D&P20 - Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  Through medicine he seeks for ways to understand and conquer it while at the same time looking for any evidence in flesh, blood and bone of the existence of the soul. While he does not seem inclined to follow his father in channelling his medical skills into improving the health of the underprivileged (Beddoes Sr founded the quaintly named Institute for the Sick and Drooping Poor!), Thomas Lovell actively supports - sometimes at personal risk - what today we would call human rights movements throughout Germany. And, of course, through the creative power of his imagination he attempts to grapple hand to hand with the Arch-Fear.

  So why come to Germany? The answer lies in what I've just written. Here he could be at the cutting edge (ho ho) of medical research; here there were strong undercurrents of social revolution such as only rarely made themselves felt in dull, complacent little England; and here with its dark forests and dramatic castles and sweeping rivers and turbulent mythology lay the true Gothic heart of Europe which, since the Jacobeans, the British had only dabbled their toes in.

  But in the end he sees that his attack has failed on all three fronts.

  I visited the site of the old town theatre which Beddoes hired for a night in a last sad attempt to pluck some morsel of comfort out of his disintegrating life by dressing young Konrad Degen up in hose and doublet and putting the poor lad on the stage as Hotspur.

  Sam muses that perhaps Beddoes saw Hotspur, an uncomplicated, impulsive, brave, honourable, poetry-mocking, life-loving man of action, as the kind of son who wouldn't have let his father die. Or perhaps the only way a man can really bring a father back to life is to become him by having a son yourself.

  Poor Beddoes. For a moment I slipped out of my skin and time into his and felt his pain, and felt too, what is worse, his faith that the future must be better than the past and that by the time we reached, say, the twenty-first century, the world would have taken large steps towards Utopia.

  But enough of these dolorous imaginings! The festive season was waiting for me back at Fichtenburg. Let me tell you how I have celebrated it.

  On my return to the castle early in the evening of December 23rd, I found Linda and her party had arrived that morning. She greeted me warmly with her version of the Continental kiss. One of the most popular videos on offer in the Syke was called Great British Sporting Moments (Dr Johnson was right; if you want a patriot, look in the jails!) and one of the Moments which got a particularly loud cheer was the old black-and-white footage of Henry Cooper flooring Cassius Clay, as he still was then, with a left hook.

  Linda's bruising buss to the point of my cheekbone had much the same effect. I was still reeling from it as she followed it up with close enquiry into the progress of my researches. I got the impression she knew all about the pattern of my first couple of days there - Frau Buff, probably - and regarded my rather abrupt departure to Zurich as a pleasing demonstration of my capacity to put duty before pleasure. No hint she knew the form that pleasure took, thank God!

  She took the coincidence of the Stimmer connection with Beddoes in her stride, very much a Third Thought reaction. God's hand is in everything; we should marvel all the time, not just on the odd occasion when our spiritual caliginosity clears enough for us to glimpse Him at work. She has no real interest in Beddoes. She is backing me because by doing so she disobliges a lot of poncy academics, and also because (I make the point objectively not vaingloriously) in some as yet undefined way she likes the look of me.

  She foresaw no problem in getting the Stimmers to permit examination of the Keller painting. That's her real strength. She simply doesn't admit the possibility of failure!

  But I could tell she was genuinely pleased by my progress, for suddenly she apologized - with that brusqueness you encounter in people who are not used to apologizing - for a regrettable but necessary interference with my scholastic privacy. It seems that her party has swollen some way beyond its opening numbers (politicos love a freebie!) and pressure on room space has necessitated putting someone in the chalet's second bedroom.

  The good news was that it was Frere Jacques.

  I said, 'That would just be Jacques by himself, would it?'

  She took my point immediately and said, 'Yes. Doleful Dierick's back at the Abbey, making sure the Brothers don't enjoy Christmas too much. But I should warn you, he's threatening to join us for New Year.'

  Well, sufficient is the evil, etc, and I said I'd be delighted to have Jacques' company, and I meant it. A chaperon was just what I needed. Timid and naive Mouse might be, but she's her mother's child, and Linda is a woman who hates to leave a job undone.

  I met Mouse on my way down to the chalet. She greeted me with what looked like unfeigned delight, reproached me for my abrupt disappearance, and said that Zazie and Hildi had told her to wish me a very merry Christmas on their behalf.

  ' Carefully I looked for hidden meaning. With relief, I found none.

  In the chalet I discovered Frere Jacques sitting at the kitchen table writing.

  He too expressed great pleasure at seeing me and also tried to apologize for breaking in on my scholarly privacy.

  I told him I was delighted to have the company, and hoped he didn't mind being separated from Linda's main party.

  'Good heavens, no!' he laughed. 'They seem as boring a bunch of politicos as you could hope to find outside of your House of Commons tea-room.'

  'No plans to seduce them to Third Thought?' I said slyly.

  That might be a problem, as a Third Thought clearly requires two other thoughts to go before it,' he replied gravely. Then he grinned and said, 'But you can't be a Christian without believing six impossible things before breakfast, so I'm calmly optimistic.'

  Now this was unbuttoning with a vengeance! Again that hesitant, doubtful part of my mind, always looking at the shadows in the sunniest scenes, made me recall that old stratagem of Machiavelli's, that the best way to get a man to let you into his confidence is to offer him the illusion of free admission into your own first.

  What a trouble to me is this inability to give my trust without stint, but I did feel easy enough with him to ask outright what he was doing spending Christmas at Fichtenburg when I should have thought a man in his line of work might have found the season making other calls on his time.

  He said, 'Do not imagine because I mock these politicos that I despise them. For Third Thought to prosper, it can't be seen as a refuge for oddballs. We must appeal to ordinary people, and if they see people they trust trusting me, then they have taken a large step towards us.'

  'You think people trust politicians?' I said. 'You know that Linda is known as Loopy Linda in the British Press?'

  'You think that people trust the British Press?' he countered. 'Of course with her surname she was bound to be called Loopy. Most of your papers, like Shakespeare, would sell their souls for a bit of word-play! Whenever I get mentioned in your press, few of the journalists can resist the temptation to make a dormez-vous or sonnez les matines joke. If Linda reverted to her maiden name of Duckett, I dread to think what might ensue.'

  This set the tone of the relationship between us and by the time the festivities were over, we were very good chums. He was sharp enough to notice how I avoided the company of Mouse and I countered by comparing her unfavourably with Emerald.

  'Yes,' he said. 1 thought you were somewhat struck with Miss Emerald.'

  ‘Funny,' I said. 'I thought much the same about you.'

  Which made him laugh, but I felt those keen blue eyes checking me out for hidden meanings as he laughed.

  I'm really getting to like this guy. But I still made sure I kept the innermost casket of my soul firmly locked. It's only with you, Mr Pascoe, that I feel able to reveal everything. Frere Jacques might wear the religious robe but it is you who are my sole confessor.

  So we had a great time. Even the religious bits were fun. Jacques presided at a decidedly ecumenical service in the music room on Christmas morning. His sermon was short, eloquent and entertaining, one of the politicos (
a German) proved to be a dab hand on the piano, and both Linda and Mouse turned out to have very nice voices, the latter soprano, the former mezzo, which combined most pleasingly in a Bach anthem. They sang again, making a fair shot at the "Flower Song" in Lakme after the superb Christmas dinner which Frau Buff and her team of Coppelias provided, and each of us was then invited in turn to contribute to the entertainment.

  I felt a bit like poor old Caedmon as the foreigners did their various things very competently, and might have snuck off back to my cowshed if Linda hadn't fixed me with her dominatrix gaze and said, 'Franny, let's have one for England, eh?'

  Reluctantly I stood up. The only thing that came into my panicking mind was a comic poem of Beddoes, The New Cecilia'. His sense of humour is a mix of the dark surreal and the medical robust, and in this poem he tells of the alcoholic widow of St Gingo, who denies her dead husband's capacity to work miracles with the words -

  He can no more work wonder

  Than a clyster-pipe thunder

  Or I sing a psalm with my nether-end.

  And she immediately pays the price.

  As she said it, her breakfast beginning on

  A tankard of home-brewed inviting ale,

  Lo! the part she was sitting and sinning on

  Struck the Old Hundredth up like a nightingale.

  And so it continues for the rest of her life, leading to the moral-

  Therefore, Ladies, repent and be sedulous

  In praising your lords, lest, ah well-a-day!

  Such judgment befall the incredulous

  And your latter ends melt into melody.

  As I launched into this, suddenly the huge inappropriateness of what I was doing struck me like a pink blancmange at a funeral feast. Here was I on Our Lord's birthday in front of my devout patroness, her spiritual guru, and an audience of her distinguished friends reciting a poem about a saint's widow farting psalm tunes!

  But, like the Widow Gingo, I could find no way to interrupt my flow.

  I dared not look at Linda. As I finished, I heard a choking sound come from her direction which at first I took for the beginning of an explosion of inarticulate rage. And then it matured into a long macaw-like screech of laughter. She laughed until the tears ran down her face. Most of her guests roared their approval too, and those who had to have Beddoes' nineteenth-century idiom and sometimes convoluted syntax explained to them demanded a repeat performance which I embellished with a bit of body language which also went down very well. But when they urged me to give some further examples of Beddoes in merry mood, I modestly demurred. Leave 'em laughing when you go was always a good maxim in the music halls.

  It occurred to me that it might also make a good motto for Third Thought, but I'd taken enough risks for one day so I kept it to myself!

  But life is real, life is earnest, and I'm beginning to feel the need to get down to some work on the book, so tomorrow I'm borrowing Linda's car and heading off to Basel.

  Why Basel? Because that's where poor Beddoes ended his life in January 1849.

  Despite being a doctor, his suicide was a long drawn out business, its first stage being a self-inflicted wound in his right leg in July 1848. It's ironic that after a couple of decades of active involvement in radical politics, Beddoes should have sunk to this pitch of despair in the very year when most German states were in a ferment of revolution. Initially it looked as if the radical cause was winning. In Frankfurt a German parliament was trying to draft a new liberal constitution uniting the whole of Germany, yet it was this same city that Beddoes left in the spring with his young friend, Konrad Degen, to wander through Germany and Switzerland for several weeks without showing the slightest interest in the fascinating new political situation.

  According to Beddoes' cousin, Zoe King, Beddoes had been very depressed as a result of an infection contracted through a cut in his own skin while dissecting a corpse. Also, for reasons we do not know, he believed his republican friends had deserted him. His life must have seemed utterly empty when, after the failed theatrical debut of Konrad in Zurich, the friends quarrelled and the young baker headed back home.

  So Beddoes moved to Basel and wounded his leg. Perhaps he intended to sever an artery and bleed to death. Strangely off target for such a devoted student of anatomy, he was taken to hospital where he attempted to finish the job by deliberately letting the wound become infected, he hoped fatally. Again he was only partially successful, the part in question being his right leg below the knee, which was amputated in September of that year after gangrene set in.

  By January, apparently recovered in spirits and reconciled with young Konrad who'd been installed in lodgings nearby, he was fit enough to make excursions from his hospital room. On one of these he obtained poison of some kind - not difficult if you were a doctor - and that was that.

  How sad - not that he should die, for we all must come to that - but that he who had such talent, such intelligence, and such opportunity, should have ended up so depressed and disappointed and disillusioned that life lost all meaning for him.

  He left a note, addressed to one of the two important men in his life, both of them lawyers. He was articled for a while to the first of these, Thomas Kelsall, a Southampton solicitor. The law career came to nothing, but a friendship was formed which remained one of the few constants in Beddoes' existence. Without the correspondence between these two we would know even less of Beddoes' life than we do, and without Kelsall's unselfish enthusiasm for the poetry, very little of it might have survived.

  The other lawyer, to whom the note was addressed, was a man called Revell Phillips of the Middle Temple who seems to have become Beddoes' consultant on financial matters, though, as with Kelsall, there was clearly something much deeper in the relationship. Together, Sam speculates, these two lawyers may have provided in some wise the substitute he was always seeking for that father he lost so young.

  In the note Beddoes writes the phrase which provided Sam with the title for his book.

  I should have been among other things a good poet.

  And typically he ends with a macabre jest.

  Buy for Dr Ecklin [his attending physician] one of Reade 's best stomach pumps.

  Knowing, of course, that next time Ecklin sees him he'll be dead from poisoning!

  It's a letter that makes me cry every time I read it. And smile too. He was truly a merry mad tragic figure.

  But I mustn't end on a melancholy note this letter which has been concerned with this most merry of times! I hope you and yours have had as good a Christmas as I have.

  Yours fondly,

  Franny

  Pascoe frowned as he read the letter, then tossed it across to Ellie who read it and laughed out loud.

  'What?' he said.

  'The farting poem. I begin to warm to Beddoes. Who on earth is St Gingo, or did he just make him up for the rhyme?'

  'Wouldn't be surprised. Making things up to suit his own weird purposes, sounds just the sort of thing that would appeal to Roote.'

  'And what precisely do you think he's making up here?'

  Pascoe thought, then said, 'Himself. He's making himself up. This jolly, sociable fellow who gets on with people and has serious conversations with his spiritual advisor and goes off to work out of sense, of duty. He's telling me, "Look, Mr Pascoe, I can be anything I want to be. Try to get hold of me and you'll find yourself clutching air."'

  'Ah, now I'm with you. He's telling you this in the same way he told you he'd just bashed Albacore over the head and left him to burn to death in the Dean's Lodging?' said Ellie. 'Peter, I suggested you got this business sorted, but I meant by doing your job. All you seem to be doing is diving into Roote's letters like some religious fanatic reading Nostradamus's texts and finding in them whatever fits his particular world-picture.'

  'Yeah? Well, Nostradamus was mad too,' said Pascoe stubbornly. 'And Pottle agreed there was something seriously disturbed about the guy when I showed him the letters.'

  'Yes, and di
dn't he say that Haseen was a psychologist of good standing in the trade, not the idiot you took her for?'

  'Just shows how clever Roote is, doesn't it?' said Pascoe. 'All that crap about his father, she swallowed it hook, line and sinker.'

  Ellie shuddered at the confused image and said, 'So how about maybe it's you who swallowed the crap?'

  'Sorry?'

  'What do you really know about Roote's childhood and early family background? I mean, where did you get it from?'

  'I don't know, the records, I suppose.'

  'Right. But where did the stuff in the records come from? Maybe that's the crap and Franny put it there. Maybe Ms Haseen was good enough to dig some of the truth out of Fran and, when he saw it in her book, he was really pissed off at how much he'd let slip.'

  'Yes, but it's Roote in his letters that draws my attention to this. I mean, he's not mentioned by name in Dark Cells, is he? I'd probably never have known about the sodding book if he hadn't referred to it.'

  'Yes, but he knows you're a clever clogs, Pete. OK, he may overdo the admiration for you, but my reading is, he's only exaggerating what he really feels. In his eyes, you'd have no difficulty in tracking down the book and his part in it. So he makes a pre-emptive strike and draws your attention to it and his cleverness in deceiving Haseen about the father he never knew. Because that's what he wants the world to think, that he never knew his father, that he never had this close worshipping relationship with him and suffered this huge psycho-trauma when he left them and’or died.'

  Pascoe finished his coffee and rose from the breakfast table, shaking his head in mock wonderment.

  'And to think’ he said, 'you're the one tearing me off for reading between the lines! I may be stretching things sometimes trying to break his code, but you're into astrology!'