Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  The sound was coming from inside, and it had a plangent, otherworldly quality, yet at the same time seemed familiar. As he gently pulled back the shutters, which were better oiled than those on his own window, a mist of grey light at last reached him. It came from a single candle, obscured by the cloudy glass, and as he peered at it, he saw it bow and stretch in a draught, and at the edge of its penumbra he caught sight of a dark, shaggy head, quite still, the features rapt. It was his brother. Beneath the beard, Jacques could just see the lips moving, then he heard the sound, a sort of incantation, and although he could not make out the words, he was certain from the tone of his voice that Olivier was in some act of supplication, and that if it was not exactly a prayer he was at least addressing himself to a higher being. His face, covered by the uncombed beard, came into view only when the candle flame bent his way; then Jacques could see his earnestly closed eyes and his passionate engagement with whatever reality he inhabited.

  Jacques had a sudden picture of their shared bedroom as children and of his ten-year-old brother, still at that age blond-haired, his skinny body shaking with laughter as he climbed into Jacques’s bed to escape from the flood they had been imagining downstairs. He could recall the distinctive sweet smell of Olivier’s skin as they lay holding on to each other, trying to stifle their laughter in the darkness.

  Gently closing the shutters, he wandered back from the building and found a dry piece of earth where he could sit and wait for the dawn.

  He was back in his bedroom by the time a nun, a younger one than the night before, unlocked the door and brought in a tray with a piece of bread and a bowl of tea. Jacques gave her his largest smile, but she appeared not to notice as she turned in silence to leave. He shaved in the cold water of the washstand and changed his linen; as he pulled a clean shirt from his bag, a small photograph fell from the folds: it was of Sonia, taken by Thomas outside the darkroom at the county asylum. Jacques smiled: he knew she disliked it, but it was the only photograph of herself she had and she must have debated hard before slipping it in.

  The nun returned and conducted him in silence to the medical superintendent’s office where he signed several forms asserting that he had examined the patient and took full responsibility for him. The asylum’s own diagnosis of Olivier, he noticed, was ‘dementia’; he did not demur in countersigning it, though the bluntness of the term affronted him. He felt happier to complete the section headed ‘Hospital or institution to which Patient is to be transferred’, writing ‘Schloss Seeblick Sanatorium and Clinic for Nervous Disorders’with a flourish. It made it look as though Olivier had been singled out for special treatment, or promotion.

  The superintendent, a severe, dark-haired man in a frock coat, apologised for the fact that his door had been locked; they had had some trouble with a previous visitor who had come under a false identity and had upset the patients at night by his wandering. He then escorted Jacques to a locked double door which he opened with some keys attached to his waistcoat. It was a large, light room, with pleasantly high ceilings and long barred windows overlooking the grounds. There were perhaps a hundred men in it, and when the superintendent walked down the middle, towards a long refectory table at which some were finishing breakfast from wooden bowls, there was a rustle of interest.

  ‘They do not see people from outside very often,’ the superintendent said from the corner of his mouth. ‘Which one is your brother?’

  Jacques’s eye ran through the assortment of idiots, neurological cases and madmen; he was reluctant to engage too many of the hopeful eyes that were fixed on him. He saw Olivier by the window, standing alone, and his heart was twisted by the sight because Olivier was a man, his loved brother, and did not fall into the categories in which the others could be placed. It was an error. Every time he saw him in the asylum, Jacques had the same feeling: this was a real person, a man with a name, not, like the others, a patient, a mere example of an illness, but Olivier still. You could not allow the man to be swallowed by the illness, thought Jacques: surely the human soul was more robust.

  ‘How are you?’ He held Olivier’s hands between his own. Olivier said nothing.

  ‘I am going to take you with me and look after you myself. I have a beautiful house near the mountains. You are going to live with me and Sonia. Do you remember, you met Sonia at the funeral? And her brother Thomas, who is my friend.’ He looked deep into his brother’s face: he had aged in the last couple of years, grown fatter; there were grey hairs in his beard and lines about his eyes. The years of delusion and being shut away were wearing him down, and life had gone on elsewhere, without him.

  The clutch of papers in the superintendent’s hand, together with the appearance in their midst of an outsider, was exciting the patients, who smelled the possibility of escape. They began to shuffle towards Jacques and Olivier.

  ‘It is not safe for me to go,’ said Olivier.

  Jacques knew that anxiety of any kind seemed to intensify Olivier’s symptoms and was prepared. He took a twist of paper from his bag, emptied the powder from inside it into a clean cup on the table and filled it with milk.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘It will make you feel better. Then we need to find your belongings. Look, my dear Olivier. All your friends here would love to leave. They would give anything to be in your shoes. You will be with your family and we are going to make you better.’

  ‘Last night I was talking to the Sovereign. He warned me.’

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  Olivier nodded. ‘They told me you would come.’

  Jacques turned to the superintendent. ‘Does he have belongings? I think we should leave as soon as possible.’

  The superintendent spoke to an attendant, who returned with a small canvas bag containing a toothbrush, a shirt and a notebook full of intricate architectural drawings.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes. I think you should leave. Some of the men are under the impression that you have an official function, that you are from the town hall or some such thing, and that you may be in a position to discharge them. Your carriage is waiting at the front gate.’

  ‘All right. Are you ready, Olivier?’

  ‘I am not coming. They want to kill me, I know.’

  ‘Olivier, it is natural for you to feel anxious.’

  Two attendants were looming.

  ‘Please drink the milk,’ said Jacques. ‘It will make you feel better. When you move home, it is a big change and everyone feels uneasy. But we are going to a beautiful place overlooking a lake, where I will make you happy.’

  Olivier began to back away, looking for the refuge of his solitary corner. The attendants took his arms; one of them raised the enamelled cup of milk to his lips. The other punched him in the belly, and when he gasped they were able to pour most of the milk into his mouth. They held their hands across his lips until he swallowed.

  Olivier began to struggle and swear, though Jacques could still recognise the sound of his brother’s voice and detect the true cause of his raving and his violence, which was fear. As the two attendants began to force him towards the door, a wave of activity ran through the other patients. Some were so upset by the sight of Olivier’s anger that they went into their rituals of self-protection, wrapping their arms about their heads, rocking, thrusting their hands inside their clothes to take comfort from their own bodies. Others saw in Olivier’s departure a chance of release for themselves and came to plead their case with Jacques. ‘Monsieur, Monsieur, for several years I have been kept here, but there is nothing wrong with me . . . My sister’s husband has had me confined . . .’ There were hands clutching at his elbows, there were men placing their faces close to his, bodies barring his way to the door. ‘I beg you take a message to the Quai d’Orsay, they will know who sent you . . .’ There were hands about his ankles and he struggled to keep walking. With the help of a third attendant they fought their way through the rising clamour; Jacques was compelled to use his arms and elbows to keep the sup
plicants at bay; he tried not to listen to the specific agony of each tale for fear of weakening. It seemed that scores of men had surrounded them and were placing their hopes of life and freedom on his shoulders; the room had turned from a place of quiet despair into a riot of shouting and pushing, as he squeezed between the double doors where the attendants cleared a passage with their fists. The superintendent slammed the door on the tumult and turned the keys in the heavy lock. Jacques leaned back, struggling for breath; Olivier was next to him, still held by the two attendants. After the sound of the lock turning, there was suddenly a pause in the commotion from inside, an utter, bottomless silence; and in that quiet, Jacques felt he had heard the sound of hope lost.

  The return to the schloss took them four days, during much of which Jacques had to keep Olivier sedated. Even slumped silent against the corner of the train compartment, he aroused inquisitive and disapproving looks. In Paris, Jacques called in at Madame Maurel’s to see if there were any letters and because he knew that in such a household Olivier could spend the night without incurring anything worse than the odd disdainful glance from Madame Tavernier. In his torpid state, Olivier allowed Jacques to bathe him thoroughly, to cut his hair a little and to dress him in new clothes from a draper in the rue Christine. (He paid proudly in cash; for the first time he did not have to beg credit.) He offered to lend him his own razor, but Olivier’s reaction was such that he did not pursue the matter. Then came the wearisome journey from the Gare de l’Est, food and drink bought from small wagons on the platforms as they crossed the border. After they had changed train at Vienna, Jacques found his spirits starting to lift. Soon he would be able to share responsibility for Olivier with Sonia and Thomas; soon the change of atmosphere, the diet and the loving care would start to make his brother well. They could not cure him, but surely they could ease his pain.

  Sonia had made the best spare room ready for Olivier in the main house, not far from Thomas’s, at the front, with a view over the lake. Although it was late in October, she had found enough blooms in the recultivated garden to fill two vases in the room, where she had lit the fire and made up the bed with new sheets. She had some trepidation about the safety of the fire, not knowing Olivier, but she thought it best to treat him normally and leave any special adjustments to Jacques. She was waiting at the front door when Josef, who had been despatched to the station, came back with his two exhausted travellers.

  The nine days of his absence were by far the longest period that Sonia had been apart from Jacques, and her joy at seeing him helped her to overlook the strange appearance of his brother; to her shame, she found herself reminded of an illustration from her childhood Bible showing the fettered Gadarene demoniac, whose many tormenting spirits (‘My name is Legion. For we are many’) Christ cast out of him and into a herd of swine. Thomas emerged from a consultation in his room at the end of the hall and summoned Hans to bring up wine from the cellars. Sonia had taken charge sufficiently of the kitchen to be able to insist on a plain leg of lamb with garlic for dinner, but compromised with Frau Egger by permitting fried veal brains with egg, one of her specialities, as a savoury to follow the dessert. They had set the circular table in the waiting room so they could for once not eat in with the patients, and Thomas poured red wine for them all from misty decanters he had found in the cellar. Sonia felt light-headed from the wine and from her joy at seeing Jacques again; a slight apprehension about Olivier only made her dizzier, but she thought their idyll needed something rougher in its texture to make it more likely to endure.

  For some days after his return, Jacques continued to give Olivier acetate of morphia, gradually decreasing the dose and switching to hyoscine, which Thomas told him was recommended by Bucknill and Tuke, his dependable English authority. Olivier seemed calm, though completely unresponsive. Thomas slept nearby and listened out for him; Jacques also quietly locked his brother’s bedroom door each night from the outside, worried that his apparent docility might be covering an emotional response to his change of home that was taking time to develop.

  It was decided that Olivier should be treated by Thomas. Jacques did not feel able to view his brother dispassionately, and Thomas was excited to feel that, after the years of warehousing in the asylum, he could at last spend time with someone suffering from what appeared to him a classic dementia. They had taken a dozen similarly afflicted patients from the regional asylum and housed them on the ground floor of the main courtyard. Their fees were met in part by the local authorities who had transferred them; the patients’ families contributed what they could and the remainder was waived. The ‘public’ patients ate in the large North Hall rather than in the house dining room and were asked not to use the main courtyard; in most respects they were treated in the same way as the others, and were free to wander in the grounds or help with maintenance under Josef’s eye.

  There was no official division of responsibility between Jacques and Thomas, but it began to happen, partly through the treatment of Olivier, that Thomas took more of the severe psychiatric cases and Jacques more of the neurasthenic. Every evening at six o’clock, they met in Thomas’s consulting room to compare their clinical notes; each morning at eight fifteen they met in Jacques’s room for half an hour with Sonia, Frau Egger and Josef to discuss the administration of the day ahead. Sonia would then repair to the narrow office, which lay between Jacques’s consulting room and the main waiting room at the front of the house. They ate lunch and dinner with the patients, except at the weekend when Sonia insisted they dine privately in the waiting room, laid up with flowers and candles for the occasion, and all talk of medicine was forbidden.

  In the spring of the following year, they were visited by Abbé Henri, whom they at once appointed ex-officio chaplain to the sanatorium. On the day after his arrival, Thomas decided that they should have a photograph of the staff, both for the sanatorium archive and for possible use in future prospectuses; he thought the presence of a man of the cloth would lend a certain tone. His own Kodak he thought inadequate to the task, so a photographer was summoned from the city, a man with enormous moustaches who hid his head beneath a black cloth while he adjusted the focus of the camera on its tripod. He positioned them between the pillars outside the double front door, with Thomas and Jacques seated in the middle, Sonia to Jacques’s left and Abbé Henri in full clerical costume on Thomas’s right. Standing behind them were Hans, Mary, Daisy, Josef, Frau Egger and Olivier, who insisted on being included.

  ‘It is a pity Dr Faverill cannot be here,’ said Thomas. ‘He is on our writing paper and that would make us a full eleven. A cricket team.’

  The exposure time chosen by the photographer was so long, however, that Hans had time to run along the back row and appear twice, substantially at one end, a ghostly presence at the other, in the resulting photograph that was framed and hung in the office.

  ‘We are a real concern,’ said Sonia, when she completed the accounts for the first year, ending in May 1891, and handed them to her husband.

  ‘Why not?’ said Jacques.

  ‘I never thought we could truly make it work. It was just something we . . . Invented.’

  ‘All the practical side has been much easier than I thought. Mostly thanks to you, my love. No, really. Of course, the scientific side, our research and so on . . . We are still in the foothills.’

  ‘But you are climbing.’

  ‘I am definitely climbing.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘At the moment Thomas and I are taking separate paths. We shall meet at the next plateau.’

  ‘Are you going to share your thoughts with us?’

  ‘When I am ready. It is important to try to publish. It would also be good for the schloss. Provided people think my ideas make sense.’

  ‘Are you worried that they may not understand?’

  ‘I need to go back to Paris at some stage to speak further with Pierre Janet. And before I read my paper in Vienna, I should like to try it out. I think I could perhaps read a s
hort version to an invited audience here.’

  ‘You could do it in the North Hall. In fact, we ought to have regular lectures and entertainments there.’

  When Jacques left the office to go on his rounds, Sonia tidied the papers and went up to their private rooms. Truly, she was surprised by how straightforward it had been. She herself had no training in any more than simple arithmetic, learned at dame school, then from a governess atTorrington; yet the bank seemed happy to accept her copperplate accounts, to set one of their clerks to make two transcripts, one for the tax collector and one which they returned, signed and franked with a scarlet seal, for her to put proudly in her desk drawer. They even showed a small profit. She had not been brought up to work; girls of her background were not expected to do more than supervise a house, though in a sense, she supposed, that was all she did. It was a large house, however, and a thriving one.

  It surprised her that a place of sickness could provide an atmosphere of such content. She was careful to keep their private rooms separate from the life of the clinic, but even in the main house and the courtyard there was an atmosphere of something purposeful, something worthwhile being driven through by force of will and character. Sonia walked across the great flagged hall in the late morning and glanced at the closed doors of the twin consulting rooms, behind which the two men bent their minds to the great task they had set themselves; then she pushed open the door of the kitchen, to be greeted by a rush of steam as Frau Egger and her maids were working scarlet-faced among the clashing lids and cauldrons they were heaving from the range. Then she went beneath the stairs, through the rear doors, out along the cloister and into the tranquillity of the main courtyard, where one or two of the patients might be reading on the benches, sewing or walking up and down. She would make sure the early lunch was on time for the public patients in the North Hall, then circle the far end of the building and come round into the gardens in the west, where her favourite seat gave her a view up to the mountains. It was an old bench beneath a cedar, and the tree reminded her of Torrington, though the vista could not have been more different. At first the ground gave way, going down to meadows dotted with cows, then it rose and she could see yellow and pink wild flowers in the fields as they edged into spinneys and pale woods, then into evergreen forests that went up steeply towards the tops of the mountains with their permanently white peaks. She allowed herself twenty minutes with her book before returning to her duties, but sometimes, particularly in April and May, the prospect was so beguiling that she simply sat and stared. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,’ she thought, settling back with a sigh of incredulity. She sometimes thought of Richard Prendergast, but it seemed long, long ago, and to have happened to someone strangely different from herself.