Thomas seldom if ever spoke to me about his patients and certainly never mentioned specific complaints. Once he said, ‘all these lassies, half their trouble, you know, is that they have too little to do and far too much time to brood. A minor ailment, which would be as nothing to a girl who had to work for her living, looms very large in their lives because there is nothing else to occupy their thoughts. The devil makes work for idle hands and idle minds too.
‘These things affect their minds as much as anything else,’ he continued. ‘Even the smallest imagined slight begins to loom very large for them. Their affairs of the heart concern them constantly. They have headaches and flutterings. They come seeking a measure of concern, of kindness, and – once you give them a little attention – these complaints evaporate into the air as though they had never been. But they need something to occupy them. They need to read, even if it is only novels. I’m sure your Jenny has no imagined complaints.’
‘No. She would not have the time.’
‘And from what you tell me, she would have far too much good, sound, common sense.’
‘I’m sure you’re right. But maybe you judge these young ladies too harshly. What choice do they have?’
‘None. And I’m wrong to be impatient since they give me and mine our daily bread. But all the same, I do grow impatient with them. A little.’ He laughed. ‘You know, William, sometimes, when I am in the middle of these consultations, it feels as though I am being bitten to death by midgies!’
I remember thinking how I wished that my mother, my sister Bessie, or Jenny Caddas had the troubles of these women instead of the weariness, the many aches and pains that beset them, the callouses and racking coughs, the weak eyes from overwork in damp rooms, the fatigue that was the result of poor food and little rest. I would look at my mother from time to time and think that she looked all spent, her skin sagging around her eyes, her teeth beginning to loosen in her gums. It wasn’t Thomas’s fault. He was not to blame for the injustice in the world, and he often gave his services to one of the charity hospitals in the city in an effort to relieve the woes of the truly poor. But it was the prodigious gap between rich and poor that struck me as it never had before, or not in this way. The college was a chilly, dusty old place and many of the professors who lodged there cared little for personal comfort. It was only when I was admitted to Thomas’s house and experienced what I thought of as its opulence that I became fully aware of how ill-divided was the world in which we lived. I saw the way in which the rooms were always warm and clean and comfortable, the way in which food seemed to appear on the table as if by magic. Well, there was no magic. It was down to the never-ending hard work for small reward of women like my sister, Bessie. I saw that those who are born and bred with even a modicum of wealth can have no idea of what it means to be poor. They say that money does not bring happiness and perhaps that’s true. But I tell you this. It is easier to be unhappy and rich than it is to be unhappy and poor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
William Hunter’s Book
It was only a short while later that a certain occurrence overshadowed our friendship for a time, much as a poorly pruned tree may affect the tender growth beneath. It was a fine day. I remember that. I had been wandering all over the surrounding countryside the day before, in search of specimens for Thomas. And I had been hard at work in the garden when I returned. It was that time of the year with long light nights, warm and damp to boot, when things would grow so quickly that if you neglected the gardens for only a few days, they would be out of control and twice as hard to manage. I had worked with a will, and then, leaving James to finish off, I had cleaned myself up and gone to Thomas’s house, to give myself a much-needed respite. The library seemed to me like an oasis of calm and cleanliness in the midst of the world full of mud and rampant, albeit not always healthy, growth, which I was always struggling to contain.
Usually I went to the shelves where Thomas kept his botanical books. Linnaeus was my bible in those days and I was working my way through his classification of plants, learning them as I went. The Scots Gard’ner I still kept at home, and had it almost off by heart, referring to it constantly in my day-to-day work about the college. But today, for some reason, I felt too weary for learning and instead found myself sifting through a heap of books, new acquisitions that had just arrived and which were sitting neatly on the library table where the servant had placed them, awaiting Thomas’s attention. Among them was a very large and unwieldy folio with a fine cover that proclaimed it to be an expensive volume.
The name caught my eye first. William, because it was my namesake. And Hunter, because that seemed familiar. William Hunter. My father had spoken of William Hunter and I knew that the museum that was in the process of stealing a large portion of my physic garden was being built to house the extensive collection which William Hunter had left to the college.
I also knew that Hunter had had an interest in natural history, among other things, so my attention was instantly captured. I thought it might be some illustrated volume of plants to rival Linnaeus. Well, it was a picture book. But it was like no picture book that you would ever want to see. I remember the title very well now. It is burned into my brain. It was called The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus. I saw it and realised that this must be one of Thomas’s medical books, although I didn’t understand the title at all, not at that time. I laid it flat on the blotter – it was a very large and unwieldy volume – and began to turn the pages, carefully but with simple curiosity, all unaware at first of exactly what I was seeing. Well, they say curiosity killed the cat, don’t they?
I have to admit that the book was very beautiful. By which I mean that the pictures were quite astonishingly accomplished. I know more about it now. I know that it is a serious book, written by a serious man, with nothing at all frivolous about him. It was illustrated by a talented young Dutchman. His name was Rymsdyk and he was a man of genius. It was a great work of scholarship, which probably helped to save many lives. I know all that and am willing to acknowledge it. Time and experience have mellowed me to some extent. But I still cannot bear to think about that book, because useful and beautiful as it may have been, may still be, I find that the thought of the misery and tragedy lying behind it clouds all else. I cannot help myself.
It was words and not pictures that caught my eye first. Perhaps it was the oddness of them. ‘A woman died suddenly when very near the end of her pregnancy. The body was procured before any sensible putrefaction had begun. The season of the year was favourable to dissection.’
I turned over the page and saw, dear God, I saw such a picture as I hope never to see again. I never have and I have been a dealer in books for these many years past. But that day, there was a compulsion about it. Like Orpheus losing his Eurydice on a glance, like Lot’s wife who could not prevent herself from looking, I was helpless to control my own impulse to see. I gazed and gazed and I think there was something in me that was turned to salt for ever after, some sweet innocence lost forever.
When the bird falls from the bough, it can never be made to fly again. My head went spinning and I saw the song birds falling, tumbling through the cold air. I felt physically sick. Never, never to fly again. I remember Thomas saying later, ‘An interesting book. Very. And Hunter was a difficult man by all accounts. Clever but difficult. He believed that anatomical illustration must be very precise. That one must touch as well as see.’
And I thought, ‘Touch? Dear God in Heaven!’
‘William, the book is a masterpiece,’ he went on. ‘The illustrations are amazing.’
Well, they were amazing, but not in the way he meant. The pictures you see. I can hardly bring myself to describe the book even now, even though there was a terrible beauty about it all. They were, in the main, pictures of women, their legs spread wide, bones and bellies, with their insides laid out for inspection. And the weans, Christ, the weans, the wee babies, were there too. Not so wee either, for one woman had a full-grown infant nes
tled inside her. I can call it to my mind yet, although I do not choose to do so very often. It comes to me in nightmares. The baby lies with its face hidden, half covered. One surprisingly mature hand is tucked in by its face, the hair damp, the knees drawn up, so little space is left to contain it in the womb. The skin is soft, malleable, with the bloom of life still on it. You could marvel at how the artist has captured the sheer beauty of these children, the shelly ear, the dimpled fingers, the limbs fully formed, plump and pliable.
There was such beauty about it that I was captivated by it, until I realised, until the thought struck me all of a sudden, that for a man to record it so lovingly and in such detail he must have seen it, and for a man to have seen it (and perhaps even to have touched it) both mother and child must have been stone cold dead. Not just dead either, but so lost, so cast out, that not a single soul cared enough to claim the bodies, to mourn them, to give them a proper burial. Instead some cold authority was content to consign them, like common murderers, to the anatomist’s table. It was this dual perception of repugnance and beauty that made me tremble with emotion. I did not know how to deal with my feelings.
Fascinated, in spite of my revulsion, I turned the pages. One page was full of drawings that looked like so many hives or wasps’ nests hanging there, and I realised that these were the wombs themselves. There were drawings of the exterior of the womb with what I realise now must have been blood vessels, but to my eyes they looked very like drawings of trees with trunks and branches, or of exotic plants clambering over rocks. There was something of the vegetable world about them. There was a whole series of bellies, laid open for inspection, and in some of them the child was grown, while in others it was a puny thing, as scrawny as a fledgling fallen from its nest, but still most recognisably an infant.
And there were other things I could not recognise at all, gatherings of tissue like mushrooms on a log, shapeless things, the stuff of nightmare, flesh and blood divorced from its human host.
I think I saw then that the minister who not only spoke of paradise, but also preached hell fire and damnation in the kirk on Sundays, telling us of invented horrors, of demons and suchlike creatures, was wrong. Because sometimes evil is entrancing. And sometimes it needs no perpetrators, no devil whispering enticements to this and that transgression. Sometimes evil is simply present and takes your breath away with its bold and beautiful brutality.
There were no faces of course. Perhaps that would have been too personal. Or perhaps the artist didn’t care. They were just torsos. Anonymous women’s bodies, vessels without arms or legs or heads. But some of the infants had faces, for sure, dead infants inside dead women, looking as though they slept merely.
‘A woman, immediately after a natural labour, grew faint without apparent cause and died within the space of two hours,’ Hunter had written, and ‘A woman who died of flooding in the ninth month of pregnancy.’ Further on, he pointed out that everything had been examined in the most public manner, which was deemed to be a very good thing. He foresaw that in the course of some years he might procure in this great city (which was, I take it, London, not Glasgow) ‘so many opportunities of studying the gravid uterus as to be enabled to make up a tolerable system’. Finally, he observed that in a work that had already become too large and expensive, it was thought proper to omit the internal anatomy of the child.
I gazed and gazed. And felt, God help me, my body stirring in response to the nakedness that lay before me, that part of a grown woman which I had never seen before. I slammed the book shut and rushed out of the library, out of the house and down the street, home to my little gardener’s house, which was always full of weans and the smell of smoke, bread baking and ale brewing and dust, my house which suddenly seemed cleaner and more congenial than anything Thomas had to offer, than anything Thomas or his ilk might ever have to offer me.
We did not talk of it for a little while. I didn’t want Thomas asking me about the book, so I avoided him as far as I possibly could. Oh I still went out into the countryside, still gathered his specimens, because it was the right time of year for the work. And when I was doing it, I took refuge in Jenny’s house, but I didn’t tell her about the book either. How could I? It did not seem to be a fitting subject for a young woman. It was not even a fitting subject for me! But I sent the plants to him by way of my brother James, which he must have thought odd, and I didn’t go near his house, and eventually, a week or two later, he sought me out himself.
He seemed puzzled. He was evidently a little hurt by my neglect. He must have fancied me unwell again. Or perhaps merely occupied with Jenny. But the longer I left it, the more it must have worried him. I had avoided him out of embarrassment. I didn’t know what to say to him and so I postponed any meeting with him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A Quarrel and a Reconciliation
He came to me before I relented and went to him. I was working in the garden, working – as I had been for these few days past – with a madness upon me. I had started building a wall and was hefting stones about and throwing them down at the risk of breaking my toes, in spite of the sturdy tackety boots protecting my feet. My wall was not a good wall, and I do not think it would stand the test of time, but the exercise seemed to help the feelings of acute disgust that threatened to overwhelm me when I thought about the book I had seen in Thomas’s library.
Thomas came to me and I carried on working. He stood watching me with his arms folded for a while, and then he said, ‘William, my friend, will you stop for a moment and talk to me?’
I stopped and wiped the sweat from my brow, glaring at him.
‘I have work to do. Can you not see?’
‘I can see that. But you can surely spare me a few moments from your busy day.’
He spoke so mildly, so patiently, that he made me feel clumsy and loutish. I stopped what I was doing and brushed the grit from my hands. He motioned to me to sit down and he perched opposite me on one of the boulders forming the foundations of my wall.
I said, ‘A woman died suddenly when very near the end of her pregnancy.’
He frowned. The day was fiercely hot and we were both perspiring.
‘What woman? I don’t understand you.’
I said, ‘You cannot see things the way I do. You never, never will. It’s nae use.’
‘Then explain them to me, my dear William. Let me at least try.’
He was shaking his head, puzzled, and I reflected that it was unfair of me to treat him like this, unfair of me not to explain. He obviously hadn’t the faintest idea what it was that had so upset me.
‘Your library. You gave me the use of your library.’
‘Aye. I did. And was very pleased to see you there. You seemed to be full of enthusiasm until a couple of weeks ago. You were looking at the work of Linnaeus were you not? And as far as I know you were learning a very great deal.’
‘I was.’
‘And believe me, I was happy to see you there. To see you so contented. Enjoying my books and my house. Such hospitality as I could give you. But now you seem to have had enough of books, and perhaps enough of me, and I am wondering what has happened to cause this.’
‘What do you think has happened?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll allow I was disappointed, although whether in you or in myself, I can’t tell. Perhaps you have become uncomfortable there?’
I shook my head. Speech seemed to have deserted me. There was a lump in my throat. I swallowed hard and looked away from him, trying to regain control of myself.
‘Have any of the servants made you uncomfortable? I know fine that our housekeeper can be difficult. She often forgets herself. Forgets her manners. I have spoken to Marion but she knows nothing about it, nothing that might have occurred. And I have thought long and hard about asking you, William, for fear of offending you still further. Sometimes you have more prickles than a thistle and I cannot for the life of me grasp you.’
‘No. No, they were most polite to me. They
have aye been polite to me.’
‘Well I’m glad to hear it. So what in heaven’s name is wrong with you? What have I done or said to upset you?’
‘You have done nothing.’
‘Then in the name of God, tell me what ails you?’
‘But there is a book in your library.’
‘There are many books in my library.’
‘No. I mean one book in particular. It is a book with pictures. Christ, sic a book! It is called The Anatomy of the Human –’
I saw and heard him draw in his breath sharply. Understanding.
‘Ah. You saw that one, did you? It is a new acquisition for me. And it cost me a pretty penny, I can tell you, but I had to have it.’
‘So now you know what upset me.’
‘I had no idea you – or anyone – had come across it.’
‘I could not avoid it. It was on your table.’
‘The servant should not have unpacked it and left it out for all to see. The children might have come into the room.’
‘You’ll allow that it is a scandalous book?’
‘Not at all William. Not at all. I’ll allow no such thing.’ He looked at me severely and I felt a tremor of anxiety, like when the dominie used to gaze at me sternly for forgetting my work.
‘My dear William, I am a grown man and a doctor and I think that there is nothing scandalous about it,’ he went on. ‘But I would not have wanted any of the children or young servants to come upon it unawares. The housemaids, I mean. It is not a fit book for them, if only in that it might frighten and shock them.’
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