Walls of Silence: a stunning historical thriller you won't be able to put down

by Ruth Wade

  Stephen trusted he had judged it correctly and that the man’s desperation to lessen some his burden of responsibility would overcome his inertia.

  ‘As well as the work for the clinic, I’m undertaking some research of my own on the lengths to which the mind will go to defend a secret – be it actual in the sense of something the individual has done, or fabricated out of an emotion such as shame or disgust leading to self-hatred. It’s my belief that someone in your patient’s state has induced her catatonia to prevent any probing or prying into that thing which she feels she needs to hide at all costs. Any breakthrough I may make as a result of working with her would, of course, draw attention to your institution and perhaps the trustees could be persuaded to give you an assistant.’

  Dr Johns looked as though he was beginning to soften. His shoulders dropped slightly and his jaw relaxed. Stephen gave him a moment to contemplate an easier future, and then pushed on.

  ‘You have my word that I won’t in any way interfere with the running of the asylum, or in the long-term treatment of the patient. All I want is to have the chance to try to understand what could be going on in her mind.’

  Stephen coughed to cover the lie. Of course he intended treatment. The paucity of suitable subjects meant that he had to grab every opportunity that came his way. His theories were solid, but, as yet, untested. He had become convinced by the empirical work he had undertaken so far that by applying Jung’s principles of psychological analysis, he could peel away the protective layers and get the individual to confront their need to withdraw. Yes, there was a risk – under deep hypnosis the rational mind could, in itself, become the part that was repressed and that would lead to profound and irrevocable insanity – but it was one he felt he had no choice but to take. None of his colleagues seemed prepared to sacrifice their free time in the pursuit of healing such deeply disturbed minds. The fact that it might make his reputation was a bonus; his inability to do anything meaningful for soldiers hospitalised during the Great War with shell-shock – or war neurotics as Freud so unfeelingly termed them – haunted him and was the force behind his passion. He would not let scientific ignorance dictate the marginalisation of the misunderstood.

  Dr Johns offered Stephen a cigarette, and when he refused, took one for himself and lit it. As he inhaled, he began to gather some papers from the over-crowded shelves in front of him and make an unstable pile on the corner of the desk. Stephen pulled out a pad and pen from his briefcase.

  ‘If you could just tell me what you know about her?’

  ‘Actually very little, I’m afraid.’

  Dr Johns picked over the loose files in his wire tray then selected a thin one, opened it and skimmed the contents. ‘It seems she came to us after being committed by a psychiatrist called in by the hospital her general practitioner had sent her to following a complete nervous collapse. It says here that she has some pretty horrific scars on her arms, legs, and torso; you’d be surprised just how many we get who’ve at some point or another set themselves alight – intentionally or otherwise – with a candle applied to a flannel nightgown. I really can tell you nothing more than that.’

  Stephen scribbled a few notes. ‘Is anything being done to try to ameliorate her condition?’

  Dr Johns sighed. ‘You must understand that this is not a hospital but an asylum: a place of containment – no more, no less. None of these people will ever get better mentally, and as for physically, we don’t even waste our time conducting examinations or looking for any organic problems because there is nothing we can do about them. If they have a fatal disease or infirmity they will die, if not, they won’t. Take the case you’re interested in for instance; the fact that she has scars forms part of our records so that any member of her family can’t turn up at a later date and claim she received them here. We have no idea – or interest in – what caused them. I’m sorry to sound so callous but there it is.’ He threw out a thin smile of regret. ‘I determine the level of sanity present and that’s my job done, and as long as those deemed to be unstable are safely locked away with no danger of being released on an unsuspecting public, no one requires that we do anything further. All I can say is that she doesn’t possess any of the normal physical indicators: deformed ears, misshapen palate, receding or prominent chin or brow, an abnormal skull, misshapen limbs, webbed or supernumerary fingers or toes. I can’t judge if she is easily distracted or can entertain concepts or has a poor memory, but I can say that while she has been here she has not demonstrated emotional instability of the kind that manifests itself in impulsive outbursts of violence or screaming.’

  ‘Can you only tell me what she is not?’ Stephen’s disappointment leaked out in the sharpness of his tone.

  ‘I am not a bloody miracle worker, Dr Maynard. I have over two hundred lunatics on the main wards alone. I do my best to keep them from killing themselves and each other, and that degree of attention is more than some have ever had lavished on them in their lives before. To continue: she is not an Idiot, an Imbecile or a Feeble-minded Person and, as her father was a prominent neurologist, I have to assume her insanity is not inherited. She could be a Moral Imbecile of normal intelligence or have contracted mental illness due to extreme shock or fright or exposure to danger.’

  Dr Johns looked up at the clock on the wall. ‘I have to go. Look, you do something for me and save me the time and the trouble of conducting a full assessment into the extent of her condition – flesh out these notes a bit – and I’ll arrange for you to have access whenever and however often you like.’ He brushed the pile of papers off his desk and into his arms. ‘It’ll be one less for me to worry about.’

  Stephen was reeling too much from the doctor’s remark about the woman’s father to be grateful. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her father.’

  Dr Johns seemed to be having some trouble remembering. ‘He studied under Wundt in Leipzig ... his ideas on neurasthenia were very influential.’ Johns swept out of the room.

  Stephen’s hand was trembling as he held the pen. A drop of ink dripped from the nib. Dr Potter. He had to mean Dr Gerald Potter, the man who had been – along with William McDougall and W.H.R. Rivers – a pioneer in the field of shell-shock, and one of the inspirations behind Stephen’s current hypothesis. He’d followed his career via the psychological journals, including reading about his murder at the hand of a person, or persons, unknown. He couldn’t believe his luck to be given the opportunity to include Potter’s daughter in his research. This was undoubtedly the case that would be the making of him. He felt a bolt of excitement electrify his nerve-endings as he leapt across the room and stuck his head through the doorway and out into the empty corridor.

  ‘What’s she like?’

  His voice bounced off the walls. The distant sound of a metal door swinging open accompanied Dr Johns’ disembodied words: ‘A bloody zombie; if you get anything useful out of her, it’ll be a bloody miracle.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The key being turned in the lock unnerved Stephen for a moment. He didn’t think it was ever a thing he could get used to. Eventually, after a wait long enough for his trouser legs to spawn patches of dryness, a man with bedraggled greasy locks and an air of transparency had arrived at the door of Dr John’s office and beckoned him to follow. He was led through a series of narrow and dimly lit corridors. Each one began and ended with a barred gate – not unlike those on lion cages in a zoo – and the man went through a lengthy ritual at each one, selecting the right key from the giant ring he had hanging from a chain around his waist and then locking the door again behind them.

  To say Stephen was over-stimulated didn’t even begin to capture his feelings; he was perturbed, curious, anxious, and excited all at the same time. What would she be like? Would he be able to get anything useful for his research? Was the secret her mind was concealing something to do with her eminent father or was it something else she was protecting by refusing to communicate with the world around h
er?

  He couldn’t begin to say how much he hoped that her father was at the bottom of it. Just imagine if his research uncovered something about the background motivations of the obsessively private Dr Potter? Or his death: perhaps he’d been ritually slain by a patient who blamed him in some way for his worsening condition. Insight into either of those things would be enough to elicit a coveted invitation to join the British Psychological Society – a requisite step on the route to being granted a professorship – and if he was also able to gain proof of the validity of his hypothesis concerning the treatment for catatonia, then he would indeed be on his way to the top. It all depended on how co-operative Edith Potter would turn out to be. He faltered as his nostrils caught the first whiff of the wards. His whole future depended on the lucidity of a woman whose mind had elected to remove itself from the world. The thought was not a comforting one.

  His escort having abandoned him on the other side of the last door, Stephen walked down the final few yards of the corridor before turning the corner to where, from his knowledge of the layout of other asylums, he assumed the ward office would be. His way was blocked by a ragged clot of patients dressed in the standard shapeless and colourless institutional uniform – over-washed and much-repaired shifts, or trousers and strange baggy shirts. Shaven-headed to ward off lice, dead-eyed and expressionless, both male and female looked alike. He tried to reach the one nearest him with a smile but the young man refused to look at him and continued to bang his body against the wall, his back echoing out a hollow thump with each contact. Stephen wanted to hold onto him and smother him into stopping.

  ‘Don’t mind ’em. They don’t mean nothing. Don’t even know you’re here, most of ’em.’

  An attendant had appeared in the doorway of a room off to Stephen’s right. He had hollow cheeks and a sagging stomach and only his weathered skin and the better cut of his clothes distinguished his appearance from those around him. He raised his voice suddenly: ‘Fuck off back to your wards. You’ll get tea when I’m good and ready to give it to you and not before.’

  Stephen flinched as the man grabbed his elbow and pulled him into the room as a sailor might rescue a drowning man. The office was little more than a broom cupboard furnished with a chair and a gas ring. A red electric bell push glowered at him. There was no natural light – the only window being the one in the corridor wall – a sickly sulphur yellow glow from the bare bulb making it feel as if he was standing under a dying sun.

  ‘Firm but fair; it’s the only language they understand; treat ’em like the children they are and you can’t go wrong. Now, what can I do for you?’

  Stephen longed to be let out and find the nearest pub for a stiff drink but he clutched his briefcase to his chest and explained his agreement with Dr Johns.

  ‘You talked with him you say?’ The attendant looked doubtful. ‘Didn’t know he was in. Can’t say I’d recognise him to look at if I had’ve done. Doesn’t visit this ward often. Nobody comes here unless they have to. I’m off myself tomorrow, you’re lucky to catch me. A couple of months is about all any of us want to spend with this lot.’

  The attendant reached his hand out and slapped his palm on the mucus-streaked glass that separated Stephen from the despair and smells of the corridor. He watched as the young man stopped banging himself against the wall long enough to spit a gob of phlegm towards the sound, then turn and start using his forehead to batter the brickwork. The attendant didn’t even seem to register the brutal change in tone of the impact.

  ‘Come and go as you like. I can’t give you a key, mind. This is the worst ward of the lot. Disturbed. Only place we got bigger loonies is the padded cells but I don’t expect you’ll want to be going there.’

  Stephen resisted responding with the expected shudder even though the implied threat brought back his childhood fear of the dark. He fingered the stethoscope in his pocket for comfort. ‘Were you here when they brought her in?’

  The attendant looked blankly at him. ‘Who? ... Oh, number thirty-two. Wouldn’t know, they all look the same to me. No, wait a minute, I couldn’t have been. I remember she was lying there like a useless lump when I got here.’

  ‘What about the wardress who admitted Edith Potter, can I have a word with her?’

  ‘Not here. Anyone who can get a better job is off quicker than a rat up a drainpipe. If I had any sense I’d be gone myself but then this is the only place that’ll have me.’

  Stephen didn’t think he was joking. He hesitated for a moment before taking a cigarette from the packet the attendant had thrust his way; now seemed as good a time as any to reacquaint himself with the habit. He inhaled a long drag and held the smoke in his lungs for as long as he could to kill the musty traces of decay that had settled around him like a fog. He felt equally drenched in hopelessness. ‘Who takes care of her?’

  ‘She gets a tube stuffed down her throat and gruel poured in her regular like them suffragettes they had banged-up. Then there’s a loony from one of the other wards who comes in and wipes her down with a wet sponge from time to time. And that just about does it. After all, there ain’t nothing else she needs doing; it’s not like she’s going anywhere.’ The attendant laughed through his nostrils. ‘Only way out of here for her is feet first in a box.’

  Stephen didn’t know whether it was the buzz from the Capstan Full Strength or the cruel truth of the words, but he felt queasy and wanted nothing more to do with this oaf who was now pulling faces through the window’s square of grimy glass. Stephen pushed his half-smoked cigarette into the bucket of sand that was being used as a doorstop and adopted the coldest manner he could.

  ‘I just need a few answers from you and then I’ll go and see the patient – ’

  ‘Inmates, we call ’em. Inmates or loonies. Patients sounds as if they might get better and that really would be leading ’em up the garden path, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Is she always insensible?’

  ‘Don’t know. Can’t tell. Her eyes are closed all the time.’

  ‘Has she ever complained of headaches, vomiting, seizures?’

  ‘Never complained of nothing. Never says a dicky bird in fact.’ The attendant yawned and stretched. ‘Right, got to go. Love you and leave you with this lot. Ring the bell if any give you trouble. I’ll be back when I’ve seen to the men ... hold on, though ... wait a minute ... Rumour is she was brought in after a fit. Only thing I do know about her, she’s a thrasher when she wants to be.’ He farted loudly and padded from the room.

  *

  The female ward for the disturbed had as many beds as the cottage hospital where Stephen had done his clinical practice. Twenty-four on either side under barred sash windows that might once have been painted white but were now nicotine yellow. The walls were a dark green laced with scabby patches of flaking plaster up to waist height and, above that, a dirty cream that reminded him of unwashed bandages. Three central lights hardly gave enough illumination to cut through the hanging veils of cigarette smoke, and the air was cold. The stench of unwashed and uncared-for bodies was almost overwhelming.

  Stephen kept his gaze focused on the prostrate form down the end in bed number thirty-two and forced himself to walk slowly and naturally past the women lying, sitting, standing by, or in one case strapped onto, their beds. He couldn’t bear to think of them as someone’s daughters. The word pity didn’t contain enough. He could almost see his way to understanding – if not forgiving – the harsh cruelty of the attendant; the distance of disgust or ridicule would be as much for his own self-protection as anything else.

  A new smell assaulted him as he drew level with a pale young woman cradling a pillow in her arms as though it were a baby. The sickly sweetness of blood. He allowed his eyes to drop for a second and glimpsed a shocking pool of red spreading out to kiss her toes. He only hoped it was menstrual. She certainly didn’t seem to be in pain, and it wasn’t restricting her movements as she shuffled in an erratic pattern that streaked the already stained floorboards. He w
ould find a way of alerting Dr Johns about her when it was time to leave.

  He arrived at the designated bed and could at last concentrate his mind on the task in hand. The woman was about forty years old with a spiky re-growth of hair sprouting from her scalp. Her skin looked clammy and there was dried saliva crusted in the corners of her thin lips. Her breathing was slow and regular, and stayed that way even when he bent over to introduce himself. From the lack of response he knew she’d be unlikely to give either help or hindrance in his assessment. On balance, he was probably relieved about that. The rise and fall of her chest and the tiny bubble of spit oscillating between her lips were the only signs of life.

  Stephen placed his notes on the end of the bed and started his neurological examination, being careful to explain everything he was doing in a low, steady voice: just because she was choosing not to speak didn’t make her an imbecile. He was sure Dr Johns had been quite right about that. He traced his finger in a line from her forearm into her palm. Then he took a pin from his lapel and stabbed the fleshy part of her thumb twice. He listened to her chest with his stethoscope. He lifted the heavy head and felt for any rigidity or stiffness in the neck, and then slipped his fingers around to find the carotid pulse. He ran his hands over her scalp feeling for lesions or unusual bumps, and finished the head examination by gently lifting each eyelid in turn and checking the status and reaction of the pupils.

  For a blissful few minutes, Stephen had been lost in his clinical observations, but once he had paused to jot down a few remarks, his surroundings battered in on him again. He was disgusted to realise that he saw the locked door to the ward as symbolising release for him, rather than imprisonment for them. Where had all his medical detachment gone? He couldn’t allow himself to be so affected by it all; he had a job to do and he had to get on with it even if his natural inclination was to pick up his briefcase and flee. Luckily, only one more test remained. He pulled up the corner of the bedclothes and ran the tip of his sharpened pencil over the sole of one of her grey-skinned feet, observed the muscular response, and then replaced the blanket. Now he could go. He would write his notes up on the train back to London.