Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

  When the reporter was admitted to the surgery he found it was a huge gas-lit kitchen with a pot of soup simmering on the fire range, various animals reclining in corners, and a tall, straight-backed woman sitting at a kitchen table laden with books, papers and medical instruments. She wore a white apron which covered her body from neck to ankles, with white celluloid cuffs attached to the black sleeves of her dress. Her strangely unlined face could have been any age between forty and eighty. When the journalist sat down facing her she said at once, “You look like a newspaper reporter. Is it the Daily Express?”

  He said yes, and hoped she would not mind answering some questions. She said, “Of course not, if you pay for my time on the way out.”

  He asked her if all her patients paid her in that voluntary way. She said, “Yes. They are poor people, or children. How can I judge what they are able to pay me without hurting themselves?”

  He asked if she always gave money to hungry beggars. She said, “No. I give them soup.”

  He asked if her veterinary work had not reduced her number of human patients. She said, “Undoubtedly. The human animal is prone to silly prejudices.”

  He asked if she preferred dogs to human beings. She said, “No, I am not that kind of sentimentalist. I will always feel tenderness toward my own silly prejudiced species. But nowadays folk with sick animals shun me less than sick humans.”

  He asked if there was anything in her life she sincerely regretted. She said, “The Great War.”

  He told her she had misunderstood him—he meant, did she regret something for which she felt personally responsible? She said, “Yes. The Great War.”

  He asked what she thought about de Valera’s Irish republic, the short length of young women’s skirts, Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats (a popular song of the time) and Trotsky’s expulsion from the Russian Communist Party. She said, “Nothing. I no longer read newspapers.”

  He asked if she had a message to give to British youth. She smiled brightly and said that for five pounds she would give him a very quick little answer summing up all she thought good in life, but she wanted the money first. He gave her five pounds. From a pile at her elbow she handed over a little hardbound copy of A Loving Economy, bade him good-bye and ushered him out.

  That article is the only record of Victoria McCandless between 1925 and 1941, apart from her name and address in Kelly’s street directory.

  The Second World War revived for a while both the industrial and intellectual life on Clydeside. Glasgow was the main transit port between Britain and the U.S.A. The bombing of south Britain inclined many to the northern industrial capital. The painter J. D. Fergusson returned here with his wife, Margaret Morris. They had known Dr. Victoria in her younger days, and Margaret Morris rented an upper floor of 18 Park Circus as a rehearsal space for her Celtic Ballet Company. Until 1945 the house became one of several unofficial little arts centres flourishing on or near Sauchiehall Street. The painters Robert Colquhoun, Stanley Spencer and Jankel Adler briefly lodged in it or visited it. So did the poets Hamish Henderson, Sidney Graham and Christopher Murray Grieve, better known as Hugh MacDiarmid. In his autobiography The Company I’ve Kept (published in 1966 by Hutchinson & Co.) MacDiarmid says:

  I seem to have been the only one there who knew that the queer old landlady lurking in the basement was the one female Scottish healer—apart from Long Mairi of the Glens—whose name could have been proudly inscribed beside Madame Curie, Elizabeth Blackwell and Sophia Jex-Blake. Perhaps her pets’ hospital frightened away the lily-livered, but her Scotch broth was excellent, and ladled freely out with a lavish hand.

  He reviles:

  our cowardly Scottish medical establishment which could easily have given her a university lectureship in gynaecology, but was scared out of its wits by the English gutter press led by that analphabetic hoodlum, Beaverbrook.

  This last statement is perfectly true, but would have been more persuasive if expressed more politely. We must be grateful to MacDiarmid, however, for quoting in full a letter she wrote shortly before her death. A lesser man would have suppressed it, as it said things he certainly did not like. Though undated it was obviously written soon after the 1945 general election.

  Dear Chris,

  So at last, for the first time this century, we have a Labour government with an overall working majority! I will start reading the newspapers again. Britain is suddenly an exciting country. The anti-trade-union laws of 1927 are being repealed and it seems we WILL get social welfare and national health care for all, and Fuel and Power and Transport and Iron and Steel WILL become Public Property! As Public as broadcasting, telephones, tap-water and the air we breathe! And we WILL jettison that millstone round our necks, the British Empire! Do you not feel a little happier, Chris? I feel a lot happier. We are setting the world a finer example than the Soviet Union ever did. I feel that everything between 1914 and the present day has been proved a hideous detour, a swerving from the good path of social progress whose last fixed point was the Lloyd George budget which abolished poor-houses by the old-age pension, and started breaking up the enormous estates by death duties. It seems John Maclean was wrong. A workers’ co-operative nation will be created from London, without an independent Scotland showing the way.

  I know (you thrawn old Devil) that you will not believe a word of this, and think I have a heart “too easily made glad”. I know you are even now reaching for your pen to describe for me all the obviously vicious worms gnawing at the roots of Blooming Britain. Leave that pen alone! I am going to die happy.

  If you have read my publications (but has anyone alive ever done that?) if you have read A Loving Economy (which should be read as a poem, just as your worst poems should be read as treatises) if you have skimmed through even a paragraph of my poor neglected little magnum opus you will know I am unusually acquaint with my inner workings. No wonder! I was introduced to them by a genius. A cerebral haemorrhage will release me from this mortal coil in early December. I am winding down the little clinic which was launched so bravely and richly fifty-six years ago. Easily done! My patients now are some children’s pets and two elderly hypochondriacs who feel slightly happier after talking breathlessly to me for an hour about things only Sigmund Freud could understand. I have found homes for all my dogs except Archie, the Newfoundland. He has a home waiting for him, but will not be led off to it until the friend who calls on me after breakfast (Nell Todd, a courageous Sapphist who defies the Glasgow police in male attire) uses the basement key I have given her, and finds me out. Completely. I would have preferred a warm steady man at the last, but there has only been one in my life, and he died thirty-five years ago. Not that I disliked the fly-by-nights—some of them were great fun. But steady heat is what I need now, and my Archie will provide it.

  If you insult me by offering to provide it I will never speak to you again. My love to Valda.

  Sincerely,

  Victoria McCandless.

  Dr. Victoria McCandless was found dead of a cerebral stroke on 3rd December 1946. Reckoning from the birth of her brain in the Humane Society mortuary on Glasgow Green, 18th February 1880, she was exactly sixty-six years, forty weeks and four days old. Reckoning from the birth of her body in a Manchester slum in 1854, she was ninety-two.

  The Necropolis of Glasgow where the three principal characters of this book are interred in the Baxter Mausoleum – the Romanesque rotunda on the far right.

  GLASGOW GREEN, 1880. The circle surrounds the spot where Lady Victoria Blessington drowned herself: also the bridge from which she leapt; the wharf where Geddes saw her drown; the Humane Society House where Godwin Baxter examined her corpse.

  ENTRACE TO PARK CIRCUS FROM THE WEST END PARK

  ORIGINAL PLAN OF THE CIRCUS AS IT STILL STANDS

  The Stewart Memorial Fountain with Glasgow University to the left, Park Circus right.

  The Midland Hotel, St Pancras, where Bella and Wedderburn spent the second night of their elopement.

  Lansdown Unite
d Presbyterian Church, where a wedding ceremony was interrupted on Christmas Day, 1883.

  The kind of cab in which General Blessington planned to abduct his drugged “wife”, Bella Baxter.

  AUCTIONING LOOT IN MANDALAY AFTER BURMESE EXPEDITION “‘Thunderbolt’ Blessington believes that the common soldier who preserves the peace of the Empire deserves more than mere wages.”

  KING PREMPEH’S HUMILIATION: “One of the Governor’s demands made after the Ashanti rebellion was that King Prempeh should make abject submission in accordance with native custom. The King removed his crown and sandals, came forward with the Queen Mother to perform the act of humiliation, and reached the platform on which was seated Sir Francis Scott, General Blessington and Mr Maxwell. They knelt and embraced the Englishmen’s legs and booted feet, while the Ashantis looked on with astonishment at their King’s abasement.”

  Events in General Blessington’s career as shown and reported in the Graphic Illustrated Weekly News.

  MURDER IN NORTHERN INDIA: “The punitive expedition against the Lushai Hill tribes has found the gun of the late Lieut. Stewart in the grave of the Chief Howsata. It had been reported from other villages that if Howsata had murdered Lieut. Stewart, the gun would be in the Chief’s grave. This was opened. Howsata’s embalmed body was found lying with the gun beside it: conclusive proof that General Blessington had been right to burn the homes of the guilty tribesmen.”

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  Lanark: a Life in Four Books

  1982 Janine

  Something Leather

  A History Maker

  The Fall of Kelvin Walker

  McGrotty and Ludmilla

  Mavis Belfrage

  Unlikely Stories, Mostly

  Lean Tales (With Agnes Owen and James Kelman)

  Ten Tales Tall and True

  NON-FICTION

  The Book of Prefaces

  First published 1992

  This electronic edition published 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Alasdair Gray 1992

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

  The author thanks Bernard MacLaverty for hearing the book as it was written and giving ideas that helped it grow; and Scott Pearson for typing and research into period detail; and Dr. Bruce Charlton for correcting the medical parts; and Angela Mullane for correcting the legal parts; and Archie Hind for insights (mainly got from his play The Sugarolly Story) into the corrupted high noon of Glasgow’s industrial period; and Michael Roschlau for the gift of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (published in 1894 by MacLehose & Son, Glasgow, for the translator William Jacks, illustrated with etchings by William Strang) which suggested the form (not content) of the McCandless volume; and Elspeth King and Michael Donnelly, now of the Abbot House local history museum in Dunfermline, for permission to use some of their earlier circumstances to reinforce a fiction. The shocking incident described by Bella in Chapter 17 was suggested by the Epilogue of In a Free State by V.S. Naipaul. Other ideas were got from Ariel Like a Harpy, Christopher Small’s study of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and from Liz Lochhead’s Blood and Ice, a play on the same subject. Three sentences from a letter to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir, embedded in the third and fourth paragraphs of Chapter 18, are taken from Quentin Hoare’s translation of her letters published by Hutchinson in 1991. A historical note on Chapter 2 is extracted from Johanna Geyer-Kordesch’s entry “Women and Medicine”, in the Encyclopaedia of Medical History edited by W. F. Bynum. The epigraph on the covers is from a poem by Denis Leigh. The author thanks a close friend for a money loan which allowed him to finish the book without interruption.

  Designed by Alasdair Gray

  All rights reserved.

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 4088 5632 1

  www.bloomsbury.com

  To find out more about our authors and their books please visit www.bloomsbury.com where you will find extracts, author interviews and details of forthcoming events, and to be the first to hear about latest releases and special offers, sign up for our newsletters here.