James Miranda Barry

by Patricia Duncker

  ‘There they are! Look, Barry, look!’

  Two small, shaped sticks jabbed and curled in the eddies. Barry’s face glowed a little from running. His coat now bore a dark rim of mud. Jobson looked down at the boy’s tiny blue knuckles clutching the iron railings and suddenly noticed the size of Barry’s hands. Dr Fyfe had stressed the advantages of a small, delicate hand for their bloody profession. The grey wind caught the sticks, pushing them out into midstream. The light flickered over the river as Barry’s stick lunged forwards, blocking the other’s path.

  ‘You’re winning,’ cried Jobson, generous in his enthusiasm.

  Barry peered down into the cold grey waters, feeling the wind on his neck, the damp in his boots.

  ‘But yours hasn’t got stuck. It’ll get to the bridge in the end.’

  They paced the empty gravel walks. The greenhouses were locked. The marsh-plant garden which was, in fact, a university botanical experiment, had been subdued to a barren flat patch of mud with small yellow signs bearing Latin names. Nothing broke the surface of the dark, tilled earth. Nothing sprouted alongside the evergreens. The two boys hunted assiduously for signs of life, getting colder and colder as the afternoon closed in. Dusk gathered around them, slate grey at a quarter past three. The city sounds ebbed. A solitary bird shrieked against the approaching dark. They stood, flinging pebbles into the pond, watching for ice at the edges as the temperature dropped, but the circles of cold still formed their eternal rings, pushed outwards, and vanished.

  ‘I’ve got to go.’ Barry was sinking into the sadness of winter afternoons.

  ‘Pity.’

  They walked towards the gates.

  ‘Would you like me to teach you how to box?’ asked Jobson, as they stared at each other before parting.

  Barry was so small; for his own safety he should learn how to fight. For a second the grey eyes gave nothing away. If Jobson expected enthusiasm from this child he had learned to admire, he never got it. Barry weighed every proposition with sinister cautiousness. Then the boy spoke, peculiar, quaint and courteous.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Jobson. I should like that very much.’

  He offered Jobson a frozen hand.

  ‘Done.’ Jobson shook hands heartily. Then Barry was gone, invisible almost at once in the grey sinking light.

  * * *

  James Miranda Barry made a note of what he had done that day.

  Rose at 7 a.m.

  Read a treatise on the liver until 9 a.m.

  Breakfasted with Mary Ann and Louisa. Quarrelled with Mary Ann about her remaining in Edinburgh.

  Attended lectures and transcribed notes.

  12–1 p.m. Walked the wards at the lying-in hospital with Dr Fyfe.

  1–3 p.m. Dissection in the anatomical department. Did Jobson’s share for him too. Jobson contrives to mislay one of the feet. It is discovered in a bucket.

  3–5 p.m. Dined with Jobson at his lodgings.

  6–7 p.m. Attended Dr Fyfe’s midwifery lecture. Attended anatomical demonstrations.

  9 p.m. Supper with Louisa and Mary Ann. Made it up with her. It is decided that she should speak to Dr Anderson and see what can be arranged.

  Worked till midnight.

  * * *

  Mary Ann did a sum. She added up how much it was costing to keep Barry in surgeon’s fees, lecture courses and medical instruments. The boys had to register as surgical pupils and pay separate lecture fees for every course they attended. Barry had spent eight guineas on books in one month.

  ‘Look at this, Louisa,’ she cried, waving the figures in the air, as if the bailiffs had already been summoned.

  ‘Hmmmm.’ Louisa checked all the figures reflectively. ‘Thank God we’re not paying. Write it out neatly and send it all off to David. The child really is doing extraordinarily well. Something of a relief, isn’t it? Otherwise David would begin to think that this was becoming an expensive joke. Do it tomorrow. Put out the lamp, Mary Ann. Come to bed.’

  * * *

  There was no effective heating system at the lying-in hospital. A large fire with a cauldron suspended above the flames was perpetually bubbling in one corner of the ward. But it made no difference. The air remained chilly and menacing. Everything was ruthlessly clean. The corridors were vaults of polished cold. Barry’s knuckles emerged blue from his cuffs, his hands clenched tight as he pattered along at Dr Fyfe’s coattails, avoiding the little shower of powder which descended from the bouncing pigtail. The patient was a lady of quality who lay groaning in a little alcove, surrounded by curtains. They could hear her breathing in great hoarse gulps as they approached. The boiling water and lukewarm towels were ready. The nurses hovered. The waters had broken, but the lady had failed to cast her child into the world. The baby was coming, coming. Her breathing accelerated into a yell. Barry clenched his fists even tighter.

  ‘Well, madam,’ said Dr Fyfe briskly, ‘it looks as though we shall have to give Nature a helping hand.’

  Barry observed the patient closely. The most remarkable aspect of her case was that she changed colour completely every ten minutes, from a deathly white as her breathing ebbed, then, as the pain of her contractions increased, she was translated into a deep shade of burgundy red. Dr Fyfe took her pulse. He listened to her heart. Then he made her cough, so that he could listen to her lungs. He felt her brow. She was sweating profusely with wasted effort. Her sweat-stained lace robe was now speckled with wig powder. She smelt like a cowshed. Jobson, clutching Barry’s elbow, murmured that she was a very fine lady, and very rich. Dr Fyfe refused to visit the great houses, no matter how much he was offered. Let them come to me, was his commanding refrain. And come they did. The fine lady began screaming. Dr Fyfe pounced and seized her in a wrestler’s arm-lock.

  ‘Come along, madam. Get up.’

  The students stood aghast. This was unheard of and probably fatal. The nurse in charge of the ward tried to intervene.

  ‘Doctor! I hardly think . . .’

  ‘Out of my way, woman. Barry, take her legs.’

  Barry seized the fine lady by her ankles and planted them on the floor.

  ‘Now,’ commanded Dr Fyfe, as if they were confronting the garden broad walk, ‘we shall take a turn about the ward.’

  She left off screaming as they began to walk, her nightgown trailing behind her, and began a deep, rhythmic, undulating groan.

  ‘That’s it. Better at once, eh?’ reassured Dr Fyfe. The procession began to tour the long arched hall.

  ‘Barry, get a shawl for her shoulders. Jobson, refill the gin jar. Nurse, have the water and the scissors ready. We shall be there in less than twenty minutes.’

  He thundered commands and his troops took up their battle stations. The woman faltered.

  ‘Steady as she goes,’ cried Dr Fyfe. ‘One step at a time.’ She changed colour again as the blood rushed to her face.

  ‘Yell your head off if it helps,’ Dr Fyfe shouted above her screeching wail of pain.

  ‘Barry, take her other hand. Mind out, madam, he’s got hands like an Eskimo.’

  She gripped Barry’s tiny arctic fingers and screamed. They marched three times round the ward, then –

  ‘Oh God, it’s coming! It’s coming!’

  She doubled up.

  ‘Don’t hold back, woman. Push, push, push. Blankets, one of you! Quick.’

  They swept the woman through the curtains and hurled her onto the bed.

  ‘Push! Breathe! Scream! Push! Breathe! Scream!’ yelled Dr Fyfe, as if he too were giving birth. ‘That’s it. Breathe. Push. Push. Push. Exhale – push that child out with your breath. That’s right. Knees. Hold her knee up, Barry. Bravo. Give me a son, woman, push –’

  The baby’s head was already in the doctor’s hands, and already dusted with powder, like an ancient rite of baptism.

  ‘Push, woman, push!’

  Barry grappled in a medley of flesh, sweat, blood and powder. The event was ferocious, ungainly, undignified and profoundly dramatic. Dr Fyfe’s hands
, which had been scrubbed white, immaculate, were now covered in blood that was pouring over his cuffs.

  ‘Scream! Push! Breathe!’ he yelled. ‘That’s it. That’s it, madam. We’re home. We’re there. We’re home! – Let me introduce you to your first son.’

  He was grappling with the fleshy cord. The creature was bloody, reddish-blue, and wizened. It entered the world, screaming. The sexual organs appeared to be enlarged, unnatural. Yet the woman’s face was extraordinary. The afterbirth shot out, like a ghostly slime. She hardly noticed. There she lay, her genitals mangled, bloody and exposed, her huge breasts ugly and unbound, sweat trickling into her hair. Barry gazed at her face, which was pale, relaxed, ecstatic with relief and joy. Dr Fyfe laid her child upon her breast, wrapped in a warm towel. She kissed the doctor’s bloody fingers and he looked down at her with satisfaction, as if she were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  ‘There you are, my girl,’ he cried, triumphant.

  Jobson clutched Barry’s hand and burst into tears.

  * * *

  Jobson began teaching Barry how to box in a converted shooting gallery, which was as cold as the dissecting room. Mary Ann protested. Barry insisted. Louisa sat with her eyebrows arched and her lips curled.

  ‘Well, don’t take all your clothes off, child,’ she commented, weary with arguments, as Mary Ann gave in.

  Jobson stripped down to a singlet and breeks. Barry wore his shirt under his waistcoat, but undid his collar and studs. Both were small boys, but Jobson was still a good head taller. Barry looked like a well-wrapped mutant. Nobody bothered to watch them. There were other young men who presented a more entertaining spectacle.

  The old shooting gallery had a creaking wood floor, solid stone walls in peeling whitewash and lime, and great rooflights, covered in cobwebs. Jobson’s cousin ran the establishment. He was a robust, red-faced man of forty with blackened front teeth, which he attributed to drinking down the granite in his home town of Aberdeen. There was a rudimentary gesture towards washrooms at the back of the gallery, nourished by a sequence of pipes and barrels fed from an iron tank on the roof. The tank froze solid for a week or so every winter. Once the downpipes had split inside the building and flooded the gallery. There were still high-tide marks left along the walls.

  The gallery echoed with different sounds. Two other men were boxing in a medley of thumps and grunts. On the far side there was a fencing class. Four young men in a line, white ghosts, their faces masked, formal as nuns, moved forwards in a sequence of lunges, twists and arabesques, pushing against phantom opponents. The fencing master was French. He had a tightly corseted figure and a very fine moustache descending elegantly on either side of his white lips. His face was covered in a strange white powder, like a clown, which made his ears look obtrusively red. He rapped out his commands in French. The young men pranced before him, their weapons shimmering, all at exactly the same angle.

  Barry kept his arms firmly across his body, raised, defensive.

  ‘You musn’t just retreat, man,’ cried Jobson, pounding his ears. ‘Attack! Look, like this. Quick jabs. Left. Left. Are you left-handed?’

  He danced backwards. Barry was excellent at dodging quickly. He bounced back and forth, a tiny freak on springs. His rapid breaths showed white in the dusty air. But he never came close enough to place a decent blow on Jobson’s chin or ribs. They took a puff on the bench, steaming like horses. ‘What’s the matter, Barry,’ demanded Jobson, puzzled. ‘You’ve usually got plenty of aggression.’

  Barry looked at his strangely magnified, bandaged fists and said nothing. Ever since they had begun their regular tour of the lying-in wards, James Miranda Barry had become increasingly uneasy. The cadavers procured for the medical school by the occasionally glimpsed, much-imagined resurrection men were white, empty and purely horrible. He looked down at their pitiful shrunken nakedness with indifference. Their past lives and lost histories, whether a story of murder or starvation, were not his concern. But when he was faced with a living woman’s bodily abandonment in the unselfconscious and bestial act of giving birth to monsters, Barry recoiled into himself. For this child, courage had become a daily necessity. All his life, he had watched, as if from the inside of a closed jar, the adult world of sensations, passions and desires, unjudging, shut out by his innocence. Now he was shut out forever by the very fact that enabled him to move, to act, to meddle with the privilege to which he had not been born. He watched the women, heavy as animals, bred to give birth, again and again, year after year, until they were either exhausted or dead. They heaved and screamed, terrible in their unloveliness, doing something they needed no training to do. Like day labourers, they flung forth their achievement, red and shrieking or pale, blue and cold into the waiting world. In the public hospital many of them died. Barry had closed the eyes of one poor woman whose unclaimed body was doomed to a mass grave.

  At first he had hated them, repulsed by their smell and greasy, stringy hair. He had marvelled at Dr Fyfe’s tenderness and bitter grief when one of his patients, mother or child, fled from him to God. Barry had seen the doctor bowed upon his knees, his face buried in the bloody sheets, praying and weeping like a child. It was another man, surely, who hacked at the cold stomach of a corpse on the dissecting table, demanding of the pallid Jobson what would be found in his stomach were he to mount the assault there.

  Barry feared the living, not the dead.

  He was no longer at home in his stunted body. This unease pervaded his gestures, his gait, his habit of taking stock of his surroundings, as if he feared the approach of an assassin. He shrank from Mary Ann’s embraces. He hated to be touched. He wrote long stilted letters every week to General Francisco de Miranda, addressing him formally, as if they had never met, and detailing his activities with copybook precision. These were his military reports from the front on which the overall strategy depended. From Louisa he kept his distance, and he referred to her as ‘Miss Erskine’, or ‘my mother’s companion’. He mentioned no other relationship. The students jeered at him occasionally, then begged him to help them with their notes or drawings. He was guarded in his façade of perfect impersonal manners. He never drank in public. He confided in no one.

  James Miranda Barry had cold hands and cold eyes. Only Jobson dared to take his arm or thump him on the back.

  Barry now realised that the physical intimacy of boxing was beyond him. He looked at Jobson ruefully, breaking the long silence.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be any good at this. Would you teach me to shoot?’

  * * *

  They walked back to Jobson’s rooms. Barry felt uncomfortable, prickly with sweat turning cold on his back.

  ‘Have a tot.’ Jobson rummaged with the lamp. His rooms were always warm, filled with reddish glows and a huge fire. He had a landlady who mothered him. Reluctantly, as if he regretted the loss of its protection, Barry dropped his overcoat onto a chair.

  ‘Not much for me. Here, I’ll pour in the hot water myself.’

  They settled on the rug, backs against their chairs, their fingers almost in the flames, muffins balanced on the toasting forks. The two boys were intent as medieval devils in the apocalypse painted on the church mural.

  ‘Copied your notes? Have some more whisky. That won’t taste of anything.’

  Jobson was at ease. He leaned back, his mouth open. Barry noticed a light prickle of hair on his upper lip.

  ‘I say, Barry, when we’re at the hospital, do you get – you know what I mean – are you ever afraid or excited?’

  Jobson wanted to talk about sex.

  ‘No,’ said Barry. ‘I often feel a little sick.’

  ‘You’re a cold fish, you know,’ said Jobson, after a minute or two.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Mmmm. No nerves. And no feelings either.’

  Barry suddenly became very alarmed. He straightened his back and said, with devastating formality, ‘There are some subjects, Jobson, which must never be broached between us.’r />
  Oh Lord, thought the other boy. Now I’ve offended him. Then he looked at the pale face, ginger freckles and red curls, and saw all the mortifying seriousness of a child. He was overwhelmed with pity. And took an even greater risk. Drawing both of Barry’s still frosty hands into his own, he spoke with dreadful, embarrassing sincerity.

  ‘I owe you a lot, Barry. We shall in any case always be friends, won’t we? Whatever happens?’

  Barry retrieved his hands from Jobson’s claws as quickly as was decently possible and said, from a now unreachable distance, ‘I hope so, Jobson. That would give me great pleasure.’

  That night Barry dreamed that he was lying in bed, with Dr Fyfe bending over him. The good doctor’s wig was askew and the powder was descending in showers. Well, Barry, menaced Dr Fyfe, plucking at the sheets, let’s see what you’ve got to give me.

  Barry awoke screaming.

  * * *

  Jobson began teaching Barry how to shoot. Barry’s cold eye and steady hand proclaimed him a natural marksman. Within a month he was a crack shot with a rifle and had made quite extraordinary progress with a set of duelling pistols.

  * * *

  Even this far north, the hawthorn was fully draped in bridal blossom when Mary Ann and Louisa left Edinburgh by the eight o’clock coach. It had been arranged that Barry was to lodge with Dr Anderson until the end of his short summer term, after which he was to spend the long holidays on Lord Buchan’s estate. They stood, all three of them, taking a last look around their gaudy rooms. The trunks, books and hatboxes had already been taken down. The rooms were becoming anonymous, girding themselves to threaten the next occupants.

  ‘Well,’ said Louisa, putting on her gloves, ‘thank God it’s over, and we’ve escaped from that wallpaper alive.’