Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

After a moment I asked how he had found me. He handed over a sheaf of pages scrawled with Bella’s huge shorthand. I gave them back saying my head ached too much to decipher anything. He read them aloud.

“Dear God, I have chloroformed Candle in the operating-theatre. Ask him to live with you when he wakes up, then you can both talk often about, Yours Faithfully, Dearly Beloved Bell Baxter. P.S. I will telegraph to say where I am when I get there.”

I wept. Baxter said, “Come down to the kitchen and eat something.”

Downstairs I sat with my elbows on the kitchen table while Baxter foraged in the larder then placed before me a jug of milk, mug, plate, knife, loaf, cheese, pickles and the cold remains of a roast fowl. He handled the last with a distaste he tried and failed to hide, for he was vegetarian and only got in meat for his servants. While I tackled the food he slowly drank nearly a gallon of the grey syrup which was the main part of his diet, ladling it into a tankard from a glass carboy of the sort used to transport industrial acid. Once when he left the room to satisfy a call of nature I sipped a little out of curiosity, and found it as briny as sea-water.

We sat till dawn in a melancholy silence broken by bursts of talk. I asked him where Bella learned to use chloroform. He said, “When we returned from abroad I knew she would need more than toys to keep her occupied, so I started a small veterinary clinic. I put word about that sick animals brought to our backdoor would be treated free of charge. Bella was my receptionist and assistant, and a fine clinician in both capacities. She liked meeting strangers and mending animals. I taught her to stitch wounds and she did so with the deft passionate steadiness working-class women bring to sewing shirts and middle-class women to frivolous embroidery. Many lives and limbs have been lost, McCandless, by excluding women from the more intricate medical arts.”

I felt too tired and sick to argue the point.

A while after this I asked why he had suddenly made a will the day after Bella and I got engaged. He said, “To provide for her after my death. You won’t get rich for years, McCandless, however hard you work.”

I accused him of planning to kill himself after our marriage. He shrugged and said he would have had nothing to live for after it.

“You selfish fool, Baxter!” I cried angrily. “How could Bell and me enjoy your money if we got it by your suicide? We would have kept it, of course, but it would have made us miserable. This elopement has not been a wholly bad thing if it has saved three of us from that.”

Baxter swung his back toward me and muttered that his death would not have looked like suicide. I thanked him for the warning, said I would watch him closely in future, and that if he ever died in unhappy circumstances I would take appropriate steps. He stared round at me, astonished, and said, “What steps? Will you have me buried on unholy ground?”

I told him sulkily that I would freeze him on ice till I found how to animate him again. For a moment he seemed about to laugh, but checked himself. I said, “You must not die now. If you do all your property will go to Duncan Wedderburn.”

He pointed out that the House of Commons was debating a bill to let married women keep their own property. I told him that bill would never be made law. It would undermine the institution of marriage and most M.P.s were husbands. He sighed and said, “I deserve death as much as any other murderer.”

“Nonsense! Why call yourself that?”

“Don’t pretend to have forgotten. By a straight question you exposed my guilt the first day I showed you to Bella. Excuse me.”

It was then he left to empty his bladder or bowels. Either operation took nearly an hour, and when he returned I said, “Sorry, Baxter, I haven’t the faintest idea why you call yourself a murderer.”

“That little nearly nine-month-old foetus I took living from the drowned woman’s body should have been coddled as my foster child. By recasting its brain in the mother’s body I shortened her life as deliberately as if I stabbed her to death at the age of forty or fifty, but I took the years off the start, not the ending of her life — a much more vicious thing to do. And I did it for the reason that elderly lechers purchase children from bawds. Selfish greed and impatience drove me and THAT!” he shouted, smiting the table so hard with his fist that the heaviest things on it leapt at least an inch in the air, “THAT is why our arts and sciences cannot improve the world, despite what liberal philanthropists say. Our vast new scientific skills are first used by the damnably greedy selfish impatient parts of our nature and nation, the careful kindly social part always comes second. Without Sir Colin’s techniques Bell would now be a normal two-and-a-half-year-old infant. I could enjoy her society for another sixteen or eighteen years before she grew independent of me. But my damnable sexual appetites employed my scientific skills to warp her into a titbit for Duncan Wedderburn! DUNCAN WEDDERBURN! ”

He wept and I brooded.

I brooded hard for a long time, then said, “What you last said is mainly true, apart from your remark about the impossibility of improving things scientifically. As a member of the Liberal Party I am bound to disagree there. As to you shortening Bell’s life, remember that the only sure thing we know about ageing is that misery and pain age folk faster than happiness does, so Bella’s emphatically happy young brain may prolong her body well past the common span. If you committed a crime by making Bell as she is I am thankful for that crime because I love her as she is, whether she marries Wedderburn or no. I also doubt if the woman who chloroformed me will be anyone’s helpless plaything. Maybe we should pity Wedderburn.”

Baxter stared at me then reached across the table. He gripped my right hand so that the knuckles cracked, I roared with pain and sustained bruises which took a month to heal. He apologized and said he had been expressing heart-felt gratitude. I begged him to keep his gratitude to himself in future.

After this we grew slightly more cheerful. Baxter began strolling about the kitchen, smiling as he only did when he thought of Bell and forgot himself.

“Yes,” he said, “not many two-and-a-half-year-olds are so sure-footed, steady-handed, quick-witted. She remembers everything that happens to her and every word she hears, so even when it makes no sense she picks up the meaning later. And I have saved her from one crushing disadvantage I never had myself: she has never been small so has never known fear. Do you remember all the sizes of midget you were before reaching the height you are now, McCandless? The twenty-four-inch-long gnome? Yard-tall goblin? Four-foot dwarf? Did the giants who owned the world when you were wee let you feel as important as they were?”

I shuddered and said that all childhoods were not like mine. “Perhaps not, but even in the homes of the rich screaming babies, terrified toddlers, sulky adolescents are commonplace, I hear. Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it. Now Bella (and this is why you may be right about pitying Wedderburn) Bella has all the resilience of infancy with all the stature and strength of fine womanhood. Her menstrual cycle was in full flood from the day she opened her eyes, so she has never been taught to feel her body is disgusting or to dread what she desires. Not having learned cowardice when small and oppressed she only uses speech to say what she thinks and feels, not to disguise these, so she is incapable of every badness done through hypocrisy and lying — nearly every sort of badness. All she lacks is experience, especially the experience of decision making. Wedderburn is her first major decision but she has no delusions about his character. Mrs. Dinwiddie has sewn enough money into the lining of her coat to ensure she will not lack funds if she and Wedderburn suddenly part. My main fear is that someone who interests her more will attract her into an adventure we cannot imagine. Still, she knows how to send a telegram.”