by Clare Flynn
Inside, he was immediately assailed by the smell of carbolic soap and disinfectant, transporting him back in an instant to the months he had spent in the military rehabilitation hospital in Sussex.
A nurse in a starched apron and cap walked past and he called out to her. ‘I’m here to visit a patient. Where do I find out where to go?’
Wordlessly, she pointed him towards a door. He knocked and entered, unsure what to expect of this visit. Part of him wanted to turn around, get back in his motor car and drive away before it was too late. Another part of him was full of curiosity. So he told the woman behind the desk that he was here to visit Miss Jane Walters.
The woman looked up in surprise, appraising him. ‘I don’t believe poor Jane has ever had anyone visit her before. May I enquire who you are and the purpose of your visit?’
Christopher hadn’t even thought about the inevitability of this enquiry. He stared at her, momentarily uncertain, then quickly mumbled that he was from a firm of solicitors acting for Miss Walters’ family.
‘And your name, sir?’ She thrust a visitors’ book in front of him.
‘Bell,’ he said, choosing the first name that came into his head, that of his housemaster at school. ‘Her family would like me to provide them with a report as to Miss Walters’ welfare.’
‘I see. When we admitted her we were told the family didn’t want to receive any reports on her progress – or lack of it in her case.’
‘Since so much time has passed, my client has indicated that a visit would be in order.’ Christopher narrowed his eyes and glared at her. ‘After all, my client funds her care here.’
His words and expression had the desired effect. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Perfectly understandable.’ Then looking uncomfortable, she added, ‘Jane, er, Miss Walters, used to be kept in a private room but we have found that she responds better to being on one of the women’s wards. Having the company. It’s a ward for paying patients,’ she added quickly. ‘Not one of the public wards.’
Christopher felt out of his depth. He suspected that the long term incarceration of Jane Walters and the absence of relatives had led to St Crispin’s saving on the cost of her care. ‘Could you tell me exactly what her condition is?’
‘She’s been here since childhood. She was transferred from an orphanage when they proved unable to cope with her.’ The woman rose from her desk and opened a filing cabinet behind her. She flipped through the folders and pulled one out. It was thin. ‘Here we are. Chronic brain damage, occasioned at the time of her birth, rendering her an idiot.’
She put the folder back in the drawer. ‘When she came to us, aged seven, she was unable to talk. Now she responds to her name and can say a few simple words. Would you like to see her?’
He said he would, the words out before he could think what he was doing, curiosity overcoming his fear.
The woman rang a bell and another uniformed nurse appeared.
‘Take this gentleman, er …Mr Bell… to Sycamore Ward. He is here to see Jane Walters.’
She turned to Christopher again. ‘Perhaps you would like to have a word with the doctor in charge of her case?’
‘I don’t want to trouble him.’
‘It’s no trouble. And as you are the first person who has ever been to visit the poor girl it’s the least we can do.’
The nurse led Christopher along a series of long austere corridors, their walls lined with brown glazed tiles. Sycamore was the last in a series of wards running off the main female wing to the left side of the central administrative building. Its heavy oak door was locked. The nurse took out a key and opened the door. Seeing Christopher’s discomfort she said, ‘A precaution. Some of them tend to wander, but none of those in Sycamore are dangerous.’
He followed her inside. They entered the large ward, past a nurses’ station on his left and a store room on his right. The ward was lined with beds, around a dozen on each side, some of them occupied, most not. Christopher studied the occupants, one or two sleeping or comatose, others lying groaning in pain, perceived or real, one curled up in the foetal position on the floor beside her bed. As he passed, an elderly woman got up from her bed and moved towards him, clutching at the hem of his jacket. Her hair was matted, her eyes sunken inside their sockets with dark shadows around them, her teeth blackened stumps. She said something incomprehensible and reached to grab at his hands.
‘Get away, Gracie!’ the nurse told her. ‘Go back to your bed or we’ll have to tie you down.’ Then to Christopher she said, ’She thinks you’re her husband, poor soul. But he’s been dead thirty years. She’s been here ever since. Never got over it. She’s a chronic case. Harmless though – apart from to herself.’
Christopher shuddered at the thought of spending one’s whole life shut away in a place such as this.
The end of the long dormitory area gave onto a large day room, flooded with light from tall windows on three sides. Outside were lawns, dotted about with patients, walking around or sitting on benches in the morning sunshine.
Round the circumference of the day room, several of the ward’s inmates were seated, some slumped forward, appearing to be semi-conscious, others alert and upright. There was the buzz of incoherent voices, some singing, some crying, some mumbling to themselves, while others stared blankly into space.
The nurse stopped in front of a chair occupied by a woman who had her face turned away. ‘This is Jane Walters.’ Then to the patient, ‘Come on Janey. Say hello. You have a visitor.’
Turning again to Christopher, she said, ‘Jane can sometimes manage to say her name but not much more. Depends what mood she’s in.’
The young woman in the chair turned her head and her eyes moved in his direction. She was wearing the same striped, serge dress that most of the women on the ward wore – her hair was parted in the centre and tucked behind her ears and appeared not to have been washed in weeks. Her eyes were vacant and her head was lolling.
Christopher experienced a surge of guilt. He searched her face in vain for similarities in looks to either his father or to Martha, but could find nothing to confirm the familial relationship.
‘May I sit with her a while?’
The nurse told him he was free to sit with her as long as he wished and told him to call at the doctor’s office on the way out, informing him it was back along the corridor towards the central administrative block.
He pulled up a chair and sat down opposite Jane. Her eyes were lowered and he tried in vain to make contact with them, but she appeared to see nothing and to lack the ability to focus. Her hands fidgeted in her lap – the only parts of her body that showed any animation. Christopher struggled to imagine what her life had been thus far, and what it might have been had she not spent it incarcerated. If this woman was his sister, he felt no affection or kindred spirit towards her. Looking at her sitting here, slumped in her chair in front of him, she reminded him of a rag doll, limbs floppy, facial features fixed and unchanging. He’d had a rag doll himself when he was an infant, a hand-me-down from Percy, its cloth body already grubby and losing some of its woollen hair. Then he remembered how he had loved that doll, made by his grandmother. He tried to remember its name but it eluded him.
Feeling awkward, uncertain what to do, whether to try to talk to the young woman or to leave, he acknowledged to himself that this had been a wasted journey. He was no more certain that Jane Walters was the daughter of his father and Martha than he had been before he came. And yet how could she not be? George Shipley was too careful a businessman to commit funds for this girl’s care if he had not felt an unavoidable obligation. Christopher sat beside Jane, in silence, the two of them bathed in a stream of sunlight coming through the metal-framed windows.
A passing nurse smiled at him and turning back said, ‘Jane hasn’t had her walk yet. That usually raises her spirits. We’re short-staffed today. Two nurses down with the influenza.’
‘Perhaps I could walk her around the garden?’ he said, not knowing what
had compelled him to offer.
‘If you can spare the time, sir.’
Christopher offered a hand to the woman in the chair and to his surprise she took it. Her own hand was thin, bony, with long tapering fingers and it felt so delicate in his that he feared crushing it. He helped her to her feet and they shuffled together through the French window into the garden. A large paved terrace gave onto an extensive lawn surrounded by trees. He could hear birds singing. With her thin-boned hand resting in his, he led her around the expanse of garden. As they walked, she became steadier on her feet, as if she were drawing strength from the air, from the sunlight, from the growing plants around them.
When they were a distance away from the other inmates, they came to a natural halt by a bench under a spreading oak tree. The ground about them was covered in a carpet of acorn cups that crunched underfoot. They sat down, her hand still holding his. Suddenly and unaccountably, he began to feel calm, experiencing no tension between them from the lack of speech.
St Crispin’s was a peaceful place, removed from the buzz of daily life. A backwater, forgotten by the rest of the world along with the people in it. Not what he had expected, fearing some latter day reincarnation of Bedlam. He decided he liked the place.
It was only when she let go of his hand to reach down and pick a buttercup from the edge of the lawn that he remembered she had been holding it. She turned and offered the flower to him, a ghost of a smile playing on her lips. He was reminded of Martha and how her stern face was transformed when she smiled. For the first time he saw a resemblance.
Raising her hand, Jane tapped her fingers to her breast and made an attempt to say her own name, but it emerged as only ‘Juh’. She tapped her fingers against the front of his jacket and turned her head towards him. The dead eyes now seemed to show a slight glimmer from their dark, unfathomable depths.
He felt a wave of sadness sweep over him, as he told her his name was Kit. The sadness was not only for this poor lost girl, trapped inside the prison of her damaged mind, it was for the mother who must have denied her existence. It was also for the whole rotten world that they were living in, for the terrible pointless war he had fought in, for the lives of all the young men who had died in the mud and the cold and the rain. He was sad for his mother, for the way her husband’s infidelities had eradicated any capacity for compassion, for love, for empathy in her. He grieved for the loss of the father he had believed he had known, but now realised had never existed. The stern, ambitious dynamic man by whom he had always been intimidated, had proved to be a hollow man, a weak and cruel man who used and abused and then wrote cheques to hide away the consequences of such abuse. He found himself stroking his half-sister’s hand and for the first time since he had set eyes on her, he felt an affinity with her.
Jane made a little snuffling sound, then, her head nodding in rhythm, she formed the plosive consonant of his name, repeating the ‘k’ sound over and over again.
He smiled at her and said his name again, gratified when he saw a hint of a smile play about her lips. Surely these tiny signs indicated a possibility of Jane being helped to speak. He was convinced that there was something more than a mute idiot inside her.
As they sat there in silence in the sun-dappled garden, Christopher was transported back to the day the previous year when he was wounded. It had been a very different day from this one: torrential rain that blinded the men as they marched along the muddy track, churned up and ploughed under the weight of hundreds of vehicles and thousands of boots and hooves. The muddy roads and devastated farmland had taken on a new and changing form, as shells and mortars lifted the ground, throwing it skywards, altering the landscape. Distant explosions lit up the sky in a fiery furnace. Fire and rain. He had lifted his head to witness the terrible beauty of the burning sky, and didn’t notice the tell-tale signs of unexploded ordnance. A careless moment of inattention. Whether it was seconds, minutes or hours later, he did not know, but when he was conscious again he was lying on his back at the bottom of a crater, flung there by the power of the explosion underneath him.
He had felt no pain at first, unaware that his foot was no longer attached to his leg. Above his head, he had seen only smoke, a thick pall of it, blotting out the sky. Underneath him the ground was shaking. All around he could hear the thump of guns, the scream of shells and the roar of retreating vehicles. He heard no voices, saw no faces, friend nor foe, looking over the rim of the crater to search for him. By now the pain had won out over the shock and he lay on his back in agony, his leg feeling as if it was being slowly and simultaneously burned in a furnace and crushed in a vice. He tried to call out, thought he was screaming but could hear nothing but the sounds of the battle. The pain intensified. Burning. Searing. Cutting. Killing him in a slow relentless torture. Had his own men forgotten him? Were they dead or wounded too? All around him and above him the war went on without him. He had felt utterly, completely alone. Abandoned. Forgotten.
But he had not been forgotten or left to die. He had no idea when or how, but they came for him. Hands reaching out, lifting him, digging him out of his hole, his mud-mired tomb, and laying him gently on a stretcher. They had carried him behind the lines and into the haven of a hospital where an angel in white had bent over him, wiped his brow and eased his pain with morphine to send him into the blessed peace of sleep.
Now here today in this tranquil garden, holding Jane Walters’ hand, he remembered how it had felt to be rescued. To be released, not so much from the fear of death, but from the fear of being alone, forgotten, ignored, abandoned. How must it be for Jane? Until today, no living soul had visited her, walked with her and held her hand. She had grown up, unknown, unloved, untouched by anyone save those paid to care for her. Christopher’s heart swelled and he knew at once that he must get her out of here.
A bell rang and Jane got to her feet in a reflexive response to the sound. Seeing the other inmates move across the lawn towards the house, Christopher helped steer her back to the ward.
A nurse came forward and shepherded Jane along with the others out of the ward and down the corridor. ‘Dinner time,’ the nurse said, pointing to the clock on the wall which showed it was half an hour past noon.
Jane didn’t give him so much as a backward glance. It was as if the shutters had come down inside her brain and she had reverted to the passive, inscrutable being, with dead eyes and an absence of any facial expression. He watched her move away, her feet shuffling, her head lowered, in clothing indistinguishable from her fellows.
When they had all gone, apart from those who were comatose or sleeping on their beds, Christopher went back along the corridor, knocked on the door of the doctor’s room and was invited to enter. The man behind the desk was older than he was – probably in his forties. He wore a black patch over one eye and had a neat moustache. Evidence of a military man. In confirmation, Christopher noticed a regimental tie.
‘Dr Reggie Henderson,’ the man said, offering his hand to Christopher.
‘Without thinking, he replied, ‘Captain Christopher Shipley.’ Then realised his mistake at once.
‘They told me your name was Bell. A solicitor?’
‘I’m sorry. I intended to keep my identity concealed… I wanted my visit to be discreet.’
The doctor waved his hand. ‘No need to explain. Quite understandable.’ He indicated a chair and Kit sat down.
‘Problem with the leg?’
‘Left it in a muddy hole near Messines.’
The doctor nodded. ‘Lost my eye back in ’14. Mons. That was the end of the war for me.’ He extended a wooden box of cigarettes towards Christopher, who declined. The doctor lit one himself and exhaled the smoke slowly. ‘After they patched me up I was posted here in 1916, when it was a military hospital and I stayed on after the Armistice. So, you’d like to know about Miss Walters?’
Christopher decided the truth was the best course. ‘I believe her to be my half-sister but I only learnt of her existence yesterday.’
‘What exactly is wrong with her? All I’ve been told is that her brain was damaged at birth.’
Henderson shrugged. ‘I know nothing of her history before she was admitted here. She was one of the few who remained during the war years when most of the civilian patients were removed. There are houses in the grounds where a small number of private patients, unable to return to their families, were kept, and she was cared for there throughout the war. After the Armistice, she moved back here when the place was decommissioned as a military hospital. This is a private ward, much less crowded than the public ones, and with more staff. We now tend to use the houses for staff – I live in one myself – with a few reserved for those patients who are ready to return to their families. Most of them have jobs and we can still keep an eye out for their welfare. Obviously Miss Walters does not fit into that category.’ He tapped his fingers on the top of the desk. ‘Sad case. Neglected since childhood. I don’t see why she couldn’t have learned to speak. Complete lack of stimulus. Anybody would turn into a vegetable if they were treated that way.’
‘You mean she’s been neglected here?’ Kit gripped the edge of the desk.
‘No more than many of them. And she only moved here when she was seven – the damage was already done by then. The methods used in places like these was rather crude in the past. It used to be little more than a prison. There’s a new regime here now. We look at things in a more enlightened way these days. Instead of locking them up and forgetting about them, we’re trying to get them to the point where they can return to as normal a life as possible.’
‘You think Jane might have a normal life?’
‘Sadly, no. Not her. She’s too far gone for that.’ He consulted a folder. ‘Chronic idiocy. Since birth. We might eventually get her to manage a few simple words and phrases. May even moderate the diagnosis from idiocy to imbecility. Perhaps she can reach a level you might expect from a small child. Not able to read and write or sustain a conversation, but better than she is now.’
