Page 143 of Strangers in Time

“No, they don’t,” said Oliver. “Especially now.”

ANOTHERWAY

STEPHENS HAD NOT BEENable to meet with them for breakfast, having been called away on some important matter, one of the matrons told them.

After they ate the frugal meal, Molly had once more donned the garb of a nurse’s assistant as she followed Sister Lucille on her rounds. There could not have been a greater contrast between this place and the medical clinic in Covent Garden. The latter involved wounds of the flesh. The folks here suffered from maladies of the mind. And as terrible as the injuries were that she had seen at the clinic, the ravages of mental illness that Molly witnessed here left her stricken and dismayed.

The very first patient she assisted with had been an infantryman in His Majesty’s Army. Bernard Hughes was twenty-three and had had munitions explode in front of him, both blinding him permanently and giving him shell shock to such a degree that he had tried to kill himself a dozen times in fits of nightmarish psychoses.

Sister Lucille told her that Hughes had undergone a number ofprocedures.

“But the poor man is gone and he’s not coming back. You don’t need to have a medical degree to see that, do you? He won’t talk, hebarely eats. He grunts. He has no energy. He’s like an infant, except he’s a man. Or was.”

There were others who were the exact opposite of Bernard Hughes, screaming and chanting and hurling themselves at padded walls behind locked doors. They could only be administered to when burly orderlies restrained them and sedatives were administered. Still, one had tried to bite Molly as she sought to clean and bandage a bloody and ragged self-inflicted wound.

Later, Molly had just finished helping with another patient and was walking back to the staff room when a masked Dr. Foyle stepped out of a room. His gown was covered in blood, and he appeared quite dejected. Through the open doorway Molly glimpsed a body lying on a metal table with a sheet fully covering it. A nurse stood next to the newly deceased, looking stricken and helpless.

Foyle saw Molly, pulled the door closed, and said, “A difficult case.”

“Yes, I can see,” said Molly.

“There are no easy problems to solve here,” Foyle said as he lowered his surgical mask and wiped some blood off his forehead.

“I’m sure not, Doctor.”

“You’ve been seeing patients, I take it,” he said, eyeing her uniform.

“Yes. I wanted to help however I could.”

“It’s so very kind of you.” He looked at the closed doorway. “My father was a patient here.”

“‘Was’?”

“He… I tried my procedure. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. He was in the army, you see.”

“Surely he was too old to fight in this war.”

“He fought in thefirstworld war. A mortar round hit within thirty feet of him and he awoke to see a dozen of his mates blown to bits all around him. He survived, of course, but with serious injuries. The external wounds were eventually repaired. But the internal ones, the psychological ones, festered. As a child I remembered thathe was always a bit odd after coming home. But then one day he didn’t remember who I was. And, as the years passed, there were other strange episodes. Once he… took off his shoe and tried to eat it. I was quite a capable surgeon by then. But when my father suffered what he did, I changed my career path. I studied mental disease. I brought my father here because my mother insisted that I at least try. And I did, but to no avail. He had a seizure on the operating table that stopped his heart. He literally died in my arms.”

“I’m so sorry, but I’m sure you did your best for him.”

An awkward silence persisted for a few moments until Foyle stirred.

“I meant to ask you last night, but I wasn’t sure how to broach it in front of everyone.”

“Yes?” she said expectantly.

“To better help treat patients it’s always important to understand their background, how they came by their disorders and the like. What can you tell me of your mother?”

“Didn’t my father inform you of what had happened?”

“Not really. He just said she became violent and uncontrollable. He actually had to administer a sedative to her for the trip here.”

Molly told Foyle about the incident at the bomb shelter.

“So she was… robbed and assaulted and, um…?”

“Yes. Her clothes were torn… She apparently had been… She was, understandably, hysterical.”

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