Rose slips his arm through the Physician's. They saunter towards the great door of the hospital, towards the moat of shadow that
surrounds it. From a high window a madman screams. Pigeons scatter. The carpenter looks up, spits for luck, shoulders his bag. The dog watches him go, then climbs on to a bench, turns, and settles into wary sleep.
The company are in the room they first rehearsed in. They have had wine at Mr Rose's expense, though no one is yet drunk except for two of the keepers. The costume basket has been drained of its contents. There have been fights over the choicer items - a paste tiara, a pair of extravagantly pointed boots, a plumed helmet from a forgotten production of Tamburlaine. But now they are peaceful, some conversing with themselves, some hand in hand, staring at the floor, some rocking in a corner.
James sits on top of the empty basket. Dot is beside him, dressed as the fairy queen, her face disturbingly painted. He has the asse's head on his lap. He strokes its bristles and wonders how it is he can remember none of his lines. Rose and the Physician come by, inspecting them like generals taking a turn in the camp on the eve of battle. After they have gone the flambeaux are lit around the stage and the first guests arrive, then the musicians, setting up at the side of the stage, trying their strings, their reeds. Concentrated, unobtrusive men.
When the benches are full - the women fanning themselves, the men loud, the servants at a distance, hot in their liveries - Mr Rose emerges from the hospital. There is light applause, some heckling. Rose raises a hand, welcomes them all to the Mad House. He says: 'Expect the unexpected. Tonight we shall dream together, but the
manner of the dream, that I must leave to our players. Ladies, be not afraid . . .'
On first is Mr Dee with Mrs Donnelly. They reach the green in front of the benches and stand like lost children, huddled together, staring fearfully at the faces of the strangers. From the audience there is a fascinated silence, then a muffled remark, a gust of laughter.
Mrs Donnelly begins to speak, first her own part, then Mr Dee's, both at enormous speed. The audience cheer, someone flings an orange. The butcher sits on the grass, takes off his shoes and rubs his feet. A young man in a gorgeous coat darts out and steals the shoes; a voice mimics the bray of the huntsman's horn and Mr Dee chases the young man around the back of the benches. The Collins brothers come on. Mrs Donnelly, eyes tightly shut, speaks their lines, until Nathaniel Collins pushes her to the ground. Mr Dee reappears with one of his shoes. He has a bloody lip. He waves the shoe over his head. There are cries of'Bravo!' Mr Rose comes on. He looks happy, as though the evening were progressing far better than he had hoped. He settles the audience, winks, and points to Dot Flyer, padding downstage with her attendant fairies. The flames of the torches show in her hair. She delivers her lines - part Shakespeare, part babble of her own - with a sweetness, a lewdness, an endearing distractedness, that seduces the audience to silence. Hecklers are heckled. Coins are tossed into the grass at her feet.
James acts his part as though he were sitting in the air above his own right shoulder, watching himself For an instant, in the middle of the play, he slips violently through time, and becomes again the creature of his past, cool and proud. It is a shock, nauseating him like a blow to the solar plexus. Then it passes, and the words he feared he had forgotten spill out of his mouth and his hands resume the gestures Mr Rose has so patiently taught. He is a broody, melancholy Bottom, but this makes his gambols the more ridiculous and Titania's love of him more absurd. There is
laughter from the benches; they are authentically amused, and when Dot embraces him they clap, sentimentally.
On the second night, the players are calmer. It is the audience who threaten. Sunday-drunk, restive, spoiling for a fight. They are quick to cheer, quick to turn. A quarter-hour before the end of the play part of the tiered benching collapses, men and women spilling backward, howling on to the grass or into their neighbours' laps. One woman's arm is snapped above the elbow. No one is killed. A bottle is thrown at Rose's head at the end of the play. He dodges it neatly enough. The Physician is fiirious. There is no celebration that night; no wine, no dancing. Adam sits with James in his cell. Distantly they can hear them. Rose and the Physician, shouting at the top of their lungs in the offices below.
James says: 'Have you loved? Loved a woman?'
1 had a wife, James. It was long ago. She was young. She died.'
'I am sorry for it.'
'It was long ago. I have seen how you are with Dot, James.'
'Ay, but I cannot tell if it is love, for I do not think I have ever loved before.'
'I have seen the light in you, in your eyes when you look at her. That light is love.'
'Adam, I cannot say what I fear most. That she will love me or that she will not love me.'
'It is always dangerous, brother, loving.'
The third night of the play. The final performance. The benches are shored up, the Physician is in temper again. The players recite their parts lovingly, taking their leave of the borrowed words. After the performance Lord C sends a guinea to Dot who gives it to Dolly Kingdom, an elderly, honest keeper, sending her out for wine and oysters. The players dance again, still in their costumes. When the wine and oysters come, Dolly Kingdom and a boy from the wine shop carrying them between them, the music pauses, the bottles are emptied, the oyster shells crunch underfoot. The air is rich with sweat and sea smells.
James looks for Dot. He cannot see her; nor can he see Asquini, who was whispering in her ear, the two of them together, Oberon and Titania, while waiting for their cues. Asquini is a handsome man; his madness is not offensive. He often speaks well; he has seen the world, and what he has not seen he fluently invents. Nor does he stink like most of the Bedlamites, and James has seen how he looks at Dot, his come-hither eyes.
When Wagner moves away from the door, searching among the bottles for one still with a mouthful of wine, James slips out. His leg is throbbing. He leans against a wall and takes off his shoes, then runs like an ape towards the room with the jackets. There is a light at the foot of the door. He knows what he will see when he opens it: Asquini's arse bobbing in Dot's lap. He puts his ear to the door, hears nothing. Have they heard him coming in the passage? Are they listening to his listening? He presses the handle. The door moves almost silently on its hinges. His sight is drawn to the candle, the flame burning very straight until the draught from the passageway rolls it over. Dot says: 'Close the door, Jem.'
She is alone, sitting on a stool beside the candle. Across from her is a second stool, and on top of it a chipped porcelain bowl. The bowl is full of cherries, their skins luxuriously dark, the green stalks catching the light.
Dot says: 'They are from Mr Rose.'
'He gives you presents?' James looks around the room as if its shadows might be hiding Asquini or Rose or both.
Dot laughs. She moves the bowl and sets it on her lap. James sits on the other stool. She takes a cherry in her mouth, then draws James to her by the edges of his coat and passes the fruit from her mouth to his. In this manner they work through half the bowl. There is nothing brazen. Nothing louder than a smile. They bury the stones under the jackets. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor.
When they have eaten they lie on the jackets. He tumbles her. She marks his back with her nails, stickies his face with her cherry tongue and cherry lips. It is quick, tender; almost unimportant.
Dot says: 'God keep Augustus Rose.'
'Amen to that. Dot?'
'What, Jern?'
'Marry me.'
'Mad people do not marry, Jem.'
'Then we shall not be mad, for we shall be married.'
'You do not know me, Jem. I cannot always help myself. Inside a month I should be here again or at Tyburn with a rope at my neck.'
'I would help you.'
'You who can barely help yourself.'
'Dot!'
'Hush, Jem! Set your lips to this.' She pulls the cork from a bottle. Rough green glass. He takes it, swall
ows angrily. It is not wine. He sputters, spills some of the liquid out of his mouth. Warmth spreads through his chest. 'Brandy?'
Dot takes the bottle. James watches the slide of her throat as she swallows. He did not understand it before, this manner of drinking. It was part of the ugliness and mystery of other people. Not something he would ever do, ever need to do. Now when she passes him the bottle he is greedy for his share. When it is empty they lie in each other's arms on the jackets, their breath a fiery
cloud around their heads, the candle burning lower and lower, consuming itself, the flame bobbing and snapping in currents of air, the room trembling with shadows. They doze, wake, doze. James hears the jostling of carriages, the noise of a distant dog-fight; hears footsteps in the passage. He frees himself clumsily from Dot's arms. His movements are urgent but slow, like a man undressing under water. He means to snuff the candle so its light will not betray them. It is a long way to the candle. He touches the flame. It burns him, then goes out, a speck of red at the wick's end.
Dot says: 'What is it, Jem?'
As she speaks the door opens. At first they cannot see who is there; it is a man with a lantern, two men with lanterns, perhaps more. Then O'Connor enters the room. There is the gleam, the ring, of chains.
The brandy takes off the worst of the pain, and in truth, O'Connor was too drunk himself, too idle to do much harm. Some kicks, a dozen strokes from the cane; vile, but bearable. James is learning to survive, to bear pain; uncovering the springs of courage. Love is his teacher.
He licks his fingers, reaches down, rubs gently between the fetters and the chafed skin of his legs. Chains, irons; Iron Garters they called them in the Navy.
Thanks to God they did not make him wear a strait jacket, nor did they chain his hands. Dot they carried off quietly enough. A keeper on either side of her and she looking back sleepily, drunkenly, smiHng. She did not speak. He heard her laughing as they carried her into the women's wing.
He pictures her, sitting in her cell, in chains as he is, sitting in the hot air, thinking of him as he is thinking of her. It is too hot to sleep; his mind is busy with plans.
He looks at the shadow of his hands. Might he not, one day, regain his touch, his gift? It cannot all have gone. Why not be a
sawbones in some county town? Somewhere in the north or the far west. Away from here, from ambition. Patch up farmers; bleed the squire. He would only need a horse, and the patience to ride over the county. He might roll his own pills as Mr Viney once taught him to, and Dot would sell eggs and what not and they would ride to church in a little cart and be like Adam, no man's enemy.
The phantasy warms him like the brandy. He squirrels down into the unclean straw, arranges his feet to be as easy as they may and lies there through the body of the night, picking over the details of his future joy. Towards dawn he rises and shuffles to the window. To the right, over Bishopsgate Street, over Half Moon Alley and the London Workhouse, the sky is streaked with pearl. He waits, hearing the flat tolling of the bell from the Dutch church, and the calling of birds, just a few at first, distant to each other, tentative, as though afraid that the dawn might be false, or else awed by the great hush over the London fields. Then hundreds are calling together, a great complexity of sound, the air quivering with the noise of them. It is as if he has never heard birds before, never seen the dawn. He has never wept like this. The world is good. It is astonishing.
The truth seeps out. In whispers, in rumours. In the underbelly of lies. How they took her to her cell; how she fought with them; how they overwhelmed her and chained her, hands and feet; then put a collar on her, a steel collar, and fixed it by a length of chain to the ring on the cell wall. How they left her, spitting at their backs; damning them and calling hell to be her witness.
In the morning they find her sat up against the wall, legs straight out in front of her, head twisted in the collar, eyes half open, her tongue showing past her teeth. They free her from the chains, knowing at the first cool touch of her that she is dead. One of the women in the gallery sees them lifting the body on to the pallet bed, and before they can reach her, silence her, she has screamed the news. The cry is taken up by others, travelling through bolted doors, past iron bars. The keepers, fearful for their safety, quit the wing, returning a half-hour later, a dozen of them with ropes and blackjacks. The Physician is with them, unshaven, striding at their head. He examines the body, pronounces her dead: a seizure. Common enough among the insane; to be expected with a violent creature like Dorothy Flyer. He issues orders: the cells are to be kept locked. They will bury her, as early as possible the following day. As he is leaving, word comes that O'Connor is being murdered by a lunatic in the men's wing.
O'Connor is sitting on the stairs. He cannot speak to them because his jaw is broken. There is blood on his neck and shoulder. The lobe of his left ear is bitten off. He shows it to them, a scrap of flesh in the palm of his hand; then he points to James Dyer's cell.
James is lying, apparently calm, on the floor of his cell. He asks the Physician if it is true. At first the Physician will not answer, keeps asking questions of his own, viz: What did he mean by attacking O'Connor? What was Dorothy Flyer to him? At length, thinking perhaps to end the interview and go in search of his morning comforts, he admits that it is true. She has suffered a fit in her brain. She is dead. Then, testily, he repeats the word, shouts it: 'Dead!'
At this second 'dead', the Physician observes a curious transformation in his patient, as if a delicate stem of glass inside him
has shattered. There is a small though profound exhalation, then an utter stillness, then a spasm in the muscles of the face such as accompanies certain kinds of poisoning. Wagner asks if he should chain the patient's hands. The Physician shakes his head and leaves, saying: 'I have subtler chains than yours, Mr Wagner.'
Next morning, Adam stands by James at the window of James's cell. They watch the funeral party: the chaplain, Dolly Kingdom, Passmore, and some men unknown, hired for the occasion, there to handle the coffin. A slovenly cortege, trailing from the hospital gates and turning towards the hospital burying ground beside New Broad Street, the coffin on a cart pulled by a single horse. It is not possible to see the interment. After half an hour they come back, the chaplain and the keepers. The hired men ride in the empty cart, smoking.
They reduce him with physic. Vomits and blisters, worse than when he first arrived. He cannot stomach his food. The keepers pour broth down his throat;
he brings it up, back into the vessel. They feed it to him a
second time.
She has left him nothing. No locket, no keepsake, no letter. No parting words. Nothing that might console him or sustain him. What is he to do with his love? Where is it to go? It is rotting inside of him. He is rotting.
He steals a razor from the hospital barber. The edge is rusty, but it will cut well enough. He treasures it. Hides it in his shoe.
If she were to be hid for twenty, thirty years, he could bear it. It is the never that is destroying him.
Flies settle on his face. He lets them crawl. Then the flies are gone. It is colder. The wind snags in the bars of his window. The visitors who stroll, squeamish and delighted past the cell doors, wear furs and warm cloaks. One morning there is snow on the grey straw of his bed. He looks out. The Moorfields are buried in a fall inches deep. A dozen children are snowballing beside a pond. Two men with packs on their backs trudge towards the town. They are black and stubborn as insects and leave behind them a tiny trail of footsteps. One stumbles; the other pauses, goes back, and lets the stumbler lean upon his arm. How slowly they go! What is in those packs which warrants such effort?
Then the memory, wholly unexpected, of watching another figure move slowly across the snow. The parson on his way to the forest by the monastery. The fat, good-natured parson, stopping and turning and waving.
On Christmas Day there is a concert organised by Mr Rose. The keepers take James down to the room where he once rehearsed for the play
. The razor in his shoe makes his limp extravagant. The keepers parade him in front of Rose, showing off their handiwork. Rose comes forward, bows, looks sombre and says: 'I am sorry to see you are not well, sir. If these gentlemen will permit it, I should like you to sit here at the front.'
When the Bedlamites are assembled, when they have been
hushed by prods and stares, Rose introduces Faustina Bordoni, a slight, spangled figure dressed in the high fashion of 1730. When she moves she sounds like a ship at sea; it is the creaking of her whalebones, the hissing of yards of silk and taffeta. Her face is sleepy and magnificent; the papery skin rouged and dotted, her eyes brown, burnished under the heavy lids. A fat young man accompanies her at the piano. She sings, faintly but very sweetly. The lunatics are moved. A man named Clapp leaps from the benches and embraces her. The keepers drag him away. Signora Bordoni smiles, jokes in Italian with the fat young man and sings again while the rain that has followed the snow drips and patters musically on the window.
After the concert Rose speaks again with James, speaks of Dot Flyer, his esteem for her. Later, James sees him speaking closely with the Physician. On Boxing Day the chains on James's feet are removed; a parcel of blankets arrives. On Twelfth Night Wagner delivers to him a suit of dark blue wool. James is afraid to wear it. It is like a ruse to draw him back into the world again. For days the parcel sits half opened on the floor. Then he peels off his rags, stands naked, shivering, sharp-boned in his cell, and draws on the suit.
The keepers avoid him. Even the Physician is content merely to look into the cell as he passes, nod his head, and move on to try his arts upon less visible, less protected men. James takes the razor from his shoe and gouges upon the palimpsestic surface of old wainscotting a crude heart. Dot's name, his own, and the date: February 1770.
Ingenious Pain Page 26
