Fatal Inheritance (20 page)

I left the garden at once, and circled the building back towards the front entrance with as tranquil and confident an air as I could muster. From what I had seen, the giant foyer with its towering arched ceiling contained no official person in the role of watchdog; this was not necessary, as visitors were accompanied up to the house from the gate, and led immediately to their proper destination. My best hope, then, was to behave as normally as possible and thus remain unnoticed. With a firm, unhesitant gesture, I pushed open the great entrance door, went in, crossed the foyer and tried to take the same path along which I had been led so speedily less than an hour before.

On I went, through a veritable maze of corridors, trying to recognise this or that landmark, occasionally returning the way I had come to search for a more familiar scene. I crossed a few busy employees, carrying domestic items or leading patients, but they ignored me and I ignored them, and kept moving along rather quickly as though I had a specific task to accomplish – which, indeed, I did.

Thanks to my observation of the route we had taken previously, I did eventually manage to arrive at a door I recognised as being the suite attributed to Dr Richards. There was no one in the hall, and, as slowly and silently as possible, I turned the knob and gave the gentlest possible push at the door, not to open it even by the smallest crack, but simply to test whether or not it was locked. Finding that it yielded, I released the knob, moved a little way down the hall to the top of a staircase, and concealed myself behind the heavy drapes that hung in front of all the corridor windows.

Ideally, what I wanted was a moment in which I could be certain that Dr Richards was alone inside. If he should be out of the office, I feared he would probably lock the door, and if a patient or someone else were inside with him, my plan would certainly fail. I waited and observed and watched until my legs were full of pins-and-needles.

Now and then, someone passed down the corridor in one direction or the other. Through a crack in the curtains I saw people being escorted away, and knew that visiting hours had come to an end. A little later, a nurse arrived with a patient who continually dragged her fingers through her hair, pulling and deforming the neat bun which the nurse pinned back for her repeatedly with perfunctory remonstrances of ‘Now, dear’. These two stopped at the door of the doctor’s ante-room, and the nurse opened it, went in, and knocked gently on the inner door. A murmured word, a moment’s wait, and the doctor ushered a gentleman patient out into the nurse’s capable hands and led the woman with her hair now half-falling down one side of her face into his inner room. He closed the door and the nurse went away with the gentleman, who was mumbling in a ceaseless monotone. I waited for twenty minutes or half an hour.

At the end of this time, my hopes were raised by the sight of a tea-trolley being wheeled along the corridor: the long rows of white cups with little dishes next to each containing scones were probably for the patients, but surely the doctors were also soon to be served. And indeed, the nurse returned, the lady with her hair now completely down around her face and shoulders came out and went away with her, and a minute later a little maid – not Polly, unfortunately, but some other similar little village Molly or Sally – arrived carrying a beautifully decked tea tray laden with much nicer things than what the patients were having. Having delivered this, she departed, and I knew that the doctor was alone, and that my moment was at hand.

I gave myself three minutes just to let the good doctor get properly relaxed, then set up a sudden and tremendous cry of ‘Dr Richards! Oh, please! Oh, Dr Richards, come quickly! Please!’ I was gratified to see him come rushing out of his office, hasten down the hall in the direction of my voice, and hurry down the steps near the top of which I was concealed.

I almost flew down the hall in the direction of his rooms; within a mere three or four seconds I was standing inside his private office, which was filled with the pleasant aroma of buttered toast. Another second and I was pulling open the drawer marked ‘K’ that my eyes had already accurately located at my earlier visit. Five seconds later my trembling fingers found and snatched out the file marked ‘Krieger’, and I clapped the drawer shut. I could not hurry away now without risking crossing the doctor’s path as he returned, but the risk of discovery would be too great if I remained in the room; the ante-room was the least dangerous place, and I was there in the flash of an instant, clutching my prize, lying at full length behind the settee, and trying not to breathe.

There were calls and voices from outside, and the doctor returned, flushed and displeased to judge by his breathing, and stalked into his room to finish his tea. Alas, he did not quite close the door of his private office, thereby foiling my plans for immediate escape. I remained perfectly still, and occupied myself in hoping that this obstacle might lead to some interesting event, such as a visit from Lydia Krieger. But nothing so exciting occurred, and the next person to enter was no other than little Molly-Sally, on her way to collect the tea tray. With great good manners, she balanced it on one arm while pulling the doctor’s door shut behind her, and then left, also closing the door to the hall. Instantly I was on my feet and following her, hoping that the doctor would attribute the double sound of the door, if he could hear it at all, to the struggle of the young girl with a heavy tray. I had no choice but to follow her straight out – there was no time to check whether anyone else was standing in the hall right then, but as a matter of fact the coast was clear – and off I went down the stairs, along the corridors and right out the front door, happily carrying my heavy prize concealed beneath my shawl.

Now came the difficulty of getting out of the grounds. I was afraid that the porter might recognise me from earlier, especially if he had noticed my disappearance (or rather, my failure to have properly disappeared) and raised the alarm. It was awkward, and I could not think of anything better to do than to insert myself into a group of four or five working women, probably daily assistants from the village hired to aid with the cooking, cleaning or caring for patients, by the simple expedient of asking them if they could be so kind as to show me the way to the train station. I made sure to engage them in conversation so as to look as much as possible like part of their group, and in return they were very friendly. We all exited together as easily as possible; indeed, it was quite dark outside by this time, being after five o’clock, and the porter didn’t notice a thing. I allowed myself the luxury of a tremendous sigh of relief accompanied by some nervous giggles, hurried to the train station, purchased a ticket, and leapt upon the first train to London with a feeling of unspeakable triumph. I may not have been able to talk to Lydia, but I believed I had seen her – and I had obtained a tremendously important set of documents, and played a trick on the obnoxious doctor to boot!

I settled back into my seat, extracted the thick folder of documents from the folds of my shawl, and began to examine the contents. I read, and I read, and I read.

But if I had expected a revelation – and I realised now that clearly I had – I was destined to be sorely disappointed.

According to her medical records, Lydia had been pilled and syruped, hypnotised and lectured, subjected to innumerable constraints, told to speak while writing and write while speaking, to write with her left hand, to write copying what the doctor wrote, to write with her hand guided by the doctor and a multitude of even more peculiar, irrelevant and unfortunate experiments, all of which had met with total failure and left her condition quite unchanged. As time passed, the doctor’s notes became briefer, his experiments rarer, and, above all, the expression of his inability to comprehend her meaning moved over the years from the description ‘indicative of internal logic incommunicable to outside world’ in the early stages to ‘incomprehensible’ and even ‘ranting’ towards the end.

By an unfortunate psychological mechanism which I could not rationally explain to myself, my contempt for Dr Richards’ failure was not in the least diminished by the fact that, had I been shown the many dozens of pages covered in Lydia Krieger’s characteristic flowing handwriting under any ordinary circumstances, I might well have been capable of using the very same words to describe their contents myself. I read them through, and read them through again, then shook my head.

Their contents were utterly beyond me. Dr Bernstein had believed that a repressed secret was forcing its way forth between the lines, but I could not perceive any trace of such a thing. Her writings strongly resembled the samples I had read in Dr Bernstein’s book: they expressed a kind of religious obsession with neurotic repetitiveness, and I could see nothing more. No strange incoherencies marred their natural flow. I shuffled them all back into the stolen file, and sat back, thinking.

If there was any sense at all to be made of this nonsense, any clue to the mystery of Lydia’s secret and Sebastian’s death, there was only one person in the world who could help me find it. And by asking for his help, I would also be granting him his heart’s desire.

When the train pulled into London, I immediately went and sent an urgent telegram to Dr Bernstein at his Basel home. I had really had enough of trains, and would have been delighted to hear that I was never to see another one, but it was not to be. Twenty-four hours later I was spending yet another night trundled and jumbled in yet another sleeping-car, on my way to yet another destination, in the search for the elusive truth.

The doctor rose, struck a match, and lit another candle, then pushed the brass candlestick closer to the papers that lay scattered over his desk. I sat near him in his study, my eyes heavy, but any idea of sleep was out of the question, for the doctor was buzzing about like a frantic bee. Shock, anger, joy, indignation, fury, and a feverish desire to understand crowded together to occupy all of his possibilities of expression, so that the poor man felt the need to slap his head, utter sighs and groans, take dancing steps about the room, pronounce imprecations and evolve yet another new theory, all at the same time. We had been there for hours, and the manservant who had brought us tea and then prepared a light dinner had long since gone to bed, but Dr Bernstein’s state would not admit of his stopping for a moment. It was a Sunday, and he had had no patients, and our work and discussion had been going on for hours, interrupted only by meals over which he asked me ever more questions, and reminisced with increasing openness about the past.

Alerted by my telegram – in which, in order to be certain of his immediate reaction, I had included the words ‘Lydia Krieger found’ – the doctor had come to fetch me at the Basel railway station, and the sight of the emotion painted upon his bearded face as he recognised me erased any impulse I might normally have had to respect the social conventions by preceding the moment of revelation with lengthy formal greetings. Instead, I lifted up the heavy file that I had been clutching almost without stopping for the last forty-eight hours, and plunked it straight into his arms with a feeling of relief at thus transferring an insoluble problem to one more competent than myself. He opened it, glanced at the first pages, and then looked at me. We had not yet exchanged a single word, and for several moments, he seemed unable to pronounce one. When he finally did, it was simply: ‘Come.’

Luncheon, to say the least, was a tense affair. His eyes burning, the doctor questioned me in detail, breaking off abruptly every time his manservant entered to bring or remove the dishes. I told him all I knew and all I had done, and had the pleasure of seeing him smile for the first time as I somewhat blushingly explained about the unusual use I had made of Dr Richards’ settee. I hid nothing from him, at least not a single fact or incident. I kept to myself only certain suspicions. It was his turn to question me for the present. My own time for questioning would come, and I should know to seize the opportunity when it was ripe.

The meal over, we settled into the doctor’s study, coffee was brought in, and we remained undisturbed. The doctor took out the file and spread the papers over the desk.

Being a physician, Dr Bernstein began his examination of the contents with the document I had considered last; the medical report. Of this, there was only one entry of significant interest, which was the very first one, established by a certain Dr Enderson on the day of Lydia’s arrival at Holloway. The moment I had read it, I had felt a tingling down my spine, for it confirmed at least one of my suspicions.

One sentence had leapt out at me in letters of flame:
the birth of the child
! So I was right, I had to be right: the age was the same, the resemblance was there: the child could not be anyone but Sebastian. He was, as I had guessed, and somehow in the depths of my soul even hoped, Lydia’s son.

I waited for Dr Bernstein to say something about it, any remark at all, any hypothesis about what might have happened when Lydia left Basel, but he did not mention it, and his face was inscrutable. I bided my time, and he continued to read through the documents one by one, handing each one to me as he finished. I had glanced through the file on the train to London, of course, and read it all in greater detail during the long, long trip across the continent, but it was interesting to read it again together with him, for he kept up a running commentary on the purely medical aspects of the case that were outlined on each page; every minor illness, every drug and medicine that Lydia had ever received merited his scathing commentary, and on the whole the experience was an enlightening one even if he did avoid precisely the points that most interested me. The doctor was in no hurry. He did not rush through the pages as I had done; he read them one by one in detail, frowned often, stopped occasionally to look things up in certain large medical books he kept upon his shelves, and finally concluded his examination of the medical report with a fiery diatribe against institutional treatment in general, during which he actually took notes of his own words, probably in view of some future written complaint! Then, perhaps in deference to my nationality, he peered at the clock which was ticking loudly upon the mantelpiece and rang for the manservant to bring us tea and biscuits on a tray, draw the curtains, and light the lamps, for it was already growing dusky outside. Setting aside the large sheaf of Lydia’s own writings for later, he now pulled towards him the thick notebook in which Dr Richards had recorded the efforts of five years of psychiatric treatment. The file did not contain the records of the efforts of the doctors who had held the position before his arrival at Holloway in the month of September of 1895. They must have been archived in some separate place; presumably they were too bulky to fit inside. After all, most patients did not spend twenty-five years receiving treatment, and the square files had been constructed of a limited thickness. Thus, Lydia’s file contained nothing but the records of the four and half years during which Dr Richards attended her.

During the first few weeks, Dr Richards’ comments upon the writing samples that emerged from Lydia’s pen expressed strenuous efforts at comprehension, accompanied by somewhat forced analyses. As Dr Bernstein read them, he grunted, shook his head, slapped his forehead in deep irritation and occasionally uttered smothered imprecations. I had experienced some of the same reactions upon reading them, although I did not have the professional qualifications that he did. But Dr Richards’ approach struck me as unconvincing, unlikely, and, in fact, altogether unbelievable. This feeling was strengthened, I admit, by my secret rationalistic suspicion that Lydia’s madness was simply too mad to be meaningful, and no analysis could possibly make sense of it. With all my heart I desired Dr Bernstein to prove me wrong, to discover something, to convince me, yet I was conscious of a pinch of fear that the evening might end in disappointment, either because he might find nothing, or worse, because he might enter into some slippery psychological terrain upon which I could not follow him, interpreting weird occult meanings into Lydia’s words that I could not perceive myself at all.

Dr Richards’ overbearing personality shone through his writings, exasperating me even though I knew that he was simply and conscientiously doing his professional job.
‘The previous doctors have made a mess of the case’
was the very first phrase he had consigned to the notebook devoted to the study of his recalcitrant patient.

‘He does seem to have some idea of why Lydia began to write so strangely,’ I said, after reading this page together with the doctor. We were both leaning over his broad oak desk covered with a layer of dark green leather, and the page laid open upon it was bathed in the mellow circle of light from the lamp. A very faint but not disagreeable odour of cigar smoke clung to the doctor’s jacket. Together, we read through Dr Richards’ efforts with Lydia over the following weeks and months, which consisted largely in applications of recently developed methods of dream-analysis and free association.

‘He is missing the main point,’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘All these suppositions are well and good, but he cannot hope to find the answer through attempts at direct analysis such as these!’ He turned another page, then half-covered it with his hand. Then he glanced at me, and took his hand away.

‘Hum,’ he mumbled, ‘please recall that a doctor’s job involves a certain necessary intimacy.’ I smiled and nodded gently. I had already read the entire text and seen everything embarrassing that there might be to see, as, in fact, he might have known had he taken a moment to think about it. But there seemed no point in saying so; his delicacy was kindly meant.

By two months after the beginning of his treatment, Dr Richards was displaying frustration with the case, leading him to explore the domains that Dr Bernstein feared might embarrass me. But he needn’t have worried; if anything, I found all the commentaries disappointingly tame.