Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

  I ran.

  As I entered the room I heard a mixture of thudding, buzzing and twanging in which I recognized the rhythm of a hugely amplified heart-beat. It came from Baxter who sat at the table, gripping the edge of it so tightly that the terrible vibration blurring the outlines of his face was not communicated to the arms.

  “Quick! Do! Subcute!” he called in a blurred voice, writhing his head in a beckon. I saw a filled hypodermic syringe on a plate before him, a shirtsleeve rolled back from his forearm. I seized the syringe, gripped a fold of skin between thumb and forefinger and gave him a subcutaneous injection. A moment later the vibration ceased and the dreadful sound grew quieter. He sighed, mopped his face with a handkerchief, smiled and said, “Thank you, McCandless. I am glad you came. I am about to die.”

  I sat down and wept uncontrollably, for I could not pretend to misunderstand. He smiled even more at that and patted my shoulder saying, “Thank you again, McCandless, those tears console me. They mean I have been good for you.”

  “Can you not live longer?”

  “Not without pain and indignity. Sir Colin told me from my earliest youth that my life depended on keeping a continuously even temper—strong feelings would lethally emphasize incompatibilities in my internal organs. When Bella told me she had engaged to marry you the agony damaged my respiration. On the night she returned from Paris she asked a frightening question from which my neural network never recovered. Six weeks later Blessington’s solicitor so convulsed me with anger that my alimentary canal was damaged beyond repair. You perhaps notice no great alteration to my apparent bulk, but I am starving to death, McCandless, and only derivatives of opium and cocaine have let me enjoy your evening visits with an appearance of ease. I had hoped to see April out with you, but when we separated last night I knew I had no time left. It is weak of me to want company in my last minutes but . . . I am weak!”

  “I must fetch Bella,” I cried, jumping up.

  “No, Archie! I love Bella too much. If she begged me to live longer I could not refuse, and her last sight of me would be of an uncontrollably filthy, paralytic idiot. I will leave life while I can say Good-bye with dignity. But too much dignity is pompous. Let us share a deoch an doruis, a glass of my father’s port together. I seem to remember two years ago locking up a decanter you had only half emptied. Wine is supposed to improve with keeping. Here is the key. You know the cupboard.”

  There was a cheerful zest in his speech which almost made me smile; yet I trembled as I brought out the ancient decanter and two delicate stemmed glasses. I dusted the glasses clean with my breast-pocket handkerchief, half filled them and we clinked them. He sniffed his curiously then said, “My will leaves all to Bella and you. Have children and teach them good behaviour and honest work by example. Never be violent with them, and never preach. Make sure Mrs. Dinwiddie and the other servants live comfortably here when they can no longer work, and be kind to my dogs. Finally—” (here he emptied the glass in one quick swallow) “—that is how wine tastes.”

  He put the glass down, gripped his gigantic knees with his gigantic fists, threw back his head and laughed. I had not heard him laugh before. The sound started small and swelled up huge, so huge that I flattened my hands over my ears, though the throbs and twangs of his heart-beat swelled loud too until it and the laughter stopped in a sudden sharp snap. Complete silence. He swayed neither forward nor back, but sat perfectly rigid.

  A moment later I stepped over and, trying hard not to peer into the huge tooth-edged cavity which gaped so horribly at the ceiling, discovered his neck was broken and that rigor mortis had instantly ensued. Rather than break his joints in order to lay him out flat I ordered a cubical coffin29 four and a half feet wide, with a shelf inside on which he was placed, sitting. He sits like that to the present day, under the floor of the mausoleum Sir Colin acquired in the Necropolis overlooking Glasgow Cathedral and Royal Infirmary. In due course I and my wife (who was very upset by his death) will join him there, and so can all our children and grandchildren if they make room for themselves by getting cremated.

  This record of our early struggles is dedicated to my wife, though I dare not show it to her since it tells of things neither she nor medical science dare yet believe. But scientific progress accelerates from year to year. In a short time the discovery may be made which Sir Colin Baxter communicated only to his son, and which will prove the factual ground of all I have written here.

  FINIS

  A letter from

  Victoria McCandless M.D.

  to her eldest surviving descendant

  in 1974

  correcting what she claims are errors

  in

  EPISODES FROM

  the EARLY LIFE

  of a

  SCOTTISH PUBLIC

  HEALTH OFFICER

  by

  her late husband

  Archibald McCandless M.D.

  b.1857 – d.1911

  Dear Grand- or Great-Grandchild,

  By 1974 my three strong, sprouting lads will be dead or senile, so all other surviving members of the McCandless dynasty will have two grandfathers or four great-grandfathers, and will easily laugh at the aberration of one. I cannot laugh at this book. I shudder at it and thank the Life Force that my late husband had just this single copy printed and bound. I have burned every scrap I could find of the original manuscript and would have burned this too, as he suggests in his verse on the fly-leaf; but alas! it is almost the only evidence left that the poor fool existed. He also paid a small fortune for it—enough to feed, clothe and educate twelve orphans for a year. The illustrations must have doubled the printing costs. The portrait of me is copied from one in an illustrated newspaper of 1896, and strikes me as a good likeness. If you ignore the Gainsborough hat and pretentious nickname it shows I am a plain, sensible woman, not the naïve Lucrezia Borgia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci described in the text. So I post the book to posterity. I do not care what posterity thinks of it, as long as nobody now living connects it with ME.

  Having reread that first paragraph I notice it suggests my second husband was as repulsive as the first. Untrue. I married Archibald McCandless because he was convenient, and as the years slipped by I came to like and rely upon the man. He was not much use to anyone else. He calls his book “Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer”—he was a Glasgow municipal health officer for exactly eleven months, resigning from the job as soon as he became chairman of the Glasgow Civic Improvement Trust. Our investments, not his brilliant mind, got him that position. It required him to preside at certain meetings, but he had most of the week to himself. Not all this free time was wasted. He helped Mrs. Dinwiddie (my faithful housekeeper) with the early nurture of our children, taking them for walks, telling them stories, crawling about the floor with them, helping them build fantastical cities out of bricks and cardboard, and draw up fantastical maps and histories of invented continents. These tales and games gave them a rich variety of ideas and information. His scientific bent ensured that the queerest monsters had impeccable Darwinian-evolutionary pedigrees; the weirdest machines never contradicted the laws of thermo-dynamics. The education he gave them was very like the playful one I had been given by Godwin Baxter, and used many of the same toys, books and instruments. We still kept a small zoo in the back-garden, though the last of Godwin’s dogs died five years after he did.

  There is an old Scots proverb: “The shoemaker’s bairns are aye the worst shod.” It is a fact that I, the fearless advocate of homely cuddling and playful teaching, was kept out of the house by my clinical work for most of the week, while other responsibilities took me out of Glasgow for part of every year. My husband practised what I preached. I sometimes feared he was making early childhood too attractive for the lads so that their adult lives (like those of my first husband, and Bismarck, and Napoleon, and more commonplace criminals) would become bad boyish day dreams made real. I need not have feared. When they joined the society of other b
oys in Glasgow High School (founded in the twelfth century) they grew ashamed of their idle, dreamy fantastical father and emulated their practical, busy-in-the-world mother. The eldest, Baxter McCandless, is our mathematician. He took an honours degree last year and now works in London for the Department of Imperial Statistics. Godwin, our engineer, moves so briskly between Gilmorehill and the Andersonian Institute that I never know where he is studying. He says steam and oil-fired engines are dangerous anachronisms, that we must prepare to draw energy electrically from the highland lochs and cataracts while gradually abandoning coal-mines and oil-wells whose wastes poison the air and soil the lungs. The youngest, Archibald, is in his last year at school and has two obsessions. One is painting garish water-colour landscapes, the other is commanding the Glasgow High School Army Cadet Corp. I hate military training, of course. The sight of young men marching in regular rows, each imitating the stiff movements of a clockwork doll while their movements are controlled by a single screaming sergeant—that sight sickens me even more than the sight of young women in a music-hall chorus-row, kicking up their heels in unison. However, I recognize that young Archie’s love of uniformed comrades balances his Bohemian individualism. When these sides of his nature at last harmonize he too may become a fine public servant—perhaps the best of them.

  In writing about my boys I have forgotten their father: always an easy thing to do in his later years. He spent more and more time in his study, scribbling books printed at his own expense since no publisher would pay for them.30 Every second year I would come down to breakfast and find another blue-black volume beside my plate, with a marker in the dedication page which always bore the message TO SHE WHO MAKES MY LIFE WORTH LIVING. As I leafed through it, trying to show interest I could not possibly feel, he would watch my face with a maddening expression of timid hope and humorous resignation: an expression which made the soul of me want to grip him and shake him into useful activity. He would have been a decent general practitioner had he not used Baxter’s money to buy the idleness he mistook for freedom. Having fulfilled his mother’s ambition by joining the middle class he had no wish to reform it from inside, no wish to help the labouring class reform us (and themselves) from outside. But example is the best reproof I know. I would lay the book down, walk round the table, kiss him kindly, thank him and go off to work at my clinic.

  In 1908 we found he had disseminated sclerosis (he diagnosed it himself) so it became easy to be kind. He relaxed into the disease, shifting his bed into the study and ordering a special table which let him write without getting up. He could easily have lived longer had he exercised, but he knew that and I would not bully him. I kept the marriage sweet by having a game of draughts, a light supper and a chat with him most nights before retiring. Increasingly our talk recalled our earlier days with Godwin Baxter. I also saw he was engaged on another book.

  “Do you want to know about it?” he asked one night, with a kind of mischievous vivacity which he clearly attributed to creative inspiration and I to a mild fever caused by disease.

  “Tell me if you want to,” I said, smiling.

  “Ah, but this time I want not to. I want you to read it with astonishment after I am gone. Promise to read it through at least once. Promise not to bury it in my coffin.”

  I promised.

  The bound volume at last arrived from the printers and gave him pleasure for many weeks. He slept with it under his pillow. He would lie on the sofa while the maid changed his sheets, turning pages forward or backward and chuckling over them. Later, as he weakened, a bitter impatience was what he mainly felt, and at the end he wanted nothing but the pressure of my hand on his brow, for he whimpered when I removed it. I stayed beside him though I could have done more good at other bed-sides. Never mind. I may want company during my own last days, so am glad I did not refuse it to him.

  I read the book three years ago soon after the funeral and it made me unhappy for a fortnight. I am still unhappy when I remember it. To explain why I must tell my own life story as simply as possible.

  The first home I remember was two small rooms and a kitchen where five of us lived, sometimes six when my father stayed with us. Our only water supply was a shared tap in a yard at the back. Father could have afforded a house with better sanitation. He was chief foreman (or works manager, as we call such nowadays) in a nearby Manchester foundry, and saving money was his major passion. He seldom gave my mother enough to buy proper food.

  “I cannot give us a proper start in life before I control a good patent,” he told us, “and that needs all the money I can get.”

  He treated his wife and children like he treated the workmen: as potential enemies who must be kept poor by violence or the threat of it. He thought any remark which did not obviously flatter him was rebellion. When five years old I once watched him stand before the looking-glass in our dank little kitchen, adjusting his dark-green cravat and waistcoat with green velvet facings, for he spent money on his appearance though not on ours, and in a coarse way was something of a dandy. Impressed by the contrast between the colour of the clothes and his dark-red face I said, “You are a poppy, Dad.”

  I remember no more until I awoke in bed. He had clubbed me down with his fist, my head had struck the brick-cobbled floor, I had been bleeding and unconscious for several hours. I doubt if my mother had dared call a doctor. I still have an irregular three-inch-long scar above my left ear under the hair. It follows an abnormal widening of the squamosal suture, but apart from that period of unconsciousness it has never affected my memory. This is the crack my late husband describes as “mysteriously regular” and “ringing the entire skull under the hair line”.

  Of my mother I have only this to say: she was unselfish and hard-working, and taught me how useless these virtues are when separated from courage and intelligence. She felt positively wicked when not washing or darning clothes, scrubbing floors, beating carpets or making a gallon of soup out of scraps a butcher could not sell for cat-food. I do not know if she was able to read, but if she ever saw me with a book it was snatched away because “Girls need no excuses for idleness.” I remember most clearly the misery of washing our bodies and clothes in cold water during the winter months, when we had no coal to heat it and hardly any soap. Life for Mother and me was mainly a struggle to keep the family and home clean, yet we never felt clean before my brothers died and Father (as if he had been waiting for that) shifted us into a three-storey house with a garden all round it, saying “I can afford this now.”

  I think he had afforded it for at least a year.31 It was richly furnished, with ten or twelve servants who took their orders from a fine-looking lady with yellow hair and a brighter dress than worn by housekeepers I met in later years. She was kind to us.

  “Here is your private parlour,” she said, showing us into a room with strongly patterned wallpaper and curtains, thickly carpeted floor, heavily upholstered furniture, the biggest fire I had ever seen and a bright brass scuttle of coal in the hearth.

  “Here are biscuits, cake, sherry, port wine and spirits,” she said, opening the door of a huge sideboard, “also a soda-water gazogene which is recharged by the handy-man in an outhouse. If you ever want anything pull that bell-rope twice and a maid will call for orders. What would you like just now? Will I send up tea?”

  “What does HE want?” whispered Mother, tilting her head toward Father who stood on the hearth-rug smoking a cigar.

  “Blaydon, your wife wants to know if you want tea!” said the lady, and we realized she was not afraid of Father.

  “Not now, Mabel,” he replied, yawning. “Give me a brandy. Give Mrs. Hattersley and young Vicky a sherry then go downstairs. I’ll see you in ten minutes. For God’s sake Mother sit down and stop twisting your hands together.”

  Mother obeyed and when the housekeeper left sipped the sherry uneasily and asked him, “You got it, then?”

  “Got what?”

  “Got patent.”

  “Got patent and heck of a lot more,�
�32 said Father, chuckling. “Got a lot from your brother.”

  “My brother Elia?”

  “Your brother Noah.”

  “Shall I see him then?”

  “No, nobody sees Noah now,” said Father, chuckling harder. “There is nothing much left of him to see. Take a word of advice, Mother. Don’t ask visitors here until you can act ladylike. Ask Mabel to teach you how to sit and dress and stand and walk. And how to speak, of course. She knows a heck of a lot. She’s taught ME a few new tricks. I’ll leave you now. You’ve had to wait a while for this but it’s solid. Depend on it.”

  He finished the brandy and walked out.

  I met him a fortnight later on the stairs and said, “Father, Mother gets drunk every day. She has nothing else to do.”

  “Well, if she wants to kill herself by that particular road why should I object? As long as she does it quiet-like in her own parlour. What do you want from me?”

  “I want to read books and learn about things.”

  “Things Mabel cannot teach?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right then.”

  A week later I was taken to a convent school in Lausanne.

  I will not describe my foreign education in detail. Mother had taught me to be a working man’s domestic slave; the nuns taught me to be a rich man’s domestic toy. When they sent me back Mother was dead and I could speak French, dance, play the piano, move like a lady and discuss events as Conservative newspapers reported them, for the nuns thought husbands might prefer wives who knew some things about the world. General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington was indifferent to what I knew but waltzed beautifully in spite of his wounds. No doubt the uniform helped. I was tall but he taller and the other dancers stopped to gaze on us. I loved him for many reasons. Girls of my age were expected to have husbands, homes, babies. He was rich, famous and still handsome. Also I wanted to escape from my father, who had provided this escape route. I felt truly happy on my wedding-day. That night I discovered why “Thunderbolt” Blessington was called “The Arctic Pole” by his fellow officers, yet thought the fault was mine. Six months later I had my third hysterical pregnancy and was begging for a clitoridectomy. Dr. Prickett told me a skilful Scottish surgeon was in London and might “handle the job”. So one afternoon I was visited by the only man I have truly loved, Godwin Baxter.