Read The Lazarus Secrets for Free Online

emotional burden.
    War changed Max from boy to man. Deferring his time at Oxford, he joined the Royal Navy. His emotions fuelled by the stories of his grandmother’s successful marriage, he met and hastily married Claudine Duvall, a beautiful French girl, who was pregnant with his son. The marriage was short-lived and when Claudine went to live in London while Max was at sea, his son Jules was left in the care of his uncles and his mother at Top Cottage.
    Max had a ‘bad war’ as the term was in those days. The ship on which he served as a junior officer was sunk and he was the only survivor picked up after hours drifting in the sea. He was suffering from shock and exposure and after a short spell in hospital returned home to Top Cottage depressed and traumatised. Only the time he spent with his young son seemed to make him happy but the rest of the family looked for and found, improvements in his physical and mental health. And then he disappeared. It was thirty-six hours before the family learned that he had been caught in an air-raid in Portsmouth and found wandering, scared and incoherent by an off-duty police officer Douglas Hood who took him to the hospital.
    Max spent many weeks in hospital during which time he learned that Claudine had been killed in an air-raid and his lifeline became the hospital psychiatrist, Dr Leon Bauerman. Dr Bauerman was a Jewish refugee from Austria who, while trying to lay to rest his own demons, helped Max face up to his ‘survivor guilt’ over the lost crew of his ship, the failure of his marriage and the death of Claudine.
    Leon and Max bared their very souls to one another and in doing so became indelibly bound together. Leon used his own confessions as a bargaining tool to encourage Max to remember and relive his forgotten trauma, it was certainly not an accepted form of therapy and as Leon continued to treat the troubled young man the words ‘physician heal thyself’ crossed his mind frequently. He confessed to Max that he had escaped from Austria after getting into trouble with the virulently anti-Semitic authorities, leaving his wife and two young daughters to their fate. In turn, Max told of the hatred he had felt for Claudine for abandoning him and his son and that he thought he might have killed her when he went missing. He certainly knew things about her that he couldn’t explain, like the fact that she had taken a French Naval Officer as a lover. In his most desperate moments, he hoped he had killed her and at other times that thought appalled him. In his mind, he had a vision of her making love to this man with the cross he had given to her swinging from her neck, but was this a memory of a fact, or a memory of his imaginings while he was mentally ill?
    Before Max had completed his treatment, Leon learned that his wife and daughters had perished. He told Max the news had come in a letter from a contact in Vienna and had taken several months to reach him. That day he arranged for Max to be discharged from hospital and committed suicide.
    Max left the hospital with Leon’s last words ringing in his ears. Leon had speculated that thousands of mentally damaged young men would return from the war keeping their fears and the ghosts of their past trapped in a cellar in their minds; while young and strong their feet would be planted firmly on that trapdoor but as they grew older and weaker the demons would push open the trapdoor and force their way out and haunt the old age of their hosts. Determined that this would not happen to him, Max successfully wiped away the past keeping that trapdoor firmly closed with no possibility of the demons escaping and started a new life with his son.
    He became friends with Douglas Hood; the policeman who had helped him when he was caught in the air-raid and through him became a special constable until the war’s end when he joined the regular police force. He met and married his second wife Sarah who was also