Sweet Thames

by Matthew Kneale

  Farre acquiesced, if with a certain squeamishness at actually touching the woman – who was, admittedly, more than a little stained by her sickness – and we helped her on to her feet. Hove raised his hand, with the air of a prim pupil who has the answer. ‘I’ll fetch a doctor.’

  ‘Good man,’ approved Sleak-Cunningham. ‘I know of a fine practitioner close by our house. We can take a cab together.’

  His reply jarred. I stopped, bringing a halt to Miss Symes’s slow progress across the room. ‘You’re not leaving, surely?’

  Sleak-Cunningham frowned. ‘I don’t see what further assistance I might usefully give.’

  ‘But what of the dinner?’ My remark may seem strange, perhaps, but you must understand my passions of expectation had been raised to such a pitch during the previous days that I could not contemplate the evening being so quickly, so unexpectedly lost.

  The guests regarded me with surprise. The scene before them had evidently driven their thoughts far from the planned agenda of the night.

  ‘Dinner?’ Sweet cast a grim glance across the room, lingering on the dishes to be served that were ranged on the table. Miss Symes’s first salvoes, I now saw, had struck a number of glancing hits upon these, including the roast fish, the potatoes with parsley, the parsnips and beans, and the splendid apple meringue and cream cake that had been bought, at no little expense, from one of the better shops near the Haymarket. I cast her a glance, wondering, with feeling, if she could not have made more effort to aim her expulsions.

  ‘There are matters I want to discuss,’ I urged. ‘Important matters.’

  ‘This hardly seems the time.’ Sleak-Cunningham was impatient to be away from such proximity to sickness.

  ‘Quite so,’ added Sweet, for once agreeing with him.

  As it was, further discussion was halted by Miss Symes herself, who, still propped up by Farre and myself, coughed twice, then disgorged a mouthful of substance from her gut, terminating the matter more effectively than any words could have done. After offering brief thanks, well-wishes, promises of imminent doctors, and vaguer forms of help, the Sweets, the Sleak-Cunninghams and the Hoves were all gone.

  What remained now, of the evening that I had inflated with such hope. A woman I had never liked struck with sickness. It was a low moment indeed. Still I tried not to despair. One battle lost did not mean the war could not yet be won. I must look ahead, think of other means of publicizing my notions.

  ‘I suppose it may be some time before Hove’s doctor arrives.’ Farre had stayed, the servant Jenny too, and we had managed to convey the patient to her box of a room, a bucket lodged by the bed.

  ‘I dare say.’ My thoughts were too distracted to much attend to his meaning.

  ‘He could be out on call when Hove gets there. For all we know, quite an epidemic may be started, and doctors could be hard to catch.’

  ‘True enough.’ The whole neighbourhood might be engulfed, and we might both be breathing in the miasma poison even as we stood before Miss Symes lain upon her bed. Still, I could not see what Farre’s remarks might achieve, beyond fuelling the glowering distress of the patient. ‘What of it?’

  Farre stooped bird-like above Miss Symes. ‘We should try and do something ourselves, at least until help arrives. It could make all the difference.’

  He had a point. My thoughts turned wearily to the matter. ‘It’s possible, I suppose.’

  ‘I have heard opium can be most effective. D’you have any in the house?’

  ‘Not opium. Though there are a few things that I put by for such an occurrence as this one.’

  Farre rummaged through the collection of newspaper cuttings with interest. ‘What about this one? Olive oil – you have a bottle of it here – and warm water.’

  ‘I dare say it may do as well as any.’

  He again examined the print. ‘The instructions are clear enough.’ He turned to the patient herself. ‘What d’you say we give this a try, Miss Symes. It could clear up the whole thing in a moment.’

  She was unsure. ‘You’re sure it’d work?’

  ‘Says here it never fails.’

  She shrugged. ‘Then I suppose so.’

  Jenny was sent down to warm a good quantity of water, while Farre found a cup of correct size to administer the olive oil. I found myself slowly warming to the thought of testing a cure; it was at least a welcome distraction from the failures of the planned evening. And what a triumph if we were to discover, by scientific method, a reliable remedy.

  Miss Symes swallowed the first cup and, encouragingly, kept it down for the full eight minutes before the second dose was taken. This too she retained, and our hopes were fast growing as the time for the final swallowing drew near; this to be followed by copious quantities of warm water, which Jenny had standing ready. The third cup of oil, however, proved too much for the woman’s constitution, and was barely swallowed when it came back, together with – judging by quantity, the two earlier successes, and a substantial remnant of her dinner.

  ‘It was so close.’ Farre frowned; the experiment had quite captivated his interest. For that matter, it had mine. ‘We should try again.’

  ‘We certainly should not.’ Miss Symes had, it seemed, been thoroughly put off the olive oil and, despite our combined urgings, would not be swayed. ‘I ain’t touching another drop of that foreign muck. Good enough for Spaniards, it may be, but not for proper English folks.’

  Farre again searched through the cuttings. ‘What of this?’ He held up two bottles. ‘A cure, Miss Symes, made up of two substances well known to these shores.’

  She shrugged. ‘All right. I dare say.’

  The written description of this second cure, however, proved to be by no means adequately specific. The dose – ten drops of chloroform in a wine glass of brandy – was to be repeated every ten minutes until the symptoms disappeared, but as Miss Symes insisted on instantly expelling the first glass into her bucket, we were left unsure whether we should then wait for the required interval, or whether this failed attempt did not count, and we should proceed again at once. In the event we compromised and delayed five minutes, but with no greater success. After a third failure Miss Symes again grew obstinately uncooperative.

  The Chinese cure, we both realized, was sadly inapplicable. For a start we lacked the ‘attendants’ who were ‘to stretch the principal nerves by main force’; the exact meaning of which process neither of us was quite clear of. Also there was the difficulty we would face trying to persuade Miss Symes to embark on the great letting of blood required.

  This left the American cure, which she greeted with interest, even enthusiasm. ‘Leastways with this one I don’t have to swallow nothing peculiar.’ Jenny was despatched to heat bricks in the oven and bring ice – fortunately we had acquired quite a quantity, for preserving the apple meringue and cream cake – which she mixed with salt, while Miss Symes began – with surprising absence of shyness – to divest herself of garments that she might be more easily given the ‘External application of friction of heat’. Both Farre and myself watched, not without a certain trepidation, as her ample form was revealed to sight. In the event, however, the question of who should apply friction never arose. Before Jenny had brought the hot bricks there was a loud knocking at the door.

  It was the doctor sent by Hove.

  He was a serious man, who seemed to match the heavy black leather case he carried. Marching up the stairs, led by Jenny, he absorbed the sickbed scene with sombre but deep-rooted astonishment. I realize now it may have looked out of the ordinary, with Miss Symes nakedly recumbent in the tiny room, strips of newspaper all about her, as well as a bottle of olive oil, brandy, chloroform, and a tureen of salted ice.

  ‘What on earth’s going on here?’

  ‘We’re attempting a well-known cure,’ I explained, handing him the relevant cutting.

  He glanced over it with growing displeasure. ‘This? But it’s quackery of the first order. As if such practice has any sound basis.’
He surveyed us with the disdain a schoolmaster might employ upon two pupils caught spitting upon one of their fellows. ‘You are dabblers. Dabblers, what is more, who may have caused this lady serious harm.’

  Then, however, looking to the patient – her face showing fierce dissatisfaction towards Farre and myself at such scathing utterances – he seemed to grow distracted from his own words, sinking into silence for a moment. He stepped forward to examine her. ‘Wait…’ Stooping over her, he peered at her lips, her eyes, then the skin on her arms and stomach, touching this last in several places. ‘How d’you feel?’

  Miss Symes shrugged, glancing away almost shyly at his proddings. ‘Not so bad now, I suppose. Better than before, anyroads.’

  ‘Perhaps the cures we attempted earlier had a beneficial effect,’ Farra proposed.

  The doctor replied with nothing more than an exasperated ‘Hmmph’, at once turning back to the sufferer. ‘Tell me what you have eaten today.’

  ‘Everything?’ Pausing for recollection, Miss Symes itemized what she had consumed, listing a veritable banquet of snacks and meals, the ingredients of many of them well familiar to me, as they had been obtained from our sparse everyday larder, or from the preparations for the failed dinner.

  The doctor pondered. ‘Anything else?’

  She thought. ‘There was one thing, I s’ppose. In the afternoon I went out to get some apples as were needed, and on the way I had a few cockles from a stall.’

  ‘Cockles?’ The doctor clapped his hands with sombre triumph. ‘There we have it.’

  ‘You mean…?’ I began.

  ‘A clear case of poisoning by food, from that most common of all causes, shellfish.’

  Miss Symes uttered a kind of vengeful wail. ‘You mean it ain’t the Cholera?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  I have to admit it was not a happy moment. Our mistake, though understandable enough, was unfortunate. Miss Symes, angrily pulling her clothes back about her, quite revelled in the misjudged treatment she had been given. ‘And all evening these two were feeding me the most poisonous foreign stuffs and substances, having me strip myself bare, till they came close to killing me clean away.’ Her accusations were directed, of the two of us, almost exclusively towards myself. ‘Evil-minded, deliberate murder, it was.’

  Though I insisted we had been acting with the best of intentions, the physician proved obstinately sympathetic to her plight. Indeed he went so far as to sharply criticize Farre and myself for, as he termed it, ‘Playing doctors’.

  ‘As if the practice of medicine is a mere matter of collecting cuttings from newspapers.’ Writing out a bill charging me for the pleasure of being thus denounced, he helped his patient down the stairs. Farre – eager to be swiftly away from this scene of his embarrassment – was close behind, Jenny also, regarding her evening’s work, I dare say with reason, as well complete.

  ‘Don’t think you’ll have me working in this house again,’ Miss Symes challenged, in the drama of the front doorway. ‘Not after what’s gone on this night. I’d not come back if you begged me.’

  I made no attempt to convince her from her resolution, grateful that some slight benefit might be won from the evening.

  The first glimmer of early summer dawn was visible in the sky above them as they went. Turning back into the building, I stepped into the pronounced quiet within. The dining-room table was still covered with the debris of the halted dinner which, after the long and wearying night, seemed as if preserved from some earlier era. I stood for some moments, suddenly weary, pondering sleep.

  It was only then that I began to wonder where Isobella could have been all this time. I had not, I realized, seen her since Jenny had hurried to my place at the head of the dining-table, to tell of Miss Symes’s illness, all those hours ago.

  I climbed the stairway to the bedroom door, but it was closed, with no glint of light from beneath. She must have crept quietly up to retire early, I decided, ignoring all the din of cures and doctors outside. Still it seemed strange. Reluctant though I was to wake her, and so perhaps further aggravate matters between us, I tapped lightly at the door.

  Silence.

  I tapped again, and softly called out her name. Still nothing. Heart beating more quickly, I turned the handle. All within was quite as usual; everything in place, all faintly lit by the dawn light shining in through the windows. Except that my wife was not there. Examining her bed, I saw it had not been slept in.

  Chapter Six

  Two days ago I woke to find the Alp mountains that curve about Turin transformed, their sharp outlines a freshly glaring white. There are other signs, too, that autumn is well advanced; the noonday sun still has the power to burn scarlet an Englishman’s nose, but after nightfall a chill spreads through the air, summoning forth smells – finely alluring – of woodsmoke fires. Yet my memoirs have barely reached the true start of matters. Slow progress, perhaps, but I will not be hurried; I refuse to allow any such thing. In my days in London I hurried enough for a whole lifetime – speeding forth, eyes all but shut – and paid hard for the pleasure.

  Besides, it is not easy exactly to record one’s actions of two years ago. The urgent nature of my departure from British shores – a leaving that was, indeed, nothing short of outright flight – prevented my bringing any but a few documents detailing events of that awesome summer. I have only my own remembrances and, though my powers of recollection are far from weak, these I treat with caution.

  Memory can subtly mislead. It can blind one with a sense of certainty. It can add logic to events when in truth no logic was to be found. It can even have knowledge oozed back before its proper time, insinuating into one’s remembered thoughts discoveries not yet made – waiting in the future – when in truth one was in confusion; bogged in quagmires of the moment.

  What was one thinking on this given day? What did one feel? How much did one grasp? Such questions are not always easily answered even on the very day itself, let alone eight-and-twenty months later. The picture is cloudier still if, at that distant time, one’s own judgement had wandered fearsomely astray.

  Though I miss London of course, I am growing fond of this foreign city. I am renting a set of rooms – Piedmontese seem not to think of living in houses, but lodge together of their own choice in chambers within huge blocks, as would the English only if they could afford no better – which overlook on one side a narrow alley crowded with food shops and wine merchants. At night even with the windows closed I can hear voices rising up in the sing-song and somewhat nasal local dialect – greeting one another, arguing, duping a passer-by and more – and, though the sound sometimes distracts me from sleep, still I find it strangely pleasing.

  Of course Turin is a small and unimportant city compared with the great metropolis of London, largest on this earth. That hot summer of two years ago one seemed to breathe the very size of the piece. Thus it seemed that morning – air already well warmed though it was scarce past ten – as I sat unhappily in a hansom cab speeding its way towards Battersea village.

  Most troubling to me was the thought of what surprise might be waiting to be inspected at our destination (though I was impatient to get there). Also there was the matter of Constable Collins; a fellow I had already come to regard as both useful to me, and potentially dangerous.

  In build he was typical of his profession – a huge fellow, filling up the cab, so I found myself quite wedged against the door – but with silent, sharp eyes. These last had an unsettling way of fixing themselves upon my own, for only a moment, but with something like thoughtful study; a habit I had observed also in his superior, Superintendent Lisle. It was as if each was re-examining his suspended judgement of my case; perhaps wondering if I had indeed played the part I claimed, or might yet prove more criminally interesting.

  Collins peered out from his window, ducking down to bring his head low enough, and I found myself regarding his uniform. I had never before paid much attention to the dress of the Metropolitan Police, but
now, finding a specimen lodged at such suffocating proximity, I regarded it afresh. The blue cloth coat, with its seven large buttons down the front, was most unmilitary in manner – perhaps deliberately so, that fears of despotism would not be awakened among the population – possessing instead the style of a respectable citizen, though of one full generation past. The effect of such old-fashioned clothes was curious upon Collins, who – for all his hugeness – was a younger man than I. It gave him the faint air of one pretending to be somebody else.

  My eye came to rest upon the fellow’s chimney pot hat, sat upon his lap. This was an old one, its outer skin cracked and torn, and revealing a structure within of what seemed to be struts of metal. Metal? Curious, I tapped him on the arm, calling away his attention from study of the hot landscape.

  ‘My hat?’ he answered, amenable, though his eyes were watchful still. ‘It’s made to be strong enough to hold the full weight of a man, see. So if I come upon a wall I need to peer over, but that’s too high, I can use my Chimney Pot as a step.’

  ‘Most ingenious.’

  ‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘Though I can’t say I’ve had cause to put it to use. Not yet, leastways.’

  He turned away that he might resume inspection of the view, throwing before me a mass of blue shoulder and shaved neck. At the sight of it I recalled – with weary horror – how I had done the fellow to death only the night before; for company the man had had, among others, Harold Sweet, the Duke of Wellington, and Mr Kossuth, the famous Hungarian revolutionary who had lately been so much in the papers. The blade had sunk in just about there, at the base of Collins’s neck, and with great ease, as into semolina pudding.

  Four days. For four whole days Isobellas had seemed to float before me, by turns innocent and guilty. Isobellas drowned, or self-poisoned, or leapt from some great height and smashed upon the earth, all of them regarding me with blank and lifeless eyes, accusing. Then Isobellas without conscience, stepping jauntily into carriages, baring shapely legs, or lying desported between strangers’ sheets, chirping with laughter at my recounted credulity.