Without looking, he knows when the prisoner has been brought in; a hush falls over the company. Somewhere behind him is the agent of that night of chaos and he is suddenly fearful. Because that figure had not been quite real to him and now he is about to be confronted by what felt to him as much a projection of his own mind, an inner darkness, as a human being. He is passing within a few feet of George now, and George watches his back – surprisingly slender, shoulders narrow as a boy’s – as he is led toward the makeshift dock.
George looks at the young man in the dock. It is him, of course. There is no doubt in his mind. And yet at the same time it is not him; the resemblance seems physical only. On the evening of the fire there had been a particular energy and intensity to him. All of this now is gone. He is diminished. He looks extremely young – how old can he be? Twenty at most? His shoulders are thrown back in a posture of defiance, but this somehow draws attention only to their narrowness, makes him look more like a child defying its elders. He refuses to make eye contact with any person in the room, his gaze fixed upon some point on the wall. The makeshift dock is become an island. The condemnation of the courthouse, silent, seems to surround him like a sea.
George reminds himself that this man wanted to kill him; to murder his patients. Pity here would be misplaced. And yet he thinks perhaps he has never seen a less threatening figure.
There is something in the expression that he recognises. He has seen it in the faces of other men. It is born of war. For a medical man it is a frustratingly intangible condition, and yet it is immediately recognisable.
He understands his strengths as a medic well enough; they are the same that revealed themselves at St Bart’s some eight years previously. He has a particular talent for identifying the early stages of disease, and even for recognising the subtleties of hybrids, or entirely new pestilences. One might say that it is an art as much as a science: there is a certain amount of intuition required, brave leaps of judgement.
He has never been such a good surgeon: his hands simply do not have the requisite dexterity. One can be taught, to an extent, but there is only so much that practice can achieve. It is equally impossible, as one of his tutors told him, for a poor sculptor to ever become a great one. There is something missing: the evasive magic of talent.
At the front one had to be something of a jack of all trades. One morning might present fifty cases of cholera, or a man losing his lifeblood through the stump of his severed leg. Perhaps a badly infected boil, ready to release its poison into the bloodstream, or a blight of dysentery that could fell a whole squadron. Though at least these afflictions were tangible, visible, and could be treated practically. If one did everything according to an established set of criteria – and the patient was not beyond help – there were fair odds on saving a man. What George found more difficult were the invisible, internal afflictions; those that took up residence in the mind. It did something to all of them, but it did something more to some.
The first time he came across it was in 1915, at the aid post at Anzac. Scores of wounded had been lying upon stretchers awaiting treatment. He had been kneeling in one corner attending to an injured man when a shell had exploded in the midst of the station. Many of those on the stretchers were killed instantly, where they lay. But the man he had been attending had been relatively unharmed, beyond the injuries he had already sustained. And yet … George would think later that it was like something had broken inside him, some hidden part of the mechanism. A tiny but essential cog, already loosened, rattled out of place. Everything on the surface remained intact, so that one could not see the fault until the thing tried to work. His mouth had opened and closed as though he were trying to talk, but no sound had come out. There was nothing physically wrong with the throat as far as George could ascertain: only seconds before, the man had been talking.
It had been more unnerving, somehow, than the grisliest injury. George had slapped him, hard, across the cheek in an effort to shock sense into him; it had had no effect. There was no process for such an injury – that was the thing. He had grown frustrated with the man, had shouted at him. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool, old man. Come on. Talk.’ Later he had been given up as a bad job.
Later than that, in a moment of singularly lucid calculation, the chap had put a pistol to his head and blown his brains out.
There is only one symptom, and it is in the eyes. Oh yes, he sees it now.
At first the prisoner is silent, as though stunned – or perhaps it is an attitude of defiance. But beneath
