Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

“Thank you, McCandless,” murmured Baxter.

He was sitting now in the arm-chair opposite Mr. Hattersley, Bella standing behind with her hands resting protectively on his shoulders. She watched him with an expression I later saw during our Italian honeymoon on the face of a Botticelli Madonna. Baxter now spoke to the lawyer as if nothing had happened.

“So you think the lady behind me is the same person as the General’s wife.”

“I know they are.”

“I will prove you wrong, and do so with testimonies from five independent witnesses, each a scientist of international fame. Lady Victoria Blessington was a hysteric; so childishly dependent on a husband who found her unbearable that her doctor’s visits were the happiest times of her week; so full of self-loathing that she gladly stupefied her mind with sedatives and yearned for her body to be surgically mutilated. Am I correct?”

“Yes, she gave the General hell,” grumbled old Mr. Hattersley, “but you might have mentioned that in her worst fits she still acted like a perfect lady.”

“She relieved her poor mind with sedatives,” said the doctor, “and wished to be surgically cured . Apart from that your portrait of the unhappy lady is all too true.”

“Yes, you know me wife well, Baxter,” sneered the General.

“I never met your wife, Sir Aubrey. The drowned woman who came to consciousness here is someone else. Tell the company, Dr. Prickett, who Charcot of Paris, Golgi of Pavia, Kraepelin of Würzburg, Breuer of Vienna and Korsakoff of Moscow are.”

“They are alienists — specialists in diseases of the mind and nerves. I regard Charcot as a charlatan, but of course on the continent even he is highly regarded.”

“On our world tour we visited them. Each examined the woman I call Bella Baxter and reported on her condition. These reports — signed and witnessed with English translations attached — lie on the table. Their terminology differs because they view the human mind from different standpoints, and Kraepelin and Korsakoff share Dr. Prickett’s view of Charcot. But all are unanimous about Bella Baxter — she is sane, strong and cheerful, with a vigorously independent attitude to life, even though amnesia (caused by injury to her skull and the loss of an unborn child) has left her with no memories preceding her arrival here. Apart from that her balance, sensory discrimination, recollective and intuitive and logical powers are exceptionally keen. Charcot daringly suggests the amnesia has enlarged her intelligence by making her relearn things when old enough to think about them, which people who depend on childhood training hardly ever do. They agree that she shows no signs of mania, hysteria, phobia, dementia, melancholia, neurasthenia, aphasia, catatonia, algolagnia, necrophilia, coprophilia, folie de grandeur, nostalgie de la boue, lycanthropy, fetishism, Narcissism, Onanism, irrational belligerence, unhealthy reticence and is not obsessively Sapphic. They say her only obsessive trait is linguistic. These reports are based on tests carried out in the winter of 1880–81, when she was learning to read and had an enthusiasm for synonyms, assonance and alliteration which sometimes verged on echolalia. Kraepelin said this was an instinctive compensation for her poverty of sensory reminiscence. Charcot said it might make her a poet; Breuer that the obsession would diminish as she gained more memories. It has done so. Her speech is no longer eccentric. Charcot said she was unusually free of the insane prejudices which characterize her compatriots, which of course was an expression of national prejudice, but his final words sum up the verdict of the rest: Bella Baxter’s most striking abnormality is her lack of it. Such a woman cannot be General Blessington’s former wife. Please examine these proofs, Dr. Prickett, or take them away and verify them at your leisure.”

“Don’t waste your time, Prickett,” said the General’s solicitor. “They are irrelevant. They are quibbles.”

“Explain, please,” said Baxter patiently.

“I will, very easily. Suppose that a sickly unpleasant fellow escapes from London after stealing my cash. Suppose that three years later the police arrest him in Glasgow, and are about to lock him up when a doctor cries, ‘Stop! I can prove this man is pleasanter and healthier since he stole your money, and has forgotten all about it.’ The police would think that a quibble. Lady Blessington’s erotomania made her a very miserable wife to the General, but neither he nor the laws of the land will allow her to commit bigamy and live happily ever after in a Scotch ménage à trois , simply because her happiness is sworn to by a horde of foreign brain doctors.”

A noise like a quietly cackling hen was heard — the General was amused. Baxter sighed.

Sighed and said, “Sir Aubrey. Mr. Hattersley. This woman is studying to do useful work in the kindly art of medicine. Why drag her backward into a marriage which made herself and her husband miserable? If McCandless is my parasite, Harker and Prickett and Grimes are yours. Nobody in this room wants a scandal. The only person outside it who knows the truth, or some of it, is a certified lunatic. All I have said has been to persuade you it is honourable and possible to let this woman freely choose whether she returns to England with you or stays in Scotland with us — honourable and possible.”

“Not possible,” said the General heavily. “The gossip about me wife’s disappearance has been increasin, not diminishin over the years. Half the London clubs think I got rid of me domestic problem like I got rid of the mutinous Indians and Ashanti. The damnable thing is, this time they disapprove. The Prince of Wales cut me dead last week and the cad owes me several thou. Since I left the battlefields and went into Parliament the papers have started forgettin I was once the nation’s darlin. A radical rag has started droppin hints, and unless I clap a libel writ on it the popular dailies will start callin me Bluebeard Blessington too. That arch-hypocrite Gladstone has suggested I clear me name by offerin a large reward for news of me wife’s whereabouts, dead or alive. Has everyone here forgotten that a Scotch parson will soon sit down to Christmas dinner and blab to his family and friends about a weddin service I interrupted? No, Victoria. If I find this Baxter has taught you to behave sensibly I will pay him well for his trouble, but you must return south, whether you remember me or not.”

“And think what you will have when you get home with him, Vicky!” cried old Mr. Hattersley growing very excited. “Sir Aubrey is three-quarters dead already and will not last more than another four years. That will give you time to squeeze at least one son out of him, then until the lad comes of age you can live how you like wherever you like: in the London town house or the estate in Loamshire or the other estate in Ireland! Think of those grand places, Vicky, all for you and me. Me! The grand-dad of a baronet! You owe me that, Vicky, because I gave you life. So be a sensible donkey. Honour and riches are the carrot heap ahead of you, a madhouse is the boot kicking you toward it. Yes, we can put you into an asylum for the insane! Who will care what a lot of foreign professors said two years ago when Dr. Prickett and an English specialist with a knighthood certify you are queer in the head? For you are queer Vicky, and the fact that you cannot remember your own dad proves it. Riches or a madhouse! Choose between em.”

“Or divorce Sir Aubrey,” said Baxter. “If he insists on taking a purely legal view of his marriage, so can you.”

We stared at him.