Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

“So Miss Baxter does not dread your hand?”

“No. From the moment she opened her eyes here these hands have served her food, drink and sweetmeats, placed flowers before her, offered toys, shown how to use them, displayed the bright pages of her picture-books. At first I made the servants who washed and dressed her wear black woollen mittens in her presence, but I soon saw this was pointless. The fact that others have different hands does not stop her thinking me and my hands as normal and necessary as this house and our daily meals and the morning sunlight. But you are a stranger, McCandless, so your hands thrill her. Mine do not.”

“You hope this will change, of course.”

“Yes. O yes. But I am not impatient. Only bad guardians and parents expect admiration from young brains. I am glad Bella takes me as much for granted as the floor under her: that floor on which she enjoys the music of the pianola, yearns for the company of the cook’s grand-niece, and thrills to the touch of your hand, McCandless.”

“May I see her again soon?”

“How soon?”

“Now. . or this evening. . at any rate, before you leave on your trip round the world.”

“No, McCandless, you must wait till we return. Your effect on Bella does not worry me. Her effect on you does, at present.”

He ushered me to the front door as firmly as the last time I visited him, but before shutting me out he patted me kindly on the shoulder. I did not flinch from the contact but said suddenly, “One moment, Baxter! That lady you spoke of who drowned herself — how advanced was her pregnancy?”

“At least nine months.”

“Could you not have saved the child?”

“Of course I saved it — the thinking part of it. Did I not explain that? Why should I seek elsewhere for a compatible brain when her body already housed one? But you need not believe this if it disturbs you.”

Fifteen months passed before I met her again and they were unexpectedly happy. Scraffles died and astonished me by leaving me a quarter of his money — his widow and legitimate son divided the rest. I became a house-doctor in the Royal Infirmary with a wardful of patients who seemed to need me and some who pretended to admire. I hid how much I needed them under a smooth, lordly surface broken by unexpected flashes of genial humour. I flirted with the nurses under me to the usual extent — that is, with all of them equally. I was invited to smoking-concerts where everyone had to sing something. My songs in the Galloway dialect were laughed at when comic and applauded when pathetic. I mostly thought of Bella during unoccupied moments, especially in the half hour before going to bed and falling asleep. I was trying to read through the novels of Bulwer-Lytton at the time, but his characters seemed conventional puppets when I recalled her arms flapping above the pianola like ravens’ wings, her smile of continual delight, her jerky walk and swaying stance and arms outstretched as if to embrace me as nobody else had done. I did not dream of her because I never dream at all, but when we next met I believed for almost a minute that I was in bed dreaming although I was wide awake in a public park.

A fortnight of hot calm cloudless summer weather had made Glasgow detestable. With no rain to wash it down or breeze to blow it away the industrial smoke and gases hung in a haze filling the valley to the height of the surrounding hills, a gritty haze that put a grey film on everything, even the sky, and prickled under the eyelids, and made crusts in the nostrils. The air seemed cleaner indoors, but one evening a need of exercise took me walking beside a dull stretch of the Kelvin. At one point it fell over a weir which churned effluent from the upstream paper-mill into heaps of filthy green froth, each the size and shape of a lady’s bonnet and divided from its neighbour by a crevice floored with opaque scum. This substance (which looked and stank like the contents of a chemical retort) flowed through the West End Park completely hiding the river under it. I imagined the mixture when it entered the oil-fouled Clyde between Partick and Govan, and wondered if men were the only land beasts who excreted into water. Wishing to think pleasanter thoughts I strolled to the Loch Katrine memorial fountain 9whose up-flung and downward trickling jets gave some freshness to the air. Well-dressed people and their children paraded round it and I moved among them staring at the ground as I usually do in crowds. I tried to remember the colour of Bella’s eyes but was remembering how her syllables sounded like pearls dropping one by one into a dish when she said, “Candle, where are your cord dew roys ?”

She shone before me like a rainbow’s end but solid, tall, elegant, leaning on Baxter’s arm and wistfully smiling. Her eyes were golden brown, her dress crimson silk with a jacket of sky-blue velvet. She wore a purple toque, snow-white gloves and the fingers of her left hand twirled the amber knob of a parasol whose slim shaft, slanting over her shoulders, spun a buttercup-yellow silk dome with a grass-green fringe behind her head. With these colours her black hair and eyebrows, sallow skin and bright golden-brown eyes seemed dazzlingly foreign and right, but if she seemed a glorious dream Baxter loomed beside her like a nightmare. When apart from Baxter my memory always reduced his monstrous bulk and shaggy boyish head to something more probable, so even after a week the unexpected sight of him was shocking. I had not seen him for seventy weeks. He was muffled in the thick cape and overcoat he wore outdoors in every sort of weather, because his body lost heat faster than most people’s, but his face shocked me most. It usually looked unhappy, but now his aghast eyes seemed to reflect an absence of something as essential as sanity or oxygen, an absence that was slowly killing him. There was nothing hostile in this settled gloom — he gave me a nod of dreary recognition — yet it menaced me because for a moment I feared that what he ached for and needed could not be mine either, though Bella was now smiling at me as eagerly and expectantly as in her younger days. She had taken her right hand from under Baxter’s arm and was holding it straight out to me. Again I rose on tiptoe to take her fingers and touch them with my lips.

“Haha!” she laughed, thrusting the hand above her head as if grasping a butterfly. “He is still my little Candle, God! You were the first man I ever loved after wee Robbie Murdoch, Candle, and now I me Bell Miss Baxter citizen of Glasgow native of Scotland subject of the British Empire have been made a woman of the world! French German Italian Spanish African Asian American men and some women of the north and the south kinds have kissed this hand and other parts but I still dream of the first time though oceans deep between have roared since auld lang syne. Sit on that bench, God. I am taking Candle for a walk saunter stroll dawdle trot canter short gallop and circum-ambu- lation . Poor old God. Without Bella you will grow glum glummer glummest until just when you think I am for ever lost crash bang wallop, out I pop from behind that holly bush. Guard him, lads.”

She and Baxter were accompanied by five children whose big boots and coarse clothes showed they belonged to the servant or artisan class. If small companions were still a clue to Bella’s brain then her mental age was now between twelve and thirteen. Baxter, with no change of expression, slumped obediently into a space on a crowded bench. From one side of him an army officer hurriedly departed, from the other a nursemaid with a baby that had started to scream. Two of the boys took their places. The rest stood in a row before him, facing outward with legs astride and folded arms. “Good!” said Bella approvingly. “If anyone stares at God stare back until they stop. This will keep you going while I am away.”