After Such Kindness

by Gaynor Arnold

  ‘What is the point of writing something that cannot be read? But the test is – can you read it aloud?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘I read aloud all the time.’

  ‘You could of course read it aquiet, but I might have to get my ear-trumpet and that would be very inconvenient.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of “aquiet”,’ she says.

  ‘That’s because you haven’t “aquiet” enough knowledge. Come now, read it to me.’

  And she reads, in slightly halting speech: ‘To Miss Amy Frances Elizabeth Edgerton, from her friend and admirer, John Jameson, November 1872.’ She pauses. ‘Are you really my friend and admirer?’

  ‘No doubt about it. You won my heart in an instant with your fur hat and muff. But are you mine? That is to say, did you like Daisy’s Daydream?’

  ‘Oh, it’s my favourite book. I read a chapter every night before bed.’

  ‘Then I expect you know it better than I do, as I’ve only read it the once – for it’s nonsense, you know. But which part do you like best?’

  ‘Oh.’ She pauses, thinking. ‘I can’t choose. But I like it when Daisy goes to sea with all the four-legged creatures and they use her hair as a sail, and the Fatted Calf says how much he loves the sea hair! And the dormouse wakes up and says –’

  ‘– Hair, hair!’ I chorus with her. We both laugh.

  She is so delightful as she laughs, as her cheeks grow pink with merriment, her soft blue eyes crinkling up like little crescent moons. ‘Do you live in Oxford?’ I say, hoping against hope that this is the case, and that she has not been sent merely to enchant and then disappear. So many of my little friends are merely pen-friends, which is pleasant enough, but I like it best when I can be in their company.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We’ve just moved here. We live on Cumnor Hill.’

  ‘So you will be able to visit me whenever you like?’ I say. ‘Whenever you come to tea with your uncle, perhaps? If you are very good, I will tell you some other stories.’

  ‘About Daisy?’

  ‘Yes, about Daisy. She is a most interesting child, and the world quite rightly loves her. And so do I, my dear, more than I can say.’ I find my eyes filling with tears. I know for certain now that Daisy has gone from my life. I’ll never entertain her in my rooms again, never hand her a sandwich or make her laugh, never see that wondering look in her grey eyes as she asks a question. Never, never, never, never.

  ‘Mr Jameson?’ Amy fixes her blue eyes on me. ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘Crying? By no means. These are not real tears, you know. They are of the crocodile variety; pure glycerine and treacle, and you must take no notice. But I am thinking that maybe it is time to write about someone else.’

  ‘Someone else?’ She looks crestfallen.

  ‘How would you like it,’ I say, ‘if I made up a story about a child called – let us say quite spontaneously and at random – Amy?’

  ‘Me?’ Amy clasps her hands excitedly. ‘Oh, yes please!’

  ‘Very well,’ I say. ‘And now I have another question to ask you, but it’s not at all hard, because there is only one answer and that is, yes.’

  She looks at me expectantly. She is as lovely as a dream in her white fur.

  ‘Will you permit me to take your photograph?’

  ‌LONDON, 1872

  Harley Street,

  London.

  November 1872

  My dear Charcot,

  I had a most interesting case brought before me this week: a young woman – a very attractive young woman, with considerable education and a finely wrought sensibility – who is displaying some interesting features of nervous amnesia. She has recurrent nightmares, waking dreams, and a form of hysterical paralysis which prevents her consummating her marriage. I’ve been looking for a case like this since I returned from Paris and I am very excited to have found Mrs C. (as I shall call her), whom I hope to treat over the coming weeks.

  The way she came to my attention was interesting. Her own family doctor, who is not without some experience in these matters, had heard of my work with you, and when the lady’s husband wrote asking for assistance, he referred the matter for my attention. As it happens (I think serendipity was at work here) I had an engagement the very next week to speak at a public lecture in the city where this lady resides – my subject being, naturally – The Supremacy of the Brain. It was an evening event, followed by a dinner, as these things tend to be, and I had put the following afternoon aside to examine the lady at my leisure. However, the moment my train arrived in the city, Dr L. (as I shall call the family doctor) was on the platform to meet me, saying that the husband had written that very morning to cancel the appointment. I was extremely disappointed, as you can imagine, especially as I had previously understood Mr C. to be quite distraught, and anxious to resolve the matter as quickly as possible. I asked Dr L. if he knew the reason for the change of heart, and he said that he did not, and he was very embarrassed to have advocated so strongly on their behalf and then find them unwilling.

  I suggested that perhaps the lady was anxious about a physical examination. ‘Is she of a nervous disposition?’ I asked. Whereupon he disclosed to me that her father had been subject to religious mania, and had been committed to an asylum where he ended his days. But he said that the young woman herself had always been of a modest and agreeable nature, with no signs of insanity. This intrigued me the more, and I was aggrieved not to be able to meet her. Dr L., however, said that he had spoken to the young man inviting his attendance at my lecture, hoping it might influence a change of heart.

  Therefore, after I had given my talk (conveying much I had learned from your eminent self), and was enjoying a little hospitality with some of the university’s more prominent scientific men, I was not completely surprised when I was approached by a young clergyman who introduced himself as Mr C., the very husband in question. He was most apologetic, and hoped it would be possible to reinstate our original appointment. He said his wife’s circumstances had previously changed (although the nature of the problem remained the same), but he had listened to my lecture and felt I might be of assistance. I accepted with alacrity and arranged to see the couple the very next day.

  I now précis the results of my findings:

  It would seem that Mr and Mrs C. have been married for some ten weeks. Prior to that, they had enjoyed each other’s company over a number of years – since Mrs C. was a child, in fact (she is six years younger than her husband). Once engaged, they had looked forward as any couple might to the nuptial event. They were well-matched in intelligence and social station, and their families (such as they were – Mr C. being an orphan, and Mrs C. having no effective father) were in favour of the betrothal. However, it would seem that the young man, being a clergyman of high morals and little experience, had not made even the most modest of sexual advances during their engagement. I believe, in fact, that the couple had hardly kissed. So, on the wedding night, both parties were largely ignorant of what was required of them. (Of course, my dear Charcot, we know that this is no uncommon occurrence among the respectable middle classes, especially, I may say, in England – but generally nature takes its course, a man gains confidence, and within a year we are celebrating a happy event.)

  However, it seems that ignorance alone was not the cause of the unhappiness in this case. Mr C. had read Acton and believed his bride would enjoy little pleasure from the act, but he was appalled to find that she would not engage in it at all. Her body became rigid (we have seen similar cases of paralysis in Paris, of course) and she became hysterical at the prospect of his advance. I questioned Mr C. closely and he is convinced that there was more than maidenly modesty on the part of his bride. Being a man of a sensitive nature, however, he did not press matters, but soothed his wife’s distress (which continued for up to an hour) and departed to the dressing-room where, if he consoled himself as best he could, I am not the man to blame him.

  I also established that this was no
t a case of vaginal spasm; Mr C. admitting that he had not even touched his wife’s body, let alone attempted penetration. He said that it seemed to be the sight of him in his nightshirt which caused the outbreak of hysteria, and that the young woman went so far as to shelter under the bed in her attempts to evade his advance. I think from that evidence it is safe to say that the problem lies not in the young man’s performance, but the young woman’s irrational fear.

  Now I come to the nub, and it is most interesting. As I have already mentioned, Mrs C.’s father (Mr B.) had suffered a nervous collapse a number of years before, followed by severe religious mania which eventually necessitated his committal to an asylum. He was a clergyman himself, I should say, and a brilliant one, although given perhaps to an excess of passion in both his religious and domestic life. (In fact, Mr C. was a devotee of Mr B.’s particular style of preaching and commitment to the poor of the parish. He had attached himself to him during his first term at the university, and was eager to follow in his footsteps.) The circumstances of the collapse of Mr B. are somewhat shrouded in mystery, but it seems that his natural monomania became distilled into an obsession with water and nakedness, both of which were seen by him as representing the Love of God. At the time, he alienated himself from his entire family, all except for Mrs C., then a child of eleven. It seems that she often spent time with her father during this period, but she has very poor recollection of it now, except that it was by turns pleasurable and frightening.

  There is one curious aspect to this case, which I have not yet mentioned, and that is that Mrs C., as a child, was befriended by a gentleman of some repute, who interested himself in her situation and took her about with him when the family were preoccupied with other matters. At one stage, the husband feared that this gentleman (who is so well-known that I will not even refer to him by his initials) had in some way violated his wife. I could hardly credit this, as she was a child, and the enormity of the crime would be beyond belief. Mr C. contends that it was based on an alleged ‘confession’ that Mrs C. had made to him. However, it transpires that this confession is not to be trusted. The gentleman in question is above reproach and, in any case, when confronted by Mr C., he swore most solemnly on the Bible that no such act had taken place. Interestingly, when I questioned Mrs C. myself, she denied that she ever made such an allegation, and insisted that it was her husband who had misunderstood her meaning. I suspect, therefore, that Mrs C., in spite of her charm, is an unreliable witness – as we have found many of our Hysterics to be – and I have no doubt that her fears with regard to the sexual act will prove to have stemmed from similarly disordered thoughts.

  It is clear to me that the source of her condition is her father’s unfortunate habit, while mad, of revealing himself in an undressed state (attested to by Mr C. himself). This exposed the young Mrs C. to views of the male body that may have frightened her. It is easy to see that such an experience would have rendered Mr B. a fearful figure in the eyes of a young child, and that the repetition of such a scene on her wedding night, with her husband in a state of undress, might have brought back all these unpleasant recollections.

  In discussion with Mr C., I have agreed to treat Mrs C. until her antipathy to the marital act is overcome. I am confident that if Mrs C. (with my help) exerts the power of the Brain in a positive fashion to subdue the weakness of the Body, she will tame all her irrational fears. I have arranged to put her in a hypnotic trance next week so I may imbed in her the healthful thoughts that will lead, I hope, to a diminution of her symptoms and a happy conclusion of this case. She is understandably nervous, fearful of what she might disclose while under hypnosis, and apprehensive that what (she feels) lurks in her deepest mind may come unbidden to the surface. She even thinks it may shock me. I had to explain to her that as a specialist in the manifestations of brain disorders, all kinds of situations are every day put before me: rage and jealousy, fear and hatred, excess of will and weakness of will, extreme agitation and extreme melancholia – and so on ad infinitum. The genteel fears of a lady of the English middle classes, I said, are unlikely to surprise me. But she is persistently anxious. All she wishes, she says, is to be a good wife to her husband, to love him fully and have children. In short, she wishes to be no different from any other woman. However, she made me promise that I would not, under any circumstance, tell her husband anything that she discloses. And although I think it is generally a husband’s right to know the details of his wife’s condition, I have, in order to gain her compliance, agreed to keep silent.

  What is interesting is that Mrs C. retains an adamant belief that she has in some way misbehaved herself with her father. She is most sincere in this and can recount vivid dreams about lions and walruses and crocodiles – all of whom make attempts on her virtue. The choice of animal is interesting and peculiar, but of course it is nonsense. I am only surprised that such a gentle-minded female has the capacity to conceive of such things out of her own head (perhaps, dear Charcot, you will not be surprised, knowing as you do the strange convolutions of the human mind), but I understand she has read widely on all manner of subjects, and her reading, when young, was unsupervised. I venture to suggest that, being an imaginative child, she found herself drawn into the fearful worlds of demons and monsters, hermaphrodites and anthropomorphs, and in her unformed mind has conflated what is real with what is false. I suggest that this should be a warning to all parents to keep their daughters away from questionable reading matter, including, I may say, some of the more extreme kind of so-called ‘fairy stories’.

  I reassured Mrs C., of course, saying I would make her forget everything wicked she had ever thought about her father. ‘Such thoughts, however lucid they appear to you, are not the purveyors of truth,’ I told her. ‘They are deceptive vehicles, full of art and fancy, and not to be trusted. Without them, you will be a new person and a fit companion to your husband.’

  I am confident that I will be successful, and I will keep you apprised of my progress, which I hope eventually to present (in similar anonymous form) to the important medical societies. I fear, of course, that my ideas will be too advanced for those who are still convinced that a little letting of blood will answer all distemper. It would serve me best if I could collect more similar case studies to convince them that this kind of brain-generated paralysis is not uncommon, but I fear that, owing to the delicacy of the subject, I am unlikely to find many other patients willing to put themselves into my hands. Therefore, Mrs C. is very special to me, and I intend to make the best use of her that I can. She might even enjoy, as Patient C., a modicum of celebrity in the annals of medical science.

  To that end, I remain,

  Your most sincere pupil and friend,

  Edward Franklin.

  AFTERWORD

  I was initially wary about writing another novel set in the nineteenth century, and featuring yet another famous writer. But the idea of exploring the relationship between ‘Lewis Carroll’ and Alice Liddell was tempting for a number of reasons. Carroll (or rather, the real-life Charles Dodgson) has suffered a generally bad press on account of his fondness for small girls, a predilection of which we are highly suspicious in our post-Freudian age. Having worked in Child Protection myself, and being aware of the distorted thought processes of most abusers, I was interested in how a man such as Dodgson, in spite of behaviour that would now be considered as the most blatant kind of ‘grooming’, maintained an apparently unstained reputation while he lived. I did not, however, want to focus only on Dodgson. Many writers of the epoch (for example, Ruskin and Dickens) seem to have held idealized (and sometimes highly confused) views on the desirability of ‘child-women’ and even the apparently well-balanced Rev. Francis Kilvert is not above giving voice to feelings about little girls that we would regard as very questionable today. In fact, nineteenth-century writers for children, particularly male clergymen such as Charles Kingsley, seem to have been given to exorcising their own religious and sexual demons through the apparently innocent s
tories they devised. Thus, After Such Kindness is not just the Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson tale in disguise; it is an exploration of a number of themes that interest me; and my made-up story of Daisy Baxter has ramifications that never, as far as I know, affected either the real-life Alice or those around her.

  ‌ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Apart from the fiction of Lewis Carroll, I have taken information and inspiration from a number of other sources:

  The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (ed. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, 1898)

  Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dream Child as Seen Through the Critics’ Looking Glass, 1865–1971 (ed. Robert Phillips, Penguin Books, 1972)

  The Beast and the Monk: Life of Charles Kingsley (Susan Chitty, Hodder & Stoughton, 1974)

  Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, Volume 1 (ed. Frances Eliza Kingsley, 1877)

  Secret Gardens (Humphrey Carpenter, Houghton Mifflin, 1985)

  Kilvert’s Diary, 1870–1879 (ed. William Plomer, Penguin Books, 1977)

  John Keble: A Study in Limitations (Georgina Battiscombe, Constable, 1963)

  ‌THANKS

  I would like once more to thank all at Tindal Street Press, especially my editor, Alan Mahar, whose detailed advice, suggestions and words of encouragement helped me knock this book into a much better shape. My thanks are also due to Luke Brown and Emma Hargrave for their additional comments and many pertinent queries, and to Melissa Baker, who has worked in many unseen ways to ease the book into its public life. I’m also grateful to the current members of Tindal Street Fiction Group for their feedback when the manuscript was in its early, unformed stages. And, of course, to my husband, for all the meals he cooked and all the cups of tea he brought me during the entire period when I was writing this book, especially during the late night sessions, of which there were rather too many.