What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 24
If you are the man you will try to press on. If you are the woman you will try to go back. If you are a miracle and a foreigner anything could happen. It’s pleasing to note that if the man does not press his case too speedily, and the woman does not make a teasing and false retreat to gain time — but for what, perhaps to allow her body to catch up with her mind — then the miracle and the foreigner can join together in a mutually satisfying rhythm. It would be coarse to describe what follows blow by blow: we all do it, all know how it’s done, how many descriptions are needed?
On the other hand, if it were Charles Montague rubbing ointment into Valentina’s shoulders and directing his hot priapic breath into her ear, and stamping his satyric hoofs, who knows what we might soon find it amusing to describe in turgid or flaccid detail. There’s no crueller perspective in this world than over the shoulder of a labouring man who’s dribbling down a woman’s neck. But it won’t ever be Charles, because when Valentina loves someone, she really loves him.
The early-morning fog is thick and yellow, and all that can be seen of the cloaked people who move through it are their swinging lanterns. Valentina hurries to the Exhibition Hall where nearly all physicians and surgeons in Oxford are gathered. But don’t assume they are quiet and thoughtful or that the air is clean — no, there is a most unholy racket, and the suffocating stink of a hundred cigars and the fug of wet worsted.
Valentina is made to sit on a small stage in front of them while the head physician present at her revival puffs out his chest in preparation. He outlines the situation amid much murmuring and some shouting: some of the older men don’t like his interpretation of things — perhaps they think she should be exhibited in a zoo or a circus. Then he tilts her head up by the chin and shows off her neck, nearly healed now, and says, ‘You should have seen it before, gentlemen, and now here she is large as life. She didn’t leave it a moment too late. We were about to cut her up like a mutton roast.’
There is much laughing at this point, but also more shouts of objection. Valentina looks around and waits her turn to speak.
‘What do you attribute this miraculous recovery to?’ a young surgeon bellows from the back.
‘Well, we don’t like to see it in terms of miracles,’ the physician explains.
‘What do you like to see it in terms of then?’
‘My theory is that death is never instantaneous. That the spirit leaves the body only slowly.’
‘You mean like a long defecation?’
‘Here now!’ someone at the front objects.
‘They say that girl was dead for a day and night at least. I hope I never have a twenty-four hour shit,’ the surgeon, unchastened, perseveres.
‘You’ll get what the good Lord gives you, filth!’ his detractor shouts.
‘Excuse me,’ the physician interrupts, rapping a mallet on the lectern. ‘As I was saying, the spirit leaves the body but slowly, and obviously this can be arrested, even reversed, under the right circumstances. It is my opinion that with the proper research — vigilant autopsy near and at the point of death and immediately after — doctors can hope to understand, then control, this reversal. Gentlemen, death can be conquered!’
Valentina turns to look at the physician with her mouth agape. The man has taken leave of his senses. A silly expression really: it is his rational thought he’s taken leave of. Vigilant autopsy near the point of death? How near and how large the point? Perhaps they will take to murdering every felon to see if they can stop him from dying!
The crowd is now roaring, some with approval: they most certainly want to be in the vanguard of this wonderful new development. But some are furious: the man must be an atheist or worse if he thinks he can snatch bodies back from God. Of course, if there is no God there is no snatching, but outrage rarely thinks this coherently. This physician, they fume, must be one of these new materialists, one of these mechanists! We always knew that one day they’d want to become God themselves. Once belief in God’s balsam has been done away with, it will be conceited physicians like this one who’ll arrogate to themselves the right to choose whom to breathe life into. We never heard such arrogance! But some appear to be angry for entirely different reasons. What, they wonder, are we going to do with all the un-dead? They’ll be clogging up the towns and cities, spreading crime and disease. Don’t assume these malapert doctors will have fixed their dead patients’ disgusting propensities and pestilences.
‘Who wants to conquer death anyway?’ Valentina hears someone yelling above all the rest. ‘It’s the only sweetness that was put in this miserable world. Don’t go dragging me back from the grave so I have to spend even more time listening to you lot.’
Amidst the racket the senior doctor smiles beatifically. Clearly this man has spent many sleepless nights pondering the significance of Valentina’s resurrection. If a mere man can turn death on and off, he has certainly cheated God of one of his most feared prerogatives. Goodness, the mourners only needed a doctor present when Jesus was crucified and everything could have turned out very differently. Look, he could have said to the credulous, here’s the spill, here’s the flame, put the two together and voilà! Anyone can do it — well, anyone with a medical education in Latin from Oxford or Cambridge, that is. Let’s not be part of that radical group that is setting the standards too low. Did you hear they do their medical studies in English at Edinburgh — it’s enough to make you shudder.
The physician raps his mallet again.
A tall man at the front stands up. ‘Well, what tests have you done on her?’ he asks when the hall falls quiet — a matter of contrast only, since there is a constant low excitable hum and much coughing and rustling of paper.
‘None as yet. I have had difficulty conceiving of a suitable one. Clearly it’s no use weighing her brain, since we don’t know its weight before. And anyway this fetish about weighing has become absurd. I see no problem with the soul being weightless.’
‘Perhaps her soul went to heaven and yours jumped inside her to avoid being housed in the body of a raving heretic,’ someone else bellows. ‘You should see if she’s the same inside as the rest of us.’
The doctor holds up his hand. ‘Yes, indeed. But I rather think we’ll have to wait till she’s dead again.’ He wets his lips greedily. ‘What won’t we be able to do then, gentlemen!’
Valentina continues to stare at the physician incredulously. This man wants her dead, no doubt about it. His reputation is going to be erected over her grave. She catches his eye and beckons him over. ‘I’d like to speak,’ she tells him.
‘What are you going to say?’ he asks.
‘Nothing much,’ she replies. ‘Only that I never went to heaven or hell. But that that’s beside the point. The real point is what you do with your life. And can you do anything with your life — is it something that can be used or only used up?’
‘Stop babbling, girl,’ he orders, and walks back to the lectern.
‘Pure existence,’ Valentina shouts, leaping up so abruptly that the chair clatters over behind her, ‘that’s all an ordinary mortal can enjoy and understand. And every religion is against it. Every religion sins against life!’
Several doctors in the front row jump to their feet and make a rush for the stage.
‘You can be sure the prophets of the future will deny the existence of God,’ she shouts before the men have managed to grab hold of her. ‘Your God Himself will have sent them because He is so disgusted at what belief in Him has done to His beautiful creation.’
The front row have tackled Valentina and have now got her on the ground. The hall is in pandemonium. The back row are breaking chairs and ripping down curtains; the physician is banging away with his mallet on the lectern but nobody is taking any notice.
Lucky that England does not burn people for their opinions, or no doubt Valentina’s second death would be of the slow and hot variety, but as things are, many of the doctors still seated between the first row and the last simply assume she is temporarily deranged as a result of extreme circumstances. The second row roll their eyes and move to pull the front row off Valentina, who quickly stands up and smoothes her rumpled dress. Then, before she can be trussed up in some restraint and dosed with boiled hellebore, Charles Montague grabs her by the arm and drags her out of a side door, thence to relative safety inside the medical students’ private suites.
‘Why can’t you behave yourself?’ he shouts once they are behind closed doors.
‘Why can’t they?’ she shouts back.
‘Because they are right and you are wrong,’ Charles bellows. There is always someone ready to take over when the popes, priests and witchdoctors are done.
‘If what I experienced happened to someone else as well, would you believe it then?’
‘Two crazy people?’
‘You know very well I’m perfectly sane.’
‘I’m sure anyone else would have done the decent thing and gone straight to hell.’
‘Well, we’ll soon find out, won’t we?’
Charles narrows his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m in correspondence with a man who died in the same way. Well, nearly.’
‘Nearly died or nearly the same?’
‘It was the same method. But I’m still not sure how dead he was.’
‘How dead? Are there degrees of death?’ Charles asks scornfully.
‘Well, clearly there are, aren’t there?’
‘So who is this other lunatic?’
‘He was a sailor on a Dutch sailing ship that went on a voyage of discovery in the South Seas.’
‘And did they discover anything apart from sea serpents?’ Charles asks sarcastically.
‘Yes, they did. Staten Landt.’
‘Which is …?’
‘Um, a place near Antony Van Diemen’s Land.’ Valentina waves her hand around. ‘Sort of down and under.’
‘So this luckless swabber died there?’
‘Oh no, his boss, the skipper, a man called Abel Tasman, tried to kill him for disobediently leaving his quarters in some other South Seas island. But then Abel Tasman was punished himself. He was suspended from his position and had to pay the man compensation.’
‘When exactly was this?’
‘1649. Year before last.’
‘And this poor sod you’re in correspondence with, he can read and write English can he?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ Valentina admits, ‘I haven’t received a reply.’
‘And how did you find out about this?’
‘From the newspaper. Then I wrote to the governor-general of the company that employed Tasman.’
Charles suddenly bursts out laughing. ‘So you wrote to the head of a rich and powerful company, then you wrote to an illiterate Dutch sailor in English? And you are expecting a reply?’ Charles Montague laughs so much he has to lie down.
3
As soon as Valentina has been fully revivified, young William Petty scurries off to write up his medical notes. They say these notes are soon to be made into books, and already there’s a famous writer who wants to do Petty’s biography. No doubt Valentina will end up as little more than a footnote if such a work eventuates, but a footnote is enough to corroborate any story, so the young medical students tell her, laughing unashamedly. And if she is not in William Petty’s biography, she will be in that of another, for the students are all bright and rich, and anyone with a pen who has to earn his living by it is just waiting for any one of them to do something extraordinary.
In Valentina’s opinion, the most extraordinary event of their lives has already happened, but biographers see no moral lesson in a woman being restored to life without the intervention of saint or treatment. So a footnote she will become. It’s more than a lot of people get: in her former life she would have been most impressed. She didn’t know it then, but she certainly does now, that history’s footnotes can be much more remarkable than the text.
How this remarkable footnote first managed to engage the fencing instructor in conversation as he circled the gym is anyone’s guess. Suffice it to say some young women are extremely wily beguiley: best watch out for them and stand clear. But it isn’t long before the instructor steps outside for some cool air between bouts and Valentina is always waiting for him.
Valentina patiently converses with the reeking students, and out of the door comes that elegant foot — a foot that does not strike the ground flat, a foot that knows where its partner is and avoids it assiduously. The foreigner seems ill at ease outside the domain of his unassailable superiority. He shrinks — definitely he’s not as tall as she first thought, and listen to that grammar. Valentina notices the medical students are nearly polite, could be mistaken for being polite, but they’re cool rather than sycophantic. With their sort, grovelling is the only sure sign they believe they’ve met their social superior.
‘How many more classes do you have today?’ Valentina asks the instructor.
He mentions a number she doesn’t catch because she is distracted by the way Charles Montague is looking at her. As if it has just struck him like a bolt of lightning that she might not want an Oxford man for a husband. Not a doctor, of course, don’t even think it. Nor one of these reliables who pour smoking liquids from one tube into another in the labs, nor the man who, after operations, mops up congealed blood and sweeps up the gristle. Valentina keeps her expression neutral, thinking, I certainly don’t want any of you lot. Just how many centuries will it take you to learn to be both masculine and seductive?
It starts to drizzle. The students make their farewells and hurry off. The instructor says he has to go back in for the next class.
‘You could come to my house for a drink later. There’s no one else there,’ Valentina says boldly as he turns to go.
‘Do young women entertain men unchaperoned in England then?’ he asks, looking shocked. Or that is what he means to say, even if the words don’t come out quite like it: none of his sentences ever sounds quite like English. But Valentina always perceives the perfect sentence above the jumble.
‘No,’ she says, ‘young woman in England don’t. But …’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m not what I seem.’
‘You’re not a young woman in England?’
‘I’m a miracle.’
The instructor laughs. ‘Anyone who says that must be. It’s miraculous anyone could be so silly.’
‘You don’t believe in miracles then?’
‘How could I not? When a self-proclaimed miracle is standing right in front of me. But now I have to go in.’
‘Please come. I won’t disappoint you.’
‘Perhaps not. But I will most certainly disappoint you.’
He turns and steps quickly through the door. Valentina makes her way slowly home. The rain soaks her: let it. Miracles can get a little wet without shrinkage. She’s not disappointed, not at all. His rejection is only a feint whether he knows it yet or not. In the fencing between the sexes Valentina is the provost, not him. He has been simmered in poetry for most of his life, so no doubt he will go down on his knees one day and recite a verse with his hand over his heart, then they’ll see who gets to drive the blade home.
A wind gets up. Valentina is soaked through to the skin. Miracles might not shrink but they can feel cold and uncomfortable, and they can dislike the idea of contracting any illness that provides the young doctors with even more reason and excuse to cluster round. She takes temporary shelter in a doorway. While sheltering there it’s impossible to keep her thoughts from straying back to the fencing instructor. What is it about this man that she finds so attractive? He’s certainly temperamental, loses his temper publicly and without shame, and the next minute he’s laughing again: this kind of behaviour is a strain in the short term and said to be a bore in the long. But by the time he first exhibited these tendencies it was too late. She had already made up her mind.
Which is to say, her mind had nothing to do with it, if by mind we mean some tool that objectively assesses the qualities of people, allotting them their proper weight in the scheme of things. Perhaps it was her eyes that decided — but what did they see that they haven’t seen before: hair, eyes, cheekbones, chin, nothing out of the ordinary. Where’s the clue to help us understand what the eyes covet? Perhaps it was her ears. A voice can convey so much — place of birth, manner of upbringing, level of intelligence, sense of humour. Even if its owner speaks a foreign language, intonation and expression give much away — and God save us if a man should start to sing, then we’ll truly know if he’s among the elect. In Valentina’s first life what was a beautiful singing voice but the incarnate voice of the angels, and in this life the sound that consoles her for the loss of them?
But anyway, how fascinating is his controlled aggression in this town of effete students with their entourage of giggling girls in pinnies. That’s what these poor men have to put up with: pretty little things who’ve been taught to blush instead of speak. What’s going to happen to these pretties when they finally discover what they’ll be subjected to — the recurrent agony of all the daughters of Eve. It’ll knock the blush right out of them.
The house when she finally gets home is cold. She lights the fires and surveys the dust that is again building up. Valentina is not entirely convinced miracles should do housework — is this what she was born again for, to endlessly clean and polish? There’s a spare room on the ground floor, completely empty of furniture, and she resolves to use it to make the housekeeping easier. She quickly gathers up all the objects that are cluttering up the sitting room and which are not of any immediate use — the newspapers William Seaton gives her, heavy clothes that are still hanging where she flung them in colder weather, wrappers of various sorts from the market — and dumps them all unsorted into the empty room. She closes the door and dusts off her hands.
