The Lines We Leave Behind

by Graham, Eliza

  I read the novels Mama sends, though they are screened and anything deemed too likely to excite me isn’t allowed. An elderly major improves my chess on afternoons when the Kaiser’s artillery isn’t shelling him in a Somme trench.

  There’s someone at Woodlands I would like to see, someone who can explain what happened to me. The drugs have made my memory sluggish and I can’t pull his name out of my mind at first. Tim. No, Jim. My friend Jim who was so worried about the doves. I found his concern touching but why had he really wanted to remind me of their vulnerability?

  I force the coarsened threads of my memory to write this question on a scrap of greaseproof paper I find stuck to the bottom of a cake when I stack the enamel tea mugs and plates on the tea trolley. You have to try and please the staff. My survival instinct is muted, but I still remember that. When nobody’s looking I carefully remove the greaseproof paper from the cake and take it to the room I share. One of the women has a stub of pencil and lets me borrow it so I can write out my thought. I can’t remember how my normal cursive handwriting goes so I carefully form the capitals: WAS J BLACKMAILED BY R?

  I fold the greaseproof paper and stick it under the inner sole of my shoe. I might remember to take it out when a visitor next comes to see me. It’s been a long time since anyone’s done this, though. Probably, my parents have been told I’m too volatile, and this may be true, even though most days it’s only at the end of the afternoon that the monsters rouse, curling their tails around me, flexing their claws, showing their fangs. And now the beasts have my son to taunt me with. I know Robert will never let me see David. All I have is the name, David.

  In one of her letters my mother tells me she paid a surprise visit on Cecilia Holdern’s house early one afternoon when she imagined the good doctor’s wife might be out shopping or visiting friends. As my mother suspected, David is being looked after in the house by the same nanny I met just before Robert and I married.

  The nanny came to the door. She seems kind. I think she felt sorry for me, but she wouldn’t let me look at my own grandchild, told me Dr Holdern had given her strict instructions not to let anyone connected with Maud Havers, or Maud Knight as was, into the house.

  I also have a divorce, it seems, applied for without my knowledge and without my consent being necessary, on grounds of my insanity. Does he think he can persuade me, too, that I never parachuted into the hills and worked with Branko and Ana? That I never headed north in pursuit of Naomi and found her mutilated body?

  But I can’t bring up the subject of my wartime work with my parents in a letter. They’ve probably been told I am imagining the whole thing. It would just make me sound deluded. Could I commit my suspicions about Jim’s role in my undoing to a letter, or would that just prove to the people who matter that I am truly paranoid?

  These questions ripple through my mind during the sweet spot of the day, when I’m not so heavily drugged I can’t think straight, but not yet so assaulted by the monsters that I can’t concentrate.

  If Amber is still around she’s so cowed and beaten these days that I can’t find her. To be honest, it’s almost easier to let her stay away. She doesn’t belong here.

  ENTR’ACTE

  19

  August 1992

  Mandalay Care Home, Sussex

  Maud will nod her thanks for a cup of tea, occasionally managing to mutter the words. It’s pretty well all she says. But she never wets herself and doesn’t attack anyone or wander off.

  She just won’t join in. Apparently she hasn’t communicated much, not since some time in the late forties.

  Dissociative, says one of the nurses who fancies herself a bit of an expert on mental disturbances. Some part of Maud is stuck somewhere. A place that’s a long time ago and a long way away, I’d say. A bad place.

  Maud plays patience and solitaire. Sometimes you’ll see her pick up a newspaper and fill in some of the crossword as she puffs on a Senior Service. Recently she has been seen reading the international news. Occasionally, when some of the sharper residents play bridge, she listens in to the bidding with a look on her face that suggests she knows how the game works.

  Knowing Maud has her marbles is aggravating because it suggests she would be able to converse if she could make an effort.

  She ignores the television for most of the time – can you blame her when it’s only drivel such as game shows and soaps? But her gaze flickers towards the evening news, increasingly so in the last few months.

  Tonight it’s Sarajevo, capital of poor old Bosnia. Kate Adie talking about the siege. Maud’s back straightens. One of the old boys starts gibbering on about something he wants to watch on the other channel.

  ‘Be quiet.’

  And everyone does, because Maud speaks so little. Her voice is clipped, almost patrician, that of Celia Johnson or the youthful Queen Elizabeth when she first took the throne. The lounge falls silent but for the reporter on the TV screen, showing burning buildings, women screaming in the streets, children clutching their skirts. The TV watershed means it’s too early for them to show all the details. Thank God.

  Maud isn’t adhering to the watershed. She stands up and starts talking: fast and accusingly, swearing, blaspheming, crying. Her newspaper has fallen to the carpet. Her eyes are filled with fury and pity. She’s switching in and out of a language nobody can understand, one full of Zs and Ks. Yugoslavian? Is that what they call it? Bosnian? Does Maud know this place of death and terror on the television? Has she been there herself? She’s standing now, almost as upright as a young girl. An assistant tries to persuade her to sit down and Maud shakes her off. ‘I remember now,’ she shouts. ‘Hearing this language has brought it back to me. He needs to go to prison. He’s wicked. A traitor.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My husband, of course.’

  Maud doesn’t have a husband. She’s been divorced for decades. Nobody has visited her for years. Around the lounge a ripple of half-fear, half-fascination laps the residents. They haven’t been as animated since this year’s Grand National, when a pool of those who can still tell a horse from a donkey put fifty pounds on Party Politics at 14-to-1 and watched him win.

  It’s fascinating to see the place erupt, but probably best if nurse can come and give Maud a sedative before she harms herself or things get out of hand.

  PART TWO

  20

  April 1995

  The Bays sheltered housing complex, southwest London

  I’m mostly Maud these days. Amber had a bit of a burst into my life three years ago, when she started shouting as I watched the news about the siege of Sarajevo. Came as a shock to me. They’d stopped drugging me as much, which probably meant that my response to the events was more acute. I’d forgotten how deeply one could feel things. It hurt, seeing that city pulverised, seeing Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims turn against one another, seeing the dream of Branko and Ana implode.

  Yet, awful as it sounds, that appalling Balkan war on the television screen each night was my cure. I feel ashamed of how it worked on the dead parts of my memory, binding fragments together that had been split from one another for decades. Watching the Balkans on fire de-balkanised my mind.

  ‘Trauma cures trauma, perhaps?’ I asked Dr Ahmed, the psychiatrist, when he next saw me and explained that I no longer needed to be living in an institution; that I could avail myself of care in the community.

  ‘Perhaps it can.’ He shuffled his papers around, as though looking for something in my notes he could use to answer.

  ‘What do you think is wrong with me?’ I corrected myself. ‘Was wrong with me?’

  ‘There’s the thing, Maud – over the last half-century a lot of diagnoses have been suggested where you’re concerned, ranging from schizophrenia to shell shock.’

  Shell shock made me laugh. If the official line is that I worked in Cairo in Signals at a time when there was no risk of invasion, how was I supposed to have experienced anything leading to shell shock?

  ‘There
have also been mentions of a particular psychosis affecting women who’ve given birth. And some of the drugs you were prescribed may have muddied the waters. None of the people who’ve treated you have come to a definitive conclusion, but your first psychiatrist, Dr Rosenstein, was certainly very thorough.’

  ‘Attacking that hoodlum with the spade was what did for me,’ I told him. ‘I was close to release when I did that. Dr Rosenstein thought I was sane.’

  ‘So her notes say. Your family and friends probably thought that it would be better for you not to go to prison.’ Dr Ahmed had soft brown eyes. He reminded me of Dr Rosenstein a little. ‘They must have expected that you would recover and could be discharged.’ The wound I inflicted on that youth was perhaps more superficial than we’d thought. How long a prison sentence would I actually have served if I’d pleaded guilty without any mitigation on the grounds of insanity?

  I could have killed that boy as easily as I could apply a lipstick to my mouth. Did something stop me from striking the dove-killer in a more deadly way: my reason? My conscience?

  My parents always vowed they’d have me released – that, rather than discharged, is the word they used – from mental institutions, but my father died suddenly of a stroke in the early fifties and Mama of cancer a year later. Then there was nobody left other than my elderly solicitor. I drifted from Woodlands when it closed down to Stoke Park, an asylum or psychiatric hospital, whatever you want to call it, on the Kent coast, and then to The Mandalay in Sussex in 1972. And now here I am in The Bays in a southwest suburb of London, a complex of ten bungalows set around a patch of green, with a warden. My house is tiny, just one living room with a small kitchen area off one end, one bedroom and a bathroom.

  My parents left me all their furniture and possessions and some remain in storage. I unpacked some of my own clothes and books, some of the things I’d owned before the war. The clothes were fit only for secondhand shops now. In an old handbag I found a small furry toy rabbit, in remarkably good condition. Never used. Presumably the other baby things went with David to Cecilia’s. I discarded the bag but put the rabbit in the display cabinet I remember from our time at Trpca mines. He could guard the minerals. The rabbit appeared very soft against their angular, crystalline outlines. I knew how he felt.

  No psychiatrists now. Nor any of the other therapists: psychologists, counsellors, analysts, I have seen over the years. I miss them. Most of them were interesting people and I enjoyed charting the fashions in psychiatric medicine over the decades. We’ve had some intriguing sessions as they tried to pin the diagnosis du jour on me. After my parents died I stopped asking about being released because I hadn’t a clue where else I could go.

  Sometimes I thought of writing to Robert, reminding him that I was still around, hopefully worrying him that I clearly remembered my wartime work and what had happened on the evening I went into labour with our son. That I suspected his role in my downfall at Woodlands, knew he had worked with someone within the institution to find out my weak spot and exploited it. I have often thought about those mysterious men from the ministry who came to see Jim and possibly threatened him in some way. Jim must have told them about my love for the doves and mentioned the yobs throwing things over the wall. Easy enough to bribe one of the boys into carrying out more serious damage, or to blackmail Jim into doing some of it. It would make sense of that muttered comment of Jim’s that I didn’t quite hear. Jim had betrayed me, but he was horrified at the reality.

  But Robert would just ignore me or claim I was deluded. And finding his address proved difficult when I had to rely on mental hospital telephone directories that often had pages ripped out of them or had suffered other, indescribable, assaults. Perhaps my solicitor, or his successor, could have helped more. I probably didn’t know the correct way to phrase my letter asking for help in finding my son.

  From the mid-seventies they would probably have given me day release to go and see David, if he’d agreed. I had enough money in my trust fund to pay for the necessary chaperone. But before I could manage this, Robert, too, died. In 1976, in Greece, my solicitor told me. I felt the most extraordinary mixture of relief and grief when I found out.

  I thought of approaching James and Cecilia Holdern and asking them to put me in touch with David. I even found an unsullied London telephone directory which told me that they were still resident in their house in Holland Park, the house where Robert and I dined on Brown Windsor soup and daub of rabbit just before we married. The house where my son was taken after his birth. I hoarded coins and made the call from the telephone box in The Mandalay. A woman answered. She sounded foreign. A maid? She told me that Dr and Mrs Holdern were on holiday. I couldn’t think of a message to leave so I hung up. I was a coward. I was not Amber; I’d lost that part of myself. Amber would have fought harder for her son.

  My solicitor told me he understood that Robert Havers told his son that I was dead. We would think of a way of contacting David and telling him that this is not true. It would be done with delicacy, because knowing his father lied to him in such a way would come as a shock.

  Then my solicitor died. He was well past retirement age. Another solicitor was assigned to me. How would you like me to proceed, Mrs Havers? he wrote.

  Mrs Havers. Just seeing that surname made me shudder. I should change it by deed poll. Knowing I am still alive might be equally repugnant to my son. He’d managed without me for decades, after all; probably has a job, a family of his own. Why would he want to be saddled with an institutionalised elderly mother he has never known? I would be a shame or an embarrassment to him.

  I have no instructions, I replied to the solicitor.

  I think of David every single day, marking his birthday each year silently and telling myself that my longing for him is not one he can possibly reciprocate as he thinks I’m dead. In a way, that’s what I am.

  Amber hasn’t made her presence felt again. I can manage, just about, if I’m Maud, eccentric, quiet Maud, with her limited but intense interests: the cryptic crosswords. I still like gardening and help maintain a local park, for instance. These days I’m even trusted with garden implements.

  The money left to me by my parents enabled my move to The Bays. My own space. I can eat when I want. When I knew I was going to be released into the community I asked if I could take cookery lessons. My trust fund authorised a taxi to take me to evening classes for six months. I have extended my repertoire of dishes and can cook pretty well anything I like.

  It’s lunchtime now. I switch on the Radio Four news. A Serb paramilitary group has killed dozens of civilians in a town in northeast Bosnia.

  If Branko is still alive he must be appalled. Branko’s – and, at times, his mother’s – ideology sometimes made me roll my eyes, but his heartfelt desire for a Yugoslav state that didn’t allow for violence on grounds of religion or ethnicity was something I admired.

  Thursday is my day for helping in the community, as it is called. A minibus picks up half a dozen of us from the borough and drives us to a local park. As always, I find the noise of the streets a shock after a week in my little enclave. At least the park is peaceful.

  I pick up rubbish, prune rosebushes and scrub bird muck off benches. It isn’t mentally demanding, but the exercise is welcome.

  We volunteer gardeners are a strange bunch. Definitely green-baize-door people. But we have had our little triumphs. We have protected the ducklings from prowling cats. There was once a young girl weeping on the bench. We offered her a can of Coca-Cola and coaxed her into a smile.

  Maureen, who manages our small team, asks for a word with me. I light a cigarette and sit down on a bench with her. Although in every way different from Ingrams, not least in the fact that she is black and female, there’s something in the gentle yet firm way she talks to us that reminds me of him. I never had more than a distant glimpse of Ingrams again after they shut me up behind the green baize door.

  A light breeze blows the cherry trees. Some of the pink blossom dr
ifts down. I remember sitting in the orchards of a farmhouse in northern Croatia where I was holed up with the POWs and airmen. It was almond blossom: paler, almost bridal.

  ‘That language you can speak,’ Maureen says. ‘Romanian? Bosnian?’

  ‘Serbo-Croat.’

  ‘Is that what they speak in Bosnia?’

  ‘A form of it. There are differences, but the language is essentially the same. Why?’

  ‘A colleague of mine in another borough has these women from Bosnia. They’ve been given visas because of . . . well, the things we saw on the television.’

  Ethnic cleansing. Rape.

  ‘My colleague wants to help them, but finding interpreters is hard and money’s an issue.’

  ‘You want me to talk to the women?’

  Maureen nods. ‘They’re learning English quickly but there are some things that you can only describe in your own language.’

  ‘I don’t talk much,’ I say. ‘Even in English.’

  She laughs. ‘You’re known for your silences. But I hear you talking when you’re working here, Maud.’

  ‘It’s easier outdoors.’

  ‘Perhaps talking in a different language would help you?’

  I look at her, wondering if she knows just how profound what she has said is. If I spoke in the language of my childhood, would it connect me with a deeper part of myself, a part less troubled by all that has happened to me?