The Novels of Beryl Bainbridge Volume 1

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘Am I to be sent away?’ I asked, and my voice trembled at the enormity of the question.

  He didn’t answer, being occupied in adjusting his tripod. I knew that speed was of the essence once the plate was slotted into the camera, and struggled to be patient. When he was satisfied all was ready, he tugged at my arm and positioned me at the head of the bed. ‘Put your hand on his shoulder,’ he bid.

  ‘Am I to be sent away?’ I repeated, and he replied with some irritation, ‘No, Myrtle, no. All I ask is that you hide what you know. It wouldn’t do for Mrs O’Gorman to learn of the facts.’

  ‘I don’t tell Mrs O’Gorman most things,’ I protested. ‘Not even when she whips me.’

  ‘Lower your voice,’ he begged. ‘Walls have ears.’ Then he added mysteriously, ‘Things will be different from now on … you’ll see. We won’t go on as before. Now, incline your head … a trifle more … stretch out your fingers … you’re bidding him farewell.’

  I was saying goodbye to a stranger, because the figure on the bed no longer resembled Mr Hardy. His mouth was a thin, grim line and there were hairs crinkling out from the nostrils of his mottled nose. I could smell something pungent, a combination of iodine and honeysuckle, and wrinkled my own.

  ‘Stop that,’ Master Georgie ordered. ‘Stand stock still. Don’t blink.’

  I fixed my gaze on the dead man and told myself God would strike me blind if my eyelids quivered. So intense was my concentration, it was only Master Georgie who breathed in that sun-dappled room. Outside, the birds continued to twitter. All my life, I thought, I will stand at your side; and then I did blink, for the grandness of such a notion welled up tears in my eyes.

  Plate 2. 1850

  A VEIL LIFTED

  George Hardy had called at my lodgings on his way home from the Infirmary. He’d wanted to know whether I was willing to work for him the following morning. I’d replied I was.

  ‘I suggest you be at the house at five o’clock,’ he said.

  That was just his manner of speaking. Had I taken it simply as a suggestion and arrived five minutes later he would have bitten my head off. Most people thought of him as bookish and of a saintly disposition, but I knew better. He’d said he could promise me an interesting day, which, when it was explained what he had in mind, was nothing short of the truth.

  I walked up from the town, the sky still starry, and got to the house an hour early. I was familiar enough with its domestic arrangements to know that the servants would still be in their beds, it being winter. And if it should happen that old mother O’Gorman was up and stirring, she’d have to climb the stairs to catch me. She’d grown deaf over the years and now that the dog was buried in the orchard there was no one to alert her to footsteps. Even if she did rumble me, why, I could sweet talk her round in no time, and be given a bite of breakfast into the bargain. Consequently, I was easy in myself when I stole through the dark yard, past the stables and outhouses, and lifted the latch of the kitchen door. I took my boots off before I stepped inside.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been in the house without anyone guessing. I did no harm, at least not of the lasting sort, and I didn’t thieve. That would have been foolish and against my own interests. Nor did I ever venture above the ground floor. What I did on my dawn perambulations through the parlour, the dining room and the study was in the nature of an experiment. I moved things around – and waited to see who noticed. I’d begun in a small way, changing the poker from right to left in the grate, shifting a vase from the front to the back of the mantelshelf, altering the order of the musical boxes on the piano top. Then, after a few months, I became bolder and swapped the pictures from one wall to another. It took five weeks for Dr Potter to spot that the painting of ships in the river, previously situated behind the desk in the study, now hung beside the door.

  The resulting rumpus, reported to me below stairs, was all I could have wished for. Potter repeatedly quizzed Mrs O’Gorman as to the character of the servants. She, good soul, swore they were all honest, and in their right minds besides, so he drummed up a notion about sleep-walkers and stayed up two nights on a chair in the hall, hoping to catch someone. Young Mrs Hardy, sickly again following another of her unsuccessful confinements, was kept in the dark on the matter. As for old Mrs Hardy, it didn’t affect her in the slightest, she being uninterested in where anything was, as long as her bed stayed in its usual place.

  Then, just as I was growing bored with the whole caper, Mother O’Gorman let on that Beatrice Potter was convinced there were ghosts in the house and had even asked her husband to consult a clergyman. He’d refused and called her a fool, and there’d followed a shouting match in which Mrs Hardy added her pennyworth, informing Dr Potter he was the only fool she knew of and that she cursed the day Beatrice had ever married him. Later, Beatrice told Mrs O’Gorman she was worried it was the restless spirit of her dead father that was causing the mischief – which was the reason, this particular morning, for my being so early in the house. I intended to play one last joke.

  I went first to the dining room. The curtains were still drawn and the room in darkness, but I knew it well enough to find what I wanted. Picking up the strip of Persian runner from beneath the windows, I crossed the hall to the study. The light of a gloomy dawn was already stealing though the glass, outlining the tiger’s head where it nudged the fender beside the desk. Pulling the rug out through the door, I laid the runner in its place at the hearth, and then, keeping an eye on the stairs, began to drag the tiger behind me. I froze instantly, for the creature’s claws screeched on the tiled floor and I was forced to hold it up by the paws and waltz it into the dining room.

  I had intended to arrange it under the windows, where it used to lie when Mr Hardy was alive, only I was chuckling so much at the absurdity of my dance through the hall that I dropped it in a heap and helped myself to a mouthful of port wine from the decanter on the sideboard. Though some of it slopped to my jacket, most went to my head, after which it struck me it would be more of a jape if I draped the rug over a chair and had the beast’s head pointing at the door. I drew back the curtains the better to see the effect. Beyond the windows the frosty orchard gleamed.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table when Mrs O’Gorman rose from her bed. She made a fuss of me, which she always did, and seeing I had my boots off and was rubbing at my toes to get them warm, poked the fire into a blaze and put the kettle on the coals. I played up to her and let my teeth chatter, for I knew she had drink in the cupboard, having supplied her with it myself, and bought with my own money.

  Not quite mine. Leastways, not at the start. It came from the proceeds of an investment provided by George Hardy some years past, to do with a woman whose memory he wanted stilled. He was a fool in the ways of the world, the woman in question being too addled with drink to remember anything longer than the immediate moment. I used the money to purchase a camera and the necessary chemicals, and once my enterprise was up and running I treated Mrs O’Gorman. She was an ignorant soul and I owed her nothing, but I hadn’t a family of my own and it pleased me to buy her little extras.

  Sure enough, when the kettle had steamed, she set before me a tumbler of brandy and hot water, to revive me, she said, and a slice of cold mutton to go with it. She wanted to know what Master Georgie needed me for at such a time in the morning.

  ‘We’re off to William Rimmer’s uncle in Ince Woods,’ I said. ‘We’re going to do something with an ape.’

  She didn’t hear me right away, and when I shouted louder and she understood, she screamed, ‘An ape … a wild beast?’

  ‘Dreadful wild,’ I hollered. ‘It was transported yesterday from the Zoological Gardens in West Derby to Mr Blundell’s place. Mr Hardy and Mr Rimmer are going to cut out its eyes.’

  She grew quite pale and said she’d never heard of anything so horrible. That was a lie, or forgetfulness, for hadn’t she suffered worse agonies of her own? Last Christmas, around the time young Mrs Hardy underwent her third misc
arriage, she’d told me, weeping, that she herself when little more than a child had borne an infant by an older brother who’d buried it alive in a turf bog.

  It took an age to get all the photographic apparatus loaded. Twice, we were half-way down the lane before George remembered something else that couldn’t be left behind. We started off with myself at the reins of the carriage and he ahead on horseback, but for no good reason he changed his mind and took back the horse and climbed up with me: there wasn’t room inside.

  ‘Blazes,’ he said, once we were on our way. ‘It’s infuriating the things one has to remember.’

  ‘It is indeed,’ I replied crisply, and bent my head against the wind.

  I didn’t wholeheartedly despise George Hardy, even though I considered him a hypocrite. He’d done me no harm, far from it, and I acknowledged his good qualities, including not being close-fisted. I dare say he could afford it, but often he treated broken bones and abscesses and the like, knowing full well his patients didn’t have a button to their names. Hadn’t he mended my mouth, damaged from my fire-eating days!

  At the beginning, when chance had hurled us together, he’d offered me full-time employment, of a menial sort, in his household – blacking boots, seeing to the horses, running errands – but I told him straight I wasn’t cut out to act the servant, not having the temperament to take orders. Some people find it comfortable to go through life on their knees, and good luck to them, but I prefer to keep my spine in the position nature intended. Besides, I already had my own means of keeping body and soul together, and after he’d learned me the tricks of the camera I earned a respectable living from the taking of shilling portraits.

  I should have been grateful, but I wasn’t, not entirely. What riled me was his lack of ease in my company, his keeping me at a distance, which couldn’t be put down to differences of birth or education, for in his dealings with inferiors at the hospital his manner contained not the slightest degree of condescension or stiffness. With me, he held off. On the occasions when he addressed me directly I grew to fancy even his voice came out muffled, as though he spoke from within a nailed-up box. Since our first meeting he’d never once referred to that rainy afternoon when we’d carried a dead man across a field, but the recollection of it stood between us all the same, and when he looked at me I often thought he saw his father’s hat jammed upon my head.

  We took the Regent Road that ran beside the docks, the wind carrying the sickly sweet odour of damp grain, the air raucous with the screech of foraging gulls. We were forced to go at no more than a walk through the crush of vehicles juddering in either direction. Near the Brunswick Tavern a shipment of cattle, just then unloaded from Ireland and headed for the abattoir, came slithering and jostling across our path. George roared out, ‘Whoa,’ the command swooping out like a war-whoop, though it was me that gripped the reins. We were delayed for a quarter of an hour or more. He grew tetchy, fearful of missing his appointment with the ape, and vowed he’d never forgive William Rimmer if he commenced the business without him.

  ‘What part am I to play?’ I enquired.

  ‘It will be your job to hold the animal down,’ he answered.

  I digested this with some unease. It was one thing to throw a tiger rug over a chair, quite another to subdue a wild beast.

  ‘And it’s then that you’ll cut out its eyes?’

  ‘Not out,’ he cried. ‘We shall merely remove its cataracts.’

  I hadn’t a notion of what these might be, and couldn’t ask, for now he was on his feet, fairly jigging with impatience, rocking the two-wheeler alarmingly, kicking out at the nearest cow and shouting at the drover to make haste.

  ‘Self-control is a great asset,’ I observed, at which he shot me a look of fury, and sat down.

  At Bank Hall, the dockyards coming to an end and the tide well out, we drove on to the shore, rolling beside the ink black waves, the sand hard as oak after the night frost. At a spanking pace we passed Miller’s Castle, now empty, its forecourt silted up with mud, its bathing cubicles toppling into the mud pools.

  ‘What news of Myrtle?’ I asked, bellowing against the sea wind. Myrtle had been sent away to a boarding school in Southport. I’d seen her but once in two years, the time she’d come home for the Michaelmas holidays. She’d said she was glad the stain had gone from my lip.

  ‘Miss Myrtle,’ George corrected.

  ‘Miss Myrtle indeed,’ I said. ‘I never doubted it.’

  ‘She’s on her way to becoming a lady,’ he conceded.

  ‘Does she take to it?’

  ‘She blooms,’ he replied. ‘And excels in French.’

  I had a photograph of Myrtle, though it was only me who would have known it. It had been taken in old Mr Hardy’s bedroom and thrown aside on account of coming out black. I’d made pin holes in her eyes and scratched lines where her hair might have been, and in time I believed I saw her plain, though possibly she was in my head and it was my mind that printed her likeness.

  At Little Crosby we left the shore, taking the cinder path through the sand dunes, until we reached the inland road and trotted a silent mile between potato fields. I had been brought up hereabouts, my mother being a drudge to a farming family in the hamlet of Sefton.

  Crossing over the little humpbacked bridge, the rushes impaled in the frozen stream, we entered the leafless woods to a clamour of rooks. At the noise of our approach the lodge keeper hobbled out to see to the gates. He was so slow and crippled in his walk that George ordered me down to help him. No sooner had I done so and the great iron gates had swung inwards, than the carriage bowled up the drive, leaving me to follow on foot. I half thought of turning back, out of spite, but curiosity got the better of me.

  I’d travelled this route once before, sent by my mother when she lay dying, only that time it was high spring. I was seven years old and there were pretty patches of heaven, lupin blue, dancing above the budding trees. Now, the path stretched dark and moody as a photograph, the winter branches stark against a cold white sky.

  Blundell Hall was a gloomy edifice, low built of sandstone and timber. On either side of the porch crouched a stone lion with a man’s head between its shoulders and a mocking smile to its mouth. I went round to the back and was told by a stable boy, just then unloosing the horse from the carriage shafts, that the gentlemen were in the glass-house beyond the kitchen garden and I was to fetch the photographic apparatus along with me. When he saw the collection of bottles and trays that required shifting, he very civilly went off and brought back a wheelbarrow.

  The glass-house was fully forty foot in length and no longer put to its original purpose, the long trestle tables being empty of pots and supporting instead a quantity of statues, all without a stitch on them and hung about with cobwebs. Mr Blundell was a collector of such things, and had been in the newspapers for it the year Prince Albert came to lay the foundation stone of the Sailors’ Home.

  The ape took me by surprise. I had expected it to be three times larger than myself and to find it wildly prowling its cage, but it was no bigger than a small man and sat inert against the bars, slumped amid a mess of sawdust and yellowing cabbage leaves. Fear left me; I even poked at it with my finger. Its skin was patchy, its eyes dull as mud. It stank of old age.

  William Rimmer and George were busy sorting their instruments. Laid out alongside the scissors and punch-forceps sat a heap of cotton pads, a wire contraption with a coiled spring, an India-rubber bag with a length of tube looped into a metal basin, and a bottle of colourless liquid. The ape was looking past the table, in the direction of a marble statue with a severed leg. The statue was male, with a cock folded like a rose-bud.

  ‘Ho, ho,’ I cried. ‘A Judy wouldn’t find him of much use, would she? Even the monkey thinks so.’

  ‘The ape is all but blind,’ William Rimmer said.

  George didn’t say a word, which made it worse. I was angry with myself for appearing loutish.

  A quarter of an hour later the latch of the
cage was lifted and I stepped inside holding a pad saturated with ether. I took care to keep it at arm’s length, being aware of its giddy properties. Ether was a component of the collodion solution painted on photographic plates, but mostly I used a commercial preparation from which the ether had evaporated while this was fresh from the bottle; already my eyes were smarting. The ape shuffled sideways but otherwise showed no sign of aggression. From behind, I clapped the pad over its muzzle. It gave an almighty start and rose off its shanks, flailing its arms and jerking its head backwards, catching me a crack on the forehead that nearly had me on the floor. ‘Hang on, man,’ cried William Rimmer, ‘keep the pad in place,’ and I did hang on, from fear of being trampled, though now I was damn near choking and mucus dripped from my nostrils. Like a man drowning, I fought against drawing breath, and just as I felt I could hold on no longer the beast shook me away, uttered a ghastly shriek, and scrabbling at its throat, fell down insensible. Piss steamed through the sawdust and splattered between the bars.

  The three of us carried the patient to the table, securing its chest and forearms with straps. I was astonished at how closely the splayed limbs resembled those of a human, and one capable of arousing pity. Its head lolled sideways, exposing a patch of neck, hairless and wrinkled as worn leather. When the wire contraption was fixed to its skull and the spring prised up the lids of its eyes, I made to turn away, but Rimmer shouted, ‘Stay where you are, damn you … put the bag over its nostrils,’ at which George added, ‘Please, Pompey,’ and I liked him for it. It wasn’t often he addressed me by name.

  I scarcely saw what followed, for my eyes watered continually. I had the nous not to rub at them with my contaminated fingers, even though I was feeling uncommonly light in the head. The pulse in my neck thumped like a drum and I heard myself sniggering.

  George wielded the scissors and Rimmer the forceps. They’d both wound strips of sheeting over the lower halves of their faces, which struck me as comical – likewise their conversation.