The doctor told Edie it could be on account of the shells. ‘A bursting shell creates a vacuum, and when the air rushes back in it disturbs the cerebro-spinal fluid.’ He told her this as though he were breaking good news, as though he had just won a large sum of money. He grinned from a mouth jammed too full of teeth.
Edie tried not to stare. His mouth reminded her of an ill-kept graveyard, tombstones untended and falling over. She stared at the top button of his white coat. She still had a year and a half left at Medical School and felt flattered that he spoke as a colleague. After all, how did his enthusiasms differ from her own? Yet Dr Fisher’s lack of tact in his diagnosis of her brother seemed almost indecent, or as Mrs Newman would have said, it indicated a certain lack of breeding.
‘Geoffrey,’ he said, ‘call me Geoffrey.’ He looked into her eyes, shook her hand again, holding it longer than necessary. ‘There are, of course, other possible explanations,’ he said as she extricated her fingers. ‘French and German neurologists don’t believe it’s caused by organic trauma any more. They say shell-shock’s a functional nervous disorder arising in a premorbid personality . . .’
Premorbid personality. Edie had never thought to apply such principles to her family.
‘The symptoms,’ Dr Fisher continued, ‘are actually the same as for traumatic neurasthenia.’ He smiled. ‘What the common man might call hysteria.
‘The latest opinion is that any circumstance, including shells exploding, might bring about onset. But the predisposing cause is fear combined with gradual psychic exhaustion . . . of course, here we are dealing with a neuropathic individual.’
Edie thought about Robbie. Neuropathic?
‘So what is the course of treatment?’ she asked.
‘Encouragement, persuasion, fresh air, exercise, nutritious food, work – yes, it’s the work that’s important, that’s what Dr King would say . . .’
Dr Truby King. After Mrs Newman’s ravings, it was a disappointment the superintendent was away in England. Edie wanted to see for herself, to compare the myth with the man. Now she would have to wait until their class visit next year. She’d heard Dr King would discuss cases of insanity, even parade his favourite patient – the infamous Lionel Terry. Apparently, Terry would put on quite a show. With guards on either side, he’d give a speech, recite poetry and have students calling for more, wondering what he was in for.
‘. . . we’ll get Robert out in the garden,’ Dr Fisher – Geoffrey – was saying, ‘digging round the rhododendrons, tending the beans and lettuces.’ He grinned. ‘By the time he gets out of here, he’ll be a right Chinaman, you’ll see. Come, I’ll take you to him.’
He was sitting in an armchair, staring out the windows onto the garden. Even with sunlight falling across his face, his thin body, he looked cold. He had a greyish pallor that seemed inconsistent with the brightness of his hair, his freckled skin. And his clothes fell over him as if loosely wrapping a collection of bones.
Edie spoke his name, but he did not turn his head. ‘Robbie,’ she said, her voice an echo. She pulled up a chair and sat down beside him, searched his face, looked into the opaque blue of his eyes.
Even after Dr Fisher’s descriptive lecture, it was a shock. Robbie had always been so annoying, so full of himself. She remembered a game they played after dinner, their father conjuring words like a magician. She should have loved it. After all, she was the one who got up quietly in the night, took the dilapidated dictionary down from the shelf and read it by flickering candlelight. But she could see her father’s impatience – letters and words already forming on his tongue, archaic derivations, obscure meanings ready to leap in ambush from behind his waxed moustache – and even as a word and its meanings rose in her throat, she’d swallow them down again, almost crying for the lack of something amusing to say.
It was Robbie who loved the game. Robbie and their father. She would watch the delight in her father’s eyes at Robbie’s stupid responses, the way he praised him, laughed with him, played with him, and she’d hope and pray that her brother would die or be crippled or simply disappear, that her father would forget he ever existed, that now he’d tell her his jokes and outrageous tales, make her toys from balsa wood and empty cotton reels, take her to cricket at the Basin.
Even after their father died, Edie still resented her brother. Their mother fussed over him, worried about him, fought with him. He was the braggart, the larrikin, by his loudness the centre of the known world.
She looked into Robbie’s blank eyes. He was like the leather cover she’d wiped dirt from, wrapped in tissue and hidden at the bottom of her drawer – all its words ripped out.
She took Robbie’s hand, but he did not respond.
This was what she studied. Life. Medical disorders. Death.
The day before at the anatomy museum she’d studied wax models of the human embryo. One had a round, protruding forehead, wide-set eyes, a squat nose, and an open mouth with tongue poking out. The bulbous face reminded her of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on – some mythical beast, something not human . . .
She pressed Robbie’s hand. He turned, but there was no flicker of recognition.
She had worked at the hospital and seen horrific injuries and diseases. During the flu epidemic she’d watched patients spit pus and phlegm, greyish-white and bloody; watched them drown in their own secretions. They lost their hair, fingernails, toenails; lapsed into coma or delirium. Great strapping lads and men in their prime, boys like George McAlister, the varsity wrestling champ, the suddenness of it all, his skin translating to deep crimson then, just one look away, and he’d turned, in an instant, jet-black . . .
And yet this was worse. This was her punishment – her prayer had been answered.
She stared at Robbie and did not know what to say. Realised she didn’t know what she’d say even if he were well.
She’d stood on the wharf waving goodbye to Dr Bennett, just as she knew her mother must have done to Robbie. What had this war done? Dr Bennett had risked everything serving the wounded in Serbia. Bombs landed beside her, she contracted malaria, her beloved brother died at Passchendaele . . .
Edie held Robbie’s hand. She opened her mouth, let words stumble out.