The Sleep Room (11 page)

Maitland waved away my apology with his hand. I felt relieved – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say absolved. I should have known better than to accept a dispensation granted with such casual disregard. I should have been less easily persuaded.

That evening I went to see Michael Chapman. He was a little agitated, but I managed to engage him in some casual talk about chess and this seemed to calm him down. For several minutes he spoke in a measured way about diversionary and eliminatory sacrifices. I told Nurse Page to look in on him and to call me if he became restless again. ‘Yes, doctor,’ she replied, while emptying a jar of pills into a silver kidney dish.

On leaving the men’s ward I descended the stairs to the sleep room. As soon as I opened the door, I was aware of the sound of someone crying. The nurse seated behind the desk immediately turned away from me so that she was facing in the opposite direction. I could tell by the fullness of her figure and the colour of her hair that it was Mary Williams. Even though she was making valiant efforts to stifle her sobs, the acoustic properties of the basement amplified each gasp and sniff. I didn’t want to intrude and cause the girl embarrassment but, equally, I didn’t want to appear callous or indifferent. After a momentary hesitation, I decided that it would be wrong to abandon her when she was exhibiting such obvious signs of distress. Moreover, I was disinclined to enact a shoddy pantomime, however well intentioned, of having just remembered something very important that would necessitate my prompt withdrawal.

I crossed the floor and halted in the halo of half-light emanating from the desk lamp. Mary did not acknowledge my approach. She remained very still, although her shoulders, which were broad for a woman of her height, shook intermittently.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. She did not respond. ‘Mary?’

I heard her swallow and she shifted on her chair. ‘They won’t leave me alone.’ Her voice had a shrill, hysterical quality.

An atavistic instinct made me peer uneasily into the darkness. ‘Who won’t?’

I touched her shoulder and she turned around. Her eyes were moist and unfocused. Indeed, she looked dazed and there was a lengthy interlude before she registered my presence: ‘Dr Richardson.’ Her intonation was dull; even so, a gentle ascending gradient introduced a suggestion of uncertainty.

‘Mary,’ I repeated. ‘Who won’t leave you alone?’

She took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Richardson. I thought . . .’ She stopped, quite suddenly, and her compressed expression betrayed the exercise of mental effort. ‘I must have fallen asleep.’ Her face went blank and she took another deep breath. ‘I had a nightmare.’

‘I see.’

On the desk was a time-worn volume bound in black leather. Mary saw my interest and quickly picked it up and placed it in one of the drawers. She then made a show of tidying some other objects: pens, a paperweight, a ruler. Her bungled attempt at concealment was so clumsy, so misconceived, that I found myself pitying the poor girl. The embossed gilt cross on the black leather cover, faded, but still conspicuously reflective, strongly suggested that Mary had been reading a book of prayers.

‘Are you all right now?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Mary replied. ‘I’m sorry.’

I could sense that she wanted to ask me something and it was easy to guess what that might be. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, anticipating the cause of her anxiety. ‘I won’t tell Sister Jenkins.’ Mary sighed with relief. I picked up a formulary and pretended to study the index. ‘It must have been a very bad dream.’ I heard Mary fidgeting before she replied. ‘Yes. It was very bad.’ Then she stood up with peremptory haste and marched over to the beds. Clearly, she did not wish to continue our conversation.

Marian Powell groaned and Mary was at the patient’s bedside in an instant. I watched as Mary reversed Marian’s pillow, then gathered the loose sheets and tucked them beneath the mattress.

Why, I asked myself, did Mary think it was necessary to bring a prayer book with her whenever she was on night duty in the sleep room? She did not know that I had glimpsed the prayer book on two previous occasions. She was a simple soul and possessed no talent for deception.

Dr Peter Bevington

Oak Lodge

Nr Biggleswade

Bedfordshire

30th April 1955

Dr Hugh Maitland

The Braxton Club

Carlton House Terrace

St James’s

City of Westminster

London SW1

Dear Hugh,

Forgive me for writing to you at the club regarding a professional matter, but it feels more appropriate given the circumstances. A tricky situation has arisen and I think you might be able to help. I won’t supply you with all the details now; however, if after reading this letter, you can see a way forward, then do give me a call. Elspeth and I will be going to Norfolk for a few weeks with Moira and Geoffrey, but I’ll be back in harness on Monday the 16th of May.

We have a patient at Oak Lodge known as Celia Jones. The reason why I say ‘known as’ will become apparent shortly. She is a lady, probably in her mid-fifties, who has been in a stuporous state for over a decade. Since my appointment last September, she hasn’t uttered a single word. She rarely moves and occasionally demonstrates waxy rigidity.

Nevertheless, she is able to eat, particularly so when her appetite has been stimulated with insulin (5 soluble units). Abdominal scarring suggests that she once had a Caesarian section. I’ve tried pretty much everything with this woman. Benzedrine, Drinamyl, 3 courses of ECT, even metrazol, without any effect.

Now, here’s the rub: it turns out that a patient called Celia Jones was killed when St Dunstan’s Asylum in Stepney was destroyed by the Luftwaffe back in January 1941. I worked there once and have fond memories of the Superintendent, a Dr Wilson, who sported bushy side-whiskers and dressed like an eminent Victorian. All of the staff were killed, including dear old Wilson. As you can imagine, things must have been pretty chaotic that night, and what with survivors being shunted here, there and everywhere, I suppose it isn’t surprising that errors were made. All the documentation must have been lost in the fire. Anyway, I have very good reason to believe that the patient I have hitherto called Celia Jones is in fact an unknown person, who was mistaken for the real Celia Jones after the tragedy. If her stuporous state persists, then her true identity will remain a complete mystery – and I can’t abide mysteries: this one more so than others, because even a negligible improvement in her condition would probably result in her being able to tell us who she really is. Any suggestions?

I hope that you and Daphne are both well. Elspeth sends her love.

Kind regards

Peter

Dr Peter Bevington

Director of Services

PS I heard you on the wireless last night. I’m so glad you showed that couch merchant up to be such a fraud. You could hear the panic in his voice. Personifications in the unconscious! What clap-trap! I thought Freudians were bad enough but these Jungians really take the biscuit!

7

The heath seemed to darken earlier with each passing day. Flocks of birds rose up from the grazing marsh, creating living whirlpools that unravelled in a southerly direction, the trailblazers peeling off shadowy pennants of concentrated activity. The softly undulating horizon, hazy and indistinct, was tinged with russet and magenta, like pigment diffusing through the saturated paper of a watercolour.

As the new season advanced, Jane and I continued to meet in secret. She would creep up to my rooms at least twice a week, and on one occasion we dared to spend an entire Sunday together.

We were lying in bed, enjoying the lazy, self-satisfied torpor of exhausted lovers, and talking in short, unconnected bursts, when I mentioned the patients in the sleep room and how I wanted to know more about their histories. Jane rolled over on to her front and looked at me with her exquisite green eyes: some mascara had fallen onto one of her cheeks and she was looking irresistibly sluttish.

‘Interesting,’ she said, maintaining her steady gaze.

‘What is?’

‘That you should be so curious about the lives of others.’

‘I’m a psychiatrist,’ I laughed.

‘Yes, but . . .’ She reached out for her packet of cigarettes. After lighting one she placed the filtered tip between my parted lips. ‘You know a lot about me, but I don’t know anything about you.’

‘Well, there’s not a lot to tell.’

‘You never mention your parents, your family.’

‘Girlfriends?’ I cut in, playfully.

She snatched the cigarette out of my mouth, inhaled deeply and blew smoke in my face. ‘Not necessarily.’

‘All right, what do you want to hear?’

‘The usual things – the things that people talk about when they’re getting to know each other.’

‘I think we’re pretty well acquainted already,’ I teased, squeezing her buttocks. ‘Don’t you?’

She looked upwards and assumed an expression of mock exasperation. ‘You know exactly what I mean!’

‘And I thought I was doing you a favour.’

‘A favour?’

‘Sparing you the detail. It’s pretty boring stuff.’

‘I don’t care if it’s boring.’

‘You’re just saying that.’

‘No, I’m not.’

I sighed. ‘Very well then. If you insist. But when I’m done, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ She offered me the cigarette again and I took a few more drags. After collecting my thoughts, I said, ‘To begin at the beginning.’ I was quoting the first line of a play that I had listened to on the wireless. For some reason it had become lodged in my memory. I repeated it again, ‘To begin at the beginning.’ Jane knocked my ribs, as she might a gramophone player when the record on the turntable gets stuck. ‘I don’t remember a great deal about growing up, but I think I was a reasonably happy child. We lived in Canterbury, where my father was a GP. He was well-liked by his patients but he could be rather reserved at home: not cold exactly, but not terribly demonstrative either. I don’t think he was unusual in this respect. It’s just the way men of his generation are. What else can I say about him? He’s a decent man, dependable, hardworking – a safe pair of hands. My mother is a very different kind of person. Lively, capricious, a little on the nervy side perhaps, with a dry sense of humour that often escapes my father’s notice: they’re an unlikely match really. She left school when she was only fourteen. Even so, she’s a great reader and passionate about poetry. She used to make me rote-learn screeds of Keats and Coleridge: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree . . .” and so on. I haven’t forgotten a word. When the war ended my mother and father moved to Bournemouth. My father still practises.’

‘Do you see them very often?’

‘Not as much as I should.’

‘Don’t you get on?’

‘They’re perfectly pleasant. It’s just . . .’

‘What?’

‘There’s so little time.’

‘Would I like your mother?’

‘Yes. Actually she’s quite amusing. Some would say eccentric, and getting more so as she gets older.’

I talked about school, Cambridge, national service and Edinburgh. As I spoke, I became acutely aware of the fact that my rather studious life was, by and large, embarrassingly void of significant incident, and it occurred to me that I was probably more like my earnest, reliable father than I cared to acknowledge. I omitted mention of any girlfriends and Jane didn’t press me to make any revelations – which was refreshing. My former lovers were positively obsessed with the subject. Even Sheila had displayed some curiosity, albeit of an oddly detached variety.

When I had finished, I folded my arms and said, ‘There. Are you satisfied now?’

Jane leaned forward and kissed me.

Then after a lengthy pause she said, ‘You don’t find it easy talking about yourself, do you?’

She was more perceptive than I had given her credit for.

‘Is it such a bad thing,’ I smiled, somewhat insincerely, ‘to be interested in other people – other lives – rather than your own?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I suppose not.’

Before she could ask me any more questions, I returned her kiss, and continued kissing her until our mutual excitement made further conversation impossible.

When night fell I made sure that nobody was on the stairs, or in the vestibule, and signalled for Jane to follow. She pecked me on the cheek and tiptoed to the front door. A moment later, she was gone.

Although Jane continued to occupy my thoughts for much of the time, I was still troubled by what had happened when we had spent our first night together. The shadowy figure that I had observed blocking the moonlight could be reasoned away with the help of a medical dictionary, but the sound of twelve volumes hitting the floor with great force (which both of us had heard) and the circumstantial evidence of the broken spines could not be so easily dismissed. There seemed to be no natural explanation.

I knew all about poltergeists or ‘noisy spirits’. Their defining feature was the power to move physical objects. I had read about them with naive relish and uncritical enthusiasm as a boy; however, I had never expected in my wildest imaginings to experience such phenomena myself.

As I tentatively opened my mind to possibilities beyond the remit of science, I found myself recalling a number of perplexing incidents that I had hitherto ignored, or more accurately failed to give proper consideration: the sigh that I had heard in the bathroom, the biro that had dropped on the landing, Mary Williams’s odd behaviour, and the two wedding rings – one having vanished, the other having suddenly appeared. I was even prepared to reconsider Michael Chapman’s claim that his bed moved.

The idea of the dead returning to annoy the living by performing small acts of mischief had always struck me as being faintly absurd. Even so, I was obliged to reserve judgement because, no matter how hard I tried, I could not think of a plausible alternative that would account equally well for all of the facts. To my surprise, arriving at this conclusion was accompanied by a sense of relief. It was as though I had been inadvertently (or dare I say unconsciously) resisting a supernatural explanation, and that maintaining this attitude had been effortful. At the same time, I was not willing to abandon logic altogether. I had generated a hypothesis and now, by rights, it should be tested. Undertaking some sort of experiment was, of course, out of the question, but I could still gather information and look for meaningful connections.