According to Queeney

by Beryl Bainbridge

  The phrase ‘in my time’ was so portentous that Boswell thought something of a public or general catastrophe had taken place, such as the assassination of the King or a disaster comparable to the Fire of London.

  Mrs Thrale, on receipt of Johnson’s condolences, sat dry-eyed and not simply because she had no more tears to shed … in a distress which can be so little relieved, nothing remains for a friend but to come and partake of it. Poor dear sweet little boy … When you have obtained by prayer such tranquillity as nature will admit, force your attention, as you can, upon your accustomed duties and accustomed entertainments. You can do no more for our dear boy, but you must not therefore think less on those whom your attention may make fitter for the place to which he has gone.

  Attention … attention, thought Mrs Thrale, he is thinking merely of himself, and stuffed the letter into a drawer.

  Johnson came back to Bolt Court on the Sunday. He was in a distressed state of mind. Mrs Williams wept with him and Mrs Desmoulins did her best to appear in accord. He told them that he had left Lichfield soon after learning the awful news and that, stopping for one night only at Dr Taylor’s in Ashbourne, had travelled on to Southwark, where he had found Mrs Thrale in her carriage at the very gates of the Brewery, about to depart for Bath with Queeney and Baretti. Dr Jebb had advised that a change of air was imperative if the girl was to remain well; the two younger children had already been taken back to Mrs Cumyns’s school by Lady Lade. Waving the carriage away with many a sad look, he had gone at once to comfort Henry. A servant had stopped him on the stairs and said that his master wished to be left alone.

  ‘Such discourtesy,’ cried Mrs Desmoulins.

  ‘Discourtesy!’ Johnson shouted. ‘The poor man is distraught. If it had been I who had suffered such a blow, I too would wish to be solitary.’

  Mrs Desmoulins checked her tongue. Upon Tetty’s death, Sam had demanded company day and night.

  From Perkins Johnson had learnt of the events leading up to the fatal afternoon. There had been an expedition to the Tower. Young Harry had been in perfect health and clambered so energetically about the cannons and the mortar employed to defeat the Spanish Armada that he had come to resemble Frank Barber. When Count Manucci had complimented him on his knowledge of history and urged that he should be a soldier like himself, Harry had retorted, ‘I would not fight for the Duke of Tuscany because he was a Papist.’ Later, according to Baretti, he had taken pains to show the Count the instruments of torture used by the Spanish.

  ‘Such a precocious child,’ murmured Mrs Williams.

  ‘His mother boxed his ears for it,’ said Mrs Desmoulins.

  It was Queeney who had shown signs of sickness. There had been an incident in the Menagerie when she had pushed her hand through the railings and rattled the chain of the bear. ‘Poor thing,’ said she, though only Count Manucci heard her, ‘you too are caught by the neck.’ Then, on the return journey across Blackfriars Bridge, she had attempted to throw herself out of the carriage, on the delusion that she saw a pathway to Heaven. Harry’s sudden collapse a day later had come as a complete surprise. There had been no evidence of illness until a mere half-hour before his demise.

  ‘Not so,’ corrected Mrs Desmoulins, who had been visited by Old Nurse and had all the sorry details at her command. ‘In the morning, the day after the visit to the Tower, he rose quite well, went to the baker’s for his roll and ate it in the company of the clerks in Brewhouse Yard. After this, he bought two penny cakes for Susannah and Sophy and tickled them so much that they ran about shrieking. Mrs Thrale spoke to him harshly for it—’

  ‘She was worn out’, countered Mrs Williams, ‘from sitting up all night with Queeney. A half-hour on, he was playing in the nursery, banging his drum and generally behaving in a boisterous way, when he suddenly began to cry. Alarmed – he was not a crying boy unless hurt – Old Nurse hurried into the breakfast room to acquaint Mrs Thrale. She rebuked him for the noise he was making and held up his sister as an example, for Queeney, much recovered, was insisting on pouring out tea for her papa and Mr Baretti—’

  ‘Mrs Thrale was busy fussing over that Italian count—’ interrupted Mrs Desmoulins.

  Voice high and cracked, Mrs Williams said, ‘It was then that he vomited and Mrs Thrale, coming to see the change in him, sent the servant off to fetch whatever physician could be found. Then she ordered a tub to be filled with hot water, and laid him in it, and gave him an emetic in wine, all the time crying out most pitifully. At last Dr Jebb arrived and gave him more hot wine, then Usquebaugh, then Daffy’s Elixir. Harry was now in his bed sitting upright and talking quite briskly, so much so that Mr Baretti said he should be whipped for giving his mother such a fright. But then Mr Jebb said he must go with the utmost speed to ask Dr Heberden’s help in the matter, which put all into a fright again—’

  ‘Some two hours later’, said Mrs Desmoulins, and now her voice too began to waver, ‘there was a terrible shriek from those around the bedside. Harry had been thrusting his fingers down his throat, trying to make himself vomit; then he stopped and turning to Old Nurse said very distinctly – “Don’t scream so … I know I must die.”’

  ‘Enough,’ said Johnson, greatly affected. ‘I have heard enough and can bear no more.’

  He stood for a while at the window, looking out into the Court. Behind him Mrs Williams continued to sniff. Outside, clad in his white wolf coat, Mr Kranach walked round and round, finger stabbing the winter air as though conducting an invisible quartet. Life goes on, Johnson thought, and pondered whether this was a good thing.

  Neither Mrs Williams nor Johnson being cheerful company, Mrs Desmoulins descended below stairs to the kitchen. Frank Barber had gone out to meet one of his sooty friends and only Levet was at the fireside.

  ‘You,’ said she. ‘Idle as usual.’

  ‘You,’ said he, ‘ill-natured as always,’ and getting up left through the scullery door.

  Sitting in his vacated chair she stared into the flames. How easily, she mused, one’s sight registers alteration and how quickly the impression fades. She was thinking in particular of Samuel, of how when she beheld him after an absence she perceived him as old and tired, only to find in a blink of an eye that he had become the man she had known so many years ago.

  ‘God willing,’ she said aloud, ‘it is the same for him,’ and knew it could not be, for her gaze was dimmed by love and his clear of such mist.

  It had not always been so. Time was, when she had been companion to Tetty in Hampstead, in those lodgings in Church Row to which he came infrequently, he had looked upon her differently. Tell him I am unwell, Tetty had urged, when word was sent that he would come. Tell him I need you to lie beside me. It was not Tetty’s fault; she was above twenty years older than he who would so urgently require her wifely embraces.

  She had done as she was bidden, leaving Tetty giddy from laudanum, the expression on her face disordered, her nightcap askew. Then, all a tremble, she had filled his warming pan and thrust it between the sheets, and gone to crouch on the stairs for his knock at the door. How the small hour chimes of the church clock had quickened the beat of her heart! What shameful fantasies had swarmed within her head! When she twiddled her hand about in the candlelight, a rabbit nibbled the shadowy wall. Sometimes, Lord help her, she had opened the wig cupboard on the bend of the stair and touched the powder dust to bring him closer.

  Hearing his thump upon the door was both dreadful and full of joy; seeing him stomping in, boots splashed with mud, wig sparkling under raindrops, large eyes so full of desire, caused her words to quiver. ‘Your wife is not well. It is best that I sleep in her bed tonight.’

  ‘It is not best that she keeps me from her bed,’ he retorted, ‘and I doubt if illness has much to do with it.’

  Later, when Samuel was in his nightshirt – he knew she was hovering on the landing – he called her into his chamber and persuaded her to lie down beside him. First, they indulged in pillow talk. She had pleaded with
him to lower his voice, to curtail his feverish thrashings about the mattress; when he fondled her he was apt to shout in triumph at the discovery of a protuberance or a suspicion of moisture. But then, at the very moment when, in spite of God’s teachings, she would have welcomed a final assault, he had thrust her from him and bid her quit the room.

  A moral man, she had then thought, and revered him for it, but now – now that it was all too late – she was not so sure. Perhaps a cowardly man was nearer the truth. It was curious, was it not, that great men who compiled dictionaries, whose intellect enabled them to expound upon the state of nations, had not the words or the understanding to define the small business of love?

  Rising from the table, Mrs Desmoulins poked at the fire. The way the cinders fell and died on the hearth, leaving the young sea coals to flare up anew, confirmed her worst fears. She was, she reasoned, a woman snuffed out by the abominable Mrs Thrale.

  It afforded her some satisfaction to discover Levet’s shoes stood beside the scuttle. He, at least, would be tramping ice-footed through the mire of the world.

  Mr Baretti’s relationship with Mrs Thrale had never been easy. They were too alike in temperament, both being fiery, and had fallen out many times in the past, yet such was his tenacity and her shrewdness – she had a high opinion of his qualities as a teacher – a patching of sorts had always been possible. Then, a mere week after she had fled to Bath to take the waters, a more serious rift occurred. It arose from a rumour, believed to have been spread among the servants by Baretti, concerning a letter she had received from Dr Jebb. According to the Italian, Jebb had requested most urgently that she stop giving tin pills to her daughter, for the remedy might prove more fatal than the affliction. Mrs Thrale had denied receiving any such letter and charged him with scandalmongering.

  At the time, in spite of her liking for Mr Baretti, Queeney had sided with her mother who for a whole seven days had behaved towards her with unaccustomed sweetness. By day Mamma had taken to scarcely ever raising her voice in temper, and at night had got into the habit of lying beside her as she drifted into sleep; she said nothing, merely held her close, one hand clapping against her back in imitation of a heartbeat. It is true her dosing and purging had intensified, but this was understandable in the circumstances and but a small price to pay for such a display of motherly love. Then, Mr Baretti having soured her mood, she reverted to her old self and once again became crotchety.

  Mrs Thrale spent the remainder of the year moving from Bath to Brighthelmstone and back again in the company of what she referred to as the ruins of her family. Sometimes Johnson joined them, though apart from sea bathing in Brighthelmstone he found both resorts dull.

  In the New Year they returned to Streatham Park. Mrs Thrale had made a new acquaintance, that of Dr Burney, a man renowned for the teaching of music and one whose instruction she had long sought for Queeney. On meeting this eminent personage, Baretti spoke boastfully of his own knowledge of the art and generally behaved in a boorish manner. Mrs Thrale was annoyed; she feared he would prevent Dr Burney coming to the house on future occasions.

  There were other worries on her mind, the most serious being Thrale’s state of health. Shortly after their return from France the previous year he had complained of a testicle swollen to an enormous size. She had thought only of a cancer and had pleaded with him to get the best help he could find. Far from calling on Jebb or Cruikshank, he had insisted on consulting a quack named Osborne, whose services were sometimes advertised in the paper and who claimed to have studied under Monsieur Daran, a physician famed as a practitioner in the venereal afflictions. And all the while Henry had gone on protesting it was neither a cancer nor an infection, but a swelling caused by his leap from the chaise between Rouen and Paris. During this fretful time Johnson was of considerable support, urging prayer, and more importantly, a trust in physic. He corresponded with Dr Heberden, who recommended the rubbing of Mercury ointment into the skin around the affected area, and the taking of a nightly dose of Balsam Copabia, which stopped the running but not the inflammation. Thrale complained bitterly of a soreness of the mouth and a loosening of his teeth. Sometimes of a morning tufts of his hair lay shed upon the pillow, a circumstance he insisted was natural seeing he was now in the fifth decade of his life.

  ‘If he should die,’ wailed Mrs Thrale, ‘we are all lost,’ an observation overheard by Baretti, who retorted, ‘If he does, then it will not be long before Mr Johnson stands in his place.’ This remark so disconcerted Johnson that he raised his stick as though to strike the Italian to the ground. Shortly after, due no doubt to the stream of prayers issuing heavenwards, the swelling abated.

  Now, it returned. She had no sooner settled back at Streatham Park than she was required to get to her knees night and morning to hold poultices to the injured part. At such illuminating moments Mrs Thrale could not help but recall the words of her father, who had prophesied that if she married such a scoundrel as Henry he would give her the pox. Nor did she receive much thanks for her administrations, Thrale being sunk into self-pity and constantly berating her for being either too rough or insufficiently firm in her applications. He still protested that his sickness was brought about by his tumble into the chalk pit, and stoically refused to give up wine and the excessive eating of meat as advised by Osborne. Samuel, though in accord with the strictures regarding bloody beef and fatty cuts of pig, went along with the notion that Henry’s swelling was merely a consequence of a jolting of parts. Poor fool that I am, thought Mrs Thrale, it is best that I believe it.

  What with the nursing Henry needed and Johnson falling under an attack of gout, for which he demanded sympathy and wearisome talk as to the causes of the complaint, she felt much put upon. It was not to be wondered at that matters at last came to a head between herself and Baretti.

  The night before, he had bullied her into tears over the cancellation of the trip to Italy. Henry was at the table, but it was only she who was upbraided for what Baretti called the wilful breaking of a sacred promise. It was a well-known fact, Baretti argued, that an alteration of scene was of benefit to those suffering from bereavement and, in any case, was it not better to be miserable in Italy where the sun shone, than in England where rain never ceased to fall? He had made so many plans. His relatives had expected them; his friends had incurred expenses through the arranging of excursions and accommodation. Were they to be left under the misapprehension that he had invented such a visit, that he was a man given to untruths and fantasies? Henry, befuddled with drink, had said he would recompense him for the trouble he had gone to, but Baretti’s eyes had fairly blazed with anger.

  Then, the following morning, he overreached himself in the presence of Miss Reynolds and Mr Langton. Dr Burney, who in spite of his earlier encounter with the Italian had accepted an invitation to dine that evening, was fortunately closeted with Johnson, who sat at his desk composing one of his many charitable letters. Queeney observed the confrontation.

  Old Nurse, the tears coursing down her cheeks, came into the drawing room clutching a toy soldier which had belonged to Harry. She wanted to know what she should do with it.

  ‘Burn it,’ Mamma cried, and snatching it from her flung it on to the fire. After a while there was a spitting sound as the paint began to bubble from the wood. Papa, pale as snow, stared into the flames.

  It was then that Mr Baretti said, ‘Would that the consuming of an object could eradicate a mother’s guilt,’ at which Mamma flew into a fury and accused him of stepping beyond his position.

  ‘My position, Madam,’ he shouted back, ‘is that of a man who wishes to save this family from further grief.’

  ‘What do you know of grief,’ Mamma retorted, ‘or guilt for that matter, you who stood trial for murder …?’

  ‘My murder’, he retorted, ‘was committed to prevent my own life from coming under the threat of extinction—’

  ‘Come, come,’ interrupted Papa, rising to his feet in agitation, ‘this goes too far.’
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  ‘Did Dr Jebb not write’, demanded Mr Baretti, stabbing a quivering finger in the direction of Mamma, ‘that if you continued your meddlings with patent medicines you would tear Queeney’s bowels to pieces?’

  ‘You forget yourself, Sir,’ she screamed.

  ‘—And that if you persisted you would soon send the daughter to join the son.’

  At this dreadful reminder Papa left the room rather in the manner of Belle, head lowered and a growl coming from his throat. Mamma sank into a chair and Mr Langton strode to the window, where he stood staring up at the mild sky. As for Miss Reynolds, she hid her face in her hands, either from shock or to hide a smile. It is not easy, thought Queeney, to feel something that does not directly affect oneself.

  Some moments after, waving a piece of paper, Mr Johnson bustled in. He announced he had finished his petition on behalf of the unfortunate Dr Dodd, now approaching sentence of death for forgery, and was anxious to read aloud what he had written.

  ‘My Lord Mansfield,’ he began, ‘but a few days – and the lot of the most unhappy of created beings will be decided forever! I know the weight of your Lordship’s opinion. It is that which will undoubtedly decide whether I am to die an ignominious death, or drag out the rest of my life in dishonourable banishment. O my Lord! Do not refuse to hear what I in my humility dare to—’

  Glancing up from the page, he saw that Mamma was gazing about her distractedly. ‘It is somewhat flowery, I agree,’ he said, frowning, ‘but it is written as if from the pen of the wretched Dodd.’

  ‘What do I care for Dodd?’ wailed Mamma.

  ‘What do you care for anyone?’ sneered Mr Baretti.

  ‘What is wrong?’ asked Mr Johnson, perplexed and none too pleased at the reception given to his morning’s labour.

  ‘There has been a disagreement,’ Miss Reynolds squealed, a description Queeney considered less than adequate.