The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories by Reggie Oliver Page B

In particular, I read and re-read the cross-examination of Miss Marchant herself. It seemed to me that she was in the grip of a profound moral disease. The words ‘mad’ or ‘insane’ were somehow inappropriate. The intellectual faculties were in good order: she was reasonable and restrained, and she showed considerable adroitness in her replies to Sir Stanford Rivers Q.C., who led for the crown; but there was something unsettling about the way she appeared to be unaware of the gravity of the charges. She had no sense of how ordinary people might react to what had gone on. A short extract from the cross-examination illustrates:

    RIVERS: Miss Marchant, do you remember a female patient named Powell?
    MARCHANT: I do. Yes. An elderly woman.
    RIVERS: Was she subject to fits?
    MARCHANT: She had all kinds of abnormal behaviour, yes.
    RIVERS: Including fits?
    MARCHANT: Seizures, fits, tantrums . . .
    RIVERS: Call them what you will, Miss Marchant. For the convenience of this court we will call them fits. And did she, in the course of these fits, lose control of her limbs and roll about on the floor, muttering and foaming at the mouth?
    MARCHANT: That may have been something she did.
    RIVERS: Did she or did she not, Miss Marchant?
    MARCHANT: Yes.
    RIVERS: And were not these fits the very reason why Powell was placed in your care?
    MARCHANT: The fits were but one outward sign of her mind sickness.
    JUDGE: Miss Marchant, will you please answer counsel’s questions directly.
    MARCHANT: She was sent to me because of the fits, yes.
    RIVERS: And did you, in the presence of witnesses, say to Dr Bradley on one occasion, ‘we must beat the fits out of her’?
    MARCHANT: What I meant was—
    RIVERS: Never mind what you meant, Miss Marchant, did you say those words?
    MARCHANT: I may have done. I really cannot recall.
    RIVERS: And did you, or did you not, personally administer a beating to Powell when she next had a fit?
    MARCHANT: That was a different matter.
    RIVERS: Will you answer the question, Miss Marchant?
    MARCHANT: At that time her mind sickness was cured and it was my conviction that the fits were not involuntary. Any physical act on my part was done to make her aware that she was no longer helpless and sick. The patient who has recovered from mind sickness must be made aware of the moral responsibility which that recovery bestows. Powell had failed to show that responsibility as her deliberate falling into the fits demonstrated . . .

    There was much more of this casuistry, through which one could see that Miss Marchant was convinced of her own rightness on all occasions. The consequence of this was that everything she did must be correct; and all those who opposed her must be crushed or eliminated. ‘Powell’ was the one who was burned to death in the summerhouse.
    The phrase ‘mind sickness’ recurred often in her testimony and in her book On the Care and Cure of the Insane . The fact that she used it in preference to a more common word, like insanity, showed a desire to carve out an individual approach to mental illness. I could not say what exactly she meant by the words, but I recognised the egoism with which she insisted on them. She was claiming mind sickness as her territory, just as Dr Freede and I were claiming Miss Marchant as ours.
    I wrote my play easily, but without the ecstatic satisfaction that usually comes over me when a piece of writing goes well. The trouble was, there was no redeeming feature: the story of Miss Marchant was a relentless downward slide into murder, madness and oblivion. It was the pure tragedy of someone with a great capacity for goodness brought down by the flaw of hubris. I experimented with altering the chronology of the scenes so that the play ended with an image of Miss Marchant at her best, but it did not work. There was no honest way of deviating from the descent; that was the power and the truth of the work.
    While I was working on the final draft, I received an invitation through