Elephant Man (12 page)

He didn’t know what he’d expected to hear from Carr-Gomm. Certainly not sympathetic partisanship. Carr-Gomm had lived too long for that, and seen too much. It was not in his nature to come down firmly on anybody’s side. But reason, justice, a willingness to listen, these he had secretly hoped for; and he had been met with the dead stone wall of officialdom.

Treves walked down the corridor toward the stairwell and started down the steps, barely seeing where he was going until his eye focused sharply on the next landing below him and disclosed the unwelcome presence of Bytes. At the same moment Bytes spotted him and halted on the landing, yelling upwards like a fox that has sighted the prey.

“I want my man back,” he bawled.

Treves hastened down the stairs. The last thing he wanted was Carr-Gomm to hear this unsavory creature and emerge from his office. He met Bytes halfway down and was immediately enveloped in a cloud of gin fumes.

“Just a moment,” he snapped. “How did you get in here?”

Bytes glowered, refusing to be diverted. “Never mind that. I want my man.”

“He’s still very sick. Please come downstairs with
me. I’ll explain the situation.” He attempted to take Bytes by the arm and edge him back down the stairs. He made it as far as the first landing before Bytes wriggled free and bawled into Treves’ face.

“
Don’t
 … Don’t muck about with me! You’ve had plenty of time to fix him up, and he’s leaving with me,
now
. Do you understand me? Now, Mr. Treves. We had a bargain!”

“You misunderstood,” said Treves flatly. “This man suffered a severe fall, if you take my meaning.” He stared back at Bytes, feeling the hopelessness of trying to frighten a man made belligerent by drink and desperation. Some distant part of his mind prayed that no one in the hospital would hear Bytes yelling about their bargain. “He’s my patient now and I must do what …”

“Pull the other one, why don’t you! We made a deal!”

“I know what you’ve done to him and he’s never going back to that.”

“He’s a freak! That’s how they live. We’re partners, he and I, business partners. You’re willfully depriving me of my livelihood!” The legal-sounding phrases came out with a dreadful practiced ease. Treves wondered how many police interventions Bytes had fought off in the past.

“All you do is profit from another man’s misery!” he said.

Bytes thrust his face closer. A terrible knowingness shadowed his eyes. Treves had to fight to prevent himself from flinching.

“You think you’re better than me?” Bytes whispered at him. “
You
wanted to show the freak to all your doctor chums and make a name for yourself.
You
, my friend. So I gave him to you. On trust, in the name of science! And now I want him back.”

“You don’t own this man!” Treves said, tight lipped with fury.

“
I want him back!
”

“So you can beat him? So you can starve him? A
dog in the street would fare better with you!” Treves had forgotten about caution and was now bawling back.

“I’ve got my rights, damn you, and I’m going to the authorities!”

“Well, go to the authorities …” said a bored, silky voice from above them.

Both men wheeled to see the elegant figure of Carr-Gomm regarding them from the top step. When he was quite sure he had struck both of them dumb with amazement he continued. “By all means do so. In fact, I’ll fetch them myself. I’m quite sure they’d be very interested in your story, as well as ours.”

Livid, knowing himself defeated, Bytes glared at Treves, then at Carr-Gomm, then at Treves again.

“Now I think we really do understand one another,” said Treves.

Bytes almost choked on his own venom. “Right … right …” he seemed incapable of saying anything else but these words in threatening tones. Slowly he backed down the stairs, his eyes flickering back and forth between Carr-Gomm and Treves. It would have been hard to say which of them he loathed the most at that moment. When he reached the landing a change came over him. His hatred seemed to drop from him like a cloak he had shrugged off. His aspect became casual, that of a man who has decided to cut his losses and search out the next good thing. The look he gave them before he vanished down the stairs was almost cheeky.

Treves and Carr-Gomm were left to stare at each other, both feeling they had been led into territory they had not meant to travel. It was Carr-Gomm who spoke first.

“Singularly unpleasant chap …” he said uneasily, “uh … I don’t suppose there would be any harm in my meeting your … patient, Mr. Treves.”

Nothing in Carr-Gomm’s manner altered. He spoke in precisely the same tone he had used to dash Treves’ hopes a few minutes earlier. His surface remained as
it always was, bland, imperturbable, smiling as inscrutably as a Chinese mandarin. It took a moment for Treves to see beyond the manner to the words. When he realized what had been said he stammered out his gratitude.

“Thank you very much, sir. Shall we say in a few days then?”

“Shall we say two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?” Carr-Gomm replied with a smile.

“Wh … whatever is most convenient for you, sir.”

“Two o’clock then.” Gomm half turned to go, then turned back, troubled, “you know, Treves … it seems this acquaintance of yours has become rather more than just an acquaintance.”

“… Yes, sir.”

Treves escaped quickly before he could be asked any more questions. Carr-Gomm watched him go, an expression of dissatisfaction on his face. It was aimed entirely at himself, for allowing his disgust for Bytes to lure him into becoming involved where he had meant to remain aloof.

“Elephant Man?” he muttered crossly as he returned to his office. “I don’t
want
to meet an Elephant Man.”

“Freddie …”

It was the second time Anne had said his name, and now she sighed a little impatiently. From where she sat at her dressing table she could see his reflection on the other side of their bed. He didn’t seem to have heard her.

She wanted him to look up and say how pretty she looked with her hair flowing over her shoulders. The light was dim now, just one flickering gas lamp, and in the shadows she could still see herself as the Anne Mason who had married the promising young doctor fourteen years ago. Two children and the cares of housekeeping had added a few lines to her face and a couple of inches to her frame, but in the twilight it was possible to ignore these if you wanted to. Soon it would not be possible in any light. Anne felt her youth slipping inexorably through her fingers and tonight she wanted to be reassured that it had not yet all gone. But her husband sat there staring into space, and didn’t seem to care for the fresh lace on her nightie or the gleam in her hair.

“Freddie—” she coaxed him again. “Freddie, don’t look so glum.”

He made a wry mouth. “I shouldn’t. We made great progress today. I taught him to repeat a few basic phrases. He did rather well, too, but I had to lead him every step of the way. Though frankly at times I was unsure of who was leading whom.”

She had to suppress a sound of impatience. This was not what she had wanted to hear. She did not
understand him when he talked like this and he knew she didn’t, but he continued to do it because her understanding was not important. He simply needed someone there so that he couldn’t actually be accused of talking to himself. She wound a drifting blonde curl round her finger and sighed.

“What do you mean?” she said dutifully.

“Are you listening to me?” He looked up and seemed to become aware of her for the first time.

“Of course, darling. Go on about your Elephant Man.” Anne Mason was a headmaster’s daughter who had had wifely duty drummed into her by a stiff-backed, stiff-necked mother who considered that she and her husband should live only one life—his. Those lessons were too deeply ingrained to desert Anne even at this moment when she was totally exasperated. So she unwound the curl and settled her face into an expression of deep interest. Treves plunged on as though addressing a meeting of colleagues, trying to articulate what had obscurely nagged at him all afternoon.

“Well, I wasn’t sure whether he was parroting me because that’s all he was capable of, or whether he sensed that that’s all I wanted to hear and he was trying to please me.”

“But I thought you said that he was rather—simple.”

“He is. I mean—I’ve always thought he was. I think he must be. Or is that just something I’ve wished upon him to make things simpler for myself?”

“Frederick, why are you so troubled over this?”

“I don’t know.” He ran a hand miserably through his hair. “I can’t explain it. If this is an intelligent man, trapped in the body of a monster, then I’m under a moral obligation to help free that mind, free that spirit as best I can, to help him live as full and content a life as possible.

“But—if he’s an imbecile, whose body I can’t treat and whose mind I can’t touch, well, then my obligation is discharged. They can put him where they will.
He won’t be bothered, I won’t be bothered, but everyone’s conscience can remain free and untroubled. And that is my dilemma. What is in his mind?”

She was not a profound woman. Much of what he said was beyond her. But her love for him had detected the undercurrent of bitterness in his voice. She forgot her own annoyance and came to sit beside him on the bed, wrapping her arms round him.

“Perhaps you’re just polishing a stone,” she said gently. “Endowing this Elephant Man with qualities he doesn’t possess.”

“And what qualities are those?” he said impatiently. “Intelligence or stupidity?”

She withdrew her arms from him, cold and hurt at what seemed to her a rejection. She had thought her meaning was perfectly plain. It had seemed ambiguous to him only because he was still absorbed in a world from which he shut her out. She went to her own side of the bed and climbed in.

“I’m sure I don’t know, Freddie,” she said with her back to him.

He turned to her, contrite. “I’m sorry. I don’t know either. I just don’t know.”

She twisted onto her back to look up at him, and said the lame, feeble words that were all she could think of.

“Well, these things take time.”

“I’ve only got until two o’clock tomorrow afternoon, when Carr-Gomm meets him. Somehow, between now and then I’ve got to make John Merrick at least seem like an intelligent man … It’s my only hope. Why am I fooling myself? Nothing short of John delivering the Sermon on the Mount is going to sway Carr-Gomm …”

His voice, which had become distracted, was cut off abruptly by Anne’s hand over his mouth, as she sat up suddenly. With her other hand she reached overhead and pulled the chain on the gas lamp. In the darkness she put her arms lovingly about him, pressed her mouth against his, and tried a remedy
that had found no place in Mrs. Mason’s
Housewive’s Almanac
.

“I’m here, Mr. Renshaw.”

The clock was just striking one in the distance. Renshaw had almost given up hope of seeing Betty that night. But now here she was standing just outside his cubbyhole, looking as though it would only take a word to make her run for it.

“That’s right, Betty.” He slipped out and put an arm round her. “Don’t let’s waste any time then. It’s this way.”

He drew her down the corridor, into the Receiving Room and out on the other side. She offered no resistance till they reached the last flight of stairs before the Isolation Ward, but then she stiffened suddenly and tried to draw back.

“Mr. Renshaw, is he really—?”

“Horrible, darling,” he assured her. “That’s why you want to see him, isn’t it?”

“I dunno—”

His arm had tightened across her shoulders, making retreat impossible.

“You’re not going to tell me I’ve been wasting my time, are you, Betty?” His voice became coaxing but the hint of steel beneath it was unmistakable. “When I think of the girls I could have brought on a treat like this—I wouldn’t like to think I’d been wasting my time …”

“No, Mr. Renshaw …” she gasped.

“That’s better. This way.”

Together they climbed the last short flight of stairs and he rammed the door open. Even in the dim light the Elephant Man’s deformity was clearly visible. Betty gave a shriek which was echoed by Merrick, and wriggled free of Renshaw’s arm. He let her go. She wouldn’t go far. He’d find her downstairs, sobbing and crying most likely. And then of course he’d have to comfort her, and in the course of doing so he’d naturally claim his reward.

Renshaw could see the Elephant Man making frantic efforts to scramble under the bed. He was laughing as he closed the door and started down the stairs.

Anne found herself alone when she woke the following morning. In the dim light her eyes made out the time—five-thirty. She had a vague sense of having been woken by the closing of a door, and a glance out of the window confirmed it. Her husband was hurrying along Wimpole Street as though driven by devils, and even as she watched him he turned a corner and vanished.

She sat by the window for a long time, not consciously thinking, but brooding with a sense of loneliness. She had reached Frederick only briefly the night before; she knew that. Then he had slipped willingly back into that distant world that had started as a fascinating challenge and was rapidly becoming a torment for him.

She sighed as she went back to bed. Often she wished that he could learn to be more cynical, like other men. But then, he would not be the man she loved.

Treves ran through the streets, searching for a cab that would get him to Whitechapel quickly, but not expecting to find one at such an hour. He could not have stayed at home a moment longer. He felt driven with inspiration. A kind of glorious terror possessed him. He had the answer. It had come to him as he lay awake in the small hours with Anne sleeping quietly beside him.

It was often so. She could not reach his mind with her own, and sometimes that chasm yawned between them. But she could reach his mind with her sweet body. Sated with the gifts she brought him in the decorous darkness he would find the ideas falling into place in his head, the pieces interlocking neatly as if they had been oiled. In the blue-grey dawn the inspiration had come to him, and he had got up and left
her. It wasn’t the first time she had woken to find herself alone. He tried to make a mental note to make it up to her that night, then made an impatient noise, because he knew he would forget.