Bedlam (13 page)

One look at a keeper after he’d been with us two years and you knew Bethlem made people mad. Thank God I had a loving family about me at home, and when I went out, friends I could go unbuttoned amongst and so ease the strain of modelling behaviour in a madhouse. Jerdan, Kemble, Incledon, and Braham: these were my boon companions. Once a week we gathered at the home of the sixth of our party, the eminently lovable Dr. William Kitchiner.

Like me, Kitchiner’s of common stock, but, unlike mine, his father rose from wharf-porter to well-to-do coal merchant and Justice of the Peace for Westminster. Kitchiner attended Eton and later Glasgow University to study medicine. Like me he never sat for his examinations, though unlike me he could afford to and with two thousand pounds
per annum
from his father could also afford not to practise. Instead, convinced that few circumstances impair British health like the dreadful quality and preparation of British food, he threw himself into writing a compendious cookbook, to be called
The Cook’s Oracle.
As Jerdan put it, “Kitchiner’s medicating is cookbook-making and his cookbook-making is medicating.” To this end, we were all invited to dinner on Sunday
nights, to pronounce upon the dishes served. With the assistance of Henry Osborne, who had time on his hands, being London cook to the tireless explorer Sir Joseph Banks, Kitchiner’s goal was to prepare and test six hundred recipes. At three per week with subsequent variations for fine-tuning, we had our work cut out.

Kitchiner’s a narrow, stooped, bespectacled fellow my own age. Though married once and with a natural son by another woman, that part of his life was long over by the time I speak of. The man was a born bachelor, too fussy to live with. Fortunately, his friends didn’t need to, only to obey the rigorous rules of his culinary
converzationes,
viz., though we five enjoyed a standing invitation, we could not just show up but must indicate in writing the previous Wednesday an intention to be there—punctually—on the Sunday, heading swiftly into the dining room as soon as the dinner bell sounded, and before the doors were locked. Looming on the mantelpiece above us as we moved to our stations was a card declaring, “Come at Seven; go at Eleven.” Those who’d applied in writing on the Wednesday and on the Sunday entered the dining room on time constituted that week’s Committee of Taste, to assist which in the centre of the table stood Kitchiner’s Magazine of Taste, a swivelling teak cabinet with shelves displaying bottles of sauces and flavourings and with drawers underneath containing assorted implements: a mortar and pestle, a nutmeg grater, a corkscrew, measuring spoons, graduated cylinders, scales and weights, etc. These last-mentioned items indicated what was revolutionary about Kitchiner’s recipes: exact proportions. It was time, he believed, science retrieved the lost art of British cookery. His motto:
No proper taste without measurement.

A typical Kitchiner menu included an appetizer of soup, Mulaga-tawny, say (his secret: cut up and fry the chicken after it’s
half boiled and put it in last). For the second course, calf’s head with sage and onion sauce was a dish he was particularly good at, the brains ranged round the tongue on a separate platter, dressed with lemon juice, mushroom ketchup, and cayenne. Roast potatoes. A boiled salad of baked Portugal onions, baked beetroot, boiled cauliflower, boiled celery, and boiled French beans, all tossed together with a sauce made from the yolks of two eggs rubbed through a sieve with a wood spoon and mixed with double cream, melted butter, salt, mustard, and tarragon vinegar (the tarragon gathered just before it flowers, dried at the fire, steeped fourteen days, strained through a flannel jelly bag, then corked). Served with a sprinkle of raw burnet. For dessert, he would offer a batter pudding drizzled with four-year-old curaçao ketchup (take half a pint of curaçao, a pint of sherry, an ounce of lemon peel, a half-ounce of mace; steep fourteen days, strain, and combine with a quarter-pint of capillaire; mix with melted butter).

The serious business of pronouncing upon such
wonders of science
concluded, our Sunday evenings turned into voyages of loving Tom-Fools. Someone (I think it was me) had inked “to it” between “go” and “at Eleven,” and it was true we rarely cleared out as punctually as we entered in, not after four hours of the best food, wine, music, and conversation in London. Between courses, Kitchiner would scoot over to the piano and vary proceedings with a splash of Handel or a composition from his own hand. Sometimes he’d accompany Incledon, Braham, or the two together as they sang a pretty or facetious air (often composed by Kitchiner himself) that they’d all rehearsed together in secret. As well as gastronome and musician, Kitchiner’s an astronomer and hoarder of telescopes. On clear nights we’d stump upstairs to peer at the heavens through the dozen instruments he has set up in
what he calls his Crow’s Nest, an observatory that consumes the entire top floor of his house.

How good it is to be free of care for an evening! Crouched at the eyepiece of a Kitchiner telescope, smoky Mars jiggling in my sights, the majesty of the universe aweing us all to an embarrassed hush, I knew Bethlem was only a gloomier vale amongst many such here below, and each of us was a miniature firefly Newton, emitting now and then a few glimmerings in our respective narrow spheres. It’s a sanity of proportion such moments of drunken poise can offer, and these together with the love of my family and hope of rescue by my pen were enough to render supportable a life spent six and three-quarter days a week inside Hell. Then, before we’d know it, we were back downstairs and had reentered the bright ring of fellowship of the Captain’s Table, and hauling down with us those larger views, we’d set about reminding each other of them in our lives.

Braham, a stout tenor, in those days a great success in Drury Lane, would tell a story on himself, how once in the festival at Hereford he was singing “The Bay of Biscay,” and at the line in the last verse, “A sail! a sail!” he went down as usual on one knee, except across the front of the stage the organizers had erected a low barrier, behind which he disappeared entirely from the sight of the audience, who, thinking he’d fallen through a trap door, leapt to their feet as one, shouting with laughter to see him there on one knee, still singing away.

Incledon was a tenor too but like Kitchiner and me had a medical connexion, being the son of a Cornish surgeon. At age eight, he was sent from home to sing in the Exeter Cathedral choir, but after a few years he ran off to sea, where the officers noticing the beauty of his voice, wrote him letters of recommendation to musical
promoters up and down the country. Soon he was a regular at Covent Garden. Between acts of operas, he’d come out in nautical gear and sing sea-shanties. In farces he had a gimmick of throwing out his arms as he sang. Each time he did it they grew longer. You never saw anything more comical. He was an affable, witty, restless fellow who wore seven cheap rings on his hairy hands.

Incledon was a fine singer, especially of tender ballads, but his inability to remember lines made him a poor actor, whereas our friend Charles Kemble was universally acknowledged as one of the true greats of the age. Though as corpulent and ungainly as Incledon, Kemble stood taller, had a handsome head, and by his carriage made the most of what he’d been given. As an actor, his range was as broad as Garrick’s, or so we told him, but I would say he showed himself most original in comedy. Amongst company he affected such a world-weary, indolent manner you asked yourself why if he was this exhausted he’d bothered to crawl out of bed on his day off. But the ostensible fatigue had no effect on the spontaneity and quality of his drolleries, the manner of delivering which varied depending on the character he’d been playing that week. The effect was of a heavy, discarded puppet now and then rebounding to charmed life.

And then there was Jerdan, the philosopher of our crew, and the one I knew best and keep in closest touch with to this day. A newspaperman, he has a first-rate writer’s way of placing faith in no system of ideas, and yet by a miracle of character he’s not in the least cynical or jaded. Though serious in outlook, he’s ever on the watch for human absurdity, which being copious affords him plentiful amusement. By his face he might be a pop-eyed bumpkin just arrived in the city, but he’s shrewder than he appears, and his good humour runs deeper than ordinary country equanimity.

Often in those last days of the century our
converzationes
revolved on what the nineteenth held in store. The fact the demarcation’s a calendary fiction didn’t mean a fantasy of new beginnings could fail to operate on every mind. The only question was, With what effect?

In Jerdan’s view, the newest thing about the new age would be its fascination with its own newness, which it would view as a worthy quality in itself, as if everything was now mysteriously growing better, so all a thing would need to be to win enthusiastic approbation was the very latest.

“An uncritical faith in the new,” Jerdan declares, “is daily replenished.”

“And will infantilize us all,” I mutter, thinking of Crowther.

“And if ultimately there’s nothing in it?” Braham wants to know.

“The only thing
in it,”
Jerdan replies, “is this unaccountable phoenix of hope. The bloody bird is not even hope, it’s the
assurance
of hope. It’s like the monarchy. There’s nothing in it, but it works. The less in it, the better it works. And won’t easily be toppled, not here. Here there’s too little in it.”

Some of us (I mean Kitchiner, Jerdan, and myself) believed one order of business would—or must—be the abolishment of our trade in slaves, if not the granting of freedom to the poor wretches. Surely this was one respect in which the fantasy of human brotherhood needed to take effect. The fact seven years ago the French had freed all slaves on French soil (though not in their colonies) should not stop us from at least getting out of the trade.

Incledon and Braham are not convinced. In the midst of one such debate, the former turns drolly to the latter. “I’m surprised at
you,
John. With your kinked locks and sizable
Schnauz’
you’re a good way down that road yourself—”

“Aye, but not so far as in chains,” Braham replies equably, “and somehow that makes all the difference—”

Speaking of chains, there was also the question of Catholic Emancipation. Once we joined with Ireland, Jerdan argued, it would be only a matter of time before Catholics were elected to public office.

None of the rest of us could see it. “And what of the Protestant religion, sir?” Incledon demands to know.

“Finished,” Jerdan informs him. “Dead and gone. Empty churches. The reason you haven’t noticed is you never go. What do you think Methodist tents say about Anglican cathedrals? The Catholics will have their emancipation for the simple reason Christianity will continue to pitch camp farther and farther out from the centre of things. This is no temporary truancy, it’s a popinjay disappearing over the horizon never to return. The soul of the coming century, gentlemen, will not be found in the parish church but
in the town itself,
in the ashes of our phoenix hopes, daily reborn in these streets, squares, arcades, gardens, markets, parks, fairs, factories, racetracks, taverns—”

“Brothels—” Incledon mutters.

“Hospitals, should Fortune happen to smile—” I put in.

“Oh my, yes,” Kitchiner agrees, “and her gaols and asylums, and plenty more of them, certainly—”

“London’s too great a city,” Jerdan declares, “not already to provide—or at least to promise—what the French are still fighting for: pleasure, freedom, and wealth. All an Englishman needs to do is find work in London, and he can profit himself enough to buy all the pleasure and freedom he wants. Or at least in London he can hope he can, for he will daily see and hear of so many others’ success he’ll blame only himself if it turns out his own pleasure and freedom
begins and ends in the alehouse—where he’ll have plenty of good company to console him. How can life be more modern than that?”

“And the war,
O Vates?”
Incledon wants to know. “When’s it over?”

“Soon,” Braham announces.

But the one everybody looks to is Jerdan, who grimly shakes his head. “In an age of banks, credit, and the mechanized production of weaponry, in an age when, as Mr. Paine has said, there are men who get their living by armed conflict and make it their business to keep up the quarrels of nations, war will be simply the normal state of things.”

“I wouldn’t speak that name aloud, William,” Incledon mutters, “unless you want us all disembowelled and hanged.”

“You don’t need to be a republican,” Jerdan calmly replies, “to know Paine’s right about that much.”

In his more playful moods, Jerdan likes to have fun with my hopes of Philippe Pinel.

“So, Haslam,” he says. “Could you tell us once again,
slowly,
how you reckon Pinel’s visit is going to help you free this raving lunatic Matthews, whom word has it you enjoy a natural affinity with?”

In reply—silently cursing I ever confided my inchoate plans to my good friend and now knowing I only did so out of a guilty fear it was more selfish pride than concern for my patient that would have me working against the wisdom of Liverpool and the British Government—I say I hope to alert Pinel to the dubious circumstances of Matthews’ incarceration.

“Tell me, sir, if I have got this straight,” Jerdan says, with the same amused detachment he showed as when I first told him. “You’re looking to a Frenchman on a tour to help you extract a mad Welshman from an English madhouse run by yourself.”

“That’s it!”

“Sir, on behalf of those who love you, let me wish you every success in this remarkable international-flavoured endeavour.”

A favourite topic with Jerdan was how the administration of Bethlem actually worked, when Monro had all the power while I had all the responsibility and when the steward and matron, who were in charge of the keepers and gallery maids, answered to Monro, who was never there, and when the clerk was a sphinx who answered to who-knew-who and the surgeon a drunk who took his orders solely from Mr. Chivas and Mr. Haig. “No wonder they call it Bedlam!”