, it needn’t be, Maud.’

  ‘The pack. The electrodes.’

  ‘No.’ Dr Rosenstein runs up, breathless, not used to running. ‘We were just at the point where you had faced up to it all. You needn’t go back to the beginning, Maud.’

  ‘There’s no point. Look what I’ve done. Another attack.’ The court, this time. A trial. Prison.

  ‘Think of your child,’ she urges me.

  David, lumbered with a mad mother. ‘Too much damage,’ I tell her. ‘Don’t you see?’

  The youth must have thrown another bottle onto the lawn before he climbed over. I pick it up and smash it against the wall so that I am holding a jagged glass weapon. I slash my right wrist before they can reach me. Some of my blood trickles over the dead white dove on the grass.

  Jim is there, his face drained of colour. He mumbles something. I only hear the last words, ‘. . . not like this.’

  Dr Rosenstein and Ingrams bind my bleeding wrists and someone drives me into the local hospital for stitches. A doctor injects me with something. Mama and my father come to visit, but by then I’m drugged and can’t talk to them. Some strange men come in and look at me and talk to Dr Rosenstein. Voices are raised. I hear all they say, but the individual words are like pearls that have fallen from a string: lacking order or pattern. Later, just before I’m due another dose, I see Dr Rosenstein sign something. She almost throws the piece of paper back at them. Her face is black as she tells them to get out of the ward, but when she turns back to me her eyes are gentle. I hear her remonstrate with the nurse who comes to give me the drugs but the nurse obviously wins the argument because a strap is applied to my upper arm and the syringe plunged into me.

  A private ambulance takes me back to Woodlands a couple of days later. Ingrams meets me at the door. He looks at me wordlessly, but I know what he is telling me. When we get to the top of the stairs we will turn left. It’s always been the Woodlands way: suicides and those who are dangerous to others are always roomed to the left, behind the green baize door, because it is easier to keep an eye on them in that part of the house that has been fitted out for the truly mad. Patients are not alone in their rooms, which are tiled and easy to hose down and have been fitted with all kinds of equipment not deemed necessary in my old room with its soft rugs and writing desk.

  We walk up the stairs, past the family portraits. When the green door is opened to receive me, I see its reverse is reinforced with steel panels and four rows of locks. Ingrams has the keys but once the door is open he does not follow me through because he belongs to the other side. ‘Take care of yourself, Maud,’ he says softly. ‘Maybe I’ll see you again soon.’ I know he’s only saying it to be kind. I won’t return to the other side of the green baize door. Attacking that youth with the spade, attempting to kill myself: I have become the person Robert tried to make me out to be last year. He let everyone think I was psychotic. He has done it again now. It must be him, still plotting against me.

  Someone else will now be living in my old room with its window seat: Woodlands always has a waiting list; there’s no shortage of people who don’t know who they are and what they’ve done. None of the rooms this side of the house face the drive, so I won’t be able to sit and look out at those coming and going. I try to express these thoughts but the drugs they’ve given me have dulled my powers of speech and I can’t say what I feel quickly enough.

  I make a final effort as the nurse closes the door behind us. ‘I know I had a baby,’ I shout. ‘His name is David. I made it to the end, Ingrams. I remembered everything.’

  There’s a snatched glimpse of Ingrams’s face: half sorrowful, half joyful, before the door closes on him and the nurse takes me by the arm.

  18

  July 1947

  ‘We won’t give up on you, Maud,’ my mother tells me when she’s allowed to visit me at Woodlands. We aren’t alone in the visitors’ room, of course. Mama looks furtively at the other patients, at their mismatched clothes and their faces that don’t express anything. Do I look like that too? There’s no mirror in the room I share with three others, but I steeled myself to glance at my reflection in the bathroom glass before the nurse brought me down here. I would have liked to have worn lipstick, but I don’t know where mine is. I think my eyes still look like my eyes, but how can I tell how they appear to other people?

  ‘What are they going to do with me?’ I ask her. Mama’s lowered eyes tell me that it isn’t anything I would like. ‘Can I talk to Dr Rosenstein?’

  ‘You’re not her patient any more, draga.’ She hasn’t used the old Croatian endearment for years, so I know things look bad for me. Mama explains that my removal to this wing means I am no longer under the care of Dr Rosenstein but that of Dr Manners, who treats all the patients behind the green baize door, along with certain of the more severe cases who are on the other side, such as Jim.

  ‘Can I write to her?’ I want to tell Dr Rosenstein that it was my own fault, not hers, that I did what I did.

  ‘Give me the letter and I’ll see if I can get it to her.’

  ‘Are they going to charge me for what I did to that boy?’

  Mama nods.

  ‘I didn’t mean—’ But I had meant it. I had wanted to punish him.

  A policeman comes to talk to me. I had thought they’d take me down to the police station to be charged, but apparently it’s different when you’re really mad. My solicitor sits beside me. I haven’t met him before. I sign the statement.

  ‘It will probably be all right,’ my solicitor tells me when the policeman has gone. ‘You weren’t brought to trial last time so you don’t have a criminal record to complicate things.’

  ‘Will I have to go to court?’

  ‘To answer the plea. If you plead guilty there won’t be a trial. And your psychological state, the mitigating circumstances—’

  ‘What were those?’

  ‘The intruder climbing in here and damaging asylum property.’

  ‘Burning the doves,’ I say.

  ‘We will say that you were acting as an agent of Woodlands as you had cared for the doves in the past. You were protecting Woodlands property.’

  Calling the doves property makes them sound something other than creatures of feather and blood. I want to enter a plea that the boy taunted me by talking about terrible things that had happened, things I had witnessed in Yugoslavia, but my solicitor urges me not to.

  ‘Why not?’

  He has a kind old face and now he looks almost distraught. ‘Thing is, Maud, my dear,’ we have agreed he should call me this, as I hate being referred to as Mrs Havers, ‘there is no proof at all that those things you refer to having done in Yugoslavia actually happened. And if they did happen, they are covered by the Official Secrets Act.’

  I stare at him. ‘Of course they happened. They parachuted me into Croatia. I operated there for ne
arly four months. I helped rescue prisoners of war and downed airmen.’

  ‘There is no record,’ he says. ‘We have files relating to your job in Cairo, but nothing proving that you left Egypt for anywhere else. And the boy denies saying anything at all to you.’

  No witnesses. Ingrams reached me after the boy had thrown those words at me. Did he actually say them at all? My drugs had been recently stopped. I was probably in a heightened emotional state, anticipating my release, seeing my baby. Could I have imagined what I thought he’d said to me? I’m back on a variety of medicines now, of course, and my memory is already growing treacly. Jim said something to me, too, didn’t he? Something strange? I can’t remember what it was.

  The case comes to court. I attend on the first day to say I am indeed I, whoever I am, and to hear the charges against me. I plead guilty, as instructed.

  The boy I attacked isn’t there, but a middle-aged man and woman in plain, worn clothes sit at the back and eye me. They must be his parents. Is the boy still badly hurt? Perhaps they need his wages to support the household. But then I remember the doves and I hate that boy and despise him and I am not sorry for what I did.

  I’m guilty, but as I’m already under lock and key there is little else the judge feels he has to do, my solicitor reports back the following afternoon.

  ‘You won’t be going back to your old wing,’ the nurse tells me later that day, finding me standing at the green door as though I could look through it and see Ingrams standing there on the landing, waiting to take me up to my old room or out to the garden. ‘Forget about it, Maud. This is your life for the foreseeable.’

  Life on the wrong side. Forever.

  But in a way it is easier being behind the baize door. Very few expectations are placed upon me. The drugs keep me bobbing along beneath the surface of complete awareness. I try hard to keep myself looking as I used to. They let me keep the face cream and lipstick Mama sends me. A hairdresser comes out from the town to set my hair once a week. Sometimes they let me walk in the gardens outside our wing. They aren’t extensive like those on the other side where I once played badminton. No gardening for me, either, and certainly no visits to the doves, if any are still left. I wonder if the survivors flew away. Their home is destroyed. Can they find another safe place to roost? I crane my neck as I stand by the barred window of the room I share with three others and scan the cloudy sky. I don’t see the birds, but I see the buzzard, floating on an air current.