Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

“Bella, I have met you only three times in my life and this is the third.”

“Exactly!” cried Bella with a frightening gust of anger. “I am only half a woman Candle, less than half having had no childhood, the bit of life Miss MacTavish said we dragged clouds of glory into, no sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice-little-girlhood, no early-love’s-young-dream-womanhood. A whole quarter century of my life has vanished crash bang wallop. So the few wee memories in this hollow Bell tinkle clink clank clatter rattle clang gong ring dong ding sound resound resonate detonate vibrate reverberate echo re-echo around this poor empty skull in words words words words wordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswords that try to make much of little but cannot. I need more past. On our boat up the Nile a fine lady travelled alone and someone told me she was a woman with a past , O how I envied her. But Duncan will give me a lot of past fast. Duncan is quick.”

“Bell!” I pled, “you will NOT go off and marry this man! You will NOT carry his bairns!”

“I know!” said Bella, looking at me in a startled way. “I am engaged to you.”

She pointed to the lapel of her travelling-coat where I saw the tiny pearl of my tie-pin. She said cunningly, “I bet you’ve eaten all my gobstoppers.”

I told her I had placed the gobstoppers in a glass jar with a lid which now stood on a sideboard of my lodgings, because the heat of my body would gradually melt them into a shapeless lump if I carried them in my pocket. I also said that since Baxter refused to protect her from this bad and worthless man, and since she refused to protect herself, I would go down and wait for him in the lane; if my words did not turn him away I would knock him down. She glowered at me — I had never seen her glower before — and her lower lip swelled and stuck out like an angry baby’s, and for a moment I feared she would bawl like one.

A lovely thing happened instead. Her face relaxed into a smile as delighted as when we first met, she stood and stretched her arms straight out to me like then, but now I stepped between them and we embraced. I could not remember being so close to another person before, she pulled my face so deep into her bosom that I had less air than when she embraced me in the park. I dared not stay till I lost consciousness so again struggled free. She stood holding my hands and said kindly, “My dear wee Candle, when I try to give you pleasure you cannot take it and break away. So how can you give much pleasure to me?”

“You are the only woman I have loved, Bella, I am not like Duncan Wedderburn who has been practising on servant women all his life, if you count the wet-nurse who was hired to suckle him. My mother served on a farm. Her boss practised on her, making me, and I am lucky that he did not fling us both out afterwards. There was no time for love in our lives — the pay was too poor, the work too hard for it. I learned to survive on small quantities of it, Bell. I cannot suddenly start enjoying whole armfuls.”

“But I can and will, Candle. O yes!” said Bella, still smiling but nodding very definitely. “And you once said I could do anything I liked with you.”

I smiled and nodded back, being now sure I would win her, and said she could still do what she liked with me, but not what she liked with other men. She frowned and sighed fretfully at that, then laughed aloud and cried, “But Duncan won’t be here for hours and hours and hours so come upstairs and let me surprise you!”

Pulling my right hand under her arm she led me to the door. Feeling completely happy I asked about the surprise; she told me not to ask before it happened.

As we climbed to the top landing she said thoughtfully, “Duncan is an amateur boxing champion.”

I told her that I too was a fighter; that more than one big boy in the playground of Whauphill school had thought my quiet ways and smaller size made me an easy mark to hit, but without always winning I had always proved them wrong. She squeezed my hand. I then noticed something oddly familiar: the mingled aroma of carbolic and surgical spirit that goes with hospitals. I knew old Sir Colin’s operating-theatre, like all such theatres, would have been on the top floor, but had not thought it was still in use. We had climbed up to brightness. There was still an hour before sunset. A breeze had swept the sky clean, and near the summer solstice there is always light in the Scottish skies, however dark the streets and fields. The top landing was directly under a big cupola lighting the stairwell. Bella put her hand on a door-knob and said, “You must wait outside and not peep until I call you, Candle, then you will be surprised.”

She slipped sideways through the door, closing it so quickly behind her that I had no glimpse of the interior.

While I waited some very queer ideas entered my head. Could Wedderburn have so corrupted her that on being called in I would see her naked? The notion made me tremble with an agony of conflicting feelings, but as the moments passed I was tormented by another and even worse suspicion. Most big houses have narrow back-stairs for servants. Had Bella crept down these, was she even now walking briskly towards Charing Cross where she would take a cab to Wedderburn’s rooms? This image of her came so clear to my mind that I was about to open the door when it swung inward and I knew she must be standing behind it, the room before me was so empty of visible life. I heard her say, “Step inside and shut your eyes.”

I stepped inside but did not shut my eyes at once.

This was indeed old Sir Colin’s operating-theatre, built to his specifications when the Circus had been built in the days of the Crystal Palace. The furnishings were few and gaunt but bathed in warm evening sunlight. This flooded in from tall windows and from a ceiling which seemed to be four skylights sloping up to a reflector in the centre, a reflector casting a pool of greater brightness on the operating-table beneath. I saw benches with what looked like barred hutches and kennels on them and noticed a whiff of animal in the hospital smell. I heard the door click shut behind me, felt Bella breathing on the nape of my neck. Suddenly certain she was naked I half closed my eyes and began trembling. From behind she slid an arm across my chest, and with relief I saw it clothed in the sleeve of her travelling-coat. She pressed me back against her body and I relaxed there, noticing briefly that the chemical odour of the place was unusually strong. I felt as much as heard her murmur in my ear, “Bell will let nobody hurt her wee Candle.”

She put her hand over my mouth and nose, and when I tried to breathe I became unconscious.

I heard the faint steady hissing of a gas chandelier. I had a headache, but did not open my eyes because light would hurt them. I knew something horrible had happened, that something essential was taken from me, but I did not want to think of it. Nearby someone sighed and whispered, “Evil. I am evil.”

Bella came to mind. I sat up and a blanket slipped from me.

I was sitting (had been lying) on the sofa in Baxter’s study. I was coatless, my waistcoat unbuttoned, my collar and shoes removed. The sofa was a massive mahogany article upholstered in black horsehair. Baxter sat gloomily watching me at the other end of it. Through the windows (whose curtains were not drawn) I saw a big half moon in a clear night sky, a sky so full of deep blue light that it was starless. I said, “Time?”

“Well after two.”

“Bell?”

“Eloped.”