Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

“It means,” said Dr. Prickett hastily, “that you wished to sleep in his bedroom — share his bed — lie with him (I am forced to be blunt) every night of the week. Gentlemen!”—he turned from Bella and appealed to the rest of us—“gentlemen, the General is a kind man who would cut off his right arm rather than disappoint a woman! On the day before his wedding he asked me for an exact description — from the scientific, hygienic standpoint — of a married man’s duties. I told him what every doctor knows — that sexual intercourse enfeebles brain and body if over-indulged, but in rational doses does nothing but good. I told him he should allow his lady wife to lie with him half an hour a night during the honeymoon period, and once or twice a week afterwards, though all amorous dalliance should cease as soon as pregnancy was detected. Alas, Lady Blessington was so deranged even in her eighth month she wished to lie with Sir Aubrey all night long. She sobbed and wailed when not allowed to do so.”

Tears streamed down Bella’s cheeks. She said, “The poor thing needed cuddling.”

“You could never face the fact,” said the General through clenched teeth, “that the touch of a female body arouses DIABOLICAL LUSTS in potent sensual males — lusts we can hardly restrain. Cuddlin! The word is disgustin and unmanly. It soils your lips, Victoria.”

“I know everyone here is telling what they think is the truth,” said Bella, drying her eyes, “but it sounds daft. Sir Aubrey talks as if he was liable to tear women apart, but honestly, if he cut up rough with me I think I could break him over my knee like a stick.”

“Ha!” cried the General scornfully and his doctor began talking very fast, perhaps annoyed by Bella’s words and the equally sceptical glances Baxter and I had exchanged during his account of the case. His voice was almost as shrill as the General’s as he said, “No normal healthy woman — no good or sane woman wants or expects to enjoy sexual contact, except as a duty. Even pagan philosophers knew that men are energetic planters and good women are peaceful fields. In De Rerum Natura Lucretius tells us that only debauched females wriggle their hips.”

“That creed is both false to nature and false to most human experience,” said Baxter.

“To most human experience? Why certainly!” cried Prickett. “I speak of refined women — respectable women — not those of the vulgar mass.”

“This peculiar notion,” Baxter told Bella, “was first recorded by Athenian homosexuals who thought women only existed to produce men. It was then adopted by celibate Christian priests who thought sexual delight was the origin of every sin, and women were the source of it. I do not know why the idea is now popular in Britain. Maybe an increase in the size and number of boys’ boarding-schools has bred up a professional class who are strangers to female reality. But tell me this, Dr. Prickett. Did Lady Blessington agree to a clitoridectomy?”

“Not only did she agree to one — she begged for it with tears in her eyes. She loathed her hysterical rages, loathed her pathetic desire for contact with her husband, raged against her diseases as much as he did. She eagerly swallowed all the sedatives I administered, but at last I had to tell her they were worse than useless — that I could only cure her by cutting out the centre of her nervous excitement. She begged me to do it at once, and was bitterly sorry when I said we must wait until her child was born. Lady Blessington!” said Prickett, turning back to Bella again, “Lady Blessington, I am sorry you remember none of this. You used to consider me a good friend.”

Bella shook her head wordlessly from side to side. Baxter said, “So Lady Blessington did not flee from home because she feared your treatment?”

“Certainly not!” cried Prickett indignantly. “Lady Blessington used to say my visits were the pleasantest part of her week.”

“Then what was the reason for her flight?”

“She was mad,” said the General, “so needed no reason. If she is now sane she will come home with me. If she refuses she is still mad, and it is me duty as her husband to place her in an institution where she will be properly treated. I cannot leave her in a ménage which is turnin me maniac ex-wife into a nurse !”

“But she has not been your wife since she drowned herself,” said Baxter quickly. “The marriage contract says the marriage lasts until death do you part . The only independent witness to the identity of your wife and my ward is the Humane Society official who saw the suicide and retrieved the corpse. Dr. Prickett suggests I gave her a new life. If so I am as much the father and protector of the revived woman as Mr. Hattersley was of the earlier, and as entitled as he once was to present her in marriage to the husband of her choice. Mr. Harker, how does that logic strike you?”

“As piffle, Mr. Baxter: piffle and poppycock,” said the lawyer coolly. “I have no doubt Lady Blessington immersed herself in the Clyde, and no doubt the Humane Society official rescued her. He is paid to rescue people. He called you in to resuscitate her, and you plainly succeeded. You then bribed him to let you abduct her and bring her here where, pretending she was an invalid niece, you used drugs to render her childish, and thus enjoyed her physical charms and amorous weaknesses under the façade of being a good uncle and a kind physician. You even took your mistress on a world tour while playing that rôle! By the time you returned to Glasgow you had tired of her, so connived at her elopement with the unfortunate Duncan Wedderburn. Yesterday I visited poor Wedderburn’s mother, a terribly distressed lady. She told me her son had been bodily, mentally and financially destroyed by the woman he calls Bella Baxter. Were he not now in a locked ward of Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum he would be in jail for defrauding his clients of their funds. Your twice discarded mistress returned to you last month, so you quickly arranged to marry her to McCandless, your weak-minded parasite. If this story is put before a British jury they will believe it, because it is the truth. Look, Sir Aubrey! Look at him! The truth has hit him hard!”

With a groan like underground thunder Baxter had left the chair, pressed his hands to his stomach and bent over them, writhing epileptically. I was surprised he did not fall, but not by his distress. The solicitor had mixed facts and lies so cleverly that for a moment even I believed him. But Bella sprang to Baxter’s side, put an arm round his waist and soothed him upright again. This brought me to my senses. If the visitors had never before heard the cold fury of a thoroughly rational Scot, they heard it now.

“Mr. Baxter would be a stone statue if he felt no pain,” I told them. “You have used this wise, kind, self-sacrificing man’s hospitality to call him a freak and a liar. In the hearing of the patient whose life he saved you have accused him of viciously assaulting her. You know nothing of the terrible crack which rings her cranium — had he not tended her like a mother and educated her like a father it would have caused worse than total amnesia: she would be an imbecile. His tour with her was no amorous excursion, but the best way of reintroducing her to a world she had forgotten. He did not connive at her elopement with Wedderburn — he tried to dissuade her, begged me to dissuade her, and when we both failed he gave her means to return to us when she tired of the escapade. No roué discarding a mistress would have done that ! You have also had the insolence to call me — his best friend! Archibald McCandless M.D. of Glasgow Royal Infirmary! — you have dared to call me a low-born ruffian and weak-minded parasite. No wonder that vagal nerve discharge has induced reverse peristalsis and that excess pancreatic juice has irritated the oesophagus causing severe heartburn! And you say his pain at such vilification is a sign of GUILT!!!??? Think black black shame of yourselves, gentlemen. You have almost persuaded me that you are not gentlemen at all.”