Bedlam Page 36

  When Mr. Lewis returned from England, he was devastated to hear of Jim’s death. After we wept together, he insisted we pray, in the middle of the floor, side by side, which we did, and when our knees were bruised from praying, we wept some more. I don’t know if Jim’s death put a pall on the place for him as it did for me, one that wouldn’t lift, but before two months passed, he announced his intention of returning to England.

  This time I begged him to take me with him. At first he said he couldn’t possibly. With himself not there he needed me on the place to ensure the new book-keeper didn’t revert to the cart-whip. He vowed he’d personally locate my husband and write me the same day. But seeing my unhappy expression, he immediately reversed himself, adding, but if I truly felt I must speak to my husband in person, then I could come with him, but I must promise to return to Jamaica the next time he did. And bring Jamie with me, if I wanted; he would enter him on the payroll. And if it happened while in Jamaica my husband required time in an asylum, since the island had no madhouses, either because everybody was so sedate or so crazy, then he would build one at Cornwall.

  Yet though before Jim’s death I by no means hated our Jamaica life and loved, I think, the Negroes as much as he and Mr. Lewis did, I realized I could promise my employer nothing until I had either laid eyes on my poor dear husband or knew for certain I never would again. The fact, I assured him, I’d had no answers to my letters did not mean he’d not received them or not written. And since Jim’s death I had not written him, for fear of the desolating effect of the news. But now I knew I must tell him soon and in person, before my very silence—assuming, that is, he’d been receiving my letters—had a desolating effect.

  “In that case, my dear,” Mr. Lewis said, sighing but smiling too, “and seeing you’re already hard at work growing out your hair, I absolutely insist you come with me.”

  And so on the first of May—all Cornwall lining the driveway to wave bandannas and kerchiefs, my three friends joking and weeping and godspeeding us half the way—following twelve oxen straining at a train of four baggage carts accompanied by six Negroes walking two on each side and two behind, and after it Tita in a covered gig to keep his gimlet-eye on things, we rode together in Mr. Lewis’s curricle the five miles to Savannah la Mar. On the way, he said he only hoped his future dealings with white people would bring him half so much gratitude, affection, and good will as he’d experienced from his Cornwall Negroes. Their kindness had operated on him, he said, like sunshine. Later that same afternoon we boarded the cutter for Black River Bay, a choppy ride of several hours east along that dreary mangrove coast. Two days after, on board the Sir Godfrey Webster, a vessel already six hundred tons before it took on Mr. Lewis’s baggage, we weighed anchor for England.

  On his previous trip home the year before, Mr. Lewis had made inquiries after Jamie but got only far enough to understand that the whereabouts, or fate, of my husband would take time to determine. Old Bethlem was gone, razed, vanished; level ground, camped in by Gipsies. No one he spoke to at New Bethlem had heard of my husband. None of the old staff I’d told him of—Haslam, Alavoine, Crowther, Bulteel, White, Rodbird—still held their positions. Haslam had been dismissed in disgrace. (While dismissal was something like what he deserved, I don’t know about disgrace and must say I felt for him.) Crowther, Alavoine, Bulteel, and White were all dead, Rodbird reportedly a living corpse. There was a Monro but not the same one. A son, by the sound of it: He was expected at any moment but never appeared. To Mr. Lewis’s annoyance, the apothecary, a beggar-on-horseback named Wallet, refused him access to the incurable wing, though just about any of the older, lucid residents there would have known if Jamie was among them, and if he wasn’t, where he had gone.

  “Did you speak to the clerk, Mr. Poynder?” I had asked Mr. Lewis one morning at Cornwall when he kindly invited me to join him for coffee on the piazza.

  “No. He was another one Mr. Wallet didn’t want disturbed. I never got past the servants’ hall, where a divine service was underway—on a Friday, if you can believe it. The experience was too bizarre: conferring in whispers with the insufferable Wallet in the corner of a room full of lunatic-custodians on their knees in prayer. It told me I’ve been away from London too much. A new age has dawned in my absence and needs me there to disorganize it.”

  “As clerk of the place, Poynder would know if Jamie was at New Bethlem or what happened to him. I’m surprised Mr. Wallet didn’t-”

  “Next time I’ll have Tita strangle Mr. Wallet and we’ll proceed from there.”

  Mr. Lewis left New Bethlem in a fury. But his father had worked under the 1st Earl of Liverpool when his Lordship was secretary of war and had been a friend of his, and Mr. Lewis himself had served six years as M.P. for Hindon, so he was well positioned to make inquiries in government. But the only person who seemed to recognize Jamie’s name was Liverpool’s son, the 2nd Earl, already (and still, for that matter) Prime Minister, and he assured him he had no distinct knowledge of the case. But then, strangely, his Lordship added, “These republican lunatics were thick on the ground—”

  “Oh—” Mr. Lewis said, acting the innocent. “Was he a republican? I didn’t know that.”

  It seemed Liverpool knew something he wasn’t admitting to.

  As he sipped at his coffee, Mr. Lewis regretted having told me all this only to aggravate my fears. To console me, he offered a paean of praise of the glorious modern hospital Jamie was probably ensconced in, adding it must be the extraordinary increase of madness in recent years that would preclude so vast a place keeping track of every last resident.

  But I knew that if the apothecary didn’t recognize the name, then Jamie was gone before that one’s tenure began (whenever that was). And I knew that if the Prime Minister had something to hide about Jamie, then his life had not ceased to be in danger. So the question was, If not dead then gone where?

  How dearly I longed to see my dear husband. Acquaintance with the mind of Mr. Lewis had me pining afresh for that quality in Jamie that I constantly missed in missing him, a quality that before Mr. Lewis burst on our Jamaica life, I’d been watching in wonder shine brighter and brighter in Jim as he grew to be a man. I mean the lucid sympathy of intelligence that emanated from these people like rays from the sun. But with the unbearable loss of Jim combining so soon with renewed sight of a comparable intelligence in Matt Lewis, I all of a sudden missed Jamie so much that when my employer said he was returning once more to England, I absolutely must go with him.

  Like Jamie’s, Matt Lewis’s intelligence was prone to eclipses, for he was apt to grow tedious on the subject of himself, and though a true-hearted man and genuinely brilliant, he could be as alarming a bore sane as Jamie was raving. Perhaps there was madness in Matt Lewis too. Perhaps in an imperfect world you don’t find intelligence at its keenest pitch without some touch of it. Perhaps there needs a certain pressure, heating the thoughts until they glow, and glowing ignite yours and by that sympathy show you more than you could ever see on your own, but then the brilliance grows too hot, fever sets in, all common sense is lost, and that connexion is betrayed.

  It might indeed be thought a taste for intelligence so pure and fierce as to resemble mindsight has itself something foolhardy if not mad in it, and when you mix madness with that intelligence, then an ordinary mortal might seem an Icarus, venturing too near the burning brightness. But for myself, I’ve too often seen to the bottom of the vessel to answer to such pride. But I flatter myself I possess imagination, for I have talent for putting myself in others’ shoes. And I do have an eye for intelligence. Jamie, Jim, and Matt Lewis: those (with my dear mother’s) are the best faces humanity has ever showed me, and theirs the best eyes I ever looked at humanity through.

  HOME

  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, a
s 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 fro
m 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—?”