A grey-whiskered man was holding court, attended to by a cluster of brightly dressed elderly ladies and gentlemen who had all been leached of the colour of youth: white skin, milky eyes and silver hair. The man spoke his opinions with great confidence, as if they were indisputable facts. ‘The people who inhabit that part of London,’ he declared, ‘acquire a taste for thieving and violence when still in their mothers’ arms. You cannot remove criminality any more than you can extract bad breeding from a dog.’
His audience nodded in agreement.
‘Well, they are different, are they not? You only have to look at them. They are short and have terrible complexions. They are simply not well bred,’ said a woman who appeared to be missing a chin, her lower jaw an apathetic bridge to her neck. All those generations of good breeding had bred out the ability to fold a tablecloth, but then if you never had to fold your own, what use was a chin?
The better classes tended to talk of money as if there was a finite amount of it, as if it were a cake. They had their slice and didn’t want to part with it. But they kept adding extra slices to their plate, using their first portion to justify why they were entitled to a second, and a third. Before long, the original cake was twice the size – a celebration cake! what a triumph to be British! – and yet the rest of us were still waiting obediently for a single piece.
I wanted to interrupt, inform them that gentlefolk were only taller because they were better fed, that bad skin could be fixed with good food, fresh air and decent hygiene. I wanted to talk to them about the children who left the hospital in better condition than when they were admitted but who would certainly get sick and malnourished again, their parents being too poor to cover the rent and feed them. But I didn’t. I was a coward. I disliked myself. I had been disgusted by the patients and happy to marry upwards myself, yet here I was, piously offended by the wealthy and their assumptions that their status was due to their innate superiority and nothing at all to do with luck, or greed, or theft. All this as I drank wine and ate creamed sweetbreads and cold boned turkey, served to me by a waiter who heard everything and kept his eyes nailed to the floor.
The group went on to discuss the murder of Martha Tabram.
‘Have you heard, my dears, that there were three cases of infanticide and another murder in Whitechapel this week alone!’
‘Indeed. But the latter was a straightforward case, was it not? The man beat his wife to death with his fists, I understand. Nothing like as dramatic as that poor unfortunate found cut to pieces in a stairwell.’
The ladies gasped into their silk handkerchiefs and leaned more closely into the conversation. They appeared thrilled, overtaken with a macabre fervour.
There followed theatrical descriptions of the ‘howling wilderness’ of the East End and the savages that lived in its criminal corners. How the subversive Jews made blood sacrifices and were conspiring to drive down wages and undercut English tradesmen.
‘There are far too many foreigners coming in. It’s like a flood!’ a portly gentleman opined. ‘They will overrun us all.’
‘And the socialists will drag us into the middle of Trafalgar Square and guillotine us. Let us not forget the poor French.’
‘And the whores! What shall we do with all the whores? Why can they not keep their skirts down? Those women are not women at all. They infect married men and send diseases into good, middle-class homes. Someone should stop them. No wonder they end up murdered and disembowelled in stairwells. Why do they not stay at home?’
My stays felt as if they were shrinking, pulling tighter and tighter, and I thought my ribs would crack. The press of the room was preventing me from taking my breaths deep down into the bottom of my lungs. I needed air. I was scared I would have another experience like I had when Emma Smith was brought in. There was a thunderstorm in my chest. I had to get out. I pushed through the crowds, apologising and trying not to look at the disgruntled faces as I shoved past them. I put a hand on the French doors, and the expressionless waiter approached.
‘Madam, it’s raining.’
‘I know,’ I said, and pushed open the doors and ran out into the cold blue rain. The chill shocked my skin and calmed me down.
I must have stood there one, maybe two minutes when Thomas called out.
‘Susannah! What are you doing? Get back in here at once.’
He was in the doorway, the waiter beside him. One angry face, one bemused. My hair stuck to my cheeks, dripping wet. Pallid faces stared back at me as if I had gone mad.
In the cab on the way home, Thomas lost no time telling me how humiliated he was.
‘I told a few choice people who won’t be able to stop themselves from gossiping that you have been in despair ever since you… are no longer… You understand. It was an odd display, Susannah. You are growing stranger by the day. I think perhaps you are unwell.’
I said nothing, but there it was again: unwell.
After that, Thomas talked incessantly of me seeing a doctor. He kept suggesting there was something wrong with me, that I was depressed and listless. He urged me to make an appointment with his friend, Dr Lovett. When I insisted that there had been no child to lose, for it had been too early to tell and I’d been foolish to speak of it, he told me I was in denial. I countered that I was only being scientific, to which he called me cold and unfeeling, saying it was not natural for a woman to say such things about her own child. I began to doubt myself. His obsession with finding a mechanical error with my body made me responsible for everything, so I stopped arguing; everything I said only seemed to prove his theory anyway. It dawned on me this was the most attention I’d had from Thomas in weeks. He appeared to take pleasure in talking about my insides as if they were defective, as if I was a rusty old machine that could be taken apart, assessed and reassembled, this time with younger parts.
At the end of August, when I could no longer avoid it, I did see a doctor, but I made damn sure to pick my own.
11
The wiry little clerk took too much pleasure in telling me, down the slope of his nose, that the renowned Dr Shivershev wasn’t taking on any new patients at the moment, he was already far too busy. Did I have a recommendation, he asked, in the tone of one who thought he already knew the answer. I lied, told him we were friends, that we knew each other very well from the London. This confused the poor boy, since Dr Shivershev was the type who ignored everyone, indiscriminately. So I told him I expected my friend to be outraged when he heard I’d been turned away. The young clerk lost his superior attitude in a cloud of self-doubt and suggested an appointment for the following week, on Monday the twentieth of August.
I hadn’t been hell-bent on having Dr Shivershev as my physician. I had trudged up and down Harley Street and found myself baffled by the countless names on gold plates outside every door. The more I read, the more muddled I became. I nearly gave up and resigned myself to consulting Thomas’s friend, but then I saw his name: Dr Robert V. Shivershev. How many Shivershevs in London could there be? We had no friendship; I was simply a nurse. I was sure that to him we were all interchangeable and faceless, smoothed over, like ivory pieces on a chessboard. This was not important. I only wanted to have my physician and my husband’s newfound obsession with my health in separate jars on a shelf.
*
‘You say you know him from the London?’ the elegant housekeeper asked as I followed her up the grand staircase. Old enough to be my mother, but more beautiful than I would ever be, she had a pile of dark hair arranged in an intricate weave, soft eyes and an accent I couldn’t place. She wore a lilac silk dress and was the most captivating housekeeper I had ever seen, like a misplaced duchess down on her luck.
‘I was a nurse, but then I married.’
‘Oh! How wonderful. If I were an adventurous young woman again… Well, never mind.’
She led me to his office door, put one hand on the handle, hesitated, then whispered, ‘Knowing that you, a professional woman, would have kept your ward spotlessly clean
, I feel I must apologise for the state of his office. The doctor refuses to let me in, he accuses me of moving things, which I never do.’ She shook her head. ‘There I go with my overexplaining, when you must be aware of how stubborn he can be, yes?’
‘He can be a character.’ I smiled. I had no clue as to what we were both referring.
‘A good way of putting it, my dear,’ she said and opened the door.
Once inside, I understood what she meant. The drapes were in a random state – some were closed, others open, and most of them looked as if they’d been strung up in a hurry and forgotten about. It had a disorientating effect on the light, plunging some parts of the room into darkness and highlighting other areas with bright shards that illuminated the floating dust. I sneezed as soon as I entered.
The room looked as if it had been ransacked and abandoned in a great hurry, as if the doctor had been hunted down and had then fled. There was paper everywhere, weighted down with medical utensils and equipment that belonged in trays and cases, not splayed out carelessly. The air was stagnant and, shall we say, laced with the aroma of nervous patients. I doubted the windows had been opened for days. Specimen jars lined one side of the room, where they’d been pushed onto a shelf, no care taken to their arrangement, and were covered in thick dust that all but masked the oddities contained inside. Piles of books sprang up like wild mushrooms from the floor, and I had to weave my way among them to reach his desk. The building had presented itself as the perfect white-fronted townhouse faced with black ironwork; the hallway, the housekeeper and the winding staircase had conveyed a picture of elegance and conformity; but this room was like walking into a hermit’s cave.
There was a loud thump at the window to my left. It startled me. I saw the smear of ghostly grease left by a bewildered bird and thought of that little dunnock and my grandfather coming into the room with him cupped in his giant hands.
Dr Shivershev leaned forward on his chair, emerging from the gloom like a spirit at a séance, which startled me all over again.
‘It was a pigeon. They fly into the windows here all the time. I don’t know why, for the windows are filthy. I try to stop her having them cleaned – I thought that would help the birds understand what they were, but it doesn’t. It’s a great shame. The city has developed too fast for some species to cope with; it’s as if they cannot perceive the building at all. They cannot adapt fast enough to avoid the new obstacles we build that harm them. If only I knew how to stop them from destroying themselves. Won’t you sit down, Mrs Lancaster.’
‘Are you sure it’s not merely stunned? My grandfather saved a bird once. He put it in a box, in the dark, and the next morning it flew away. I’d thought it dead.’
‘My clerk has never retrieved a live one.’
‘Your clerk retrieves them?’
‘Yes. They are always dead, necks broken. But a tragedy for one species often means another thrives. My housekeeper will throw it to the cat that comes by the back. He will be grateful at least.’
The doctor himself looked like a rumpled piece of old cloth. One that had been cleaned and pressed long ago, and had since been dragged over bushes, trodden on repeatedly, wrung out and reused time and again. His hair, eyes and complexion were all dark. I thought he might be French or Spanish, or Italian. He had that ambiguous colour that Englishmen have a passion to classify but out of ignorance grudgingly characterise as ‘foreign’ or ‘exotic’. His accent, on the other hand, screamed English boarding school. His eyes had dark shadows, his black hair, which was long and beginning to curl at the neck, shot out in all directions, like a hedgehog. He needed a shave. He wasn’t wearing a jacket and there were spots on his shirt. He looked more like an alcoholic than a reputable surgeon. I began to think I might have made a pig-headed mistake.
‘So, you are my dear old friend from the hospital. Forgive me, I have forgotten how we came to be so familiar,’ he said, tipping back in his chair and smirking as my cheeks burned. ‘I had to laugh when my clerk described you. I thought I knew who it might be, but I wasn’t sure. I would never have guessed you’d be the type to talk your way into my diary. I was intrigued. The question is, why didn’t you come and speak to me at the hospital?’
I was red as a berry and squirmed at being trapped by my own lie.
‘I’m not at the hospital any more, Dr Shivershev. I married.’
‘Now why on earth would you do that?’ he asked, his face screwed up as if he really couldn’t understand.
I picked at the stitching of my gloves and stared at the floor. I’d thought I would be in there ten minutes at most, that I would blather on about my health and be on my way. Now I wasn’t sure what to say at all.
‘My husband has a practice further down Harley Street. Though I’ve never been there, as he doesn’t like to be disturbed at work. You should know him from the hospital, he’s a surgeon at the London too. Thomas Lancaster.’
As soon as I mentioned Thomas’s name, Dr Shivershev froze. He seemed to be making every effort not to betray what he was thinking. He looked about his desk and shuffled things around, pushing an inkpot an inch to the side and some papers to the edge of the desk. Then he interlaced his fingers as if he couldn’t trust them either.
‘I see,’ he said after an unnatural pause. ‘Well, Sister Chapman, now Mrs Lancaster, there has to be a reason why you have made such efforts to consult me and not… discuss whatever it is with your own husband. I’m curious, if nothing else.’
The hot blood had reached my chest and burned like a furnace. ‘My husband has concerns that there may be… My husband is a little younger than myself. Do you think…? Is there an opinion, a modern scientific one, on the ideal age for a woman…? I want to make sure I am in good health. I have been worrying… about my health.’ I had made a hole in the finger where I’d pulled at the loose cotton on my glove. I wished I could crawl into it.
He asked the obligatory questions about my age, Thomas’s age, my history – which was amusing, since I knew only half of it – and my general health, the answers to which he scribbled down on a piece of paper snatched from one of the piles strewn around his desk. There was already writing on the other side and I was sure his scrawling was all an act, for my benefit. He could have been compiling a shopping list for all I knew.
‘Mrs Lancaster, you are well within childbearing age, if that’s what you are trying to ascertain.’
‘I am older than my husband,’ I said. ‘What can I tell him that may reassure him?’
I had the idea that if Dr Shivershev said something scientific, then the next time Thomas accused me of having something wrong with me I could quote him and not be held responsible.
‘Tell him that there are many women who have children at the age you are now. That my own mother was forty when I was born. I can’t honestly think of any scientifically based medical intervention that would help. Although I’m sure I could invent something and charge you for it, but your husband would know better, or should. Unless there is something else? Are there any other irregularities you wish to tell me about?’
I wondered what would happen if I were to ask him in plain English if it was normal for a man to laugh as he caused his wife pain or to choke her until she gasped for air. If there was truly a God-given appetite that men couldn’t control and women had to satisfy whether they liked it or not. If the fairy stories, the tales of married bliss, of love, were all a trick to get us under them, so that once trapped we were embarrassed at our gullibility and bound by bitter resentment to keep the conspiracy from younger girls, else suffer the pain of jealousy at their escape. I could ask him if it explained everything; if many women suffered from a simple overexertion of the natural male urge, provoked by an unresponsive wife somewhere. I wondered if the doctor choked his wife when he fucked her, and if she enjoyed it, or if, like me, she played along, making the correct noises, hoping to make it end a little faster.
‘Is there something else, Mrs Lancaster?’
‘No,’ I
said. ‘I suppose I have too much time on my hands – I spend a lot of my day thinking.’
‘Perhaps voluntary work, Mrs Lancaster. You have skills that come highly valued. Not many lady volunteers are experienced surgical nurses. I can think of several charities that would be thrilled to have someone like you. If that doesn’t appeal, I do have some clients who find distraction through keeping a journal; a collection of their thoughts and feelings, some say it helps.’
That sounded terrible, but I made a face that suggested I considered it a good idea.
‘Other than that, you should try and relax and enjoy being married. You have time, Mrs Lancaster. Lots of it,’ he said.
My eyes darted about the room, trying to avoid his. They had adjusted to the light. I picked out large, worn books of illegible writing in a language I didn’t recognise. The specimens in jars were now revealed to be real pieces of flesh: organs and skin in formaldehyde. My eyes fixed on the bottom half of a face floating in yellow liquid, the skin peeled from below the person’s eyes, the lips intact, the skin covered in lesions.
‘I have an interest in diseases of the skin,’ said Dr Shivershev.
‘Oh.’
Next to the face there was a mouth with a fleshy tongue and long tentacles like fingers surrounding it.
‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never seen such an organ.’
‘That’s a sea creature. It’s for decoration,’ he said.
I was still looking at it when he added, ‘You were a companion of that nurse…?’
I stopped breathing, pulled my shoulders back like Thomas had taught me, and cut him off before he could continue. ‘Sister Barnard,’ I said. ‘Yes. We shared a room.’
People of Abandoned Character Page 9
