The Essex Serpent(7)
It heartened her now to see that Cora had not taken to her bed in mourning, but with her old habit of looking over what she called ‘her Studies’, as if she were a boy cramming for college. On the bed beside her was the old leather file which had been her mother’s, and which had lost the gilt from its monogram, and which smelt (so Martha insisted) of the animal it once had been. And there also were her notebooks, written in a small clear script, the margins covered, the pages interleaved with pressed stems of weeds and grasses, and a map of a section of coastline marked with red ink. A spill of papers lay all around her and she’d fallen asleep clutching her Dorset ammonite. But in her sleep she’d held on much too hard: it had crumbled to pieces, and left her with a muddy hand.
FEBRUARY
1
‘I mean: take jasmine, for instance.’ Dr Luke Garrett swept papers from his desk as if he might find beneath them white buds popping into bloom, and discovering instead a pouch of tobacco set about rolling a cigarette. ‘The scent is so sweet that it’s both pleasant and unpleasant; people recoil and go nearer, recoil and go nearer; they’re not sure whether to be disgusted or seduced. If only we could acknowledge pain and pleasure not as opposite poles but all of a piece, we might at last understand …’ He lost the thread of his thought, and cast about for it.
Accustomed to these lectures, the man who stood beside the window sucked at his beer and mildly said, ‘Only last week you concluded that all states of pain are evil, and all states of pleasure are good. I remember your words exactly, because you said it so many times, and in fact wrote it down for me, in case I forgot. I might actually have it on me –’ He patted ironically at each pocket, then flushed, never having quite got the hang of affectionate mockery. George Spencer was all that Garrett was not: tall, wealthy, fair, shy, with feelings deeper than his thoughts were swift. Those who’d known both since their student days joked that Spencer was the Imp’s good conscience, severed from him somehow, always running to keep up.
Garrett shoved himself deeper into his armchair. ‘Of course it seems completely contradictory and wholly unjustifiable, but then the best minds can hold two opposing thoughts at once.’ He frowned, an expression which caused his eyes almost to vanish below his black eyebrows and blacker fringe, and drained his glass. ‘Let me explain …’
‘I’d like that: but I’m supposed to be meeting friends for dinner.’
‘You don’t have any friends, Spencer. Even I don’t like you. Look: it’s useless denying that causing or experiencing pain is the most repulsive of human experiences. Before we knocked the patient out cold, surgeons would vomit in horror at what they were about to do; sane men and women would shorten their lives by twenty years rather than endure the knife – so would you – so would I! But all the same – it is impossible to say what pain actually is, or what is truly felt, or if what pains one pains another: it is more a matter of the imagination than of the body – so you see then how valuable hypnosis ought to be?’ He narrowed his eyes at Spencer and went on: ‘If you tell me you’re burned and in pain, how can I know whether the sensations you report bear any resemblance to what I’d feel if I suffered the same injury? All I can safely say is that we each experienced some physical response to an identical stimulus. True, we might both yelp, and splash about in cold water for a bit and so on, but how can I know that you are not actually experiencing a sensation that, if I were to experience it, might have me yelping to an entirely different tune?’ Wolfish, he bared his teeth and went on: ‘Does it matter? Would it alter the treatment a physician might give? If you begin to question the truth – or I suppose the value – of pain, how could you resist withholding or dispensing care according to some measure which you admit yourself is completely arbitrary?’
Losing interest, Garrett stooped to collect the fallen papers from the floor, and set about sorting them into neat files. ‘Doesn’t matter in the least, to all practical purposes. The thought just occurred to me, that’s all. Things occur to me, and I like to talk about them, and I haven’t anyone else. I ought to get a dog.’ Spencer, noting his friend’s plunge into gloom, took out his cigarette, and ignoring the ticking of his watch sat in a bare-seated chair and surveyed the room. It was fanatically clean, and the parsimonious winter sun could not pick out a speck of dust, no matter how it tried. It contained two chairs and a table, with two upended packing cases making do elsewhere. A length of fabric nailed over the window was washed thin and pale, and the white stone fireplace gleamed. There was a strong scent of lemons and antiseptic, and over the fire were black-framed photographs of Ignaz Semmelweis and John Snow. Pinned above the little desk there was a drawing (signed LUKE GARRETT AGE THIRTEEN) of a serpent coiled about a staff and testing the air with its split tongue: the symbol of Asclepius, who was cut from the womb of his mother on her funeral pyre and grew up to be the god of healing. The only food and drink Spencer had ever seen up those three flights of whitewashed stairs were cheap beer and Jacob’s crackers. He looked down at his friend, conscious of the familiar battle between frustration and affection which he always roused.
Spencer could recall with perfect clarity their first meeting in the lecture rooms of the Royal Borough, the teaching hospital where Garrett proved himself to have leaped ahead of his tutors in theory and understanding, bearing their tutelage with ill grace save when studying cardiac anatomy and the circulatory system, when he’d become so boyish and enthused he was suspected of mockery and often tossed out of class. Spencer, who knew the only way to conceal and overcome the limits of his own intelligence was to study, and study hard, avoided Garrett. He suspected no good could come of being seen with him, and besides was a little afraid of the black glitter set behind his eyes. Encountering him one evening, long after the laboratory was emptied and its doors ought to have been locked, he thought at first he must be in deep distress. He was seated with a drooping head at one of the scored and Bunsen-burned benches, staring intently at something between his outspread hands.