The White Garden (24 page)

The White Garden

me died with her, and now it is coming to life again. I know this sounds completely nutty.’

‘Supposing she never even took the book with her to the garden.’

‘I know, I know. There are so many ways of looking at it. I sometimes think I’m going mad myself. But I just have to keep going.’

‘Do you suspect Goddard?’

‘Of what?’

‘I don’t know. An accidental overdose of drugs — and

— well, getting the bees to sting her — no, that wouldn’t work.

If she was already dead bees wouldn’t. Has it occurred to you that the book might have had things written in it, things that would incriminate somebody — Goddard for instance — in some way, and that he took the book and destroyed it?’

‘Again, yes, I’ve thought of all that. But I still want to try to find the book.
Was
Ambrose Goddard the first person to find the body? Who was
really
the last person to see Vickie alive? I want to know who were some of the people working in the hospital

— and who were the patients. Dr Goddard is dead, but I want to talk to people who were there.’

‘There’s an Action Group. Mandala Action Group — people trying to find redress for the injuries they or members of their families suffered. I have nothing to do with them. I take the attitude that Goddard is dead anyway, and Marjorie is dead, and in my opinion he killed her. And that’s that.’

Michael paused, and Laura sensed the depth of his sadness at the memory of his wife. There was a split second when the ghostly presence of Marjorie Bartlett could be felt in the room, before Michael continued. ‘I don’t have the interest, or the heart, to go to meetings to discuss it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.

But they might be useful to you. Of course they would. Some of them were there. Of course their real interest, I gather, is to get William Vincent, the doctor who did most of the ECTs for Goddard, into court. And James Trent — he did the brain surgery.

But those people, the Action Group, they’d talk to you.’

‘But don’t you see — one of them might have the book, and might never say.’

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163

‘Same goes for anyone you talk to.’

‘Please, can you just tell me, then, about the people you remember at Mandala. Do you have any contact, at all, with anyone?’

‘There’s one. A strange, sweet woman who calls herself Shirley Temple. She sends me a Christmas card every year.’

‘Do you keep the cards?’

‘I think Rebecca does. I fancy there’s a box in the hall cupboard with hundreds of old Christmas cards. But in any case, I do have her address. She’s completely out of her tree in one way, but in another way she’s very canny. In fact, now I come to think of it, she probably knew more about what went on in that hospital than anyone else.’

‘Does she belong to the Action Group?’

‘No. They have no time for poor old lunatics like Shirley.

She’s in a nursing home in the hills. If you want to see her, I suppose I could go with you. Or Ivan might go. I’ve caught your excitement about the little red book. Is this a murder hunt? Do you think your sister was murdered?’

‘That’s what I think in my heart. But I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

‘Laura, I would say that the only murderer at Mandala was Ambrose Goddard. He was also the maddest person there. He’s dead. Do you still want to go on?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Of course you do. Now, have you talked to your other sister about the book? She might simply have forgotten to take it back to the library.’

‘I don’t really want to let Eleanor know what I’m doing. She’ll think it’s crazy. She’d try to stop me. And I know she would have taken the book back if she had it.’

‘OK. Now before we go any further, I am going to tell you about my wife, Marjorie, because I think you ought to know just how things were at Mandala. I really never talk about this, but I can assure you I think about it, I still think about it, every day of my life.’

THE CASE OF MARJORIE BARTLETT

Michael told Laura that Marjorie was admitted to Mandala in January 1967.

She was underweight and suffering from depression. A month later, three days after the death of Vickie Field in the garden of the clinic, Marjorie died in the Royal Melbourne Hospital having been taken by ambulance from the Deep Sleep ward at Mandala in the middle of the night. Marjorie had been in the general Deep Sleep ward known as Hawaii where there were ten other patients under sedation. All these patients, including Marjorie, were naked, lying in urine and faeces and blood and vomit. They were covered in sores, and their breathing was laboured. They were in a state of deep sedation, and from time to time each of them would cry out in the terror of nightmare, shrieking as the devil of hallucination danced across their tortured minds. The ward was lit by one ghostly green light.

There was one nurse on duty, and one sister. The nurse went round once an hour to shine her torch on each patient. At 2:00 AM she looked at Marjorie and saw that the patient was dark blue and choking. The nurse called the sister who called the ambulance and then tried to reach Dr Goddard. His home telephone was answered by the young woman who looked after the children. She said there was nobody there but the children.

The doctor and Mrs Goddard were out. She couldn’t say where they were. Later it became clear that Dr Goddard had been in the other Deep Sleep ward, the one he called the ‘Sleeping Beauty’s Palace’. This was a single ward. The patient being treated there on the night that Marjorie died was Therese Gillis. In the Sleeping Beauty’s Palace the doctor would administer to his sedated patients what he considered to be the ultimate treatment. He would rape them.

Marjorie died during her second Deep Sleep treatment. She had survived the first one which was seven days long, only to fall into a more severe depression. On the third night of the

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165

second treatment she succumbed to the rapid onset of a virulent pneumonia. A time is reached, during the administration of barbiturates, when so much of a drug is needed to bring about artificial sleep that the side-effects are likely to cause death. Although the whole notion of the use of deep barbiturate sedation as a treatment had been dismissed as dangerous and ineffective by its pioneer Dr William Sargant in the fifties, Ambrose Goddard was convinced it could repair broken minds. He gave his patients four-hourly doses of Tuinal which was a combination of two barbiturates — Amylbarbitone and Quinalbarbitone. At any time during the four hours, if a patient began to rise from the deep sedation, he gave a dose of Neulactil. Larger and larger doses were needed as patients developed a tolerance to the cocktail of drugs. He would happily tell people that he was the biggest provider of Tuinal in the Southern Hemisphere. The sedated patients were given daily treatments of Electro-Convulsive Therapy during which they would scream and convulse, foam at the mouth and writhe, naked in their filthy beds. Sometimes they would fall from the bed and fracture bones, but usually they were firmly strapped to the bed.

If a patient’s mental condition had not improved after three long sessions of sedation, the patient was pronounced hopeless and sent out for a lobotomy. Dr Goddard had discussed this possibility with Michael Bartlett, in the case of Marjorie. But Marjorie never got that far. Although most of her records disappeared mysteriously, there was a manila folder with her name on it, and on the back Dr Goddard had scribbled in pencil: ‘Suddenly became pale and cyanosed. Air passage blocked. Ambulance called.’ The nurses often saw the doctor alter records, alter death certificates. The hospital averaged one death per month, and the wonder and miracle is that the place lasted for ten years before a Royal Commission was called to investigate the deaths. Before he could be forced to face his crimes and humiliation, Ambrose Goddard took his own life. The Mandala Action Group would continue to call for the exposure of the other doctors involved, James Trent and William Vincent. How could these men claim
not
to have noticed that the patients in the Deep Sleep ward suffered from a range of complaints — pneumonia, dehydration,
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The White Garden

constipation, drug rash, respiratory infections, urinary tract infections, urinary retention, excessive mucous, vomiting, falls and fractures, wild fluctuations in temperature. They had not noticed. Vincent did the ECTs and Trent did the brain surgery.

They had noticed nothing amiss in the Deep Sleep ward.

It was incredible to the general public that all this was happening, was going on for ten years behind the walls of the old convent in a prosperous and respectable suburb. And Marjorie Bartlett, wife of Michael and mother of three little children, was only one of the fatalities at Mandala. Another one was Therese Gillis.

THE HORSE WITH THE GOLDEN MANE

Therese Gillis was admitted to Mandala towards the end of 1965, several months after the admission of Rosamund Pryce-Jones. Therese was the youngest Gillis girl, and she and all her sisters went to school at Immaculate Heart — which later became Mandala. Therese was familiar with the chapel before the mysterious light of blue and gold and ruby glass was replaced by transparency, when it was alert with tall plaster saints in pale plaster garments edged with gilt and sprinkled with bright stars. As a little girl she linked the chapel, in her mind, with the fairground carousel. She was the queen on the white wooden horse; she was the saint with the lily and long hair. She prayed that her front teeth would not come through crossed, and her prayer was answered; she prayed for and got the horse with the golden mane. She rode it into the forest, into the sunset, into the sea. She was the girl in the dark red dress who galloped off into the clouds. She prayed that Violetta da Fabriano would turn round and look at her during the hymn. ‘O Flower of Grace!

Divinest Flower! Maiden purest, Maiden rarest’. The sweet pure voices of the choir filled her eyes as well as her ears, her whole head, her whole heart; and Violetta’s shining dark hair flicked quietly to the side, and from the corner of her pansy-black eyes she stared at Therese.

Those girls were inseparable, Therese and Violetta. Hand in hand in the corridors and on the gravel paths. Heads together underneath the trees. Passing notes, making gifts for each other from flowers and mirrors and ribbons. My darling Violetta; My Itty Bitty Therese. They hid behind the brick wall at the back of the convent orchard. They lay in the long grass and tickled and kissed and promised to love forever. They went together to Mademoiselle for extra French. They played piano duets and performed as twins in golden wigs at the ballet concert. They wrote poems and plays and put on recitals in the garden of Violetta’s house. Under a weeping willow they played Romeo and Juliet and ate summer fruits from crystal bowls. They drank
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Italian wine and kissed in the cool damp of the cellar. On hot afternoons they lay on velvet couches in vast dark rooms where the walls were painted in strange shades of umber and sienna and where magical chandeliers hung from ceilings painted all over with cherubs and golden leaves. They lay on the graves in the cemetery and wept for the dead and kissed. Violetta was considered by the nuns to be very special. Her mother was dead; she was her father’s only child. She was a very bright girl, and destined to become a singer.

But Violetta’s father married again and he packed up Violetta like extra luggage and whisked her off with her new mother and her new baby brother to a bigger house, a hillside of grapes, a grove of olives across the desert in Western Australia. Perhaps Violetta should stay on at the Immaculate Heart as a boarder?

At first Mr da Fabriano said yes, but then he decided no, and Violetta had hysterics and was smacked and locked in her room.

Therese thought she was going to die, and that Violetta would die as well, from grief. They were twelve. Violetta was taken out of school in the middle of the term, was kept at home to pack her things and pack herself and leave forever.

Therese and Violetta must both arrange to commit suicide to be together. They cannot get messages through by ordinary means. But their minds are so powerfully attuned that they communicate by thought. Starvation is too long and obvious.

They have sometimes said if they were separated they would both die on a Wednesday afternoon, both slash their wrists with a carving knife. On an unremarkable Wednesday afternoon Therese and Violetta both score their wrists with kitchen knives.

They draw, in fact, very little blood. Violetta is sedated by the doctor and put on a plane for Perth. Therese is put in hospital to have her tonsils out. The girls are forbidden to write to each other. Telepathy grows swiftly weaker across the desert.

Violetta was gone.

Therese got over the horrors of having her tonsils out. She recovered from the fear that as the surgeon reached into her mouth and down her throat he would damage her teeth. Her teeth were intact. Violetta was gone. Mademoiselle gave Therese extra tasks and responsibilities. Therese would sing the solo in

The Horse with the Golden Mane

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Les Noces du Papillon
at the French soiree. At her extra lessons, Therese was now alone. But here the absence of Violetta was unbearably obvious. To discontinue extra French? Reverend Mother had an idea. Give the little one a challenge; give her a sweet and demanding task; let her read the autobiography of her namesake in the original. So Mademoiselle gave Therese the book of soft thick creamy pages with black and white photographs of the Little Flower. ‘Photography was rather new then,
cocotte
, and we are very, very lucky to have these pictures of our Little Flower. Her sister was always there with her camera. Imagine.’ Mademoiselle gave Therese a packet of dried rose petals from Lisieux, blessed in honour of the Little Flower. Therese kept the packet in a cigar box containing letters from Violetta, a photograph of Violetta with her dog, a brooch of enamelled violets arranged in the shape of a heart, crystallised violets in a tin. Therese hid the cigar box in a secret space at the back of her wardrobe.