What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 16
‘Well, call me old-fashioned, but we have put a sternutatory of onions and horseradish up her nose; we have rubbed her gums with a paste of garlic, and poured warm urine down her throat. We have brushed her all over with a prickle-brush, giving her nipples a particularly strenuous application. We have cut open her feet with a knife, and if you like we can chop her fingers off.’
‘I don’t like,’ James cries. ‘Is she to live without fingers if she revives?’
‘She won’t revive,’ the physician returns dryly.
‘And why do you keep saying we?’ James demands. ‘Weren’t you alone with her?’
The physician pulls his shoulders back and sticks his chest out. ‘I mean to imply that I am not alone in my methods, that I always follow standard practice. But if you’re really worried, you can call in that visiting German quack from the hotel down the road. I hear he’s brought his tobacco-bellows with him. Here’s his card.’
James takes the card, sees the insulted physician out, and before the morning is over has arranged for the German doctor to visit his dead mother and perform his special test of life.
The German doctor arrives with a large instrument which he lovingly calls his Doppelbläser. It sounds promising but looks like a journeyman’s tool — a great slab of Teutonic wood with dangling tubes and nozzles. In hilarious English he orders a furnace be brought to the mother’s bedroom. When such an item cannot be produced, he orders the body be taken to the kitchens.
James Montague’s mother’s body is dumped on the kitchen table, and the under-cooks and scullery maids run away in fright, their scaly hands covering their witless eyes. Dr Tod busies himself with setting up his apparatus while his assistant sets a fire of tobacco burning in the stove. When everything is ready, James is ordered out of the room — unless he wishes to stay and see his own mother’s livid dead rump, that is. James exits with alacrity, and we could go with him into the cold passageway, stand with him and watch him wringing his hands over the indignity about to be afflicted on the corpse of his mother, but it will be far more interesting and instructive to stay in the kitchen and witness one of the more disgusting and ludicrous tests of life ever invented.
The assistant turns the corpse over onto her front and hoists her nightdress up to her waist. Dr Tod inserts a nozzled tube into her anus and the assistant then uses a pair of large bellows to blow acrid gusts of tobacco smoke from the stove up the inserted tube into the humiliated corpse. Dr Tod watches carefully for the twitch of a lip or blink of an eyelid — for anything to indicate that she is not stone-cold dead. And if we have fallen to shamefaced sniggering and the conclusion that there is a distinct odour of necrophilia about such depraved practices, perhaps we could employ ourselves more constructively by trying to consider whether, scientifically, a more severe test of life has actually been performed. Whether a corpse is more likely to respond to a smoking enema than to the excoriations of the nipple prickle-brush.
Soon James is called back into the kitchen. The instrument has been packed away, and his mother is lying face up with her hands folded modestly across her chest.
‘Very dead,’ Dr Tod pronounces, ‘no deader corpse I ever see.’
‘Thank you very much,’ James replies. ‘We will bury her as soon as possible.’
‘Forsooth,’ the doctor agrees heartily. ‘She is stinking.’
James orders his servants to take the corpse back upstairs and escorts the learned doctor and his assistant to the imposing front door of his establishment.
‘Ve do from da backside up,’ the assistant informs James confidentially as they walk together. ‘Udders vey do udder vay.’ James is entirely mystified until the assistant, shaking his large shaggy head in great sorrow, says, ‘Da udder vay, da Doppelbläser go into throat of der Scheintod person, try to blow da smoke out da udder end. But vhat happen? Oh dear, oh dear. All der shit explode all over da vall.’
During a suitable period of mourning James is alone in the large house which, though amply heated by an army of servants, dissipates warmth through its myriad windows and doors, its staircases and passageways, its many empty rooms, its cavernous attics and lugubrious cellars. To drive away the cold and his leaden gloom, James devises one grand scheme after another. He proposes to go in for politics or mountaineering; plans trips to Alexandria, Peru and Easter Island; applies to the Dutch, French and Portuguese to become part of possible expeditions to New South Wales, New Zealand or any other place recently discovered in the upside-down side of the world. But indolence and grey despair get the better of him. So he makes do with decanters of claret and a wider than usual sample of the charms of the female staff. Indeed, the sample is so wide there are edges where the charm has worn off entirely — or was never on, delighted though these begrimed, buck-toothed plains are with the master’s philandering attentions.
Afterwards, chastened, James retires to his study and his newspapers. Still more land has been enclosed by Act of Parliament in the Midland counties, he reads. Wasteland is disappearing, but so are the woodlands, and large numbers of rustics are disappearing with them. Owner-occupiers of small tracts have become farm labourers; labourers have become paupers on relief allowances; workhouses are being constructed overnight for those ineligible for such largesse; the common man’s goose no longer owns the common.
No wonder there is such interest in emigration to America. The Englishman of limited means needs land, the American trustee of wanton space needs manpower. James himself requires neither property nor employment, but life in New York or Boston might prove refreshing. Needless to say, he would not be going there to become a Napoleon of finance or some such, he’d be going to … well now, what would he be going there for? Perhaps to witness, over time, the invention of the steamship, insulated wire, false teeth and the revolver. Or simply to avoid the spectacle of the English rabble going the way of the rebellious French?
But James Montague doesn’t go to America. In the end he is too lazy, although his sister in New York keeps pressing him to come in her monthly letters. Consequently he avoids both the English Revolution which doesn’t happen and the American Civil War which does. He also successfully avoids an American wife — a blessing if ever there was one, not because the women are ugly or unrefined or in any other way unsuitable to be wives, but because we are so looking forward to our trip to the southern hemisphere. We are looking forward to being there, to seeing the herds of moa and the solid sea of blue whales and the groves of giant totara. If indeed anyone can look forward while going backwards.
The idea of a wife occupies James more and more often these days. He lies alone on his bed in the claret-fogged waste of the afternoon, the latest ploughed plain — our James is never chastened for very long — having gone back to the coal cellar or the bowels of the earth, wherever it was these trolls hid in the days when he tried to rid the house of them. It’s not that in getting married he wishes to sacrifice variety, or to cure himself of the vice of promiscuity — not at all. Rather, he wants an heir on whom to bestow his large and benumbing property. By making a big effort and getting out more, by going to parties and dances and suppers and all manner of tedious pinky-raising social occasions, James is finally tête-à-tête with a suitable female. He is somewhat surprised at the charm of slow wooing in lieu of galloping seduction — a change is indeed as good as a rest.
During the period that James Montague is courting Annabella, Edward Gibbon Wakefield is born in London, thus ensuring that the background and the foreground of James’s descendants’ lives develop at roughly the same pace, since how can James’s descendants stand on the banks of the river that flows through Britannia if Edward’s relation has not somehow secured the land? By the time James Montague is being pulled dead out of the asylum, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his brother William are in Newgate prison and the former is penning his little gem, The cure and prevention of pauperism by means of systematic colonisation. Well, we all know what happened after that, and if we don’t we ought to, albeit it has been said many a time that the English don’t know their own history because so much of it happened overseas.
Annabella gets with child virtually on her wedding night — we say virtually because who can ever be exactly sure. But we all know what James is like: do we really believe he’d wait? Still, there is always Annabella to consider. Perhaps she was a restraining influence upon his appetites. Unfortunately, we will never get to know her. She will be dead in nine months, just as soon as she has pushed her only son out into this merry-go-sorry world. She will not even know that instead of their pre-planned John, the child will bear the Christian name of the famous potter Wedgwood, whose vast fortune has earned James Montague’s eternal breathless esteem.
Thank God they opened the whorehouses again, James Montague thinks as soon as it is safe to think such things again. At this point, his first wife has been dead for a year; for a year he has been visiting the brothels — well, a little more than a year if the truth be known. Old habits die hard. At first, after his wife’s death, he only went when drunk enough to forget his pained heart, then when tipsy enough to be feeling a little jolly rather than numb. Lately he’s been going when stone-cold sober because his once acute emotions have repaired to the chronic wing and a man has his needs.
He knows there has been a resurgence in syphilis, but everyone says it’s not the virulent strain that came back from the Americas on the purulent pecker of Columbus’s pilot. It’s a much milder disease now: no eaten groins or whole-body scabbing, you only get a chancre and a rash, and the libidinists are regularly cured of it. So he goes to visit the farded tarts and takes what he fancies, foreign as well as local. It doesn’t take too long before he sees the tell-tale chancre. He takes it to the quacksalver, who applies mercury and cleanses his blood with a cordial of sarsaparilla and sassafras. This treatment does the job. His chancre disappears and James is again ready for action.
James Montague stops visiting whores in 1803 because he remarries. He is now forty-eight years old and in need of a little pampering and quite a lot of rest. It’s good too that his infection appears to have gone now, though his second wife will die of tuberculosis well before she has any opportunity to exhibit general paresis of the insane. Unfortunately, as we have seen, James will have that opportunity in spades.
There is no issue from this second marriage, no step-children to complicate the handing down of property and money, although there is a lengthy interlude of squander before the inheritance of James’s parsimonious father actually reaches the bank account of his grandson Josiah’s guardians. And of course the costs of all medical treatments have had to be deducted. Still, the remaining sum is deemed sufficient by the maternal grandparents to take on responsibility for their orphaned grandson.
3
Harvey Montague pushes back his bedcovers and labours to his feet. His enfeebled legs buckle and he must grab the corner of his night table to prevent himself toppling back into the death bed from which he has so miraculously arisen. As he steadies himself, his eyes fall upon the amber bottle that contains his palliative. It sits on the night table with an air of beneficence — no, more than that, truly it is liquid gold. But how can Harvey Montague both hold on and uncork the lid? This is the problem of his remaining life, which just goes to show there are problems right to the bitter end.
Never mind, when he has managed to put on his coat, he will slip his darling into his pocket. On his last journey through the icy streets of London he will find some means of balancing himself and will drink to his heart’s delight. Hand over hand to the wardrobe then, out with his winter coat — no need for a fuss about the striped nightshirt, who will ever see it? It’s a monstrous struggle to put on the coat while holding onto the furniture, but at last it is done. With perseverance a coat can be put on with one hand and arm, but they can never remove a tightly closed lid.
Now the boots — they will have to remain unbuttoned, it is just too much for him — then back to the night table for his beloved. Really he should just collapse with her into the enveloping bed. But no, he has had other loves in his life, and one of them is the city of London. He must farewell her before he goes, he must tread the streets where memories of his hesternal self flit like ghosts, he must … of course, the obvious thing is that he should sit down in his armchair and uncork the lid, why didn’t he think of it before? He has become so confused. If he can rise from the sagging bed he can easily push himself up from the much harder armchair, but anyway his feet have steadied as his head has cleared. Look, he has been standing without holding onto anything for at least a minute. Harvey grasps the bottle with determination, shuffles over to the armchair, drops down into it, is drinking deep of the rivers of nepenthe in a trice.
He does not know how he escapes into the streets. All at once he is out in the rime-frost. He holds up his arms to the sky — is that poached egg the sun? He laughs with joy as the tears run uncontrollably down his hollow cheeks. Then this crazed chantpleur shuffles a step or two and reaches Covent Garden, there to dance with a bosomy flower-seller in a blood-red dress. Another shuffle and he is in Fleet Street amidst the musty old bookshops and crowded coffee houses. One final exertion and he’s in the gallery at Drury Lane, cheering and clapping the ill-fated lovers on the stage before him. But alas, no, it would seem he is lying on the wintry earth: ah, vive la belle indifférence. Now snow like flower petals is falling, sweetly, softly; little cold kisses alight on his cheeks and melt away. He purses his lips for the snow angel’s paralysing mouth …
Harvey Montague opens his eyes expecting to see the searing light of heaven, or at least the velvet canopy of his own bed, for he remembers arms lifting him up and men’s voices. Instead he is surrounded by a blackness of crushing density. It is pressing itself to his face and pinning his arms to his sides. Slowly he becomes aware that he is wrapped in a sheet of some sort — perhaps the physicians have been administering one of their barbarous water cures, although oddly the wrapping-sheet is not soaking wet. He puts up his hands, and from the inside painstakingly tears the coarse fabric from his face, then more easily rips it open to his waist. He is surprised the darkness does not abate. Obviously it is night and the attendants have not permitted him a candle.
With some annoyance, Harvey Montague tries to sit up, but his forehead bangs against some kind of low ceiling. Indeed, a ceiling so low it could be called a lid. The very idea that he is inside a lidded container instantly re-freezes the thawed blood in his veins. Surely this can’t be — what kind of abominable cure is this, to shut a man in a box in the pitch blackness, and without his anodyne which he so desperately needs, the pain of his growth is so merciless. With his hands Harvey Montague beings to feel out the contours of his captivity. Since he can’t sit up he has to complete the job with his feet. This is no mean task, for his feet remain hindered by the heavy sheet, but still, there’s no doubt about it, this is a very small universe. Every limit is only several inches from the outline of his body, and he’s the only one here. He begins to knock loudly on the lid — definitely he’s had enough of this quacks’ joke. As he does so he notices how terribly cold it is and that a very bad smell permeates the limited air of his strait-house.
Harvey Montague suddenly stops knocking, for now he is certain that no one can possibly hear him. Above the wooden lid all sound will be muffled by six feet of solid clay; above the clay there is frozen grass; upon the grass there is a headstone, one of many in the large snow-filled churchyard; around the churchyard the mists swirl and the ravens crunk, and the cold opaque air is only infrequently filled with the dolorous sound of church bells.
In the hour or so of remaining oxygen — not that Harvey Montague is privy to this interesting scientific fact — will he bang his forehead bloody and wildly heave himself about into unnatural postures? Will he scream and gnaw his own fingers down to bloodied stumps? Who will ever know? There will never be reason to dig him up — the combined effects of hypothermia and a startling overdose of liquid opium will not be widely known for a very long time. Besides, his son James is right now philandering with the slatternly but huge-breasted wife of the sexton. So the sexton is not attending to his caretaker’s duties but is creeping about the neighbourhood, trying to catch in the act the man who’s plugging his property.
Harvey Montague now knows that nothing will cure him. The growth in his belly is beyond the knife, potion or prayer, and he is becoming incapable even of crawling down to the scaffold where cure by corpses is given out gratis. Not that the clammy touch of a corpse has helped him at all — he’s been palpating the fingers of the dead for a long time now and still his tumour has flourished. Harvey Montague lies in his bed during the long day sipping his paregoric, and the one miracle left to him is that the pain does ease. He drowses in a bubble of pale golden light, he drifts on a painted ocean in a tropical balsamic breeze, he hears the alluring ululation of naked cinnamon maidens. But when he is awake his movements are slow and his breathing shallow.
Harvey Montague is startled to find one of his daughters by his bed. She is holding a book, is reading in a silken tone about the South Seas. ‘Have you heard enough, Father?’ she inquires, then takes up her embroidery before he can form an answer. She is embroidering a stark white shroud — ah no, it is only a tablecloth. He stares at the crown of her bent head, at her corn-yellow hair and the alabaster skin of her austere parting, and asks irritably, ‘Why are you here? Why are you not in New York with your mother’s relations?’
‘I told you, Father. There’s a war.’
‘There’s always a war. Why should that prevent your being wed?’
‘They’re fighting us, Father. The American colonies are fighting us. They want to be free of us.’
Harvey realises she has indeed told him this before. He is not losing his memory then — it is but a brief moment of forgetfulness. He subsides into a sensation of almost religious peace. Such moments are increasingly rare. He is now so quick to become agitated that the first thing he does upon sitting up is shake his amber bottle. If the volume is low he roars at everyone within earshot. Half a dozen servants set off at a trot to the druggist, half a dozen doors bang shut behind them. Behind his counter the apothecary must deduce from the servants’ witless clamour that they constitute but a single customer.
