by Ruth Wade
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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
For the next ten days, Stephen was able to get someone to cover his afternoon appointments and was at the asylum from three until lights out at seven-thirty. On every visit, Edith seemed a little brighter. Admittedly he had precious little to base it on other than feeling she was able to sense his presence on an instinctual level. Physically, she must’ve begun feeding herself – or be willing to be spoon-fed by another – because she had lost the signs of incipient malnutrition. Although she was still criminally thin.
He’d found a note from the asylum director on his third trip down. Dr Johns had made an exception to his rule of non-intervention and had been administering the electric shock therapy Stephen had asked for. It would have helped bridge some of the connections in her brain and nerve-endings but that was a very different thing to re-establishing consciousness. And that was the delicate task ahead of him now she had been forced into relating – however tangentially – to the world again.
All he required was patience. And her co-operation.
*
‘Are you feeling any better today, Edith? I do hope you don’t mind me using your first name but Miss Potter sounds excessively formal when one of us is wearing nightclothes. I must say that you do look a little more rested. I’ll just sit here and take in the view for a while. Except it’s raining so the grounds can’t be said to be looking their best.’
Stephen felt the weight of the tin of sardines in his pocket as he took his jacket off in the overheated room and draped it over the back of the chair. He’d brought it for the kittens but, not surprisingly, they hadn’t been out playing in the wet. He stole a glance at the bed. Edith had turned her head slightly to look at him. He had to work hard to pretend he hadn’t noticed. He didn’t want to scare her by appearing too eager. Everything had to be done in her time.
‘I haven’t any more chocolate I’m afraid but I suspect you’re the sort of woman who’d distrust someone who always came bearing gifts. And quite right too, we doctors can be a sly old lot; I’m sure you’ve heard the proverb: feasting is the physician’s harvest.’
Stephen rested his pad on his knee and began to make a few notes. Every now and then he glanced up and tried to look for any evidence of real awareness in the eyes that he felt had never once flickered in their gaze. He had to start probing the state of her mental capacities; while she was still without speech it would be difficult but, he hoped, not impossible. He had a hunch that a direct approach would elicit the best results.
‘Can you hear me, Edith? You’ve been ill and I want to help you. I believe I can find what is at the root of your trouble and then, once it is out in the open, we can work together to overcome it and make you well again. Get you out of here.’
The offer of a complete recovery was undoubtedly a promise too far, but if what was left of her rational mind didn’t at least have something to clutch onto then there’d be no incentive for her to drop some of her defences. He watched as her body shifted; not so much in terms of movement but in attitude as if thin strands of energy had started to seep through the reserve and make her weak attention more focused. Stephen began to feel he was making a difference. He leaned forward in his chair, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands flopping.
‘I’d like you to indulge me and consider the logic of this. I believe something went very wrong for you in your past and that you never really had a chance to confront the truth of whatever it was that happened. Now circumstances have forced you into a position where things are equally out of your control and your mind knows only one way to cope: to shut down; to stop thinking; to stop feeling; and to react again like a ten-month-old baby.’
He tried to meld his gaze with hers.
‘I can help you, Edith. I can facilitate the unlocking of those memories and that, in turn, may assist you in finding a way to come to terms with your situation.’ He straightened up. ‘If my intuition is right then, like me, you believe that it’s always better to learn the truth – whatever the consequences.’
An energy rippled through Edith’s body. It was a tiny movement but one he’d been trained to spot. It was signal enough that she was ready to let him in a little. A short session of deep hypnosis would test how much further she was prepared to go.
‘All you need do is relax and let yourself drift; be prepared to let your mind wander where it will. You’re in control at all times, Edith. Think of your memories as being shut tightly in a closed room. It’s one you’ve built yourself and for which only you have the key. No one can force you there and no one else can get in unless you allow them to. My job is to help you to walk as far inside that room as you want, as you need. I’ll always be here at your side, and you can turn around and walk out again at any time.’
Stephen stood up and pulled the curtains; it had stopped raining and a slick of winter sunlight from where they didn’t meet in the middle fell across the bed and suffused Edith’s features with a soft glow. He walked over and arranged her pillows so that one was supporting her head, and the other two at her sides for her arms to rest on. Stephen re-positioned the chair so that he could sit beside, and a little behind, her head. The air in the room was heavy and conducive to sleep. Her breathing slowed as her eyelids flickered shut.
‘I want you to do some small things for me, Edith. I want you to use all the power you have to scrunch up every muscle in your feet; to feel every bone and sinew pulling and jumping to dance you out of bed. I know you can do this. You only have to want to hard enough and you’ll remember how.’
Her face was impassive, but under the bedclothes her body twitched.
‘Good. Now I want you to feel all the strength drain out of them again. Ask your mind to make it happen ...
‘... your feet are heavy as though you’re pulling them out of mud and now you couldn’t move them again even if you wanted. They are blocks of stone ...
‘... I want you to do the same with your legs. Feel the muscles as tight as if you were going to leap up in the air – way, way up until you can touch the ceiling ...
‘... now come down and feel the touch of your shift on them; the texture of the material. Press down with your back and feel it on your spine and across your shoulders ...
‘... let the edges of your flesh melt away until you can feel nothing but the cloth, and you can no longer tell where you end, and it begins.’
The skin over Edith Potter’s cheekbones tightened as her face relaxed and her jaw dropped open. The rise and fall of her chest didn’t break rhythm as Stephen picked up her wrist and gently let it flop back down onto the pillow. All resistance had gone.
‘I want you to imagine yourself on the terrace of a large house, Edith. It’s a hot sunny day and you can smell the warmth of the bricks, and you want to kick your shoes off so you can feel the heat rise up through your feet. Do it. Do it, Edith. Kick off those shoes.’
He watched as the bedclothes ruffled.
‘Now walk down the steps and stretch your hand out to touch some of the lavender growing there. Hear the bees as they buzz around you – but they won’t sting you, Edith, you are safe from harm ...
‘... crush some of the flowers in your fingers and take some deep, deep breaths ...
... one ... two ... three ...
‘... the smell makes you drowsy. You see a daybed under the big cedar on the lawn. Walk over to it, Edith. Feel the grass tickle. It makes you want to laugh but you’re too tired. You need to sleep ...
‘... you reach the cool shade where you can smell the spice of the wood. Now you can’t keep your eyes open any longer, so you sit down on the cushions and feel yourself drifting off into a slumber so deep and calming that you may never want to wake up.’
Her head sunk further into the pillow.
‘What do you feel, Edith? Tell me, what do you feel?’
The voice, when it finally came, was croaky through lack of use: ‘Relieved everyone’s
leaving me alone. I know no one can find me because I am invisible with the sunlight blinding the windows of the house. I’m weary but I’m not tired. I don’t want to sleep but I am getting a headache.’
Stephen dipped forward and spoke softly so that his words would be little more than a rush of air in her ear. ‘I can show you how to let go of those things that are hurting you, Edith. All you have to do is to tell me what they are. Let them escape out of your mouth.’
He sensed a rigidity returning to her jaw and he thought that maybe he had pushed too early in his desire to get through these initial stages; every patient responded differently to the process, and he suspected Edith Potter had no intention of making things easy for him. He sat and picked at a piece of skin at the side of his thumbnail until it became sore.
‘My thoughts are crowded as though there are too many people ... there is an intruder here. I can sense a presence and it makes me afraid.’
The first skirmish in her internal battle was over.
‘Nothing can happen to you, Edith. You are safely here with me. No one will harm you.’
‘How can you say that?’
Her voice had gone up an octave, and Stephen could feel the anger encased in the inexorable will the poor woman was fighting with. For. Against.
‘... How can you possibly understand? Everything I believe in has its basis in empirical fact, irrefutable evidence; I have lived my life by the rules of logic and it is too late for me to abandon them now...’
But Stephen wasn’t going to let her give up after she had made such a phenomenal effort. He needed to appeal to both the conscious and subconscious parts of her mind, and to do so in a way that allowed her to convince herself to let go for him. Such an approach was a calculated gamble; she was the only person in a position to undermine her defences but those protective barriers once thoroughly dismantled would be almost impossible to re-erect. If his treatment resulted in a cure then such momentary discomfort would be worth it but if not ... if not ... she could be left with her emotional vulnerability shockingly exposed. But it was the only route to progress and he felt he owed it to her trust in him to try.
‘You are lying under the tree, Edith, and you see a bird fly above you and perch on one of the branches. You think it’s funny because you can see it clearly but you know that your eyes are closed. You wonder if your sight has gained magical powers or if the bird is inside your head but then you realise that it hardly matters. The bird is there and you can see it. You let your eyes discern the feathers and the outline of the beak, and you’re no longer afraid that you’re going mad because you know the bird is real.’
Once again her breathing had slowed to match that of his as if she were trying to subsume her physical presence in another; she had a long way to go before she would come out of hiding. She may be co-operating, but she was still catatonic.
‘We had a canary once. Granny did. Horrible, smelly thing it was. Used to pluck its feathers, and its skin was purple and puffy underneath, and you could see its guts like a nest of tiny snakes. Granny used to make me clean it out and I knew ... I knew that all I had to do was take it in my hand and squeeze it and squeeze it until I heard the bones crack, and then I wouldn’t have to clean it out anymore. It made me feel so good just knowing that. Power over another life is a very precious and dangerous thing but it is a defect, a mental defect, which has its roots in the wish to destroy and be destroyed.’
Her voice had shifted in tone once more.
‘One day I did put my hand in the cage and I pulled the bird out and held it tight and stared at its ugliness until I couldn’t stand the sight of it any longer. I took it to my room then – and every day after that – and I started to teach it and teach it until it could hop on and off a rubber ball and push a grain of rice with its beak and fly from the top of the wardrobe onto my head. In time, as I knew it would, the bird stopped plucking at itself and the feathers grew back until it was beautiful and bright and happy. Then, one day, after it had performed all its tricks and was flying back to land on my shoulder, I opened the window and it flew out and over the trees ...
‘... I found it dead the next morning.’
‘How did that make you feel, Edith? Tell me, how did that make you feel?’
He could see a ripple of pain convulse through the facial muscles lying just under her skin.
‘I was heartbroken and bitter with myself for what I had done ... but, late at night, when I was in bed and outlining the map of my scars like I always did when I couldn’t sleep, I was happy. I was glad I’d done it. I was pleased it was dead ...
‘... and I wished it were me.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The London train up from Brighton was late. Stephen had to stand on the platform for over half an hour. There was a Waiting Room with a paupers’ fire burning in the grate but it was full of men coughing, sneezing, and smoking. He needed space and air to help clear his thoughts. A beer when he got into Victoria would be nice to look forward to but he had to return to the clinic; there would be no patients to see but there would be paperwork. Always paperwork. And, in addition, he had to write up his private notes on what had happened with Edith under hypnosis. Try to draw some conclusions. Or speculations at least. It had gone well in terms of how she had been able to retrieve early memories. But he hadn’t anticipated such a depth of desperation. And he should have done. With his experience of Olive, he should have done.
He watched the train get larger as it puffed up the line. A bell on the wall clanged. On cue, the stationmaster bustled out of his office and put his head in both the Waiting Room and the Ladies’ Room to announce the arrival. Stephen walked up the platform away from the emerging mothers admonishing their children for whining about the cold, and a gaggle of young women screeching in their excitement over window-shopping in the West End. A couple in evening dress huddled together. En masse, people were such herd animals, standing shoulder to shoulder as if to ward off the invading train. On the whole he thought he didn’t like them much. People, that is. Individuals were fine; individuals he could relate to. Disturbed individuals he could treat. But a society that colluded in believing it could bury the collective memory of the Great War in Selfridges, or dinner and a show, was unfathomable.
With the tang of coal tar smoke in his lungs, Stephen stepped up into the carriage. It was one without a connecting corridor, and he hoped that by choosing to be so close to the guard’s van he would have it to himself. He sat with his briefcase on his lap, ready to leap out and swap at the last minute. He relaxed as he heard the wheels squeal on the rails and the deep bellow of the engine as it began to chug away. It wasn’t particularly warm in the compartment but he took off his overcoat anyway and bundled it into the luggage net above the seat opposite; hadn’t his mother always told him he wouldn’t feel the benefit of winter clothes if he wore them indoors? He’d never understood that particular concept. A coat’s ability to function effectively was defined by its material, thickness, construction, and fit; not by some innate capacity to suck up cold that diminished if it was worn too often or in inappropriate places. Two tangled thoughts pushed their way into his consciousness: had Edith Potter’s mother had time to pass on any wisdom – spurious or not – to her daughter? And cold, like pain, was relative so maybe the coat thing wasn’t such nonsense after all.
Pain and Edith. Edith in pain. Because she was. Under that cocoon of indifference to her existence she was hurting very profoundly indeed. Was he being cruel in forcing her to bring it to the surface? And were his motives to do so rooted in selfishness? He had known the risks involved in taking her back to a childhood in which a major tragedy had occurred, and from which she still – literally in the physical sense – bore the scars more than thirty years later. He had felt at the time that he was weighing them up appropriately, but how much was his decision to press on influenced by his ambition? His hunger to prove himself. His need to gather irrefutable evidence on the efficacy of hypnosis in acute cases of ca
tatonia.
He stared out of the window. The South Downs were rolling away to reveal a river and marshy fields. The silver-grey of a heron spiked up from a clump of mace rushes. Cows scattered as the engine breathily puffed past. Ever since he’d been a small boy he’d loved train journeys. The trips down to the coast at Bexhill or Hastings had been such rare treats that he’d sit with his nose pressed to the window trying to memorise every inch of the way in case each one was to be his last. Then, as he’d got older, he’d begun to appreciate the anonymity of being somewhere in time but nowhere in space; of being blindingly in the present with the past left behind on a station platform, and the future waiting for him at a point down the line. Of being between expectations. How he wished he could recapture that freedom now. But even as he sat there, Edith’s future weighed heavily in the briefcase on his lap. But not only there.
Because he’d got it wrong once before. Terribly, terribly wrong. Olive hadn’t been catatonic but she had been severely and deeply depressed. Her face had been more sad and tormented in its sorrow than any other he’d come across. He’d treated her for a period of months and had thought she was getting better. She had responded readily to hypnosis and had seemed to enjoy their sessions. He’d even been thinking of seeing if he could arrange for her to spend some time out of the hospital to lodge with his landlady at the weekends – a sort of test to see how she coped in ordinary life with ordinary people. He was going to take her to Forest Hill. She would’ve liked that and he would’ve loved to see her smiling, her face wiped clean of worry. He hadn’t thought her capable of suicide. Refused to believe that she was so unreachable.
What if he could cure Edith’s catatonia with hypnosis, what then? Might she have to live the rest of her life like Olive, wrapped in impenetrable misery? But the whole point about Olive was that she hadn’t wanted to live with herself. What if, once confronted with it, Edith found her own reality too much to bear? In theory, patients in a lunatic asylum should be safe from themselves but he thought her capable of achieving anything she set her mind to – however self-destructive.
