Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

From a poke in her pocket she gave each child a large sweet of the kind called gobstoppers, then drew my hand under her arm and hurried me off past the duck pond.

Bella’s firm and talkative manner made me expect a torrent of words, not what happened. She strode forward glancing from side to side until she saw a narrow path through a shrubbery and steered me abruptly up it. At a bend in the path she stopped, snapped shut her parasol, hurled it like a spear into a thick rhododendron bush and dragged me in after it. I was too surprised to resist. When the leaves were higher than our heads she released me and unbuttoned her right hand glove, smiling and licking her lips and muttering “Now then!”

Stripping off the glove she clapped her naked palm over my mouth while flinging her left arm round my neck. The edge of the palm blocked my nostrils and though still too astonished to struggle I was soon gasping for breath. So was she. Her eyes were shut, she wrenched her head from side to side moaning through flushed and pouting lips, “A Candle oh Candle the Candle of Candle to Candle by Candle from Candle I Candle you Candle we Candle. .”

From feeling as helpless as a doll I suddenly wished to be nothing else, her pressure on my mouth and neck became terribly sweet, I began struggling not against suffocation but against a delight too great to be borne. A moment later I was free again, dazed and watching her pick the glove from the branch where it hung and pull it on again.

“Do you know, Candle,” she murmured after some deeply contented sighs, “I haven’t had a chance to do that since I got off the ship from America a fortnight ago? Baxter has not left me alone with anyone except him. Did you enjoy what we did?”

I nodded. She said slyly, “You didn’t enjoy it as much as I did. You would not have pulled away so soon and would have acted more daft. But men seem better at acting daft when they’re miserable.”

She retrieved her parasol and cheerfully waved it to some starers on a terrace of the hillside above. 10I was depressed to see we had been overlooked, but relieved to realize the watchers must first have thought she was trying to strangle me then decided she was coping with a bleeding nose.

When we regained the path she brushed twigs, leaves and petals off our clothing, drew my hand under her arm again and walked onward saying, “What will we talk about?”

I was too bemused to answer till she had repeated the question.

“Miss Baxter — Bella — oh dear Bell have you done that with many men?”

“Yes, all over the world, but mostly in the Pacific. On the boat out of Nagasaki I met two petty officers — they were devoted to each other — and I sometimes did it six times a day with each of them.”

“Did you. . do anything more with other men, Bella, than you and me did together in the shrubbery just now?”

“You rude little Candle! You sound as miserable as God!” said Bella, laughing heartily. “Of course I never do more than we’ve just done with MEN. More with men makes babies. I want fun, not babies. I only do more with women, if I like the look of them, but a lot of women are shy. Miss MacTavish ran away from me in San Francisco because doing more than kissing hands and faces frightened her. I’m glad we can talk straight about these things, Candle. A lot of men are shy too.”

I told her I was not afraid of straight talking because I was a qualified doctor who had grown up on a farm. I also asked about Miss MacTavish.

“She was the main part of our cortège retinue ong-to-rage suite train trail or body of retainers when we left Glasgow. She was my teacher escort governess companion instructor chaperon pedagogue duenna guide philosopher and friend until San Francisco. She taught me a lot of words and poetry before the final fracture. You grew up on a farm! Was your dad a frugal swain tending his flocks on the Grampian hills or a ploughman homeward plodding his weary way? Tell tell tell your Bell Bell Bell. I am a collector of childhoods since that collision destroyed all memory of my own.”

I told her about my parents. When she heard I could not recall where my mother was buried she smiled and nodded though tears started flowing down her cheeks.

“Me too!” she said. “In Buenos Aires we tried to visit my parents’ grave, but Baxter found the railway company that paid for the interment had put them in a graveyard on the edge of a bottomless canyon, so when Chimborazo or Cotopaxi or Popocatapetl erupted the whole shebang collapsed in an avalanche to the bottom crushing headstones coffins skeletons to a powder of in-fin-it-es-im-al atoms. Seeing them in that state would have been like visiting a heap of caster sugar, so instead Baxter took me to the house where he said I had lived with them. It had a dusty courtyard with a cracked water tank in a corner and some chickens pecking about and an old caretaker janitor gatekeeper porter concierge (stop tinkling Bell) an old man who called me Bella Señorita so I suppose he remembered me but I could not remember him. I stared and stared and stared and stared and stared at those scrawny chickens and that cracked tank with a vine growing out the side and I STROVE to remember them but could not. God knows every language so he questioned the old man in Spanish and I learned I had not lived there long because my pa and ma had been migrants wandering hither and yonder upon the wastes of the waters like the son of man who hath no space whereon to rest the sole of his foot as Miss MacTavish aptly remarked. My pa Ignatius Baxter marketed rubber copper coffee bauxite beef tar esparto-grass all things whose markets fluctuate so he and mama had to fluctuate too. But what I want to know is, what was I DOING while they fluctuated? I have eyes and a mirror in my bedroom, Candle, I SEE I am a woman in my middle twenties and but nearer thirty than twenty, most women are married by then—”

“Marry me , Bella!” I cried.

“Don’t change the subject Candle, why were my parents still carting a lovely thing like Bell Baxter about with them? That is what I want to know.”

We walked on in silence, she obviously brooding upon the mysteries of her origin, I fretting over her neglect of my impulsive but sincere proposal. At last I said, “Bell — Bella — Miss Baxter, I accept the fact that you have done what we did in the shrubbery with many men. Do you ever do it with Godwin?”

“No. I can’t do it with God, and that’s what is making him miserable. He’s too ordinary to have fun with in that kind of way. He’s as ordinary as I am.”

“Nonsense, Miss Baxter! You and your guardian are the most extraordinary couple I have ever—”

“Shut up Candle, you are too impressed by appearances. I have not read Beauty and the Beast or Ruskin’s Stones of Venice or Dumas’ Hunchback of Notre-Dame or is it Hugo’s in the Tauchnitz limp covered English translation costing two shillings and sixpence from start to finish, but I have been told enough about these mighty epics of our race to know most folk think God and me a very gothic couple. They are wrong. At heart we are ordinary farmers like Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights by one of those Brontës.”

“I have not read it.”

“You must because it is about us. Heathcliff and Cathy belong to a farming family and he loves her because they’ve been together and played together almost forever and she likes him a lot but finds Edgar more lovable and marries him because he is outside the family. Then Heathcliff goes daft. I hope Baxter won’t. There he is, all alone, how very handy. I’m glad he sent the lads home.”

When we reached the fountain the park-keepers were blowing their whistles before locking the gates and a deep-red sun was sinking behind bars of purple and golden cloud. The solitary bulk of poor Baxter was slumped exactly as we had left him, hands clasped on the knob of a stout stick planted upright between his legs, chin resting on hands, aghast eyes seeming to gaze at nothing. When we stood arm in arm before him our heads were level with his own, yet he still seemed not to see us.