The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  Felt good to whisper these words under my breath when no one was looking. Piss. Shit. Nightingale nurses are Christian women with excellent values. They pray three times a day, are clean in word and deed, read the Bible to their patients and tell the men to think of their country and their wives.

  I thought about writing to Matilda. Thought about sneaking into Abbey’s room, going through his things, but got to his door and just kept on walking like I had somewhere else to be.

  Charlwood lay in his bed and declared, “Bit of rotten luck, really. And just before the push; I feel so awful about it, awful about leaving the men.”

  Once, a major with very similar injuries to these had made a very similar speech, and I had blurted, “Don’t you think you’ve given enough? Don’t you think it’s time to be honest?”

  He had blustered something behind his great grey moustache, and muttered that at least he’d had the Boer War, and the next day hadn’t met my eye, and complained that the pain was getting worse, and when we sent him home, I didn’t know if I had done a terrible thing or a great good. I still don’t know, and kept my mouth shut after.

  “I feel so sure we’ve met, Dr Abbey,” mused Charlwood. “I feel certain of it.”

  And Abbey smiled, and said nothing, and sniffed at Charlwood’s bandages, and eased back the sheets to check for pus seeping between the plaster wedges at his groin, and Charlwood lay on his back and stared at the ceiling and proclaimed, fingers clawing at the sheet and smile locked like a bayonet, “Maybe in London, or at HQ perhaps? Or maybe I’m just confused, very likely, you know, very likely.”

  Slowly Abbey straightened up, pulled sheet and blanket back over the lieutenant’s hips, looked him in the eye and said, “Given your paperwork, Lieutenant, do you think acquaintance advantageous at this time?”

  I saw it then in Charlwood; like he’d seen a spider in the corner of his room. He was frozen for a moment, then gave a single, short laugh and blurted, “Ah well, you know how it is with faces!” and looked away, and held a little tighter to the sheets bunched in his fists, to stop himself scratching at the places where limbs should be.

  At night, I sat on a bench of gently blooming yellow lichen and green weeds, and smelt the trenches’ stink on the breeze, piss and rubber and wet khaki and smoke and acid and shit. Before the War Department started shifting gas masks – so slow, everything so slow – men wrapped socks soaked in their own urine around their noses and mouths. It made a bit of a difference, the survivors said. The only other thing to do was stand as high as they could, away from the trenches and tunnels where the gas pooled, and hope that no one shot you as you made yourself a welcoming target.

  Abbey sat down next to me without a word, no socks or shoes, bare feet pressing on cold stones. The moon was fat and brilliant, drowning out the stars; a good killing moon. First time we’d seen a plane fly towards the battlefield, all the sisters had waved and screamed, before we realised it was German, not one of our own. An owl screeched, exasperated at disturbances. A sister dropped her pan in the pantry, and I hoped it were empty before it hit the floor.

  Finally I said, “HQ didn’t send you.” He swung bare feet back and forth, a child kicking at an imaginary stream, and didn’t answer. “You here for Charlwood?”

  His feet kept kicking, and now his bottom lip curled in, chewing on a reply. A single nod. The kicking slowed and stopped, then he nodded again.

  “Are you going to hurt him?”

  He shook his head, paused, as if wondering whether that flat denial conveyed the nuance of his response, then shook his head again.

  I let my head roll back to watch the moon, until I found even its light too dazzling. “I saw this lady speak once in Manchester; suffrage, socialism, freedom – all that. My da worked in the mill; Ma was a maid. She taught me to speak properly, like the Nightingale sisters, said a proper maid with a proper voice would go further than a factory girl. Got me my job, working in the house where Matilda lived. But when we… after we realised that there was… I had to go away. Matilda arranged for me to be a nurse, brushed my hair like I’d brushed hers and said she’d be waiting for me, that she was proud.

  “I know liars: my da lied his whole life, to Ma, to his boss, to me. Matilda weren’t lying, but that didn’t mean I could stay. Ps and Qs. Proper manners. Our father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Matron thinks I come from a nice house, respectable. If she found out, she wouldn’t say a word, because I’m good at what I do and they always need more sisters. But she wouldn’t let the new girls sit with me at dinner neither. I went to join the suffragettes but they said I weren’t quite what they were looking for. I went to join the suffragists and they said I was clearly good with my hands so could make the bunting. Now the girls work in the munitions factories and the boys die walking in a straight line towards a machine gun cos men in a big room back home decide that’s how it’s gotta be. And that’s it. That’s me. That’s my story. What’s yours?”

  The owl screeched and fled from the moonlight.

  The cannon fired, then stopped, then fired again, as if the gunner couldn’t quite work out what he was aiming at.

  In the pantry, Sister Louise cursed and muttered and mopped up a stinking mess from the floor.

  In the house, the men slept, or lay awake and stared at the darkness, or pretended to sleep, and fluttered their eyelids open only when the lamplight had passed by.

  In the garden, Dr Abbey stretched his arms and legs, rolled his neck up to the sky, his eyes down to the earth, and began to tell me his story.

  Chapter 6

  I am a truth-speaker, he said, and where I go the shadow follows.

  I was cursed in Natal, in 1884. I stood by as a boy was beaten to death by a mob. I was the local doctor. I did not try to heal his wounds. His mother cursed us all by truth and by blood, but the shadow took to me and we have been together since.

  I was born in London at the height of Queen Victoria’s reign. Then it was almost impossible to imagine that the sun could set on the Empire, or that white men might ever have to meet the consequences of their barbarism. We were the chosen people, leaders of the world, destined to carry the white man’s burden.

  I was nearly the youngest of seven children, and as such I was permitted to choose my profession, to a degree. I chose doctor. This was not as acceptable as banker, lawyer or politician, but at least it had a certain moral probity about it. Younger sons should be vicars, dispensing wholesome wisdom to women of middling income; a doctor struck my father as a modern interpretation of this traditional path.

  I studied at University College, and was a terrible physician. Our family doctor had not studied at any college at all, but had been apprenticed to an apothecary and believed there was almost nothing in this world that, if one were male, could not be cured by brisk walking with plenty of well-fed dogs for company, or if one were female by the inhalation of scented lavender and massages to the pelvic area that if illustrated in a textbook would result in said text being banned.

  The reality – of stinking corpses three days out of the ground, of intestines and the crack crack crack of breaking bones, of the shark-tooth saw, of weeping cysts and black-bursting ulcers – had me vomiting on the laboratory floor and on the verge of quitting within a week. Only fear of my father’s terrible judgement kept me learning, and I was somewhat reconciled by the fact that my fellow pupils were as nauseated as I.

  In time, we grew used to putrefaction, and were able to regard the corpses on our slabs and the organs beneath our scalpels as scientific exercises, to be cut, considered and cured through the brilliance of our own intellects. It was a dazzling time to be a physician, and a jubilant time to be young in a city at the centre of the world. My dearest friend Plender introduced me to alcohol, the music hall and women. Women were a revelation, which blinded me outright, and through this I was introduced to debt, which compelled me to get through my exams despite the inherent mediocrity of my character.

  “Whatever we
are, we are better than the alternative!” Plender would repeat, as we swung, drunk as midnight rum, through the back entrance to the morgue. “Even if we cannot cure it, we can at least cut it out!”

  This was medicine’s approach to most things, and Plender at least was highly skilled with the knife and saw, merrily hacking off a leg in four minutes, determined to beat Lister at his own game and get the record down to two. His patients died regularly, of course, but everyone was still hugely impressed at the speed of the thing.

  I was not that talented, so to the London Hospital I was sent to offer up a regular cascade of bad news to the desperate crawling through our door. Too poor to pay for treatment, our patients would wait until their chests were distended with the black body of the tumour, or their eyes could no longer open beneath the weight of sagging, ulcerated flesh, or they could hardly breathe from the fluid in their lungs, before finally yielding to their desperation and coming to my ward. By then there was very little I could do, and what small compassion I had in me at nine a.m. was by close of business little more than a brisk: “You’ve come too late, now you must see to the provision of your children.”

  But the dying will tell their stories. Prostitutes who could not feed themselves, let alone their children, torn from the ward to another night’s work not hours after birthing a child. Mangled limbs crushed on factory floors; women with faces ripped in two by flesh-gnawing sulphur. Children coughing tar from the chimney stacks; bursts of pestilence that swept through eight-to-a-room tenements faster than a man could sneeze. Faced with this, I longed to escape my patients entirely and the reality of their suffering. When I had money to spend, I spent it on bad drink with Plender and flowers for beautiful, unobtainable women, and it was my pursuit of the latter that banished me from England.

  I was twenty-five years old, and wildly and inappropriately in love. Her name was Isabella, and her father was a general who owned most of Wiltshire, her mother a secret reformer who owned most of Suffolk. Consequently, it was decided that Isabella should marry a man who owned most of some other place, a destiny that had been made very clear to her almost from the moment of her birth. Who this man would be was still unclear when we met, I steeped in perfume of ammonia, she seventeen years old and determined to flirt with every man she could before her final imprisonment in marriage. When she deigned to flirt with me, I was at once smitten, and understood that our love was the single most magnificent thing that had ever blazed in scarlet. She encouraged me along with the many other suitors who brought fresh flowers and rotten poetry to her door, but it all fell apart when in a moment of madness her aunt discovered us with my hand upon Isabella’s modestly garbed thigh. When I leapt to my feet with the declaration that I was ready to propose and that a doctor’s life was as noble as it was poor, the older woman screamed, the younger fainted, and I found myself being packed off to Plymouth faster than you could say “eternal devotion”.

  “I’m being banished!” I wailed at Plender, who tutted and said, “Do you have the money to support yourself? If you can support yourself then of course you’re not being banished. Just write back to your father and say you’re your own man and can woo where you will.”

  “I have debts! And I need to buy a ring for Isabella otherwise she’ll never believe in my love!”

  “Well,” he mused. “That does rather muddy the waters, old thing.”

  Naturally, my father won, as he always did. The calling-in of my debts and subsequent penury, the best part of my income having already been spent on Isabella, settled the case. He offered me only one way out: a position, secured I knew not how, as doctor to some pestilential backwater in Natal. Take it, he said, and you will still be my son.

  “Old thing, you know I’d love to help, but I just don’t see it doing any good,” Plender sighed, as I lamented the brutality of this cruel, harsh world on his parlour floor. “Perhaps getting away will be good for you? An opportunity? Make your fortune, strike gold, do well, then come back and sweep her off her feet, that’s the ticket! Besides, I hear that since the whole Zulu thing was settled, Natal is just charming in winter!”

  It was the best part of a month at sea.

  Sometimes we pulled in to restock with coal from sweating, buzzing stations off the Oil Coast, and I sank into a horizon of black trees, limbs slithering into the muddy mouth of the sea like rotting claws, and heard the shrieking of the jungle, and thought of the stories I’d read of Livingstone, and the exploits of the great adventurers. Livingstone had died in the interior, too wretched to move, and was buried in Westminster Abbey; his mission of Christianity, Commerce, Civilisation was bashed into the brain of every British schoolboy with chalk and cane.

  When we rounded the Cape, forcing our way past black rocks and through howling winds sent by the gods to prevent our mooring, Cape Colony was not what I expected. Not blackened swamp; neither blazing desert. Rather a warmer version of English summer, a place where fruits were beginning to grow where once green-grey shrubs had clung to the mountainside; where native men wore striped suits and straw hats and said “God bless you, sir.” Men about their evening repose read Engels, Dickens, Nietzsche, Eliot, Reid, Hardy, James, Gaskell and all the plethora of penny dreadfuls that were washed in, a little dog-eared, from far-flung shores. Beneath a silver sky and over an azure sea came Germans, French, Dutch, American, Spanish and Portuguese, drawn to the tip of Africa by promise of vast land, good cattle, and diamonds. No one mentioned that these lands were already occupied; true occupation meant a flag, a brick wall and a gun, not the rights of those people who’d lived there since before the time of Jesus. There were also bearded, glowering Boers, descendants of those trekkers who had first set out into the wilds when the English came, fleeing one tyranny to create their own.

  In Durban, there were more peoples again. Now to the mix were added Malays, Ceylonese and Indians, brought over in their thousands to work the docks, factories and fields. They weren’t kept as slaves; that would have been illegal. Merely they would not receive a penny of their pay until they had earned back the cost of their passage. On to which cost would then be added that of their rooms and food, the matter of payment never quite settled.

  Nor was the condition of the Bantu peoples within Natal or the neighbouring Boer states slavery, for lo – if a white man killed a black man, beat a black child to death, assaulted a black woman or burnt their property, they would duly be taken before the court of law. There, guarded by white men, they would be judged by their white peers, their plea considered by a white judge, and there might even upon some occasion be a fine passed down, if the case was considered severe. If matters got that far.

  Of course, should a black man kill a white man, it was unlikely that the wandering lawmen of the wild grasslands would have anything to say on the matter. The white men would come with rifle and rope, and before all his family they would most likely torture that same black man to death, leaving his mutilated body for crows. And if, incensed by this, his black neighbours turned against the white and drove the farmers from the land, impaling hand and head with spears hoarded in the secret places of the kraal, those bruised survivors of Boer or English stock would flee to Pretoria, Durban, Kimberley or the Cape and report on the feared uprising of the natives, and there would come marching with drum and Maxim gun all the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men, and the vultures would flock in from mountain and far-off withered perch to feast royally on a spread of flesh.

  Thus all men were free, under God and the law.

  I did not stay in Durban long, but headed inland over the forested, monkey-shaking, mist-soaked Drakensberg. You did not have to travel more than a day before the white-timbered houses, civic stone monuments and military men’s brick barracks gave way to the abyss. Rivers of sluggish summer mud where the fish gasped and died beneath the endless blaze; cragged hills crowned with burnt-out kraals of men and women who had fled before Shaka’s Zulus before being turned and turned again to flee before the Boers who had fled before t
he British, each new migration bringing more ways to kill, more blood between men.

  In some places the grassland was a maze of biting spines as tall as a horse, hiding spitting black snakes, a million bugs that sucked, leeched, sapped and poisoned with their bites, great beasts and growling predators that circled the camp at night. In others it was a barren plain where the dust bit bone shards into blinking eyes, and the only company was the vultures circling overhead. In some places we passed cattle grown to huge, sagged-belly slaughter as they prowled at the river, guarded by boys with sticks and bare feet; in others the creatures of the earth were as the men that watched them, ribs mottled with grey, as if they were turning to chalk from the inside out.

  By this road I came to Kimberley, which in 1884 had a marvel I hadn’t seen even in London – electric street lights, threaded down the main street like a festive dance. The rush for diamonds had brought every kind to this place. Men gestured and hollered in their jabber-tongue for a shovel and a map; wealthy potentates in stovepipe hats bickered about the route of the railway line that would connect Cape Colony to Kimberley to the world, little caring whose territory they needed to travel through for their dream of money. Redcoats eyed Boers with their rifles slung across the saddle, faces turned yellow from the kicked-up dust of their travels; Boers glared at every Bantu they passed, be they wrapped in wax band and animal cloth or dressed in the finest three-piece suit of the Cape, dapper gentlemen with scars on their faces and money in their pockets.

  If Kimberley was a haven of roaring business and booming change, the town where I was to doctor was not. Baker, some thirty miles from Kimberley’s bright lights, was a frontier nowhere for smugglers, miners and thieves. It had been founded not fifteen years since by a man called Baker, and was run now by himself and his three sons, who pillaged cattle from black men and white with absolute impunity, and had built a church because it was pious to pray, and a brothel next door because to err was human.