CHAPTER TWO
SERAPHINA'S FIRST SECRET RECORDING 1920
“I’m sitting in a window seat in my electromagnetic laboratory in my new home, Starlight, recording these words directly onto a twelve-inch black shellac disk in the hope that this recording and those that follow will help save my husband’s life.
I’ll explain why in a moment, but the weight of love is never more important than it is on this beautiful day. Radiant waves from the star at the centre of our solar system are making the ionosphere shine like pale blue crystal, while the gentle wintergreen swell around our peninsula dances with light. I’m watching my six-year-old daughter, Rachel, and her pa plant bougainvillea vines in our lovely garden overlooking the harbour and I know Rachel is especially happy. She loves digging and planting with her meticulous pa, and working with him, she is never more content, but for Jacob even the simplest pleasure is threatened by the demons that haunt him day and night. He returned shattered from the world war, his gentle nature ravaged by shell shock for which there is no treatment or cure. The terror and despair in his eyes overwhelm us both, and more than once he’s said he cannot bear to live another day. As a scientist I’m shocked that medicine has no remedy for the damage done to Jacob’s mind, other than cruel experimental therapies that are barbaric at best. How many years will it take for medical science to understand the deep trauma in a mutilated soul?
My heart-breaking failure to find peace for Jacob over the last two years led me finally to a paper given in Vienna at the start of the world war by the Jewish neurologist Dr Sigmund Freud which has given me at least a ray of hope. While not convinced by some of Dr Freud’s theoretical positions about women and motherhood, I was fascinated by accounts of his techniques in which he heals nervous disorders by encouraging patients to talk in detail about their innermost feelings. I couldn’t find a practitioner in Sydney, so I decided to try Dr Freud’s principles by encouraging Jacob to join me in recording our most private thoughts and feelings as I’m doing now. Jacob may not agree to talk about the horrors he so far refuses to describe, but if I succeed, my idea is to review the recordings over the months and years to come in the hope that it creates a therapeutic benefit for us both.
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