James Miranda Barry

by Patricia Duncker

  Jobson looms darker in the twilight, but he does not speak until I am already mounting the steps, pulling myself up by the sticky grey ropes threaded through a sequence of iron rings. The steps are slippery, with a long drop on one side. I try to rise up with dignity, but have some difficulty doing so. Jobson is irritatingly sympathetic.

  ‘I say, James, don’t take it so hard.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have lost him. We were there three days. He passed the crisis last night. We have no excuse.’

  ‘There may have been some secondary infection.’

  ‘No doubt. But we should have foreseen that too.’

  ‘Tropical fevers are very unpredictable.’

  ‘But he had been ill at sea for over a week. That didn’t kill him. That anyone manages to survive our farmyard of a hospital is beyond me. We will have to create an isolation ward. There will be other cases. And not necessarily from the same ship. I want buckets of disinfectant by the door and shallow footbaths for anyone going in and out. Either you or I, but not both of us, will take charge. I want to see every single man who was aboard that ship. Are you certain that the quarantine rules were followed exactly?’

  Jobson nods. I accept his invitation to settle on the ropes beside him, while he loads his pipe with coarse tobacco. I outline my plans.

  ‘Check that all the infected linen has been burnt. And I want that building scrubbed down from top to bottom, so that the planks are as clean as a butcher’s block. Make them use salt water.’

  ‘Yessir,’ says Jobson affectionately. It amazes me that he has never resented the fact that I am his superior, his commanding medical officer. I register insincerity and flattery at once. Jobson never flatters or wheedles. He never expects favours. He never presumes on our long acquaintance. His affection is sincere. He pulls me to my feet.

  ‘Good God, James, why are you always so cold? Your fingers are like chilled swabs.’

  We walk home, arm in arm, to our lodgings with the widow in Bridge Street. We can see the lamp refracted through the leaded diamonds in the window of her front parlour. She has dainty little curtains with a lace flounce, which she washes with fanatical dedication every six weeks. The light flickers onto the muddy street and reveals the outline of a ferocious-looking man, waiting by the horse trough. The widow is peering out. Tonight there is no fog. And she can hear us coming. The squelch of our boots in the early darkness betrays us. The widow rushes out onto her step.

  ‘Dr Barry! There’s an urgent message from London.’

  I can hardly make out the features of the man who stands by the horse trough, but I can appreciate why the widow will not even allow him into her kitchen. He smells. The night is quite still, so I ask her to bring a candle out onto the step. While we are waiting in silence, all three of us stand staring at each other. Jobson puffs pleasantly enough on his pipe. I can see very little of the messenger, but he seems to be a colossus. His smell is constituted of old clothes, sweat drying on an acrid unwashed body and a faint tang of excrement. I set great store by my ability to read smells. I am used to the smell of disease. It is a very useful clue in diagnosis. The candle arrives. I lift the fluttering light high above my head, so that the man’s great nose, crowned by a hairy wart, glows red in the night. I notice at once that he is embarrassed and intimidated.

  ‘Well?’ I demand curtly. ‘You may speak now.’

  This is the one thing that the messenger finds hard to do.

  ‘Y-y-y-y-our m-mother, sir. S-s-s-s-s-ent me w-with this.’

  He produces a tormented scrap of paper, still sealed with the emblem of the Miranda family. I break the seal and read the letter by candlelight, standing outside in the cooling dark.

  It is not dated. There is no address.

  My Dearest Love, James Barry is dying and has asked for you. He is very agitated. We cannot calm him. He has eaten nothing for days. Our physician does not expect him to outlive the week. Louisa has been here. He will not see me, but I am dealing with the house. The filth is indescribable. Francisco is expected back within the hour. The funeral arrangements will be quite dreadful. I am counting on you. Come at once. MA.

  I hand the message and the candle over to Jobson. The Widow twitters on the step. I peer up at the messenger. He stutters wordlessly, appalled. A gust of foul breath descends upon me in a cloud.

  ‘S-s-s-she didn’t a-ask for an a-a-a-answer, sir. S-s-s-he said I was to a-a-a-a-company you back. I’ve already a-a-a-arranged horses, sir.’

  Curiosity is already overcoming his awkwardness. He is staring at my uniform. I wave him away in irritation.

  ‘Return in an hour.’

  The widow leaps forward.

  ‘Oh dear, Dr Barry. I hope it’s not bad news.’

  She hopes that it is. She wants to hear details of catastrophes and disasters. Why rent rooms to military doctors if you don’t want dramas? The widow thrives on fantastic tales. Jobson hands them out. She believes him. I nod her sympathy into the distance. She retreats in hushed mutters, back into her tiny glowing parlour, and the messenger recedes into darkness.

  ‘Jobson, don’t take your coat off. We must go straight to the hospital.’

  We squelch our way back down the black street, unable to avoid the horse shit and dank, stinking puddles. Somewhere far off we hear the first cry of the night watch. I tap Jobson’s elbow.

  ‘I must give you my detailed instructions for the fever ward before I go. It will be your sole responsibility. And I shall expect to hear from you every day. If there should be more than three fresh cases before the end of the week you are to notify all the army authorities at once and create a complete cordon sanitaire around the port. I will come back at once, whatever my uncle’s situation. He is an old man. He does not need me to show him how to die. And I want that mad woman released. I will sign the order tonight myself. And one of our men can escort her home to her mother tomorrow morning. To her mother, mind, not to that husband who brought her in. With any luck he’ll be so drunk for the next few weeks that he’ll have forgotten all about her.’

  ‘But she was exceedingly violent . . .’ Jobson objects.

  ‘She certainly resisted being chained to the wall in a shed,’ I snap back. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. But we had two witnesses.’

  ‘Her husband’s friends. If I were a judge I’d have had them thrown out of my consultation cabinet.’

  There is a pause between us as we negotiate a thick lake of mud.

  ‘I’ll take full responsibility.’

  I relent a little and take his arm under mine. Jobson replies with a protective squeeze. He has grown so much taller than I over the years that he always assumes the role of bodyguard. I proceed through the murky streets accompanied by this disproportionate bear of a man, who has all my confidence and affection.

  Jobson is a good doctor, perceptive and sympathetic. But he does not ask himself difficult questions. He is too inclined to give way to accepted opinion. Most of the unfortunates who creep into my weekly clinic for the townspeople, or who are dragged there by their families, think that they have fallen victim to sorcery, magic and spells. Groans are interspersed with maledictions and confessions, all purporting to explain their sores, tumours, fevers and diarrhoea. What is disease? Disease is a form of reprisal. Or is it God’s judgement?

  I find my atheism especially helpful in my work. I am a doctor, not a priest. I believe in hygiene, not morals. My military patients are not permitted to have an opinion on their maladies. I am the officer in charge of their disease. And I will supervise my uncle’s dying. His dying at least shall be achieved with painlessness and grace. I shall escort him politely out of this world.

  * * *

  We are not the only night travellers on the road to London. By midnight the drizzle has begun again and we overtake carts that are barely visible in the darkness. The messenger insists on riding ahead, so that I remain downwind of his persistent stench. But gradually the cold night air disperses his trace so that I
am left to contemplate the bare spikes of hawthorn pushing against our shoulders and thighs. We make slow progress past the farms as our horses flounder in the mud by field gates and turnings, but once we are on open downland the chalk trail before us emerges clear in the wet gloom. The moon is there, somewhere above us, wrapped in a thick veil. We proceed at a brisk trot. The reins are slippery in my hands, the horse snorts and shudders beneath me. We both shrug off the damp, trickling onto our shoulder blades. I feel the creature’s withers ripple and shiver.

  I endeavour to silence my anxieties. ‘If I laid my head upon my pillow without having dissected something in the day, I would think that a wasted day.’ I smile into the darkness, remembering my old teacher’s comment. Well, he can’t reproach me. I may not have dissected anything, but I have not laid my head upon my pillow either. When I am old I will be able to say, with great pride, I was a pupil of Astley Cooper. Sir Astley is a fearless surgeon. I try to follow his example. Yet I am afraid of what lies before me, anxious at what I have left behind, and impatient of this moment of transition. My master’s words are always in my mind. ‘The quality which is considered of the highest order in surgical operations is self-possession; the head must always direct the hand, otherwise the operator is unfit to discover an effectual remedy for the unforeseen accidents which may occur in his practice.’ My entire life has been a perpetual encounter with unforeseen accidents. Remain unruffled, or at least appear to be so.

  What lies before me at the end of this damp gallop through the dark world would ruffle any man. My uncle is dying. He is the kind of man who is as likely to die of bad temper as of one particular illness. He alienates everybody with his opinionated belligerence. That Mary Ann should scuttle over his threshold, bearing sheets soaked in lavender, is little short of miraculous. He has not addressed a civil word to her in years. That he should call for me, however, is not odd. We have learned a mistrustful respect for one another. But I have seen very few men face death calmly, at peace with the world and themselves.

  I am not afraid of death. We have gazed steadily at one another too many times for that. But it is still not easy to watch his arms encircling the young, who cower like terrified animals. Even the old, grizzled with terror, flinch from his grasp, clutching one more hour of pain to their failing hearts. I am a doctor. I stand beside death, measuring myself against him, evening the odds. Sometimes I can prise his fingers loose from the flesh that he so tightly grips. But even as he turns away I know he will return, again and again. He can be held at bay. He can never be defeated. One day he will return for me. No, I will never be afraid of death. We know one another too well.

  But there is someone in that household whom I am afraid to meet.

  I have not seen Alice Jones for two years. She writes occasionally in response to my letters: odd mixtures of formal copybook sentiments and tirades of unorthodox opinion, all laid out like a formal garden, in an impeccable sloping hand. Her letters demonstrate all her social aspirations, yet betray none of her energy, her obstreperous bright life. None of the things which make me love her. I write to her regularly. Every month. I try not to fill up the pages with diseases, commentaries on dissection and moral admonitions. But often I have little else to offer or report. The only way I can express my affection is by writing these long, repetitive letters. Alice must know this, for she maintains the connection, despite the huge differences which separate us now.

  Alice is desperate to escape from her class altogether. She begged my uncle to take her to London. So far as I know he pays her little enough in wages. It is to her credit that she did not want to rise by the traditional method, from the scullery up to the parlour, via the bedroom. My uncle is lecherous enough, but Alice, while she has no time for virtue, has too much good sense to let him do more than peer down her bodice or pat her on the bottom. Alice wants all the trappings of prosperity. She wants fine china and Asiatic carpets. She wants hand-stitched good linen, lace from Cambrai and a shawl, several shawls, from Benares. She wants silver cutlery and a tea caddy that locks. She wants a kitchen with two stoves, one she can walk straight out of once she has ordered dinner. She wants a conservatory with oranges. She wants to travel abroad now that the wars are over.

  Alice does not appear to give a damn about being received in good society, which she never could be, no matter how brilliant a marriage she makes. To sit on sofas beside dowagers with sagging chins certainly doesn’t form part of her plans. No, Alice wants things. She wants objects on tables and shoes in cupboards. She wants wagon-loads of bibelots, hand-painted, engraved and inlaid. She wants to please herself with chests full of new toys. In short, Alice wants to be vulgar and rich.

  Education is a means to this end. Not that Alice is not curious. She wants to know more or less everything I do. I send her a large parcel of books every quarter. And she reads the lot, very carefully, from the Dedicatory Preface through to the Index. Her letters, once she has got past the cautious formalities of greeting, puzzle me dreadfully, for she writes as if we were strangers. Or as if I was a benevolent guardian, interesting myself in a poor relation. Then she delivers brisk reports of her findings. These too make for very curious reading, because her opinions are unconventional. I write back, full of pompous and, yes, somewhat conventional advice. She tells me not to be too sure of myself.

  Alice makes periodic raids on James Barry’s library too. He accused her of stealing Repton’s Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. She produced the book and apologised for borrowing it without permission. My uncle upbraided her roundly, then demanded, ‘What the devil do you want with a book about gardening, woman? You live in the middle of London.’

  ‘I was studying how to construct a maze’ was Alice’s unrepentant admission. She reported this conversation without irony or comment, in her perfect copybook prose. Nobody knows what my uncle made of this. Does Alice already have extensive plans for her country estate, to be laid out in the elegant style of fifty years back? One thing Alice and I have in common is our deliberate, calculated practicality. We are not utopian dreamers. I make the best of wherever I find myself. But my life, my profession, to which I am dedicated, were chosen for me. But is that not true of every son with the good fortune to be born into the richer classes? No one chooses their origins, and, as Alice has always made abundantly clear, she would not have chosen hers.

  I hear her voice, clear in the cold night. ‘No one gets dealt the same hand of cards, James. It’s how you play your hand that counts.’ Her words, not mine. But Alice has not got a drop of honesty in her fingertips when it comes to cards. In fact, Alice does not operate on the principle that games are played according to rules. She plays to win, and will cheat if she has to. But I have always adored her unscrupulousness. It is so bare-faced, so guiltless, and so effective. It is an extraordinarily attractive quality.

  The most fantastic aspect of Alice’s ambition is her complete lack of fear, her confidence in her own abilities and her certainty of promotion. I am told that she has grown into a beautiful young woman. Francisco has seen her. He tells me that she is now much taller than I am, and that she has huge dark eyes and dimples when she smiles. She always did have an especially underhand method of delivering both the dimples and the smiles together upon her unsuspecting public. In the wet chill of dark, just before the sky shifts from black to deep blue, I imagine Alice Jones, standing on the front step of James Barry’s house, in a white apron and cap, and smiling when she greets me.

  The messenger has pulled up at the washhouse just outside the next village on the road and is waiting.

  ‘T-t-t-there’s lights at t-t-the Three Tuns, sir. Would you be w-w-w-w-wanting a hot drink?’

  ‘Yes. The horses could do with a rest.’

  We stumble into the yard. Someone comes to the back door with a lantern. It is too dark for me to see the mounting block in the yard and the innkeeper’s boy witnesses my rapid and ungainly descent into the mud. My uniform does a little work in re-establishing
my dignity. And I am shown into a moderately clean parlour with a good fire. It is half-past six in the morning.

  I hear that there was a hard frost on the downs and that the Alfreston coach was overturned while making the descent. No serious injuries were reported and they had decided to sit it out until dawn. The woman offers me hot, spiced brandy. I see that my fingers are quite blue when I peel off my gloves. She is larger than I am and keeps curtseying, so that she can look into my face. Her own is not a pleasant sight, pock-marked, with a mottled nose, many teeth gone, and those that remain are covered with an evil stain of brown.

  On the window of the staircase the woman keeps a pot containing a little mass of spring flowers. These she had prudently culled to escape the frost, and they are the only things at the inn which do not stink of tobacco and urine. I find the messenger also drinking brandy in the kitchen. He is so closely tucked into the fire that his leggings are smouldering. The colossus leaps to his feet as I come up to him, almost dislodging one of the pots on the range.

  I tell him to rest. We too will wait for dawn. James Barry will not die today. If he is able to swear at Mary Ann and savagely refuses to eat, he is not yet in the arms of the angels. Nor will one hour or two make much difference. I am not superstitious, but I am seldom wrong in my premonitions. I never discount my intuitions. No good doctor ever does. They have saved too many lives.