Ingenious Pain Read online

  As for James, no man could seem less ardent, but his composure inflames her, draws her deeper into the indignity of her passion. She cannot help herself. Soon she does not care who sees, who knows, who gossips. She has never felt so free, so hugely embarrassed. She discovers in herself a cunning, a salaciousness, a daring she would never have suspected. She is a stranger to herself. Everywhere there is the marvellous whiff of imminent disaster.

  The town is amused. Nothing diverts it more than a domestic farce, and the more stolid, the more respectable the players, the better it is liked. What did Munro expect, a man of his years marrying a green, headstrong woman like Agnes Munro? And

  then to invite that creature Dyer into his house. Half the women of Bath would lie down for him, particularly the married women. Does Dyer return her passion? No one can say, for when they search it appears he has not a single confidant, not a single friend, other than his henchman Marley Gummer. And Munro himself, of course.

  New Year 1762. The festivities bring on a recurrence of Munro's gout. He is put to bed on a diet of steel and angostura bark. James and Agnes spend their evenings by the fire in the drawing room, drinking tea and playing backgammon. She asks him about his life; he tells her nothing, or nothing she actually believes. She invents a life for them both. A life of glamour, of riches, of curly-haired children called George or Caroline or Hester; of a house in Grosvenor Square, of neighbours' envy. Lord, what if her husband were to die? What then?

  James gammons her, sips his tea, looks up at her. He understands what is required of him. She is there to be taken, part of the world's munificence. When the pot is empty, the last game finished, and the candles, good wax candles with their clean smell, are down to the last inch of their lives, he crosses over to her, lands a kiss on the hot of her mouth and fingers her into a sweat. She jerks her head back, shudders, kicks, sends the card table, the board, the counters tumbling over the blacks and sumptuous reds of the new carpet.

  She sobs, cannot stop herself from asking if he loves her, truly, as she loves him, utterly, for ever, ever and ever.

  James is setting up the board again, laying out the counters on their leather spikes. Agnes is on her knees beside him. He does not know what she is saying. Is she happy, afraid? Frankly she seems drunk. He helps her to her feet, answers all her questions with yes, yes, yes, of course. He is thinking of the twins, of pearls and boiled eggs. The memory of them is like a finger pressing his chest. He stares at the miniature of Munro above the mantelpiece.

  tries to clear his mind. Molina's studio, the light there, the light in the girls' hair as they slept. The finger presses harder. It is like the tip of a cane, but hot. He does not Hke this feeling. Shakes his head to clear it. Agnes asks: 'Are you well, my love?' He says something to her, he does not know what, and makes for the door. The stairs are immensely long. He hauls himself up by the banisters. His heart is beating violently. He is afraid he will not reach his room. Munro is snoring. Is that Canning's voice? Canning?

  'What did you expect, James?'

  'Not this!'

  'No one is safe, James. Not even you. Especially not you.'

  He is lying on the bed. There is a small fire in the room. His hand hurts, his fist is clenched. He opens it. He is holding the dice from the backgammon. He lets them roll on to the floor. He lies a long time, uncertain if he is awake or dreaming. Some perceptions - the rattling of the window, the creak of the fire - remain with him; but there are visions that rise like smoke from the other world. He says: 'I have a fever, I am sick.' He feels himself seeping out of his body; the room glows, very bright, and looking down he sees himself lying across the bed, and sees Agnes knocking at her husband's door and Munro's blind, drugged face climbing out of sleep. For one avrful moment he seems to experience Munro's emotions, the vast resources of the man's unhappiness. He fights it, flounders in the air, escapes to new horrors. A line of men and women shuffling through the mist, heads bent to their chests as if they carried a great burden on their backs. Ahead of them is an evil-scented, vaporous pit, like the common grave in a city racked by plague. Those at the head of the line stumble into it, some screaming, some with a profound groan like a death groan. Others go in silence. One looks round, wildly, sees James, points, then waves him towards the fine. The line halts, others look, two step apart to make a space; a voice cries: 'This is your place, James Dyer!'

  There is no repetition of the incident. In the following months his strength, the fine powers of his concentration, are greater than ever, as if the episode had purged him. Despite Munro's insistence that he should take more rest, he works harder. Plans are laid for a building in Grand Parade to be purchased and used as a private infirmary. Six months later they open with Chinese lanterns and concert parties. The upper floors are for inoculations and on the ground floor there is an operating theatre, fine as any in a London hospital, with seating for thirty guests who, for a modest fee, may watch James Dyer cut, slice, and saw his way to eminence.

  Munro can also be seen, free of charge, but more often he is to be encountered by the river, sipping from a flask, feeding cake to the swans, or drowsing in nooks of sunshine, wig askew, his hat over his eyes. Occasionally his wife will be with him, sitting at a distance, leafing impatiently through a novel or frowning at the hills, but the denouement - the scandal, the duel, the flight - fails to materialise. Mrs Vaughan, whose opinion is always to be trusted in these matters, declares that the Munros and James Dyer have reached an arrangement, a very improper thing in people of their class, like a farmer's daughter learning the harpsichord. Munro has evidently resigned himself to the inevitable. As for Mrs Munro, she has shown herself to be a very brazen piece, for which the women of Bath have a duty to despise her. James Dyer - well, he could hardly be said to be human at all. A machine for cutting. An automaton. Dangerous.

  'Dangerous?' ask the women, pausing with their needles.

  Mrs Vaughan inclines her head. 'He appears to have been born without a soul. What, then, has he to lose?'

  Patients come from Bristol, Exeter, London. In Grand Parade, James and Munro purchase a second house. James refines his techniques, designs new instruments: probes and forceps and cunning scissors. In the upstairs rooms of the new house he treats victims of the pox with mercury. They lie in the little wards in suits of flannel, gums swollen from the mercury, dribbUng their saliva into pots, two to three pints of it in a day, until they are cured or can stand the treatment no more.

  These salivations, and the inoculations in the other building, bring James four hundred and fifty pounds in 1764. Add to this the lithotomies, the amputations, the bleedings, the settings, and his income is close on seven hundred pounds.

  In the winter of '64 he has a new and potentially even more lucrative service to offer the people of Bath. He becomes a man-midwife, an accoucheur, after he is called on one night to save the life of a mother in childbed. The woman, a Mrs Porter, had been in labour for three days with Dr Bax and Mr Crisp in attendance. Bax, on the evening of the third day, rubbing his chin with the gold boss of his cane, decides she cannot be helped. Nor will it garnish his reputation to be at the bedside of a dead mother. He gives her over. Mr Crisp stays on, glad of a clear field. He leads Mr Porter on to the landing and in a whisper that fills the house he counsels the extermination of the infant, its corpse to remain inside the mother, two, three days, such that it might soften sufficiently for them to extract it. There is a steel hook he has, so long, which he has used before with considerable success. Thus the mother will be spared; that is, perhaps she wiU be spared,

  he can give no assurances; hands of God, the lady's constitution, etc.; these cases, sir, very unfortunate, very uncertain. Mr Porter is aghast, takes hold of Crisp's coat, shakes him violently.

  'Damn your hooks! Damn your incompetence!' He runs to the top of the stairs, shouts to one of the servants below: 'Fetch Dyer!'

  'Dyer?' cries Mr Crisp. 'That mountebank!'

  Exit Mr Crisp, face in a cramp of anger, sh
outing from the window of his coach: 'On your own head, sir! I wash my hands of it! Folly, sir! Lunatic folly!'

  When James arrives it is three o'clock in the morning. The weather, bad all night, has deteriorated into a full storm. Before morning a dozen chimney stacks will be down, and already roof tiles scythe through the darkness. There is no moon, no stars. All the houses are shuttered, all save one.

  Mr Porter is waiting in the dining room, holding a lamp up to the window. He has drunk a half-bottle of brandy but has never felt more sober, more appallingly conscious, in his Hfe. He catches a ghmmer of his servant's lantern, and then the horses, heads down, looming.

  The moment James enters the panelled hallway and the door is shouldered shut against the wind, his physical presence, the unconsidered precision of his movements, quieten the house. He walks up the stairs carrying his green baize bag. He refuses to be hurried.

  Mr Porter has only seen him from a distance, and once only, from the far side of the abbey courtyard. It was raining, and Dyer was sheltering under the west door of the abbey with his friend - his servant? - Marley Gummer. Waiting for someone, for something. Mrs Porter pointed him out. 'That man', she called him. She was only just with child then.

  James opens the door. The lying-in room. The sick-room. The death-room perhaps. The hearth is chock with fire. The air is

  thick, over-hot. Three women sit around the bed. The eldest of them James recognises as Mrs Allen, a woman said to have powers, connections with unseen forces. Her presence speaks clearly of Porter's desperation. She is chanting over the bed, over the figure in the bed. She stops when she hears James. Turns on him.

  'Come to finish her off, have you?'

  To Mr Porter James says: 'If this witch is to stay she is to keep her mouth shut.'

  He leans over Mrs Porter. Their eyes briefly connect, hers looking up from the well of suffering, his responsive as moons. He gets his hands on to her belly. She flinches at the coldness of his fingers. It is her first child. She whispers: 'Do not kill it, sir.' James throws back the blankets, prods, squeezes, reaches his decision. He goes to Mr Porter, says: 'Her pelvis is narrow and the child has not turned. There is a way to save her and to save the child. But I must cut her.'

  'Cut her?'

  'As Caesar's mother was cut. An incision of the abdomen.'

  'Cut?'

  'Ay, sir, cut. We cut her belly to let the child out. It must be now. If not I shall have to leave you to Mrs Allen's spells. There is a calling-out fee, of course.'

  'And if you cut her, you can save her, and the child?'

  James shrugs. He wants the operation, believes he can pull it off, though he has never done one before, nor seen one performed other than on Mr Smellie's leather woman during an obstetrics lecture in London six years since. He also knows that his profession universally condemns it as being little better than an assassination of the mother. He has heard of no instances where it has been performed successfully.

  'I have your permission?'

  Porter's eyes film with tears. 'There is nothing else?'

  James looks at Mrs Allen, looks back, raises his eyebrows. Porter gives his permission.

  *Get these women out,' says James. 'No, leave this one.' He points to one of the younger women. She has a strong, calm look to her. Not a flincher.

  'And bring me some water, warm water, and wine and fresh linen.'

  James strips off his coat, opens his bag, selects a knife, examines briefly the rosy skin, then cuts, fast, a vertical incision from belly button to pubic hair. Mrs Porter roars, swings a small white fist with considerable power against his left ear. He laughs, does not look up. He says: 'A good sign, I think. Now hold her still. I have some delicate work here. Jog my knife, Mrs Porter, and you shall bleed to death.'

  He cuts through the muscles of the abdominal wall, opens the abdominal cavity, then makes a transverse incision, right to left across the lower part of the uterus. Behind him there is a crash as Mr Porter succumbs to the sight of a stranger's hands lodged in the slashed belly of his wife. The infant seems determined to resist, to fight off this terrible invasion. Feebly it kicks at James, plucks at his hands with its daisy-stalk fingers, cHngs to the bloody gubbins of the womb. It comes at last in a drench of its mother's fluids. James passes it to his assistant, ties the cord, cuts it, delivers the placenta and drops it on to the boards, where a dog, hiding under the bed, stretches out and takes it tentatively in its teeth. James seals up the mother, those stitches Miss Lucket so commended. Rather surprisingly, Mrs Porter is still alive.

  The young woman is binding the child in a shawl. She asks: 'What shall I do with it? Give it a posset?'

  He says: 'Do whatsoever you like.' He looks around the room. The father groaning on the floor, the mother in a swoon in the

  bed, the infant mewing in the young woman's uncertain grip. He wraps his knives.

  'Tell him I expect my bills paid promptly.'

  She starts to say something, but he has gone.

  Robert Munro is a man coming slowly from a long sleep. Or, as he sometimes thinks of it, a man on the trail of himself in the midst of a sunless forest. He does not hurry. He is afraid of what must come; afraid that he will not have the strength.

  Towards his wife he has never felt a greater tenderness. Certainly he does not condemn her. She has conceived a passion. Her slender sense of duty could have been no match for it. He himself is to blame. Who but he brought them together? Brimstone and tinder. There is a justice to it, a considerable justice. And if he believed James Dyer loved his wife, that it was truly love, then they may indeed have reached an arrangement. But Dyer does not love her; he wears her like a coat, puts her on or off at will. And that is monstrous, worse than the betrayal of friendship - for in fairness there was no friendship on Dyer's part - worse even than the visions that haunt him of their couplings, the sounds of which sometimes wake him, an awful noise, not at all suggestive of pleasure, more like the muffled distress of a child.

  What must be done, then? Kill James? Kill them both? He would swing for it but hanging does not signify. He is more afraid that he will fail in this supreme test of his life. Fail himself. Fail Agnes. Fail everyone. Voices whisper - Take up your sword, Munro!' - but his limbs are heavy and the blood ticks so slowly

  in his veins. How good just to go on sleeping in his favourite chair in his study, shutters drawn, a single candle for company. Distant bells, distant footsteps. Just to sleep, past morning, past all mornings. Endless sleep.

  The door slams; he rouses himself, goes to the window and sees their backs departing. What is it tonight? Another ball, a charity concert, a trip on the river? He goes up to his room, stands there vacantly a while, then carefully selects a suit of clothes, changes, and goes back to his study. His watch says half past eight. Chowder is squatting on the floor, staring up at him, black, beseeching eyes. 'Good dog,' he says, then pours himself one last drink, hearing in his head, again and again, until they are like nonsense, the words he will have to speak.

  James and Agnes are at the theatre in Orchard Street. It is a short walk from the Orange Grove. There is no need for the new carriage. The theatre is crowded, rowdy. Tattered plush, yellow mushrooms of light from the chandeliers. Figures call to their acquaintances; the men offer each other snuff; the women gaze out from their white faces, stroke their hired diamonds, tap their fans. There is an air of stupendous boredom, as if nothing in the world remains beyond fashion, beyond manners, beyond the predictable mechanics of intrigue. There is not even a war on.

  James and Agnes settle in their box. She feeds him sweetmeats with her fingers, and all throughout the play asks him why such and such a character does this, and if that is not Mrs Lewis below them, and if he does not think that the actress in the red is egregious ugly. Would he care for another sugar plum?

  James takes no interest in the play. He is dimly aware of characters larking among the painted trees, of certain voices, words, the laughter or hush of the audience. There is a fight, a
reconciliation. A song. A joke about the City Corporation. A joke about Wilkes. Another song. The lovers die, then come to

  life again. Someone is recognised. Someone is lowered from the flies on a cloud and throws paper flowers at the audience. Everyone claps like mad, and stamps their feet until the building shakes. It is all so pointless. Childish. He does not care for it at all.

  They eat supper near the theatre - fried fish, boiled mutton in a caper sauce - and walk back through the clammy air to the Orange Grove. James is tired. He has a woman's foot to take off in the morning, a half-dozen inoculations after that and then a ride to Marshfield to examine a farmer whose gun went off in his face. Agnes is chattering about a garden, a hat, a friend, a day last week when something occurred that quite amazed her, or didn't, or saddened her or made her laugh. A servant with a candle lets them in. Dinah. She is looking at them oddly.

  The door of Munro's study opens. Munro is there, filling the doorway. He is dressed as though expecting a visitor of consequence. He does not look like a buffoon, a cuckold.

  A moment with you, James.'

  *I am sure it may wait until morning.'

  'No, sir, it may not.'

  James has his foot upon the first stair. Ignoring Munro has never been difficult. Until now. He turns. Between himself and Munro is the servant, clutching her candle.

  Agnes is standing very still in the dark place by the front door. She whispers: 'Robert?'

  Munro says: 'Good night to you, Agnes.'

  James says: 'Be brief if you will, sir.'

  Munro steps back for him. James passes, Munro closes the door. Agnes stares at the door, then at Dinah. Dinah starts to cry.