Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

  “Sir Aubrey usually prefers to stand,” murmured the General’s doctor cautiously.

  “Good,” said Baxter. He sat where he had a clear view of everyone and began talking at once.

  “In a world as thickly peopled as ours nearly everyone must have several others who look and sound like them. Has anyone a better reason for thinking Bella Baxter is Victoria Blessington?”

  “Yes,” said the old manufacturer. “A week ago I got a letter from a man called Wedderburn. He told me my Vicky was living here, with you. I contacted my son-in-law and was told he had received a similar letter a fortnight before, but had done nothing about it.”

  “It was a madman’s letter!” said the General’s lawyer swiftly. “Wedderburn not only said Lady Blessington had been his mistress, he said she had been the mistress of Robert Burns, Bonnie Prince Charlie and a string of celebrities leading back to the garden of Eden. Are you surprised that the General ignored such an epistle?”

  “Yes,” said the old man, scowling at the flames. “That letter was the only clue to my Vicky’s whereabouts in three whole years. We should have moved heaven and earth to find her when she first disappeared, but Dr. Prickett here said, ‘No need to call the police—I am sure it is a temporary derangement—a public scandal will only unhinge her further—if you love your daughter, give her time to return home of her own free will.’ Of course Prickett only says what Sir Aubrey wants him to say. I know that now, though I did not know it then. Days passed before Scotland Yard were told, and they handled the whole business very quietly because . . . because . . .” (he made a noise between a chuckle and a sob) “. . . Blessington is the nation’s darling—an example to British youth—Lord Palmerston said so! The newspapers never printed the story and nothing was discovered. Or if it was, nobody told me. So as soon as I read Wedderburn’s letter I employed Grimes here. Tell them what you found out, Grimes.”

  The detective nodded, sipped from his glass and spoke in the rapid lingo of a London native. He was an ordinary man of about thirty: so ordinary that I noticed nothing personal in him except his style of speech, which left out first-person pronouns.

  “Was called to investigate Lady Blessntn’s dispearance seven days ago, three years after event. Lady vanished fromerome sudden being disturbed distressed distraught and in the famly way—eight months and a fortnight pregnant which often drives the fair sex round the twist poor things. Obtained photoportrait of lost lady, a goodun. Came to Glasgow pursuing information in letter from Duncan Wedderburn esquire and find said gentleman incarcerated in locked ward of Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum, positively no admittance. Lady B vanished from 49 Pochester Terrace 6 Febry 1880 so examined all police and Humane Society records of distraught or mindless female vagrants apprehended or otherwise detected in Glasgow after that date. Notice female of Lady B type seen diving from bridge into Clyde river on Febry 8 and fished out by Humane Society employee, one George Geddes. Showimphoto. ‘Thatser!’ sezee. ‘Where now?’ says I. ‘Corpus unclaimed,’ sezee, ‘so taken to University Medical College by police surgeon on Febry 15,’ sezee—wrongly. Godwin Baxter was police surgeon but College ledgers show Mr. Baxter delivered NO corpses there on Febry 15 or anytime after, because on Febry 16 College gets letter fromim saying he is resigning from police work in order to concentrate (sezee) onis private practice. Which he certainly did. By end of Febry coalman, milkman, grocer, butcher deliverin to 18 Park Circus know Mr. Baxter as a resident lady patient. Paralysed. By April she is walkin but childish. Three years later she sits here bloomin like a rose and fit to marry again. Good luck to you, Miss or Lady B!”

  Seymour Grimes raised his glass to Bella and swallowed the contents.

  “I like that man,” whispered Bella so intensely that I did not know if she understood him. Everyone else looked at Baxter.

  “Your chain of reasoning has a missing link, Mr. Grimes,” he said. “You tell us that George Geddes (a popular and respected person in this city) says he recovered a dead body.26 How can the corpse he retrieved sit with us here, when you say it lay for seven days in a mortuary?”

  “Can’t say—not my department,” said the detective, shrugging his shoulders.

  “I believe I can cast light on this dark business,” said the General’s doctor, “if Sir Aubrey allows me.”

  The General gave no sign of having heard him.

  “This is my home, Dr. Prickett,” said Baxter. “I not only allow, I request you to give your opinion.”

  “Then I will, Mr. Baxter, though you will not like it. The London medical world is aware that since the start of this century the Glasgow surgeons have been putting electric currents through the nervous systems of dead bodies. It is on record that in the 1820s one of your sort animated the corpse of a hanged criminal, who sat up and spoke. Public scandal was only prevented by one of the demonstrators severing the subject’s jugular with a scalpel.27 Your father was present at that demonstration. I have no doubt he passed on all he learned to you, who were his only assistant, apart from ignorant nurses. Sir Colin was notorious for knowing more than he shared with his colleagues.”

  “God,” said Bella in a dull voice I had not heard from her before, “when we left the church today you said you were going to admit that you lied to me. I think I know now what the lie was. My pa and ma never died in an Argentine train crash. You invented that to hide something worse.”

  “Yes,” said Baxter, and covered his face with his hands.

  “So that poor old man really is my father? And that pole of a man who seems afraid to face me is my husband? And I ran away from him and drowned myself? O Candle please hold me tight.”

  I am glad I did so because the General turned round.

  He turned round and spoke in a crisp, thin, high-pitched voice which grew steadily louder.

  “Stop shammin, Victoria. You remember perfectly well that Hattersley is your father, that I am your husband and that you ran away from home to escape from your wifely duties. This absurd story about drownins and morgues and loss of memory has been cooked up to hide the plain fact that for three years you have lived with a freak in order to glut your insane appetite for carnal intercourse, first with him, then with a lunatic libertine, and now with a low-bred ruffian. You are doin it now—here—before me eyes. UNHAND ME WIFE, SIR!”

  He screamed the last words so loud I nearly obeyed him. One of his icy-blue eyes may have been glass but it matched the other so perfectly that I shuddered at the hatred I read in them. But I suddenly saw Baxter beside us, every inch as tall as the General and five times thicker, and unexpected support came from the old man who still gazed into the fire.

  He said, “Do not talk about my Vicky like that, Sir Aubrey. You know whose carnal appetites drove her from home. If she is pretending to have forgotten then we should thank her. If she has truly forgotten it let us thank God.”

  “I am ashamed of nothing in me treatment of me wife,” said the General sharply, but Bella gently untwined her body from mine and went to the old man.

  She said, “You are trying to be kind so maybe you are my father. Let me hold your hand.”

  He looked at her, twisting his mouth in a painful smile that reminded me of my mother’s smile, and let her take his right hand between both of hers. She closed her eyes and murmured, “You are strong . . . fierce . . . cunning . . . but can never be kind, because you are afraid.”

  “Not true!” cried the old man, snatching his hand away. “Strong, fierce and cunning, yes thank God, I am those. Those let me heave myself and your mother and you out of the stinking muck of Manchester, heave us all out by thrusting weaklings under it. I could not haul out your three little brothers—they died of cholera. But I fear nothing in the world except hunger, poverty and the sneers of folk with more money. Only a fool does not fear these, especially when he has suffered them. We all suffered from them until I squeezed your uncle out of his share in the workshop. He squealed like a gashed pig and tried to get his own back by joining Hudson—Hudson! T
he railway king! But I smashed him and Hudson too. Yes Vicky,” said the old man with a sudden roar of laughter; “your old father was the man who smashed King Hudson! But you are a woman and know nothing of business. Ten years later I had an Earl on my board of directors, was putting men into Parliament and employing half the skilled work-force of Manchester and Birmingham. Then one day you turned seventeen, Vicky, and I suddenly saw you were a beauty. I had been too busy to look at you before that or think of getting you groomed for the marriage market. So I dragged you straight to a Swiss convent where the daughters of millionaires are scraped clean and polished along with daughters of marquises and foreign princes. ‘Make a lady of her,’ I told the mother superior. ‘You will not find it easy. She is headstrong, like her ma once was—the sort of donkey who needs more kicks than carrots to drive her in the right direction. I do not care how long you take or how much it costs, but make her fit to marry the highest in the land.’ It took them seven years. Your ma was dead (feeble action of the liver) when you got home, and for your sake I was glad. Though a good wife for a poor man she was no use to a wealthy one. Her plain ways would have ruined your chances. Ee the nuns had turned you into a lovely thing—you spoke French like a real Mamselle, though your English still sounded Manchester. But the General did not mind—did you, Sir Aubrey?”

  “No. Even her quaint dialect entertained me. She was the purest creature and prettiest thing I had ever met,” said the General broodingly. “She had the soul of an innocent child within the form of a Circassian houri—irresistible.”

  “Did I love you?” said Bella staring at him. He nodded heavily.

  “You adored him—worshipped him,” cried her father, “you had to love him! He was a national hero and cousin of the Earl of Harewood. Besides, you were twenty-four years old and he was the only man apart from me you had been allowed to meet. You were the happiest woman in the world on your wedding-day. I hired and decorated the entire Manchester Free Trade Hall for the reception and banquet, and the Cathedral choir sang the Hallelujah chorus.”

  “You loved me, Victoria, and I loved you,” said the General hoarsely, “so we became husband and wife. I am here to remind you of that, and protect you. Gentlemen forgive me!”—and his right eye flickered disconcertingly toward Baxter and me—“forgive me for shoutin and insultin you. Perhaps you are honest men despite the circumstances, and me bad temper is notorious. For thirty years I served England (perhaps I should say Britain) by usin meself as harshly as the regiments I commanded and the savages I subdued. Not a muscle in me body is without its separate ache, especially when I sit down. I can only rest when perfectly prone. Will you allow me to rest for a moment?”

  “Please do,” said Baxter.

  Lawyer, doctor and detective sprang from the sofa. The doctor helped the General lie down flat on it.

  “Let me put a cushion under your head,” said Bella, carrying one over and kneeling beside him.

  “No, Victoria. I never use a pillow. Have you truly forgotten that?” said the General, closing his eyes.

  “Yes. Truly.”

  “You remember nothin at all about me?”

  “Nothing certain,” said Bella uneasily, “yet something in your voice and appearance does seem familiar, as if I once dreamed it or heard it or glimpsed it in a play. Let me hold your hand. It might remind me.”

  He wearily stretched out his hand but when her fingers touched it she gasped and pulled them back as if they had been scorched or stung.

  “You are horrible!” she said, not accusingly, but astonished. “You said so on the day you fled from me,” he answered wearily, his eyes still shut, “and you were wrong. Apart from me military honours and social position I am a man like other men. You are still an unstable woman. Prickett should have operated on you after our honeymoon.”

  “Operated? What for?”

  “I cannot tell you. Gentlemen only discuss such things with their physicians.”

  “Sir Aubrey,” said Baxter, “three people in this room are qualified medical men, and the only woman present is training to be a nurse. She has a right to know why you say she is an unstable woman with insane appetites who should have had a surgical operation after her honeymoon.”

  “Before would have been better,” said the General without opening his eyes; “the Mahometans do it to their women soon after birth. It makes em the most docile wives in the world.”

  “Hints are no use, Sir Aubrey. This morning in church your doctor whispered to me what he thinks—and you think—the name of your wife’s illness. If here and now he does not say it aloud it will be discussed in court before a Scottish jury.”

  “Say it Prickett,” said the general wearily. “Bellow it. Deafen us with it.”

  “Erotomania,” muttered his doctor.

  “What is that?” asked Bell.

  “It means the General thinks you loved him too much,” said Baxter.

  “It means,” said Dr. Prickett hastily, “that you wished to sleep in his bedroom—share his bed—lie with him (I am forced to be blunt) every night of the week. Gentlemen!”—he turned from Bella and appealed to the rest of us—“gentlemen, the General is a kind man who would cut off his right arm rather than disappoint a woman! On the day before his wedding he asked me for an exact description—from the scientific, hygienic standpoint—of a married man’s duties. I told him what every doctor knows—that sexual intercourse enfeebles brain and body if over-indulged, but in rational doses does nothing but good. I told him he should allow his lady wife to lie with him half an hour a night during the honeymoon period, and once or twice a week afterwards, though all amorous dalliance should cease as soon as pregnancy was detected. Alas, Lady Blessington was so deranged even in her eighth month she wished to lie with Sir Aubrey all night long. She sobbed and wailed when not allowed to do so.”

  Tears streamed down Bella’s cheeks. She said, “The poor thing needed cuddling.”

  “You could never face the fact,” said the General through clenched teeth, “that the touch of a female body arouses DIABOLICAL LUSTS in potent sensual males—lusts we can hardly restrain. Cuddlin! The word is disgustin and unmanly. It soils your lips, Victoria.”

  “I know everyone here is telling what they think is the truth,” said Bella, drying her eyes, “but it sounds daft. Sir Aubrey talks as if he was liable to tear women apart, but honestly, if he cut up rough with me I think I could break him over my knee like a stick.”

  “Ha!” cried the General scornfully and his doctor began talking very fast, perhaps annoyed by Bella’s words and the equally sceptical glances Baxter and I had exchanged during his account of the case. His voice was almost as shrill as the General’s as he said, “No normal healthy woman—no good or sane woman wants or expects to enjoy sexual contact, except as a duty. Even pagan philosophers knew that men are energetic planters and good women are peaceful fields. In De Rerum Natura Lucretius tells us that only debauched females wriggle their hips.”

  “That creed is both false to nature and false to most human experience,” said Baxter.

  “To most human experience? Why certainly!” cried Prickett. “I speak of refined women—respectable women—not those of the vulgar mass.”

  “This peculiar notion,” Baxter told Bella, “was first recorded by Athenian homosexuals who thought women only existed to produce men. It was then adopted by celibate Christian priests who thought sexual delight was the origin of every sin, and women were the source of it. I do not know why the idea is now popular in Britain. Maybe an increase in the size and number of boys’ boarding-schools has bred up a professional class who are strangers to female reality. But tell me this, Dr. Prickett. Did Lady Blessington agree to a clitoridectomy?”

  “Not only did she agree to one—she begged for it with tears in her eyes. She loathed her hysterical rages, loathed her pathetic desire for contact with her husband, raged against her diseases as much as he did. She eagerly swallowed all the sedatives I administered, but at last I had to tell h
er they were worse than useless—that I could only cure her by cutting out the centre of her nervous excitement. She begged me to do it at once, and was bitterly sorry when I said we must wait until her child was born. Lady Blessington!” said Prickett, turning back to Bella again, “Lady Blessington, I am sorry you remember none of this. You used to consider me a good friend.”

  Bella shook her head wordlessly from side to side. Baxter said, “So Lady Blessington did not flee from home because she feared your treatment?”

  “Certainly not!” cried Prickett indignantly. “Lady Blessington used to say my visits were the pleasantest part of her week.”

  “Then what was the reason for her flight?”

  “She was mad,” said the General, “so needed no reason. If she is now sane she will come home with me. If she refuses she is still mad, and it is me duty as her husband to place her in an institution where she will be properly treated. I cannot leave her in a ménage which is turnin me maniac ex-wife into a nurse!”

  “But she has not been your wife since she drowned herself,” said Baxter quickly. “The marriage contract says the marriage lasts until death do you part. The only independent witness to the identity of your wife and my ward is the Humane Society official who saw the suicide and retrieved the corpse. Dr. Prickett suggests I gave her a new life. If so I am as much the father and protector of the revived woman as Mr. Hattersley was of the earlier, and as entitled as he once was to present her in marriage to the husband of her choice. Mr. Harker, how does that logic strike you?”

  “As piffle, Mr. Baxter: piffle and poppycock,” said the lawyer coolly. “I have no doubt Lady Blessington immersed herself in the Clyde, and no doubt the Humane Society official rescued her. He is paid to rescue people. He called you in to resuscitate her, and you plainly succeeded. You then bribed him to let you abduct her and bring her here where, pretending she was an invalid niece, you used drugs to render her childish, and thus enjoyed her physical charms and amorous weaknesses under the façade of being a good uncle and a kind physician. You even took your mistress on a world tour while playing that rôle! By the time you returned to Glasgow you had tired of her, so connived at her elopement with the unfortunate Duncan Wedderburn. Yesterday I visited poor Wedderburn’s mother, a terribly distressed lady. She told me her son had been bodily, mentally and financially destroyed by the woman he calls Bella Baxter. Were he not now in a locked ward of Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum he would be in jail for defrauding his clients of their funds. Your twice discarded mistress returned to you last month, so you quickly arranged to marry her to McCandless, your weak-minded parasite. If this story is put before a British jury they will believe it, because it is the truth. Look, Sir Aubrey! Look at him! The truth has hit him hard!”