Bedlam (5 page)

The sailor did die, not long after. By that time a story was abroad that he’d survived those first days on the island by eating the flesh of his drowned shipmates. How anyone could learn this without the man himself confessing it, I don’t know. Perhaps it came out in a final delirium. For my own part, I have always doubted whether the cannibalism was the cause of the look or only the story that those who knew nothing had fabulated to
explain it. As I remember it, the look was that of a man in a condition of triumph, who even now was coming heroically through, and yet at some unfathomable cost. It was the look of one who’d always understood that if he ever made it back alive, his exile would be over, yet here it was, only beginning, and all his triumph one long farewell to human regard. This was why it was a look at the same time and in equal measure proud and abashed.

But there was something else in it—or so I thought at the time. Something especially for me, or that it asked of me. But what?

Perhaps I’ve made too much of one thing or another I saw in John Haslam on my very first encounter with him. And maybe it’s true I didn’t see much that first time, and memory has enriched itself since, like a crude sketch grown unaccountably to a Dutch portrait. Perhaps it’s this habit of writing things down. When Jamie first disappeared into France, I learned that without him to talk to, if I would keep hold of my life as I actually lived and knew it (as knowing Jamie had taught me I did live and did know it), then I must talk to paper. After the travails and loneliness of the day I must retreat to my corner window at the turn of the stairs and scribble into the night while the nonscribblers of the dark city dream the dreams that nourish them another way. I am not a dreamer but a gatherer-in. My fear is of the daily vanishing of all experience down the drain of Time. In this age of cataclysm, storm, and madness, with monarchy, nobility, and Church seeking to destroy the heroes of equality—the David Williamses and the Tom Paines and my dear husband and the French male population on the march in a dream of freedom—I struggle to hold on to what matters, and at the end of the day and in the small hours, what to me matters has little to do with rank or no-rank or who has more power and who has less but with the things that won’t
change when everybody has the same. I mean how people are with each other and what each suffers and why

I was taught these things by the way my mother was with me. She knew childhood is a dangerous illness you must be nursed through by love. Without love you die a child, not knowing life, not knowing death, not knowing the first thing that matters. Without love your guide will be every bully and fool in the playground.

As for Haslam, a purpose may be served in setting down these reflections about him now, if only to indicate what kind of man I seem to be up against. Not a cannibal, of course, but one for whom, from certain angles, all seems more than possible, glory is more than achievable: achieved. Except the matter keeps turning.

As I rounded the corner, John Haslam’s odd wave still visible in my mind, I could hear the man himself—as Jamie had done earlier, and me after him, and many others over the centuries I am sure—shouting forlornly through the bars of that asylum,
For God’s sake, somebody open this door and let me in!

Home before ten o’clock, I was relieved to find our servant Justina had opened the shop for business. Though cool in her manner toward me, she’d cleared the counter, dusted the shelves, swept the floor, and put the sign out, forgetting only some of the lights. Jamie had been in Bethlem but a month, yet for lack of his daily efforts the wholesale trade he’d patched together over the previous ten was already unravelling. We needed every customer who wandered in. In the note I’d left Justina, I wrote JAMES large, underscoring it. Beauty, not reading, being her strong suit, I hoped she’d recognize the name and gather where I was. When not flouncing by in a sulk she loved nothing more than to please me, and being popular with our customers and knowing it, why would she not open the shop? Because, while she professed to pray as fervently as I did to have Jamie back with us, she was sunnier when it was just us two. But yes, she did open the shop, yet her look, when I thanked her for it, too much resembled those I used to receive from her when Jamie’s old friend from his Camberwell days, Robert Dunbar, was often on the premises with Jamie away on the Continent. It was a look that said, Why must
he
be here?

I sometimes think I have too much hope of people always to admit to myself the danger they pose. Justina Latimer, now that was danger—yet how far would she need to go before I recognized what it was I harboured, and acted?

Robert Dunbar had been danger too, I suppose, but was too transparent and compliant to seem so—and necessary. It was he who helped me when I took the business retail. An eager, practical man adept with hammer and saw, he appeared at my door a year after Jamie disappeared into France. It was he who built for me, his labour
gratis,
the counter and dividing walls necessary to turn the office into a shop. That job finished, he stayed on to help me open the books. By the time he was competing with Justina to be first to greet the customer when the bell jingled, it was evident (if I would only give him a sign, the one he was getting from everybody else telling him his old friend wasn’t coming back) he’d next be exercising his ingenuity in my bed, his own by then a mat on a treadle we kept under the counter he’d built. With Robert Dunbar’s muscle and penetration I might have clawed my way back to wholesale. But my experience has been that while pride, desire, and the compromises of security are quiet enough temptations when met with singly, in concert they make a noise on the conscience. Finally I could not betray my husband, even if he was mad and missing in war time on the wrong side of the Channel.

It was some while before Robert Dunbar was able to grasp my fidelity for the plain dull thing it was, convinced as he was (and so like a man) my reluctance had something to do with him and therefore, if only I would tell him what it was, could be fixed. When at last, by saying it in as good as so many words, I got him to understand the difficulty did not extend even so far as his existence, the shine for Robert went off the do-gooding life. One
mopish day, before he would take up his treadle and walk away, he made a fumbling, I suppose despairing, attempt upon the virtue of Justina, who welcomed his advances long enough to eviscerate one, and make an energetic start on the other, of his testicles with the razor I thought he knew she always carried.

Hardly was our poor crippled Lothario packed off to Guy’s Hospital and Justina’s tears dried than her mood, which had been in eclipse for a year, rebounded as cheerful as it was in the interval between Jamie’s first disappearance and Dunbar’s first showing his face. That’s how it stayed until the morning last March when the shop door jingled, and Jamie, back from three years imprisoned in France, staggered in like a buyer for the dead. I was too concerned for my husband’s health, not to say overjoyed to have him with me, to take overmuch notice when Justina’s mood passed again into eclipse. But in the ten months Jamie was back with us, I would sometimes catch on her face an expression of disgust with me that I should sink to being a
dirty puzzle
in my own bed with my own husband. This I ascribed to youth’s queasiness at the animal, as well as to the callous violations of a child-bride by her late husband Latimer (mysteriously stabbed to death in his bed when she was out of the house not ten minutes for bread for his morning tea, as she explained to the police).

But I never saw Justina’s mood so black as that morning I arrived home from returning Jamie to Bethlem. Mistaking it at first for sympathetic concern, I was amazed when, after I thanked her for opening the shop, she turned from me and coldly asked “what Mr. Matthews wanted in showing his face again” and said “she hoped this time they’d keep him—” She then stole a glance round and, seeing me angry, quickly added, “So he’d have benefit of treatment from expert practitioners—”

This was insolence from a maidservant with a politic coda, and I can only plead it was the first time I ever heard anything like it voiced so brazenly by this one. Gazing at her in my shock, I thought,
As a child, Justina, you were ill-treated by a homicidal parent and when not much older by a savage husband, yet have turned out decent enough, if moody, in many ways intelligent, with good impulses, only slow to know what they are and not much skilled in the articulation of them. This reticence has left you hostile to men and what you call their
performing snails.
But perhaps forgiveness by me this morning, and one day heartfelt love by a good man, might assuage the bitterness of so much cruelty and loss in your life—

This was as far as I had got in my earnest delusion when the shop bell jingled, and I watched a girl as relieved to be saved by it as I was to watch her trip away.

On Monday I tried to see Lord Erskine, a mad-eyed republican Scot famous for his unsuccessful defence of the second part of Tom Paine’s
Rights of Man.
Though Jamie’d told me Erskine had agreed to act as his counsel, I soon learned either this was fantasy or Erskine had changed his mind. I couldn’t get past the man’s secretary, who said his Lordship was no longer taking criminal cases, and when I mentioned Bethlem, added nastily, “—and never did charity for lunatics.”

The small hours of Tuesday and Wednesday I spent tossing and turning in a struggle to believe I had delivered Jamie back into the best medical hands in the kingdom, which would soon enough return him to me. It was true what Jamie had said: If Bethlem hasn’t cured them after a year and deems them a danger to no one, they’re released, whether the family likes it or not. So there was no
reason to believe I faced more than eleven months’ wait, in which case our child (if we were so blessed) had a chance of growing up secure in a loving household of London tea dealers, whose head was only at times of exceptional distress prone to pluck a privet-leaf and call it Orange Pekoe.

As, however, to the mysterious circumstances of Jamie’s admission to Bethlem: What if this was no ordinary lunatic case but a political one, meaning he’d be held as long as who-knew-who wanted him held? But how to set about finding who wanted what, when I had no idea what Jamie had done (if it was more than crying
“Treason”
in the House) or was thought to have? For that matter, was it for new transgressions or old?

Meanwhile, life must carry on. The staff in the shop now just us two, those were desperate days. Nauseated by worry, exhaustion, and perhaps something else, I had no reserves of patience with Justina, who at times behaved with such sullen insolence I must dismiss her, but then where would I be? My fear was any increase in demand on my energy and time and I would crack. Alert to my fragile condition, Justina chose a thousand small ways to punish me for the crime of wanting my husband back. So she would linger two or three seconds longer at a task before moving to greet a customer, or silently wipe away tears that were somehow my doing, or when she burned the pudding apologize so vaguely as to imply it was only to be expected given all she now had to do. These little needling things reminded me, if I didn’t already know it, how selfish what some call love can be.

Wednesday dawned warm (for February) and foul. Leaving Justina pacing crackly as a cat, I made the walk that by now I knew pretty well, this time carrying a basket of goods I imagined Jamie would appreciate: warm stockings, clean linen, a half-dozen oranges,
a block of chocolate, a plate and knife, a toothbrush. My basket also contained two books, the first the second part of Mr. Paine’s
Rights of Man,
which (Lord Erskine being unsuccessful defending) was rare, having been burned. “The flames,” I can remember Jamie once remarking, “is where the English consign the Rousseau of British democracy.” I didn’t think he’d read the second part, but I knew well his enthusiastic opinion of certain sentiments in the first, as well as those in Paine’s pamphlet
Common Sense,
written against our King and nobility. The second book in my basket was Jamie’s hero the republican David Williams’
Letters on Political Liberty,
which I did know he’d read but thought he might like to have by him, as Williams (a Welshman like Jamie’s father) had once been instrumental in his first mission to Paris.

At the gate, as I half anticipated, the animal Bulteel made a great show of knowing nothing of my visit and would see me off, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Well before I could make a scene, he turned away and wrote me out a ticket, instructing me to wait inside the gate for my guide, the hospital steward, Mr. Alavoine, who—whether by arrangement or chance was not clear—was standing only a few feet away, in conversation through the bars with a dissolute lascar. This Alavoine I knew was the monster of depravity known to Jamie as Sir Archy, and I must say, with his greasy ginger-yellow locks and his ginger-white grizzle and his tiered black hat pushed back high on his degraded brow and his dirty red coat and his breeches buttoning between the legs, he showed himself as unwholesome a human figure as I ever met with in my life. When at last the horrible fascination he exerted on me palled to mere disgust, my attention reverted to the situation I found myself in.

How strange to be at last inside Bethlem’s gates. If you’ve seen them, you’ll know they’re adorned left and right on top by the sculptor Cibber’s giant reclining statues of Melancholy and Raving Madness. Directly behind and above where I waited, it was Raving Madness, naked and head-shaved and shackled forever. Forever about to draw breath and bellow forth his rage. As I looked up at him and at Melancholy, all drooping and woebegone, verses about them from a poem I once read sprang into my head. “That seems to whine, and this to roar,” something, something, then,

Ingenious toil that could devise

One foaming fury, one as cool as ice.

A Jew at the gate the week before told me Raving Madness was modelled on Oliver Cromwell’s porter Daniel, a giant who went insane and was lodged at Bethlem and used to preach from the window using a Bible given him by the actress and mistress of Charles II, Nell Gwyn.

And here in front of me, no bars intervening, was the building
itself: a stately edifice vanishing left and right into the dingy fog. At the invisible far ends, beyond the east and west pavilions and beyond them the newer, incurable wings, are grass plats where the patients are said to walk in fair weather. Being high-walled, these cannot be seen from the forecourt, and on that day I could not even see the walls. But straight ahead the central pavilion was only a little enshrouded in murk. Above the main doors of it are set pilasters worthy of the architect Wren, and in the pediment over them I could just make out the royal arms, enwreathed with carved flowers. A-top this rises an octagonal turret with a three-dialled clock, the whole thing crowned by a handsome cupola.

The structure is noble enough, or was once, but dismal, and it wasn’t only the bars and boards on the windows. The Jew also told me this is not the original Bethlem, which stood four hundred years just east of Moorfields, outside Bishopsgate, but rather the one that took its place, hardly more than a century ago. Unfortunately, Moorfields was always a fen, and the builders, after they filled in the garbage dump the City ditch had become along there, rejected any effort at proper foundations, setting the bricks a mere few inches beneath the floor of a basement sunk only three feet into the rubbishy soft ground. Imagine the Tuileries Palace thrown up on a levelled trash pile, and you have a pretty good picture of Bethlem at Moorfields.

From the rear, which is to say from London Wall, on the other side, you see the effects of a century of sinkage: the gaping fissures running from ground to eaves. But from inside the front gate that morning there was nothing visible to account for so strong an impression of decay. The whole fabric was black with soot, but in London anything is soon that. With Bethlem, it’s more a case of what’s audible: the clanking, screaming, roaring, and wailing that
emanates—or suddenly falls silent—within. But why should it be surprising when associations of sound contaminate those of sight, or human misery have power to inflect iron windows and make a horror of stone?

At last the obscene banter between my guide and the lascar grew desultory, yet still they lingered, though they knew I waited, because I heard them joke about it. Finally, with a look of impatience, such that you’d think he was the one kept waiting by me, the steward turned in my direction, and that was when it struck me how bizarre it was to see breeches that buttoned between the legs. It was something I had never seen before in my life and don’t expect to see again soon, and it so rattled me that when, in an accent I never heard before, he said something like, “You have got your ticket, have you?” I was in a state approaching mental deafness. He could have been a citizen of Nova Zembla, addressing me in Zemblan.
Yho hahv g-haht hyohr t-hehk-haht, hahv yho?
He, meanwhile, not looking to see whether I had my ticket or no, or indeed caring whether I understood him or if understanding knew that I was meant to follow, went sloping away across the forecourt.

From my first glance at him at the gates, the judgment
low-minded blackguard
had fixed itself in my brain, and ten minutes’ eavesdropping on the melange of smut and jibes that passed for conversation between him and his friend had done nothing to dislodge it. Here was a being that I did not want to know had power over any creature on earth, let alone the one I loved more than life itself. Yet he might have information I needed, so I picked up my basket and made haste, and coming abreast of him I asked, “Why was my husband admitted here?”

At first he pretended not to hear. I was about to put the question again, when the head began a slow rotation. As it came, it
dragged behind it a gaze so recalcitrant it was not until several seconds after the arrival of the face that I felt the scorn of its scrutiny. At last, in that uncouth accent, he said, “Why, because he’s mad.”

“But who put him in here?”

“You are mistaken if you think I am the one to ask that of,” was the eventual reply, spoken in such a slow, queer way—
yho hahr mihz-tuh-heykhahn hehv yho t-hinkh—
with provincial affectation so outlandish, that its primary purpose seemed to be to treat as an imbecile anyone who’d expect anything of a response uttered in so grotesque a fashion.

“Who should I ask? Dr. Monro?”

This query issued in a spasm of mirthless amusement before he said something like,
Yahz, yho hahzk hem, lahz. Dho theht.

Now we were at the door, not the main one but the penny gate the porter and his colleague had come reeling out of. Here in niches left and right stood ancient wood figures of young beggars, male and female, life size, holding great black jars with slots for money and above them the inscription,
Pray remember the poor Lunatics and put your Charity into the Box with your own hand.
The figures were painted and shellacked, the paint rubbed away by the strokings of visitors at their noses, nipples, and crotches.

And then it was down a miserable narrow passage and up a few stone stairs into a large hall with several doors leading off it, streaky windows, and cherub-festooned tablets listing benefactors. Here it smelled like a refrigerated lavatory, with an under-stink of greasy cooking. Here the dirty daylight scarcely intruded, and the squalls and jinglings of the inmates resounded less muffled than they did outside.

“Haslam you’re to see, is it?” the steward ascertained over his shoulder, adding, “Because I have no bloody idea where he is.”

“We have an appointment,” I piped, the ninny with her basket, tripping after.

“He ain’t in there,” he volunteered, dismissing with a flick of his hand a door on his left as we passed down the hall.

Here were iron gates on both sides. Beyond, a winding staircase, which we climbed to a landing on the first floor. It too had iron gates on both sides. The one on the west, as I knew, led to the women’s wing, which had exposure to the warmest and most salubrious winds. The men were eastward, being better able to endure the bleaker air.

Spying a horseshoe set in the floor on the west side, before the women’s gate, I asked my guide what it was for.

“To guard against witchcraft,” he replied. “Or keep it in. They’re all witches through there.”

As I looked about me, I could see that though by its façade Bethlem might pass for a palace, on the inside it was genuinely a madhouse, and I don’t just mean the bars and malodorous damp and dull interior clamour (now seeming to issue mostly from the back of the building, below us, though also through the iron gates). I mean the fractured walls and the short-timbered, gaping floors. I mean how every surface was out of true, how there was nothing here sound, upright, or level; no bonds, no ties, no securement between the parts. I mean how you could see daylight around the window frames and glimpse the main floor through fissures in the boards of the first. This was not just an old building settling into the ground, it was a building that was never built right in the first place. One of those just thrown up, as if it didn’t matter, they were only lunatics, and now it was falling down and mattered less.

“Should we look in the court room?” the steward asked me in his inimitable fashion.

Not knowing what an assent to this question would mean and thinking confusedly the court room was where the Bethlem subcommittee would be meeting (though it wasn’t Saturday), I said we could, but not wanting to interrupt anything added, if he liked he might also take me direct to my husband, I could see Haslam later.

This suggestion meeting with no acknowledgment, I next found myself standing behind the steward as he tried a door at the back of the hall, but it was locked, and so he knocked, and this producing nothing, he sorted through the keys he kept on a ring inside his jacket. Why he would think if Haslam was in a locked room he would want it unlocked when he didn’t answer a knock, I don’t know. In any event we went in, and it was a clean bare space under an ornamental plaster ceiling, with a large table and many wood chairs scattered here and there as if by a gust of wind. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I saw over one of the two empty fireplaces a three-quarters portrait of Henry VIII, all bejewelled, with the fat-arse, purse-mouth cat look he always wears. Otherwise, arms and portraits I didn’t know.

“Haslam must be where he’s usually at,” the steward said, giving me a knowing look.

“Where is that?”

“In’t Dead House, opening heads.”

“Please,” I said. “Take me direct to my husband.”

“And who would that be?”
Hehn whoh whohd theht bhay?

I told him. He seemed to wait. I gave him sixpence. He left the room. I followed.

We next passed through one of the iron gates, the east, as I determined (unless I’d got turned around), by a small door set in the bars, with a sill you had to step over, and then I was following
my escort down a long gallery lit on one side—the north, Moorfields side—by windows set too high to see out of, while the south side was all doors, one after the other, some open, most closed, each with a barred aperture and overhead louvre, so light came from that side too, though today not much. It was not cold in the gallery, but it was colder than outside. You glimpsed your breath only faintly. At the far end of the gallery, which was perhaps two hundred feet long, were more iron bars, floor to ceiling, and still the building continued beyond. What most struck me, besides the length and draftiness of the space, was how subdued the commotion immediately inside it was, much of the noise seeming to come from elsewhere, mainly below. It was so subdued, in fact—and in the grey light—I didn’t at first see how many patients were out of their cells, moping along the walls.

But our arrival was having an effect, and as we made our way down the gallery, faces were looking to us and various soliloquies seemed to rise in volume. There was a general shuffle closer, as of a battalion of invalids and beggars, and something my mother used to say chimed in my brain:
If you can’t earn a living, it’s only another way of starving.
Though many were dressed in shirt and breeches and had shoes on their feet, others wore coarse, ill-fitting blanket-gowns, with shaved heads and no shoes. I could not take my eyes off their feet: black and chilblained, most of them, though here and there some were wrapped in flannel. I was put in mind of an army in rout. But it wasn’t rout, it was debility, and those who approached, whatever they said, were only begging to be given back what they had lost, and those that didn’t approach seemed only to have given up begging, having lost all they ever had or could have. But whether they approached or not, they were all of them equally poor. Poorer than beggars. Poor as the dead.

“What news of London?” one old gentleman in jacket and waistcoat enquired of me quietly, laying a hand on my arm. “How does the King?”

Another asked me what he should do about the weakness in his knees.

Another assured me several times he had “jumped to save a fall,” and truly, he kept telling me, “there was nothing for it.” He then tried to sell me a canary, saying, had he only been it, he’d have flown, and if I listened I could hear it—and indeed I could, singing its heart out in a near-by cell. I told him I had no money to spend on a canary. Incredulous, he was demanding to know why, when a squirrel ran across the boards at my feet. Thinking it a rat, I let out a cry.

The steward halted. “Major Capstick!” he called sharply to an old man in a ragged military tunic who stood by, a piece of dirty string dangling from one wrist, his terrified rheumy eyes following the squirrel’s zigzag dash. “I want that animal on its leash by sundown or Mr. Hester’s up here first thing tomorrow to bite its head off!”

Major Capstick went shuffling and moaning after the creature.

This was a gallery for the male sex, not just adults. A boy of eleven or twelve blocked my way. “Are you come for me?” he asked, lightning-quick, and right away I regretted meeting his eyes. He was a desperate, cunning creature with a pilfered look, and I had nothing for him. “Are you come to operate Dr. Monro’s electrical machine?” he asked me, touching the basket with one hand, my stomach with the other. “Have you a generator inside?”

I stepped back. “No, it’s things for my husband.”

“Not from him?”

“Madam,” Mr. Alavoine said wearily, waiting for me.

When I tried once more to by-pass the boy, he moved in again, whispering, “Listen close. Irish Maximus died last Friday. The basketmen haven’t noticed yet. Me and Percy’s obtaining his meat. Tomorrow’s mutton. We’re holding out for a second Sunday: beef. You’re a woman—pray slip us a little perfume to fight the rising stench.”

Here he was yanked away from me and sent reeling by the steward, who muttered, “Leave her be, Jo. She’s no need of your consultations.”

And so we were walking again.

Now I became aware my presence was being made known to the entire population of the hospital, for the patients communicated with one another from the top of the house to the bottom and from one end to the other. For the most part, the exchanges were unintelligible to me because either muffled or conducted in arcane jargons or private languages. What I did understand was so obscene as to be either comical or breathtaking, depending on the ratio of wit to hostility. I won’t outrage sensibility by recording any of it here but only observe everybody’s primary concern: what most ingeniously splitting use might be found for my arsehole, mouth, and cunny—in that order. No wonder women imagine themselves all lightness and vacancy, when the world would have us so porous. But what most struck me about the tumult of opinion that boiled up in my wake was how many women joined in, and how aggrieved they were at the thought of a rival set of orifices loose on the premises.