Nina In Utopia

by Miranda Miller

  What Nina is may have become clear in my dreams as I slept fitfully in my armchair by the dying fire in my study. I awoke hardly knowing who I myself was, with a very stiff neck, to yells that pierced the grey shroud of the dawn. I was tempted to feign deafness and shrink back into my sanctuary, but Tommy’s lungs would galvanize a corpse. I ran upstairs before his uproar woke all the neighbours and caused more gossip. A tortured child as well as a mad wife.

  Old Emma stood helpless in the door of the night nursery where Tommy writhed on the floor, an eel in a nightgown.

  ‘I want Mama, not you. Go away, Papa.’

  ‘Your mama must rest.’

  ‘Go away!’

  ‘You must learn to govern your temper.’

  ‘Is that why you’re called the guv’nor? I hate you.’

  ‘You are a very spoiled little boy. Too much petticoat government has enfeebled you. You must go away to school and learn to be a man, then you and I will be able to have civilized conversations together.’

  ‘Don’t want them. Don’t want to be a man. I want to be a little girl. Like …

  He didn’t name her, but Bella was in the room with us. I saw her in his face and his long dark curls. She can’t come back, a ton of stone and three coffins weigh her safely down, and yet … A tear fell down my nose, and I was glad of the darkness and more than ever determined that Tommy will enjoy the privileges I was denied. Dinner parties will hold no terrors for him. At school he will make aristocratic connections, will learn to construe Greek and play cricket and a thousand other mysteries.

  ‘This fashion for making girls out of boys is detestable. Frocks and drawers and long curls are effeminate. No wonder you cry all the time.’

  ‘Let go of my hair! You’re pulling.’

  ‘When I was a boy I would have been thrashed for speaking to my father as you have spoken to me.’ Not true, for Pa was always kind to me, but he is dead now and may serve as a caution. ‘Be thankful it is only your hair I hurt.’

  I told Emma to bring a candle and scissors. By the flickering light I saw her disapproval and Tommy’s fear, as if I were some great bully and not a decent man trying to prepare his son for life. While I sheared him Tommy wriggled and yelled and bit me and did his best to make me harm him. The scissors twisted in my hands and nicked him, but I didn’t really hurt him. He just likes to make a commotion.

  ‘You look much better now. The other boys will see you are a little man and not a little girl to be teased and tormented.’

  He did look better. His hair stopped at his collar, and his face had lost that sickening prettiness. Pa was a barber as well as an apothecary, and I have the knack, even by candlelight. There were bloodstains on the pillow, and Tommy’s dark fleece covered the bed and floor.

  ‘I want Mama.’

  ‘She will not come to naughty children. You should be among other boys to give you a more manly bearing and spirit. If you live to grow up you will appreciate what your papa has done for you tonight.’

  The sooner he starts the better. I told Emma to buy him some knickerbockers and a jacket on account at Marshall and Snelgrove and to be sure he mixes with other boys in the park. Emma glared back at me and muttered under her breath, ‘I am not to be frightened by fee-faw-fum.’ Why the devil is it that other men have obedient servants and wives and children and well-run households?

  If Tommy’s sister had lived and his mother had been strong we might have waited a few years, but next January Tommy will be seven, quite old enough to be sent away. By the time I was seven years old I had seen more of the seamy side of life than my son, I hope, will see in his entire lifetime.

  Our shop was on Bunhill Row and backed, most conveniently,

  on to the graveyard. I was very proud of the sign outside Pa’s shop, with its serpent S like a stick of delectable red-and-white barley sugar, and learned my letters on it:

  SS APOTHECARY AND BARBER.

  PRESCRIPTIONS AND FAMILY MEDICINE ACCURATELY COMPOUNDED.

  TEETH EXTRACTED AT 1S. EACH.

  WOMEN ATTENDED IN LABOUR 2s. 6d. EACH.

  PATENT MEDICINES AND PERFUMERY. HAIR CUT.

  BEST LONDON PICKLES.

  BEAR’S GREASE. GINGER BEER.

  No mention of his other services. The little bedroom I shared with poor Sam overlooked the graves and the shed where lived the vat that still haunts my dreams. After Pa had removed the women’s hair for wigs and their grinders to sell for dentures, the bodies were immersed in near boiling water to flay them and make them unrecognizable. Of course, Sir Astley was too much of a gentleman to raise his own bodies, and Pa was very faithful in his interests.

  I was five years old when my father first suggested that I should go with him on a fishing trip, and I was very proud to be woken up in the middle of the night to go to work. Pa was over six foot tall and heavy set, so my littleness and nimbleness were handy when it came to squeezing through railings and clambering over walls in the dark. He always took pride in leaving a grave as he found it, and on many a night my fingers would be raw with cold after carefully replacing flowers.

  Once we were chased by a rival gang of Resurrection men who fired a blunderbuss at us. It was when we were at work in the old St Mary’s churchyard that got closed down a few years later when the authorities found the bodies stacked twenty deep in the charnel-house and under the chapel. The stench was so bad that the windows in the surrounding houses had to be kept shut all year round for fear of body bugs. Anyway, it was a bright moonlit night, and I remember how exciting and terrifying it was to run with my pa, the body in its sack bumping between us. He hailed a cab - the cabbies charged twice the going rate when they saw the sack - and we escaped to Sir Astley’s. Pa handed the subject to the porter, who gave him nine flashing sovereigns and a pot of ale from which I was allowed to sip .

  In those days magistrates turned a blind eye to mysterious sacks and hampers, for they didn’t want to obstruct the progress of medical education. Legally, fishing in graveyards was only a misdemeanour, but the mob hated the Resurrection men, and before I was Tommy’s age I knew I had to keep quiet about our nocturnal excursions. I never sold any body that had not died a natural death, neither did Pa, I am quite certain. I was well acquainted with skeletons long before I met them in the dissecting-room. How like the Gothic tales that Nina used to love, that I used to prevent her reading, my childhood was. Little does she know she has married Varney the Vampire. Well, and whom have I married?

  Dr Phipps, Nina’s father, used to come to our shop to pick up parcels of drugs. Sometimes I would deliver them to his house in Finsbury Square, where the two exquisitely dressed little girls lived their celestial life with a mama angel who sang to them. My own mama had died when I was born, or so I was told. Perhaps she had a squeamish nature and bolted. If she did die, I hope she was allowed to rest in peace and not sold on to Sir Astley’s dissection-room. Our mothering was done by Betty, a kind old woman who stank of gin and snuff. She was our nurse and housekeeper and cook, and she also helped Pa to boil up the horrors in the vat in the shed. Pa never married again, for Betty took care of all his practical needs and his others were taken care of by the brothel next door.

  My father, Joshua, was as lively as his sign, with a social range that extended from cockney cant to drawing-room manners. Having been left with two sons, or a vegetable and a monkey as he sometimes said, he didn’t allow fatherhood to cramp his style. On the evenings when we were not out fishing, the warm stone-flagged kitchen behind our shop was a club for prostitutes, surgeons, tradesmen and their wives and soldiers from the nearby barracks who had agreed not to see Pa’s nocturnal activities. They all drank and played cards and gossiped together, discussing religion and politics with a passion that was very attractive to a listening monkey. Pa was a Freethinker, even an atheist, and I grew up with radical ideas.

  That was back in the twenties, when London was more horizontal than it is now. The People’s Charter and memories of the French Revolution quivered in the
air, and there were many who hoped to abolish our own ancien régime. Old men still had powder on their heads, ruffles on their shirts and great silver buckles on their shoes. Our kitchen glowed with candlelit faces and throbbed with argument. I was the only child present, for poor Sam lay upstairs, drugged with Godfrey’s Cordial lest he had one of his fits in the night and disgraced us before our friends. I remember nothing but hugs and sweetmeats from the women and kindness from the men, many of whom were later transported or hanged for their dangerous ideas.

  I soon decided I didn’t want to be an apothecary’s apprentice with a pestle and mortar but a respectable medical man with a big house and a wife and daughters. Pa was proud of my ambition and delighted when a professor of phrenology, who did some shady business with him involving skulls, examined my bumps and said I had the head of a genius and was destined for greatness. My favourite visitor was Jackie Scraggs, who had left one of his limbs at Waterloo and had a fascinating wooden one to entertain me with. He was nightwatchman at Bart’s and was carefully blind when Pa turned up to claim a body. In those days most patients in London hospitals died, so if friends and relations didn’t claim the body it was easy pickings and saved the hospital the expense of burying it. Many hospital patients still die, for powder and pills can be as fatal as powder and ball, but operations are not as lethal as they once were since the introduction of the leech, that most singular and valuable reptile, which can be applied before and after operations to reduce swelling.

  Sometimes, when the talk in our kitchen grew fiery with republicanism and radicalism, I was sent up to my damp bed and would creep back down again to listen. Sitting on the cold stone stairs, shivering and a little drunk with the porter I had been indulged with, I would hear the excited voices shouting and laughing through the door and think our house a very fine one that so many people came to visit.

  After the scandal of the London Burkers blew up, working the graves became dangerous. But I had set my heart on being a doctor. At first I dreamed of becoming a surgeon like Sir Astley, but a good surgeon must have an eagle’s eye, a lion’s heart and a lady’s hand. I was a clumsy-boots, and for all Pa’s loyalty to him Sir Astley never offered to help me on my way. Unmentored, the best I could hope for was to be broiled for a pittance in the West Indies. All I needed to become a doctor was the constitution of a rhinoceros and twenty guineas. We had to have three bodies during our sixteen-month training: two for anatomy and one for operations. So Pa and I went back to work for just long enough to let me pocket my profits and put them towards my expensive medical education. My dear old father died of a pox just before I presented myself for my viva voce. I always thought he caught it from one of the Subjects, but perhaps he caught it from the girls next door. I miss him still, for if he was not the most respectable of men he was certainly one of the kindest.

  I must be getting old to think fondly on my sordid childhood. Fortunate Tommy, to grow up with servants and a nursery and an education he doesn’t have to burke for. Times change, and sensible people change with them. Now I am quite contented with the ancien régime and want to be a part of it. I am still sometimes expected to use the tradesman’s entrance, but Tommy will be a gentleman. Will he read this one day? I wonder. If not for him, for whom am I writing, here in the early morning as I wait for Lucy to bring breakfast and for my first patients to arrive?

  Downstairs I can hear mothers and babies arrive, waiting to be vaccinated with a fine lancet on the top of their arms against smallpox, that hideous, disfiguring disease that used to carry off thousands of children every year. But we are about to conquer it. We must work towards the future, not Nina’s ravings but the actual scientific tomorrow. Lucy has just brought a note from Lady B— to say that Clara has had another of those distressing nervous attacks. I will have to call on them later and play a hand of whist with her ladyship to prove my medical acumen.

  Somewhere in the crowded day I must find space enough to meet with the servants and make sure that all the arrangements for Wednesday night are in place. Do they give dinners? That is the question they ask about smart young couples at my club. I was so proud when I joined it five years ago, although since Nina’s ‘illness’ I have not been there once and will soon lose my right to attend if I am not able to pay my overdue subscription. The couple that does not give dinners is doomed to suburban life and social extinction. We do. We must. We will.

  How happy I was on Monday when I thought a villa in Stockwell was the worst fate that could befall me. All night I have lain awake counting the excruciating degrees of embarrassment I suffered. At a post mortem it is customary for the corpse to be present, but my ambition is already six feet under and my wife and son dance on it, laughing at my discomfort. No, I shall go mad myself if I believe they acted out of malice.

  I had been over the guest list with Nina many times to establish the intricacies of precedence and seating.

  ‘Why can’t they just go downstairs with whoever they like best and sit next to the person they want to talk to?’

  ‘It is not helpful of you to laugh at such serious matters.’

  ‘But, Charles, you always said you despised snobbery and had no wish to pretend to be richer and grander than you really were.’

  ‘Did I? I must have been extremely young.’

  ‘You were extremely nice.’

  ‘Very well, I shall have to be both host and hostess. All that is required of you is to look elegant and to listen with delight to the conversation of the men on either side of you. Remember not to mention Malta to Sir Archibald - it was there that his wife bolted - or to stare at the Reverend Humphreys’s glass eye. Do not give more than fifty per cent of your attention to either gentleman, and after each course you must turn to your other side and direct your conversation to your other neighbour. Not in mid sentence, naturally. And do not remove your gloves until we have all been seated at the table.’

  ‘Perhaps I should carry an etiquette book on a chain around my neck to consult it during dinner?’

  ‘I see you are determined to be facetious.’

  The evening began well enough. James looked convincing in his butler costume, with the local greengrocer dressed as a flunky and Lucy in a beautifully starched apron trying to look as if she had an army of servants to supervise. Nina and I inspected the dining-table, which looked charming, with red and white roses to match our best china. There were half a dozen glasses for each person and a battalion of cutlery. The ancestors I bought at auction last year looked very dignified, glaring down at the table with authentic aristocratic disdain. I told Nina they were the Norfolk Sandersons, for how are we to flourish without roots and a tree? Pa would approve. He always said I would rise in the world. Wherever could I have fallen to?

  We went down to the kitchen to taste the lobster sauce for the turbot and check that Cook had not cracked or burned the Chantilly basket filled with whipped cream and strawberries. I hoped that Nina’s black silk and my own black armband would remind our guests of our bereavement only two months ago and excuse any imperfections in our hospitality. I had persuaded Emma to act as an additional maid and bribed Tommy (another half-crown) to put himself to bed.

  ‘Charles, why do you look so terrified? Are they not our friends?’

  ‘Certainly not. They are patients and potential patients, and it is important to please them.’

  ‘Well, if we poison them they shall need you all the more.’

  ‘I hope you do not intend to make any bizarre remarks during dinner.’

  ‘I shall be too frightened to open my mouth.’

  If only both she and Tommy had taken a vow of silence.

  All our guests were punctual. The business of introductions and precedence went better than I had feared. William looked quite disgustingly prosperous, and his wife, a rather plain lady several years older than him with a prominent nose, had that enviable air of having been born speaking French and eating oysters. If one could buy such confidence in Marshall and Snelgrove I would go down th
ere this morning and buy several yards for Nina. Perhaps it is not a deficiency of confidence but a surfeit of frankness that is the problem; a quality delightful in a girl of ten but not in a matron nearing thirty. Our dining-table was not long enough to muffle her clear high voice as it trilled singularities above the symphony I was trying to conduct. I sat with William’s wife on my right and Mrs Humphreys on my left, their ears as sharp as their mouths were bland. As they boasted of their genealogy, lowering their eyes modestly and blushing as they launched each knight and peer into the contest between them, they were riveted by the other end of the table.

  Nina was dissecting the fowl when I saw the abyss into which she was plunging the conversation.

  ‘As you say, Reverend, it’s all very dreadful - cholera, poverty, the depravity and ignorance of our rookeries. And yet we can rejoice, for a beautiful dawn is coming soon.’

  ‘I did not know you had become an evangelical, Mrs Sanderson.’ The Reverend Humphreys, an Epicurean High Church man, shot me a look of sympathy.

  ‘Oh no, you’re thinking of my sister, Henrietta. I do not speak of the next world but of this.’

  ‘Chartism?’ The Reverend looked ready to throw his napkin on the floor and flee.

  ‘There is no word for the things I have seen, for they are in the future. We are watched by our ancestors’ (she pointed rather melodramatically to my recent acquisitions), ‘but how much more inspirational to fix our gaze on our descendants!’ Nina’s face was flushed with wine, and her voice was alarmingly passionate. She was the prettiest woman at the table - William couldn’t take his eyes off her - and certainly the most garrulous.