‘Sir William, I am Howard. Dr Howard. The names of my colleagues…’
‘Are of no account whatsoever, Doctor. Doctor Benjamin Howard.’
Gull drew a bag from his pocket and reached deep down into it. ‘Would you care for a grape?’
He cut off a bunch, selecting a prime specimen, which he proceeded to rapidly skin.
‘Or would you prefer the relic?’ He poked the crumpled purple scrap across the table. ‘Does it not resemble the foreskin of our Lord? The first drop of His Blood that was shed. Practical people, the Jews.’
He swallowed. ‘I take but little wine, but the sugar of the grape seems to supply the readiest refreshing material of which I have in my own person any experience. Grapes and raisins and water, gentlemen. And with each grape a lesson in theology. From the first drop to the glorious conceit of transubstantiation. This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many. But which of you will betray me?
‘You are writing very busily, gentlemen. Putting down your names for fear that you forget them before the end. Do not stop. Write that down. And that. And that. It exercises the fingers most usefully.’
Dr Howard drew the white bag from his head. A young man with heavily oiled and carefully arranged hair, thin on the scalp. Simous nose, snuffling, probably with some allergy; rasping.
‘Do you want to look at this paper, Sir William? There is nothing written, I do assure you, on its outside.’
He slid the top sheet towards Gull. Who did not move. ‘Is the nothing in your own hand, Dr Howard?’
‘There is nothing, Sir William. Nothing at all.’
‘Then it is a forgery!’
‘Not of my making.’
‘That, sir, is my proof. Who said I could not swim?’
The eleven, the hooded ones, scribble furiously over their papers. A team scoring the scorer.
‘Sir William, your record and your achievements, recent as well as over the past forty years, are too well known to need my advocacy – but we are gathered in this chamber today in the character of a court of medical enquiry; there are matters, at present wholly in shadow, that must be brought into the light.’
‘De Lunatico Inquirendo. You are a commission in lunacy. You prove your own fitness to sit upon this commission by demonstrating my insanity. Excellent! I have a Gold Medal in Lunacy; I am Lecturer in Lunacy; Fullerian Professor in Lunacy; Fellow of the Royal College of Lunatics; Resident Madman to Guy’s Hospital; Baronet and Mooncalf Extraordinary to Her Majesty the Queen. I rave in my chains; I rattle. The marble is winning, gentlemen.
‘I have been mad for a long time, in a dream of men, of duties. What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly? He requires much more. He requires the truth. I saw more clearly than others. I held that our science alone is sufficient to raise, and will in course of time raise, the human tribe towards a higher form. I believed in a physiological physic founded upon a study of individual peculiarities, and sought not to battle violently with disease but to harness nature’s own healing powers. Discover the essence and distil it! I knew power and felt that it was my own. Mad! Mad then. With never a yelp. I sought to become what I was.’
Gull stood up, walked around the table. Dr Howard rose, hesitantly. To confront the outstretched little finger of Gull’s right hand, which was intimately threatening his outraged nostril.
‘With this humble digit I probed the rectum of his Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. You notice the length of my first joint? There was only a slight puckering on the anterior wall of the stomach, but his annular structure was so tight that it admitted only the tip of my little finger. The first joint. What do you think, Doctor – that I have not washed it from that day? I have entered the divinity of kings to the length of my finger nail. How many men can say as much?’
The scratching of pen-nibs on paper had altogether ceased. Gull resumed his seat.
‘A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and wine!’
Gull’s broad hand on the table-top. They stare in heat, scorching a print of its outline into the marble. Fingers hooked once more into his waistcoat. Another naked grape, obscenely squelched.
‘Observe the dyer’s hand!’
Gull placed his right hand upon his left breast with the thumb squared upwards. He bowed with mocking piety.
‘Sir William, there is the question of experimentation upon animals.’
‘Never harken to a crow that lies, or a dog that tells the truth!’
‘You attempted to defend, I believe, Claude Bernard who invented a stove which enabled him to watch the process of baking dogs alive. You justified this hideous performance by claiming, and I quote, “our moral susceptibilities ought to be bribed and silenced by our selfish gains”. Of what would those gains consist? Precisely?’
‘Better prepared meat! I am not a red indian savage. I will not devour raw flesh. If I have practised the necessity of vivisecting animals I have not hesitated to also experiment upon myself. I have watched myself bake in far more fierce ovens. I have seen my fur crisp, my skin crack, my brain burst. And I have had the self-knowledge of what that suffering would mean. I always knew before I began. That is exquisite torment.’
‘In 1873 you read a paper before the Clinical Society of London, “On a Cretinoid State supervening in Adult Life in Women”. It was a justly celebrated account of myxoedema based upon five cases, women from a small privately-funded asylum, under your personal supervision, as part of Guy’s Hospital. In this paper you mention nothing of the thyroid gland and of any experiments in its removal. And yet we have sworn evidence that in pursuit of your own wholly unproven thesis you removed these glands, first from monkeys and later from the women themselves; you succeeded in producing a chronic myxoedema, a cretinoid state, with the tissue-changes, physical and mental hebetude, memory loss, the alteration in excretions, temperature, and voice. But, by as late as 1888, no practical use has been made of these barbarously achieved results.’
‘If my description of this condition, which ran to no more than five pages, had sufficient elegance and was correctly formed and argued then the experiments that followed were unnecessary, yes. But they were carried through to cancel what I had written. I was by that time exclusively involved with uninventing my own history. The traces of acts are cruder than the traces of concepts. I left five cretins to live at my charge, freely and without harm, instead of leaving alive the possibility of my theoretical proposals being acted on by five-and-twenty bunglers, who could not open a laundry bag between them with their scalpels.
‘I would leave a city of female cretins if I could absolutely erase the work that I have done. Ignorance is the only safety. I have done what was required of me. I say again that I have redeemed my time. I did not fulfil this commission merely to cancel some irritation or threat to those in power, on whose power we all depend. I aborted that insult – but it was of no importance. I acted out the description of an act that was always there. And in doing this I erased it. I freed that space. It could not be left to madmen, prophets, millennial tremblers.
I have hacked out an infected womb that would have bred monsters. But my acts failed. I did not see that they would themselves form the shape of a new myth, and that in removing the outline of the old fear I was planting a spoor of heat that would itself need to be brought to earth, chilled to immobility, stopped. The myth kills the myth; makes new, infinite rings, smoke above the white stones. I would unhinge the cap of my skull and let the stars pull wires from my brain. This is a terrible matter. Doctors, wake up!’
He spoke with his back to them, but it did not signify. The light was gone from him. A froth remained; grape-juice staining to purple his full lips.
‘“For this must ever be
A secret, kept from all the rest,
Between yourself and me.”’
The Tylers came.
Sir William Withey Gull was committed to St Mary’s Hospital, Islingto
n, in the name of Thomas Mason. Was given the number, 124. Nothing more is known. The rumours from here on are all lies. The screams in the night are false theatre. In that decayed zone, hidden on a hilltop, in windblown paper, among hoardings and estate agents, there was no Gull. He was flown.
26
A nautilus inquisition.
The Zest of Endurance. Joblard splits in the uneven panels of a long mirror. Pin-ups and moonshot advertisements on either side of him. He is swallowed in the red pads of the machine; forced breath. He emerges. Huge thighs enclose him. He drives free. Dynamic tension expelled with a lion’s roar. He lies upon a board, dragging down a weighted bar. He does the circuit, swallowing his own air; relishing the new mysteries of pain.
At this early hour the gym is his. His young son playing with a blue motorbike, not concerned with these gruntings and strivings. The massacre of the previous self, the willed annihilation of past histories of accepted limits and boundaries, continues. Thoracic expansion driving out images of repression. Again: forcing the set weights, the manifested moral obstacles.
The quest is simplified and brought to the scale of this playpen: the sculpted machines of steel and chrome and leather; their chains and balances are for use. The studio is in some way made redundant. The acts are repeated, with no trace, beyond sweat and the changing body armour. It is not that anything new emerges – but that old inhibitions are removed.
The skin softens, becomes childlike. Heaving himself from the floor of London. But the true child, strapped in his buggy, is much more ancient, intent. He is open to it all, it still flows through him and around him, no barriers, nothing to keep out: he is contained.
The father’s head split by the mirror; deformed hemispheres. And the back of the child’s head above him. And the moon photograph with the text printed on the reverse showing through as a fault, or stain. And the black doorway with the waiting watcher.
I cannot work up the generosity to suffer this; not for the obvious taints and shower-stall risks, but because I prefer other fate games. There is a polarity of risk in this elimination of comfortable flaws that is useful to Joblard: he has decided to Stalinise his personal history, to re-edit the past. It will appear to be whatever he wants it to be.
The flame is high, but new energies are running into him. To be and not to do. The world was defended by what he made and now he has to keep place in it without these weapons. The objects, accretions, the tools of a false magic are abandoned. He is unhoused. Like Nicholas Lane, he wills his absence from the world. He is erased.
But the child, effortlessly, announces his presence, like the first sentence of Moby Dick, such apparent simplicity; it is hardly noticed, but it is final. There. And everything changes by it. The Leviathan is fatally marked, invisibly wounded, brought down. The richest fault in time is the least seen. This ancestor, in his striped-bundle, is sleeping. The head nods over, already weighted.
At the back of Guy’s Hospital, between Newcomen and Snows-field, at the corner, in Great Maze Pond is a red brick building, coded with roses and with fruits, once a private ward, now a gym.
The sign ‘New Outpatients Department’ is still fresh; but that function has already been terminated. Gull’s asylum has closed its doors, last refuge of the least pained; they lock their gates to preserve the status of the doctors. Hospitals translate into gymnasia: members only, boxers, bull-workers, narcissists, cruisers. The facilities include steam baths, that alternate their use between the men and the ladies, with profitable confusion: also a bar.
The child is still out; we take our breakfast coffee.
Involuntarily returning to our past, to the fables we construct out of it. On the river. Tooley Street. I once had a job re-labelling cans of condemned Argentine beef. It was one of the few manual tasks at which I excelled. Worked up to a speed that began to alarm the management. The mountain of silver reduced in a few hours to exhibitionist lines with gleaming new wrappers, all ready for the supermarket shelves. The fact that I was helping to put high risk merchandise into the mouths of babes and sucklings in no way inhibited my performance. I liked where I was. Unknown: I fell into the task. Took my breaks on the riverside, saw the city on the far bank, coming up out of the mud, a sediment of its own memory.
Metal detectives probed the foreshore, eyes down. Truant children made rings out of broken stones. The river eliminates itself, heavy with its repeated lies. Montague Druitt, a victim, taken into the fringe of Ripper mythology, found himself here. Self-assassin only. Swimming out, his pockets filled with pebbles.
Joblard again suffers my ramblings, graciously. A surface calm of near collapse: he checks the sleeper.
‘The hospital, that theatre, contains its secret history in its bland outward architecture. The forecourts, quadrangles, iron gates and chapels disguising frenzy and fear. You know that it was founded by a bookseller who made his money speculating in South Sea stocks? The nervous occultism of the merchant again: trading in invisibles. The walls are calcined books.’
Joblard stretches his long jaw, a yawn of suspicion. His boots no longer tapping under the table. Temporary ease. No scratching. A thumb nail grazing the stubble.
‘Lies are the only way of getting at the truth. What we know is so stamped down, walked over, familiar – its power is gone.
‘We can’t just carry on repeating the same myths: until we arrive at a fresh version. An authentic replica of our own making.
‘We must use what we have been given: go back over the Ripper text, turn each cell of it – until it means something else, something beyond us.
‘Otherwise we never over-reach our obsessions. We’re doomed not to relive the past, but to die into it. To abandon the ambition to keep alive what never was, and what never will be, unless we make it so.
‘The conspiracy is all with time: those on the fringe of event simply disappear. Like the Kennedy assassination. There are no reliable witnesses. A sudden wound releases the unintegrated souls, psychic pus, fear and loathing, spectres of world conspiracy.
‘It’s like your bodybuilding – sorry – weight-training. How I describe you, is made into a lie: you change what you appear to be. You make your past a lie, but you do not eliminate it. Nor the fall to future decay.
‘I can’t believe, therefore, in anything I say. I repudiate this disbelief. There is no explanation that will redeem the time. And if I undermine the lies I am telling about this, this, this moment – I mean that we were never here, this conversation never took place – I am doing no more than re-writing a past that never, in fact, occurred. Disallowing the present. Aborting the future. It shifts, slips through our clumsy hands.
‘The words cover so many fears: are used to hold those fears back. What we can describe is what is known; and knowable. Words keep out the world. What we cannot describe, we cannot know: or truly want to know. How can we let go of all this and sink through the tremble and shiver of the leaves? The cancelled movements, wiped-over holes, the spaces? Those shapeless trees beyond the window, breaking cloud into bone: not holding back in disbelief.
‘The saints had a word that could redeem it. A word that I will not use. It cost them too much. They kept out the world to reach it. I cannot say it, even to transcend this pain. Because that word is tied to everything that cannot be reached and is most desired.’
The set is broken. Nothing remains: no pretence that this is a record of any true dialogue. The gym does exist, but that was another country.
We have gone so fast that we are ahead: we are describing what has not yet happened, and what does not now need to happen. We have made arrangements to foreshorten the future.
Always erasure, not exorcism. Exorcism merely confers status on the exorcist: who claims, falsely, that he has the power to unmake. Has tricks to stake the demonic, nail the black heart.
Erasure acts over, is a discretion. Joblard’s performance in the warehouse erased itself so that the voices were set free. They wound back the memory of the future.
; There is no need to rub out the inscription on the stone, for as soon as it has been read, it fades from before your eyes.
We pushed the child out into the air, to release him in the small park at the back of St George the Martyr, Tabard Street. We sat on a bench beneath the spread of a mottled London plane tree. It was raised ground. The wall beyond us was a collage of dates and periods and colours, with sealed doors, set at a custodial height. There was a plaque: ‘This site was originally the Marshalsea prison made famous by the late Charles Dickens in his well known novel “Little Dorrit”’.
Strength had transferred to the child. We are now drained, witnesses, merely. He held the horns of the buggy and wobbled over the grass, not walking free, nor falling to the ground.
On another bench, under the wall, a man was sitting reading. We recognised him as the barman from the Wheatsheaf. He did not see us. Head over, stern glasses, trembling; back of his hand wiping his eyes. Not weeping, laughing. The solitary celebrant of such laboriously constructed pathos.
27
From the hill he watched the people crossing the fields, by tracks and pathways, to secure a good position. There were families with small children who had risen in darkness, milk on the table, a slab of coarse bread in the hand, walked twenty miles and further, to be here. The women in black, none of the men bareheaded, and even the children are hushed, imitating the long faces of their elders.
By the time that the sun climbs out of the plantation the whole length of the road, from the station to the church, is marked out with villagers and country people.
He stands watching them; he might be a blasted tree-stump. No breath in him. Now the train has arrived from the city. Smoke and pomp. Ha! The dignitaries awkward as their own ghosts, creaking in starch, scarcely able to articulate their limbs. The gleaming brass of the coffin. ‘William Withey Gull, Bt., 1816–1890’. He is boxed in oak. He is sealed, no breath upon the varnished wood. But his eyes are open. The business is done. Done justly.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 17
