Bedlam (25 page)

Again she sighed, or someone did. “No, Jamie. Not even your mighty David can help you now. And I can’t sell the house—it’s yours and you’re in here, there’s no time—We must leave quickly—”

To ease the brute finality of this, she leaned in to kiss my lips, her
own warm and dry and myself docilely compliant, when, to my horror, from between those chaste lips (or so it seemed) came the outrageous probe at my teeth of a brash French muscle.

Dear God, it was Charlotte. I’d know that tongue anywhere.

“Margaret,” I said, and just to dredge up the name was me fighting for my life, “you don’t want to go—”

“Jamie, you must understand I have no choice, only please don’t strain yourself to believe I’m not failing you—It will only aggravate your condition—”

“Salope—!”

“No, Jamie—” She was wiping at tears. “You must remain strong of mind. Please. For Jim and me and yourself and everything you ever believed in—”

What was this but a nail’s wail for the hammer? And yet I could only close my eyes, remembering how twelve years ago Charlotte showed herself outside the gate when The Middleman and a French agent disguised as Bulteel came bearing down on us, except this time I could only sigh, “Begone, harlot—” to which, beyond a sob and a shoe-scuff and the insolent solace of a lingering phantom squeeze at my testicles, there was no response. When I could see again, I was alone, and could only wish the encounter start to finish had been some newfangled prank by the gang, but it wasn’t, and I had just broke my own heart in two.

Twenty years it’s been since I first took up my Bethlem post. Twenty years that on a retrospective springtime Sunday morning in neat suburban Islington, my library windows open on a June blue sky, seem as many weeks. A daily headlong press of business, with all the hurry and confusion of a madman’s thoughts, a rolling tide of sights and uproar and smells and fleeting ragged reflection under swift grey clouds. A man in full career, oh yes. Only a few minutes now and then does he have to stare through a telescope at the night heavens, or at the end of it all, as now, in the lucid calm before the breezes of a new day start up, gaze behind him at the dying turmoil and discover his own storm-tossed progress and ask himself,
My God, what was I thinking?

About the proper treatment of lunatics, constantly, for to stop would have unleashed a flood of grief and fear I was too caught up with exhausting myself to endure and exhausted could endure less. My wife was dying, and what for me then? How much of a present shadowed by that could I bear? Better to slip away into work, away from her cough in the hallway, from presiding with paternal cheer over the family meal hardly able to
meet the frightened eyes of my children, from sitting with her evenings pretending to delight in her unnatural animation, from allowing her heart-rendingly to believe (because it gave her such hope) that I was a hair’s breadth from taking Christ as my Saviour, from discussing together the shining futures of our beautiful Henrietta and brilliant John (soon off to Glasgow to study medicine) and thereafter the Glad Day we’d be reunited as a family, gazing out from our celestial home at azure sky and passing cherubim.

One night six weeks before the end (John had been in Glasgow eight months), I invited Henrietta into the library to let her know how little time remained to her mother. She only looked at me. Returning the look, I wondered how I could have thought she didn’t already know this. How old was she? Seventeen? Eighteen? Her look seemed to ask, What more do you want from me? Tears at least, I wanted to say. Anything but that insolent little smile, that so-be-it shrug.

Lamely I said, “That’s all. Just so I know you know—”

“I do,” she replied. “Who spends every day and night with her while you hide away in here? Who sponges her four times a day and when she coughs performs sleight of hand with the handkerchief to conceal the red? Who reads to her from the Bible because she no longer has strength to hold it herself? Who has promised hand-on-heart to devote her life to a God who’d do this to so good a woman?”

“I can’t hear you. You’re unhappy. We all are. There will be too few more of these days and nights—”

“If that’s all, Father. I hear her bell-”

As I watched Hetty leave me, I wondered how it happens a
child’s grief for one parent will reverberate as rage at the other. Any small curb, it seems, is enough to rouse fury in a heart conscious of servitude. Ever since I’d prevented her visits to Matthews when we lived at Bethlem, she’d been kicking against me in small ways. More lately I’d incurred her unmistakable wrath by refusing her permission to walk out with her “friend” Mr. Felpice. Yet surely these were trivial losses compared to her mother’s dying, and only extremity of grief could turn a loving daughter’s values so topsy-turvy. Still, I was at a loss to know how my darling girl could become this bitter young woman, who’d accuse me of hiding away, in her presumption to know this was not me desperately doing what I must to keep a hopeless enterprise going.

On the night of May 7th, 1810, Sarah passed mercifully to her rest. I almost wrote
died in agony in a bed filled with blood.
The bland formula is a drape over that, but the deceit shocks in its own way. Sarah did not pass
mercifully to her rest.
Long before she finished dying, there was no Sarah to pass anywhere. And
rest
is not the word for what a corpse is
at.
A corpse is at full speed back to the dust it came from.

Sarah died and the world went black.

But not black enough for the gods. A month after the funeral (Methodist; it was for my wife, not me), Jenny sobbingly handed me a note in my daughter’s hand:

Father—

I am now married to the man I love and have left London forever. While my sincerest wish is when you read this you will rejoice on our
behalf, you must appreciate that only the certainty of your objection could have inspired us to so drastic a recourse.

Your dutiful daughter before this, and loving

daughter always, whether this union

has your blessing or no,

Henrietta Felpice

Frantic, I made every inquiry: nothing. Who was this monster? What kind of name is Felpice? When calmer, I wrote John, just returned to Glasgow. By the scant surprise his answer evinced, I guessed she’d confided what she intended. Leaving me to derive what solace I could from his manly reticence.

I was not much consoled. Neither was I by thoughts of remarrying. While it’s true the circles I moved in were mostly male (if you didn’t count the women’s wing, which you shouldn’t), the fact was I never met a woman to compare with my late wife. A too-convenient conviction, you might think, and even if true don’t expectations have a way of accommodating to circumstances, when the desire is there? But it wasn’t, and Sarah’s incom-parableness was the sort you don’t—because you can’t—replace. The result was that first year I spent not in fantasies of new-spouse pleasures but shuffling so drearily through the house I drove out even poor Jenny—more tears—to work for a luckier family. After Jenny there was old Mrs. Clark, who came in days to wield a duster and deliver tea and cakes to my desk, silently taking the stale, cold, untouched things away. All I needed of the female now were Sarah’s expressions, habits, and opinions, which filled my head and informed my actions. Not keepsakes but salvage from the deep, freely claimable, the vessel sunk. If they’d fit me, I’d have worn her clothes. After walking around with my head ready to
burst, it took burying my face one desperate night in her dressing-gown to undam my tears.

It was not long after Sarah died I published several things that bother me still. The first was a small volume devoted to Matthews’ delusional system. After Butterclerk and Cluckbeck, by testifying he was sane, had everybody thinking we were the ones medically incompetent and doing less than we could, I wrote another book,
Illustrations of Madness,
to establish once and for all the nature and extent of his insanity. But though that book has the merit of accuracy and originality and includes an engraving of the Air Loom by Matthews himself, with explanatory notes and frequent passages in his own words, it’s marred by the bitterness of the occasion, for I indulge in a sneering tone and conclude with an unadvised, categorical defence of the habeas corpus decision, a defence that would later do me no good at a juncture I would need every good done that could be done. More than this, even at the time I reflected,
Is this what my decades’ study of Matthews has been for?

The other pieces, though more minor, in having nothing to justify them bother me as much. At the time they seemed harmless pranks, holidays from care. Now I can only wonder what flailing state I was in. My friend Kitchiner having published his expansively titled
Art of Invigorating and Prolonging Life by Food, Clothes, Air, Exercise, Wine, Sleep, Etc.,
I at first wrote two satiric articles on it, both anonymous, both published in the
London Gazette
by our mutual friend Jerdan, who didn’t know who their author was but like me considered the pieces good-humoured enough for print. In the articles I made sport of such Kitchiner enthusiasms as his “Peristaltic Persuaders”—laxative pills of rhubarb, oil of caraway, and syrup—and fired off squibs like, “If all the puny children in this country were brought up to the study
of physic, it might conduce to beneficial results, both to themselves and the community, or it might not” and, “Contents of the several chapters do not correspond to titles, but this trifling informality introduces greater variety.”

Good fun, what? Reading the pieces now, I find something nasty in them, a quality even of misdirected rage, that so sweet a man as Kitchiner was no deserving victim of. Yet at the next meeting of the Committee of Taste, seeing how exercised he was by what I had wrote and being the one he hit on to demand what he should do about these vicious attacks, I, still thinking they weren’t vicious at all and amused to see him fired up, cruelly stoked the flames, exhorting him to face Jerdan (whom he’d banned forever from our dinners for publishing the attacks) in a duel. I can only thank Christ the two best friends I ever had were not the sort of men to take up weapons. It was bad enough I’d estranged them. Yet still I wasn’t satisfied, for at the beginning of June I published—also in Jerdan’s
Gazette—
a supposed autobiographical essay by Kitchiner, debating whether it was my lack of interest in women or my pearlike corpulence that had been the greater persuasion to a hermit bachelorhood whose solemn mission in the world was to “invent new dishes, and devour them.”

Is this how you repay a man who’s generously fed and wined you in the best company every Sunday for a decade? No, it’s how you come to wonder if you know yourself at all. Why did I do it? The fury of grief? Rage at the universal assumption, in Matthews’ habeas corpus case, of the irrelevance of medical opinion, whether pro or con? Or did the idea for the prank—as well as the anger that fuelled it—come from Bryan Crowther’s conviction that I was the author of a dismissive
Medical and Physical Journal
review of his book
Practical Remarks on Insanity,
in which he denies any necessary
connexion between lunacy and physical symptoms in the brain, declaring that what he calls my “experiments” have utterly failed to establish it? As soon as I caught wind of Crowther’s suspicions, I had made every effort, through letters brimming with the friendliest assurances, to convince him I was never guilty of the betrayal he was accusing me of. To no avail. As for my own behaviour, one thing about the Bethlem keepers, it’s the lovable patients, not just the unruly ones, who bring out the worst in them. The feeling at such moments is that nothing could be more natural than to teach innocence a lesson. But what is this but the serpent saying to the loving woman or man, “Here is something you should know about a world that contains a creature in a state of pain like mine.”

Throughout this period, Bethlem continued her dizzying descent, as was too evident even to one so intent on his own. Though on the premises daily, I rarely stayed long. By then we were down to scarce more than a hundred patients yet not so few I could be there so little. I should have done more, particularly for some, like Matthews (though none were like him). Then again, sometimes I wonder how I found time to do so much as I did. For God’s sake, my wife was dying. Besides,
I had enough materials.
Nothing could save Sarah now, but as long as she was alive so was the hope of Portugal to prolong her days. The plan remained to publish more books, grow more famous, and graduate to rich and influential enough to secure the Haslams two annual winter months in the warm south. Except for this third step—how or why it should follow from steps one and two—the plan was a good one, not least in offering the writer’s singular advantage of being so busy putting the finishing touches on yesterday’s suffering while telling himself
he’s mitigating tomorrow’s that his exposure to today’s is mercifully reduced.

But this is mere second guessing of former motives and no less fantastical than dreams of Portugal. What does hindsight know? What difference did it make really that I once tangled with William Tuke? Didn’t his grandson Samuel in his
Description of The Retreat
deal with me fairly—as fairly almost as Pinel (to my amazement) in the book he wrote after his visit with us—asserting I treat the insane with judgment and humanity? Young Samuel understood that in speaking candidly to his grandfather I was only demonstrating a professional regard. Like Pinel, old Tuke was discerning enough to have seen through me had I maundered on about what we once were or could be again if only the Government would give us more money. Why argue there’s no difference between The Retreat, where the pretense is good manners and no chains because reputation is all, and Bethlem, where such playacting when it happens only the lunatics do it, and the physical restraint is not administered behind locked doors because nobody at Bethlem was ever foolish or cunning enough to pretend insanity is anything other than the most awful and terrifying disease that ever afflicted humankind?

No, my professional problems do not originate with the Tukes but with how their London disciples have used The Retreat to pander to the modern fashion of pronouncing all well when we are wretched. For we are now entered into the high gold age of the mighty reformer-projectors—the Wilberforces, the Whitbreads, and the Romillies—strutting and declaiming on the public stage as they vow to eradicate insanity from the earth in a generation. And most visible of them all, a crusader for compassion as that principle can be understood by a disciple of smiling madness, is
the tall beautiful Quaker Edward Wakefield, a true Tukeite in the modern mould, for whom happiness in conformity is guarantee of cure of insanity. And who better to appreciate the tear-extracting loveliness of The Retreat than one by occupation a Pall Mall estate agent? Meanwhile, like all Quakers, he keeps one soulful eye out for opportunities in kindness, the other for his next coup in business. So it was no surprise when he publicly announced his plans to set up a new London asylum on the model of The Retreat. Or when he struck a high-power committee to raise funds. Or when the same committee, to drum up publicity to that end, appointed itself to investigate the wretched conditions lunatics must endure at Guy’s, at St. Luke’s, and at Bethlem.

While awaiting their scrutiny of our inadequacies, at a time when our inadequacies were unglaring only on paper, I spent most of my time here at home in my dressing-gown—my wife dead, my son in Scotland, my daughter thrown away in marriage and living who-knew-where and in what circumstances, Matthews no longer speaking to me, Margaret Matthews by all reports in Jamaica (if not already [as no letters from her to her husband ever arriving had me fearing], God forbid, in her grave from yellow fever), my ever-cheerful maid Jenny quit, Crowther loathing me—sitting here at my desk, rubbing my temples, hating myself. I felt like the man falling from a steeple-top. Experiencing a certain excitement in his sickening plunge, he thinks,
Really, this is bearable enough, if it would but last—