Bedlam (33 page)

I looked at him.

“Jack, you do know, because it’s in the book you wrote about me.”

“‘He is the talisman,’“ I dully answered.

“Yes, that’s it. And he knew what he spoke of. I am your talisman,
just as Peg is.
By your use of us you defend your power.
That’s the other reason I’m in that you and I have come here to learn. In your own scrabble after immortality, you have done to us exactly as Liverpool and Co. have done to you, no matter what the sugar-candied medical terms you might put it in for your own consumption.”

“James,” I said, needing to take a deep breath to continue, “I’ve only ever tried to do my professional best—”

“Your professional best,” he jeeringly retorted. “And to be seen by the world to be doing it. But do you know what my life has taught me, Jack? A man’s best is not always the right thing, or enough, if it ever was. And sooner or later there comes a time he must walk away.”

To have, I suppose, something to occupy my hands, I had picked up Peg’s needlework from the floor. It was a likeness of a coat of arms, a canary yellow crown against a white shield, with round about the crown a charge of dolphins leaping out of green waves, two of the dolphins as yet stitched in outline only. What right did Matthews have to tell me my best was not enough and I should walk away, when he believed his own best had saved two nations and he could never forgive his friend Williams for doing just that: walking away? I was thinking this as, my God, he went on talking. I was being hectored by a lunatic I had done everything for I could do, short of ruin myself.

“Your best, Jack, has too long done us all an injustice. As soon as it sinks in how great, that’s when the genuine suffering will start for you—”

What happened next I don’t know. I guess I threw myself at him. I can still hear Peg’s cries, which passed into my skull like knives into cheese. I remember the curious mixture of satisfaction, shock, and terror on Matthews’ face as my hands closed upon his
throat. I remember I had every intention to kill him if I could. But Davies must have been loitering nearby if not directly outside the door, for he it was who quickly dragged me off. I suppose I fought him too, because next thing I remember I was in a strait-waistcoat, alone in a brand-new cell, rocking and weeping.

C
ORNWALL

W
ESTMORELAND
, J
AMAICA

M
ARCH
5
TH
, 1816

Dearest Jamie,

Mr. Lewis has lost no time making changes and doesn’t care a jot they’re spectacularly failing to recommend him to the white planters. Mr. Scrubbs the book-keeper is already gone, dismissed for his mistreatment of our slaves. This is a consequence of the fact Mr. Lewis, as examining magistrate, has accepted the word of five Negroes against that of one white man (namely the agent, Mr. Wilson, who’s still grumbling about the affront to his honour). It’s a decision unheard of on this island, where the word of one white man is normally good against that of a dozen blacks.

Among other reforms initiated at Cornwall by Mr. Lewis: The use of the cart-whip is absolutely forbidden. No Negro is otherwise to be struck or punished except by express order of the new overseer Mr. Sorley and then only after a cooling-down period of twenty-four hours. Records are to be kept of all punishments. A white man who has sexual relations with the wife of a slave faces instant dismissal. In addition, though Jamaica
law provides the Negroes every second Saturday off work and here at Cornwall they already have every Saturday off Mr. Lewis has doubled their holidays by adding to the legislated three days at Christmas, three more days: Good Friday and the second Fridays in July and October. July 9th is his own birthday. October is the month of the Duchess of York’s (a particular favourite with him). In honour of her, each Cornwall pickaninny-mother will receive a scarlet girdle with a silver medal for every child born, which she must wear on feast days.

In light of the fact our Negroes are still slaves, these may seem paltry measures, but in this place at this time to blacks and whites they are, respectively, joy- and dread-inducing initiatives. When you add to them Mr. Lewis’s orders for the building of a new Negro lying-in hospital, the sum is a uniquely enlightened regime. No wonder the other planters say he’s as bad as the Methodists: a radical menace to the peace of the island. Jim, though Mr. Lewis’s over-affectionate attentions make him nervous (I can see why), is greatly impressed by our employer’s manifest concern for the well-being of the Negroes and now says he wants to be—in that regard—exactly like him.

“He has money,” I pointed out. “I’m not saying he’s not a good man, Jim, but he can afford to be liberal. Also, remember this: He’s just visiting. He won’t be here to suffer the consequences of his actions.”

“What do you mean—?” Jim cried.

“He’s returning to England, at the end of the month—”

“And never coming back?”

“He promises he is but can’t be sure when.”

“But he only just got here!”

“I know. I’ll miss him too.”

So will the Negroes, though the uncomfortable fact is (as Mr. Scrubbs never tired of telling everybody as he packed) two weeks after Mr. Lewis’s

arrival our production of sugar fell from thirty hogsheads per week to twenty-three. Now we’re at seventeen. Who knows how little Mr. Lewis’s kindnesses will have them producing if he stays longer?

Human nature is more mysterious than all our intentions, isn’t it, Jamie? But I think that’s something you and I learned pretty well a long time ago.

Your loving

Margaret

Aside from precipitating what I shall call my nervous collapse, Matthews’ revelations had two effects I could immediately recognize. First, I now knew he must not be transferred with the rest to New Bethlem, that I must do everything in my power to resuscitate Crowther’s initiative and smooth his way to a new life in a private madhouse in the country. Second, he had warned me the truth would hobble me, and it did, far more even, I would say, than he intended, because all on my own I took it further, by convincing myself I wasn’t hobbled at all. To do this, I thought of Matthews’ story of treasonous intentions by dead politicians and of how he was right, it was less a story now likely to do anybody any good than the events of it, whatever they had been, to go on sowing darkness down the generations. When I thought of myself, it was first and foremost as one more victim of such-and-such former evil. But that’s what happens when you have too much invested. You say to yourself,
This isn’t going to do anybody any good,
when what you mean is,
There’s nothing to be done.
You say,
The bastards,
when you mean,
It was never my fault.
And yet at the same time, I knew that in the end it did come back to me. They could not have used me without what Matthews once called the
insensibility of my own ambition. This was the deeper understanding of the matter that in order to get to they would first need to grasp the shallower. For me, meanwhile, the deeper remained a pull-back position, and I had not yet pulled back. Not yet.

If this seems strange logic, it is. But it, along with what I construed as the catharsis of my collapse, must be why I approached my last time on the stand so strangely collected. Sometimes you’re dreading a public appearance, and then a crisis in another part of your life or some touch of illness (a megrim will do) provides merciful ballast, and lo and behold you sail through with ease. So too when you go in with the right kind of secrets, the overshadowing kind. They give you power, they make you a better actor. This was the sort of advantage I believed I would have on the stand. Even if the reason Matthews was in was not what this investigation was about, the fact was, I now knew enough from what the man himself had told me to know why he was in. They didn’t and never would. He thought he’d hobbled me. I thought I knew better.

Matthews had slipped me my trumps on a Friday and Saturday. My last time to testify was on the Monday. On the Sunday between, at that hour when hardly a glow illuminates the eastern horizon, when the air can be almost clear, I made a gift to myself of a ramble round the periphery of my devastated dominion. It began with a stroll out the front door to the front gate, with a wide skirt of the slope of rubble now spreading across the courtyard from westward, the direction there was no longer any building at all.

(The reason I was at Bethlem before dawn on a Sunday was I’d been sleeping on a cot in my office all month while we worked to move out the last of the male patients before the demolishers started on their rooms. I didn’t mind. Returning home at the end
of a thirteen-hour day to a cold kettle on the hob and a piece of Mrs. Clark’s cake in a biscuit tin was become more loneliness than I could bear. All there was at home for me was sporadic letters from my son John, now a surgeon with the Navy in the North Sea, and though they arrived months apart, they were what I lived for.)

The front gate was chained, but I came to it armed with rings of neatly labelled keys pressed upon me by our new porter, Mr. Hunnicut. Like Wallet and Forbes, Hunnicut is a clean, efficient representative of the modern age, but his finicking method of labelling the keys only confusing me, I needed to try them one by one, now and then pausing to crack my neck. That’s how I noticed how bereft the old gates seemed without Melancholy and Raving Madness sprawled a-top.

Free at last, I set out on my ramble. To judge from the energy shown by the demolishers—English workingmen taking down the English Bastille—if I didn’t do it this morning, the next chance I had there’d be nothing visible above the wall but sky.

My route took me first westward along the front wall toward Moorgate. At each of the open, barred panels, provided to give citizens complimentary views of lunatics being aired in the days when they didn’t just wander out unattended, I stopped to peer in at level nothing: a choppy terrain of bricks and splintered boards. What remained of the building was a good distance to my left, looking like a ship torn in half by its own weight on its plunge to the bottom. The half visible to me had landed upright on the ocean floor, its interior compartments rising in ragged terraces, all in shadow now that the sun (to confound the metaphor) was rising behind it. But if I concentrated, I could determine pretty well which roofless, ragged compartment had been which in that former reality.

At ground level there jutted a row of tiny ceilingless compartments with doorways like notches in the wall that faced the lower gallery, now ceilingless too. These had been the rooms of the female patients. At the edge of the second-level terrace, by counting along, I determined the one that for three decades had served as home to Peg Nicholson. East of Peg’s room on that level, farther back, I could see half the upper central hall. From where I stood, it appeared one could take the main staircase from the hall outside my still-extant office and, were the barred door at the top of the west side not chained shut with padlocks that not even Mr. Hunnicut had keys for, step out onto what was now a rubble-strewed open balcony, to a prospect of the City and Westminster to rival—or so it looked from here—the one from the dome of St. Paul’s.

It’s interesting to stand before a part-demolished building of any kind—not just a prison or madhouse—and look up at its drab-or garish-painted or -papered compartments exposed in cross-section to merciless daylight and know that the only way its residents could have tolerated such vile, cramped spaces was they were already dwelling deeper, inside the compartments of their own thoughts. And know that only the human animal, that is blessed and cursed with a brain strong enough to discover freedom in phantasms of hope, dream, and memory, can find comfort in such narrow miserable pens as most people in cities must spend the majority of their lives inside.

I rounded the corner and continued south. No Bethlem to see from Moorgate: No building remained at that end, and if it did, no barred panels entertained pedestrians along there, only a tattered chaos of flyers and scrawled desecrations of a higher wall.

At London Wall I turned east and started down the building
along its rear side, or what remained of it. At my left hand, once I passed the corner entrance (unused since before my time), was the wall itself of London Wall, which, though in places the rag-stone has crumbled sufficiently to host shrubbery, still rises a good eight feet above the pavement, and being eight feet thick has had erected on top of it at the far side, beyond more bushes growing high-up there, another, tessellated wall, the Bethlem wall proper, and beyond that, across a narrow yard, would be the building itself, except that for half this walk you now saw nothing above the Bethlem wall but northern sky, the building gone, and you saw the Bethlem wall—I mean more than its parti-glazed, stone-coped battlements—only if you walked at sufficient distance from the first to risk being trampled by a gig in the street.

But once you came as far east as the part of the building still standing, there it was, hulking above you the same soot-blackened pile it always was. And yet though objects of human significance (a weathered blanket, a windmill on a stick, a dead bouquet, a glove with the thumb torn out) dangled from the window ledges; though you knew there were still men in there, because the jingling of their chains and their constant coughing had woke you early enough to get you out here before sunrise; and though you’d just passed the window of James Matthews, Emperor of the Universe, which you knew by the shape of its broken glazing and the cant of its shutter—despite all these signs of human habitation, the building emanated pure desolation. This was because public faith in it had been withdrawn months ago, for deposit at St. George’s Fields. Also, its former inhabitants, having lived so long inside, departed as its epitomes, and so carted off its existence as they went, leaving behind a gutted shell. But look! Here comes a medical officer of the place now, in final orbit before he follows
the rest out, the last epitome of an institution that every single soul that ever knew it, whether in his right mind or out, would sooner had never existed at all.

Now I’d come as far as opposite the convalescents’ airing grounds, or so we used to call them. A huddled rubbish-strewn pen without even a bench to sit on. After that I was opposite where the men’s airing grounds used to be before they tore down half the east wing along with my house and office, the infirmary, the Dead House, and laundry building. Again I could see the north sky, and my trip was shorter than it once would have been. I made the turn north then left into the Common Passage and so back to the gates.

Another grapple with keys and locks, curse Hunnicut to Hell, and safe inside once more.