Silver Wattle (17 page)

With my impressions of the asylum in Prague, I had been afraid of what the clinic might look like. But there was nothing frightening, at least on the surface, about Broughton Hall except its proximity to Callan Park Mental Hospital, where the certified cases were sent. The grounds we passed through on our way to the admissions office were picturesque with flowerbeds and ponds. Palms and pine trees shaded the road while the rolling lawns were dotted with peacocks pecking at the grass.

A nurse in a white apron greeted us on the stairs of the converted Georgian mansion that now served as the admissions building. ‘Good morning,’ she said to us. She nodded to an attendant who pushed a wheelchair towards us and held it while Uncle Ota helped Klara into it. Inside the admissions office, Uncle Ota filled in the paperwork for Klara.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Klara, clinging to my arm. It dismayed me to see her looking so lost.

I stroked her hair. ‘You have nothing to be sorry about. It is not your fault.’

Although Doctor Norwood had described Klara’s behaviour as ‘psychosis’, she was admitted to the clinic as ‘suffering from melancholia brought on by shock’. This meant she would not be restrained and would be free to wander the grounds in the company of a nurse.

‘You are to visit her only once a week, on the supervising doctor’s orders,’ the admissions nurse told us. ‘With the first visit not to take place within a fortnight of today.’

‘Why?’ I asked, upset that Klara was being kept from us.

The nurse’s mouth twitched in a way that suggested she did not like to be questioned. ‘Many patients remain ill as long as they have their family to show them sympathy. With the family removed, they often decide to cure themselves.’

With the paperwork done, the time came for Klara to be weighed and put into bed. Watching her being led away from us was like having my heart torn into pieces. Before she passed through the ward door, she turned to us. The vague look left her face and she smiled. ‘I will get better as quickly as I can,’ she said. ‘I love you.’

For a moment Klara was herself again. It was like catching a glimpse of the sun on a cloudy day. My spirits lifted. But the moment was lost with the sound of jangling keys and the turn of a lock and my sister disappearing from view.

Uncle Ota and I returned to Broughton Hall a fortnight later, this time with Ranjana, full of hope to see Klara recovered. But when the nurse brought her out to the visiting room, her hair was flat and dull and her skin was grey. I remembered the way Klara had always glided into rooms, her poise commanding attention. But that day the best she could do was to shuffle in and collapse into a chair.

I knelt beside Klara and she kissed my cheek but it was a reflex action rather than a loving gesture. Her hands trembled like an old woman’s.

On the second visit I went alone as Ranjana and Uncle Ota had to work and Esther was looking after Thomas. Klara was no better than she had been the previous week. She barely recognised me.

‘Where is the doctor in charge?’ I asked the ward nurse, a thin girl with sinewy limbs.

‘Doctor Jones is doing the rounds this morning,’ she said. ‘He comes to the women’s ward in the afternoons.’

‘I want to see him now!’ I told her. ‘I want to know why my sister is not any better.’

‘He is not your sister’s doctor,’ the nurse told me. ‘She is being looked after by Doctor Page. He is in the men’s convalescent ward at the moment.’

‘Is he a senior doctor?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said the ward nurse. ‘He is a junior medical officer. But he is very good. In fact he is the—’

I did not wait to hear the rest of her sentence. I rushed through the hall and into the reception room. The admissions nurse called after me when I hurried by her in the direction of the men’s convalescent ward but I ignored her. My blood was on fire. A junior medical officer indeed! My sister was seriously ill. She needed to be treated by someone with experience. There were no locks in the convalescent wards and I burst through the swing doors before stopping in my tracks. The curtains had been drawn around some of the beds but they did not reach all the way to the floor. Dozens of white, hairy bottoms squatting over bedpans shone back at me. The sulphurous smell mixed with scents of chlorine and pine oil knocked the charge out of my stampede.

‘Can I help you?’

I averted my gaze from the male backsides and saw that the voice came from a doctor in a white coat at the far end of the ward. He was standing with a nurse by the bed of a patient.

The colour rushed to my cheeks. ‘Are you Doctor Page?’ I asked, trying to hide my embarrassment with a veil of superiority.

The doctor handed the nurse the patient’s chart and instructed her to give him a warm bath, then walked towards me. ‘Yes, I am,’ he said. As he drew closer, I realised how young he looked. His jaw and his cheekbones were masculine but his hair was a rich chestnut colour and his complexion was what would have been called ‘peaches and cream’ in a woman.

‘I am Miss Rose. Miss Rose’s sister,’ I said, blushing again when I realised how foolish my self-introduction sounded. ‘Why are you treating my sister instead of Doctor Jones?’

Doctor Page, undeterred by my abrupt manner, smiled and his dimples showed. ‘I had some experience with shellshocked patients in the war,’ he said. ‘He thought I would be the best person to treat her.’

The war? With his slim neck and rosy cheeks Doctor Page looked too young to be out of school. But I realised that to have finished his medical training he would have to be at least eight years older than me.

‘Why is she so lethargic?’ I asked.

Doctor Page’s face turned serious and he guided me to the door. ‘If you will come to my office, I can explain your sister’s treatment to you.’

I followed him down a corridor and into a room that was the size of a cupboard. The folders on the bookshelves were neatly arranged, and the desk held only a telephone, writing pad and a glazed Chinese figurine. But between the cupboards and the visitor’s chair there was barely room to spread out my elbows. It seemed that junior doctors did not command large offices at Broughton Hall.

Doctor Page offered me a chair then squeezed behind his desk. The figurine was of a Chinaman sitting on a rock and fishing. His smile was lopsided and the glaze of his hat had run down one cheek. He looked like he was weeping.

‘Tea?’ Doctor Page asked me.

I nodded. A warm drink was exactly what I needed. The smell of bowel matter still lingered with me and I had a taste of metal in my mouth.

Doctor Page picked up the telephone and seemed to have trouble persuading the person on the line to bring some hot water. He succeeded, however, and a few minutes later an orderly appeared with a tray of cups and a pot of tea and he squeezed past me to put the things on the desk. Had I not been so worried about Klara, the clatter of crockery in the tiny room and the man with burly arms handing me a delicate china cup might have been comical. The orderly left and Doctor Page turned his attention to me.

‘The standard treatment with any patient brought into care with hysteria is to sedate them,’ he said, donning a pair of spectacles and pulling out a file. ‘They lose their appetite and become lethargic. I am reducing your sister’s medication but I have to do it gradually. While she is sedated she cannot explain to me what caused her to have an attack, and until I know that I cannot help her.’

Doctor Page glanced at me. His blue eyes were even bluer behind the glasses. ‘I see here that you and your sister are from Prague. My father went to Bohemia on his grand tour and speaks highly of it. How is that you came to Australia?’

I realised Doctor Page was questioning me. He would need to know, wouldn’t he? Someone would have to tell him about Mother’s death and about our leaving Prague. I had never imagined mentioning those things to anyone outside the family. Who was Doctor Page and could I trust him?

He must have sensed my discomfort because he did not push me further on the matter. Instead he glanced back to his file. ‘Once your sister regains her stamina, I will get her involved in activities and you will start to see progress then. I believe she plays the piano?’

‘Klara is exceptionally talented,’ I told him. ‘She has mastered pieces that most girls her age could not tackle.’

Doctor Page smiled and his dimples appeared again. He made a note of what I said in the file. His hands were slim and neat. I became aware that one of my nails was broken and hid it by placing one hand on top of the other in my lap. Mother had been so particular about grooming and I was becoming careless.

‘What a marvellous talent to have,’ he said. ‘I wish I had some sort of musical ability. But my father says I sing like a foghorn.’

Despite the anxiety I was feeling, I could not help laughing at the image. ‘Surely your singing is not that bad,’ I said.

‘I don’t think so either,’ he said, with a mischievous grin.

I found myself blushing. I had stormed into the men’s ward ready to attack Doctor Page, and now I was charmed by him. His calm, thoughtful manner had won me over. What did it matter that he was young? He was obviously the sort of doctor who cared about his patients.

He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m sorry, but I will have to get back to my ward duty. However, do make an appointment with me with the admissions nurse. I would like to speak to you further about your sister.’

I rose from my chair and Doctor Page inched past me to open the door. ‘Your sister will be having her nap now. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow?’ I exclaimed. ‘But the nurse said I could only come once a week.’

‘Good gracious, no,’ said Doctor Page, walking out into the corridor with me. ‘Come every day if you wish. It will do your sister good. I only try to keep away relatives who are part of my patient’s problems.’

On our way to the reception area we passed a nurse assisting a male patient back to the ward. The man’s haggard face transformed when he saw Doctor Page.

‘The nurse tells me that when I’ve put on a few more pounds you are going to let me play cricket with the other patients?’

‘My word, Mr Cameron,’ Doctor Page said, patting the man’s back. ‘And I should very much like to watch the match.’

I bade Doctor Page farewell and walked out of the grounds through the tall gates into the bustling street. I turned back to look at Broughton Hall. I had entered these gates feeling desperate for Klara. Now Doctor Page had given me a glimmer of hope.

Although my conversation with Doctor Page gave me a brighter outlook regarding Klara’s recovery, the healing was slow and the months that she was in Broughton Hall were lonely for me. I had not realised until her absence that in all we experienced in fleeing Prague and coming to Australia, Klara had transformed from my charge into my best friend. But perhaps I had confided in her too much?

To find relief from my pain I went to Mr Tilly’s cinema in the mornings before visiting Klara. Mr Tilly gave me free tickets and asked the usherettes to keep an eye out so that I would not be bothered by men. He did not know Klara was in Broughton Hall; he thought that she had glandular fever.

‘Give my best to her,’ he told me. ‘We miss her playing here on Saturday nights.’

When the lights lowered and other worlds flashed on the screen, I had some reprieve from my worries. Afterwards I would eat a sandwich in the foyer cafe and watch the people coming and going from the cinema.

My other favourite distraction was the Vegetarian Cafe on George Street in the city. When I felt the need for something different after the cinema, I went there.

Australians were as carnivorous as Czechs: mutton, bacon and beef were the staples of their diet. Vegetarianism was a belief on the fringe of society. Uncle Ota commented that while it was not considered bizarre to pass a butcher and see men in aprons up to their elbows in blood and intestines, or to view the gory display of body parts in the windows, ‘to announce oneself a vegetarian is to defy the belief that man was designated by God to have dominion over animals’.

Because of the subversive nature of vegetarianism, the cafe attracted an interesting mix of people: artists, philosophers, actors, dancers and athletes. There were many charity workers and socialists too. The charity workers argued that the meat industry debased the working class by forcing men to perform brutalising work, while the socialists believed more people could be fed better-quality food if land was used to cultivate crops instead of producing meat.

I would peer over the rim of my cup of chicory coffee and build theories about the people around me. One of these was a beautiful artist’s model whose skin was like ivory satin even though she must have been close to seventy years old. ‘Imelda’ I named her in my imagination because of her exotic taste in clothes, and made up a story in which she was wondering if she would take another lover or travel to Italy this year. I had just seen Fritz Lang’s
Der Müde Tod
, so my head was full of the glamorous locations like Venice and China. I created histories for the young women sharing recipes and the groups of men studying together. But there was one man whose past I was afraid to touch. Although he did not wear a military uniform or a badge, I could guess from his age how he had lost his leg. I often saw him there in the corner booth, his trouser leg pinned to his thigh and his face twisted into a scowl. Occasionally he was joined by a skinny man with ruddy cheeks who wore a cap and scarf even when the weather was warm. On these occasions, it was the skinny man who made conversation while his friend nodded or grunted. Most of the time, the man’s companion was a cockatoo with a dropped wing that sat on his shoulder and bobbed up and down whenever he fed him a piece of apple. In those moments, the man’s face softened and he would scratch the bird under its chin. They were a poignant couple. One could not fly and one could not walk.

One day I arrived at the cafe before the young man. I was finishing my salad when the door swung open and I looked up to see him manoeuvring himself over the step with a crutch to support his leg. I had never seen him move before and was surprised that he also carried a wooden tripod under the same arm that held the crutch. A camera bag, much larger than the one I used, was slung over one of his shoulders while the cockatoo perched on the other. The man was so burdened under his load that I wanted to help him by either holding open the door or pulling out a chair for him. From the way some of the customers glanced up when he hobbled past them, I wondered if they were thinking the same thing. But nobody moved. There was something in the man’s eyes that forbade help.