Fascination (25 page)

She rode in the omnibus down to St Pauli, trying not to think of
the floor manager’s expression as he had asked her to leave. To distract herself she unrolled the sheet music Hannes had given her. Hannes had been kind, decent, he had remembered her. All written by hand, too, the little squiggly black scratching of the notes. How can they play from that? His brother had been polite also. She read the title slowly, her lips moving as she formed the words: ‘Fantasia on a Favourite Waltz’. A souvenir. A nice gesture. She said it out loud, softly: ‘
Phantasie über einem beliebten Walzer
’… There were some decent people about in the world, not many, but a few of them. Hannes. It was a good name, that, short for Johannes… Yes, maybe that was what she should call the baby. Hannes Billroth.

She was still musing on the baby’s new name when she arrived at Herr Flügel’s
Lokal
. Hannes Billroth – it had a ring to it. It was only when she took her position by the bar, and the pianist started thundering away noisily at a boring old polka, that she realized she had left the music behind her in the horse tram. It made her angry at her carelessness, for a moment or two, before she asked herself what she could possibly do with such a manuscript anyway, and certainly that ape pounding away on the piano wouldn’t have been able to make head nor tail of it, not something so delicate and beautiful.
Phantasie über einem beliebten Walzer
. I ask you. Head nor tail.

Patient 39 was admitted this morning. I put him in the ground-floor room of the Belvedere wing, the one that gives on to the herb garden. I didn’t see him myself, but the nurses said he was comfortable and that he ate a little treacle sponge and custard. We had been told that he had begun to speak since emerging from the coma, but he didn’t utter a word.

The facts as we know them. Patient 39: male, early twenties. Discovered naked and unconscious after the heavy fighting at Villers-Bocage, near Caen, on June 12 1944. No identification was found on him, but he is most likely British, judging from his dental work, though it’s conceivable he could be German. He showed general scorching and contusions over his body. His feet were badly burned and his left side over the ribs, second degree, and there were copious shrapnel wounds on his back and buttocks. According to the preliminary records seventy-four men were reported killed in action that day in the battle at Villers-Bocage, sixteen are missing believed killed, thirty-four bodies remain to be identified (owing to the ferocity of heat in the burned-out tanks). Enemy casualties are not known. We must also consider the possibility of baled-out aircrew, USAF and RAF. But the short odds are that he is a British soldier.

The wound. A piece of shrapnel entered the right parieto-occipital area of the cranium and lodged there. Resulting inflammation caused adhesions of the brain to the meninges and engendered further trauma to adjacent tissues including the left hemisphere of the brain. The shrapnel was removed in the field hospital but the inflammation has provoked irreversible damage to posterior regions of the left and right hemispheres. The scar tissue
has stimulated a partial atrophy of the medulla. Prognosis? Very difficult.

I saw Patient 39 today for the first time. He was sitting in the herb garden in his dressing gown staring intently at a clump of tall blue salvia that was shifting sinuously to and fro in the gentle breeze. I picked a flower and handed it to him. He tilted his head noticeably in order to focus on it (there must be problems with vision). I said the word ‘flower’ to him several times. When I tried to take it away from him he would not let me.

He looks very young, does Patient 39, no more than a boy. The scarring on the back of his head is intensive, very buckled. I told the nurses that we could let his hair grow back, now.

Patient 39 recognizes me, it seems. He canted his head and smiled when I came into the room today. He is eating normally (but only with a spoon) and his bowel movements are regular. His burns have healed; the wounds in his back also. From the neck down he is a healthy young man.

I placed a paper and pencil in front of him to see if he would make any mark or sign. He picked up the pencil and rolled it in his fingers as if he were enjoying the friction of its hexagonal shape on the palps of his fingertips. He looked at me and said one word: ‘flower’. This was the first word he had spoken since he arrived here.

I showed him how to use the pencil but I could see that the effort of making a mark on the paper was immense. He managed some tiny cursive squiggles, very faint as if he was afraid to press down too hard.

The salvia’s stem is ridged, square in section. This must be the pencil–flower link. After he had made his tiny marks on the page I noticed him smelling his fingers. Touch, smell… If the vision is very partial perhaps the route to take is a stimulation of the other senses.

He started speaking again today. Disconnected words. I wrote them down.

‘I feel… I feel…’

‘Wednesday night… Make it Wednesday night.’

‘
Je t’aime pour toujours
.’

‘My head is very… Hurting me.’

Then he pursed his lips and whistled, tunelessly. Then he started to repeat a name, mumbling it at first.

‘Sylvie.’

Then back to Wednesday, Wednesday and then, ‘I feel my head is very hurting me.’ It was a sentence of sorts.

‘Who is Sylvie?’ I asked him. He couldn’t answer and I saw sudden tears form in his eyes so I pushed him no further.

It was like seeing an ancient rusted engine trying to splutter into life: a spark, a piston turns, a fart of exhaust smoke. And then nothing.

Sylvie/salvia – of course. The French phrase was odd: but he’s clearly English with an educated accent. A young officer? A tank commander? I’ve sent the information I’ve gleaned and the few precise facts – height, weight, colour of eyes, colour of hair – to the War Office.

I played Patient 39 some music today. The adagio from Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony. He listened with huge concentration. When I took the needle from the disc he seemed as if he wanted to say something.

‘It’s very…’ He stalled, as if searching his mental lexicon for the right word. He shrugged.

‘Beautiful?’ I said.

‘Beautiful?’ The word meant nothing to him. Then he smiled. ‘It’s very
dry
,’ he said, with a look of triumph on his face.

The words are coming, but at random and with associations of meaning that I can’t identify.

This afternoon when I looked in on him on my usual round of the hospital he seemed unusually alert.

‘I need a bicycle,’ he said.

‘A bicycle? Why?’

He thought for a while. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. Then he sat down at the table and drew something on the sheet of paper. He showed it to me: two wobbly circles joined by a bar – a rudimentary, schematic bicycle, certainly. Then he remembered something and added two looped, L-shaped extensions.

‘A bicycle,’ he insisted.

I told the nurses to book in an optician for the next day.

Patient 39 has his spectacles yet he still tilts his head to see. The optician said he had done his best but the prescription was something of an estimation. The spectacles make him look younger, if that were possible, but Patient 39 seems glad to have them – as if he had reclaimed some vestige of his old self from the time before the trauma suffered in the battle. He handles them carefully; he
looks at his face in the mirror as if he sees someone he vaguely recognizes.

We had something approaching a conversation.

ME: How are you?

39: I’m, yes, I feel… I feel I am…

ME: Better?

39: I’m sorry. I don’t know.

ME: Would you like to go for a walk?

39: I don’t know.

ME: Who’s Sylvie?

39: Sylvie… Sylvie… She’s… She’s Sylvie.

ME: Is she your wife?

39: I don’t know.

He sat for a while thinking, then he stood and led me outside. It was one of those late summer mornings, full of sunshine yet with a coolness in the air, a presaging current of the cold days to come. He pointed up at the sky.

‘What is that?’

‘Sky?’

‘No, what is that?’ he made a spreading motion with both his hands.

‘That is blue. The colour blue.’

‘Blue.’ He thought about this for a second or two and said, ‘Sylvie is blue.’

The papers came from the War Office. It seemed conclusive evidence so I went to find Patient 39. He was on the south lawn walking along a gravelled path, occasionally stooping to stare at something – an insect, a quartz pebble – that caught his attention.

When I was about ten yards away, I called out.

‘Gerald?’

There was no reaction.

‘Lieutenant Gault? Lieutenant Gault?’

He still didn’t turn, so I circled round and came back down the path so he could see me. I asked him how he was.

‘I feel…’ he thought. ‘Feel fine. Yes, fine.’

I told him papers had arrived from the ministry.

‘We think we know who you are,’ I pointed at him. ‘We know your name.’

‘My name?’

‘Yes. Your name is Gerald Gault. You are twenty-three years old. Your family live near Thame, in Oxfordshire.’

He smiled at me. His eyes were candid, his expression mildly interested. It was apparent I might have well been talking Gaelic.

‘Are you sure?’

I know a great deal about Lt Gerald Gault of the 4th County of London Yeomanry. I now have photographs of him at various stages of his life. I have his school reports. I have the details of his army medical. I have several letters he wrote to his mother and father (he is an only child). I have a copy of
Penguin New Writing
containing his short story ‘The Ghost of a Bird’. I can track his life from nursery to prep school (where his father was headmaster) to his minor public school. He did not go to university but joined the army in 1941 at the age of nineteen. After Sandhurst he saw active service in North Africa then was shipped home to England in 1943 with bad pneumonia. It was during his convalescence that he began writing.

‘The Ghost of a Bird’ was published in early 1944 when Gerald Gault had begun training with his regiment for the invasion of Europe. It is a strange, almost surreal tale (therefore not entirely to my taste) about a young English soldier in the North African
campaign who, lost and separated from his unit, comes across the body of a dead German in the desert. He takes the personal papers from the body and amongst them finds the photograph of a girl. On this photo is written: ‘
Je t’aime pour toujours, Sylvie
.’ In a series of overlapping hallucinations the soldier has a short but intense love affair with this Sylvie. It’s not entirely clear, but the likelihood is that the soldier then dies of thirst. The narrative point of view changes. Back in England, the young soldier’s parents receive a small bundle of their son’s personal effects: amongst them is the photograph of Sylvie. The boy’s parents are consoled by the thought that at least during their son’s short life he had been in love and had been loved in return.

The pages detailing the fancied affair with Sylvie are rapt and overcharged. Gerald Gault is clearly a virgin.

Mr and Mrs Gault sat anxiously in my consulting room as I explained the many handicaps their son was suffering from as a result of his brain injury: extreme memory loss, traumatic aphasia, partial vision. Mr Gault was a rosy-faced, bald man, trimly moustachioed. Mrs Gault, a handsome woman with a sharp patrician accent, wore pearl earrings and a pearl necklace. I imagined she had had great plans for Gerald.

‘He can’t see?’ Mr Gault asked.

I explained: as far as we could tell only half of Gerald Gault’s field of vision was functioning. ‘If he looked at a page of a book he would only see the left half. He can read but it takes considerable effort: you’ll notice how he moves his head to bring the seeing half of his field of vision into play. He has to piece together the visual world he occupies, just as he has to struggle to make his verbal world comprehensible.’

‘How long before he gets better?’ Mrs Gault interrupted.

‘We have no idea.’ I paused. It’s always best to be a little blunt
on these occasions. ‘I should warn you: it’s almost a hundred per cent certain he won’t know who you are.’

Mrs Gault laughed at my preposterous assertion.

I took Gerald to the Star and Garter at noon today. He was wearing his own clothes (brought by his parents). The pub was quiet, and the wide unmatted flagstones of the dark snug-bar made the room cool. I brought him a pint of bitter and offered him a cigarette. He used to smoke, apparently, but he refused and when he saw me light up and exhale it made him smile. ‘I can see the air you breathe,’ he explained.

Mrs Gault had accepted a cigarette in my consulting room after her collapse. As she smoked I could sense her discomfort growing: her shame at her behaviour crept up on her, obliterating her misery like an advancing tide. She became curt and hostile towards me. Not that I blamed her: even I still find the memory of Mrs Gault’s shocked response to Gerald’s absence of reaction as she greeted her son disturbing. How she wilted before his candid, oblivious stare as she uttered his name and touched his face – and how she screamed and wailed as we struggled to lead her away – but Gerald clearly had no idea what was going on.

He sipped his beer.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I like it.’

‘You know the war will soon be over,’ I said.

‘I was hurt in this war.’

‘Yes… Can you remember how you were hurt?’

He frowned. ‘I remember the sky. How it was… blue. And how it was not cold.’

‘Hot.’

‘Yes… Hot. And Sylvie was there.’

Heat. The desert? Or memories of his burning tank? An account of
the action at Villers-Bocage places Gerald Gault and his Cromwell in the middle of a line of tanks ambushed in a Normandy lane by the 501st SS Heavy Tank Battalion. The German Tigers were impervious to British return fire and the column of British tanks was severely mauled. Many tanks, unable to move in the narrow lanes, blazed fiercely before exploding. Gerald was seen climbing from his tank, his uniform on fire. And then the tank erupted in a billowing fireball. Whether his clothes were ripped from him by the explosion or whether he removed them himself is not clear. The wound in his head was caused later, it seems likely, when another tank near by exploded, hurling him through a hedge (many wood splinters were removed from his body) into a field beyond, where he was discovered later in the day when the Germans temporarily withdrew. Twenty-five British tanks were destroyed that afternoon and twenty-eight other tracked vehicles.