Bedlam Read online

  Wednesday dawned warm (for February) and foul. Leaving Justina pacing crackly as a cat, I made the walk that by now I knew pretty well, this time carrying a basket of goods I imagined Jamie would appreciate: warm stockings, clean linen, a half-dozen oranges, a block of chocolate, a plate and knife, a toothbrush. My basket also contained two books, the first the second part of Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man, which (Lord Erskine being unsuccessful defending) was rare, having been burned. “The flames,” I can remember Jamie once remarking, “is where the English consign the Rousseau of British democracy.” I didn’t think he’d read the second part, but I knew well his enthusiastic opinion of certain sentiments in the first, as well as those in Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, written against our King and nobility. The second book in my basket was Jamie’s hero the republican David Williams’ Letters on Political Liberty, which I did know he’d read but thought he might like to have by him, as Williams (a Welshman like Jamie’s father) had once been instrumental in his first mission to Paris.

  At the gate, as I half anticipated, the animal Bulteel made a great show of knowing nothing of my visit and would see me off, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Well before I could make a scene, he turned away and wrote me out a ticket, instructing me to wait inside the gate for my guide, the hospital steward, Mr. Alavoine, who—whether by arrangement or chance was not clear—was standing only a few feet away, in conversation through the bars with a dissolute lascar. This Alavoine I knew was the monster of depravity known to Jamie as Sir Archy, and I must say, with his greasy ginger-yellow locks and his ginger-white grizzle and his tiered black hat pushed back high on his degraded brow and his dirty red coat and his breeches buttoning between the legs, he showed himself as unwholesome a human figure as I ever met with in my life. When at last the horrible fascination he exerted on me palled to mere disgust, my attention reverted to the situation I found myself in.

  BETHLEM

  How strange to be at last inside Bethlem’s gates. If you’ve seen them, you’ll know they’re adorned left and right on top by the sculptor Cibber’s giant reclining statues of Melancholy and Raving Madness. Directly behind and above where I waited, it was Raving Madness, naked and head-shaved and shackled forever. Forever about to draw breath and bellow forth his rage. As I looked up at him and at Melancholy, all drooping and woebegone, verses about them from a poem I once read sprang into my head. “That seems to whine, and this to roar,” something, something, then,

  Ingenious toil that could devise

  One foaming fury, one as cool as ice.

  A Jew at the gate the week before told me Raving Madness was modelled on Oliver Cromwell’s porter Daniel, a giant who went insane and was lodged at Bethlem and used to preach from the window using a Bible given him by the actress and mistress of Charles II, Nell Gwyn.

  And here in front of me, no bars intervening, was the building itself: a stately edifice vanishing left and right into the dingy fog. At the invisible far ends, beyond the east and west pavilions and beyond them the newer, incurable wings, are grass plats where the patients are said to walk in fair weather. Being high-walled, these cannot be seen from the forecourt, and on that day I could not even see the walls. But straight ahead the central pavilion was only a little enshrouded in murk. Above the main doors of it are set pilasters worthy of the architect Wren, and in the pediment over them I could just make out the royal arms, enwreathed with carved flowers. A-top this rises an octagonal turret with a three-dialled clock, the whole thing crowned by a handsome cupola.

  The structure is noble enough, or was once, but dismal, and it wasn’t only the bars and boards on the windows. The Jew also told me this is not the original Bethlem, which stood four hundred years just east of Moorfields, outside Bishopsgate, but rather the one that took its place, hardly more than a century ago. Unfortunately, Moorfields was always a fen, and the builders, after they filled in the garbage dump the City ditch had become along there, rejected any effort at proper foundations, setting the bricks a mere few inches beneath the floor of a basement sunk only three feet into the rubbishy soft ground. Imagine the Tuileries Palace thrown up on a levelled trash pile, and you have a pretty good picture of Bethlem at Moorfields.

  From the rear, which is to say from London Wall, on the other side, you see the effects of a century of sinkage: the gaping fissures running from ground to eaves. But from inside the front gate that morning there was nothing visible to account for so strong an impression of decay. The whole fabric was black with soot, but in London anything is soon that. With Bethlem, it’s more a case of what’s audible: the clanking, screaming, roaring, and wailing that emanates—or suddenly falls silent—within. But why should it be surprising when associations of sound contaminate those of sight, or human misery have power to inflect iron windows and make a horror of stone?

  At last the obscene banter between my guide and the lascar grew desultory, yet still they lingered, though they knew I waited, because I heard them joke about it. Finally, with a look of impatience, such that you’d think he was the one kept waiting by me, the steward turned in my direction, and that was when it struck me how bizarre it was to see breeches that buttoned between the legs. It was something I had never seen before in my life and don’t expect to see again soon, and it so rattled me that when, in an accent I never heard before, he said something like, “You have got your ticket, have you?” I was in a state approaching mental deafness. He could have been a citizen of Nova Zembla, addressing me in Zemblan. Yho hahv g-haht hyohr t-hehk-haht, hahv yho? He, meanwhile, not looking to see whether I had my ticket or no, or indeed caring whether I understood him or if understanding knew that I was meant to follow, went sloping away across the forecourt.

  From my first glance at him at the gates, the judgment low-minded blackguard had fixed itself in my brain, and ten minutes’ eavesdropping on the melange of smut and jibes that passed for conversation between him and his friend had done nothing to dislodge it. Here was a being that I did not want to know had power over any creature on earth, let alone the one I loved more than life itself. Yet he might have information I needed, so I picked up my basket and made haste, and coming abreast of him I asked, “Why was my husband admitted here?”

  At first he pretended not to hear. I was about to put the question again, when the head began a slow rotation. As it came, it dragged behind it a gaze so recalcitrant it was not until several seconds after the arrival of the face that I felt the scorn of its scrutiny. At last, in that uncouth accent, he said, “Why, because he’s mad.”

  “But who put him in here?”

  “You are mistaken if you think I am the one to ask that of,” was the eventual reply, spoken in such a slow, queer way—yho hahr mihz-tuh-heykhahn hehv yho t-hinkh—with provincial affectation so outlandish, that its primary purpose seemed to be to treat as an imbecile anyone who’d expect anything of a response uttered in so grotesque a fashion.

  “Who should I ask? Dr. Monro?”

  This query issued in a spasm of mirthless amusement before he said something like, Yahz, yho hahzk hem, lahz. Dho theht.

  Now we were at the door, not the main one but the penny gate the porter and his colleague had come reeling out of. Here in niches left and right stood ancient wood figures of young beggars, male and female, life size, holding great black jars with slots for money and above them the inscription, Pray remember the poor Lunatics and put your Charity into the Box with your own hand. The figures were painted and shellacked, the paint rubbed away by the strokings of visitors at their noses, nipples, and crotches.

  And then it was down a miserable narrow passage and up a few stone stairs into a large hall with several doors leading off it, streaky windows, and cherub-festooned tablets listing benefactors. Here it smelled like a refrigerated lavatory, with an under-stink of greasy cooking. Here the dirty daylight scarcely intruded, and the squalls and jinglings of the inmates resounded less muffled than they did outside.

  “Haslam you’re to see, is it?” the
steward ascertained over his shoulder, adding, “Because I have no bloody idea where he is.”

  “We have an appointment,” I piped, the ninny with her basket, tripping after.

  “He ain’t in there,” he volunteered, dismissing with a flick of his hand a door on his left as we passed down the hall.

  Here were iron gates on both sides. Beyond, a winding staircase, which we climbed to a landing on the first floor. It too had iron gates on both sides. The one on the west, as I knew, led to the women’s wing, which had exposure to the warmest and most salubrious winds. The men were eastward, being better able to endure the bleaker air.

  Spying a horseshoe set in the floor on the west side, before the women’s gate, I asked my guide what it was for.

  “To guard against witchcraft,” he replied. “Or keep it in. They’re all witches through there.”

  As I looked about me, I could see that though by its façade Bethlem might pass for a palace, on the inside it was genuinely a madhouse, and I don’t just mean the bars and malodorous damp and dull interior clamour (now seeming to issue mostly from the back of the building, below us, though also through the iron gates). I mean the fractured walls and the short-timbered, gaping floors. I mean how every surface was out of true, how there was nothing here sound, upright, or level; no bonds, no ties, no securement between the parts. I mean how you could see daylight around the window frames and glimpse the main floor through fissures in the boards of the first. This was not just an old building settling into the ground, it was a building that was never built right in the first place. One of those just thrown up, as if it didn’t matter, they were only lunatics, and now it was falling down and mattered less.

  “Should we look in the court room?” the steward asked me in his inimitable fashion.

  Not knowing what an assent to this question would mean and thinking confusedly the court room was where the Bethlem subcommittee would be meeting (though it wasn’t Saturday), I said we could, but not wanting to interrupt anything added, if he liked he might also take me direct to my husband, I could see Haslam later.

  This suggestion meeting with no acknowledgment, I next found myself standing behind the steward as he tried a door at the back of the hall, but it was locked, and so he knocked, and this producing nothing, he sorted through the keys he kept on a ring inside his jacket. Why he would think if Haslam was in a locked room he would want it unlocked when he didn’t answer a knock, I don’t know. In any event we went in, and it was a clean bare space under an ornamental plaster ceiling, with a large table and many wood chairs scattered here and there as if by a gust of wind. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I saw over one of the two empty fireplaces a three-quarters portrait of Henry VIII, all bejewelled, with the fat-arse, purse-mouth cat look he always wears. Otherwise, arms and portraits I didn’t know.

  “Haslam must be where he’s usually at,” the steward said, giving me a knowing look.

  “Where is that?”

  “In’t Dead House, opening heads.”

  “Please,” I said. “Take me direct to my husband.”

  “And who would that be?” Hehn whoh whohd theht bhay?

  I told him. He seemed to wait. I gave him sixpence. He left the room. I followed.

  We next passed through one of the iron gates, the east, as I determined (unless I’d got turned around), by a small door set in the bars, with a sill you had to step over, and then I was following my escort down a long gallery lit on one side—the north, Moorfields side—by windows set too high to see out of, while the south side was all doors, one after the other, some open, most closed, each with a barred aperture and overhead louvre, so light came from that side too, though today not much. It was not cold in the gallery, but it was colder than outside. You glimpsed your breath only faintly. At the far end of the gallery, which was perhaps two hundred feet long, were more iron bars, floor to ceiling, and still the building continued beyond. What most struck me, besides the length and draftiness of the space, was how subdued the commotion immediately inside it was, much of the noise seeming to come from elsewhere, mainly below. It was so subdued, in fact—and in the grey light—I didn’t at first see how many patients were out of their cells, moping along the walls.

  But our arrival was having an effect, and as we made our way down the gallery, faces were looking to us and various soliloquies seemed to rise in volume. There was a general shuffle closer, as of a battalion of invalids and beggars, and something my mother used to say chimed in my brain: If you can’t earn a living, it’s only another way of starving. Though many were dressed in shirt and breeches and had shoes on their feet, others wore coarse, ill-fitting blanket-gowns, with shaved heads and no shoes. I could not take my eyes off their feet: black and chilblained, most of them, though here and there some were wrapped in flannel. I was put in mind of an army in rout. But it wasn’t rout, it was debility, and those who approached, whatever they said, were only begging to be given back what they had lost, and those that didn’t approach seemed only to have given up begging, having lost all they ever had or could have. But whether they approached or not, they were all of them equally poor. Poorer than beggars. Poor as the dead.

  “What news of London?” one old gentleman in jacket and waistcoat enquired of me quietly, laying a hand on my arm. “How does the King?”

  Another asked me what he should do about the weakness in his knees.

  Another assured me several times he had “jumped to save a fall,” and truly, he kept telling me, “there was nothing for it.” He then tried to sell me a canary, saying, had he only been it, he’d have flown, and if I listened I could hear it—and indeed I could, singing its heart out in a near-by cell. I told him I had no money to spend on a canary. Incredulous, he was demanding to know why, when a squirrel ran across the boards at my feet. Thinking it a rat, I let out a cry.

  The steward halted. “Major Capstick!” he called sharply to an old man in a ragged military tunic who stood by, a piece of dirty string dangling from one wrist, his terrified rheumy eyes following the squirrel’s zigzag dash. “I want that animal on its leash by sundown or Mr. Hester’s up here first thing tomorrow to bite its head off!”

  Major Capstick went shuffling and moaning after the creature.

  This was a gallery for the male sex, not just adults. A boy of eleven or twelve blocked my way. “Are you come for me?” he asked, lightning-quick, and right away I regretted meeting his eyes. He was a desperate, cunning creature with a pilfered look, and I had nothing for him. “Are you come to operate Dr. Monro’s electrical machine?” he asked me, touching the basket with one hand, my stomach with the other. “Have you a generator inside?”

  I stepped back. “No, it’s things for my husband.”

  “Not from him?”

  “Madam,” Mr. Alavoine said wearily, waiting for me.

  When I tried once more to by-pass the boy, he moved in again, whispering, “Listen close. Irish Maximus died last Friday. The basketmen haven’t noticed yet. Me and Percy’s obtaining his meat. Tomorrow’s mutton. We’re holding out for a second Sunday: beef. You’re a woman—pray slip us a little perfume to fight the rising stench.”

  Here he was yanked away from me and sent reeling by the steward, who muttered, “Leave her be, Jo. She’s no need of your consultations.”

  And so we were walking again.

  Now I became aware my presence was being made known to the entire population of the hospital, for the patients communicated with one another from the top of the house to the bottom and from one end to the other. For the most part, the exchanges were unintelligible to me because either muffled or conducted in arcane jargons or private languages. What I did understand was so obscene as to be either comical or breathtaking, depending on the ratio of wit to hostility. I won’t outrage sensibility by recording any of it here but only observe everybody’s primary concern: what most ingeniously splitting use might be found for my arsehole, mouth, and cunny—in that order. No wonder women imagine themselves al
l lightness and vacancy, when the world would have us so porous. But what most struck me about the tumult of opinion that boiled up in my wake was how many women joined in, and how aggrieved they were at the thought of a rival set of orifices loose on the premises.

  We were nearly to the bars at the end of the gallery when Alavoine stopped at one of the closed doors and peered through the peep-hole. “Presentable, are ye, Tilly-Fally Fiddlestick?” he said and opened the door, which was not locked. He stood back for me to enter. As I attempted to do so, he placed a hand on my basket.

  “It’s for my husband,” I said, tightening my grip.

  “All baskets are to be inspected by the keeper on duty.”

  “And where is he?”

  “On’t women’s side. I must take it to him—”

  “If he’s engaged, inspect it yourself. There’s nothing—”

  This proposal was a blow against his honour. “Am I a basketman?” he asked, looking shocked.

  “No, you’re an ignoramus!” I cried. “Or think I am! Keepers aren’t called basketmen because they’re inspectors of baskets!”

  “So why are they?”

  “I don’t know!”