Naomi's Room

by Jonathan Aycliffe

  Lewis stood. I was unable to take my eyes from the pitiful heap on the floor. At that instant, quite without warning, the temperature dropped. In moments it grew bitterly cold. Lewis pulled my arm.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he shouted, ‘let’s get out of here.’

  I could see my breath hanging in the beam of the torch. Turning, I saw Lewis by the opening, beckoning to me. Then, as though a change had come over my vision, I became aware that there was another source of light in the room. I looked round and saw that someone had lit the oil-lamp on the table. And by its light I saw that the room was no longer in a state of squalor, that the dust and cobwebs had gone, and that someone was standing by the far wall, watching me. It was the man in black, the white-faced man who had followed me to Venice and Egypt. He was smiling.

  ‘They would not be taught, sir,’ he said. His voice seemed to come from a long, long way away, or from deep down, from the depths of a pit. It was the voice I had heard in my sleep the night before. The man was holding something in his hand, something that shone dully in the yellow light. It looked very like a knife.

  I felt something tugging at my arm, then I was being pulled away from the figure in black. Lewis was dragging me back through the opening. The attic beyond it had changed too. There were drab curtains at the window, a mirror hung on one wall, candles burned in brass sticks on a long, low table.

  And then I was being pulled down the stairs, half stumbling, half falling. The door lay open. Lewis got me through, grabbed the door, and slammed it. His hand shook visibly as he turned the key in the lock.

  A voice whispered seductively in my ear.

  ‘It will grow easier, sir. I do assure you.’

  I looked round quickly. There was no one there.

  16

  We took a while to recover from what had happened. Laura was badly affected, though withdrawn rather than hysterical. Her reserves seemed to have broken down entirely. Scepticism had been a means of blocking out her growing awareness of a new reality that threatened to undermine the fragile world she had built around herself.

  It is not that she was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist or an unyielding rationalist, someone for whom the supernatural might carry a threat of dissonance. She went to church from time to time, she read her horoscopes in newspapers and cheap magazines and half believed them, she once consulted a faith healer when she fell ill with shingles and was in great pain. To believe in ghosts, to run from apparitions of the long dead, would not have been hard for her.

  Her problem lay in coming to terms with Naomi’s death. If Naomi were truly dead, either an angel in the arms of Jesus or bones in a country churchyard, that was hard but manageable. But to learn that she might in some sense still be alive, conscious and accessible, to be all of that yet in some different dimension, struck Laura very hard. She could not rest, knowing Naomi might need her, knowing she had no immediate means of fulfilling that need.

  Lewis took me aside some time after the incident in the attic. We were in the garden, where we had gone to seek refuge from the house.

  ‘You will have to find it all out,’ he said. ‘Your wife needs more than reassurance, man. She needs to see it in black and white, a reason for all this, an explanation.’

  ‘Do you think there can be one?’ I asked. Laura was not far away, sitting on a garden bench watching small birds build a white nest in a chestnut tree.

  ‘I don’t mean that we can find a scientific explanation for the manifestations, of course not. That’s neither here nor there. But something happened in this house a long time ago, something that is still troubling it. Perhaps knowing just what it was will make it seem less threatening. Fear of the unknown is the worst of all.’

  I agreed. And I said I would begin work on the investigation. Would things have been different had I said no? Would I have done what I did if. I had not known?

  I haven’t seen Laura in days. She must be sulking somewhere. I wonder if she knows what I’m up to. What I’m writing. I wonder if she has come across the photographs . . .

  For the next three weeks, I buried myself in research. I divided my time between the public library and the County Record Office in Shire Hall, with occasional side-trips to the University Library and Trinity College. In those days, the public library was still at the back of the Guildhall. The librarian in charge of the Cambridgeshire Collection took me gently through the complexities of Burgess’s lists of ratepayers, the old street directories, and the general directories for Cambridge, which went back as far as the 1790s.

  For weeks I walked down miles of archive corridors, waded through acres of printed and handwritten papers, and all to come to the man in black. Or was he coming all the time to me, were we hurtling towards one another, like planets converging, about to strike, to plummet into the carved and tilted centre of things?

  The simple act of research was more therapeutic to me than a rest or holiday could ever have been. I was doing what I knew best. My days were spent among archives, unearthing names and dates and long-forgotten facts. For all that the field was so different to my own, the techniques were sufficiently familiar to instil in me a sense of routine, a delusion that what I was doing was commonplace and that the anxieties I suffered were everyday anxieties.

  I asked Laura to go and stay with my sister in Northampton. She was at first reluctant, but her experiences in the attic had opened her to persuasion. She would not tell me exactly what she had seen, for all that I pressed her. When the attic had shifted, she had been at the other end. I did at least ascertain that she had not seen the man in black. That was all she would say.

  I persuaded the college authorities to give me the use of a guest room, making some excuse about renovations at home. For the first few nights, I was fearful lest I be followed to college. I listened for footsteps as I walked home from the library in the dark. In bed at night, I held my breath each time feet sounded on the stairs outside my room. But they passed by and I was left alone with my beating heart.

  Piece by piece I assembled a file of notes and photocopies. I still have it here in my study, a thick black arch-lever file locked away in my corner cabinet. I never need to look at it now, of course: I know everything it contains in detail, intimate detail.

  His name was Liddley, Dr John Augustus Liddley, MB, LSA, MRCP. The letters LSA stood for Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. The qualification passed out of common use after the Medical Act of 1858, but before that general practitioners regularly gained it. In Liddley’s day, there was still much rivalry between the medical estates: physicians, surgeons, and, bottom of the heap, apothecaries. Nurses and midwives weren’t even in the running. The elite remained the elite: the College of Physicians did not rub shoulders with the College of Surgeons, nor the latter with Apothecaries Hall.

  But the others – the ordinary Members, the Licentiates – were not so particular, especially those living outside London. College Fellows might hold themselves aloof from cutting and bleeding and lancing, but ordinary physicians, whose bread and butter lay in patients and their cure, could ill afford such scruples. The passing of the Apothecaries Act in 1815 made possession of the LSA obligatory for any medical man who wished to prescribe and dispense.

  John Liddley took his MB in 1823, three years after his BA at the age of twenty-one. He is listed in Munk’s Roll, the 1878 original, not Browne’s later volume. You may find all the details there, in black and white, as I did, you can read it all for yourself. The basic facts only, of course, for Munk does not say much about the personal details, the life outside of doctoring.

  Liddley spent his undergraduate years at Downing, not a prestigious college in those days. He was fortunate to be at Cambridge then, of course, for the great Haviland had just commenced his reforms and medical education was improving rapidly.

  After obtaining his MB, he headed for London to further his studies at the hospitals there. He spent his first year at the London Hospital, where he won the gold medal in pathology. The London was close
to his family home, which meant he was able to live there as a means of saving on expenses while still training. It is not clear why he did not remain there. The London was still one of the only hospitals with a medical school of any description, and his gold medal would have secured him excellent prospects.

  Whatever the cause, he moved in the following year to Guy’s, where he was one of the first students to be chosen for a clinical clerkship by Addison, who introduced the new training system in 1828. Our man was twenty-nine by then and by all accounts on the verge of a great career.

  I can picture him at Guy’s, pale, lanky, working late by lamplight in the dead-room, peeling skin from muscle, muscle from bone, his hands red, his face illuminated by . . . By what? By knowledge? Suffering? Bestiality? A dark-suited man with a cane walking through half-lit wards, pointing with a long finger at the amputees, the spindle-shanked, the consumptive.

  But I fear my image is flawed and partisan, the result of hindsight, unworthy of my training. I must be objective. John Liddley was no figure of horror, whatever I may have come to know of him. He had little to do with surgery, deeming it, as did most physicians in his day, a mechanic’s job, a trade not fit for a gentleman. His records at Bart’s and Guy’s were exemplary. He was not loved, but what doctor expects to be loved? His colleagues respected him, his teachers praised him, his patients feared him. What more could he have wanted? What more, indeed?

  For some reason – there is a shadow over this period of his life – he gave up the metropolis and the prospect of a consultancy, the certainty of a fellowship at the Royal College. He returned instead to Cambridge and a career in general practice. That was in 1829. It is rumoured – I have found letters that relate the story – that he had left behind in Cambridge a woman, the daughter of one of his teachers, and that his return had as its aim the winning of her hand. Be that as it may, he did not marry until fully eight years later, when his practice was firmly on its feet and he could afford a wife and family.

  I say ‘afford’, but of course he had never been in want. His father was a London merchant with dealings in the silk trade, a man of substance, lacking only the social graces. He had hoped for better from his son, of course: doctoring was not then the pinnacle of attainment it is today, it was little more than a trade. In London, John might have become something, found wealthy patrons, worked his way to a knighthood; but in Cambridge, preferment of that order was out of the question. Nevertheless, Mr Liddley Sr did not deny his son the funds he needed to make his way in the world. What else had he to pass on?

  There were children, two girls, Caroline and Victoria, born in 1838 and 1839 respectively. Their names appear in the 1841 census, along with that of their mother, Sarah, née Galsworthy.

  Sarah was the only daughter of Samuel Galsworthy, the rector of the Round Church. It is not recorded how she and Liddley met, but their match was a respectable one, a union that cemented Dr Liddley’s growing reputation in the little town. She was late in marrying, twenty-eight years old, according to the marriage certificate in the PRO.

  Liddley did some teaching in the University, but there seems to have been some difficulty about his being offered a permanent post, nor is it clear that he would have wanted one. He was appointed physician to the Madingley Medical Club, he acquired clients among dons, parsons and lawyers, he was a favourite with children.

  This was, in large part, on account of the gentleness of his treatments. In certain quarters, he gained a false reputation as a homoeopath, so nearly Hahnemannian were his prescriptions and his advice. He would not dose with calomel, not even in venereal cases; he would neither bleed nor purge with jalap; he was judicious in his use of antimony and quinine. Some of his colleagues shunned him for his lack of principle, but, like the homoeopaths in Europe and America, he won his patients to his side. They did not, at least, die of his treatments.

  He built his house in 1840, just in time to be included in the national census of the following year. It was one of the first erected on Pemberton land. The Pembertons were, it appears, among his patients.

  He had his surgery downstairs, in the room now occupied by my study. There is a photograph of it in an early issue of the Nineteenth Century magazine. It corresponds in every respect to a much later photograph, one taken by Lewis in my presence. And since then I have seen it for myself, in the flesh, as it were: the cabinets filled with glass jars, the heavy chairs, the boxes of instruments, the framed diplomas on the wall. It looks better in colour.

  His household was meagre for the time: a cook, two maids, a gardener, a governess for the girls, Miss Sarfatti. The Liddleys lived well, but never flaunted their wealth. They walked everywhere, though John had the use of a light chaise when visiting patients. Only the surgery and Liddley’s study were furnished with gas lighting.

  In 1845, Liddley dismissed the maids, and in the following year his gardener. What became of them is not recorded. It seems that the cook, Mrs Turret, had to take on all the duties of running the household. A letter from Liddley to his father-in-law dated 1846 defends the action on the grounds of economy. The Reverend Galsworthy’s reply, if there was one, has not been preserved. But a woman of Sarah’s class and expectations would not in those days have been expected to lift a finger to clean or cook or sew.

  There is evidence in family correspondence that Liddley was becoming increasingly reclusive, and his family with him. He seemed morose and was uncommunicative. Many of his patients began to desert him, though most stayed out of loyalty or an abiding preference for his treatment. It was remarked on that he was not a regular attender at church, though Mrs Liddley and her girls were to be seen there every Sunday, at morning and evening service alike.

  What of Sarah Liddley? What did my researches reveal about her? Very little, if the truth be told. She seems to have quarrelled with her parents a little before her marriage to John, and to have been considered headstrong. Letters between her father and his brother (a military man) reveal her to have been an unpopular child and an ill-natured woman. She broke off an engagement when she was eighteen, occasioning no little scandal. The name of her suitor is not known. By the time she married Liddley, she was considered unmarriageable, and there is good reason to believe that theirs was not a love match. Liddley benefited from it, of course, and she seems to have been content at first.

  In the summer of 1846 – the exact date was on or about the third of July – Liddley informed Miss Sarfatti that he no longer required her services. He would take care of the children’s education himself, he said. I found papers relating to the termination of the governess’s employment in the files of a London registry. He gave her good references and three months’ pay in lieu of notice, generous treatment by the standards of the time. Mrs Turret followed a few months later, in January 1847. The Liddleys now lived alone.

  It is difficult to establish exactly what happened next. For a few years, all went as well as it might. A girl came in from time to time to clean. Tradesmen were met at the house by Mrs Liddley, who acquired a reputation as a force to be reckoned with. Her parents – from whose correspondence and diaries much of our information comes – were refused entry to the house, nor did their daughter visit them at the rectory. The garden grew wild, though there were no close neighbours then to complain.

  Some time between the winter of 1848 and the spring of 1849, it was observed that neither Mrs Liddley nor her children had been seen for some time, whether at church or in town. Liddley himself moved his surgery to rooms in Sidney Street, ‘that he might be less remote from those who sought him out’. His father-in-law paid an unexpected visit to the house in March 1849, when he found Liddley alone, at work in his study. The doctor told him that his wife and children had gone to stay with relatives of his in London.

  Galsworthy made inquiries. No one had seen Mrs Liddley, Caroline or Victoria. Confronted, Liddley confessed that his wife had left him, taking the girls with her. When asked how she was managing to live, the doctor claimed that he had agreed to pa
y Sarah an annuity, the money being delivered through a lawyer in London. And indeed, when the lawyer was questioned, he confirmed that such monies had been received and paid out. But he could not reveal the whereabouts of his client.

  Matters did not rest there. The house and gardens were searched, for Liddley was suspected of having stealthily done away with his family. But nothing was found: no bodies, no trace of violence, no sign of disturbed earth. Galsworthy continued to voice his suspicions, but with time people lost interest. Liddley was shunned, and by the time he died, he had lived alone with his books and chemicals for another fifteen years.

  He died on, or about, the ninth of March 1865. The exact date is not known, since almost two weeks elapsed before he was found, following several abortive visits from the postman. His relatives in London claimed the body, and two days later he was carried back to the metropolis and buried in the parish where he had been born.

  17

  The General Register Office has no record of the deaths of Sarah, Caroline, or Victoria Liddley between 1849 and 1929, the year at which I arbitrarily called a halt to my long search. There are deaths under those names, of course; but the other details do not fit: dates of birth, marital status, places of residence.

  I looked under Galsworthy, of course I did. There was nothing under that name either. But I already knew the answer. If a stranger had wanted their remains in order to transport them to a country churchyard somewhere or to return them to a family vault, I could have told him where to look. What I could not yet have said was precisely how they had come to be there, how Liddley had killed them, or why.

  My sources, public and private, had told me all they were likely to. I was at my wits’ end. The things I really wanted to know, the motive, the manner of the crime, above all, what circumstance had left behind all that hate, all that anger – these were denied me. It’s not enough to be clever; you have to be lucky too.