Bedlam (36 page)

The winds not being in our favour, we headed first for what’s called the Gulf of Florida passage, which though not the shortest route, is said the most dependable. Those early days of the voyage, Mr. Lewis appeared in excellent spirits. If, as he liked to say, people claimed he’d gone out to Jamaica because he’d exhausted his welcome in England, Scotland, and on the Continent, he showed no apprehension to be returning home. Tita set up his master’s battered piano (bound with brass straps for travel) in a widening of the passageway outside his cabin, and Mr. Lewis sat at it for hours, pounding out impromptu melodies. At meals he insisted I sit on his right hand, joking we were husband and wife, but though he was more familiar than was decent with the two ladies at our table, it was the young sailors who received the more rigorous discernment of his eye. Altogether though, it surprised me how untalkative he was at meals for so generally vivacious a chatterbox. But when he did speak it was in a drawling voice that won every heart it didn’t grate on. With his pop-eyes, slouching posture, and habit of licking his little finger and drawing it slowly across his eyebrow as he delivered his sallies, he was the sort of gargoyle a person
tends to glance at expectantly, ready to laugh, even if he went whole meals only ogling you.

In light of what came next, those silences now seem dreadful portents. In the second week of the voyage Mr. Lewis began to hæmorrhage from the nose and to complain of stabbing pains in his eye sockets. About the same time, he stopped taking nourishment. Mealtimes found him pacing the deck, shrilly declaiming German and Italian poetry with violent chopping motions of his stubby arms. On the 10th of May, against Tita’s and my objections, he gave himself an emetic, which weakened him at the very time he needed all his strength. By then poor Tita was as beside himself as I was. Upon his return in April from Hordley, his other Jamaica estate, Mr. Lewis had suffered what was likely a bout of yellow fever. While Tita and I feared this could be a recurrence, Mr. Lewis knew it was. One day he called me to him to tell me not to worry, he’d seen to it I’d be well provided for.

This was not what I needed to hear.

“Now, now, Margaret. No blubbering. You must convert each of those pagan little tears into a prayer for me.”

But as losing Jim had taught me, prayers, if they work at all, work as comforts not destiny-contrivers. And on the 16th, while propped against pillows reading his beloved Goethe, after taking a minute to write on Tita’s hat a memorandum ensuring Tita received his wages, the hat still on Tita’s head, Tita sobbing at his breast, he died.

Having told the captain what he’d often told me, “that it was a matter of perfect indifference to him what became of his ugly little husk,” Mr. Lewis would have been amused to see so celebrated a life tipped overboard in a hasty coffin wrapped in a sheet loaded with weights, and would have clapped his hands in delight when,
on impact with the water, the weights slipped free of the sheet and the bare coffin bobbed to the surface, so the last we saw of his little box it was floating back to Jamaica.

The remainder of the voyage we passed either becalmed in stifling heat or tossed about so violently there was no good reason we didn’t founder a thousand times. As for me, I would not have struggled long. Unsonned, unemployered, and by all evidence unhusbanded, what was left for me in this world? But in the third week of July we did reach Gravesend, a fog-world of shouts and splashes and clanks and creaks of ghost-ships, of which there must have been a good hundred in that grey obscurity. There, leaving Tita with letters of condolence for Mr. Lewis’s sisters, I descended planking to the wharf to arrange conveyance of my luggage to town. I then boarded a carriage for New Bethlem.

Was the Greenwich Road that morning as unusually busy as it seemed? Were seven years of rural Jamaica enough to make an English port road seem perfectly mobbed when it wasn’t? Yet truly everybody really was on the go, exchanging quips and looks, porters and servants weaving in and out—But going whither? Come whence? Not all fresh off boats, surely? How to explain such energy? What drove these people? Sheer life-force? English liberty? Or were these only wide-eyed Jamaica questions, where life is easy-does-it and you have two kinds of inhabitants: lumbering, sun-burned whites and bone-thin, slow-moving blacks?

How different a world Jamaica is from England! I don’t mean the people, who are who they are, or the countryside, which in its own way is as green and lovely, I mean the towns. Savannah la Mar is shabby and dirty, yes, but more than that, fugitive, a one-street-to-the-water settlement of booths and lean-to’s, not one of them older than the sunny morning forty years ago an earthquake
off-shore brought the sea a mile inland to a depth often feet. And that was it for then for Savannah la Mar. Today the residents of the island (the Spanish having bid farewell to the native Indians as warmly as they could hack them down) are mainly Europeans and Africans, conquerors and slaves and their multicoloured descendants. With a population entirely from elsewhere and the governor a military puppet on strings pulled from Westminster, the place itself counts for less with its inhabitants than the world they’ve left behind. Whole-hearted history doesn’t happen there.

But newly back in England (so my reflections continued as we came into the more brick-built outskirts of London), you catch a glimpse of what it means to live not in the shadow of exile or cataclysm but of Time. Which is to say, you live in an old country, where it’s not disaster or dislocation around the next corner but History, not here to sweep everything away but to say,
You are what you are and will dwell forever in the shadow of this.
And you find yourself thinking perhaps more than you should about that queer fellow Robinson Crusoe and those like him, who escaped to become hollow-eyed, lank-haired kings of their own remote and solitary destinies.

Now I remembered it was not so far from here I had caught sight of my cannibal sailor, whom John Haslam later reminded me of. And though that was now nearly half a century ago, I still think of my cannibal (if that’s what he was) when I think of solitary kings. I suppose if Crusoe, Selkirk, or another shipwrecked hermit ever ate human flesh, he’d think twice before he told his gentle reader. That he prevailed is the main thing and what most people want to hear about: You can never tell when knowing how he did it could come in handy. Which isn’t to say a recourse so extreme as eating humans would fail to catch their interest or they’d not
insert a cannibal element if it seemed missing, only that they’d have no solace to offer a prodigal who’d strayed so far from everything civilized. All he’d have on his return would be a feeling of specialness in society’s eyes, a feeling not likely unmixed if he’d fed on humans. But what if he could know there was someone here who had sympathy enough to understand and understanding forgive and not only forgive but forgiving let him know it? What for our cannibal then?

At last we came out of Great Surrey Street into the Lambeth Road, and where it meets St. George’s Road, under a solar disk the colour of soot-streaked copper, I saw it: the massive columns of its portico rising above towering brick walls: New Bethlem. As it loomed before me, I experienced, instead of relief to imagine my husband a resident of such a fine modern accommodation, the return of every sensation of doom from twenty years before when approaching Moorfields with the knowledge he was inside.

And I remembered my seven years in Jamaica, especially those last months with Jim gone, waking in the sweltering animal-cry dark from a nightmare of diminishing means, my skiff on the infinite seas for home now child-sized and rudderless, the oars mismatched and shrinking. And as I fell back panting in a rope of bedclothes, I knew that whatever else it was, my absence from my husband’s side (or as near to it as I could get) was a setback to my greatest hope. I did not those nights blame John Haslam. I had known at the time what I was doing and would have left England without the obstacle of him. There was no question I needed to get away. I could not risk being in the same city with Justina Latimer after what she told me and fearing what she might do. I wasn’t fleeing, only doing what was necessary to preserve my child and myself for the sake of my child, and it never occurred to me I’d
not return one day to fight again for my husband. But as I peered through the iron gates of New Bethlem, all I could think was,
So here I am, back at this again. And here’s the measure of how much ground I have lost by going away: The child I was pregnant with then and took from this country to protect is in the grave, and the good news now will be that my husband’s still in there.

A clean methodical fellow, the porter, a Mr. Hunnicut, was no Bulteel—those days at least were over—but he was no more prepared to let me in. For one thing, it was not a visiting day. For another, he had no Matthews on his list. When I said in that case I must speak direct to Dr. Monro, he informed me I would need an appointment. And how to arrange that? By writing to The Physician, c/o Bethlem Hospital. And he stepped into his porter’s lodge for a scrap of paper to write down the address for me. Waiting, I stood gazing through the gates as I’d done so many times before, through different gates, wondering (as ever) what to do now, when who should I see emerge from the great doors and come, stifling a yawn, down the front steps in his old bag-wig and rusty black coat and worsted stockings, but Mr. Poynder.

After handing me the address, the porter turned to unlatch for him. Closer up, the clerk was older, greyer, transformed somehow about the mouth.

As soon as he stepped through, I stepped in front of him. “If you please, Mr. Poynder, the whereabouts of my husband James Matthews—”

A consternating request, it seemed, the way surprise will consternate age. Then he saw who it was and seemed almost to grow frightened, as if I was a ghost. “Margaret Matthews?” he whispered in amazement, a trembling hand at his heart. “Not dead in Jamaica—?”

So he knew my letters had stopped? “Not since May.”

“Thank God! I feared—Never mind what I feared!” And he broke into a smile that revealed, in place of the snaggly old velvet chompers, a snow-white palisade.

“Mr. Poynder, your teeth!”

“Boys’ teeth.” He rapped them with a fingernail. “Battle of Waterloo teeth. English or French, what does it matter once they’re all mixed together in shipping barrels?” And he gazed at me as if they’d turned him a boy again, one who’d undressed me too many times in his mind not to be confounded to find me standing so immediately before him, an entire living person. Coming out of it, he said, “You have a friend here—”

“Jamie—!”

“—a Mrs. Latimer.”

“Justina Latimer? A gallery maid?”

“Oh, heavens no. But perhaps less mad than too beautiful to be hanged, though she did murder a senior minister in government—and even, I have heard, made an attempt on the life of the Duke of York. Last year when she strangled one of our keepers, we moved her to the incurable wing. But what was he doing in the women’s quarters at four in the morning? She speaks of you with fondness though now and then seems of the opinion your leaving London without her was a grievous betrayal. A word of advice: If you visit her, watch your back. And The Monk? How’s he?”

“The Monk” was the name Mr. Lewis was generally known by in England, from the title of an obscene novel he once wrote. As I told Mr. Poynder of Mr. Lewis’s fate, I imagined he must have spoken to Jamie to know about my connexion to Mr. Lewis. So Jamie had received my letters after all and Alavoine kept only his back?

When Mr. Poynder was done his condolences, I said, “Pray sir, is my husband here?”

Holding up a hand, he glanced round to see if Mr. Hunnicut listened, before he edged closer. “A retirement dream of the Poynder complexion, Mrs. Matthews: a stationer’s shop in the warm south. As one who’s been and knows trade, any advice?”

“Go with a good range of stock. If it’s Jamaica you want, set up in Montego Bay (and only there) with cash enough to see you through the first year. The wharf and best houses burned a few years ago, but they’re rebuilding. That same year and the one following, the town was struck by two hurricanes and four earthquakes, but all has been calm since. Don’t be stubborn about sticking to pens and paper if it turns out nobody can write or be bothered to, and you’ll scrape a living well enough. Is my husband here?”

“Montego Bay! Could a man not die in bliss to the music of such a name, even if it be in a hurricane or earthquake?”

I waited.

“Your husband? Not any more.” He patted his breast. “As a matter of fact I have here his August cheque—”

“Alive!”

“I should think alive—” and he explained how two years before, Jamie’d been removed to a private madhouse. “Bethlem splits his expenses three ways with the government and his family—”

“I’m his family.”

He frowned. “Why then, I don’t know. Here I’ve been thinking the third part was Jamaica sugar money—”

“Where is this house?”

“Hackney, by Hoxton—”

“Not Monro’s—?”

“No, no. But the only one who knows, though I don’t think he’s been, and who ensures all three cheques are—”

“Haslam.”

“How’d you know? The removal of your husband to Mr. Fox’s was the only Crowther initiative he supported in twenty years. Poor Bryan—”

“Where’s Haslam now?”

“Lamb’s Conduit Street, Number 56—toward the Foundling Hospital end. He’s a widower now, I guess you know—”

“No, I don’t—only that his wife was ill. I’m going there now and will say my regrets. I can take him the cheque—”

An astonishing offer, from the response. But the Poynder brain was nothing if not limber. From an inside pocket of his coat jacket appeared a narrow yellow envelope on which was written, in the familiar clerkish hand, the precious words, “James Tilly Matthews, c/o Mr. Fox’s, London House Private Hospital, Hackney.”

“Very kind of you, madam—” he said, bowing. He then encouraged me to visit my friend Mrs. Latimer and while I was at it to feel free to drop in on himself, any time. When I said I would, he seemed to grow teary-eyed, before bidding me farewell with such feverish warmth I almost imagined myself a long-lost Poynder paramour.