Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

  After a moment I asked how he had found me. He handed over a sheaf of pages scrawled with Bella’s huge shorthand. I gave them back saying my head ached too much to decipher anything. He read them aloud.

  “Dear God, I have chloroformed Candle in the operating-theatre. Ask him to live with you when he wakes up, then you can both talk often about, Yours Faithfully, Dearly Beloved Bell Baxter. P.S. I will telegraph to say where I am when I get there.”

  I wept. Baxter said, “Come down to the kitchen and eat something.”

  Downstairs I sat with my elbows on the kitchen table while Baxter foraged in the larder then placed before me a jug of milk, mug, plate, knife, loaf, cheese, pickles and the cold remains of a roast fowl. He handled the last with a distaste he tried and failed to hide, for he was vegetarian and only got in meat for his servants. While I tackled the food he slowly drank nearly a gallon of the grey syrup which was the main part of his diet, ladling it into a tankard from a glass carboy of the sort used to transport industrial acid. Once when he left the room to satisfy a call of nature I sipped a little out of curiosity, and found it as briny as sea-water.

  We sat till dawn in a melancholy silence broken by bursts of talk. I asked him where Bella learned to use chloroform. He said, “When we returned from abroad I knew she would need more than toys to keep her occupied, so I started a small veterinary clinic. I put word about that sick animals brought to our backdoor would be treated free of charge. Bella was my receptionist and assistant, and a fine clinician in both capacities. She liked meeting strangers and mending animals. I taught her to stitch wounds and she did so with the deft passionate steadiness working-class women bring to sewing shirts and middle-class women to frivolous embroidery. Many lives and limbs have been lost, McCandless, by excluding women from the more intricate medical arts.”

  I felt too tired and sick to argue the point.

  A while after this I asked why he had suddenly made a will the day after Bella and I got engaged. He said, “To provide for her after my death. You won’t get rich for years, McCandless, however hard you work.”

  I accused him of planning to kill himself after our marriage. He shrugged and said he would have had nothing to live for after it.

  “You selfish fool, Baxter!” I cried angrily. “How could Bell and me enjoy your money if we got it by your suicide? We would have kept it, of course, but it would have made us miserable. This elopement has not been a wholly bad thing if it has saved three of us from that.”

  Baxter swung his back toward me and muttered that his death would not have looked like suicide. I thanked him for the warning, said I would watch him closely in future, and that if he ever died in unhappy circumstances I would take appropriate steps. He stared round at me, astonished, and said, “What steps? Will you have me buried on unholy ground?”

  I told him sulkily that I would freeze him on ice till I found how to animate him again. For a moment he seemed about to laugh, but checked himself. I said, “You must not die now. If you do all your property will go to Duncan Wedderburn.”

  He pointed out that the House of Commons was debating a bill to let married women keep their own property. I told him that bill would never be made law. It would undermine the institution of marriage and most M.P.s were husbands. He sighed and said, “I deserve death as much as any other murderer.”

  “Nonsense! Why call yourself that?”

  “Don’t pretend to have forgotten. By a straight question you exposed my guilt the first day I showed you to Bella. Excuse me.”

  It was then he left to empty his bladder or bowels. Either operation took nearly an hour, and when he returned I said, “Sorry, Baxter, I haven’t the faintest idea why you call yourself a murderer.”

  “That little nearly nine-month-old foetus I took living from the drowned woman’s body should have been coddled as my foster child. By recasting its brain in the mother’s body I shortened her life as deliberately as if I stabbed her to death at the age of forty or fifty, but I took the years off the start, not the ending of her life—a much more vicious thing to do. And I did it for the reason that elderly lechers purchase children from bawds. Selfish greed and impatience drove me and THAT!” he shouted, smiting the table so hard with his fist that the heaviest things on it leapt at least an inch in the air, “THAT is why our arts and sciences cannot improve the world, despite what liberal philanthropists say. Our vast new scientific skills are first used by the damnably greedy selfish impatient parts of our nature and nation, the careful kindly social part always comes second. Without Sir Colin’s techniques Bell would now be a normal two-and-a-half-year-old infant. I could enjoy her society for another sixteen or eighteen years before she grew independent of me. But my damnable sexual appetites employed my scientific skills to warp her into a titbit for Duncan Wedderburn! DUNCAN WEDDERBURN!”

  He wept and I brooded.

  I brooded hard for a long time, then said, “What you last said is mainly true, apart from your remark about the impossibility of improving things scientifically. As a member of the Liberal Party I am bound to disagree there. As to you shortening Bell’s life, remember that the only sure thing we know about ageing is that misery and pain age folk faster than happiness does, so Bella’s emphatically happy young brain may prolong her body well past the common span. If you committed a crime by making Bell as she is I am thankful for that crime because I love her as she is, whether she marries Wedderburn or no. I also doubt if the woman who chloroformed me will be anyone’s helpless plaything. Maybe we should pity Wedderburn.”

  Baxter stared at me then reached across the table. He gripped my right hand so that the knuckles cracked, I roared with pain and sustained bruises which took a month to heal. He apologized and said he had been expressing heart-felt gratitude. I begged him to keep his gratitude to himself in future.

  After this we grew slightly more cheerful. Baxter began strolling about the kitchen, smiling as he only did when he thought of Bell and forgot himself.

  “Yes,” he said, “not many two-and-a-half-year-olds are so sure-footed, steady-handed, quick-witted. She remembers everything that happens to her and every word she hears, so even when it makes no sense she picks up the meaning later. And I have saved her from one crushing disadvantage I never had myself: she has never been small so has never known fear. Do you remember all the sizes of midget you were before reaching the height you are now, McCandless? The twenty-four-inch-long gnome? Yard-tall goblin? Four-foot dwarf? Did the giants who owned the world when you were wee let you feel as important as they were?”

  I shuddered and said that all childhoods were not like mine. “Perhaps not, but even in the homes of the rich screaming babies, terrified toddlers, sulky adolescents are commonplace, I hear. Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it. Now Bella (and this is why you may be right about pitying Wedderburn) Bella has all the resilience of infancy with all the stature and strength of fine womanhood. Her menstrual cycle was in full flood from the day she opened her eyes, so she has never been taught to feel her body is disgusting or to dread what she desires. Not having learned cowardice when small and oppressed she only uses speech to say what she thinks and feels, not to disguise these, so she is incapable of every badness done through hypocrisy and lying—nearly every sort of badness. All she lacks is experience, especially the experience of decision making. Wedderburn is her first major decision but she has no delusions about his character. Mrs. Dinwiddie has sewn enough money into the lining of her coat to ensure she will not lack funds if she and Wedderburn suddenly part. My main fear is that someone who interests her more will attract her into an adventure we cannot imagine. Still, she knows how to send a telegram.”

  “Her worst fault,” I said (Baxter at once looked indignant) “is her infantile sense of time and space. She feels short intervals are hu
ge, yet thinks she can grasp all the things she wants at once, no matter how far they are from her and each other. She talked as if her engagement to marry me and her elopement with Wedderburn were simultaneous. I had no heart to tell her time and space forbid this. I did not even explain that the moral law forbids it.”

  Baxter was halfway through explaining that our ideas of time, space and morality were convenient habits, not natural laws, when I yawned in his face.

  There was daylight and bird-song outside the window. Mournful hooters were summoning workers into shipyards and factories. Baxter said a bed was prepared for me in a guest-room. I answered that I would be on duty in a couple of hours and wanted nothing from him but the use of a wash-basin, razor and comb. As he led me upstairs he said, “We have talked about Bella exactly as she foretold in her letter, so you had better live here too. I ask this as a favour, McCandless. The company of elderly women is not enough for me now.”

  “Park Circus is very far from the Royal Infirmary compared with my digs on the Trongate. What would your terms be?”

  “A rent-free room with free gas-light, free coal fire and free bed-linen. Free laundering of your small clothes and shirts, free starching of your collars, polishing of your boots. Free hot baths. Free meals when you choose to eat with me.”

  “Your food would sicken me, Baxter.”

  “You would be given the same meals Mrs. Dinwiddie and the cook and housemaid give themselves—plain fare excellently cooked. You would have the free use of a good library which has been greatly enlarged since Sir Colin’s time.”

  “And in return?”

  “When you have a spare moment you could help me in the clinic. From dogs, cats, rabbits and parrots you may learn much to help you mend featherless bipedal patients.”

  “Hm! I will think it over.”

  He smiled as if he thought my remark an empty show of manly independence. He was right.

  That evening I borrowed a big trunk, packed it, paid my Trongate landlord a fortnight’s rent for notice of quittal, and came in a cab to Park Circus with all my goods, gear and chattels. Baxter received me without comment, showed me my new room and handed me a telegram wired from London a few hours before. It said M HR (am here) with no name at the end.

  11

  Eighteen Park Circus

  If hard rewarding work, interesting, undemanding friendship, and a comfortable home are the best grounds for happiness then the following months were perhaps the pleasantest I have known. All Baxter’s servants had begun life as country girls of my mother’s class, and though none were much less than fifty I believe they liked having a comparatively young man in the house who enjoyed the food they prepared. They never saw me eat because my meals were hoisted up to the dining-room on a dumb-waiter, but I often sent a cheap bunch of flowers or note of thanks down to the kitchen with the dirty plates.

  I ate with Baxter at a huge table, sitting as far from him as possible. Having little or no pancreas he made his digestive juices by hand, stirring them into his food before chewing and swallowing. When I asked about the ingredients he evaded the question in a shamefaced way which suggested some were extracted from his bodily wastes. The odour at his end of the table confirmed this. Behind his chair was a sideboard loaded with carboys, stoppered vials, graduated glasses, pipettes, syringes, litmus papers, thermometers and a barometer; also the Bunsen burner, retort and tubing of a distillation plant. This last bubbled on a low gas throughout the day. At unpredictable moments in every meal he would stop chewing and stay absolutely still as if listening to something remote, yet inside himself. After seconds like this he would slowly stand, carefully carry his plate to the sideboard and spend minutes concocting messes for addition to it. On the sideboard lay a chart where every four hours he recorded his pulse, respiration and temperature, besides chemical changes in his blood and lymphatic system. One morning before breakfast I studied it and was so disturbed that I never looked at it again. It showed daily fluctuations too irregular, sudden and steep for even the strongest and healthiest body to survive. Times and dates (noted in Baxter’s clear, tiny, childish yet firm script) showed that when talking to me the day before his neural network had passed through the equivalent of an epileptic seizure, yet I had noticed no change in his manner. Surely all this apparatus and charting must be pretences, ploys by which an ugly hypochondriac exaggerated his diseases in order to feel superhuman?

  Outside the dining-room life at 18 Park Circus was splendidly commonplace. After the evening meal we tended the sick animals in the operating-theatre, then retired to the study where we read or played chess (which Baxter always won) or draughts (which I nearly always won) or cribbage (where the victor was unpredictable). We resumed our long weekend tramps and all the time talked about Bella. She did not let us forget her. Every three or four days a telegram saying “M HR” arrived from Amsterdam, Frankfort-on-Maine, Marienbad, Geneva, Milan, Trieste, Athens, Constantinople, Odessa, Alexandria, Malta, Morocco, Gibraltar and Marseilles.

  One foggy November afternoon came a telegram from Paris saying DNT WRRY. Baxter grew frantic. He cried, “There must be something dreadful to worry about if she tells me not to do it. I will go to Paris. I will hire detectives. I will find her.”

  I said, “Wait till she summons you, Baxter. Trust her honesty. That message means she is not disturbed by an event which would upset you or me. Rather than thwart her you trusted her to Duncan Wedderburn. Better trust her to herself, now.”

  This convinced but did not calm him. When the same message came from Paris exactly a week later his resolution collapsed. I went to work one morning feeling sure he would have left for France when I got back, but as I entered the front door he hailed me vigorously from the study landing shouting, “News of Bella, McCandless! Two letters! One from a maniac in Glasgow and one from her residence in Paris!”

  “What news?” I cried, casting off my coat and running upstairs. “Good? Bad? How is she? Who wrote these letters?”

  “The news is certainly not altogether bad,” he said cautiously. “In fact, I think she is doing remarkably well, though conventional moralists would disagree. Come into the study and I will read the letters to you, leaving the best till last. The other one has a south Glasgow postmark, and a maniac wrote it.”

  We composed ourselves on the sofa

  He read aloud what follows.

  41 Aytoun Street,

  Pollokshields.

  November 14th.

  Mr. Baxter,

  Until a week ago I would have been ashamed to write to you, sir. I then thought my signature on a letter would convulse you with such loathing that you would burn it unread. You invited me to your home on a matter of business. I saw your “niece”, loved her, plotted with her, eloped with her. Though unmarried we toured Europe and circled the Mediterranean in the character of husband and wife. A week ago I left her in Paris and returned alone to my mother’s home in Glasgow. Were these facts made public The Public would regard me as a villain of the blackest dye, and that, until a week ago, is how I viewed myself: as a guilty reckless libertine who had ravished a beautiful young woman from her respectable home and loving guardian. I now think much better of Duncan Wedderburn and far, far worse of you, sir. Did you see the great Henry Irving’s production of Goethe’s Faust at the Glasgow Theatre Royal? I did. I was deeply moved. I recognized myself in that tormented hero, that respectable member of the professional middle class who enlists the King of Hell to help him seduce a woman of the servant class. Yes, Goethe and Irving knew that Modern Man—that Duncan Wedderburn—is essentially double: a noble soul fully instructed in what is wise and lawful, yet also a fiend who loves beauty only to drag it down and degrade it. That is how I saw myself until a week ago. I was a fool, Mr. Baxter! A blind misguided fool! My affair with Bella was Faustian from the start, the intoxicating incense of Evil was in my nostrils from the moment you foisted me onto your “niece”. Little did I know that in THIS melodrama I would play the part of the innocent, trusting Gr
etchen, that your overwhelming niece was cast as Faust, and that YOU! YES, YOU, Godwin Bysshe Baxter, are Satan Himself!

  “Notice, McCandless,” said Baxter at this point, “that the fellow writes as you talk when you are drunk.”

  I must try to write calmly. Exactly a week ago I crouched in the corner of a stationary carriage with Bella on the platform outside, chattering to me through the window. She was bright and beautiful as ever, with a fresh expectant youthfulness which seemed wholly new, yet hauntingly familiar. WHY was it familiar? Then I remembered Bella had looked exactly like that when we first became lovers. And now, with every appearance of kindness (for it was I who had said we must part) she was discarding me like a worn shoe or broken toy, having been RENEWED by someone I had never seen, someone she must have glimpsed that very morning, for we had arrived in Paris from Marseilles only six hours before. In those six hours she had met nobody, spoken to nobody but me and the manageress of our hotel—I had been beside her the whole time, apart from my visit to the nearby Cathedral which took thirty minutes or less—yet in that time she had fallen in love anew! All things are possible for a witch. Suddenly she said, “Promise when you get to Glasgow that you tell God I will soon want the candle.” I promised, although I thought the message gibberish—or more witchcraft. This letter discharges that promise.

  Why, having discharged it, am I gripped by an urge to tell you more, tell you all? Whence this hunger to disclose to YOU, Mephisto Baxter, the innermost secrets of my guilty and tortured heart? Is it because I believe you already know them?

  “Catholicism just might restore his sanity,” muttered Baxter. “Lacking the rites of the confessional he will seize any excuse to blether out his second-hand, second-rate sentiments to anyone.”