Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

  With a groan like underground thunder Baxter had left the chair, pressed his hands to his stomach and bent over them, writhing epileptically. I was surprised he did not fall, but not by his distress. The solicitor had mixed facts and lies so cleverly that for a moment even I believed him. But Bella sprang to Baxter’s side, put an arm round his waist and soothed him upright again. This brought me to my senses. If the visitors had never before heard the cold fury of a thoroughly rational Scot, they heard it now.

  “Mr. Baxter would be a stone statue if he felt no pain,” I told them. “You have used this wise, kind, self-sacrificing man’s hospitality to call him a freak and a liar. In the hearing of the patient whose life he saved you have accused him of viciously assaulting her. You know nothing of the terrible crack which rings her cranium—had he not tended her like a mother and educated her like a father it would have caused worse than total amnesia: she would be an imbecile. His tour with her was no amorous excursion, but the best way of reintroducing her to a world she had forgotten. He did not connive at her elopement with Wedderburn—he tried to dissuade her, begged me to dissuade her, and when we both failed he gave her means to return to us when she tired of the escapade. No roué discarding a mistress would have done that! You have also had the insolence to call me—his best friend! Archibald McCandless M.D. of Glasgow Royal Infirmary!—you have dared to call me a low-born ruffian and weak-minded parasite. No wonder that vagal nerve discharge has induced reverse peristalsis and that excess pancreatic juice has irritated the oesophagus causing severe heartburn! And you say his pain at such vilification is a sign of GUILT!!!??? Think black black shame of yourselves, gentlemen. You have almost persuaded me that you are not gentlemen at all.”

  “Thank you, McCandless,” murmured Baxter.

  He was sitting now in the arm-chair opposite Mr. Hattersley, Bella standing behind with her hands resting protectively on his shoulders. She watched him with an expression I later saw during our Italian honeymoon on the face of a Botticelli Madonna. Baxter now spoke to the lawyer as if nothing had happened.

  “So you think the lady behind me is the same person as the General’s wife.”

  “I know they are.”

  “I will prove you wrong, and do so with testimonies from five independent witnesses, each a scientist of international fame. Lady Victoria Blessington was a hysteric; so childishly dependent on a husband who found her unbearable that her doctor’s visits were the happiest times of her week; so full of self-loathing that she gladly stupefied her mind with sedatives and yearned for her body to be surgically mutilated. Am I correct?”

  “Yes, she gave the General hell,” grumbled old Mr. Hattersley, “but you might have mentioned that in her worst fits she still acted like a perfect lady.”

  “She relieved her poor mind with sedatives,” said the doctor, “and wished to be surgically cured. Apart from that your portrait of the unhappy lady is all too true.”

  “Yes, you know me wife well, Baxter,” sneered the General.

  “I never met your wife, Sir Aubrey. The drowned woman who came to consciousness here is someone else. Tell the company, Dr. Prickett, who Charcot of Paris, Golgi of Pavia, Kraepelin of Würzburg, Breuer of Vienna and Korsakoff of Moscow are.”

  “They are alienists—specialists in diseases of the mind and nerves. I regard Charcot as a charlatan, but of course on the continent even he is highly regarded.”

  “On our world tour we visited them. Each examined the woman I call Bella Baxter and reported on her condition. These reports—signed and witnessed with English translations attached—lie on the table. Their terminology differs because they view the human mind from different standpoints, and Kraepelin and Korsakoff share Dr. Prickett’s view of Charcot. But all are unanimous about Bella Baxter—she is sane, strong and cheerful, with a vigorously independent attitude to life, even though amnesia (caused by injury to her skull and the loss of an unborn child) has left her with no memories preceding her arrival here. Apart from that her balance, sensory discrimination, recollective and intuitive and logical powers are exceptionally keen. Charcot daringly suggests the amnesia has enlarged her intelligence by making her relearn things when old enough to think about them, which people who depend on childhood training hardly ever do. They agree that she shows no signs of mania, hysteria, phobia, dementia, melancholia, neurasthenia, aphasia, catatonia, algolagnia, necrophilia, coprophilia, folie de grandeur, nostalgie de la boue, lycanthropy, fetishism, Narcissism, Onanism, irrational belligerence, unhealthy reticence and is not obsessively Sapphic. They say her only obsessive trait is linguistic. These reports are based on tests carried out in the winter of 1880–81, when she was learning to read and had an enthusiasm for synonyms, assonance and alliteration which sometimes verged on echolalia. Kraepelin said this was an instinctive compensation for her poverty of sensory reminiscence. Charcot said it might make her a poet; Breuer that the obsession would diminish as she gained more memories. It has done so. Her speech is no longer eccentric. Charcot said she was unusually free of the insane prejudices which characterize her compatriots, which of course was an expression of national prejudice, but his final words sum up the verdict of the rest: Bella Baxter’s most striking abnormality is her lack of it. Such a woman cannot be General Blessington’s former wife. Please examine these proofs, Dr. Prickett, or take them away and verify them at your leisure.”

  “Don’t waste your time, Prickett,” said the General’s solicitor. “They are irrelevant. They are quibbles.”

  “Explain, please,” said Baxter patiently.

  “I will, very easily. Suppose that a sickly unpleasant fellow escapes from London after stealing my cash. Suppose that three years later the police arrest him in Glasgow, and are about to lock him up when a doctor cries, ‘Stop! I can prove this man is pleasanter and healthier since he stole your money, and has forgotten all about it.’ The police would think that a quibble. Lady Blessington’s erotomania made her a very miserable wife to the General, but neither he nor the laws of the land will allow her to commit bigamy and live happily ever after in a Scotch ménage à trois, simply because her happiness is sworn to by a horde of foreign brain doctors.”

  A noise like a quietly cackling hen was heard—the General was amused. Baxter sighed.

  Sighed and said, “Sir Aubrey. Mr. Hattersley. This woman is studying to do useful work in the kindly art of medicine. Why drag her backward into a marriage which made herself and her husband miserable? If McCandless is my parasite, Harker and Prickett and Grimes are yours. Nobody in this room wants a scandal. The only person outside it who knows the truth, or some of it, is a certified lunatic. All I have said has been to persuade you it is honourable and possible to let this woman freely choose whether she returns to England with you or stays in Scotland with us—honourable and possible.”

  “Not possible,” said the General heavily. “The gossip about me wife’s disappearance has been increasin, not diminishin over the years. Half the London clubs think I got rid of me domestic problem like I got rid of the mutinous Indians and Ashanti. The damnable thing is, this time they disapprove. The Prince of Wales cut me dead last week and the cad owes me several thou. Since I left the battlefields and went into Parliament the papers have started forgettin I was once the nation’s darlin. A radical rag has started droppin hints, and unless I clap a libel writ on it the popular dailies will start callin me Bluebeard Blessington too. That arch-hypocrite Gladstone has suggested I clear me name by offerin a large reward for news of me wife’s whereabouts, dead or alive. Has everyone here forgotten that a Scotch parson will soon sit down to Christmas dinner and blab to his family and friends about a weddin service I interrupted? No, Victoria. If I find this Baxter has taught you to behave sensibly I will pay him well for his trouble, but you must return south, whether you remember me or not.”

  “And think what you will have when you get home with him, Vicky!” cried old Mr. Hattersley growing very excited. “Sir Aubrey is three-quarters dead already and will n
ot last more than another four years. That will give you time to squeeze at least one son out of him, then until the lad comes of age you can live how you like wherever you like: in the London town house or the estate in Loamshire or the other estate in Ireland! Think of those grand places, Vicky, all for you and me. Me! The grand-dad of a baronet! You owe me that, Vicky, because I gave you life. So be a sensible donkey. Honour and riches are the carrot heap ahead of you, a madhouse is the boot kicking you toward it. Yes, we can put you into an asylum for the insane! Who will care what a lot of foreign professors said two years ago when Dr. Prickett and an English specialist with a knighthood certify you are queer in the head? For you are queer Vicky, and the fact that you cannot remember your own dad proves it. Riches or a madhouse! Choose between em.”

  “Or divorce Sir Aubrey,” said Baxter. “If he insists on taking a purely legal view of his marriage, so can you.”

  We stared at him.

  Even the General opened his eyes and watched for a moment as Baxter returned to his seat at the table and rearranged the papers so that a different set lay on top. He glanced at the upper page and said, “On the 16th of February 1880 Lady Blessington, then in an advanced state of pregnancy, was visited by another heavily pregnant woman, a former kitchen-maid in Porchester Terrace who said she was Sir Aubrey’s discarded mistress and begged for money. Sir Aubrey—”

  “Take care sir!” barked the General but Baxter spoke louder: “Sir Aubrey broke in on them, flung the visitor into the street and locked his wife in a coal-cellar. Next morning Lady Blessington had disappeared.”

  “Mr. Baxter,” said the solicitor swiftly, “you now pretend to know astonishing things about the past of a lady of whom, until this moment, you pretended to know nothing. If these allegations are not backed by eye-witnesses who will swear to their truth in a court of law—witnesses who will not collapse under the stress of skilful cross-examining—you will pay dearly for that slander.”

  “My information comes from Sergeant Cuff,” said Baxter, “who you perhaps know of, Mr. Grimes?”

  “Late of Scotland Yard?”

  “Yes.”

  “A good man. Asks big money but gets results. Likes sniffin around the skirts of the aristocracy. Yooimploydim?”

  “I employed him last month to find all he could about Lady Blessington, after a letter from Wedderburn told me Bella Baxter was a reincarnation of Victoria Blessington. Cuff’s report here names many who will testify against the General in court, most of them servants who resigned or were dismissed from his service soon after Lady Blessington disappeared.”

  “No connection,” said the General. “English servants are the worst in the world and none last more than two months with me. People say I dealt too savagely with the savage races, but the only man I can entirely trust is me Indian manservant. Odd thing, that.”

  “Servants who testify against their former employers,” said the solicitor, “have very little credit in an English court of law.”

  “These will be believed,” said Baxter. “Please, Mr. Harker, take this copy of the report back to your hotel and discuss it privately with the General. Go now, at once. Too many wounding things have been said here today. Tomorrow I will visit you in the St. Enoch’s Hotel and hear what you decide to do.”

  “No God,” said Bella in a firm, gloomy voice, “my past has grown too interesting. I want all the details now.”

  “Tell her, Baxter,” said the General, yawning. “Play your word game to the end. It will change nothing.”

  Baxter sighed, shrugged and started summarizing the report while the solicitor, on a chair near the window, studied the copy he had been given. Baxter spoke straight to the General, however; not to Bella. Had he done so he would have been disturbed by the change the story made to her face and figure.

  He said, “Dolly Perkins, a girl of sixteen, was your parlour-maid until the day before your wedding, Sir Aubrey, when you hired an apartment for her in a boarding-house near Seven Dials. You did not give your name to the landlady, Mrs. Gladys Moon, but she recognized you from your pictures in the Illustrated London News. She says you visited Miss Perkins regularly for two hours every Tuesday afternoon, and also on Friday afternoons when you paid the rent. This went on for four months, then one Friday while paying Mrs. Moon you told her, ‘This is the last time I’m doing this, you won’t see me again. Dolly Perkins is no use to anyone now. If you do not get rid of her she will give your house a bad name.’ Mrs. Moon spoke to Miss Perkins who admitted she was penniless and pregnant. So she was told to leave.”

  “She was not pregnant by me,” said the General coldly, “because me revels with Dolly never involved impregnation. Nobody will believe that, of course, so the greedy bitch tried to blackmail me into givin her money to give birth to the bastard, sayin she would tell me wife I had sired it if I refused. So I told the slut to go to hell and left her without a shillin.”

  “You queer sad old General,” said Bella mournfully, “did you honestly think your wife a maniac because she wanted warmed by you more than an hour a week, while you regularly hugged a young girl for four?”

  “I never hugged Dolly Perkins,” said the General through tightly clenched teeth. “For God’s sake tell her about MEN, Prickett. She has learned nothin about em in this place.”

  “I believe Sir Aubrey wiwiwishes me to say,” said his doctor faintly, “that the strong men who lead and defend the BuBuBritish people must cucultivate their strength by satisfying the animal part of their natures by rererevelling with sluts, while maintaining the pupupurity of the mumumarriage bed and sanctity of the home where their sons and daughters are engendered. And that is why pupupupoor pupoor pupoor—” (here the General’s doctor pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed his face) “—that is why poor Dolly had to be treated in that tutututerrible way.”

  “No need to blub about it, Prickett,” murmured the General placidly. “You explained that very well. Now finish your story, Mr. Baxter, while rememberin I have done nothin I am ashamed of, indoors or out of it.”

  Baxter finished the story.

  “On the 16th of February 1880 Dolly Perkins entered 19 Porchester Terrace by the servants’ entrance. She was exhausted, ragged, penniless and hungry. The cook, Mrs. Blount, gave her a cup of tea, something to eat and a chair to rest in, then went on with her work. Shortly after she saw the chair was empty. Dolly Perkins had crept upstairs to the drawing-room, confronted Lady Blessington and told her story—”

  “Mostly lies,” said the General.

  “—and begged for help. Lady Blessington was about to give her money when Sir Aubrey entered, called in his footmen who thrust Dolly Perkins out into the street, and with the help of his manservant dragged his wife upstairs—”

  “Carried her upstairs. She had fainted,” said the General.

  “Then she soon recovered. You locked her in her bedroom but she flung up the window and started throwing things down to Dolly in the street outside: first a purse and jewellery then every small item of value in reach. By now, though it was a snowy day, a crowd of the poorer sort had gathered. I imagine—”

  “What you imagine is not evidence,” said the solicitor without looking up from the copy of the report he was reading.

  “—her violent actions before an appreciative audience must have filled Lady Blessington with a kind of ecstasy. No wonder. They were probably the first decisive things she had ever done. She now flung out dressing-table sets, shoes, hats, gloves, stockings, corsets, dresses, pillows, bedding, fire-irons, clocks, mirrors, crystal and Chinese vases which smashed of course—”

  “And a small oil portrait by Ingres of me mother as a girl,” said the General drily. “A cab wheel ran over that one.”

  “At first Sir Aubrey thought the uproar in the street was caused solely by Dolly Perkins and a mob of her plebeian friends. When at last he learned the truth and rushed into the bedroom Lady Blessington was flinging out chairs and light tables. She was dragged down to the basement by his footm
en and manservant—”

  “Carried!” said the General firmly. “She was in a delicate condition, even if she had turned into a ravin lunatic. The basement was the only part of the house with barred windows.”

  “Yet you locked her in a windowless coal-cellar.”

  “Yes. I suddenly realized every damned room down there except the coal-cellar had keys I did not know about, and I did not trust the servants. Victoria had always been too friendly with em and I feared they would help her escape. Which happened. It took me three hours to collect Prickett and another doctor who would certify her, and find an insane asylum which would accept a pregnant lunatic, and was prepared to send along a padded ambulance with three stout nurses to manage her transport. When I got back she had flown the coop.”

  “Your former footman, Tim Blatchford, admits to smashing the cellar lock with a poker,” said the solicitor, consulting the last page of the report Baxter had given him. “Your former cook, Mrs. Blount, says ‘We all begged him to do it. The poor lady’s sobs and frantic cries for help was heard all over. We feared she had gone into labour, and her terrible confinement might cause the deaths of two.’ However, Lady Victoria emerged intact. Your former housekeeper, Mrs. Munnery, gave her clothing recovered from the street (it was cleaner than the coal-stained garments) and also the train fare to visit her father in Manchester.”