by Patrick Gale
‘She looks so wise,’ Miss Bannerjee laughed, as the baby devoured her with a stare from beneath her frilly sun hat, ‘and so important. Like an imperial dignitary on a tedious mission.’
Then Miss Bannerjee’s visitors arrived and Sally and Dr Pertwee were left alone together.
So much had passed between them in their recent letters that they said nothing at first. It was as though their physical selves needed time to catch up with the alterations made on paper during their long separation. When they did speak, walking slowly along the shoreline, well behind the boisterous crowd, it was deliberately of practicalities – Sally’s journey, how long she could spare, Miriam’s needs, the older Bankses’ health – and not of emotions. Edward was not mentioned until they had visited Dr Pertwee’s spartan room to fill Miriam’s bottle and collect a picnic the old woman had amassed on the sly to spare them the hectic intrusiveness of a communal meal in the dining hall.
‘Here, my dear, you take the things and let me carry this divine creature.’
‘Are you sure you can manage? She already weighs a ton.’
‘You’re worried I’ll drop her?’
‘No.’
Sally smiled and passed her baby into Dr Pertwee’s confident grasp, noting how huge she suddenly looked in the little woman’s arms. As they left the room, she spotted the small photograph of Miriam she had posted with a letter. It was tucked into a dusty, framed picture of herself, aged about twelve, all hair and travelling teeth. She felt once again the queer ambiguity of being a daughter-elect.
Dr Pertwee led her down a spiral staircase, out of a low door, and through a walled herb and vegetable garden whose air hummed with bees from the community’s hives. Several landed on the old woman’s sleeve and Sally noted with surprise how calmly she brushed them off, unstung. They passed out onto a narrow headland, bristling with gorse and a few stunted pine trees and down to a tiny, sheltered beach.
‘My secret place,’ Dr Pertwee announced, as they settled into a natural sofa where tussocks of coarse grass and stout cushions formed by decades-old sea pinks sank into the sand. Hungry from all the fresh air and an early start, Sally dug in the bag and uncovered a clutch of roast chicken legs. Holding her food with one hand, Dr Pertwee twitched up her skirt a little with the other to let the sun onto her legs. She caught Sally noticing how skeletal they had become and leaned back with a sigh.
‘I’m ill, you know, my dear,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Sally. ‘I’d guessed.’
‘A year, they’ve given me. Six months to a year. It’s really of no consequence. Ah the sun, the sun! It feels so good on old bones. I suppose it’s because they’re so much nearer the surface than plump-fleshed young ones.’
Sally stared out at the gentle waves for a moment. She was perturbed at how little pain the news had caused her – no more than a brief chill, as at a momentary clouding of the summer warmth. Had the dreadful months of Edward’s suffering left her with such a hard crust? Perhaps it was simply that her friend’s tranquillity was infectious.
‘God,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be. No point.’
‘But can’t I do something? Don’t you want to see someone besides the doctor here? I could find you a specialist or –’
Dr Pertwee silenced her with a gentle touch on the forearm and a deep, kind look from her bottle green eyes as she shook her head.
‘Listen, dear, I don’t want to be kept alive. And for what it’s worth, I’ve already ascertained that the dispensary here has a healthy stock of morphine.’
‘Oh. Well. Good.’
Sally managed a smile and took Miriam back into her arms to let her suck at her bottle while her companion poured them each a glass tumbler of tart, slightly warm white wine with a homemade label on it. She admired the way the sun caught the faint down where the baby’s pale hair began.
‘A pity he isn’t here to share this,’ Dr Pertwee said. Sally caught her eye and looked back to Miriam but her daughter pulled back from the bottle with a miniature grimace and stared at her too, as if to say, ‘Well?’
Sally sighed, wiped Miriam’s mouth with a handkerchief and set her on the sand between her knees. She drew together some largish pebbles for her to play with. Miriam grasped one with both hands, laughed, dropped it, grasped another, laughed, dropped that. She seemed to be weighing them, divining against some mysterious scale which was the best, which was most quintessentially pebble. Occasionally one of the small waves broke with a slight crash and Miriam would start, threatening to lose her balance in the effort to face the source of the noise.
‘I wish I knew what to do,’ Sally began. ‘It’s so unlike me to be so indecisive. At first I was so scared. I only told them about him trying to kill himself. I didn’t like to say anything about him hitting me or going for Miriam like that. I mean, Thomas knows, of course, and you, but I thought if I told Ernest Waltham he’d be. Oh. I don’t know. I’m rambling aren’t I?’
Dr Pertwee smiled kindly.
‘Yes. Go back to when you were scared.’
‘I was scared. Being on my own back in the house, just me and Miriam, I felt so safe. But when I went to see him he seemed so harmless, and desperate. I suppose, if I’m honest, I feel I’ve failed him. Thomas keeps saying the specialists know what they’re doing and I should trust them, but in a way I still think of Edward as my patient as well as my lover.’
‘You haven’t failed him in love.’
‘Haven’t I? Well I’ve failed him as a doctor. I managed to get Mum to take Miriam for a day last week and I spent an afternoon in the medical faculty library. I read up on ECT. It seems it affects memory. Some researchers claim it can wipe out whole tracts of memories. Well I may not be a specialist, but even I can see that he needs to come to terms with whatever’s in his past if he’s to be well again, not lose it altogether. I think memories could be the key. They’ve tried drugs on him. They’ve tried vitamins. I know depression can be purely chemical and I know it’s sacrilege for a doctor to say so, but in this case I think their approach is just too bloody scientific. When someone cries, you don’t say shut up, have a pill, you try to find out why they’re crying, surely?’
‘And aren’t they trying?’
‘Oh I think Caldecott tries to talk to him, but you know how cold Waltham is.’
‘A human fish.’
‘Caldecott’s pretty feeble too, anyway. The ward’s so crowded that no-one can get proper attention. And the other thing I can’t stand is Mum’s attitude. She manages to imply that it was somehow my fault. She can’t bear people knowing. I found out she’s been telling them he’s gone to Hollywood for a bit. She seems to think I should have soldiered nobly on in private, cured him with sex or better cooking or something.’
Dr Pertwee chuckled. Sally went on.
‘And last week she was daring to say we should never have had Miriam, that it could be genetic. I hate leaving Miriam with her, even this young. I can’t bear the thought of what she might pick up.’
‘You didn’t pick up much.’
‘I picked up more than you suppose,’ Sally said with a grin. ‘The apples don’t fall so far from the tree. Anyway, I had you to counteract her. And why are you laughing? It’s not funny.’
Dr Pertwee opened her penknife and began to peel a pear. Its juice ran over her gnarled fingers and plopped into sudden dimples in the sand. She stopped laughing but made no response until she had cut off a slice and eaten it thoughtfully.
‘We survive,’ she said at last. ‘It’s the harshest lesson of all; worse than sickness, worse than losing the one you love – and believe me, dear girl, I’ve lost plenty one way or another. I don’t know how we do it, but we survive. Compared to the perfected simplicity of the lower animals, man seems expressly designed to suffer, punish his fellows and destroy himself. He’s been given faculties to make every bad thing worse by analysing it and comparing it with the bad things that went before. Worst of all, he remembers so a
cutely that he can relive any suffering he might be in danger of forgetting. But he survives. Exhausting really, but there it is. It will be a relief to stop, frankly. Oh Sally Banks you are a sweet fool, but no-one could ever change your mind for you. Anyway, I can see, beneath all this hand-wringing, that it’s already firmly made up. Now please don’t cry. I said don’t! Oh hell. Here. Use mine.’
Sally’s handkerchief was too damp with milk to be of much use. She took Dr Pertwee’s with mumbled thanks and blew her nose. Miriam looked up at her mother briefly then returned happily to clicking her pebbles.
‘I don’t want you to die,’ Sally said at last.
‘Well thank you very much. I moan about what hell life has been and you say you want me to have more of it. Such selfishness!’
‘Sorry. But you know what I’m trying to say.’
‘Yes,’ the older woman said quietly. ‘And thank you.’
‘What did you mean just then about me making up my mind?’
Dr Pertwee busied herself peeling another pear.
‘You’re going to take him away from the doctors and try to care for him at home,’ she said.
‘But I never –’
‘And it’s going to be hell, but gradually it’ll get better and then you’ll hardly notice you’re suffering at all.’ She held out a chunk of dripping fruit for Sally to take and watched her bite into its delicious, sun-warmed flesh. ‘You’re a sweet fool,’ she said again, suddenly serious, ‘but you’ll live.’
27
The room was yellow. Edward knew every detail of it like an overly familiar text. The high windows with their flaking paint and unpeopled view of brickwork, tree and sky. The fire precaution notice and accompanying, padlocked extinguisher. He read the patterns of clouds without further understanding. He strove to learn the language of the old radiators, annotating in his head their vocabulary of clicks and gurgles as though it might impart some secret purpose of the institution that housed him. Yet a pattern in their sounds no sooner began to emerge, filling him with an urgent desire to write it down or rouse one of his fellows to tell him, than it dissolved before the wavering light of his comprehension.
At first he was kept heavily sedated. He would wake, allow himself to be led, shuffling, to bathroom and dining room but, whether eating, bathing, or simply sitting in a chair beside his bed, he did not mentally enter the scene around him. The drugs made him neither elated nor depressed. Rather, they seemed to suppress his emotional and mental life altogether. This state, in which he was reduced to a kind of walking plant, registering sun on his skin or a draught on his ankles but little more, was as welcome after his recent turmoil as sleep after labour. To be sure that he was taking them, the nurses liked to place the drugs straight onto his tongue. Their fears of subterfuge were groundless; when the pill trolley was wheeled to the end of his bed he began to salivate on cue.
People talked to him. The patient in the next bed lay stroking his pillow and poured out melancholy, circular monologues about the hopelessness of trying to communicate with others. Edward learned to avoid the man’s eye and so evade the unwanted confidences. Other patients needed little encouragement to leave him in peace, cast, as each was, as the lead in his own drama, which left the staff. A nurse led him repeatedly to a room with a large, stuffed fish, where a man with a kind face and a tweedy suit sat back in a leather armchair and asked him questions.
‘Does my pipe bother you?’
‘Do you dream?’
‘What does this image suggest to you?’
He had a manner which inspired confidence and, ordinarily, Edward might have liked to talk with him. Even when the doctor’s words made sense, however, Edward found his encounters with him unreal. The one-way conversations were as impossible to enter as dreams in which he was mouthless, doomed to observe. This did not bother Edward especially. He was beyond bother.
Sally came to see him, as did Thomas. Sometimes they came separately, sometimes together. When Thomas came alone, he sat in silence, close to the bed, and held Edward’s hand. Often he did this without meeting Edward’s eye. Edward felt Thomas’s caress and Sally’s bright words the same way he felt the sunlight on his skin. And Sally’s needy hugs and Thomas’s sad, loving gaze. All were welcome sensations, but he could only receive them passively. Sometimes his inability to stir himself sufficiently in response caused a terrible panic to boil up inside him, a feeling he could only counteract by lying quite still and closing his eyes. He dreaded decisions being made about his welfare in his hearing, as though he were no more than a corpse. As the weeks went by, however, he would occasionally hear a mumbling voice responding to his visitors’ and doctor’s enquiries and realise that it was his, but he no sooner heard it than he slipped back into watchful wordlessness, discomfited as a man sunk in mortification after obeying a sudden compulsion to call out to an actor on a cinema screen.
There was no clock in the ward and Edward’s watch had vanished with his clothes. For the first time in his life, he lost all track of the passage of time. He knew day from night and that his days were divided up by more or less indistinguishable meals, heralded by a gurgling in his stomach, but to tell whether it was Monday or Friday, the twelfth or the thirty-first, was beyond him. He had a birthday, marked by cards, a cake and a new pair of slippers. This gave him a date to seize on briefly, but he soon lost it again and did not especially care. Sometimes he seemed to miss a day. Sometimes it seemed he had no sooner fallen asleep than it was time to rise again. He had been liberated from numbers as utterly as he had been liberated from bother.
Then the comfortable doctor was replaced by one whose shining pate, fat hands and penetrating, sarcastic gaze were dimly familiar to him. He explained that he was going to treat Edward’s brain with electric shocks sufficiently strong to send him into convulsions.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘There is no cause. These shocks will heal you and the process will be quite painless. Think of it as a necessary but controlled violence, like shaking out the creases from a sheet.’
He explained it as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world and Edward believed him.
‘I have your wife’s consent,’ the fat doctor added. ‘Have you any questions?’
The merest hint of a smile twitched the corners of his lips, as though he were well aware of the unlikelihood of Edward’s mustering any response, much less anything so assertive as a question. Sure enough, Edward merely shook his head.
The shocks did hurt. He was led to a treatment room where he had to lie on a couch. Nurses tied his arms and ankles down and made him bite on a plastic spatula. A wet substance was smeared on his temples before something not unlike a pair of the bakelite studio headphones was slipped over them. Then followed an instant of shattering pain which, invariably, caused him to black out. When he came round, his arms and legs were untied and the apparatus had been wheeled away. He ached all over, his tongue felt far too large for his mouth, his head, as though it might float grotesquely off his shoulders. The strange thing was that the memory of lying down, of the electrodes and the brief, outrageous pain was wiped out afresh with each treatment. Each time he was led back to the treatment room he felt a gnawing sense of recognition which flared into sudden, sickening déjà-vu for the brief instant of the electric shock, only to be smothered again by the shock’s after-effect. He found he began to reach for words and be unable to find them, even if he wanted only to think them, not to speak them aloud. It seemed as though the ice that held him over the abyss were being methodically melted from below, but to express his fears aloud was increasingly beyond him.
As the strength of his night-time medication was reduced, he began to dream again or, at least, to recall his dreams for a few confused minutes on waking. He had a recurring nightmare in which he was pursuing someone or something through a set of empty rooms. The rooms opened out into each other to form a circle but, although he tugged each door open, he would find it firmly closed again when he returned to it. He k
new it was vitally important for him to maintain his pursuit. If he stopped, not only would the doors become impossible to open but he would cease to be the hunter and become the prey. And yet, even as he persisted he felt the doors inexorably stiffen until he was having to squeeze through little more than a crack and his quarry’s progress grew louder behind him.
‘I dream now,’ he managed to tell Dr Caldecott, the man with the stuffed fish.
‘And what precisely do you dream about?’
‘I … I …’ Edward stumbled. ‘Trains.’
‘Trains?’ From the doctor’s frown it was clear he expected more than this.
‘Trains,’ Edward repeated and retreated back into silence.
Superficially his dreams had nothing to do with trains, it was true, but now it seemed to him that in allowing the word to rise unbidden to his lips, he had somehow blundered on to the very essence of his nightmare horror and there was no more to be said.
Even as the treatment fogged his recent memories, they seemed to revive images from the distant past. Inspired perhaps by similarities of institutional life, the same smells, the same long corridors, the same all-powerful, all-male routines, he began to recall his schooldays in minute, even insane detail. His English schooldays. He remembered timetables exactly: Latin before breakfast, double Maths on Saturday morning, divinity on Sunday night. He remembered the brutalities disguised in sports clothes, depths of hypocrisy plumbed in order to escape senseless punishment. He remembered hard little fists, relentlessly vindictive tongues, the stripping away of privacy, the pervasiveness of sarcasm, the difficult ambiguities of friendship. Now his personality was submerged by what? Fear. Medication. Electric currents. Back then he had learnt to submerge it voluntarily, learnt to suppress the characteristics most likely to attract derision or violence and, crucially, to offer mimicry as a kind of pacifying homage to the boys most likely to cause him harm. Letting his eyes stare, without seeing, at a few feet of yellow wall or clouded sky, Edward found himself trapped by remorseless memory in an environment where he lived in daily fear of exposure.