Ann-Marie MacDonald - Belle Moral - A Natural History

DR REID. Pearl, I understand your reluctance to confess … multiple indiscretions. But I fear you may be suffering from a more serious malady.

PEARL. What is that?

DR REID. I cannot, in all decency, speak the word. Be assured there is hope that, with timely surgical intervention –

VICTOR. He thinks you’re a nymphomaniac.

PEARL. Really, Doctor? I’ve always wondered what they looked like.

VICTOR. Just my luck I’d finally meet a nympho and she’d turn out to be me sister.

DR REID. Pearl, I’m still willing to marry you.

MR ABBOTT enters dressed as a Highland warrior, his face streaked blue, still wearing his pince nez and carrying his briefcase .

ABBOTT. Good afternoon, Doctor.

DR REID [to PEARL]. Is this the man?

VICTOR. “Crucify him!”

PEARL. Mr Abbott, the documents, please.

VICTOR. Look lively, Lorenzo, we’re due at the asylum at half six.

DR REID. The asylum?

VICTOR. We’re going curling with the lunatics. They’ve got up a bonspiel.

DR REID. Pearl –

PEARL. I’ve no plans to marry at present, Doctor, thank you all the same.

DR REID. You realize that in the absence of an heir, Belle Moral must revert to the Kirk. I am not a rich man, but I am far from poor and I pledge to provide for you all.

MR ABBOTT hands PEARL a legal-size document from his briefcase .

PEARL. Thank you, Mr Abbott.

DR REID. You’ll be out in the street, the lot of you. Who will you depend upon then, eh? Your brother? He isn’t fit to black my boots. Your aunt? How will you live on the few pennies she’d eke out as a seamstress or washerwoman? That leaves you, Pearl, and whatever special talents you may have discovered of late.

PEARL slaps him

Quite right. Forgive me. Marry me.

VICTOR. But Doctor, there is an heir.

DR REID. Where?

PEARL. Claire.

FLORA enters dressed as Cleopatra .

FLORA. I’m ready, Pearl, how do you want me? [sees DR REID, stops]

VICTOR. Auntie, you are ravissanti .

PEARL [to DR REID]. My sister is quite competent. Despite twenty-seven years of privation she has, in a matter of months, learned to eat with a knife and fork, mastered the alphabet, and ceased to growl.

DR REID. She can’t inherit.

PEARL. Why not? You said yourself she’s not a lunatic.

DR REID. She’s an animal!

FLORA. We’re all of us animals.

DR REID. You won’t find a physician with a scrap of integrity willing to certify her human much less sane.

VICTOR. That leaves you, then.

DR REID. I’ll sign nothing. In the eyes of the law, this creature does not even exist, she hasn’t so much as a birth certificate.

Realizes what he has said even as PEARL produces a second document .

That was Ramsay’s idea. He forbade me to register her birth, he –

PEARL. In the eyes of the law, you as attending physician were responsible for registering the child’s birth.

ABBOTT [reading from a law book through his pince nez] . “It shall be the duty of every qualified medical practitioner attending at the birth of any child, to give notice thereof forthwith to the Division Registrar of the Division in which the child was born —”

DR REID. I am aware of the law.

ABBOTT. “Any physician making a false statement —”

DR REID. I said –

ABBOTT. “— as to the cause of death of any person shall be subject to discipline by the Medical council of —”

DR REID. This is my recompense? This, my due?

PEARL. You falsified Mother’s death certificate to conceal her suicide.

DR REID. For you. For the sake of your family name–

ABBOTT. “— shall, on summary conviction therefor, be liable for every such offence to a penalty of —”

DR REID. Enough!

DR REID signs the documents .

Where’s your integrity now, eh Abbott? Where in your legal lexicon does blackmail appear as a just remedy?

ABBOTT. See under “humane”.

DR REID. See under “sex”.

WEE FARLEIGH enters as Pan, with horns, furry legs and pan pipes .

You are not well, Pearl. And what you nourish in your womb harbours the taint of your own forbears along with the moral degeneracy of some stray male.

He looks from WEE FARLEIGH to MR ABBOTT. They look at one another then at DR REID.

PEARL. What I carry, is a gift.

DR REID. When you see it you will beg me to take it from you.

PEARL [going to her camera] . Are we ready? Gather round, now.

They gather on and around the couch .

Young Farleigh. [loudly] Young Farleigh!

DR REID. You’re mad.

PEARL [unable to rouse him] . Well, gather round Young Farleigh then.

They do .

DR REID. What are you doing?

PEARL. I’m taking a family photograph.

DR REID. This is your notion of family? This is not a family, this is … a menagerie.

PEARL. The tree of life is a family tree and we are all part of it.

DR REID. Even him? [YOUNG FARLEIGH.]

PEARL. Even you, Doctor. Would you care to be in the picture?

DR REID. He’d’ve killed your precious sister. He was on the point of casting her from the cliff when I stopped him.

PEARL. But he hadn’t yet, had he?

DR REID. Nay, but –

PEARL. So we’ll never know.

DR REID. He knows.

PEARL. He doesn’t. He hopes he would not have. But he doesn’t know.

DR REID. You think he’s atoned for that? How? By bringing her sweets in the asylum?

PEARL. He taught her her name.

DR REID. And that exonerates him?

PEARL. No. But it’s the best we’ve got.

FLORA. I don’t know that we’re any of us fit to cast the first stone. Heaven will judge him.

VICTOR. He’s coming back in his next life as a winkle. [to PEARL] Tell him to stop looking at me like that.

PEARL. Who?

VICTOR. Pan. [to WEE FARLEIGH] Pick on him, he’s the one wearin’ the skirt.

ABBOTT. It is a kilt , sir.

DR REID. Pearl, how do you propose to live? An unmarried woman with an illegitimate offspring, surrounded by a pack of lunatics, sodomites, and vegetarians.

PEARL. I am a scientist. I shall observe and document us. Belle Moral shall be my laboratory and we, my subjects.

DR REID. But you’re part of the experiment.

PEARL. Aren’t we all.

DR REID. You’re not dispassionate.

PEARL. True. As it turns out I am terribly, terribly passionate.

DR REID. Your results will be corrupted. You cannot be both an observer and participant.

PEARL. I cannot but be both. “Observation is participation”.

VICTOR. Who said that?

PEARL. No one; but someone really ought to. Was I to work and dwell at your side, never knowing my true relation to the subject?

DR REID. Knowing who she was would have hindered your ability to discover what she is. What is the good of such knowledge?

PEARL. “Knowledge is power” said Francis Bacon. I too am a child of the Enlightenment.

DR REID. I fear you are its bastard.

PEARL. Was it rational to deprive me of the crucial fact?

DR REID. A fact that would have destroyed your objectivity.

PEARL. What is objectivity but the ability to consider every influence on our powers of observation? Facts, uprooted, can tell us only so much. A fact out of context is like a fish on a slab, inexplicable without water.

VICTOR. Like an ear in a jar, inexplicable without a head.

PEARL. Facts do not float in sterile solitude, they are embedded in reality, tainted with everyday life, stained with history; inextricable, like Darwin’s web. How am I to know Claire and other marvels of nature as ordinary as a dust mote, if I do not admit to being part of that exquisitely, well-nigh infinitely, complex web? The remains of Julius Ceasar may be in that speck of dust. I shall be in that speck of dust one day. [ambushed emotionally] We are all here so briefly. Awake, for a moment. Unique, for a moment. Able to look and to love, for a moment. And then we return. To the generosity of this universe and its great making power. That is love. And nothing, not even the merest particle, reveals itself without it.