Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

How astonishingly selfish I was in those days! I had no moral imagination, no intelligent sympathy for people. God wanted a good husband for me so that he might enjoy again the life I had interrupted; he had not expected my marriage to add ANOTHER person to his household! A person he did not greatly like! He nearly fainted when I told him the news. He begged us to consider the matter for at least a fortnight before making up our minds. We agreed, of course .

I hope the people of 1974 are less shocked by sexual facts than most of my late Victorian contemporaries. If not, this letter will be burned as soon as read .

In the following week the McCandless kiss filled my thoughts and daydreams. Was it because of McCandless, I wondered, or could any other man give me that feeling of exquisite power combined with exquisite helplessness? Perhaps (I even dared to think) ANOTHER MAN MIGHT DO IT BETTER! To find out I seduced Duncan Wedderburn, a man I had never considered before and who (to be fair to him) had never considered me! He was a conventional soul, so completely devoted to a selfish mother that the notion of marriage never occurred to him before he and I became lovers. However, it occurred to him immediately after. I did not realize that the elopement he proposed was to involve marriage. I thought of it as a delicious experiment, a voyage to discover how suitable McCandless was. I explained this to God who said forlornly, “Go your ways, Victoria, I cannot teach you about love. But be gentle with poor Wedderburn, he has not a strong head. McCandless, too, will suffer when he hears about it.”

“But you won’t shut me out when I come back?” I asked him brightly.

“No. But I may not be alive.”

“Yes you will,” I said, kissing him. I no longer believed he had syphilis. I found it easier to believe he had invented that to prevent women like me twisting him round their little fingers .

Well, I enjoyed my Wedderburn while he lasted and was gentle with him when he fell apart. I still visit him once a month in the lunatic asylum. He is bright and cheerful, and always greets me with a mischievous wink and knowing grin. I am sure his insanity began as a pretence to evade imprisonment for embezzling clients’ funds, but it is real enough now.

“How is your husband?” he asked me last week.

“Archie died in 1911,” I told him.

“No, I mean your OTHER husband — Leviathan Pit-Bottomless Baxter de Babylon, surgical king of the damned material universe.”

“Dead also Wedder,” I said with a heartfelt sigh.

“Teehee! That one will never die,” he giggled. How I wish he had never died .

When I returned to Park Circus he was dying already. I saw it in his shrunk figure and trembling hand.

“O God!” I cried, “O God!” and kneeling down I embraced his legs and pressed my weeping face into them. He was sitting in Mrs. Dinwiddie’s parlour, she on one side and McCandless standing behind. I was astonished to see my fiancé there, though of course I had kept in touch with him by letter. With the onset of the disease God had come to need medical help with some functions for which his mother’s strength was too little. The nearness of death had also driven out his dislike of McCandless.

“Victoria,” he murmured, “Bella-Victoria, you Beautiful Victory, my mind will soon be all gone, all gone, and you will no longer love me if our candle-maker friend does not give me a very strong medicine. But I am glad to see you before I drink it. Marry this candle, Bella-Victoria. All I own will be yours. Promise to look after my dogs for me, my poor poor lonely leaderless dogs. Poor dogs. Poor dogs.”

His head began to shake and his mouth dribble.

McCandless bared his arm and gave him an injection. He became sensible for a few more minutes.

“Yes, take the dogs for their Sunday walks, Archie and Victoria. Go along the canal bank to Bowling then go by Strowan’s Well to the Lang Crags above Dumbarton, cross the Stockiemuir to Carbeth, come back by way of Craigallion Loch, the Allander, Mugdock and Milngavie Waterworks. Or go up the Clyde to Rutherglen or Cambuslang, mount the Cathkin Braes by the Dechmont and stroll by way of Gargunnock and the Malletsheugh to Neilston Pad. There are glorious walks around Glasgow, all leading easily to high places where you can look out upon glorious tracts of the world: mountains, lochs, pastured hills, woodlands and the great Firth, all framing this Glasgow which we do not love enough, for we would make it better if we did. Enjoy these things for me: the stepping stones by Cadder Kirk, clear Bardowie Loch, The Auld Wives’ Lifts, The Devil’s Pulpit, Dumgoyach and Dungoyne. If you have sons, please name one after me. Mummy will help you with them. Mummy! Mummy! Treat the McCandless bairns like grandchildren. I am sorry I could give you none. And try to forgive my father, Sir Colin. What a damnably foul old scoundrel the man was. He started more than he could see the end of. But we all do that haha. Quick, McCandless! The medicine!”

Archie brought forward the draught but it was I who took it from him and, after pressing my lips to my beloved’s in the only kiss we ever shared, put my arm behind his head and helped him drink .

That is how Godwin Baxter died .

You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable. My second husband’s story positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries, the nineteenth. He has made a sufficiently strange story stranger still by stirring into it episodes and phrases to be found in Hogg’s Suicide’s Grave with additional ghouleries from the works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. What morbid Victorian fantasy has he NOT filched from? I find traces of The Coming Race, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Trilby, Rider Haggard’s She, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and, alas, Alice Through the Looking-Glass; a gloomier book than the sunlit Alice in Wonderland. He has even plagiarized work by two very dear friends: G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion and the scientific romances of Herbert George Wells. Ever since reading this infernal parody of my life-story I have been asking, WHY DID ARCHIE WRITE IT? I am now able to post this letter to posterity because I have at last found the answer .

As locomotive engines are driven by pressurized steam, so the mind of Archibald McCandless was driven by carefully hidden envy. His good fortune in later life never stopped him being at heart just “a poor bastard bairn”. The envy the poor and exploited feel toward the wealthy is a good thing if it works toward reforming this unfairly ordered nation. That is why we Fabians think the trade unions and Labour Party are as much our allies as any honest public servant (Liberal or Tory) who wants a decent minimum wage, a sanitary house, proper working conditions and the vote for every British adult. Unluckily my Archie envied the only two people he loved, the only two who could tolerate him. He envied God for having a famous father and tender, loving mother. He resented my wealthy father, convent education and famous first husband, resented my superior social graces. Most of all he envied the care and company God gave me and the strength of my love for God, and hated the fact that the most we felt for him was friendly goodwill tempered (on my side) with sensual indulgence. So in his last months he soothed himself by imagining a world where he and God and I existed in perfect equality. Having had a childhood which privileged people would have thought “no childhood” he wrote a book suggesting that God had none either — that God had always been as Archie knew him, because Sir Colin had manufactured God by the Frankenstein method. Then he deprived me of childhood and schooling by suggesting I was not mentally me when I first met him, but my baby daughter. Having invented this equality of deprivation for all of us he could then easily describe how I loved him at first sight, and how Godwin envied him! But of course, Archie was no lunatic. He knew his book was a cunning lie. When chuckling over it during his last few weeks what amused him was how cleverly his fiction outwitted the truth. Or so I believe .