The White Garden (5 page)

— brain surgery, lobotomy, leucotomy. He had listened to the doctor’s speech about treatments and had been waiting for a
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mention of the hot wire in the brain. If you cut something away will you cure the disease, jump the needle from the groove, set life in motion again?

‘Yes,’ said Dr Goddard, ‘surgery is another alternative. Psy-chosurgery can be effective, very effective indeed in some cases. These cases are specially selected and again there is a ninety-five per cent success rate. But, never let anyone tell you it can be used with schizophrenics. Never. Disaster. And there is no such nonsense at Mandala as Group Therapy. Another fiasco dreamt up by who knows what feeble brain. Patients need their rest; the last thing they want is to sit around like a herd of deranged elephants showing off their anxieties and manias and phobias and god knows what to each other. No.

These days we’ve got some very beautiful chemicals that allow us to achieve some incredibly stylish results in the mental functions of our patients. Think of the benefits of Largactil, for one thing. And Sodium Amytal with Ritalin. You’d be tickled pink, Mr Umbartlett. Tickled pink.’

The doctor was relaxed; he sat in his chair with his feet up on the desk. Michael Bartlett sat opposite him, tense, concentrating on every word, trying, through this comforting, genial, glowing man to make sense of what had happened to Marjorie, of what had brought her to the clinic.

Ambrose fished into the pocket of his jacket and brought out a handful of capsules. They lay in his open palm like the eggs of sinister and exotic spiders. Their shiny skins were marked with small letters and numbers — F63 on the ones that were half orange half blue, LOL5 on the pink and green, F33 on the blue, R365C on the violet and fawn — their colours and symbols part of a secret, powerful and deadly language. Here was salvation and damnation in the palm of the doctors hand. Michael looked at the capsules, and then he looked away. Ambrose smiled, jiggled the capsules, tossed them lightly in the air and caught them.

As Michael looked back at the doctor, and past the doctor’s head, he fancied he caught a glimpse of a figure moving past the window. A slender woman dressed in the medieval brown habit of a nun, hurrying along with an armful of long grasses. Was

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he beginning to see things? Ghosts of the old convent? Soon he would be talking to himself, throwing things at the children, throwing the children at the walls. He sat up straighter and took a breath to steady himself.

‘Yes,’ he said, about nothing in particular. ‘Yes, I see. I understand.’ His voice was quiet and troubled, and the doctor’s words flowed over it.

‘Have her right as rain in no time at all. You’ll see. They come out of their Sleeping Beauty trance as bright as buttons and as fresh as daisies. Up and running, ready for anything, if you get my drift, as I’m quite sure you do. Visiting hours are on one of the cards in this folder. We’ll have your wife back home in the twinkling of an eye.’

Ambrose handed Michael a small buff folder containing six cards. Michael stood in the office and looked at the cards.

They gave information about different aspects of Mandala and they were of different sizes and colours so that they lay in the folder like samples of paint. The colours were dull and muddy, suggesting depression and repression. The olive green one was general information for the patient’s family and friends. It said there was a kiosk where you could buy cigarettes and snacks, and included a warning against smoking in bed. The orange card told of meetings that ex-patients could come to in order to maintain contact with the clinic. The brown one was all about the occupational therapy programs, the pottery, the yoga, the bee-keeping, the gardening. Rust was about drugs and sedation and clothing and valuables; mustard was about lectures on sex that patients and their families could go to; and there was a card the colour of vomit that told of the opportunities for families and friends to experience the therapies offered to the patients.

As Michael read the cards, Ambrose gazed contentedly out the window. Michael fanned the cards out in his hand. Ambrose swung round to look at him and said, ‘Of course those cards are the merest summary of things. No detail, no detail at all, really.’

The light in his eyes drew Michael towards him. ‘The papers for you to sign are these.’ He handed Michael the documents that would place Marjorie in his care.

Michael signed. Ambrose smiled and stood up and gestured
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out the window. ‘See that woman,’ he said warmly, ‘the one in the habit. She is to all intents and purposes a Spanish saint. Her family have virtually given up on her. But when I’ve finished with her she’ll make some lucky bastard a bloody good wife.

Hard to believe, isn’t it? But there are such beautiful chemicals around — things to open their minds and their legs. She’ll come good in the end. And so will Marjorie. I promise.’

The interview was over. The doctor placed a friendly hand on Michael’s shoulder and walked to the door with him.

Marjorie Bartlett was admitted to Mandala three weeks before the death of the young woman in the garden. On the day of the woman’s death Marjorie was huddled under the camellia bush outside the doctor’s window. She liked to sit there in her dressing gown, clutching her handbag to her chest, pretending she was an orphan who would one day be saved by Dr Goddard. He would come out and find her and lift her up and take her into his office and order fine new clothes for her, and dishes of wonderful food, and he would embrace her and propose marriage to her, his breath warm on her cheek, his strong arms around her.

When she looked through the window she saw Ambrose with a lovely woman in a large red hat. She thought it must be his wicked wife. The doctor embraced his wife; he took off her hat and kissed her, and then he pulled the hat down over her eyes and she laughed and straightened the hat and patted the doctor on the chin.

‘He is taking it on the chin,’ Marjorie whispered to herself.

‘One day things will be different and he will come to me.’ She was as quiet as a mouse and as still as a statue under the camellia bush.

Marjorie was admitted; Michael left her there. He left her behind somewhere in the grim grey hospital. You could call it a clinic, talk about meditation and gardening, but it was a madhouse, and to Michael’s sad eyes that is what it was. Marjorie was in the madhouse. He was overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, the only comfort coming from the light of truth and kindness in the doctor’s eyes.

Michael could not imagine where Marjorie was, what she was doing. He tried to make himself think of her asleep in a narrow

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white bed with a smooth white cover, the curtains drawn across the window, the play of light on the back of the curtains making shadow patterns on the walls, on Marjorie’s sleeping face. He tried to invent a sleeping beauty, a dreaming princess, but he could not. He tried to build a wall between himself and his visions of Marjorie in a pit of slime surrounded by raging creatures, half beast, half human. Their cries were pitiful but savage; their teeth dripped with black and silver slobber; their hair hung in tangled, stinking locks about their hairy shoulders, which were draped with rags. Gradually Marjorie’s flowery nightdress faded and was replaced by greying tatters; her short pale hair fell out and her skull, covered with dark sores, shone with a horrible light. She snarled and bit and kicked and laughed with the other lunatics as they roamed round and round the pit. A nurse threw a bucket of raw meat down to them and they fought for it with cries and howls. Somebody died at the bottom of the heap. It was Marjorie.

Michael could not remember whether the doctor had said the words: Your wife is at the bottom of the heap. Had he said it, or had Michael imagined it? He hated himself for thinking or remembering those words. Had he thought them up, or had the doctor actually said them to him? What had the doctor said? The memory of the doctor was bathed in a pale glow; the doctor’s eyes gleamed with bright goodness.

Michael kept walking down the drive towards the gate of the clinic. As he walked he thought of the word ‘Mandala’ and then he thought of Manderley, of the film
Rebecca
. It seemed to him that there was something of the haunting menace in the film hanging about the hospital. The name Manderley attached itself to the clinic and carried a sense of drama and tragedy into Michael’s heart. He thought of baby Rebecca crying for her mother. He saw the image of Manderley burning. The burning house. Behind him the old convent stood in the centre of the gardens, on the rise, and Michael imagined, without looking back, the sight of each window filled with leaping flame, the glow of the burning building, the crackle of timber, showers of sparks against a night sky. You hear about places, mental hospitals, where the fire breaks out in the kitchen and spreads in
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a few minutes to the wards; and the patients are locked in and can’t escape and are overcome by smoke. Mental Patients Die in Fire. There is an inquiry. The health minister makes statements.

The public wonders why there were no fire extinguishers in the building, no fire escapes. Everyone is sorry. It will never happen again.

Michael brought his thoughts back to the image of Marjorie sleeping peacefully in the white bed. She has been troubled and depressed. She needs to sleep it off, as Dr Goddard says.

Dr Goddard is considered by many people to be the best psy-chiatrist in the country. Mandala is the most up-to-date clinic in the world. One day soon Marjorie will be better and they will pack a picnic and drive to the hills and pick strawberries in the sunshine.

The doctor spoke of sex. Marjorie is too tired for sex. Three children — and Rebecca still a baby. Marjorie has no energy for romance. That’s all, surely. Dr Goddard said she was afraid of sex. But how could that be? Where does fear come into it? The doctor could have that wrong. In any case he said she would be right as rain in no time, right as rain. Right as rain, he said

— not ‘bottom of the heap’.

Tickled pink and open her mind and legs and right as rain.

Michael’s mind moved back and forth from images of Marjorie transformed into a naked sex-goddess, to thoughts of his happy family picking fruit in the summer to pictures of Marjorie asleep in the white hospital bed to visions of lunatics writhing in a dark and filthy cell. He thought of what the doctor had said about offering drug therapy to relatives of patients. Perhaps he needed that; perhaps he too needed a chance to rest his mind, or to expand it with visions of beauty and peace.

He reached the gate and showed his visitor’s pass to the gatekeeper. He tried to think of other things, of the children and his students and golf and a glass of Scotch.

He drove home.

He had walked straight from the convent building to the gate. Three weeks later Vickie Field would not walk to the gate but would take the path to the White Garden, and would die there. She would sit on the steps and two bees would sting her

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on the throat. The poison would be so strong that she would be overcome and unable to call out or go for help. Nobody would see or hear her. She would die from acute laryngeal oedema.

She would choke to death. She would sit in the White Garden at the Mandala Clinic, thousands of miles from the White Garden in Kent, and she would be dressed to resemble a portrait of the woman who made the White Garden in Kent. This woman, Vita Sackville-West, was allergic to the stings of wasps. Perhaps also to the stings of bees, as Vickie was.

One afternoon Vita was having tea with a friend in the garden when she was stung on the neck by a wasp. Her neck and tongue and gums swelled up and her friend took her to the hospital where she spent the night and lived to tell the tale of how she had been attacked by what she called a small samurai in lacquered velvet.

Michael Bartlett went home through the busy sunny streets to the empty house. The children were with his sister and her children. A flicker of fear went through Michael as he thought that perhaps one day his sister too would dissolve in tears at her kitchen table, and she too would have to be escorted, with a bag of toiletries and a hairbrush, to the iron gates of Mandala. He thought of a snowball effect — clumps of little children being gathered and shunted around as their mothers disappeared into the mystery world of the big old convent on the hill behind the trees. You would end up with someone like the old woman who lived in the shoe — some woman with so many children in her care she wouldn’t know what to do. Meanwhile all the mothers would be locked in the burning building, their cries stifled by the sound of falling timber and the roar of the flames, the sky alight with showers of flying sparks.

Fathers were the ones who went out to offices and lecture rooms and construction sites and bars and golf courses. The women in the burning building; the children living in the shoe; the fathers driving cars to the office. There was Dr Goddard’s far-fetched idea of giving the husbands and fathers some of the treatment enjoyed by the wives and mothers. Michael dismissed that idea from his mind. Not for him the LSD or the Deep Sleep.

He had serious work to do in the world. He needed tenure and
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superannuation and sabbatical leave and lunch at the University Club.

He walked up the path to the door of his house. The key scraped in the lock in an odd silence. He went into the hall where everything seemed cool and sane, where a soft good quiet had settled. The mirror on the hall table reflected a bowl of flowers. Michael entered his study, turned on the music, poured a Scotch, and sat in the armchair as a feeling of well-being drifted over him. Songs of the Auvergne, cool, clear and strangely perfect, filled the lonely study. He began to forget the menace he had felt all around him at Mandala. He began to re-arrange his thoughts and to place Marjorie in good hands, in her narrow white hospital bed with the shadows playing through the curtains. Then he sat at his desk and his mind moved as it must to the matter of tomorrow’s lecture to second-year English.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. Michael became absorbed in the significance of the Pentangle and wrote: ‘This is perhaps the most important sign in magic, the quintessence of the alchemists, as old as time. As old, at least, as recorded history. The Pentangle can be seen scratched on Babylonian pottery.’