Bedlam Read online

“And Welsh father? Interesting. Good. Well. Now we’ve got that far, why’s he with us?”

  I was stunned. “You don’t know?”

  “Nobody’s told me, and he refuses. All I know is his trade, which is tea-broker, and a story of how he’s preventing French chaos here by doing battle with a gang of French magnetic fluid-workers responsible for all madness in this hospital. Ever since he discovered the existence of this gang and others, his energy has gone into opposing what he calls their event-working. Their response has been to have him labelled insane and so rendered harmless, for in here, he says, every word he speaks against them is chalked as another symptom—”

  “He told me he’s in by an order of the Privy Council. He also mentioned Lord Portland—”

  “Your husband’s never spoke of Lord Portland to me, and the only kind of privy he’s mentioned is the close-stool kind, how the stinking condition of ours is an insult to the nostrils of a gentleman, and how a dusty vapour he calls Egyptian snuff overcomes him, conveyed by the gang from Nile marshes in August heat, when stagnant pools emit their nauseous stench. Mind you, it’s also such vapours as Egyptian snuff; effluvia of arsenic, sulphur, and dogs; gas from the anuses of horses; and vapours of human seminal fluids, both male and female, all harnessed in barrels, that power his Air Loom—

  “Mrs. Matthews, we don’t exactly comb the streets. Most people can bellow at the gates as much as they like. This is not a private madhouse that must solicit patients of paying families. As to your husband, I would say he’s a republican—”

  “He’s not!” At least, no longer—

  “—in a condition of nervous collapse. Unable to vent his politics for risk of being hanged, he talks nonsense. Whatever the particulars of his initial admission, he’s hied himself back to safety inside the finest madhouse in the world. He’s a lunatic who knows exactly what he’s doing, and while he goes about it, your duty as his concerned spouse is to ensure your visits have a calming effect.”

  “I’ve tried to visit him ever since I found out he was in here! The porter won’t let me pass!”

  This appearing to contradict my claim Jamie had brought me to see where he was kept, Haslam just looked at me. Then he said, “He’s willing to see you?”

  “The porter says not. I say he’s lying!”

  “Why would he lie? You know, it often happens the patient feels betrayed by those that put him in here—”

  “I didn’t put him in here!”

  “Is your husband clearer about that than I am?”

  “I want him out.”

  “No more than do I. If it was up to me, all but the dangerous ones would be out today. Back to the attic, the stake in the yard, or the hole in the floor with the crib over it. Harmless ones lacking homes to go to could be Tom o’ Bedlam again, with his metal arm-clip licence to beg. But who can wind back the clock? Nowadays, once the mad exhaust the tender mercies of their families, they come, if they’re lucky, here to Bethlem Hospital, where for a little while we treat their suffering, before we push them out again, cured or uncured, because we need the bed.”

  “Mr. Haslam, please open this gate so I can see to my husband.”

  “Mrs. Matthews, I can’t. First, because it’s not a visiting day. Second, because the rule here is, disobedience so extreme as an attempt at escape is met by a temporary suspension of all privileges.”

  “But he returned!”

  “To do that, he first had to escape.”

  “This is insufferable!”

  “I can see that. But if you come back Wednesday morning at ten, we’ll go over the details of your husband’s admission. Afterward I’ll take you along to his private room, where with your own eyes you’ll see how we do the best possible in circumstances constrained by a ruinous shortage of funds. The sad fact is, the recent upswell of public solicitude for lunatics that’s been a consequence of madness striking down our mighty monarch King George hasn’t translated into an injection of hard currency for our oldest and finest public hospital devoted to the care of unhinged minds. But I promise you, Wednesday you’ll go away from here assured I’m as steadfast in my intention as you—only mine is for the real benefit of three hundred patients and not the hoped-for benefit of one.”

  I looked at Haslam then, attending to what was still visible in his eyes, that eloquent opaqueness of emotion. For a moment neither of us spoke, until, saying only, “Wednesday,” I stepped around him and walked away. It was do this or burst into tears and so enact the seal of his power upon me.

  But before I reached Broker Row, I glanced back to see, I think, if my ragged crew had been there the while, because the first thing I noticed was they were gone. It was now only John Haslam standing before the iron door he’d come through, the image of a man who’d locked himself out. Except, even as I looked round, he turned from the door with an odd little wave and made a pantomime with the key to show me he could not get it to work and found this amusing and seemed to think I would too. Yet considering his treatment of me just now, this was strange. Besides, I was too flustered to be caught looking back to indulge that collusion, and turned away, so abruptly I nearly twisted an ankle.

  But that odd little wave stayed in my mind, and there, as I walked on, it was joined by another, by which I realized what Haslam reminded me of. It was something I once saw when I was a girl of seven or eight and have never forgot.

  I was with my mother in Southwark High Street. (O Dearest Parent, though a poor widowed schoolmistress with barely means to dress and feed thy Daughter, Thou gavest her something of infinitely greater worth than fine food and fine clothes: experience of what genuine love is, and love of reading and good books, so as a Woman she might not only by the common superiority of female virtue but also by an uncommon strength of female intellect be truly worthy to love a good and intelligent Man!) She and I were on our way to the fair in the last year of its operation—and if you know when they closed down Southwark Fair for good, you will know my age to the year. As we went, we were passed in the street by a chair carrying an English seaman who’d survived shipwreck in the South Seas by crawling out of the surf to spend two years in solitude on a tropic island. When I saw him he was just off the ship that rescued him, then at Wapping Docks. Having contracted a fever on the voyage home, he was being carried to St. Thomas’s Hospital. He was bundled up in blankets, helpless as an infant, and he was waving at the passing scene with a slow, kingly wave, his mouth formed in a little smile like a digestive grimace. Maybe it was his eyes that made that smile appear so uncanny, for they seemed to gaze at me from out of that haggard young-man’s face as from ten thousand miles away, but there was something more in them than distance. My mother and I were not at the fair, only on our way to it, and yet the sight of him gave me a confused idea he was somehow of the company of those we would see when we got there. I mean the tumbling posturemaker lad and the midget lady and the Scotsman who broke glasses by shouting at them. It was that same look in the eyes.

  In those days, crowds were not so well-behaved as now, and when an unusual figure passed, they seldom failed to let him know their feelings. If he met their approval they might offer up a hip-hip-hooray. If not, they were as likely to pelt him with offal. Or if there was something about him peculiarly incensing—if, say, he had the look of an Italian—then they might spill him out of his chair and set upon him with kicks and cudgels. But in the case of the seaman it was as if he carried along with him through the streets so commanding a space of silence and unease that the entire scene blanched and faltered before him as he went. Many averted their eyes. Others hesitated, or stepped aside, hardly seeming to know what they did, like automata, or animals suffering a premonition. And it was not just because he had the look of a sick man, or a dying person, though he had both, it was something else.

  The sailor did die, not long after. By that time a story was abroad that he’d survived those first days on the island by eating the flesh of his drowned shipmates. How anyone could learn this without the man
himself confessing it, I don’t know. Perhaps it came out in a final delirium. For my own part, I have always doubted whether the cannibalism was the cause of the look or only the story that those who knew nothing had fabulated to explain it. As I remember it, the look was that of a man in a condition of triumph, who even now was coming heroically through, and yet at some unfathomable cost. It was the look of one who’d always understood that if he ever made it back alive, his exile would be over, yet here it was, only beginning, and all his triumph one long farewell to human regard. This was why it was a look at the same time and in equal measure proud and abashed.

  But there was something else in it—or so I thought at the time. Something especially for me, or that it asked of me. But what?

  Perhaps I’ve made too much of one thing or another I saw in John Haslam on my very first encounter with him. And maybe it’s true I didn’t see much that first time, and memory has enriched itself since, like a crude sketch grown unaccountably to a Dutch portrait. Perhaps it’s this habit of writing things down. When Jamie first disappeared into France, I learned that without him to talk to, if I would keep hold of my life as I actually lived and knew it (as knowing Jamie had taught me I did live and did know it), then I must talk to paper. After the travails and loneliness of the day I must retreat to my corner window at the turn of the stairs and scribble into the night while the nonscribblers of the dark city dream the dreams that nourish them another way. I am not a dreamer but a gatherer-in. My fear is of the daily vanishing of all experience down the drain of Time. In this age of cataclysm, storm, and madness, with monarchy, nobility, and Church seeking to destroy the heroes of equality—the David Williamses and the Tom Paines and my dear husband and the French male population on the march in a dream of freedom—I struggle to hold on to what matters, and at the end of the day and in the small hours, what to me matters has little to do with rank or no-rank or who has more power and who has less but with the things that won’t change when everybody has the same. I mean how people are with each other and what each suffers and why

  I was taught these things by the way my mother was with me. She knew childhood is a dangerous illness you must be nursed through by love. Without love you die a child, not knowing life, not knowing death, not knowing the first thing that matters. Without love your guide will be every bully and fool in the playground.

  As for Haslam, a purpose may be served in setting down these reflections about him now, if only to indicate what kind of man I seem to be up against. Not a cannibal, of course, but one for whom, from certain angles, all seems more than possible, glory is more than achievable: achieved. Except the matter keeps turning.

  As I rounded the corner, John Haslam’s odd wave still visible in my mind, I could hear the man himself—as Jamie had done earlier, and me after him, and many others over the centuries I am sure—shouting forlornly through the bars of that asylum, For God’s sake, somebody open this door and let me in!

  JUSTINA

  Home before ten o’clock, I was relieved to find our servant Justina had opened the shop for business. Though cool in her manner toward me, she’d cleared the counter, dusted the shelves, swept the floor, and put the sign out, forgetting only some of the lights. Jamie had been in Bethlem but a month, yet for lack of his daily efforts the wholesale trade he’d patched together over the previous ten was already unravelling. We needed every customer who wandered in. In the note I’d left Justina, I wrote JAMES large, underscoring it. Beauty, not reading, being her strong suit, I hoped she’d recognize the name and gather where I was. When not flouncing by in a sulk she loved nothing more than to please me, and being popular with our customers and knowing it, why would she not open the shop? Because, while she professed to pray as fervently as I did to have Jamie back with us, she was sunnier when it was just us two. But yes, she did open the shop, yet her look, when I thanked her for it, too much resembled those I used to receive from her when Jamie’s old friend from his Camberwell days, Robert Dunbar, was often on the premises with Jamie away on the Continent. It was a look that said, Why must he be here?

  I sometimes think I have too much hope of people always to admit to myself the danger they pose. Justina Latimer, now that was danger—yet how far would she need to go before I recognized what it was I harboured, and acted?

  Robert Dunbar had been danger too, I suppose, but was too transparent and compliant to seem so—and necessary. It was he who helped me when I took the business retail. An eager, practical man adept with hammer and saw, he appeared at my door a year after Jamie disappeared into France. It was he who built for me, his labour gratis, the counter and dividing walls necessary to turn the office into a shop. That job finished, he stayed on to help me open the books. By the time he was competing with Justina to be first to greet the customer when the bell jingled, it was evident (if I would only give him a sign, the one he was getting from everybody else telling him his old friend wasn’t coming back) he’d next be exercising his ingenuity in my bed, his own by then a mat on a treadle we kept under the counter he’d built. With Robert Dunbar’s muscle and penetration I might have clawed my way back to wholesale. But my experience has been that while pride, desire, and the compromises of security are quiet enough temptations when met with singly, in concert they make a noise on the conscience. Finally I could not betray my husband, even if he was mad and missing in war time on the wrong side of the Channel.

  It was some while before Robert Dunbar was able to grasp my fidelity for the plain dull thing it was, convinced as he was (and so like a man) my reluctance had something to do with him and therefore, if only I would tell him what it was, could be fixed. When at last, by saying it in as good as so many words, I got him to understand the difficulty did not extend even so far as his existence, the shine for Robert went off the do-gooding life. One mopish day, before he would take up his treadle and walk away, he made a fumbling, I suppose despairing, attempt upon the virtue of Justina, who welcomed his advances long enough to eviscerate one, and make an energetic start on the other, of his testicles with the razor I thought he knew she always carried.

  Hardly was our poor crippled Lothario packed off to Guy’s Hospital and Justina’s tears dried than her mood, which had been in eclipse for a year, rebounded as cheerful as it was in the interval between Jamie’s first disappearance and Dunbar’s first showing his face. That’s how it stayed until the morning last March when the shop door jingled, and Jamie, back from three years imprisoned in France, staggered in like a buyer for the dead. I was too concerned for my husband’s health, not to say overjoyed to have him with me, to take overmuch notice when Justina’s mood passed again into eclipse. But in the ten months Jamie was back with us, I would sometimes catch on her face an expression of disgust with me that I should sink to being a dirty puzzle in my own bed with my own husband. This I ascribed to youth’s queasiness at the animal, as well as to the callous violations of a child-bride by her late husband Latimer (mysteriously stabbed to death in his bed when she was out of the house not ten minutes for bread for his morning tea, as she explained to the police).

  But I never saw Justina’s mood so black as that morning I arrived home from returning Jamie to Bethlem. Mistaking it at first for sympathetic concern, I was amazed when, after I thanked her for opening the shop, she turned from me and coldly asked “what Mr. Matthews wanted in showing his face again” and said “she hoped this time they’d keep him—” She then stole a glance round and, seeing me angry, quickly added, “So he’d have benefit of treatment from expert practitioners—”

  This was insolence from a maidservant with a politic coda, and I can only plead it was the first time I ever heard anything like it voiced so brazenly by this one. Gazing at her in my shock, I thought, As a child, Justina, you were ill-treated by a homicidal parent and when not much older by a savage husband, yet have turned out decent enough, if moody, in many ways intelligent, with good impulses, only slow to know what they are and not much skilled in the articulation of them. This retic
ence has left you hostile to men and what you call their performing snails. But perhaps forgiveness by me this morning, and one day heartfelt love by a good man, might assuage the bitterness of so much cruelty and loss in your life—

  This was as far as I had got in my earnest delusion when the shop bell jingled, and I watched a girl as relieved to be saved by it as I was to watch her trip away.

  On Monday I tried to see Lord Erskine, a mad-eyed republican Scot famous for his unsuccessful defence of the second part of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. Though Jamie’d told me Erskine had agreed to act as his counsel, I soon learned either this was fantasy or Erskine had changed his mind. I couldn’t get past the man’s secretary, who said his Lordship was no longer taking criminal cases, and when I mentioned Bethlem, added nastily, “—and never did charity for lunatics.”

  The small hours of Tuesday and Wednesday I spent tossing and turning in a struggle to believe I had delivered Jamie back into the best medical hands in the kingdom, which would soon enough return him to me. It was true what Jamie had said: If Bethlem hasn’t cured them after a year and deems them a danger to no one, they’re released, whether the family likes it or not. So there was no reason to believe I faced more than eleven months’ wait, in which case our child (if we were so blessed) had a chance of growing up secure in a loving household of London tea dealers, whose head was only at times of exceptional distress prone to pluck a privet-leaf and call it Orange Pekoe.

  As, however, to the mysterious circumstances of Jamie’s admission to Bethlem: What if this was no ordinary lunatic case but a political one, meaning he’d be held as long as who-knew-who wanted him held? But how to set about finding who wanted what, when I had no idea what Jamie had done (if it was more than crying “Treason” in the House) or was thought to have? For that matter, was it for new transgressions or old?

  Meanwhile, life must carry on. The staff in the shop now just us two, those were desperate days. Nauseated by worry, exhaustion, and perhaps something else, I had no reserves of patience with Justina, who at times behaved with such sullen insolence I must dismiss her, but then where would I be? My fear was any increase in demand on my energy and time and I would crack. Alert to my fragile condition, Justina chose a thousand small ways to punish me for the crime of wanting my husband back. So she would linger two or three seconds longer at a task before moving to greet a customer, or silently wipe away tears that were somehow my doing, or when she burned the pudding apologize so vaguely as to imply it was only to be expected given all she now had to do. These little needling things reminded me, if I didn’t already know it, how selfish what some call love can be.