Bedlam (16 page)

Pinel’s visit brought me to several conclusions, all soberer than Monro’s. Our strengths showed better on paper. The reality of Bethlem as it registered on a sheltered or biased sensibility was too apt to undo too much good work. There was also my own career to think of. Before I met Pinel I was content to bask in the knowledge he approved my book and my approach. But my satisfaction was based on a convenient assumption of his qualification to judge. Now that I’d met him and noticed he was as implicated as the next politico, I felt the fatuousness of his praise and with it the emptiness of my own self-congratulation, and in seeing that saw, glaringly, the slightness and shortcomings of my little book.

This was how I came to conclude that the thing I must do next, if I was to remain at the forefront of this dirty-faced infant science called mad-doctoring, was publish a second edition more assured and substantial, improved by corrections and additions, something worthy to stand as the authoritative British text for the treatment of madness. Something to confirm my strengths before the world while forestalling the back-handed attack on me Pinel could now be counted on to be drafting for his own next book. In this way our mutual awakening had perfected my resolve to become
the foremost English mad-doctor
in fact
that he
in imagination
once concluded me. In this way, my apotheosis to words would serve as means to a most practical and down-to-earth of ends.

As for what to do about Matthews, something was dawning. What it was I didn’t as yet quite know. But I did know this was no ordinary lunatic. Not to me.

Pinel’s visit falling on a Friday, I had the foresight to obtain written permission of the governors to take the family to Hampstead for a recuperative Sunday ramble upon the plain on top of the hill there, called by the locals the Heath. After months of working nights on my mouth-key and days overseeing preparations for Pinel to view the place, it was my first time since last autumn outside Bethlem’s walls in full daylight, Kitchiner’s
converzationes
being evening affairs. All I’d glimpsed of springtime was blossoms on the spindly cherry by my office door.

Had the day not dawned warm and dry, we’d have stayed at home. The last thing Sarah needed was a chill. But the day promising fair, we piled into a hackney and rattled out into the countryside. All London had the same idea, some in coaches, most afoot, walking alone or in straggling family groups, everybody in need of a leg-stretch and fresh air. The closer we came to Hampstead, the more plots of flowers sprang up by the roadside, at the top of each a ragged woman or child with a basket, hawking. Market gardens were also planted along there, neat rows of cauliflower and cabbages, and these too were for sale, or would be soon. Every third house, shed, and barn glimpsable from the road had been converted for the day to an alehouse or tavern, with doors thrown open and tables and benches put out. For an exodus to the peace
of the countryside, it was the most festive, mob-filled Sunday morning I ever saw.

But once we disembarked and started to climb, following a broad path where at times oaks and chestnuts made a green canopy, the crowds seemed to fan out and dissolve, and before long we were as good as by ourselves, taking slow steps upward under a sun shining down out of Wedgewood heavens, my dear Sarah on my arm. Indicating the blue, I said, “As soon as I have determined how to translate fame into money and time, we’ll spend three months each year in Portugal and that way, my love, spare your precious lungs London winters. Until then, Hamp-stead Hill on a glorious spring Sunday is the best I can do.”

“Still sanguine, John?”

“Aye, my love. Ever that.”

Her eyes had been fixed some distance higher up the slope, on Jenny gnawing at a hangnail as she watched over the children, who were picking wildflowers, Henrietta on John’s detailed instructions. Now those eyes, shining brighter than mortal eyes shine, fixed on me.

Frightened, I indicated the little party. “Our son, have you noticed, has a genius for natural philosophy—”

“You’ll face your disappointments squarely, won’t you, John?”

“Oh, he won’t disappoint—” A cowardly response, as I knew when I made it.

“You won’t grow a monster of bitterness and destruction?”

I laughed. “Why? Am I beginning to show symptoms?”

“The man I love is forthright and has good intentions—” Here she broke off, waiting for me to look at her. When I did she said, “Your honesty has made you and it will break you, and, God willing, John, it will save you.”

“What’s this? The flesh of his flesh can read the future now?”

“And will the flesh of hers remember what she told?”

“Yes, because every word she utters is rat-tat-attooed on his heart.”

And so it was. The life I lived with Sarah in those years was too conscious, with everything composed within the frame of its end. Once a trudge up Hampstead Hill would have set me dreaming. Today I was a watchful, flinching eye.

After a morning of following the breezes, we spread a cloth on the grass and ate a lunch of bread, cheese, fruit. Later we lolled while the children played, then roused ourselves and wandered again, the children racing ahead, and would have wandered longer, were there not now glooming skies in the west. Slowly we circled a massive solitary beech while Jenny pushed the squealing children on its swings, before descending to find a carriage waiting as if only for us, to carry us through a deluge that turned the unpaved part of our route to one long slough—but we arrived home safe, dry, and pleasantly exhausted.

It was a day that even as you live it emanates a luminous remove that most achieve only afterward, as crystal pools of memory.

Monday morning early, after a meeting with Poynder to learn what I’d failed to catch on Pinel’s visit, I paid a call on Matthews, who was sitting on his bed eating his breakfast of bread and butter with water-gruel.

“Well, James,” I said, crossing idly to the little table where he kept his engraving materials. “How did you enjoy our visitors?”

“The woman was an honest soul.”

“She was indeed, and a statuesque beauty—” Saying this, I
picked up the copper-plate he’d been working on and slanted it toward the light. “James, you never did tell M. Pinel what this is an image of—”

“Put it down.”

“Why, it’s a woman—”

“Touch it longer and I’ll destroy it.”

I set it back down and turned to him. “It’s your mother, isn’t it, chained to her loom?”

At this, he sprung from the bed to snatch up the copper-plate and graver. He then crossed to the far wall and with his back to me set about scratching the plate all over.

“James, why?”

“Because,” he cried, with a glance round at me, tears standing in his eyes, “after being entreated by her so long, you can’t even recognize who it is.”

“Your wife—? It’s not a loom, it’s a gate—?”

“Why don’t you let her visit?”

“James, I’ve told you. It’s not my decision, it’s Monro’s, with the governors fully behind him.”

“You could talk to him.”

“I have, too many times. His back is up.”

“You could sneak her in. He’d never know.”

“Alavoine would, and tell him. Don’t you realize some in here are jealous of the favours I grant you? How many other inmates are secretly given free candles to work at night?”

“How many others burn them while recording abuses of beggars and slaves too frightened and confused even to understand that’s what they are, while you labour on your mouth-key so you don’t have to hear what the ones who do understand say?”

“James,” I replied, trying to be droll, “this look I see is the one a slave puts on behind his master’s back, not before his face.”

“No, Jack. A fawning look only means he’d be a greater tyrant, if he could, than his master ever was. It must be contamination by the spirit of Liverpool that has you seeing slaves where they’re not.”

“I know you’re no slave, James. And you know I’ve tried to be a friend to you in here—”

“Your friendship is selfishness and strategy, Jack, your kindness a counterfeit for action. You have no interest in what I have to say, only in whether I still believe it or am yet prepared to abjure it. By what presumption do you dismiss my professions while pretending not only to know but to judge my mind?”

“By my capacity, James, to penetrate as far into the mind as into a millstone, once it is cracked.”

“Once it is dead, is all you know. You always was nothing but a shoddy empiric, Jack, and now you’re not even that. One sniff of fame has ruined you beyond all reach of humanity. With your pen you’ve erupted to a greater villain than Monro and his brushes ever was. At least he stays away.”

All the time he abused me he was scratching wildly at the copper-plate. I put a hand to my eyes. “I suppose this will be what you told Pinel.”

“No, for him I expressed it in more graphical terms, with corroboration by hand-lettered documents. I needed it made absolutely clear you’re destroying me, so they think twice before the gang redouble their efforts.”

“You shall be destroyed, James,” I said quietly, not intending a threat, though I can’t pretend it didn’t sound like one, “if you persist in this insolence.”

“When the mighty abuse their power, Jack, what humbles them?”

“It’s hardly a riddle which of us is the madman, if that’s what you mean. You know, James, sometimes I think you need to be taught the ordinary forms of things around here, the same as any other patient. In your caudled state, you seem to have forgot that words and actions deserve consequences, even in here. Nay, all the more so in here.”

“How convenient your morality should dovetail so nice with your viciousness.”

“And this, sir, is the very insolence that shall no longer be tolerated. Dispute our authority, damn you, and we’ll soon let you know what our authority is!”

Here I broke off trembling and left him before I made the situation worse, cursing myself that I should have let him provoke me. Before I closed the door I looked back to see a lunatic hunched over a copper-plate destroying the image of his last hope, himself a perfect image of the self-destruction he’d tell the whole world that I and I alone was responsible for.

Well,
a clear small voice said,
let him tell it. We’ll see who sanity believes.

My confrontation with Matthews upsetting me too much to proceed on my rounds, I took a walk down Broad Street, to my immediate regret. The city was so foggy and hot, the pavement so thronged with feet and lungs, it seemed a holiday, or Bethlem had exploded. “By your leave,” the carman mutters after he’s shoved you aside, while a rotting hag recites the beauties of her girls to the jingle-jangle of a tambourine. The City’s burgeoning. Every foray
out, you plunge into half again as many whores, musicians, beggars, sailors, Negroes, urchins, pedlars, and thieves. The clamour only drove me in on myself, to gloomier reflection than if I’d stayed indoors.

A good mad-doctor does not allow a lunatic to provoke him, if for no other reason than in the heat of the exchange the lunatic goes too far and so brings down on himself an answering discipline, not to punish but to remind him there is a real world out there we all must live in, like it or not.

As I thought this while I walked, for some reason I kept glimpsing Margaret Matthews in the unlikeliest faces. Though our restraint order precluded her approaching Bethlem, it wouldn’t stop her approaching me. But she hadn’t been camped at my door, and with this fog, these crowds, and the intricate puzzle of London streets and alleys, what were the odds? No sooner had this thought come to me than of course I saw her, truly saw her, in Threadneedle Street, peering into a swag-shop window.

Too shaky from one confrontation already this morning, I slipped into what I thought was Finch Lane, but it was a cul-de-sac and she followed me in. As soon as I saw my mistake, I swung round and nearly knocked her down. Though smaller than I remembered (for so great a nuisance) and looking ten years older, she was still fadingly pretty but exhausted, distracted, and shabbier dressed than on her Bethlem visits.

“The reason he’s not answering my letters,” were her first words, spoke with grim lack of to-do, “is he’s not received them.”

I said I didn’t know what she meant.

“Your basketmen,” she said, with slow enunciation, “are intercepting my letters to my husband, and if not mine to him then his to me. Or both.”

I assured her any keeper who did such a thing without cause was at risk of immediate dismissal.

“Does my husband receive my letters?”

“Not that I know.”

“Who has charge of the post?”

“Mr. Poynder.”

“Could you ask Mr. Poynder if he’s received any letters from me to my husband, and could you make sure if he has and has filed them somewhere, he passes them on to their intended recipient? Could you at least do that much?”

I nodded, adding, “You should understand, Mrs. Matthews, it’s the keepers’ duty to scrutinize anything sent to the patients, including letters.”

“The keepers are illiterates. You mean Alavoine.”

“Yes, I should think it’s mostly Alavoine—”

“Who will have burned or sold them. Nothing is being hatched, Mr. Haslam. These are sentiments of loving concern from a wife to her unjustly incarcerated husband. There is no reason on earth to prevent him from reading what I write him.”

“No, there’s not. But you should know some have argued letters will encourage an inmate to forget where he is.”

This stunned her. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, for the same reason it’s universally acknowledged lunatics do better removed from their families, some practitioners maintain that correspondence, to the extent it keeps the connexion alive, impedes recovery.”

“And are you one of those ‘practitioners,’ Mr. Haslam?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then what is telling me this but pure cruelty? Why give mad reasons? You have the power to undo the abuse, you don’t need to
offer a cowardly half-defence of things as they are. Or is this only something you say now, here, to me, out of habit or instinct of survival, and you’ll go away and do what surely you understand must be done? This isn’t you telling me you won’t do anything—is it? Tell me it’s not—”