Nina In Utopia

by Miranda Miller

  ‘Of course I remember. And that evening we had on the razzle after we sold the teeth your father claimed to have procured on the battlefield of Waterloo to that dentist in Berkeley Square! How picturesque London was then in the days of the Resurrection men, not like our quiet, dull old town. Plate-glass windows and gas lights, not to mention the Anatomy Act, have put paid to all the romance.’

  I kept quiet about some of my other, less romantic memories and looked admiringly around his library. ‘How far you have come, William, since we walked the wards together.’

  ‘All built on feminine weaknesses. Bless the dear little ladies, for they are only fit for love. And when love goes awry, as it generally does, they come to me.’

  ‘What exactly is it that you do to help them?’

  ‘I very soon realized that bodily aches and pains are only manifestations of sicknesses of the soul. And the soul, in women, is always amorous. Men are less inclined to resort to physic for every passing ailment, for we have less time and opportunity for doing so, from the greater vigour of our constitution and a more nourishing diet. Our nervous system is less excitable and our moral sensibility is less acute.’

  ‘And what do you prescribe for these broken-hearted females who besiege you?’

  William bestowed his warm and cynical smile on me. The smile that has launched a thousand bank drafts. ‘Why, Charles, each case is different. Thomas Aquinas tells us that woman is a misbegotten male. Overstimulation of the female brain causes nervousness, hysteria, difficult childbirth, inflammation of the brain - how they suffer, the poor little darlings. Sometimes it is enough to recommend Porter’s Balm of Elysium (five shillings and sixpence) and Porter’s Electric Belt (two guineas, old chap!) - as part of my patent cure. Erotomania is so often the result of disappointment in love. Other ladies, particularly young unmarried ones, require help disposing of their little mistakes, and such help does not come cheaply. Sponges, pessaries, douches - the armies of Cupid require an arsenal of weapons. No pun intended.’

  I laughed none the less, torn between disapproval and envy. Two guineas for a few pieces of elastic and a couple of wires in a fancy box!

  ‘And does your wife permit these intimacies with other women?’

  ‘My wife has milliner’s and dressmaker’s bills like any other. She does not interfere with my work. But this is too much about me. Tell me about your work, Charles.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell. I see patients, attend committee meetings and generally do a great deal for other people for very little pay.’

  ‘And are you satisfied?’

  ‘No!’ I shouted with a vehemence that surprised me.

  ‘I am sorry to hear it. I know you are honest and hard-working and married for love, whereas I -’

  ‘You are the happiest man I know.’

  ‘I would like to help you. I wonder, could I put you up for my club? Meeting the right people can make all the difference. The ladies are always eager to talk about their amorous problems, but gentleman also confide after two or three brandies. ‘

  ‘I scarcely have time to go to a club.’ I didn’t want to admit that I can’t pay this year’s subscription to my own shabby little club let alone the exorbitant cost of William’s Pall Mall mansion.

  ‘I hesitate to intrude where angels fear to tread, not that I have ever seen myself as an angel. I mean one ought not to ask too many questions about a fellow’s marriage …’

  ‘Go on. You seem to be an expert on every other marriage in London.’

  ‘Well then, Mrs Sanderson’s delusions, are they foolish fancies or something more serious?’

  ‘She has written a long account of the days she claims to have spent in the remote future. You may read it if you wish.’

  ‘I should be fascinated. And how do we get on? The human race, I mean.’

  ‘We flourish, apparently. Money and war are to be abolished, differences between the sexes also. We are all to wear bloomers -’

  ‘Marvellous! The ladies of the future will have no need of me.’

  ‘They are quite Amazonian. They work as doctors and even prime ministers -’

  ‘A female Gladstone! In bloomers and a bonnet, of course. I’m so sorry, Charles, I should not make light of your wife’s misfortune. How does she react to her ejection from this utopia?’

  ‘Very badly. She seems to feel quite an aversion to me. Instead of her former modest and respectable demeanour her behaviour has become most odd, as you saw yourself at dinner the other night. She says my face has become a mask, and she will not be polite to callers. I have told her to rest, but on Monday I found her attempting to escape the house to go on a solitary walk. She displays great irregularities of temper, and, although I have warned her again and again that she must rest her brain and have tried to confiscate her journal and sketchpad and books, she disobeys me and still spends much time in writing and drawing and serious reading. Yesterday I found her with a volume of Kant.’

  ‘Let us hope she has studied him well. Kant warned that a woman who escapes from the natural domination of father and husband might become a dangerous rebel and revolutionary. Or, as Hegel would say, without the family there is only the mob. Women and children must, of course, be totally dependent.’

  ‘Yes, but she has got it into her noddle -’

  ‘Charles, a woman’s noddle is no place for philosophy. Nature has made women more like children in order that they might better understand children. You must be firm with her. Home is the appointed scene of women’s labour, the shop window for their unselfish love and cheerful industry. Women have neither heart nor head for abstract political or philosophical speculation. Such matters may be safely left to men.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do, William.’

  ‘You have come to me with your troubles, and that is the very best thing you could have done. Now tell me more. You say you have known your wife since childhood. Was she restless, excited and stubborn at puberty?’

  ‘It always seemed to me she was the most enchanting and delightful child, and when she was a young girl I was in love with her. I found no fault with her until this event - her disappearance - she was gone for three days.’

  ‘And you really have no idea where she went?’

  ‘No,’ I whispered, ashamed to confess my inability to control my wife. ‘But in this letter she speaks of a fellow called Jonathan -’

  ‘Aha! So there is another man! Three days! I have come across other cases of seemingly respectable females who escaped from their domestic leash and were ruined. Since her return to the fold, has she suffered from depression or loss of appetite?’

  ‘Yes, both. But it is far worse than that. She seems quite another person, sullen and angry and undutiful.’

  ‘Ah yes! The subterranean fires become active and smoke and flames gush forth.’

  ‘We are discussing my wife, not Mount Etna.’

  ‘It is the same thing, my dear fellow. Is there any hereditary disposition to insanity?’

  ‘Her mother was a very kind lady but somewhat eccentric. Italian by birth, a Catholic -’

  ‘Tainted foreign blood, no doubt. That would make your poor wife more susceptible to evil influences, more easily unbalanced. Her vital powers are depressed. She has been deranged by the death of your little girl and suffers from delusions. A clear case of moral insanity. We must act, Charles.’

  ‘But what action can I take?’

  ‘I assume you don’t have enough money to divorce her? Any court would accept her criminal conversation with this man as justified grounds for divorce.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘At least seven hundred pounds.’

  ‘It is more than I earn in a year!’

  ‘My poor fellow. Then we must find another way. Do you wish her to be cared for at home or in an institution?’

  ‘But - this is so sudden - I do not feel I have the right -’

  ‘You have every right. We physicians are the guardians of women’s interests and
the custodians of their honour. They are weak, and we are strong.’

  I fell silent. I was bewildered by the solution to my domestic chaos he dangled before me (and more than a little drunk). William’s voice boomed on, offering me a lifeboat into which I longed to jump.

  ‘It’s really quite a simple matter. You remember Bob Jenkins and Richard Temple? We were students together. They’ve made a great success of the mad business. They’ll come to your house and interview your wife - only a formality, of course - and sign a certificate. You could find a keeper to look after her at home, but it would be difficult for your son, not to mention you, and your patients might get to hear of it. Some of the private asylums around Hoxton are good, but they are rather expensive, so if you’re strapped for cash you should send her to the Royal Bethlem. I hear that Dr Hood has worked marvels there and has turned it into quite a palace. He will only expect a small premium.’

  Thank you, I mouthed, but words failed me as I felt I had failed Nina. I could never have done this to her, but it was being done for me. I had only to allow it to happen. And, after all, the woman it was happening to was not really my Nina at all.

  Our mood became more jovial again until William’s magnificent Jacobean grandfather clock struck five, and I realized I was due for tea with Lady B— in fifteen minutes.

  ‘Do give her my regards. And ask her how her husband’s little problem is. She will know to what I allude.’

  I tried to look stern but found myself laughing instead. For all our greying hair and professional gravitas I felt that we were still students and could not resist quoting Thomas Hood’s ditty in a shrill falsetto before I left:

  ‘The cock it crows - I must be gone;

  My William we must part;

  But I’ll be yours in death, altho’

  Sir Astley has my heart.’

  I left William’s house shaking with laughter. Yet by the time I turned the corner of Hanover Square my mood had changed. I felt a wave of anger against Nina, a cold wave that washed me out of William’s lifeboat and left me floundering again in the treacherous currents of love.

  As I stared at the chaotic traffic and blank passing faces of Oxford Street I thought how my wife, my Nina, must have passed here on that summer morning, dressed in her mourning weeds. Some heartless villain with smiling face and genteel clothes must have accosted her. Must have told her some brazen lie or artful subterfuge and lured her to a house or hotel where - tears obscured my outer vision, but my inner eye ruthlessly narrated the scene.

  My darling, naïve girl follows him upstairs - perhaps she has been drugged or rendered unconscious with chloroform. In the dark he steals from me the most precious … when a woman has lost that inestimable jewel, her virtue, she can never be the same again. Hours later she must have woken in the dark beside him and have concocted her ridiculous tale from fear of what she had done. It was done to her, but she let it happen. Did she feel pleasure or only shame? The man who ruined her should die.

  There, on the corner of Oxford Street, I experienced a moment when, as Byron says, the Fates change horses. My jealousy was so violent that I felt dizzy. I vomited there where I stood in the filthy street, stooped in helplessness like some repulsive old drunkard. Out spewed William’s Madeira, my boyish adoration of Nina, my bitter grief for Bella and my medical ideals, to mingle with the foul ordure of horse dung, rotting vegetables and rotten humanity. I was no longer standing on the banks of the river of life but floundering in it. My mouth tasted of death, and death was on my mind when I was able stand up straight again.

  I wished I could kill this Jonathan. I have asked Nina a thousand times where he lives, but she only weeps and points to the other side of our wall, where the horses are stabled. If I could find him I would gladly challenge him to a duel. However absurd, there would be satisfaction in such a death. Honour is the word that boomed in my head like a gong summoning me to judgement. My wife has been dishonoured and since I cannot find the blackguard I must punish her.

  For a second I saw Nina’s corpse sprawled on the chaise-longue where she spends her days now, still dressed in her mourning clothes. Mourning Bella and our love and her own death. I could see it quite clearly, the useless doll in the long black dress with the necklace of red marks upon its waxen neck. I knew whose fingers had put them there. My murdered wife floated above the sordid street, as vivid as the poster advertising Dr Kahn’s Anatomical Museum in Piccadilly.

  Then the horrid phantom passed. I reached in my pocket for my little tin of peppermints and sucked one to sweeten my breath and my temper. My pocket-watch warned me that I was already late for tea with Lady B—. I looked around me, suddenly terrified that a patient or servant might have witnessed my vile weakness. With time, reason returned and opened her arms to me again. Reason is a plain, churchy sort of creature, rather like Henrietta. There was not much comfort in her embrace, but I felt safer.

  To argue that Nina must die because she has deceived me is the argument of the sultan who sends the erring inmate of his harem on her last sail on the Bosporus. Besides, I am not a sultan and should hang for it. Yet if she is not to die, what is to be done with her? I cannot live with such a wife.

  Foul thoughts emanated from the cesspit of Oxford Street. Within minutes I had reached the privacy of Wimpole Street, and my mood became more serene and dignified. I am more and more convinced that our actions are determined as much by our surroundings, health and the weather as by our principles. My conversation with William has made it very clear to me how feeble my principles are.

  In Lady B—’s drawing-room beautiful ideas shone like the chandeliers, and the most violent topic was the elopement of Miss Barrett. Here, a scandal titillates for at least a quarter of a century, and I have no wish to become gossip fodder. As I bowed over her ladyship’s hand I murmured my apologies and mentioned William’s name.

  ‘Ah, the charming Dr Porter.’ Her horsey, languid face was as animated as I have ever seen it.

  ‘He sends his respects. And enquires after Lord Bingham’s little problem.’

  It was as if a secret panel had sprung open in the stolid mahogany of her dark eyes. I glimpsed amusement, even a grotesque flirtatiousness. Her arthritic fingers, encrusted with rings, pumped her fan so vigorously that I felt the draught and more: the engine of her repressed life. ‘I did not know that you and Dr Porter work together.’

  ‘We are very old friends.’

  ‘And do you bring me anything from him?’

  An electric belt? Porter’s Balm of Elysium?

  ‘Next time, your ladyship.’

  I’m sure I didn’t imagine the change in her manner towards me. We doctors are considered parvenus in these very grand houses, where I am still often shown to the tradesmen’s entrance. But this afternoon I progressed from local doctor to initiate into some kind of freemasonry. The other guests, who had ignored me at first, also defrosted, and I was passed around the drawing-room like a muffin. They all complained of their arthritis and their gout. Only people of family can have bona fide gout.

  I left the house with the distinct impression that William’s name was an ‘open sesame’ that will unlock many doors formerly slammed in my face. The last of my doubts about treating sexual hypochondria dissolved between Cavendish Square and Harley Street. A man ought not throw away such a chance of extending his practice.

  Henrietta’s regime has brought many improvements, but I find her insistence on daily family prayers rather a trial. We are commanded to gather before supper so that Tommy can improve his soul, which is apparently in disrepair. Tonight he came into the drawing-room, which now doubles as a chapel, very sulky, tugged by Emma. The servants followed more willingly, no doubt pleased to rest from their duties for an hour (although I would not say that the sound of Henrietta preaching is exactly restful; her voice is so very scratchy, and she is on such embarrassingly intimate terms with God). Nina was the last to join us, after Lucy had been sent to fetch her from her room.

  It was t
he first time I had seen my wife all day, and I was struck by her mutinous air. In the past, Nina often reminded me of Tennyson’s Princess: ‘A rosebud set with little wilful thorns, / And sweet as English air could make her.’ The thorns are growing like beanstalks, and her sweetness is but a memory now.

  Since I showed Henrietta Nina’s extraordinary letter to me her disapproval has been very obvious. The little sister seems diminished, disappearing into silence and gloom, while the big sister expands and fills our house. I sometimes feel these prayer meetings are a gladiatorial contest between the two women. My wife cannot win this battle. I watch her nightly punishment and do not intervene.

  I am, as Henrietta constantly reminds me, the head of a Christian household. She pushes the Bible under my nose and points to the passage I am to read from St Paul: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.’ My own upbringing was cheerfully heathen, but I try to read as if the passage were familiar to me. I am learning that religion, like electrical belts, can be a social asset. My voice stumbles over the unfamiliar words, and I really have no idea what I am saying. I try to say it in a suitably Sunday voice. Henrietta removes the Bible and strides purposefully over to the piano. She does not so much walk with Christ as strut with Him. Her skirts balloon over the piano stool as she indicates that we are to sing:

  Trust no forms of guilty passion —

  Fiends can look like angels bright;

  Trust no custom, school or fashion —

  Trust in God and do the right.

  Our singing is ragged, and I am not familiar with the tune. Nina does not sing at all and Tommy, I observe with shame, makes uncouth noises, raspberries as we used to call them when we were urchins. It really is time he was sent away to school. If, as Henrietta claims, our family has become a ‘little church’, there is no doubt who are the sheep and who the shepherdess. She does not wield her crook lightly.

  After the hymns the soul searching begins. Despite Lady B—’s excellent simnel cake I long for supper, and my stomach groans and rumbles as Henrietta’s voice improves us. I worry that Cook, who is yawning beside Emma, will not have had time to prepare the food. Henrietta, as if reading my mind, warns us not be too entangled in the world. I long to become entangled with a lamb chop and a jam roly-poly.