In zodiac light, p.3
In Zodiac Light, page 3
‘A conchie and a poet genius? What – you think they’re from the same mould?’
‘Is there anything to suggest Gurney—’
‘Nothing whatsoever,’ he said angrily. ‘Except that he left a trail of admissions and transfers a year long while the war continued. Gassed, apparently. Sent home, stayed home.’ There was the same uncontainable note of scornful disbelief in everything he said. ‘And, meanwhile, presumably, his genius continued to flower and grow. I daresay you’ll hear all this again from Miss Scott.’
Presumably when I met her and reassured her with our usual range of well-rehearsed platitudes; when I listened to her pleas on Gurney’s behalf; and when I finally understood that everything Osborne was now telling me was true.
‘Does she say when she intends coming?’
He shook his head. ‘Just that she’s happy Gurney is at last close to old friends. And that she and they will now be in a position to do a great deal more for him. What does she imagine this place is? What does she imagine we do here? Best of all, and I say it again – why does she imagine her – her – ’
‘Wunderkind?’
‘Precisely – her wunderkind is here? She writes as though the place were some convalescent home for retired theatrical folk. Plenty of those on the Downs, on the coast. Perhaps that’s what she’s aiming at – getting Gurney out of here and back into the clean, fresh air.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps I – you – should write back to her asking her to bring some actual proof of Gurney’s genius to show us.’
‘We can’t completely—’ I began.
‘What?’ he shouted. ‘We can’t completely what ? Can’t completely ignore the fact that Gurney isn’t some kind of blighted genius? Is that what you were about to suggest? In which case, perhaps I’m talking to the wrong man. Perhaps I should hand Gurney over to Webster or one of the others.’
I felt a sudden and inexplicable pang at the thought of not now being appointed to assess and care for the man.
‘I was going to say that he might at least have some talent, some capability,’ I said.
‘I imagine whatever small talent he might once have possessed has long since deserted him. Do you honestly think he’d be here – here – otherwise?’
I shook my head. ‘So how do you want me to proceed?’
Osborne sighed. ‘Where Gurney and Lyle are concerned, I want you to do exactly what you would do with all your other patients, no more, no less. You may have Miss Scott’s overenthusiastic endorsement ringing in your ears where Gurney is concerned, but I believe you understand your duties and the true extent of your responsibilities as well as any doctor here, and that, as usual, and as with the remainder of your patients, you will undertake and fulfil those duties and obligations to the best of your capabilities.’ Even he had become bored with this small and often-repeated reminder. It was the thick, dark, official seal stamped on to every uncertain or wayward conversation in the place. A drawn line. A reminder, too, of the division of responsibility and authority. Osborne had made himself Perfectly Clear. Any further complaint, discord or confusion, then I alone was its architect.
Soon Osborne would return the scattered papers to their files and hand them to me, a baton passed, the exact point of exchange.
‘I could perhaps take Gurney to a piano and find out what he’s capable of,’ I suggested.
‘Or perhaps you could give Lyle a rifle and show him a photograph of his mother, sisters, whoever.’
It was a cruel and clumsy comparison to make, and I saw that he regretted it the instant he’d finished speaking.
‘Forgive me,’ he said.
‘Perhaps Gurney’s playing – if he’s still capable of it – might be in some way therapeutic,’ I said, unwilling to dwell on his remark about Lyle for both our sakes.
‘“Therapeutic”?’
It was another of our new and eagerly embraced expressions.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave that for you to determine. Townsend at Barnwood says he’s perfectly harmless. Gentle as a lamb. He even goes so far as to suggest that Gurney – by his own admission – was suffering from varying degrees of mental and nervous exhaustion before the war started. He even suggests that his enlistment and service did him some good as far as his health was concerned, that it gave him something other than himself to focus on. Imagine that.’
‘And afterwards?’ I said.
He pursed his lips and shrugged. ‘Who knows? Perhaps afterwards those same old problems and weaknesses simply returned. I imagine Miss Scott might be able to tell you more on that score.’ He paused briefly, considering what he was about to say next. ‘She sounds in her letter as though Gurney were her son.’ He looked directly at me. ‘It might be something you’d want to bear in mind when you meet her.’
‘Or him?’ I said.
‘Either way, it would certainly be something we might need to take into account if she did turn out to be a trouble-maker. The more we know, the better prepared we’ll all be. But, as I say, by all means lead the horse to water.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Gurney. Take him to one of our pianos. Let his genius ring out loud and true and clear.’ He hesitated, remembering something else he had read in either Gurney’s file or Marion Scott’s letter. ‘He’s also highly regarded by Sir Hubert Parry, Charles Stanford and Walford Davies.’
The names meant nothing to me – I’d heard of Hubert Parry, but that was all – and I shook my head at hearing them.
‘And by Ralph Vaughan Williams.’
The name caught us both by surprise.
‘Probably attached to Miss Scott’s music school in some capacity, and added to the list to give it some weight, I imagine. He’s probably added it to a dozen other appeals on behalf of ex-pupils. I wouldn’t set too much store by it, if I were you.’ But I could hear by his tone, and by the speed with which he made these qualifications, that he regretted the sudden imbalance caused by the name. ‘Apparently, judging from what she says, Miss Scott is a good friend of Vaughan Williams and his wife. You might clarify the matter with her. For the record, so to speak. Perhaps they themselves – the Vaughan Williamses – might also want to come and see Gurney and convince us of his talents. I imagine the press would love that. War Hero to Asylum Maestro.’ He was pleased with the remark. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think it will all come to nothing,’ I said, remembering the countless other appeals I’d seen in the past five years, all of them cast too hard and too insistently against the solid walls of what the men concerned had continued to suffer and endure.
‘You think Marion Scott will come here, see Gurney, and quickly realize the futility of her claim?’ he said.
All he wanted to hear me say was ‘Yes.’
‘It’s more than likely,’ I told him.
But it was enough, and he immediately slid the scattered sheets into their files and pushed these towards me.
‘My grandfather was a fisherman,’ he said unexpectedly.
I wondered if I’d heard him correctly.
‘The whale. My grandfather. Up in the North-East. There was a whalebone arch on the clifftop close to where he used to live. We were taken to see it as children. I had three sisters – two now. We were told that walking through it would bring us luck. He drowned at sea. His body was never recovered.’ He stared absently at the files. ‘Perhaps I should have come with you to see the fish.’
‘Then it would have disappointed you more than it disappointed me,’ I told him.
‘They called the bone arch the “Eye of the Needle”. Imagine that. My grandmother and my parents went out to sea and threw a wreath on to the water. We children wanted to go with them, but weren’t allowed.’
I rose from my seat and he looked up at me.
4
I was busy for much of the day with my other patients, and it was late in the afternoon before I was free to visit Gurney and Lyle.
My morning was occupied by routine ward visits, talking to and assessing the progress, or otherwise, of those men already assigned to me. This task was seldom rewarding. Some welcomed my visits and examinations, but many sat in complete silence as I spoke to them, forcing me to turn to their assigned orderlies for answers.
I encountered Lewis again and endured his own banal assessments and recommendations without argument. I still heard Cox in most of what he said.
A few of the men I visited continued sitting and staring and speaking to themselves as though neither I nor any orderly had ever existed, lost to themselves in the worlds they now inhabited.
I measured wasted limbs. I asked simple questions and assessed even simpler answers, usually no more than a baffled ‘yes’ or ‘no’, a nod or a shake where nodding and head-shaking were largely indistinguishable from each other.
Some of the men greeted me like a long-lost friend; and some, having been seen by me almost daily since my arrival there, asked me who I was. I answered all their questions as simply, as openly and as honestly as I could, though all my answers were tempered by my desire to cause them as little distress as possible. As might be expected, my commonest remark was that I didn’t know. But this was usually enough for them, and most were reassured by it until they next asked me exactly the same question. Some held my arm as they spoke to me, as though this were some measure of my integrity or honesty; others stood in the corners of their small rooms, their faces to the wall, for the duration of my brief visits. I encouraged men to sit with me, to talk face to face, but few accepted these invitations, preferring to maintain their distance or to cling to the other few failing certainties of their lives.
Examining one man, who insisted on stripping naked to the waist in front of me, Lewis told me that I was wasting my time. I listened to the man’s lungs and heart because that was what he wanted of me.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked Lewis, increasingly impatient of his ill-informed interventions and judgements. The man in front of me relaxed at the touch of my stethoscope.
‘He can put it on,’ Lewis said. ‘All that breathing stuff. Minute your back’s turned, he’ll be sitting on his bed and laughing like a girl at having tricked you. Does it every day. I’ll prove it to you.’
‘Does it matter?’ I said.
‘What do you mean, does it matter? You get through with him, come outside, close his door, and then look back in at him through the glass. That’s what he’ll be doing. He puts all this on like a stage act.’ He turned to the man before me. ‘That right, Billy-boy? All an act? This what got you sent home in the first place? This what’s keeping you away from it all now?’
The man grinned at him and nodded vigorously. His heart continued beating at the same excited rate. I made him hold out his arms and then examined his wasted muscles. I pressed his stomach and liver. His ribs and breastbone were clearly marked against his pale flesh. There were bruises beneath one arm. I asked Lewis about these.
‘He holds himself,’ Lewis said, making a clasping motion with his own arms. ‘Like this. Grabs and lets go, hours on end.’
I asked the man why he did this, but he merely grinned at me in answer. As usual, upon finishing my examination, I gave him the stethoscope so that he might listen for himself to his own racing heart. And, as usual, this both pleased and calmed him.
‘You’re still alive then, Billy-boy?’ Lewis said to him, and the man nodded.
I made my notes in his file and then initialled all the necessary pages.
He was my last patient before lunchtime, and the bell summoning everyone to eat, or at least alerting them all to the possibility of eating, sounded as I left his room.
Outside, Lewis held my arm. ‘Want to see?’
I looked back in at the man, and just as Lewis had said, he was now sitting calmly on his bed, holding himself and grinning. Another day away from wherever it was that he had lost himself.
‘See,’ Lewis said. ‘Things I could tell you that you’d never learn in a month of Sundays from your examinations.’
‘I’m sure,’ I said, and then left him. I went outside, standing for a moment to clear my head. The meal bells rang in sequence through the distant buildings.
I walked to the rear of the block and emerged on to the lawn. The men who had been cutting the grass and edging the borders were now being gathered together and lined up prior to being taken to eat. Orderlies collected the tools they had been using and these were laid out on the grass and counted, and then counted again.
I saw Cox standing at the centre of the orderlies, watching as the mechanical mowers were pushed together, and then insisting on them being perfectly aligned, crouching on his heels to assess this, and then indicating for one or other of the machines to be moved backwards or forwards an inch.
When he was satisfied, he led the men away from me. Many of them, I saw, swung their arms as they walked, and others made the effort to march in step with the man in front of them. Cox encouraged them in this by shouting out ‘Left, right, left, right,’ as he stepped aside to let them pass him. Upon my arrival at the asylum, I had considered this an unnecessary imposition, detrimental even to the men’s treatment and recovery, but I quickly saw that many of them appreciated – enjoyed, even – being treated like this. Even the ones who had never been soldiers. When I had remarked to Osborne on Cox’s barking of orders, he had told me bluntly to stop interfering. Some things work, he had said, and some things don’t. Even then, only a few days after my arrival, I had known not to persist.
Waiting until the lawn was empty, the mowers in their perfect line and the rakes and hoes laid out equally precisely alongside them, I crossed the grass to the far trees. Rhododendrons grew to the lawn’s edge, old plants twenty feet high, and beyond these, round a curve in the border, there were seats, unseen from most of the buildings. I went there often for a moment of uninterrupted peace during my busy days.
The grass was short and firm underfoot, dry in the sun, and dotted yellow and white from the daisies which grew in it. Swathes of pure, brighter green showed where it had recently been mown.
Turning the corner, I was disappointed to see someone already sitting on one of the benches, a woman, a nurse, waving a long piece of white material ahead of her, as though unrolling it or perhaps drying it in the warm air. She concentrated on this as I approached her, slowly reducing the length of the material by wrapping it around her forearms.
She saw my shadow first and shielded her eyes to look up at me.
Only then did I recognize her as the nurse who had told me about the stranded whale.
She started to rise, but then sat back down and completed her folding.
The material, I saw, was a length of fine and weightless muslin, which she continued to compact into an ever-smaller piece. There was an open book on the seat beside her. She seemed unconcerned by my intrusion. She closed the book and brushed the wooden slats. I saw the scarlet ‘efficiency’ stripes on her sleeve as she did this.
‘Was there anything left?’ she asked me.
‘Not much.’
‘I thought you were Sister Kidd. I’m on a break.’
Sister Kidd was the senior nursing sister, and breaks, however long or short, were meant to be taken at one or other of the designated Nursing Stations throughout each building.
She patted the seat and I sat beside her. Then she asked me if I had a cigarette and I gave her one. Something else that was prohibited to the women. We sat together in silence for a moment.
‘What was the cloth?’ I asked her.
‘Muslin,’ she said. ‘I’ve been to see the bees.’
The remark surprised me and I turned to face her. ‘My father used to keep them,’ I said.
‘Mine too. That’s why I went. Do you know about them, then?’
I told her that I did, and remarked on my disappointment at finding the hives and their colonies in such poor condition.
‘No one cares about them,’ she said. ‘There were nuns here during the war. They brought the hives with them from their convent in Surrey.’
‘And never took them back?’
‘They were supposed to have been left as a gift. You know – lunatics and honey balm. They probably had as much faith in it as a remedy as anything that’s happened here since.’ She looked away from me as she spoke, towards the orchard and the hives, and I wondered if she had intended the remark to sound as critical as it had.
I introduced myself to her.
‘Alison West,’ she said. She considered me for a moment and then held out her hand to me. ‘Are you one of Osborne’s lot?’ I heard a great deal in the way she said this.
‘We’re all Osborne’s lot on the medical staff,’ I said. ‘One way or another. Whether we like it or not.’
She held my hand for a moment longer.
‘I’ve just spent two hours watching over a man on his hands and knees picking daisies from the lawn,’ she said.
‘No doubt while General Cox pointed them out to him one by one.’
‘Something like that.’ She smiled. ‘I was supposed to be washing him, the patient, but Cox decreed otherwise.’
‘He came with me to see the whale,’ I said.
‘Only because he imagined he might be missing out on something if he hadn’t gone.’
I picked up her book and read its title. It was a manual on preparing corpses.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Apparently, it’s something I need to know about before I can progress any further.’ She looked down. ‘Preparing corpses. As though I didn’t know enough on that particular subject already.’
I waited a moment for the remark to pass.
‘Were you in France?’ I asked her then.
‘Mendinghe. Then Camiers, then Proven, then Le Touquet.’ It was a litany and she recited it by heart.
‘And since?’
‘Alexandria, Reading and here.’ She drew deeply on her cigarette before dropping the last of it to the ground. I did the same, offering her a second, which she took. ‘You?’ she said.
‘Mendinghe, too. Calais, and then Le Havre.’
She rested her hand on my forearm for a moment and then took the book from me. She opened it and searched its pages. She cleared her throat and read to me.
