Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

7 The Scarlet Woman on the Beast’s back holds a golden cup full of abominations.

I do not exactly know what the cup is nowadays because Bella disliked wine and spirits, but if you and I meet and discuss the matter calmly surely we will find something?

I am horribly lonely. Mother keeps telling me to pull myself together. I long to sit close to her but when I do she fidgets and asks why I do not go out to music-hall, sports-club or other “THINGS” I used to be busy with before my trip abroad. I dread such “THINGS” nowadays. When I was little Auld Jessy cared for me when Mother got the fidgets. So now I pretend to go out for a “night on the town” but skulk round by the backdoor tradesman’s entrance into the kitchen, where I sit tippling with Auld Jessy and the cook. I never drank alcohol in my Casanova days, for a devotee of Venus must abjure Bacchus. It is cold in the kitchen. I have so wasted the Wedderburn fortune that Mother cannot afford to let servants use our coals. Auld Jessy and the cook sleep together for warmth, so I sleep between them. I cannot sleep alone. Come back please warm me Bella.

Tomorrow I will start a new life by doing three things all at once. I will make Mother rich again by underrating devotion to the science and art of property conveyancing. I will save my Bella from Beastly Baxter by boxing with the Modern Babylon at street corners, in the open forum of Glasgow Green and through letters to the press. I will embrace the only true Catholic faith, make a vow of eternal chastity, and end my days in the peace of a cloister. I need rest. Help me.

I am Faithfully and Forever,

Bella’s Outcast Welter Weight

Bleeding Waistcoat Hearted

Duncan McNab Wed Wed Wedder

(Writer to the Signet and Auld Jessy’s Big Tumshie).

We were silent for a while after Baxter stopped reading. At last I said, “Can we do nothing to save that poor fellow’s sanity?”

“Nothing,” said Baxter crisply. He had put the sheaf of pages back in an envelope and from a brown paper packet drew out a bulkier sheaf. Holding it carefully on his knees he smiled down at it, gently caressing the topmost page with the tiny delicate tips of his conical thumbs.

“A letter from Bell?” I asked. He nodded and said, “Why worry about Wedderburn, McCandless? He is a middle-class male in the prime of life with legal training, a secure home and three supportive females. Think of your fiancée, the attractive woman with the three-year-old brain he has left penniless in Paris. Do you not fear for her?”

“No. With all his advantages Wedderburn is a poor creature. Bell is not.”

“True. Right. Correct. Exactly. Yes indeed!” cried he in an ecstasy of agreement. I said grimly, “Bell’s use of synonyms seems infectious. Has she many in that letter?”

He smiled at me like a wise old teacher whose favourite pupil has answered a difficult question and said, “Forgive my excitement, McCandless. You cannot share it because you have never been a parent, have never made something new and splendid. It is wonderful for a creator to see the offspring live, feel and act independently. I read Genesis three years ago and could not understand God’s displeasure when Eve and Adam chose to know good and evil — chose to be Godlike. That should have been his proudest hour.”

“They deliberately disobeyed him!” I said, forgetting The Origin of Species and speaking with the voice of The Shorter Catechism. “He had given them life and everything they could enjoy, everything on earth, except two forbidden trees. Those were sacred mysteries whose fruit did harm. Nothing but perverse greed made them eat it.”

Baxter shook his head and said, “Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us — it is all present, all gift. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God, or the universe, or nature is mysterious, are like those who call these things jealous or angry. They are announcing the state of their lonely, muddled minds.”

“Utter blethers, Baxter!” I cried. “Our whole lives are a struggle with mysteries. Mysteries endanger us, support us, destroy us. Our great scientists have cleared away these mysteries in some directions by deepening them in others. The second law of thermo-dynamics proves the universe will end by turning into cold porridge, but nobody knows how it began, or if it began. Our science stems from Kepler’s discovery of gravitation, but though we can describe how the vastest galaxies and flimsiest gases gravitate we don’t know what gravity is or how it works. Kepler speculated that it was a form of inorganic intelligence. Modern physicists do not even speculate, but hide their ignorance under formulae. We know how species began but cannot create the smallest living cell. You grafted a baby’s brain into a mother’s skull. Very clever. It does not make you an all-knowing god.”

“I disagree with your language, not your facts, McCandless,” said Baxter with another annoyingly generous smile.

“Of course no single mind can know more than a fraction of past, present and future existence. But what you call mysteries I call ignorances , and nothing we do not know (whatever we call it) is more holy, sacred and wonderful than the things we know — the things we are! The loving kindness of people is what creates and supports us, keeps our society running and lets us move freely in it.”

“Lust, fear of hunger and the police also play a part. Read me Bell’s letter.”

“I will, but let me start by astonishing you. This letter is a diary written over a period of three months. Compare the first page with the last.”

He handed me two pages.

They did astonish me, though the first, as I expected, was covered with big capital letters cryptically grouped:

DR GD I HD N PC T WRT BFR

W R FLT PN THS BL BL S

The last page contained forty lines of closely written words, of which a sentence caught my eye:

Tell my dear Candle that his wedding Bell no longer thinks he must do all she bids.

“Good for a three-year-old?” asked Baxter.

“She is still learning,” I said, returning the two pages.

“Still learning! Still gaining wisdom and aptitude for life while struggling toward what is good in it. This letter justifies me, McCandless. Imagine I am Shakespeare’s old schoolteacher, one who taught him to write. Imagine this letter is a present from my former pupil, the original manuscript of Hamlet in his own hand. The soul who wrote this has soared as far beyond my own soul as my soul soars beyond—”

He checked himself, looked away from me then said, “—at least beyond Duncan Wedderburn. My Shakespearean analogy is not far-fetched, McCandless. The close-packed sense within her sentences, her puns, her very cadences are Shakespeare’s.”

“Then read it to me.”

“At once! It is undated, but obviously begun on shipboard soon after Wedderburn knelt snivelling in a Trieste gutter, or (if you prefer his own vainglorious account of the incident) soused himself in the Grand Canal. Apart from that detail Bella’s letter confirms the main part of his: even confirms one fact which he reported as a hallucination. But her epistle outshines Wedderburn’s as vividly as the Gospel according to Saint Matthew (which contains Christ’s sermon on the mount) outshines the Gospel according to Saint John (which does not). Or have I got that wrong, McCandless? You had the Bible drummed into you at school. Was it Saint Mark or Saint Luke who—”