Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

It was a warm fresh pleasant afternoon and I may have looked slightly childish, kneeling on the tiny kitchen-garden green and peering into a hutch where Mopsy and Flopsy were copulating. Baxter and an awkward, ill-dressed lad whose ears stuck out entered from the lane. Baxter introduced us, but the boy was too shy to say a word, and this made me equally awkward. We went upstairs to take a cup of tea, but not with Mrs. Dinwiddie, so I knew Baxter did not consider McCandless a close friend. While tea was prepared Baxter chatted pleasantly about university medical matters but McCandless was staring so hard at me that he said not a word in reply. Embarrassing! So I went to the piano and played one of the simpler songs of Burns. It may have been The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond, 33but I did not use the treadles of the pianola roll. I played with my fingers, and the timing was perfect. Besides, I distinctly remember that we acquired the pianola in the year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897. I don’t think the instrument had been invented before then. When McCandless left he insisted on kissing my hand. In Sir Aubrey’s house this flowery continental gesture had never been practised even by our French and Italian guests. I was astonished, and probably stared at my fingertips afterward in a bemused way. Our visitor’s salivation was extreme, and I did not want to dry my hand or touch my dress with it till he was out of sight. I did not see him again for a very long time, and certainly did not want to!

There was only one source of misery in those happy, happy days. God would not let me seduce him.

“Please do not fall in love with me, Bella,” he said. “I am not a man, you see, I am a big intelligent dog who is shaped like a man. Apart from that I have only one undoggy trait. I want no master — and no mistress.”

This was true, but I could not face that truth. I loved him with all my heart and all my mind and all my soul so wanted to convert him to humanity. One night, unable to sleep because of this desire, I took a candle in my hand and went naked into his bedroom. The dogs on the floor snarled jealously but I knew they would not bite. Alas, dogs were heaped beside him on the bed too and over his feet. They growled throatily .

“Victoria, I have no room for you,” he murmured, opening his eyes .

“O please let me in for a little while God!” I begged him, weeping. “Give me just enough of you to make a child for us, a little child made from both of us who I can feed and love and cuddle forever.”

“They grow up,” he murmured, yawning, “and there is a medical reason why I must not father a child.”

“You are sick?”

“Incurably sick.”

“Then I will become a doctor and cure you! Doctors can do things surgeons cannot! I will be your doctor.”

He made a clicking noise with his tongue. The two dogs on the floor nipped the calves of my legs gently between their great jaws and tugged me toward the door. I had to go.

Next day over breakfast God explained things fully, for he never made unnecessary mysteries. From his father, the great surgeon, he had inherited a syphilitic illness which would eventually cause insanity and general paralysis .

“I do not know exactly when the blow will fall,” he said. “Perhaps in a few months; perhaps in a few years. But I am prepared for it. The only doctoring which can help me is painless poison, self-administered when the first symptoms appear. I always carry my medicine with me, so you need not become a doctor on my account.”

“Then I will become a doctor on the world’s account!” I declared between sobs. “I will save some people’s lives, if not yours. I will replace you! I will become you!”

“That is a good idea, Victoria,” he said gravely, “and if you hold to it your studies shall be directed that way. But I would first like to see you equipped with a useful husband: an efficient, unselfish one who will help you do what you want while satisfying your amorous instincts — they have been terribly starved.”

“Starvation shall be my husband if you will not!” I told him through clenched teeth. He smiled and shook his head. We had stopped thinking about my famous husband in England .

He took me on a world tour. The idea was mine — I wanted to get him away from his dogs. He did it (I now see) to extend my knowledge, but also to get rid of me. We visited hospitals or attended medical lectures in fourteen capital cities. A Viennese specialist taught me the most modern techniques of sexual hygiene and birth control, after which he kept pushing me into the company of other men whenever he could. But although the sensual appetite was strong in me I could not or would not split it off from the moral appetite to embrace the admirable, and who could I admire more than God? When we returned at last to Glasgow I had made him very miserable. My company deprived him of all freedom. I let him do nothing, go nowhere without me. I was more cheerful than he, because though unable to swallow him all up in a marriage I still had more of him than anybody else could get. And then, walking one day by the memorial fountain in the West End Park, we met McCandless again .

I have mentioned how animals, children and all small or awkward people felt safer when God was near them. McCandless had first met God in the university anatomy department where God gave demonstrations when the usual lecturer was off sick. Small, awkward McCandless fell as passionately in love with God as I had done. He loved me too, of course, but only because he saw me as God’s female part — the part he could embrace and enter. But God was the first great love of his life, and the love was not returned. Long before I came to Park Circus McCandless had spied out the routes by which God took his dogs for their Sunday walk, and kept joining him on these. God was unable to be unkind to anybody, but once, when McCandless not only accompanied him home but had the insolence to force his way inside, my poor darling DID manage to say he needed more privacy than McCandless was allowing him. McCandless left God alone after that, unless they met by accident and God invited him home. Since God was infinitely good this sometimes happened, and that was how I had first met McCandless .

When we met the second time God positively thrust me onto the poor wee man. He sat on a bench, said he needed a rest and begged McCandless to take me a walk round the park. I see now (looking backward) that he wanted nothing but peace from the hideously talkative demanding creature I had become; but as I set off arm-in-arm through the shrubberies with McCandless I had another notion of his motives. Might he think McCandless was the useful, unselfish husband who would help me do what I wanted while satisfying my amorous et cetera? I realized such a man would have to be (in the eyes of the world and perhaps my own) a weakling, because he MUST NOT separate me from God. In fact, he would have to live with God and me, wanting no establishment of his own. While I pondered these things the vain little homunculus clinging to my arm babbled to me about the poverty of his childhood, his successes as a medical student and his wonderful achievements as a house doctor in the Royal Infirmary. Could THIS be the man I needed? I paused to stare at him more closely. He responded by kissing me, shyly at first, then with ardour. I had never been kissed by a man before. My only amorous pleasures had been a Sapphic affair with my piano teacher in Lausanne. I would have loved her till the end of time, but alas, she loved too many others for my selfish taste, so I had turned against her. I was amazed by the enjoyment I got from McCandless. When we separated I gazed at him with an emotion verging on respect. When he proposed marriage I agreed and said, “Let us tell God at once.” There was no doubt in my mind that God would be overjoyed to get more privacy by sharing me with McCandless .