“How is your husband?” he asked me last week.
“Archie died in 1911,” I told him.
“No, I mean your OTHER husband—Leviathan Pit-Bottomless Baxter de Babylon, surgical king of the damned material universe.”
“Dead also Wedder,” I said with a heartfelt sigh.
“Teehee! That one will never die,” he giggled. How I wish he had never died.
When I returned to Park Circus he was dying already. I saw it in his shrunk figure and trembling hand.
“O God!” I cried, “O God!” and kneeling down I embraced his legs and pressed my weeping face into them. He was sitting in Mrs. Dinwiddie’s parlour, she on one side and McCandless standing behind. I was astonished to see my fiancé there, though of course I had kept in touch with him by letter. With the onset of the disease God had come to need medical help with some functions for which his mother’s strength was too little. The nearness of death had also driven out his dislike of McCandless.
“Victoria,” he murmured, “Bella-Victoria, you Beautiful Victory, my mind will soon be all gone, all gone, and you will no longer love me if our candle-maker friend does not give me a very strong medicine. But I am glad to see you before I drink it. Marry this candle, Bella-Victoria. All I own will be yours. Promise to look after my dogs for me, my poor poor lonely leaderless dogs. Poor dogs. Poor dogs.”
His head began to shake and his mouth dribble.
McCandless bared his arm and gave him an injection. He became sensible for a few more minutes.
“Yes, take the dogs for their Sunday walks, Archie and Victoria. Go along the canal bank to Bowling then go by Strowan’s Well to the Lang Crags above Dumbarton, cross the Stockiemuir to Carbeth, come back by way of Craigallion Loch, the Allander, Mugdock and Milngavie Waterworks. Or go up the Clyde to Rutherglen or Cambuslang, mount the Cathkin Braes by the Dechmont and stroll by way of Gargunnock and the Malletsheugh to Neilston Pad. There are glorious walks around Glasgow, all leading easily to high places where you can look out upon glorious tracts of the world: mountains, lochs, pastured hills, woodlands and the great Firth, all framing this Glasgow which we do not love enough, for we would make it better if we did. Enjoy these things for me: the stepping stones by Cadder Kirk, clear Bardowie Loch, The Auld Wives’ Lifts, The Devil’s Pulpit, Dumgoyach and Dungoyne. If you have sons, please name one after me. Mummy will help you with them. Mummy! Mummy! Treat the McCandless bairns like grandchildren. I am sorry I could give you none. And try to forgive my father, Sir Colin. What a damnably foul old scoundrel the man was. He started more than he could see the end of. But we all do that haha. Quick, McCandless! The medicine!”
Archie brought forward the draught but it was I who took it from him and, after pressing my lips to my beloved’s in the only kiss we ever shared, put my arm behind his head and helped him drink.
That is how Godwin Baxter died.
You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable. My second husband’s story positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries, the nineteenth. He has made a sufficiently strange story stranger still by stirring into it episodes and phrases to be found in Hogg’s Suicide’s Grave with additional ghouleries from the works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. What morbid Victorian fantasy has he NOT filched from? I find traces of The Coming Race, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Trilby, Rider Haggard’s She, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and, alas, Alice Through the Looking-Glass; a gloomier book than the sunlit Alice in Wonderland. He has even plagiarized work by two very dear friends: G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion and the scientific romances of Herbert George Wells. Ever since reading this infernal parody of my life-story I have been asking, WHY DID ARCHIE WRITE IT? I am now able to post this letter to posterity because I have at last found the answer.
As locomotive engines are driven by pressurized steam, so the mind of Archibald McCandless was driven by carefully hidden envy. His good fortune in later life never stopped him being at heart just “a poor bastard bairn”. The envy the poor and exploited feel toward the wealthy is a good thing if it works toward reforming this unfairly ordered nation. That is why we Fabians think the trade unions and Labour Party are as much our allies as any honest public servant (Liberal or Tory) who wants a decent minimum wage, a sanitary house, proper working conditions and the vote for every British adult. Unluckily my Archie envied the only two people he loved, the only two who could tolerate him. He envied God for having a famous father and tender, loving mother. He resented my wealthy father, convent education and famous first husband, resented my superior social graces. Most of all he envied the care and company God gave me and the strength of my love for God, and hated the fact that the most we felt for him was friendly goodwill tempered (on my side) with sensual indulgence. So in his last months he soothed himself by imagining a world where he and God and I existed in perfect equality. Having had a childhood which privileged people would have thought “no childhood” he wrote a book suggesting that God had none either—that God had always been as Archie knew him, because Sir Colin had manufactured God by the Frankenstein method. Then he deprived me of childhood and schooling by suggesting I was not mentally me when I first met him, but my baby daughter. Having invented this equality of deprivation for all of us he could then easily describe how I loved him at first sight, and how Godwin envied him! But of course, Archie was no lunatic. He knew his book was a cunning lie. When chuckling over it during his last few weeks what amused him was how cleverly his fiction outwitted the truth. Or so I believe.
Yet why did he not make it more convincing? In the twenty-second chapter, describing how my first husband shot me through the foot, he says “The bullet had luckily gone clean through into the carpet, PUNCTURING THE INTEGUMENT BETWEEN THE ULNA AND RADIUS OF THE SECOND AND THIRD METACARPALS without even chipping a bone.” The capitalized words might just convince someone who knows nothing of anatomy but they are blethers, havers, claptrap, gibberish, gobbledygook,34 and since Archie cannot have forgotten his medical training to that extent he must have known it. He could easily have said “puncturing the tendon of the oblique head of adductor hallucis between the great and index proximal phalanges without chipping a bone”, because that was what happened. But I have no time to go through every page separating fact from fiction. If you ignore what contradicts common sense and this letter you will find that this book records some actual events during a dismal era. As I said before, to my nostrils the book stinks of Victorianism. It is as sham-gothic as the Scott Monument, Glasgow University, St. Pancras Station and the Houses of Parliament. I hate such structures. Their useless over-ornamentation was paid for out of needlessly high profits: profits squeezed from the stunted lives of children, women and men working more than twelve hours a day, six days a week in NEEDLESSLY filthy factories; for by the nineteenth century we had the knowledge to make things cleanly. We did not use it. The huge profits of the owning classes were too sacred to be questioned. To me this book stinks as the interior of a poor woman’s crinoline must have stunk after a cheap weekend railway excursion to the Crystal Palace. I realize I am taking it too seriously, but I am thankful to have survived into the twentieth century.35
And so, dear grand- or great-grandchild, my thoughts turn to you because I cannot possibly imagine the world in which this message will be read—if it ever is read. Last month Herbert George Wells (that honey-smelling man!) published a book called The War in the Air. Set in the nineteen twenties or thirties it describes how a German air-fleet invades the U.S.A. and bombs New York. This draws the whole world into a conflict which destroys every major centre of civilized thought and skill. The survivors are left in a worse state than the Australian aborigines, for they lack the aboriginal skills of hunting and scavenging. H.G.’s book is a warning, of course, not a prediction. He and I and many others expect a better future because we are actively creating it. Glasgow is an exciting place for a dedicated Socialist. Even in its earlier Lib
eral phase it set the world an example through the municipal development of public resources. Our skilled labour force is now the best educated in Britain; the Co-operative movement is popular and expanding; the Glasgow telephone system is being adopted by the General Post Office for extension over the United Kingdom. I know that the money which pays for our confidence and achievement has a dangerous source—huge war-ships built along Clydeside by government contract, in response to equally big destroyers being built by the Germans. So H. G. Wells’ warnings should be heeded.
But the International Socialist Movement is as strong in Germany as in Britain. The labour and trade-union leaders in both countries have agreed that if their governments declare war they will immediately call a general strike. I almost hope our military and capitalistic leaders DO declare war! If the working classes immediately halt it by peaceful means then the moral and practical control of the great industrial nations will have passed from the owners to the makers of what we need, and the world YOU live in, dear child of the future, will be a saner and happier place. Bless you.
Victoria McCandless M.D.
18 Park Circus, Glasgow.
1st August, 1914.
NOTES CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL
by Alasdair Gray
1. This was not the superstition of an ignorant woman. Bank failures were frequent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and poorer folk suffered most by them, as the prosperous were better informed as to which financial houses were unsound, or becoming so. In twentieth-century Britain such injustices only happen with pension funds.
2. In his history The Royal Doctors (published by Macmillan, 1963) Gervaise Thring gives most space to Godwin’s progenitor, Sir Colin Baxter, but says: “Between 1864 and 1869 his less well-known yet equally gifted son was attendant consultant during the delivery of three princes and a princess royal, and probably saved the life of the Duke of Clarence. For reasons perhaps connected with his precarious health Godwin Baxter withdrew into private life and died in obscurity a few years later.” In Register House, Edinburgh, there is no record of his birth, and on the death certificate of 1884 there are blanks in the spaces reserved for age and mother’s name.
3. Semmelweis was a Hungarian obstetrician. Appalled by the high death rate in the Viennese maternity hospital where he worked, he used antiseptics and cut the death rate from 12 to 1¼ per cent. His superiors refused to accept his conclusions and forced him out. He deliberately contracted septicaemia in a finger and in 1865 died in a mental hospital of the disease he had spent his life combating.
4. The following extract on this subject is from “Women and Medicine”, an entry by Johanna Geyer-Kordesch in the Encyclopaedia of Medical History, edited by W.F. Bynum: “Florence Nightingale once wrote that she didn’t wish women to become doctors at all, because they would become like their male colleagues. Nightingale’s objectives were breathtakingly broad. She wanted no less than a medical reform so thorough in prevention and care that doctors might become redundant.”
5. Michael Donnelly, indefatigable in his efforts to prove this history a work of fiction, points out that the garden here described does not mention a coach-house on the far side of it. He has visited Baxter’s old home (18 Park Circus) and asserts that the space between back entrance and coach-house is too small and sunken to have ever been more than a drying-yard. This, of course, only proves that the coach-house was built at a later date.
6. “Skeely” means “skilful”, as in the old Scots ballad Sir Patrick Spens:
The King sits in Dumfermline toun,
Drinking the bluid-red wine.
“O whaur will I find a skeely skipper
To sail this new ship o’ mine?”
7. The first ichthyosaurus was discovered by Mary Anning (the Fossil Woman of Lyme Regis) in 1810. The illustration here referred to is in Pouchet’s The Universe, a popular nineteenth-century introduction to natural history.
DWARFS OF GERMAN LEGEND BARING THE ICHTHYOSAURUS
From The Universe, or, The Infinitely Great and the Infinitely Small by F.A. Pouchet, M.D.: the 9th edition published in 1886 by Blackie & Son, Old Bailey, E.C.; Glasgow and Edinburgh.
8. The Glasgow Humane Society for the Rescue and Recovery of Drowning Persons was founded by the Glasgow Faculty of Surgeons in 1790, and the first boathouse and house built for its officers on Glasgow Green in 1796. George Geddes, the first full-time officer, was employed from 1859 to 1889; his son (the second George Geddes) worked from 1889 to 1932. The job then went to the equally famous Ben Parsonage, whose son (July 1992) now occupies the Humane Society House near the end of the suspension bridge.
St. Andrew’s Suspension Bridge, upstream from the wharf, was always a favourite place for suicides. It is a footbridge with very little traffic, and an iron lattice-work parapet which (though now covered by a fine mesh grille) was once easily climbed. The grandson of the first George Geddes was drowned while attempting to save the life of a man who jumped from St. Andrew’s Bridge in 1928.
9. The proper name is The Stewart Memorial Fountain, since it was erected to commemorate the work of Mr. Stewart of Murdostoun, Lord Provost of Glasgow in 1854. Against strong opposition from the private water companies he got an Act of Parliament passed which enabled Glasgow Corporation to turn Loch Katrine, thirty-three miles away in the depths of the Trossach mountains, into the city’s main public water supply.
However, Dr. McCandless’s mistake is understandable. Designed by James Sellars I.A. and erected by the Water Commissioners in 1872, the fountain is elaborately carved with creatures found on the Loch Katrine islands: heron, otter, weasel and owl. On the summit is set the graceful figure of Helen, the Lady of the Lake herself. Oar in hand she stands erect behind the prow of a delicately imagined bark, exactly as Fitz-James beheld her in the most famous poetical work of Sir Walter Scott.
Around 1970 the authorities turned the water off and made the stonework a children’s climbing frame. The sculptures got broken. In 1989, as Glasgow prepared to become the European Cultural Capital, it was fully repaired and set flowing again. In July 1992 it is waterless once more. A high timber wall surrounds it.
10. The steeply raked terraces of Glasgow’s West End Park were designed in the early 1850s by Joseph Paxton, who also designed Queen’s Park and the Botanic Gardens. The acute angle of the slope made it useful to Percy Pilcher when testing one of the gliders which eventually led to his death in 1899, but established the main structure of the aeroplane as it has developed to this day, and even gave the ‘aeroplane’ its name. The Pilcher connection may have led H. G. Wells to use the West End Park in his novel The War in the Air, published a month before the 1914–18 war. Wells describes Britain’s first successful airman flying from London to Glasgow and back without stopping. As he circles above the park on a level with the highest terrace he shouts to the astonished crowds there, “Me muver was Scotch!” and is wildly applauded.
11. Weather reports show that 29th June 1882 was abnormally hot and sultry. At sunset most Glaswegians were disturbed by a noise whose cause was discussed in the local press through the following fortnight. Most folk assumed it had an industrial origin and came from very far away. At Saracen Cross in the north-west folk thought something had exploded at Parkhead Forge; around Parkhead to the south-east it was thought a disaster in the Saracen Head Ornamental, Hygienic and Sanitary Iron Works. In Govan to the south-west folk thought a new kind of steam whistle was being tested in the north-east locomotive works; in the north-east it was assumed that a boiler had burst in a ship on Clydeside. A scientific correspondent in The Glasgow Herald said the phenomenon had been “more like an electrical shock than a noise”, and perhaps had “a meteorological source in an abnormal weather condition combining with fumes in the atmosphere”. A humorous periodical called The Bailie pointed out that the West End Park and University were at the centre of the area over which the noise was heard, and suggested that Professor Thomson was experimenting with a new kind of telegraph which went
through air instead of through wires. A final facetious letter in The Scotsman (an Edinburgh journal) suggested that a Glasgow tinker had been playing a new kind of bagpipe.
12. Michael Donnelly has shown me the original plans of Park Circus, designed by Charles Wilson in the 1850s, plans which show a coach-house dividing the backyard of 18 Park Circus from the lane. But the fact that an architect designed such a feature would not prevent it being built till much later. The builders of the gothic cathedrals took centuries to complete their architects’ designs. The National Monument in Edinburgh, though designed to commemorate the Scots soldiers who died fighting Napoleon, is still little more than a façade.
13. Railway timetables from the 1880s show that it was possible to get off the first Midland Line night train from Glasgow to London at Kilmarnock and continue the journey on the second train which left an hour later.
14. It was improvident of Wedderburn to do so since this insurance company (now called Scottish Widows) is still a highly flourishing concern. In March 1992, as part of Conservative publicity preceding a General Election, the chairman of Scottish Widows announced that if Scotland achieved an independent parliament the company’s head office would move to England.
15. The Royal Exchange, in Queen Street, was erected and opened on 3rd September 1829. It was built by subscription at an expense of £60,000, and was not only a lasting monument of the wealth of the Glasgow merchants, but the noblest institution of the kind in Britain for many decades afterward. This splendid structure is built in the Grecian style of architecture from designs by David Hamilton. The building is entered by a majestic portico, surmounted by a beautiful lantern tower. The great roof is 130 feet in length and 60 in breadth; the roof, supported by Corinthian pillars, is 30 feet in height. The interior is now occupied by Stirling’s Public Lending Library, and as magnificent as ever.
Poor Things Page 23
