Ingenious Pain Read online

  The Reverend endeavours to recall what he knows of James's father. A farmer, of that he is reasonably certain, though whether great or small he does not know. Of the mother he knows, if possible, rather less. Some slim reference to her having died young. What did such reticence conceal? The elusiveness of a self-invented man? Some doubt, some niggle concerning his true progenitor? Ah, what questions he should like to put to that poor, cut-about head in the stable! Mary must know a great bundle of things. He has long considered setting down the Petersburg stuff. The rest might be uncovered, somehow.

  He eases himself down a little way, breaks wind into the fireplace. Immediately he experiences the pleasant urge to shit, which, after enjoying the sensation a while, he acts upon, dragging over his close-stool, a noble piece of furniture, solid as a pulpit, and setting it with its back to the candles. With a kind of flourish he debreeches himself, removes the padded seat and settles on the wooden O. The canvas sack is to hand; he leans and draws it up to his feet. The mouth of the sack is closed by a length of cord. He unties it, slips in his hand. The first thing he touches is a smaller bag, this also of oiled canvas, rolled like a small log. He draws it out and sets it on his hairless thighs.

  Unrolling it, the implements seem to wake as they catch the light. Knives, scissors, a handsaw, needles and other objects whose name and purpose he can only guess at and which might expressly have been made the better to terrify a patient. He draws out the longest of the knives, double-edged, sharp still as a sack of limes. This surely is the knife James used on the unfortunate postillion, though w^ithout it, its very adequate bite, they w^ould have buried the fellow at the monastery. And this curved mirror about the size of a child's palm he first saw the night of their arrival at the monastery when James used it, fixed to a candle, to sew up his own head. None of the implements has been used since then, though when James came to the house, when it seemed he had regained the better part of his senses, the Reverend offered them back. James had not wanted them.

  The Reverend rolls the bag neatly and sets it down. He dips again into the sack and withdraws a sheaf of documents, stashed willy-nilly from the last time he examined them. Indeed, he has been through the sack several times, but with James's death the contents have assumed a new and important character. Tomorrow, when the body is in the ground, these will number among the very few proofs of James's existence. The papers he now examines, holding each one up six inches from his face - his spectacles are in his coat pocket and he is loath to disturb the delicate business of making a stool - are mostly certificates, some of which, perhaps all, are forgeries.

  The first and prettiest purports to be from the Hotel Dieu in Paris. Three black seals on it, a half-yard of ribbon and a frantic, indecipherable signature. The Reverend is tolerably sure that James never studied in France. Next, and more credible, is a certificate from St George's hospital in London, stating that James Dyer attended classes in anatomy and materia medica. A third is from the Surgeon's Hall, rating James as fit to serve as surgeon's mate on a sixth-rate of His Majesty's Navy. Dated 1756. James would have been barely more than a boy. There is a companion piece to this; the Reverend fishes it out of the sack. A snuff-box, ivory-topped, and inscribed on its base: A MUNRO 'H.M.S. Aquiloii. He opens it, sniffs. Though empty so many years it yet retains a pungency which, rising through the Reverend's nose to his brain, so stimulates it that Munro momentarily looms, hesitant and ectoplasmic in the shadows beside the window.

  He snaps it shut, drops it in the sack, farts tinnily into the enamelled pot. Another sheet; not a certificate but a reference, a most impressive one, for this signature is legible - John Hunter, that Alexander among surgeons, who finds James to be 'most excellent in the treatment of Fractures simple and compound, the management of Contusions and Amputations and the proper use of Bandages'. It is, thinks the Reverend, as if the Archbishop of York were to write that he finds me particularly devout, an exemplary pastor of my flock.

  The last, a fine vellum though much beat up, is in French. A neat, even hand; its carefully flourished Fs and Ys are the work of a secretary at the Russian embassy. It is signed by the ambassador and stamped with the imperial birds. It is James's letter of safe conduct, introducing him as 'Un membre distingue de la fraternite de medecine anglaise!'

  Now there is only the little book. The book that promised so much when he saw it first and which now taunts him more than ever. Surely it is some manner of diary? Yet the entire book is written in a code or shorthand that the Reverend, despite some attempts, cannot make out. Even the diagrams are cryptic; impossible to say if they are maps or visual notes for a surgical procedure, or nothing at all, merely lines without the least significance. The single legible word comes on the very last page - 'Liza'. An old love? Did he have old loves? Liza. That too must remain a mystery. Drowsily, the Reverend wonders if his own life will appear like this, a book in a language no one can understand. He thinks: Who shall sit by the fire for me, puzzling it out?

  His evacuation is not progressing well. The matter, though noisily presaged, will not emerge. The effort of it wearies him and he fears a strain. It would not do to end like unlamented George Secundus. Sleep crowds him; he closes his eyes. The faces of Burke and Ross briefly form like faces in a tobacco cloud. Other faces follow: Mary, Tabitha, Dido; not James. The clock taps out the progress of the night. He wonders: What shall I say tomorrow, what shall I say, what shall I say . .. ?

  From his uncurling fist, from the smooth, uncertain surface of his thighs, the papers of James Dyer tumble to the floor. The moth scorches its wings; the Reverend gently snores. From the stable, just loud enough to pierce the open window of Dido's room, where Dido stands, streaming tears, comes a voice, a song, husky and monotonous, utterly foreign, impenetrably sad.

  SECOND

  Three times a year the Reverend Lestrade and his sister have themselves bled. It is a ritual, like making the strawberry beds in October, or the increasingly tedious visits to Bath in May, w^hich serve to punctuate the year and which, to omit, vv^ould occasion a distinct unease. 'Bleeding', so the Reverend's father often declared - and so now, in his turn, the Reverend also declares, more for the pleasure of echoing his father than out of any deep conviction - is very good for men and horses. And right good for pragmatic, mithering women.'

  Dr Thome is their usual operator, an able man, but this year, his horse having stumbled in a rabbit hole and thrown him, he cannot come.

  'Why not James Dyer, then?' asks Dido, closing her book and holding out her hands to the evening fire.

  The Reverend taps his teeth with the stem of his pipe. 'No, sister, I do not think it is well advised.'

  'Sure he has seen blood before.'

  'Surely,' says the Reverend, 'and enough perhaps.'

  'If we cannot have Thorne and you are afraid to ask Dr Dyer - living as he does upon the fat of our hospitality -I shall open a vein myself Or if I cannot, I may call on Tabitha.'

  With an air of studied innocence, the Reverend asks: 'Has Dr Dyer outstayed your welcome, sister?'

  Indeed he has not. No, not so. You mistake me as ever, Julius. It is very vexing. It is because you vex me so that I must be bled.'

  'How do I vex you, sister?'

  'By crossing me in everything I wish for.'

  'Like the spoons?'

  'Oh, fiddlededee the spoons. Yes, the spoons. And now this.'

  'You might ask him yourself perhaps.'

  'I might. And I might walk up to Caxton's place and drink a bottle of his rum.' Dido stands, her dresses rustling like live things.

  'Good night to you, brother.'

  'Ay, good night to you, sister.'

  She goes out of the parlour, very upright. It is, thinks the Reverend, a good twenty years since he bested her in an argument.

  The moon, in its last quarter, rises at ten thirty. The Reverend sleeps, dreams of his garden, wakes and dresses, praying on his knees by his window, open-eyed, staring into the golden bowl of a November morning. Bacon and c
abbage for breakfast, hot punch, then a pipe of Virginia tobacco in his study, going over Sunday's sermon. He hears the dogs. The sound thrills him, like the sound of bells. He opens the study window, leans out. George Pace, his manservant, is there with the dogs, and Mr Astick over from Totleigh for the morning's sport, sipping from his flask and talking dogs with Pace.

  'Morning to you, Astick. Rare morning, eh?'

  'Shall there be mornings like this in heaven, Reverend?'

  'Assuredly. The dogs are sharp set, George?'

  'Larky, but they shall settle.'

  The dogs are dancing in their sleek coats, gently biting one

  another's throats. The Reverend rejoices, feels himself to be twenty.

  'I must speak a few words with the Doctor. Then I am yours.'

  He finds James in his room, dressing. 'Forgive me breaking in upon you at such an hour.'

  James says: 'I heard the dogs. They are merry.'

  'They were created for mornings such as this. I am come on an errand and that is to beg a favour of you. You know it is our custom to have Dr Thome bleed us the day of the tithe supper; well, poor fellow, he has took a fall from his horse and clacked his head and cannot come and the nub of it is will you oblige us? For myself I am content to miss, but my sister . . .'

  There is a brief silence while James buttons the legs of his breeches. Below the window the dogs set up a sudden clamour. The Reverend fidgets and steps backwards to the door. 'No matter, no matter at all.'

  James says: 'Nay. We must not disappoint your sister.' They grin at each other. 'I wish you joy of your sport.'

  'You would not care to join us?'

  'I'm a poor sportsman and I've an unaccountable fondness for hares. And this leg' - he pats his right knee - 'would hold you up.'

  'As you like, then. I shall see you at dinner.' The Reverend hurries off, takes the steps two at a time. From his room James hears the party move off, the barking of the dogs scraping and scraping at the sky, ever more faintly.

  He washes his face in a basin of shocking cold water, smooths his hair and examines his hands. One small scar on the left stands out like a tiny raw nipple, seeps a fluid. Of the other scars, fifteen or twenty on either hand, there is nothing to complain of beside a tiresome itching. Nothing to be unpleased about.

  He takes up his razor, holds it out and examines the blade. There is, at first, a quite perceptible movement, a trembling at the tip, but it settles and grows acceptably steady. He shaves in front of his small, cranky mirror. The stubble of his beard is darker than his hair, a more vigorous growth altogether, as if welling from a more wholesome part of himself, some part more atune with his two and thirty years than the weathered mask of his face, the grey hair of his head. He smiles at his reflection. The first true day of spring comes in the heart of winter. Who is to say I shall not grow entirely well again?

  He pulls on the supple dog-skin gloves with which he protects his hands, and goes in search of food, walking into the kitchen where Mrs Cole and Tabitha and Mary and a girl by name of Winifred Dade are preparing the tithe supper.

  'Lor' but we are boarded!' cries Mrs Cole, seeing James. She leaves off her pie-making to fetch him cold meat out of the meat safe. 'Shall you have some nice eggs. Doctor, what Winny brought from home?'

  'A little of the mock goose and a shive of bread will be a feast, I thank you, Mrs Cole. Morning to you, Tabitha, Winny, Mary.' The girls, red-faced from the heat of the fire, look at each other stupidly and bite their lips. James does not see. He is regarding Mary who is sat at the great table, slicing onions.

  'The onions do not make you cry?' He makes no dumb show to explain himself, such as the others do. Though he has never heard her speak a word of English, he knows how perfectly she understands him, both when he speaks and when he is silent. Now she answers him by cutting two neat pearly rings from the onion, fetching them up delicately with the knife and depositing them by the meat on his plate. Quietly, he thanks her.

  He eats, content among the scuttle of the women. If he sits quietly they will forget him and he can view them in their female world, see them almost as if he were another woman among them.

  It moves in him faint, powerful memories of his mother and sisters and the maidservant, a singer of nonsense songs, whose name he has completely mislaid. He revels in their skills. What excellent surgeons these women would make! And might not he make a passable cook? He would like to ask if he might join them, cut vegetables or mix the sweet mess of a pudding, but that would disturb them and the girls would lose their concentration.

  When he has done, he slips out of the kitchen, a small pot of warm water in his hand, and enters the garden. He pauses, listening for any sound of the coursing and thinks perhaps he hears it, a faint echo of savage barking. By the side of the parsonage is the Reverend's glasshouse. It is a small construction, too low to stand quite upright in, full of pots, tubs, the reek of geraniums. Here he has appropriated a corner for his experiments, and is pleased to find his cannabis plants, their soil lagged with straw, surviving the cold nights. He checks his sponges on their slatted shelf, brushes away the beginnings of a cobweb and takes one of the smaller sponges, slipping it into his pocket. The sponges are his joy, the ripest success - though heaven knows, a very imperfect one - of his investigations into analgesics. He began it six months back, writing to Jack Cazotte in Dover, whose name he had remembered out of the air, having once had dealings with him during the days of his practice in Bath. Three weeks after writing, the first neat aromatic package arrived, the first of many containing herbs, seeds and compounds, together with Cazotte's advice, and pages copied out in Cazotte's neat hand from learned books such as James had no access to. Thus, from Pliny, James learnt of the properties of the mandragora root, how it might be steeped in wine and how it was often used in former times, mercifully or cynically, to lighten the agony of prisoners under torture. With vinegar and Asian myrrh - and curiously inflamed emotions - he concocted the potion offered to Christ on the cross; offered and refused. The recipe for the sponges came from a manuscript of the Conquerors' time: each sponge soused in a brew of opium, fresh hyoseyamine, unripened blackberries, lettuce seed, juice of hemlock, mandragora and ivy. Permeated with their precious cargo, they are dried in the sun, ready to be rehydrated upon use.

  No one, other than Mary, knows the nature of these experiments. She discovered him with her nose, coming into his room one evening, sniffing the air and very slightly raising her eyebrows as if to say, 'Is this all you have learnt?' The Reverend and his sister are devilish curious but ask no questions. He is grateful to them.

  From the glasshouse he goes to the barn. The doors of the barn are open. Urbane Davis is sitting on a log eating a fist of cheese. He has been threshing oats and the air is still mazy with the chaff.

  'Morning, Davis.'

  'Morn'n, Dr Dyer.' Davis raises his cheese in salute.

  'I trust you have not been terrifying Sissy with your flail.'

  'Nar. I 'ad a squinny at 'er jus' now. Very tranquil she were.'

  'I am glad of it. I am on my way to pay her a visit.'

  'Sissy? Sissy?' At the end of the gallery, a snug dry spot about the height of a man below the barn roof-beams, there is a movement in the shadows, a fragile mewing, half alarmed, half beseeching. The creature is used to him now, appreciates his footfall, and is anyway too weak to flee him.

  She was found in the second week of September; a ginger female cat, panting in a kind of nest she had made for herself in the interior of the Reverend's honeysuckle bush. Sam spied her first and told James, who lay in the grass beside the bush until his arm was numb, talking sotto voce while the animal stared at him, steadily, wonderingly. It was a farm cat, a wary old pugilist, not used to petting. With patience and titbits from the kitchen he insinuated himself. After three days, he could lift it out, a surprisingly light parcel, as if it were a smaller cat crawled into the pelt of a greater one. He took it to the barn, laid it in a box of rags and straw and examined
it by lantern. The examination had revealed a tumour about the liver. She was old and dying in pain.

  What, then, to do? Only three alternatives: leave it die; kill it; treat it. Of these only the latter two struck him as acceptable. He had, after all, already interfered in the creature's existence and having done so had acquired a responsibility beyond merely abandoning the thing. As for killing it, a death swiftly dispensed was the surest relief, and George Pace was a very able killer of things, cosy with the dark gods. Good sharp blows were his stock-in-trade.

  Yet should a cat's life be less sweet to it than a man's; sweet even in sickness, even in extremisnay, more sweet then than ever? And if the pain may be abated, sensibly abated, if he possessed the probable means, was it not the best way? Was he not required to do it? Or is the creature only the unwitting subject of his experimentation? He does not like that thought. He shies from it.

  Slipping the sponge from his pocket, he tears a piece and dips it into the warm water of the teapot. 'Now then. Sissy, this is what you like.' The animal's suffering has instructed it, and when he places the swollen sponge to its face, it sniffs and chews at it, rubbing the juice on to the sensitive skin of nostrils and gums; pathetic, comical actions. The tumour eats the cat from inside. The dose is increased daily. Each time James comes to the barn now he anticipates finding her dead. It occurs to him that the cat may be willing itself alive principally to consume the drugs. He strokes the dull coat, watches her subside into placid imbecility.

  Below, Urbane Davis has taken up his flail, rhythmically striking, humming to himself a hymn. What is it? 'Come O thou traveller unknown.' James takes up his things, descends the ladder, holds a glove across his face not to breathe in the dust.