Umbrella (14 page)

Marcus’s address in 1941 had been given up grudgingly by Missus Jarvis of Records. There was still a Doctor A. Marcus listed in St John’s Wood, yet Busner hadn’t been convinced he had the right man until, upon apologising for calling on the evening of Good Friday, the pre-war voice on the end of the line said: We Jews also celebrate the death of Christ y’know – an outrageous statement, presumably intended to drive away callers, but which in this instance had the opposite effect. Busner had the unnerving sensation – so clearly did he hear the other man’s voice inside his head – that they were only two hemispheres of the same brain, yoked together by the citywide stretching of the corpus callosum phone line. He’s the one, Busner had thought, and now, having been buzzed in to the mansion block on Abbey Road, he climbs the wide and shallow treads of the stairs to see
a Jew
with a military bearing – he’s definitely the one
. Of course I remember Miss Deerth, Marcus says before anything else. He stands: a tall, stooped figure
Stravinsky ugly
with a pot-belly and a large nose with a broad, flat tip
duck-billed
, his bifocals pushed up high on a balding cranium. I saw her at least monthly, if not more often, for getting on for ten years, why shouldn’t I remember her? There’re members of my immediate family I’ve seen less of – and found less, ah, congenial. In the
twitch
of the
bill
towards a mousy wife who stands in the tenebrous corridor, there is a nasty implication, one confirmed when Marcus ushers Busner on without making an introduction and she withdraws, presumably to a kitchen. They breast smelly vapours of chopped liver and frying potatoes, their feet crackling on a plastic strip laid over the carpet, before entering a
weird chamber
. Can I offer you a sherry? Marcus asks, as he points to one of a pair of club chairs of thirties vintage with burled walnut sides
like the dashboard of the Austin
that face one another over a nest of red lacquered tables. The sherry is Cypriot –
incredibly sweet
. Marcus un-nests one table, a second and then a third to accommodate all of the case notes Busner withdraws from his briefcase. A frosted bulb of high wattage is exposed in a
perverted
way by the scalloped edge of its paper shade and the mean white light strikes Marcus’s face – a face that, as is so often the case with the
ageing male
, has been inefficiently shaved, leaving bristly crests on either cheekbone and along the line of the
resolute
jaw. You have to understand, he says, that it was all too common in the first wave of the epidemic to have one patient correctly diagnosed with encephalitis lethargica and sent to a fever hospital, but for his as it were twin in every symptomatic respect to be diagnosed with dementia praecox and sent to a mental one. This . . .
he dips for his sherry
. . . happened all the time – and it went on into the twenties, when the second wave of the epidemic felled many more of those who it’d been thought had fully recovered. Still, to be fair to the doctors of that era –. Marcus interrupts himself: But why? Why be fair to ’em! Sherry
spittles
on
my precious notes!
Some of ’em were outright bloody pervs – it’s a fact. Marcus shudders. Feelin’ up the patients – having intercourse with ’em if they were biddable, or sedated with opium, hyoscine – henbane even. They gave sex hormones to schizophrenics – I expect they were swallowing them as well! There were sadists too – but then I daresay there still are. Those who take sheer bloody delight in applying restraints – or ordering it done –. The outburst suddenly stops:
Is he guilty himself – or sly?
Of course, Marcus runs on dismissively: these were the exceptions, the bad apples . . .
Or simply touched?
. . .
the vast majority of the staff were as responsible as they could be in the circumstances – if a trifle, um, unempathetic –. She creeps in from the soundlessly opened door, one shoulder raised,
To ward off his blows?
with an oblong blue Tupperware platter upon which are lined up
shield bosses
Ritz crackers, each meticulously coated with chopped liver. She un-nests a still littler red lacquered table, sets down the platter and retreats under the cover of her rigid perm’
is it a wig?
At once there is an avalanche of crumbs that scatters between the cable-knit ridges of the old man’s cardigan as his lips purse about a cracker, his dentures
fiddling in their skin bag
. Help yourself, he says a little grudgingly – then: You cannot be so wet behind the ears that you don’t know that diagnostics were in their infancy. Besides, you can have no idea of the caseload and what a bloody caseload! Even in the early thirties there were still plenty of inmates at the Hatch with TB – and fresh cases coming in every week. They all had to wear a caution card on a ribbon round their necks – yellow for TB, red for diphtheria, green for . . . something else, I forget. I said help yourself. Busner does
mm
. . .
crunchy, creamy, salty – surprisingly
. . .
tasty
. We considered pulmonary TB to be the twin of insanity, so closely were they associated. In my time there I had plenty of colleagues who, I knew for a fact, still believed that one caused the other, although not altogether certain – euch, euch! – which. Marcus makes a conductor’s gesture, the long fingers of both hands spatulate,
duck-billed
and raised up – if he could see himself, Busner thinks, he’d diagnose acute chorea – then brought down once, twice and a third time, so that cracker crumbs and pâté blobs are left
in suspension
, flickering in the bright light – a
meteor shower
the
old alienist
thrusts himself through to spit: I doubt you’ve ever seen a case of lupis vulgaris outside of a textbook . . . and Busner, confronted by nostrils eaten away at by sharp shadows, thinks, I could be looking at one right now, but only confirms: You’re right there. Marcus next asks, More sherry? although this inquiry post-dates the unscrewing, the pouring and the re-sealing of the bottle. Last December, Marcus continues, when we had candles in here and got out the old Tilley lamp, it made me think of my first years at the Hatch – those endless bloody corridors, a gas-bracket only every thirty yards or so. D’you know, there was a neurologist who came up a few times from Queen Square to do some encephalograms with one of the first portable machines – and that was before they’d fully installed electrical light in that mausoleum, so he could scarcely see well enough to take the readings of the electrical activity in the patients’ brains! Marcus has fallen back once more, but now he comes once again
unto the light
: What I’m driving at here is that we’d patients with diphtheria, who’d had typhoid – with dia-bloody-betes, not forgetting . . .
a
duckbill speared into the air
. . . ones poisoned by lead or arsenic or alcohol. All of ’em would exhibit peripheral neuropathy so all of ’em would be given the catch-all: hysteric. Busner says nothing,
Say nothing
, for as it is to the patient, so it is to the physician: if you want them to talk
say
nothing
. . .
Look –
at what, your bill, those crumbs?
– the enkies were merely another group of patients for whom there was neither the conceptual apparatus nor the resources to disentangle the physiological from the psychological. With the enkies one neurologist’s catalepsy was another psychiatrist’s catatonia – but, anyway, it’s progress that’s the real delusion. You, young man, might like to believe that there’s no turning back – the Wasserman test and so forth . . . the replacement of diseased types by disease processes . . . but really this is utter bosh, because, after all, what’ve you got now with your so-called personality disorders – it’s only types all over again, denigrating the poor bloody patient by saying he’s got a bad character. That reminds me of something . . . Marcus pours himself another sherry to aid the process of recall, this time forgetting to impose a refill on his guest . . . there used to be a statue in the grounds, ragged-arsed Victorian kid, the Hatch’s own Madness and Melancholy – y’know, the Bedlam statues – he had a plaque on his plinth that read, Monument to the Unknown Pauper Lunatic. Still there is he, in the shrubbery by the big villa off Eastern Avenue? Busner thinks for a moment, and for some reason decides to spare Marcus the ugly truth. No, he says, no, I believe he was, um, discharged a couple of years ago. I understand the feeling was at the Health Authority that he sent a rather negative message to the patients . . . and Marcus crows, See, see! They got rid of him because he represented the truth: that the patients are poor, and they’re mad – and indeed that many of  ’em are mad precisely because they’re poor. That’s the reality all their borderline-this and histrionic-that balderdash covers up! Busner, however, doesn’t wish to pursue this line, no matter the extent to which
it speaks to my condition.
Instead: Enkies? he queries. They had a nickname? Marcus snorts, Naturally! After all, they were simply another feature of the post-war scene – along with limbless ex-servicemen and economic stagnation. I remember as a young man going to the cinema and seeing newsreels of enkies – quite a lot was made of ’em in their hyperkinetic phase, and you could understand why because they had a strange sort of physical genius, able to make sudden moves that were deft – but zany and prankish, y’know, juggling lots of balls, chucking stuff, leaping and skipping. Marcus, in attempting to illustrate this physical genius, makes a wild sweep of his arm, knocking another table out of the nest and scattering the notes, he juggles
none of them
. He is dismayed by his own clumsiness: I don’t know . . . I daresay you wouldn’t be able to spot it if you saw those films now – I mean, in films from that era everyone looks like a Chaplin or a Buster Keaton – even Lloyd George – something to do with way they hand-cranked the cameras, I s’pose. The
liverish pucks
are all gone – a lot of the sherry too. Busner says, And what of Miss Dearth – as she is now? Marcus spends a while surveying the room, squinting at the
spreading behind
of his young colleague, who, as he gathers the scattered sheets from the carpet, takes in the bookcases densely packed with decades-old professional journals and Roneographed papers that
he’ll probably never pick up again, let alone read
. Well . . . he drawls at last . . . what of her? Busner persists: I mean, you thought it worthwhile putting things in her notes, making your own tentative diagnosis . . . Marcus shrugs. – It was a jape, I s’pose – I mean, it was clear to me that she was post-encephalitic, and I wrote it down partly to twit my colleagues, partly simply to show that I knew . . . perhaps, pah! for posterity . . . perhaps to fish you from the future – I hardly know any more, it was a long time ago. I can tell you one thing, though . . . The notes are all reassembled on one of the red lacquered tables and Marcus cants forward to leaf through them, stopping from time to time to bring one up to his face so he may examine his younger self’s handwriting with lenses clawed down from his forehead . . . It certainly wasn’t with any intention of helping her – there was no cure, she’d no one to look after her that we were aware of. It mattered not one jot which sort of institution she was confined to, given how profoundly ill she was – and you say still is? Busner assents, then outlines the condition of his patient: her long periods of catatonia interspersed by manic episodes and still stranger phases when – he screws his features into an approximation of Audrey Dearth’s crises of
fixed regard –
She has her attention, her gaze . . . compelled by some invisible object up above her and to the left. Marcus is himself compelled. – Yes, yes . . . His watery eyes fix on a threadbare pelmet, its flaking brocade indistinguishable from smears of cobweb . . . this is entirely typical of post-encephalitics. Still – he snaps out of it – I’m surprised she’s still with us, she must be very elderly by now. You might’ve thought the enkies would’ve been altogether worn down by their illness, plenty died in all the usual ways, of course, but I also recognised that there were these others – like her – who were almost preserved by the sleepy-sickness, as if it were a kind of suspended animation. Sometimes . . . but this is fanciful! Busner almost shouts: No, no! It’s not fanciful at all – how could anything connected with these astonishing patients be fanciful? So please – please give full rein to your thoughts! He has, he realises, succumbed to the old man’s very