Master Georgie (5 page)

We took the Regent Road that ran beside the docks, the wind carrying the sickly sweet odour of damp grain, the air raucous with the screech of foraging gulls. We were forced to go at no more than a walk through the crush of vehicles juddering in either direction. Near the Brunswick Tavern a shipment of cattle, just then unloaded from Ireland and headed for the abattoir, came slithering and jostling across our path. George roared out, ‘Whoa,’ the command swooping out like a war-whoop, though it was me that gripped the reins. We were delayed for a quarter of an hour or more. He grew tetchy, fearful of missing his appointment with the ape, and vowed he’d never forgive William Rimmer if he commenced the business without him.

‘What part am I to play?’ I enquired.

‘It will be your job to hold the animal down,’ he answered.

I digested this with some unease. It was one thing to throw a tiger rug over a chair, quite another to subdue a wild beast.

‘And it’s then that you’ll cut out its eyes?’

‘Not out,’ he cried. ‘We shall merely remove its cataracts.’

I hadn’t a notion of what these might be, and couldn’t ask, for now he was on his feet, fairly jigging with impatience, rocking the two-wheeler alarmingly, kicking out at the nearest cow and shouting at the drover to make haste. ‘ ‘Self-control is a great asset,’ I observed, at which he shot me a look of fury, and sat down.

At Bank Hall, the dockyards coming to an end and the tide well out, we drove on to the shore, rolling beside the ink black waves, the sand hard as oak after the night frost. At a spanking pace we passed Miller’s Castle, now empty, its forecourt silted up with mud, its bathing cubicles toppling into the mud pools.

‘What news of Myrtle?’ I asked, bellowing against the sea wind. Myrtle had been sent away to a boarding school in Southport. I’d seen her but once in two years, the time she’d come home for the Michaelmas holidays. She’d said she was glad the stain had gone from my lip.

‘Miss Myrtle,’ George corrected.

‘Miss Myrtle indeed,’ I said. ‘I never doubted it.’

‘She’s on her way to becoming a lady,’ he conceded.

‘Does she take to it?’

‘She blooms,’ he replied. ‘And excels in French.’

I had a photograph of Myrtle, though it was only me who would have known it. It had been taken in old Mr Hardy’s bedroom and thrown aside on account of coming out black. I’d made pin holes in her eyes and scratched lines where her hair might have been, and in time I believed I saw her plain, though possibly she was in my head and it was my mind that printed her likeness.

At Little Crosby we left the shore, taking the cinder path through the sand dunes, until we reached the inland road and trotted a silent mile between potato fields. I had been brought up hereabouts, my mother being a drudge to a farming family in the hamlet of Sefton.

Crossing over the little humpbacked bridge, the rushes impaled in the frozen stream, we entered the leafless woods to a clamour of rooks. At the noise of our approach the lodge keeper hobbled out to see to the gates. He was so slow and crippled in his walk that George ordered me down to help him. No sooner had I done so and the great iron gates had swung inwards, than the carriage bowled up the drive, leaving me to follow on foot. I half thought of turning back, out of spite, but curiosity got the better of me.

I’d travelled this route once before, sent by my mother when she lay dying, only that time it was high spring. I was seven years old and there were pretty patches of heaven, lupin blue, dancing above the budding trees. Now, the path stretched dark and moody as a photograph, the winter branches stark against a cold white sky.

Blundell Hall was a gloomy edifice, low built of sandstone and timber. On either side of the porch crouched a stone lion with a man’s head between its shoulders and a mocking smile to its mouth. I went round to the back and was told by a stable boy, just then unloosing the horse from the carriage shafts, that the gentlemen were in the glasshouse beyond the kitchen garden and I was to fetch the photographic apparatus along with me. When he saw the collection of bottles and trays that required shifting, he very civilly went off and brought back a wheelbarrow.

The glass-house was fully forty foot in length and no longer put to its original purpose, the long trestle tables being empty of pots and supporting instead a quantity of statues, all without a stitch on them and hung about with cobwebs. Mr Blundell was a collector of such things, and had been in the newspapers for it the year Prince Albert came to lay the foundation stone of the Sailors’ Home.

The ape took me by surprise. I had expected it to be three times larger than myself and to find it wildly prowling its cage, but it was no bigger than a small man and sat inert against the bars, slumped amid a mess of sawdust and yellowing cabbage leaves. Fear left me; I even poked at it with my finger. Its skin was patchy, its eyes dull as mud. It stank of old age.

William Rimmer and George were busy sorting their instruments. Laid out alongside the scissors and punch-forceps sat a heap of cotton pads, a wire contraption with a coiled spring, an India-rubber bag with a length of tube looped into a metal basin, and a bottle of colourless liquid. The ape was looking past the table, in the direction of a marble statue with a severed leg. The statue was male, with a cock folded like a rose-bud.

‘Ho, ho,’ I cried. ‘A Judy wouldn’t find him of much use, would she? Even the monkey thinks so.’

“The ape is all but blind,’ William Rimmer said.

George didn’t say a word, which made it worse. I was angry with myself for appearing loutish.

A quarter of an hour later the latch of the cage was lifted and I stepped inside holding a pad saturated with ether. I took care to keep it at arm’s length, being aware of its giddy properties. Ether was a component of the collodion solution painted on photographic plates, but mostly I used a commercial preparation from which the ether had evaporated while this was fresh from the bottle; already my eyes were smarting. The ape shuffled sideways but otherwise showed no sign of aggression. From behind, I clapped the pad over its muzzle. It gave an almighty start and rose off its shanks, flailing its arms and jerking its head backwards, catching me a crack on the forehead that nearly had me on the floor. ‘Hang on, man,’ cried William Rimmer, ‘keep the pad in place,’ and I did hang on, from fear of being trampled, though now I was damn near choking and mucus dripped from my nostrils. Like a man drowning, I fought against drawing breath, and just as I felt I could hold on no longer the beast shook me away, uttered a ghastly shriek, and scrabbling at its throat, fell down insensible. Piss steamed through the sawdust and splattered between the bars.

The three of us carried the patient to the table, securing its chest and forearms with straps. I was astonished at how closely the splayed limbs resembled those of a human, and one capable of arousing pity. Its head lolled sideways, exposing a patch of neck, hairless and wrinkled as worn leather. When the wire contraption was fixed to its skull and the spring prised up the lids of its eyes, I made to turn away, but Rimmer shouted, ‘Stay where you are, damn you...put the bag over its nostrils,’ at which George added, ‘Please, Pompey,’ and I liked him for it. It wasn’t often he addressed me by name.

I scarcely saw what followed, for my eyes watered continually. I had the nous not to rub at them with my contaminated fingers, even though I was feeling uncommonly light in the head. The pulse in my neck thumped like a drum and I heard myself sniggering.

George wielded the scissors and Rimmer the forceps. They’d both wound strips of sheeting over the lower halves of their faces, which struck me as comical - likewise their conversation.

‘Patient under,’ intoned George, voice muffled.

‘Shall I start?’ asked Rimmer.

‘I’m ready if you are -’

‘I need to cough -’

 ‘You can’t -’

‘Lens removed from right eye. Aperture stiff...Will need iridectomy.’

‘Preparing to cut window,’ said George.

My part, on request, was to pump the bulb supplying ether; not too much, for I’d been warned an excess could halt the poor beast’s heart, nor too little, for then it might wake and its frantic thrashings cause the blades to snip too deep. In between administrations I was urged to keep an eye open for tremors and prod for rigidity of muscle, neither of which tasks I was in any fit state to perform, my breathing having become so laboured that each inhalation hurt like the devil. I was also nauseous and imagined I’d turned the colour of paper. For two pins I’d have left my post, only I doubted my legs would carry me.

The ungodly interference having come to an end, we returned the ape to its cage and I staggered outside. I retched, but my stomach was near empty and there was nothing to bring up save a watery fluid that stank of brandy. I had barely recovered when George ordered me back in again to put up the developing tent. No sooner had I shuffled away the dust and debris and erected the wigwam than he peered inside and pronounced it useless. It would, he said, admit far too much light. He was in the right of it; surrounded by glass we might as well have set up in the open air. He sent me off in search of a shed.

It took some time, most of the outbuildings being either piled with gardening and agricultural implements or else chock-full with broken statues too massive to shift. I came across a painted figure, shaped like a coffin and propped on end, its wooden casing rotted at the base. A lump of stained bandages poked out, nibbled by field-mice, from which three toes protruded, their bony segments the colour of honey. Then I thought I understood what had turned William Rimmer into a doctor, though for the life of me I couldn’t work out what had influenced George, unless it was the sight of his mother’s face looming above the cradle, eyes round as marbles.

It was the stable boy who showed me the ice-house, tunnelled beneath the rhododendrons and not twenty yards from the glass-house. George was satisfied with it, so I fetched the wheelbarrow and we got on with coating the plates.

The ape was awake on our return, and apparently none the worse for its torture. It sat with one hand gripping the bars, shaking its head from side to side as though baffled. William Rimmer, elated and sounding off like a preacher, declared that the veil had dropped from its eyes and it now saw the world clearly.

‘Clever, what?’ he crowed, thumping George on the shoulder.

‘Damn clever,’ agreed George, smirking with satisfaction.

I kept my opinions to myself; I didn’t doubt their cleverness, but what use was a world only glimpsed from a cage?

When it came to be photographed the ape turned its back on the camera. First I tried shying pebbles at it, and when that didn’t work, dragged the scissors along the bars. Its shoulders rippled, but it wouldn’t budge. Then Rimmer hit on the idea of singing to it. He had a pleasant voice and warbled some kind of lullaby; sure enough, it did the trick, the beast swivelling round to stare at him. George took four studies, though the last was marred by the ape suddenly vomiting.

Once back in the ice-house, he developed the pictures by the puny gleam of a shaded candle, dipping each plate in a mixture of pyrogallic and acetic acid. It was my job, once George had judged the correct density of each image, to fix the results in a solution of potassium cyanide. Afterwards, he made me carry out the trays and pour the excess chemicals into the ground, on account of their being so poisonous. Often I’d washed my hands in the stuff to be rid of silver stains, and I reckoned he was over-cautious.

I ate my dinner along with the servants, and hardly did justice to it. My head ached and nothing tasted right. A footman ticked me off for coming to the table with blackened fingers. Too queasy to defend myself, I stayed silent. One of the women had been in service in Strawberry Fields and had known of Mrs Prescott and her daughters. She quizzed me as to Miss Annie’s present condition and I said I believed she was in her fourth month and that this time she was holding. She said it was astounding, Miss Annie always being under the weather, considering she’d been so bonny as a child. I replied I didn’t find it in the least astounding, and had known it happen the other way round.

‘He’s right,’ agreed an old woman seated to my left. ‘Look at our Henry,’ and she pointed with her knife further down the table at a man built like an ox. ‘Would you believe a breath of wind would have blown him away as a babby?’

The footman was curious to know what we’d been up to with the ape; he’d helped manoeuvre the cage into the glass-house. After I’d enlightened him, he looked me up and down, scorn in his eyes, and remarked that he’d never have taken me for a doctor’s assistant.

‘I don’t pretend to be,’ I said. I’m a photographer.’ ‘Nor that,’ he drawled. ‘Though perhaps you come in useful when trundling a wheelbarrow.’

I rather lost my head, and spouted off about appearances not being everything, and how my father had been a gentleman and remained so, though in reduced circumstances. I could tell he didn’t believe me, and was glad when he was summoned upstairs. My pa, so I’d been told, had enlisted in a Lancashire infantry regiment some months before I was born, and promptly embarked for India. To my knowledge, he’d never returned, either from choice or on account of colliding with his maker.

*

George sought me out in the late afternoon. It was obvious he’d had a fair amount to drink, for his speech was slurred. He said he’d decided to stay the night and that I was to return alone. Rimmer would lend him a horse in the morning. I was to stick to the main road going back, so as to avoid ruffians down on the shore. I knew it was his precious camera he was concerned about rather than my safety. I must be sure to tell his mother he was stopping over.

‘Should my wife be unwell...’ he began, and hesitated.

‘I’m to come back and fetch you,’ I prompted.

 ‘Perhaps...’ he dithered. His expression was anguished, his plump mouth drooping with discontent. He looked what he was, a spoilt man. Then, making up his mind, he blurted out, ‘No, that won’t be necessary. I shall be home before breakfast.’