Seeking Hyde

by Reed, Thomas;

  “But?”

  Fanny glanced at her men. Both were staring at her expectantly.

  “Out with it!” exclaimed Stevenson. “You’re not helping me with insinuations.”

  She sighed and drew her shoulders back. “You’ve made a story of it. And a fine story, Louis. It’s extremely exciting.”

  Stevenson nodded.

  “But it should be an allegory, don’t you see? And I’m afraid…”

  “What? You’re afraid of what?”

  “I’m afraid you’ve totally missed the point.”

  Stevenson took his elbow off the mantle, crossing his arms and standing squarely on both feet. He inhaled deeply and evenly. “An allegory. Explain what you mean.”

  “Your man is bad all through,” Fanny declared. She spoke softly, as though she knew she was venturing onto perilous ground. “The transformation is only to escape detection and blame.”

  “Yes?” With his neck raked forward, Stevenson looked vaguely like a brooding crane.

  “So it really is only Brodie with a twist. In prose.”

  “It isn’t at all like Brodie,” Stevenson shot back. “Brodie was a petty thief, not a…”

  “Voluptuary?”

  Stevenson paused briefly and then nodded. “And, what is more, Brodie was always in complete control of himself. This man…” There was a spell of total silence. When Stevenson spoke again, his voice was as soft as his wife’s, but there was clearly something mounting underneath. “What, then, do you propose that I do?”

  For a moment Fanny was still. “It’s the tale of a criminal, Louis. A clever criminal. But it could become the tale of anyone. Everyone. An allegory of all humanity, don’t you see?” She waited for a response, but nothing came from him. Sam sat perfectly still on the floor, looking back and forth between the two of them. “You could make him a good man, Louis. You should. A normal man, struggling with his appetites. Urges of the flesh. You remember we talked about all that with James.”

  She looked up at Stevenson, who was breathing ever more deeply, his arms folded tightly across his chest.

  “You wanted to write something about Walter Ferrier? Or someone like him? Something good and strong that might make a difference? That’s what this ought to be, love. Really. That would be your masterpiece. Instead of, like Sammy said, another Deacon Brodie.”

  “Another Brodie,” Stevenson repeated flatly after a long and awkward silence. “Another…fucking…Brodie.”

  Fanny turned towards Sam. His eyes were wide in surprise. When she looked back at her husband, it was as though he were holding his breath before a plunge into deep water. At length, his lips began moving, shaping what seemed to be words, although he didn’t utter a sound. Slowly he turned to the mantle and, with an eerie languor, reached for one of the crystal glasses that rested there. He hefted it briefly, looking around the room, and then jerked the tumbler up to his chest with both hands. Fanny watched, transfixed, as his forearms began to tremble.

  “Louis!” she exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing?”

  There was a sharp snap and her husband’s hands flew apart, the remains of the tumbler falling to the hearth. He looked down as blood oozed then rushed from his left palm.

  “Oh my God,” cried Sam, leaping to his feet. He ran into the dining room and fetched a napkin, which he brought back and pressed into his stepfather’s open hand.

  “No, there’s glass,” said Stevenson. With his other hand, he pulled a long sliver from his flesh and turned to place it on the mantle. Looking vacantly at the boy, he wrapped the napkin tightly around the ugly wound and walked across the room to where his wife sat frozen in dismay. He held out his uninjured hand, palm up. She stared at him, uncomprehending. He extended his hand again, and she realized what he wanted. She doubled the manuscript over on itself and handed it to him, looking down as he walked quietly out of the room. A single drop of his blood trembled like mercury on the pale blue bombazine of her skirt and then, as she watched, it sank dully into the fabric.

  The afternoon was almost gone when Valentine stepped into the drawing room.

  Fanny and Sam had taken luncheon alone and then retreated to the fire, where they sat for hours, neither of them speaking of what they had earlier witnessed in the room. Fanny knitted, jumping up every now and again to straighten something on the wall or move a piece of furniture ever so slightly. Sam worked his way through the old numbers of Punch that Stevenson kept stacked in the bottom of the Dutch cupboard. Occasionally he chuckled quietly to himself, and when Fanny asked him what he found amusing, he explained or came over to her chair to show her a clever drawing. One of them, curiously a propos both of Sam’s Pear’s Soap remark and Stevenson’s unbroken three-day sequestration, was entitled “A Good Advertisement.” It showed an ill-groomed, unshaved, and obviously odiferous man stooped over his desk. “I used your soap two years ago,” read the motto; “since then I have used no other.” The only real cheer in the room, though, came from the fireplace and the ironwork cage in which the two family canaries trilled in ignorant bliss.

  “Monsieur Stevenson would like to see you,” Valentine announced.

  “Me?” asked Fanny, looking up from her knitting.

  The maid nodded.

  “Thank you.” Fanny set her wool and needles aside and gazed over at Sam. The boy shrugged and went back to his reading.

  Fanny rose and made her way to the stairs. She stole with real trepidation to the bedroom door, peering in to see Stevenson sitting once again in the bed, his head thrown back on the bank of pillows. He had unbuttoned his shirt, and his long neck and concave chest looked grotesquely wasted and pale. He heard her approach and turned to her with a look of strained resignation.

  “There,” he said, pointing a long finger towards the fire. “There it lies.”

  “My God, Louis,” shouted Fanny as she rushed over to the grate. Trembling on the glowing coals sat layer upon layer of feathery ash. Only at the very center did any paper remain, a round the size of a communion wafer bearing a tracery of familiar script. Fanny turned to her husband, her mouth agape. No words came.

  “You were right,” he said softly, his voice hoarse and broken.

  “My God, Louis. Is that the whole thing?”

  He nodded silently.

  “Why? What on earth were you thinking? Why?”

  “I would have been tempted.”

  “Tempted how? To use it after all?”

  “This was the only way. To start over.”

  There was a rustle at the door, and the two looked over to see Sam standing there, leaning against the doorjamb with an expression of grave concern. “I heard you call out, Mother. Is everything all right?”

  Fanny choked back a curious urge to laugh. “Everything is fine, dear. Lulu is just saying he’s sorry for frightening us.”

  Sam looked at his stepfather, who stared straight ahead.

  “Everything is under control here,” said Fanny. “We’re fine. Why don’t you run along downstairs?”

  Sam looked doubtful, but he took his hands off the doorjamb and made to leave. “If you need me, let me know.”

  Once her son had left, Fanny walked over to the bed and began to sit. Stevenson moved slightly to the side to make way for her.

  “Oh, Louis. I’m so sorry. Look what you’ve done to yourself.”

  “I was so angry.”

  Fanny reached out to touch his arm.

  “I think I was about to hurl that glass, Pig. God help me, but I was.” He paused for a moment. “But I knew that you were absolutely right. It was nothing more than the deacon again, back from the dead. And, naturally, that enraged me even more!”

  Fanny sighed and nodded.

  “I suppose I took my anger out upon myself.” He held up his bandaged hand. “And on that!” Again he pointed at the fire.

  “Oh, Louis!”

  Stevenson turned to her with a guarded smile. He held up an open notebook that had been resting on the counterpane to his l
eft. “Look.”

  Fanny could see two short passages on the recto sheet, separated by a tracery of doodles.

  “What is it?”

  “I have started over.”

  “Oh my!”

  “May I?”

  “Of course,” replied Fanny, feeling something between giddy relief and genuine excitement.

  “The solicitor was a man of a rugged countenance, never lighted by a smile,” he read. “Cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. I’m afraid I don’t have his name yet, but the fellow will be our eyes and ears. What do you think?”

  “Well, it’s hard to tell.” She giggled nervously. “There’s not much of it, is there?”

  “There will be more. It will be better.”

  “Louis!”

  “It will. I shall end up thanking you.”

  She looked at him uncertainly.

  “Of course I have not quite reached that point. Not just yet. But I will, I expect.” Incredibly, there was a grin on his haggard face.

  She reached out and touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers.

  “So,” he said, holding up the notebook. “Lean, long, dusty, dreary.” He stared at her with those vulnerable eyes, the cornered hare’s. “Am I, too, in any way lovable? Still?”

  Fanny shook her head and laughed outright. “You are not lovable. You are impossible.”

  “Impossibly lovable?”

  “Let’s just stick with impossible,” she said through a widening smile.

  “Fanny.”

  “Yes?”

  “This is important.”

  “What is it, Louis?”

  “About this.” He shook the notebook. “I have a notion how to develop the allegory, as you so bravely envisioned it. And you were right about Ferrier, as well. I feel poor Walter can breathe real life into this. Not that it should be about him in any literal way, you know…but as the tale of a good man plagued by a damnable addiction.” In the incalculably dark moments that had come on the heels of the manuscript’s going into the fire, Stevenson’s departed friend had indeed found his way back into the writer’s creative mind. Watching grimly from the bed as the flames subsided, Stevenson had recalled with arresting vividness that confessional moment when Ferrier had resorted to another set of pronouns to describe his addictive self—his depraved “other” self, if his testimony were to be trusted. Stevenson could almost instantaneously imagine a scene in which, in the renewed fiction’s own confessional interlude, his protagonist would similarly distance himself from a concealed and now condemned side of his nature, seeking in that way to escape all responsibility for his deeds: It was he, the man might insist. He, I say. I cannot say I!

  Stevenson gazed intently at his wife. “Walter is my dumb grenadier. I must speak for him. You do remember that poem?”

  “Of course I remember it.” “Let me read you the other bit. From what I imagine will be a kind of denouement from the man himself: I was born to a large fortune, endowed besides with a lively mind, by nature inclined to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow men, and thus with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as makes the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures.”

  Fanny shook her head and tittered.

  “What? What is it?”

  “That’s not Ferrier. Or not just Ferrier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just remembering our little exchange after your patricidal dream. The one you had in Hyères. About respectability driving you to hypocrisy.”

  Stevenson smiled through a moderate blush. “One writes what one knows. But, Fanny…”

  His wife nodded.

  “If there is anything else I need to know, please…” There was perhaps the hint of a tear in his eye.

  “Tell you now?”

  “Tell me now.”

  She wiped at his cheek. “Well…goodness. This suddenly feels awfully momentous. It makes me so nervous.”

  “My God,” sighed Stevenson over-loudly. “You have broadsides in reserve? I thought perhaps another swipe or two from your cutlass, but there are broadsides?”

  Fanny shook her head and laughed softly. “No, Louis. Just two things, I suppose.”

  The writer pulled his head back and squinted at her.

  She plunged ahead. “There was too much sex.”

  Stevenson’s eyes opened wide, then he slowly nodded. “I thought you might say that. You can’t shake yourself loose of Mrs. Grundy, can you?”

  Fanny shook her head. “Why should I? Louis, you simply cannot write about a gentleman using prostitutes.”

  “But gentlemen do.”

  “Of course they do. But this story will never see the light of day as is. As was,” she corrected herself, with a wistful glance at the fire. “And you must get rid of that bit about your ‘disgraceful pleasures.’ Jekyll’s ‘disgraceful pleasures.’ What were they, ‘indulged from an early age?’”

  “Why?” asked Stevenson. “That seems innocuous enough to me. Ambiguous enough.”

  “Oh, please,” objected Fanny.

  “All right. What did you make of them, then?”

  “What else? Self-abuse.”

  Stevenson chuckled. “Self-abuse?”

  “Of course. What else could it be?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. A childish taste for sweets. Dressing like a woman?”

  Fanny slapped him on the arm. “I mean it.”

  Stevenson studied her closely then sighed. “Done, love. No masturbating from an early age. And?”

  “And?”

  “You said there were two things.”

  “Yes. And the powders.”

  “What about the powders?”

  She looked at him uncertainly. “They are too fanciful. Don’t you think? Really!”

  “They were part of the dream,” Stevenson replied, with more than a touch of impatience. “Right at the core of it. They are where the whole idea came from.”

  “Couldn’t you make them something else, though? Something closer to what a man might really use to endow a night self.”

  “Such as what?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Fanny. “Opium. Strong spirits.”

  “This needn’t be Ferrier’s actual life, you know, Pig. In fact, it shouldn’t be. He has a family.”

  “Still.”

  Stevenson sighed. “Then what about the physical change?”

  “I don’t know, Louis. There could be a disguise.”

  “It’s not a story about what a man wears,” responded Stevenson with some animation. “Or about make-up. It’s about what a man is. And you’ll recall,” he added, “I tried a disguise in ‘The Travelling Companion.’ It was tripe!”

  “You could do it here, too,” Fanny persisted. “Honestly. This is just so very much better than ‘The Travelling Companion.’ Besides, you never had any takers for that.”

  “Thank you for reminding me.”

  “I feel quite strongly about this,” Fanny went on. “Perhaps you should talk with James.”

  Stevenson laughed. “I know what James would say. Precisely what he would say.” He looked up at the ceiling and grinned. “My man should begin by taking insufficient sugar in his tea—and then move on to taking far too much lemon—which would leave him, to begin with, a sour companion—and ultimately a murderous blight on the gentlemen’s club.”

  “I can see I’ll be making no more headway here.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve already made enough headway?”

  She studied him closely, very much aware of the fire that still burned off to the side. “I’m sorry, Louis.”

  “Let us just see where we end u
p. The brownies and we. I have made mistakes in the past by not trusting them sufficiently.”

  “And by trusting me too much?”

  “Never,” replied the writer. “You are my unfailing bulwark against artistic disaster. Not to mention self-abuse.”

  His eyes dropped reflexively to Fanny’s side of the mattress. It was distressing to stretch truths with his wife, even in the smallest ways. Already, though, the two extant seeds of the tale were germinating at pace in his fecund imagination. Perhaps he could be forgiven if he were to ask Fanny to step away, just for a bit, so he could get on with it.

  12

  “Well,” said Enfield, “That story’s at an end at least. We shall never see more of

  Mr. Hyde.”

  “I hope not,” said Utterson.

  —STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

  BOURNEMOUTH, JANUARY 1886

  “You’re certain that you won’t come out with me?” Stevenson shouted from the entrance hall as he donned and buttoned his overcoat. “It’s a bonnie day. For January.”

  “I don’t think so. I still don’t feel very lively.”

  “Would you prefer that I stayed here with you?”

  “Not at all. Honestly, you go out. I’ll be fine.”

  Stevenson walked to the door of the drawing room and looked in at his wife. She lay on the chaise longue, half-covered by a thick woolen lap robe. She was reading through what now seemed as though they might be the final chapters of Kidnapped, the title Stevenson had settled on despite James’s marked distaste for it. Fanny had been suffering for two days from a marked female indisposition, troublesome enough to be sure, but in fact a considerable relief after several long weeks of worry that the Stevenson ménage might inadvertently be growing by one member. Stevenson had had more than one nightmare about changing diapers, something he suspected Fanny might well require him to do.

  “Can I bring anything back for you? Chocolates? Champagne? A wee dog?”

  “Ooh, a puppy would be lovely.”

  “What color?”

  “You choose.”

  “I shall see what I can do.”

  The day’s post had brought a letter from Andrew Lang mentioning that his review of the newly published Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would be appearing in the Saturday Review. Stevenson expected it would be positive, although not revealingly so: the Scots man of letters was a close friend. At the same time, Lang’s would be the first appraisal to appear, and Stevenson was eager to see it.