Cedilla (33 page)

I took Arthur Osborne’s precious book with me into the hospital, but I had also put in a request for another one from Mrs Pavey at the library. Not a Hindu volume – a life of Mary Baker Eddy. Ever since I had heard of Christian Science, even before I made the connection with Nancy Astor and CRX, I felt violently attracted and repulsed. Here at last was a school of religious thought which didn’t regard pain as meaningful. Just what I thought myself, and part of what drew me so strongly to Hinduism. The drawback was correspondingly massive: if illness was Error, then I had been in the wrong continuously since I was three. It was time to decide whether Christian Science was a sort of Western Hinduism or a mean trick.

There was a Christian Science Reading Room in Maidenhead, and I had even thought of driving over there to talk to someone. The trouble was, of course – supposing that I was convinced of Mary Baker Eddy’s truth – that I couldn’t imagine the next step. How can the body repent? Would my joints listen when I recanted the fantasy and folly of Still’s Disease?

It stood to reason, in any case, that Christian Science Reading Rooms would be up huge flights of stairs unserved by lifts, to discourage the unbelieving, the wallowers in imperfection. The most that could be hoped for, logically, was some sort of ramp, up which the wilful outcasts could trundle in their wheelchairs, to gaze with the corruptness of envy through a hagioscope (or squint, or leper window, in descending linguistic registers) at the jovial elect of Maidenhead.

I had left the choice of a book on Mary Baker Eddy up to Mrs Pavey. She must have taken a lot of trouble over her selection. A library is a sort of public garden, and librarians themselves are gardeners, but their interventions are anything but neutral. In every garden there are delicate plants that do well, and sturdy ones which succumb to a mysterious blight.

The book which was transmitted in Mum’s bicycle basket was called
Mrs. Eddy
, by Edwin Franden Dakin, but that was roughly where its conventionality ended. There was a suggestive subtitle:
The
Biography of a Virginal Mind
.

The book was American, published in 1929. I knew Mrs Pavey would have good reason for supplying me with a book that was less than up to date.

It was dedicated to the author’s mother, in gratitude for the diligence she had shown in ‘exploring with painstaking care the obscure haunts of data’. That was a phrase like a toffee to be lingeringly chewed: the obscure haunts of data. There was also a Publishers’ Note which I found extremely interesting, which described the appearance of the text in a popular edition as marking ‘the failure of an organized Minority to accomplish the suppression of opinions not to its liking’.

The idea of the tyrannous Minority was new to me – any tyranny I had experienced was of another kind. The Note explained that there
had been a campaign to suppress the book in America, and pressure brought to bear on bookshops (though ‘in all but a few cities the book could always be bought somewhere’), until a counter-campaign in defence of free speech was mounted.

So this was obviously not a life of Mary Baker Eddy which was welcomed by the organisation she founded. Why not? Mr Dakin explained it like this: ‘There undoubtedly prevails a certain notion that all those who dare to talk intimately of God should conform in character to a conventional pattern, much as the design for sacred faces on church windows must all have an orthodox stare.’ Something about Mrs Eddy’s particular outlook didn’t suit stained-glass prose. A hunger perhaps. Her life in this version was an adventure, ‘a gorgeous adventure’.

I seemed to be getting a little more control over my reactions with each operation. This time as I reassembled the world after anæsthesia I neither swore nor chanted mystical Hebrew letters. I recited German verbs ending in
-ern
.

One more time my ankylosed bones had given Mr Arden a challenge and a sense of job satisfaction. He paid my ossature more extravagant compliments. ‘I break bones every day,’ he said. ‘It’s what I do for a living. But I can tell you, John, that knee of yours was something special!’ Perhaps not the most tactful thing to say to someone whose body was still reverberating with the agony of it. I’d slept through the assault, yes, but my body had to stay put. It had nowhere to go, and was visited by nightmares independent of consciousness.

After a day or two I settled down to read
The Biography of a Virginal
Mind
. The author was right in his own way – Mrs Eddy’s life story was indeed a glorious adventure. It was even better than
Pamela
!

Part of the adventure was becoming famous late in life. The first edition of
Science and Health
didn’t appear until 1875 and was slow to make its way in the world even so. Mrs Glover (her name at the time) was fifty-five then, in an age when a woman’s fortieth birthday was a sort of instantaneous autumn. She was not only a widow, with an estranged – not to mention ne’er-do-well – son, but more recently a divorcée. Neither status was desirable or promising. Soon, though, she had acquired a third husband, and the name by which she is remembered.

I longed to re-enact significant episodes of the Mary Baker Eddy story. It maddened me to be surrounded by people with (as far as I could see) nothing better to do, but with a fixed resistance to taking direction. I could just about make one flinty physio (‘anything for a quiet life,’ she muttered, though life in the hospital was far too quiet already) act out one side of the crucial dialogue between Asa Gilbert Eddy and the man who had seemed to have a hot line to Mrs Glover’s heart, Daniel Spofford.

He was her blue-eyed boy (the colour of his eyes was intense), a dreamy sort despite his rough history of farm work and service in the Civil War. Asa Gilbert Eddy, biddable, spinsterish, wearing his hair in an eccentric rolled arrangement, was not an obvious choice of husband. Then in 1876 there came a curious conversation between the two men, on the day when the engagement was announced. I coached my pet physio intensively until she could at least deliver Mr Spofford’s line clearly: ‘I confess I am surprised.’

Then as Mr Eddy I simpered, ‘As am I – I have only just received the news myself!’

On the marriage certificate Mrs Glover tactfully subtracted seventeen years from her age, so as to harmonise it with her groom’s, though presumably at the cost of making the ceremony illegal. Lemonade and cake were served.

Mary Baker Eddy’s religion was a bit of a mess in doctrinal terms. As a solo turn I practised saying Mr Dakin’s description of its system of beliefs – ‘a cabinet of theological bric-à-brac!’ – in tones most usually associated, on the English stage, with the incredulous question, ‘A
handbag
?’

There was one scene I was particularly keen to stage: Mrs Eddy screaming for help in the middle of the night. This happened a lot. Christian Science had disposed of the possibility of ill health to its own satisfaction, but not every part of Mrs Eddy was convinced. As a child she had been sickly and subject to fits of hysterical rage, but then in her view every symptom was psychosomatic, including obesity (no more than an ‘adipose belief of yourself as a substance’).
After all, ‘we have no evidence of food sustaining Life, except false evidence’.

Yet she was never a peaceful person. Her fear and pain had not been abolished by the flourishing of her church. They went into hiding merely, and reappeared in ever more distorted forms. She had banished error, sickness and pain, so if she experienced anything other than full health and happiness there could only be one explanation. Hostile agents were beaming destructive energy at her. The likely culprits were Mrs Eddy’s own disaffected followers. Some of those she had once most relied on were trying to destroy Her (by this time pronouns attaching to her were routinely capitalised) with ‘mental malpractice’.

There were other ways of describing the same destructive force: Electricity of Mortal Mind, The Red Dragon, The Trail of the Fiend, The Sting of the Serpent. The preferred term in Christian Science publications was Malicious Animal Magnetism. The attacks would normally come at dead of night, but if the magnetic assailants expected to find Mrs Eddy undefended they were mistaken. The alarm would go up – a shriek is an effective alarm. Helpers were waiting for the call (they stayed awake in relays of two-hour watches throughout the night, keeping the mental force-field charged). They would rush to Mrs Eddy’s bedside and form a ring around her, bravely facing outwards, human shields against the metaphysical malice, for as long as it took her attackers to lose their destructive concentration, to abandon yet another attempt to incinerate the Pastor Emeritus from a cowardly distance with the emanations of their loathing.

What a tableau! So much more satisfying dramatically than pressing the buzzer (if it has been left within reach) and waiting for a nurse to have a spare moment.

Animal Magnetism was a powerful force. Mrs Eddy suffered from renal calculi – kidney stones – which were really only crystallised malice (I couldn’t help picturing the edible uncut jewels of crystallised ginger). Rays of metaphysical hatred had found tiny cracks in the array of mental armour raised by Mrs Eddy’s helpers. She had to resort to a dentist’s services on a regular basis, in the teeth of her published and preached beliefs, since her upper jaw had been poisoned by the Sting of the Serpent.

I was gradually waking up to the fact that Mary Baker Eddy, elderly, disintegrating and imperious, was exactly the sort of rôle that Dad had had in mind all those years ago, when he had suggested that I could manage rather well as an actor, by playing an old lady in a wheelchair who bossed everybody about. Unfortunately I couldn’t make the rest of the company play along or acknowledge my star quality.

I had to make do with the very limited supplies of curiosity available. A nurse might say, ‘And what did Mary Baker Eddy do today?’ and I’d say, ‘
You’ll never guess!
’ How could they possibly? She was making it all up as she went along.

What I would really have liked was a tame Christian Scientist to
wrangle
with. Granny had introduced me to this attractive word, commenting that wrangling was certainly one of my talents, and that it was a shame I wasn’t more gifted in the field of mathematics, since the top student in that subject at her beloved Cambridge University was known as the Senior Wrangler.

Even wrangling of a junior sort was in short supply during my recovery and rehabilitation. Tame Christian Scientists weren’t provided free under the National Health, and unfortunately, because of the very nature of their faith, a hospital was the last place such people would come of their own accord. Perhaps they should have done. At least they wouldn’t be preaching to the converted.

It’s a good job I didn’t come across any patients with kidney stones. I couldn’t have stopped myself from asking, ‘Do you have a lot of enemies? People who might wish you metaphysical harm?’ I’m not that strong.
In the watches of the night, do you feel the black searchlights of your
foes as they search out the chinks in your walls?

My reformulated knee wasn’t supposed to move, and it didn’t, but still it found inventive ways to act up. It was enclosed in a large cast running more or less from hip to ankle, inside which it swelled and gave great pain. Concentrating on Mrs Eddy’s life was increasingly difficult as my own became filled with intensely erroneous sensations. I thought my knee would burst. I pleaded with Mr Arden to remove the cast so as to relieve the pressure, but he said he couldn’t do that.
The leg must be held in place. He compromised by having a little window cut in the plaster where the knee was, which allowed the distressed tissue to expand without jeopardising the process of healing. Then it began to itch and I had to poke at the window with anything that came to hand.

During this (third, was it?) rehabilitation my sensitive nose noticed something different in the atmosphere of the hospital. It wasn’t a new smell, exactly, it was the attenuation of an old one. Times were changing. There were fewer volatilised molecules of amylum, that white powder prepared from potato and other vegetable tissue which yields a transparent viscous fluid when boiled – laundry starch, in fact. Starch was still being used in the laundering of nurses’ uniforms, but in significantly smaller quantities. Nurses gave off a less peremptory rustle when they passed. It was almost a soothing whisper.

Of course the high tradition of nursing goes back to Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War. Many of the original nurses were genteel volunteers rather than professionals. I imagine that in those days the uniforms were so stiffly starched for a definite purpose. A squeamish nurse confronted with the horrors of warfare, infection or surgery, could faint without actually falling down, propped up by her amylum-impregnated clothes long enough to be trundled unobtrusively from the scene by colleagues, without her moment of weakness having an effect on the morale of the patients.

Mrs Eddy’s psychology seemed very extreme and remote, and then suddenly it came into focus and sat right next to me. This unstable woman was destined to failure, until suddenly she wasn’t. What had happened?

Christian Science would have been one more fizzling firework, hardly even a footnote in the history of cultic religion of America, where there is rarely a shortage of prophets and always a surfeit of disciples, if it hadn’t caught fire at a single meeting in Chicago, in June 1888. Mary Baker Eddy was sixty-six, and very hit-or-miss as a public speaker. Her belief in herself fluctuated wildly between dogged assertiveness and a querulous shrinking. Even when she was advertised as a speaker, she would often quail at the last moment and delegate the task to someone else. She rebelled against anonymity but could not fully face fame.

On this occasion the local pastor was shrewd enough to advertise Mrs Eddy as a speaker, but without telling her in case she took fright. He told her only as he escorted her to her place on the stage – too late for her to appoint a substitute.