In the lengthening days of that winter, a number of long-time employees of old Bethlem, as if reluctant to undergo so jarring a change in levels of light, warmth, and general salubriousness as New Bethlem threatened, chose to retire to what they knew: dank, dark, and decay, with Death’s added benefits of eternal privacy and silence. First to lumber off was Alf Bulteel, without whom, all considered, the world is none the worse. Next was Bryan Crowther. Him I do regret, as I do my treatment of him. It was the tragic waste of a good intelligence. The next time I saw him after his seizure was only six weeks later, to surreptitiously examine his brain before sewing him up for burial. Dropsical insanity, the usual conformations, nothing otherwise remarkable. These brain descriptors can make too-fitting epitaphs.
After Crowther it was Peter Alavoine. On February 17, 1815, he celebrated his eighty-first birthday and three days later was stricken with a paralysis of the right side. Matthews, though hardly well himself, begging access to see to him, I granted it, and he and I were separately with him a good deal. One morning the codger, his skull a wizened birdling’s against his pillow, beckoned me close to whisper there was something he wanted me to have. Conscious of the beady ancient gaze, I extracted a greasy manilla envelope from the East India Company fruit crate, with a hank of robin’s-egg chenille tacked round it, that served as his night-table.
T-hoh t-hinghs…Ch-hahn, he said. As a consequence of immobility and lack of appetite, he’d contracted pneumonia, by which he’d grown daily more breathless and exhausted. Whuhn, yho mhuhst nhaht hohp-hehn hit t-hihl hayhm g-hahn. T-hoh, yho mhuhst nehfhayhr show th-hem, t-hoh—
“Never show who what, Sir Archy?” Matthews said behind me.
With a frantic look at me, Alavoine gasped, Theh gohvehrnhers!
“Evidence, is it?” Matthews asked, peering round my shoulder at the envelope. “Mum’s the word with Jack on evidence! He’s the new kind of recorder!”
Back in my office, it was to be only a peek, but once I saw what I had I dove in.
At noon I spelled Matthews. When he left for lunch I leaned in close to Alavoine. “You old bastard. To serve your friend this way—”
In his affected dialect he whined, “To ignore a dying man’s last request—”
“Peter, you love James and have always assured me his letters went out. Why such cruelty? Read them, since the rules say you must, but why for God’s sake not send them on?”
These questions inspired a speech of raving self-justification, in which the self being justified figured in the third person. The speaker was not Alavoine but his inhabitant, the one Matthews called Sir Archy. The letters, Sir Archy told me, had been held as “scraps for the dog Alavoine.” The plan was, with none of Matthews’ letters leaving Bethlem, there’d be no answer from Jamaica. When, out of despair, Matthews stopped writing, Sir Archy would not tell himself this, which is to say would not tell Alavoine, but instead that Matthews’ more recent productions were being sold direct to Poynder. “A pretty way to twist his feed-tube, don’t you think?” he asked me.
“Whose feed-tube?”
“Alavoine’s! But—” the old head gave a rueful shake—“Matthews never stopped writing—”
“Sell them to Poynder—?” I said, confused.
“Damn Poynder! He’s keeping hers and wants the set!”
“Margaret Matthews has been writing letters? How many does Poynder have?”
“A good hundred. All the Jamaica ones.”
“She’s alive!?”
“As of three months ago, which is the time it takes a Jamaica letter to arrive, she was, but must be mad as he is, to write a hundred letters with no reply.”
“Does Matthews know she’s alive?”
“Only in his heart.”
I left him begging me not to tell Matthews he’d so callously betrayed him.
Poynder was at his desk doing his accounts. I told him Alavoine had given me 223 letters from Matthews to his wife. I also told him of Alavoine’s charge against himself.
He seemed perturbed by the first piece of information, consternated by the second. “Why would I do that?” he wondered.
“A guilty delusion,” I assured him. “He said he kept Matthews’ as scraps for the dog Alavoine.”
“This is delirium.”
“I’m writing her today.”
He regarded me with alarm. “You have her address—?”
“If the one on Matthews’ letters isn’t a fantasy, I do—”
I’m drawn to that other place Poynder watches people from, its lone remove. Conversations with him so throw me that once I found myself describing to him the Methodist minister in his rumpled coat who presided at Sarah’s funeral, how he fell on her eulogy in a slavering caress, the object of which bore no relation to the woman I knew and loved. I can only think telling Poynder this was my attempt to convey to him how alien and cruel the world has seemed to me since Sarah’s death, and that was a way to let him know how profoundly I miss her. A probe, in other words, an oblique one, for that other capacity in which he himself always seemed to operate. But no, even disguised, my anecdote was too intimate and frightened him. The abyss yawned. He temporized, fumbled out a brow-smoothing sentiment the equivalent of You’ll be fine, then rapidly discoursed on the shocking rise in the price of coal and whether we might ask the governors’ permission to fire the stoves five days in the week instead of seven. I was never in my life at the same time humiliated and abandoned by a man so familiar to me and yet so alien. The same treatment, come to think of it, I was trying to tell him I was suffering from the world.
“So no letters have ever come from her that you’re aware of?” I now inquired.
“John, you’ve asked me this before. My answer’s the same: none.”
“But you did know she’s in Jamaica?”
“Isn’t that what was said when she disappeared?”
“My letter will by-pass Alavoine.”
“Yes, drop it direct to me.”
Now, why would he say that?
A few minutes later I ran into Matthews in the upper hall, making his way back from lunch to sit with Alavoine. When I told him what the old Satan had been up to, he nodded as at old news.
“You’ve known this?” I said in amazement.
“Yes, by the fact I’ve never received a Jamaica answer from her.”
“Alavoine tells me Poynder’s kept her letters.”
‘That would further explain it.”
“But why?”
“Because she’s alive and writing me.”
“No, why would Poynder keep them?”
He looked at me startled. “Jack, have you never considered what Poynder’s days must be like? A bachelor whose entire adult life has been lived on these and Bridewell’s premises? Don’t you think a little private transgression would go a long way in an existence like that? Or a woman’s genuine loving voice, though only on paper, not be rare music in it?”
“A transgression not private enough, James, and not little. Far from only between a man and his conscience, it would be criminal interference in others’ lives.”
“But don’t forget what this place is dedicated to, or how unsignificant those other lives are. Now imagine a constant aching absence in your heart—”
“I have no need to imagine.”
“At least you and I had someone once. Think of it like this, Jack. Margaret and I, by writing the truth of what we feel, have all along been doing double good. Even as we’ve taken up our pens to nourish the other, our words, in being robbed of their proper recipient, first fed their author and second, by a serendipity of that theft, have kept alive what’s human in Sir Archy and Poynder. That those two have held fast our loving sentiments should be viewed as testimony to the tenaciousness of their humanity. Or put it this way: Though Sir Archy’s insensible to guilt, like a good thief he knows quality and has instinctively stored away my letters as a squirrel does nuts against winter’s poverty.”
“I’m writing her today.”
“Better post it yourself.”
“I’ll write two and give one to Poynder.”
“Make it a dozen. Gang agents have been scanning mail at the London and Kingston depots for years. The Government’s only been following suit, in their study of the gangs’ specialty: communication and its blocks. I’d be begging you to make a bundle of your inheritance and post it to her today, if I could believe for one moment they’d not vanish immediately down the nearest magnetic sink.”
In his last days Alavoine underwent a stunning transformation. The affected dialect—for as far as I could tell it was only ever a perverse, facetious affectation; nobody speaks English that way-cracked like a shell, leaving a regular Cheshire man’s manner of speaking, nothing otherwise odd about it at all. Also, up until the hour he died, his old nature continued evolving to ever more loving and plain. They say in old age a person will revert to how he spoke before the way he needed to, to get along in the world. And strokes, of course, can alter character and not always for the worse. But whatever caused the change, Alavoine now sincerely addressed everyone who visited—whether gallery maid (a hard-mouthed French one, Marie-Louise, called by Matthews Charlotte, was his favourite), lunatic, or medical officer—as a dear friend, and nobody heard his manner as mawkish or facetious, as indeed it wasn’t.
In this state he showed no concern about Matthews’ letters, except to extol their loving sentiments. What he did speak of constantly, with a joy liable to cause a pang for anyone not so confident it would ever happen, was the imminence of Matthews’ departure from Bethlem and how he’d always hoped—and feared—it would occur before his own another way, and how nothing could give him more satisfaction than to have Matthews close by him in his own last days and know he too would soon leave for superior accommodations, albeit (with a shy smile) more mundane than the place he himself was headed. Altogether he showed tremendous affection for his friend, and Matthews for him, to the degree that for the first time I heard Matthews call him Peter. To see them sitting together with clasped hands or Matthews gently easing him forward to plump his pillow, you’d never suspect that for at least five years one had been doing the other so heartless an injustice and the other had known all about it.
Without care of Alavoine to bring Matthews and me together, with him restricted once again to the galleries and my time more and more entailed by the thousand details of the transfer to the new place, I didn’t see him again until April, only a few weeks before the Inquiry began. Meanwhile, exacerbating my anxieties about eighteen years of keeping him as an incurable when we’d routinely sent ten times madder and more dangerous lunatics back out into the streets, the contents of his letters to his wife were constantly in my thoughts. Written in ordinary cursive script, they were nothing other than daily concerns and caring sentiments, with only here and there a stretch of lunatic delusion. In other words, the letters of any doting husband. But in communicating with such naked intimacy, such longing and love, as to seem already there, inside her mind, they lingered in mine, and there they served as a constant rebuke to my chronic failure of obligation to him.
I now resolved to try once more to convince him to tell me why he was in. Perhaps the Liverpool hints I’d picked up from Shaftesbury might loosen his tongue, by showing him I could corroborate what he told me, however incredible. If I didn’t succeed, I hoped at least, by entering again into conversation with him, to restore a modicum of communication between us, so if at the Inquiry I had no proper answer concerning his incarceration, I mean one that wouldn’t nastily rebound on Bethlem and her medical officers, at least when otherwise addressing his condition I’d pay him the respect, and do myself the service, of knowing of what I spoke when I spoke of him.