It is a long time since James has been in Munro's study. For several months Munro has forbidden the servants to come in,
afraid they will disturb the delicate disarrangement of his papers. By the various chairs in the room are stacks of books, and beneath the chairs the light picks out forgotten glasses, empty bottles. On the desk, sheets of paper, heavily blotted. Beside the sand tray is a pair of spectacles with one of the lenses missing.
1 would ask you to sit, James, but I fear this is a conversation best conducted upon our feet.'
'To the point, sir.'
Munro inhales deeply. 'The point, then. It is this. You have offended me. You have abused me. Done so in my own house. Done so for years. I know the blame is not entirely yours. I have a measure of it, as does my wife. You were strong; we were weak, deplorably so. I have earned your contempt. Well, sir, I know you do not care for speeches. You are a man of action. A remarkable man in your way, ay, and a very considerable surgeon . . .'
'The point, sir!'
Munro is sweating heavily; it shows through his coat, dark continents spreading from beneath his shoulders. He says: Your frolic here is at an end, James. You will give me the satisfaction of meeting me at the earliest possible instance. In the meantime you will shift yourself from under my roof. I shall arrange for someone to call upon you tomorrow. I doubt it is the first time you have been engaged in an affair of this kind so you will know the form. That is all.'
James bows. 'You will make a generous target, Mr Munro. I bid you good night.'
It is dusk when, the following day, James returns from Marshfield. The farmer was dead. Turning into Grand Parade he spies Mr Osbourne standing alone by the balustrade. He rides up to him. Osbourne greets him dryly, says: 'I cannot dissaude him from this course. However, it is still possible that an apology and an undertaking never to see Mrs Munro wiU be sufficient.'
James says: *I have been challenged, sir. Whether or not I see Mrs Munro is neither here nor there.'
'If you kill him, Dyer, you will be taken up. Have sense, man. It's over. You are young. You might go anywhere and prosper. It is not so with Munro. You have left him nothing to lose.'
'You are to act as his second?'
*I cannot with honour refuse him.'
'And this is an affair of honour, is it not?'
'It is.'
'Then you have come to tell me a time and place where honour may be satisfied.'
'Lansdown. Follow the road to the top of the hill. I shall be waiting. Tomorrow morning at six. If one of you is fatally hurt the other will have a day's ride to get clear.'
'And how are we to kill each other?'
*I shall bring a brace of pistols.'
'To be loaded in my presence.'
'Naturally.'
'Then we have no more to say to each other.'
He rises at five, takes a light breakfast, and leaves written instructions for Mr Timmins, factotum and dresser, informing him that he shall not be receiving any new patients that day.
The city is mostly empty as he rides through. A pair of dazed young men returning from a night of gaming and drinking. In Queen Square, a herdsman leads his flock of goats. A milkmaid sits on her upturned pail and plaits her hair. An ordinary morning, a hint of autumn in the air.
James has been out twice before, both times in London, both times with fellow students over quarrels he has forgotten. On the first occasion the pistols were faulty, tampered with perhaps by one of the seconds. The next occasion, James's ball lodged in his opponent's shoulder. There were a dozen other students
with them in the garden and no shortage of volunteers to cut the ball out. Afterwards there was a brief hullaballoo, then the matter was dropped. Two young men of no importance quarrelling in the garden of a tavern was of little concern to anyone.
On Lansdown Hill he has a sudden glimpse back over the city, the houses huddled around the abbey, their chimneys drifting smoke, the river tranquilly signalling with its light. For the briefest moment it occurs to him that he might lose it all, that he will kill Munro and have to run - to France perhaps, or Holland. He mentally shrugs. He is not interested in shooting Munro, bears him no animosity. Certainly he is not fighting for Agnes. Munro is welcome to her. When he kills Munro it will be for Munro's folly, his audacity in issuing a challenge. What did he think he was doing? That absurd scene in his study! James should have given him a sound kicking then and there and had done with it. So much tedious form in these affairs.
Osbourne steps into the road ahead, raises his cane. When James comes up, Osbourne says: "You are alone?'
'I am as you see me, sir. Where is the party?'
This way.'
He leads James through a break in the trees and through an old stone gateway, a broken crest on one of the pillars.
James says: What is this place?'
Osbourne says: 'It was a garden once.'
Munro and another man are waiting at the far end beside a tulip tree. Osbourne walks down to them, then returns with Munro. James dismounts. Munro says: 'Good morning, James.'
He has the same steady manner, the same despairing calm.
Osbourne says: 'I beseech you both to give up this most unchristian business. Even at this late hour you may reach some . . . accommodation. How do you say?'
'If Mr Munro will withdraw his challenge,' says James, 'I am content not to shoot him.'
Munro says: 1 cannot withdraw, sir. The offence is too strong.' James shrugs. *I hope for your sake, sir, your hand is steadier with a pistol than it is with a knife.'
Osbourne signals to the other man who comes forward with a box. Osbourne opens the box and loads the pistols. He holds them both out to James. James takes the one from his left hand; a good-quality flintlock: blued octagonal barrel, gold touch-hole, checkered grip. A sliding safety catch on the lockplate. In the off position.
Munro takes the other gun; they turn, walk a dozen paces. Munro calls: 'One moment.'
He hands his pistol to Osbourne and then strips off his coat and waistcoat. James says: 'You need not worry about cloth in the wound, sir. I shall be aiming at your head.'
No reply. Munro takes the pistol. Osbourne walks away. The morning is very quiet.
Osbourne says: 'Are you prepared? . . . Fire at will.'
Munro's shot follows almost immediately. A flash, a puff of smoke, a report that must have echoed for miles.
James raises his pistol. He feels extraordinarily good this morning. Braced. Capable of anything. He does not think 'I shall kill Munro', or 'I shall not kill him'. He raises his pistol to the target and discharges. Munro spins round on his toes and plunges into the grass. Osbourne runs over to him. James calls: 'Is he dead?'
Osbourne says: 'I do not think so.'
James goes towards them, curious to see what manner of wound he has made. He looks down. Osbourne is cradling Munro's head on his knees and wiping the blood from his face with a handkerchief that is already crimson. Munro has his eyes closed but is visibly breathing. The middle of his face is a mess. Bone and torn flesh.
James says: 'We shall need to procure him a new nose. Take him to the house. I shall attend to him there.'
'Attend to him?'
*Ay, sir. You have not forgot my profession?' He drops the pistol on to the grass beside Mr Osbourne, bids them good morning, and leads his horse out from the garden.
When Agnes Munro sees them carry her husband into the house, she asks: 'Is James hurt?'
Osbourne shakes his head, and as they manoeuvre the stricken man up the stairs, mutters: 'It's you they should have shot.'
The wound prospers. James dresses it daily, peering into the cavity of Munro's head and making a number of sketches he later has engraved. Neither man speaks. Munro speaks to no one for fourteen days, and when he does, his voice is as mangled as his face. Curiously, the only person who is able to understand him is James Dyer. Munro's friends look on, perplexed, frustrated. There is no remorse in James's manner, no resentment in Munro's. Bet
ween them is an odd complicity, peculiar perhaps to lovers, or to those who have offered each other death. Agnes is excluded. She wanders the house in a raggedy dress, complaining to herself and living on cup after cup of expensively sugared chocolate.
The nose is fashioned by a watchmaker in Pierrepont Street, working from James's designs. It is light, made of polished ivory and attached to a pair of Munro's spectacles. There are several fittings before James is satisfied. Munro sits up in bed and examines himself in the looking-glass. When he hands the glass back there are tears in his eyes.
James says: 'It will outlast you, sir, by some considerable margin. You shall be outlived by your nose.'
Munro replies: 'Show much ish shertain. A vegy ig-genious construction. I ham grateful to you, sher.'
There is no irony. He reaches out and shakes James's hand.
For three months, while Munro's friends look on, the two surgeons act like an old married couple. It is not that anyone suspects James of making up to Munro. James Dyer continues to be precisely himself: hard, headstrong, ambitious; hugely efficient. And there is not the least evidence of any tenderness towards Munro, any remorse. Yet they are often seen walking together, sometimes in conversation, more often in silence. They walk at dusk, aimlessly about the city.
For a time, the sight of them hoving into view is enough to make people step out of a shop or coffee house to gawp at them, Munro's nose is discreetly pointed out to children and visitors. There is a great deal of speculation as to whether he wears it at home, or in bed, or ever mislays it, or if it ever falls off his face while he is adjusting the buckle on his shoe. Does it pain him? What if he takes a cold? Munro himself seems remarkably at ease with it, now and then reaching up to stroke it.
Agnes grows portly and faintly mad, hauling Chowder about, staring malevolently at strangers she suspects of uttering slights. The sight of her evokes some pity and some satisfaction. More than one preacher adumbrates her case from the pulpit. Leaning out, they slap the air with their Bibles. God's justice! God's wrath!
The hands of the congregation curl round stones of air.
And then the preachers have their feast. Candlemas, 1767. The streets perfumed with coal smoke and frost, the night sky richly hammered with stars. James has been at Grand Parade, trepanning a young man kicked in the head by a horse. The young man survives
the drill and is handed back to his friends, feeble, bewildered, but very much alive. A woman, immensely pretty, kisses James's hand, despite the spats of blood still on his fingers. James carries their money to his strong-box in the basement, dons his coat and sets off for the Orange Grove.
In the drawing room he finds Gummer by the fire, peeling a bun from the prongs of a toasting fork. They look at each other, say nothing. He rings for the servant. She is engaged now to a journeyman baker in Trim Street. James orders supper, eats it off a tray in the drawing room. Overhead he can hear Agnes mumbling, interrogating the emptiness of her room. Gummer goes out on some louche or venal assignation. Chowder curls before the fire, shivering and farting.
Towards midnight, James retires, goes up to his room, pulls on his nightgown and nightcap and lies between the sheets, waiting for sleep. But sleep does not come. He waits, impatient, unused to those phases of sleeplessness familiar to insomniacs; the sly hallucinations, the endless settling of the bones, the beating of his heart vibrating through the whole bed. He loses any sense of time, hears the watchman's voice but not the hour. Two o'clock, three?
He hears a noise. It is not loud. Somewhere on the ground floor. Something falling. Gummer perhaps, tripping over a table leg in the dark, or Dinah, full of noisy caution, sneaking in on her return from Trim Street. Yet some instinct warns him that the sound is less innocent, that it comes as the small report of calamity. He swings out of the bed, stands in the dark, listening.
He feels for the tinder box he keeps beside the bed, lights a candle, takes a cane for protection, and goes on to the landing. If there is some unlucky whoreson below filling his sack then he has picked the wrong house and the wrong night. But even as he descends the stairs, cane at the ready, he does not believe in it and is unsurprised to find the downstairs rooms cold, unmolested, empty. All except Munro's study, where a dim light ripples from beneath
the door. And there is a smell here, as if Munro - or someone -were burning cloth.
When James opens the door he sees two things: a fire, not yet serious, where a candle has been knocked on to the carpet; and Munro, stood in the air in a corner of the room, a chair on its side beneath his feet. Munro's coat is folded on the armchair by his desk. James throws it over the flames, stamps them out, opens the window. When the smoke has cleared he examines Munro and satisfies himself that the man is dead. Those stories of men reviving on the surgeon's slab after being hanged, how interesting that would be! Munro, however, will not be reviving this side of the Last Trump.
He considers cutting him down, but the man's girth is intimidating and the rope at his neck is taut as a ship's hawser. Munro is in no hurry. Morning will do. James takes up his candle and notices upon the desk, next to a half-dozen envelopes sealed with black wax, Munro's spectacles and ivory nose.
James does not attend the funeral. He is seeing a patient, a woman with puerperal fever. In James's world, people would be dropped into lime-pits or, like Grace Boylan, bundled through a gun-port with a shot at their feet. One moment here, the next invisible; nothing but sea. None of this dressing up, this lugubrious to-do.
Officially Munro has died of heart failure, but the truth leaches out and within a fortnight, from Taunton to Gloucester, the word is that Robert Munro has hanged himself, or some say shot himself or swallowed poison, and that it was his wife and that rogue Dyer who drove him to it. Everyone, it seems, had seen it coming.
Three days after the funeral Agnes is hissed at as she walks through the abbey courtyard with Dinah. She does not go outside again for a month.
A week later, James arrives at Grand Parade to find all the windows on the ground floor smashed. Mr Timmins meets
him at the door, explains that he cannot continue under such circumstances and must therefore, respectfully, regretfully James thrusts him out of doors, sweeps up the glass, has the glazier at work inside of an hour.
He is shunned. His practice slumps. Soon only those past caring what the world thinks, whose minds can travel no further than the relief of their pain and who hold like a precious secret the reputation of James Dyer, not as a man but as a surgeon, continue to come.
Those whose condition is less insistent, who still have one foot in the stream of the world, go to Mr Crisp, who is able, or Mr Farbank or Mr Boas, or any of the dozen other men who can flourish a certificate and wield a knife, and who have drunk damnation to James Dyer. They have their wish now. He shall feel the pinch soon enough. Then they shall see.
March. A shower of stones is flung at James's back as he walks to the Orange Grove after dark. The same night the new windows at Grand Parade are smashed.
April. Four new patients in the whole month. Dinah and the cook give their notice. Replacements are hard to find. Agnes takes to her bed, lies among the sour linen clutching a silhouette of her late husband. James does not visit her. They live in the house as strangers.
The hissers, the stone-throwers, grow more audacious. James, dozing in the saddle on his return from seeing a patient in St Catherine's valley, opens his eyes to find the road barred by four men carrying staves, their faces masked with scarves. One mns forward to strike. James kicks the man in the head, sends him tumbling. The others come up; one seizes the reins; they vvresde James on to the road. The fight is short, almost silent. James has no compunction as a fighter, no fear. He lashes out at eyes and throats, but four is too many. They overwhelm, pound him with their staves. Vaguely, he is aware of
their leaning, their whispers, their hard breathing. Then he hears them running. Then nothing.
When he comes to it is Ught. A yellow dawn. A fine rain. A crow wa
tches him from the edge of the road. When it sees him move it hops into the air, flaps heavily away over the glistening valley. The horse is sheltering under an oak tree, the horse as still as the tree. Very slowly, James pulls himself into the saddle. There are not many to see him on his way home, yet enough for the news to spread: the bastard's black and blue! A modicum of justice for old Munro.
When Gummer finds James at Grand Parade next morning he shakes his head, laughs, then later on brings food and wine. The welts, the gouges, the imprints of boots on James's back, legs, arms, blossom, then melt back into his skin. He tends his own wounds; compresses, needle and thread. Within two days he is able to hobble about with his cane. In four he is quite recovered, sees the few patients who remain in the inoculation chambers and the pox ward, operates on a child's putrid tonsils. There is no search for his assailants. He does not think of them. None of this matters. He is James Dyer. Even his enemies call him remarkable, brilliant. He does not suffer. But for the first time in three, four years, he opens the old orrery and comforts himself with the sight of it, and the memory of himself at Blind Yeo, a boy convinced of his greatness.
The planets do not fail him. On the fifteenth day of May 1767 he receives a letter from Dr Fothergill in London.
My dear James,
Though you choose to forget your old tutor, he does not forget you. I take an old man's pleasure in following the progress of my more promising students, and I am reliably informed that you have put your talents to good use in the West Country. I understand you have made inoculation against the smallpox, that most vital of measures, something of a speciality.
Mr Pouschin, the Russian Ambassador in London, has made it known that the Empress Catherine is desirous of having herself inoculated as an example to her people, that the scourge of the disease in her kingdoms may be abated. To this end she has required her ambassador to discover an English operator, our people being renowned throughout the world for their skill and knowledge in this matter. Several names have been put forward and I have taken the liberty of placing yours among them. I trust you will not take it amiss.
Ingenious Pain Page 18