by Anne Buist
There was a time much later, in the boathouse where she would open herself up, ready and willing.
But by then I didn’t want her.
37
‘Vesna’s quite paranoid. It must have shaped Frank’s narcissism but I can’t quite understand how.’
‘Paranoid personalities don’t all look like Charles Manson,’ said Declan, pouring tea. It was still afternoon and Natalie would be riding back to the coast. ‘They project anger but it’s fear that drives them. There’s shame too, but unlike the narcissist they’ve buried the fear so deeply—they’re so bent on revenge against anyone who shames them—their own shame is undetectable.’
‘Get them before they get me?’
‘Yes, essentially. They are so deeply fearful of their own insignificance that to be hated is better than to be forgotten. With Vesna, it may have come from her parents’ experience in the war; but it suggests that perhaps to one of them—her father, I should imagine—she felt she was a source of disappointment. Now in all her relationships she fears that if anyone really knew her then they would reject her as deeply unworthy. Wicked, even.’
‘Wicked?’ Natalie felt again the piercing coldness go through her that she had experienced standing outside Mount Malosevic.
‘For the paranoid,’ said Declan, ‘the world is an evil place.’
‘So what if you have a mother like that?’
‘A profoundly disrupting experience for a child. The safe haven doesn’t feel safe herself, and the child of course cannot differentiate between real danger and the mother’s psychic ones.’
‘Shouldn’t that make Frank paranoid too?’
‘That’s one possible result. But he was also exposed to the godlike grandfather. As a boy, that might have had a different impact; it gave him someone powerful to identify with.’
But it suggested a fragility beneath the surface, however deep. ‘What would happen if his narcissistic sense of self was threatened? Could he become paranoid?’
‘It’s common for different defences to work at different times and in response to different threats,’ Declan said, his look telling her he knew exactly where she was heading. ‘The paranoid also struggles with envy. They might be committing adultery or thinking of it, and yet have intense delusional jealousy if their partner is the one who is having an affair.’
So, what if Frank thought Reeva, and maybe Alison, was going to leave him?
Jealousy. There were other possibilities: Vesna herself, for one. She was disturbed, whereas Frank was functioning: a job and friendships. Then there was the unknown quantity of Eliza. Any jealousy there would have been worked through long ago though, surely?
The sudden chill made her shudder this time. She wondered if it was contagious, watching Declan’s hand unsteadily return his cup to the saucer.
___________________
‘I’ve been given two weeks.’ Damian looked frustrated.
‘To do what?’
‘Find something concrete. Or we close down the investigation, treat it as an accident.’
‘We’re narrowing in on something, I can feel it.’
‘Really?’ Damian was onto his second beer. Neither of them had made a move towards dinner. ‘About as close as the local cops are to finding out who slashed your tyres, I’d say.’
Natalie didn’t want to go there; she’d convinced herself it was kids, refused to link it to the silver Commodore. She tried to get her thoughts clear. ‘We know how they died, so the choices are accident, murder or suicide.’
‘That’s really narrowed it down.’
Natalie ignored his sarcasm. ‘If Frank was involved it wasn’t because he was psychotic. He may be narcissistic and his motives warped, but he would have to have a motive. ‘We know or think we know that both Reeva and Alison were unhappy by the time they were about to deliver. Why? Reeva was looking up gene tests, maybe thinking of leaving him. Maybe Alison threatened the same.’ Hopefully not over Frank’s meeting with her.
‘So the man doesn’t believe in divorce?’ Damian absentmindedly rubbed the finger where his ring no longer sat.
‘He doesn’t believe in being left,’ said Natalie. ‘Too great a blow to his ego. He owns them, they can’t leave him, only he can choose that.’
‘Like with Eliza.’
Natalie nodded. ‘The added twist is that they are threatening to take his child. Which adds weight to why Eliza got away; Frank presumably knew Jasper wasn’t his.’
‘So better to kill the child than let someone else bring it up?’
‘Maybe. It happens all the time when couples separate, the murder-suicide thing—if I can’t have them neither can you.’
‘You don’t sound convinced.’
‘I’m not. Frank’s father killing a pregnant woman may be a factor that goes towards explaining a murderous rage. It’s really at his father for leaving him, but mixed up with Mala and the car-accident woman’s child living when it was his father he wanted.’
‘Enough to kill?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Anyone else in the family have motive? Or madness?’
Natalie gave him a smile. ‘We could easily be just seeing the tip of Vesna’s paranoia.’
‘Mala?’
‘Avenging her brother’s honour?’ Natalie shook her head. ‘The Malosevics may think they are god in this region, but that’s a very long bow to draw.’
‘Where does Reeva’s gene thing fit in?’
Natalie pulled out the piece of paper she had been trying to make sense of all day. Without her textbooks she was relying on the internet and her memory from medical school.
IEM? Not a clue. Next was SSD. Still no idea. Porphyria—okay she knew that one, a rare inherited disorder—and MCL. Some type of chronic lymphoma or leukaemia?
Then there was a list of autoimmune diseases. SLE she knew as lupus; sarcoidosis and Hashimotos were standard med student fare; antiNMDA rang a vague bell. All this group were in brackets; Natalie decided that this meant Reeva had thought them less important.
After that was BPAD: bipolar affective disorder wasn’t autosomal dominant or recessive, but those who’d been diagnosed often had family histories dotted with similar diagnoses, or undiagnosed outliers of the self-medicating variety: the alcoholics and suicides. Not that her family history did. Or at least the family history on her mother’s side, which she all she knew about.
Could Frank’s family have it? Grandiosity and narcissism were possible indicators and Frank had them in spades. So had his grandfather by all accounts.
BPAD was underlined. So was the final item: HD. Huntington’s disease?
Lyuba had died young. Huntington’s was an autosomal dominant disorder affecting men and women equally, so fifty per cent chance Vesna would have it if her mother did. Symptoms, including psychosis, depression, promiscuity and aggression didn’t appear until middle age. Suicide occurred either as a consequence of the depression or at the fear of what lay ahead.
If Vesna was suffering from Huntington’s it might explain her mental state. Was this what Reeva found out? That Vesna had a genetic disorder? Vesna was at best paranoid and Huntington’s could start like that. She had no involuntary movements that Natalie had noticed, though. Perhaps they were controlled by the medication. Vesna was old for the usual form, but there were variations. Huntington’s could be tested for—Frank and Mala might have had the test, might know. Had Reeva asked?
Natalie wondered what it would feel like, already pregnant, thinking there was a fifty per cent chance that the child you were carrying had a disorder that would have such a profound effect on them. In this context finding out there was a family history of bipolar would have been a welcome relief: it wasn’t directly transmitted and it was thought that life events might affect whether it ever even appeared. Natalie would never know if her own bipolar would have surfaced without the serious accident in her teens or the night shifts of her intern year.
Natalie stared at the paper. Some of these could
be tested in utero with an amniocentesis, but not others.
Reeva was a physician. If she had known there was a risk, she would have had her foetus tested. Natalie’s sense of the woman was that she was pragmatic, that she probably would have had an abortion if the test was positive. So why hadn’t she had the test?
Damian repeated his question. ‘The gene thing?’
‘If it is Frank killing his wives—and that’s a big if—it might be about his genes not being perfect and he’s projecting this anger onto his wives.’
Damian looked at her blankly.
‘What if, for some reason, Reeva, and maybe Alison, found out about a genetic disorder that ran in the family and wanted a test? Let’s assume for this argument that Frank is in denial but they’ve seen evidence his mother could have the disorder. Or grandmother. Maybe this is part of his attraction to doctors, a subconscious desire to be saved, or at least cared for.’ Add in the impact of his father’s death, when Frank survived the same accident. Doctors were powerful. They had the power over life and death, or so it might have seemed to a child. Enough to sow the seed. ‘His wives were both doctors, and Reeva was a very astute one. He is a narcissist, unable to admit to his own weaknesses. The attraction to doctors, and why he became one himself, may revolve around the subconscious desire to find a cure.’ If he had Huntington’s then he might already have symptoms of it: grandiosity was not uncommon among sufferers.
‘According to Sam Petersen, both women only had the routine Down syndrome testing.’
‘That’s all he knew about.’ Natalie was typing into Google as she spoke. She paused to read the information on her screen. ‘Reeva was interested in disorders that had psychosis as a symptom; Vesna, presumably. Hence if Frank had the gene, she was worried her child would have a fifty per cent chance…Yes, here it is.’ She pointed to the screen. ‘Huntington’s is one that can be tested in pregnancy. The test’s been available for some time, certainly when Reeva was pregnant.’
‘I’m still not following you.’
‘Didn’t Petersen say Frank went to the appointments? The one he couldn’t attend with Alison he rang up to check on. Alison and Reeva wouldn’t have had a chance to ask in private.’
‘So she went somewhere else.’
‘Yes.’ Natalie put the paper down. ‘And another thing—wild card.’
‘Yeah?’
‘The boy who survived the car crash that killed Wendell Moreton thirty years ago. Do you have any idea where he is now?’
38
When I think of my childhood it is in fractured halves: one of worry and impotence as my father left me to the paranoid anxieties of my mother, the second dominated by the golden ideal of male power. I gravitated naturally, under the circumstances, towards my mother’s father, who had in every practical sense become my own father.
Antonije was charismatic, charming and funny, handsome and generous. Though he could be cruel too, and at times I know Mala suffered, frustrated when she was excluded because she was too young—or because of her gender. It made her tougher, made her try harder and, with her quick mind and the beauty that was evident from an early age, she was eventually embraced by him, as much his child as I was.
I wanted to be an Antonije to my child, but a man on my own terms. Not as an artist but as something worthwhile. I had originally thought I would discover the cure of cancer; later the pull of understanding the mind was too great. I knew how influential a mother is in shaping confidence and personality, so my child needed to have the right mother, a woman who was not going to be like Vesna in any way. My mother did her best, I understand. I don’t think she was ever the same after her mother died, in circumstances no child should have to deal with.
Reeva became irritatingly preoccupied with Vesna. When she found out about the manner of Lyuba’s death and her fears reached such absurd proportions, it became increasingly evident that I had after all married my mother. I didn’t share her conviction that Lyuba’s illness was genetic—her experience in the camps was surely explanation enough. Lyuba had been there with her mother, rounded up because they were Romani. I know this only because Vesna told me; Antonije would not speak of it. My great-grandmother, I was told, had been a guest in the Gagro Hotel, the cellar where the Ustase tortured their victims. Lyuba told Vesna her mother had been strangled with piano wire. She knew because in April 1945 when the Ustase were torching the place, killing those left before they escaped the liberating partisans, Lyuba escaped and ran back to find her. She was lying with her dead mother when Antonije found her. Or so the story goes.
I didn’t want my son to be exposed to the worry and impotence that Reeva’s overt fussing would surely induce. Whichever way you looked at it, our son would have been at risk of mental illness from both sides of the family.
It was very disappointing.
39
‘This is worse than working in a morgue,’ Wei said. ‘I never thought I’d say I was actually looking forward to going back to England.’
Poor Frank.
‘You presumably didn’t know Alison as well as Reeva?’
‘Alison worked here also,’ said Wei, not looking up from his computer. ‘That is, until just before you arrived.’
This was news. Alison’s earlier psychiatry rotation would have been clinical: confined to the wards. The move to research presumably happened after she got together with Frank. ‘She was working on a grant?’
‘She was going to.’
But probably decided the brilliant Reeva Osbourne was too hard an act to follow. Or else Alison found ethics applications as tedious as Natalie did. The committee had just asked for yet more changes to her proposal.
‘Reeva worked right up until…didn’t she?’
‘Yes, it was horrid. One day she was here, next…’ Wei gestured a thumbs down with both hands. ‘Me? I’m sticking to cats.’
‘And just totally well? No warning?’ Natalie wasn’t expecting anything much from Wei but while she was waiting for Damian to chase up pathology labs for genetic tests, she wanted to do something to help make sense of Reeva and Alison’s last days.
‘She wasn’t herself.’ Wei shifted in his chair, rolling his shoulders.
‘Worried?’
‘I guess.’
Natalie edged her chair out of the adjoining carrel into Wei’s. ‘It wasn’t your fault, you know. Reeva. You couldn’t have done anything.’
‘You can’t help wondering, can you? She was…she didn’t seem right.’
‘In what way?’
Wei struggled to make sense of his memories. ‘I don’t know really. Preoccupied I suppose.’
Natalie pondered on Wei’s observation on the way to her bike when Damian’s text came: no amniocentesis results on either Reeva Moreton or Reeva Osbourne in any lab in Melbourne. He’d also checked Sydney, as she had made one trip there early in the pregnancy. Damn. If Reeva had organised a test, then she’d used a different name. Was she that paranoid? If she had been murdered, then it meant she had cause to be.
She was late; Frank had already ordered the dips and bread. Wye River had lost out to the Greek restaurant again. She wasn’t planning on drinking, so the ride home wasn’t a problem.
The way her stomach had been of late she wasn’t sure she wanted to eat either—the case had been getting to her more than she liked to admit. She expected Damian to be at her house, so she planned to leave as soon after dinner as she could.
‘Are the police still giving you a hard time?’
‘They’re just doing their job.’ Frank’s lethargy had gone; there was a new wariness, and beneath that, something hard to pinpoint.
‘Wei is pretty gutted,’ said Natalie.
Frank didn’t appear to have Wei foremost in his mind.
‘I remember…’ Natalie was finding Frank hard to read, but pushed on anyway. ‘That I felt you were feeling guilty over Reeva. Do you…feel that with Alison too?’
Frank put down his bread and looked directly at her. ‘R
eeva…it was different.’
Different? Because she was worried enough about a genetic disorder, fictitious or real to leave him? Or because he had loved her more?
‘She was obsessed.’
‘What about?’
Frank took a long sip of the wine. ‘Reeva was someone who liked everything exactly right. By the end of her pregnancy she took it to a whole new level.’
Natalie waited. Gail Osbourne had told Damian there was a family history of postpartum psychosis—had Reeva’s started in third trimester?
Frank’s head disappeared into his hands. After a moment, to her shock, she realised his body was shaking with sobs. She knelt down beside him, hand on his arm and heard him whisper:
‘I missed it. I’m a psychiatrist and I missed it.’
‘Missed what?’ But already knew the answer.
A minute passed. Frank finally looked up, looked at her for forgiveness. ‘She was acutely psychotic.’
___________________
They were the only people left in the restaurant by the time Frank finished the whole story. It had happened gradually. Reeva had been a forceful, confident woman and it had taken a long time before Frank had started to query the hours spent on the internet, before he realised that the confident woman he had married was guarded and suspicious, keeping more and more to herself.
‘Her family hadn’t noticed?’ Natalie asked.
‘She hardly saw them. Phone calls, sure. But she was very good at hiding it. She knew we would think she was mad, and she wasn’t going there. I thought at first that she was worried about the project, how she would manage motherhood and her career. I thought that’s what she was doing, writing papers, getting ahead so she could have some breathing space.’
‘But what was she doing?’