A Question of Guilt

11

'I'm going to try something entirely new.' Eliot's voice had more enthusiasm than he usually allowed himself the luxury. 'Or more correctly, something extremely old, which nobody has bothered themselves to think about intelligently.'

The patient sitting on the bench was pale, wizened, bright-eyed, sharp-nosed, skinny, growing bent. He wore a coarse woollen pea-jacket with two rows of buttons like a sailor's, a greasy choker, the patched corduroy trousers flopping over his boots held by a broad, brass-buckled belt. Stained cap and stubby clay pipe lay on the bare floor. Though before eight in the morning he reeked of beer.

His sleeves were pushed to the elbows, displaying forearms red, weeping, pitted with yellow pustules down to the wrists. He looked at Eliot with the cheerful scepticism of Cockneys, who throughout London's history have found people trying to sell them second-hand goods or political and religious ideas with comparable passion.

'Wot is it?'

'Mouldy bread.'

'Luv a duck!'

'It's been used for centuries by country people for the best of scientific reasons-it worked. There's always been lightning in the heavens and steam from volcanoes, Bill. But it needed imagination to turn them into electric light and railway engines.'

The old greengrocer's bell clanged as the door opened. Eliot was startled to see Crippen in a drenched bowler and long waterproof coat.

The streets of London were struggling to become light on the blustery, teeming morning of November 19, 1909. The People's Surgery had been open a month. Single-handed, Eliot had scrubbed and sawn, banged in nails, licked with paint the rickety shop in Brecknock Road, which still smelt of rotting cabbage. He had wheeled in a handcart bits of furniture from the pawnbrokers in the Caledonian Road. An old lace curtain from his lodgings discouraged the curiosity of passers-by through the shop window. The second-hand examination couch stood in a small inner room, with the bowls and bottles, the bandages, tow and oiled-silk. His own savings and Ј5 from the Holloway Labour Party could provide only essential dressings. He perceived that he would be offering advice rather than treatment, most common remedies being beyond the pockets of his patients.

It was his first encounter with Crippen since the day Baby died. Eliot congratulated him on being about so early. 'I generally leave home round eight,' Crippen said in his usual quiet, absent-minded way. 'I get my own breakfast, and maybe take Belle up a cup of coffee. I've a long working day. Seven-thirty's my usual home hour.' He shook the raindrops from his bowler, standing among the wooden forms facing the fire, inspected curiously by a dozen waiting patients-porters, slaughtermen, drovers from the Cattle Market, just off work or just out of the pub. 'I just had to see the surgery that everyone in the neighbourhood is talking about.'

'Not all of them kindly. The local doctors are furious at my robbing them of poor people's shillings. I'm expecting them any moment to smash my window with toffee-hammers. They say I'm insane, working for nothing. Or devilish clever, buying votes by free medicine instead of free beer.'

'I so enjoyed your company, I hoped I might meet you and Miss Grange once more.' Crippen seemed to have forgotten Eliot's remark on the stairs. 'I honestly don't recall passing more than a word with other medical men all the twelve years I've been in London. I don't join societies and all that, you know. They're a bit high-falutin' for me.'

'Miss Grange is back in New York,' Eliot told him. Partly to change the subject, partly mischievously, he said with the solemnity of addressing a Harley Street specialist, 'Perhaps you'd give me a second opinion on this case?'

Protesting he was a throat man, Crippen followed the pair into the inner consulting-room.

'You may think it a case of Bockhart's impetigo?' Crippen had never heard about the German physician Max Bockhard, Eliot knew, or the disease he described of pustules bursting from the hair follicles. But flattery of assumed knowledge was a courtesy among doctors so widespread it amounted to professional etiquette. 'Bill Edmonton here works at the slaughterhouse in the Cattle Market across at Copenhagen Fields. He's picked up a staphylococcal infection from handling the meat, which I intend to treat somewhat unorthodoxly.'

'I ain't a slaughterman, doctor.' Bill sat on the spoke-backed kitchen chair beside Eliot's deal table. 'A slaughterman can touch two 'undred pahnds a year. I'm only a boilerman.' He grinned. '"Poupart's Piccadilly Potted Meat. Londoners Love It".'

Eliot remembered the newspaper advertisements of clerics, army officers, goggled aviators, mortar-boarded schoolmasters and other persons of authority and energy, mouthing forkfuls of its slippery slices like famished Children of Israel savouring manna.

'What do Poupart's pay you?' It was a question the patients grew to expect from Eliot.

'Depends.' Bill looked sly. 'I gets paid by the meat wot comes aht of the boiler. And the sacks of meal wot I finish wiv, from grinding the marrow-bones. I can make meself a good ten bob a day, a'cause my governor don't use just wot comes from the slaughter-ahses, 'e buys cheap bits and bones left over by the butchers, even from the big ahses in the West End.'

'I suppose if it's all boiled, it kills the germs,' said Eliot resignedly. 'I'd like to take a look round the Market one day, Bill. A doctor should know the working conditions of his patients. Most know as little as of those in a young ladies' seminary.'

'Come on a Monday morning,' he invited with pride. 'It's the best day. There's two thasand bullocks an' ten thasand sheep sold on Mondays, so they say.'

'Perhaps I'll come tomorrow.'

From a glass bell on an upturned orange-box Eliot took two slimy green squares on a strip of cheesecloth. Crippen peered curiously through his gold-rimmed glasses.

'Mould,' Eliot explained. 'Which ruins leftover bread-and-cheese and last Sunday's cold mutton. It's a fungus named penicillium. It was first mentioned in that famous book by Mordecai Cooke, _Fungi, their Nature, Influence and Uses._ That was published fifty years ago.' Crippen looked vague. Eliot might have been talking of the Vulgate. 'It's a tangle of filaments, a lacework as familiar through my microscope as the tramway map of London.'

Eliot pressed the mould on Bill's pus-riddled forearms, covered it with a square of oiled silk and secured it firmly with bandages. 'Now pass a specimen of your water in this jam-jar, Bill. Boils can be associated with diabetes, can't they, Dr Crippen?'

'Undoubtedly,' said Crippen, to whom the connection was clearly as novel as between water and ice to a South Sea Islander.

Bill left, cap on head and pipe in mouth, wearing the expression of awe shot with distrust of any Cockney finding himself the object of learned attention. Eliot washed his hands with yellow soap in a tin basin on another upturned crate. He told Crippen, 'I'm not running this surgery to cure Holloway's aches and pains, but to show what must be done. This is the most generous city in the world-you've only to look at _Fry's Guide to London Charities,_ there's two thousand hospitals, asylums, dispensaries, homes, orphanages. Not to mention Bible, tract and missionary societies. All with a total income of _twelve million_ pounds a year. The British aren't mean. They're class-ridden. They'd share their last crust with a beggar, but if he demanded half as a human right they'd rather toss it down the sewer.'

Eliot wiped his hands on a towel hanging from a nail. 'Oh, I know there're plenty of medical clubs, but they have to compete with the burial clubs, and the Cockney prefers the prospect of a good funeral to that of postponing it.'

Crippen seemed unstirred by social injustice. He enquired, 'Were you free for dinner tomorrow?'

Eliot excused himself promptly. 'Tomorrow's the Lords' vote on the Budget. I'll be in Parliament Square to see any fun. Please apologize to Mrs Crippen.'

'I shall not be with Belle. You remember Miss Le Neve, my typist? We have been acquainted since '03, when I was consulting physician to the Drouet Institute, and she came to us straight from Pitman's College, only seventeen. We often have dinner together at Frascati's in Oxford Street. They have a nice winter garden with beautiful music, and you can get a good little table d'hфte for five shillings.' Eliot felt admiration at such dalliance in the ogreish shadow of Belle. 'I'm sure that Ethel would enjoy the company of a medical man so cultivated as yourself, quite as much as I do.'

Eliot rang the compliment on the counter of cynicism. After some persuasion, he agreed. It might be amusing to observe Crippen without Belle. Frascati's made a change from the Caledonian Road. Crippen was so pathetically pleased, his watery eyes seemed likely to spill over. As he turned to leave, Crippen reached for a thick green book beside the bell-jar on the orange-box. 'Walsham and Spencer, _Theory and Practice of Surgery,'_ he murmured reverently.

Crippen turned the pages. _'Trephining the Skull…Rhinoplasty…Fracture of the Shaft of the Femur…Strangulated Hernia,'_ he read aloud. 'Do you know, I've still my surgical instruments? I keep the case at home, behind the books. Belle doesn't like to look at them. She calls them a hoodoo. She had an operation once,' he disclosed quietly. 'An ovariotomy, in New York…oh, over ten years ago. They left behind the womb and the Fallopian tubes, so the scar's not too ugly.'

He took the other volume from the orange-box. 'Gray's Anatomy, Fifteenth Edition by Pickering Pick, FRCS, of St George's Hospital,' he read out, as though the title page of the Bible. 'Such a wonderful book. I came across it while studying operations here in England, back in '83.'

'Borrow it if you wish,' Eliot invited handsomely.

'May I? I shall find nothing more satisfying than renewing my knowledge of the human body,' Crippen told him gratefully. 'I'll keep it from the rain under my waterproof. I've only a little walk to catch the Underground at Camden Road Station. I really called to ask if you'd be interested in a little proposition?' Eliot stared, unbelieving after Crippen's last feeler. 'I hold the patent of a remedy called "Ohrshob-"'

'Called what?'_

'The German for "ear" with "shob" from "absorb". A good name, I think? It's an ear salve, for deafness. If you could dispose of a gross among your patients, I'd be most liberal with the commission-'

Eliot clapped him on the shoulder. He felt no anger nor contempt for this threadbare physician. Only sorrow and amusement. He later reflected this attitude brought the failure of his early life and the success of his later one. 'My patients could never afford your remedies. Might I suggest an alternative? Spare them a mite yourself.'

Crippen seemed neither offended nor unresponsive. 'I shall draw a cheque, Dr Beckett. Frascati's at eight tomorrow.'

The door jangled, and he stepped into the rain.

It was still raining hard at six the next morning, when Eliot arrived at the Cattle Market. It was almost an hour before sunrise. The Market was vast, 70 acres, 50 years old, a monument to the practicality which illuminated the Victorians' life as gloriously as their religion.

A 100-foot high, white stone clocktower, surmounted by a gold dragon wind-vane, dominated as majestically as the campinale in Florence a crushed cloister of shops and offices, the post office and telegraph station. Around massed rows of iron-railed stalls for the 750, 000 cattle which lowed their way through every year. Along the edges stretched the sheep and bullock lairs, low buildings with slate-and-glass roofs split for healthy ventilation, open-fronted with slim iron pillars, a three-foot deep cobbled gully along the back for hosing away each morning's dung. Victorian expedience incorporated a pub at each corner, identical Italianate four-storey square buildings, the Lion, the Lamb, the Bull and the _White Horse,_ open all night.

Eliot had sent a boy to Bill Edmonton at Poupart's meat works, saying to meet him in the White Horse-Bill certainly could not read a note. Eliot bought him three-ha'penn'oth of porter, but insisted leaving the warm gaslight before Bill became hopelessly drunk. They entered a broad gate in the blue-painted ten-foot railings. Under the naphtha flares, the sight struck Eliot as a brownish, choppy sea, with mooing for the sound of waves. Whistling and clanking of trains came from the huge triangular Great Northern goods depot against the Regent's Park Canal, where truckloads of cattle and sheep from the Midland shires and Yorkshire moors were shunted about all night.

The iron rails which confined the beasts hemmed the humans into narrow lanes. Butchers in bowler hats and heavy topcoats, landowners in deer-stalkers and Inverness capes, farmers wearing old-fashioned varnished flat waterproof hats, drovers with long sticks and leather-strapped corduroys who had walked ten miles from the Home Counties during the night, uncountable Cockneys with caps and mufflers and their hands in their pockets, and as many dogs, barking, snapping and sparring, seeming to enjoy the morning better than any other living things in sight.

Small, tight groups of better-dressed men with notebooks and pencils directed at the cattle sharp looks honed on experience, a nod sealing the bargain for another restless knot of animals to sizzle in the ovens or grills of Londoners. The repetitive large-scale transformation of living organisms into dead edibles chilled Eliot's imagination. To Bill, the Market was only an area which filled and emptied in the early morning, and needed hosing down before the next.

Bill conducted him across the broad, cobbled Market Road which bisected the pens. A pair of men in oilskins like sailors' goaded cattle into a long shed with a platform some six feet high running its length, on which stood a pair of men with sledgehammers.

Bill leered. 'The killing pen.' They mounted the platform as the gate clanged shut on a packed, snorting, heaving line of cattle. ''Ave a look at the knockers at work.'

Unhurriedly, the sledgehammers fell on the flat of the animals' heads, with a steady crack like a sportsman's gun. The knockers never missed. The beast fell, or sagged against the flanks of its fellows. Once the line was silent, and still save for mortal spasms, the knockers rested sweating on their hammers, the far gate was opened, and a team of men with hooks dragged the carcasses into the brightly gaslit building beyond.

Were they dead, Eliot wondered, or merely stunned? In the next building, it made no difference. All were raised by their hind hoofs on chains from the roof, and had their throats cut over buckets. The room was filled with men engulfed in leather aprons like a blacksmith's. They decapitated the animals with a stroke of a cleaver, tossing the heads like footballs into iron bins. They spread the carcasses on the flagged floor, shackling their hooves to short iron posts, and dextrously rid them of their hides. The shiny, bloody torsos were shifted by handcarts to worn wooden tables, where more aproned men chopped them to bits, separating the entrails into separate round bins of liver, kidneys, lungs, guts and tongues, with a final bin for all the rest.

Poupart's was hardly more than a shed, impossible to see across for steam. Bullocks' and sheeps' heads, bones with fragments of meat, bits of internal organs which had escaped becoming sausages, were dumped in boiling vats. The meat was sieved and minced, seasoned fiercely and packed into tins under heavy weights. The liquor went for pea soup, the skimmed fat for lard, the bones were crushed through steel rollers for meal to nourish the roses in London gardens.

''Londoners Love It,'' Eliot ended with a smile, after recounting his investigation to Crippen and Ethel Le Neve at Frascati's that evening.

'In Chicago,' Crippen said with quiet pride, 'they've got slaughterhouses so efficient, they say they use pretty well everything in a hog but its squeal.'

'Peter! You'll put me off my dinner,' Ethel dabbed her forehead with a tiny lace-edged handkerchief.

Crippen looked delighted. 'Ethel my dear, when you dine with two doctors you must be ready to hear strange things. Isn't that so, Dr Beckett?'

'Perhaps I should never have mentioned it at dinner at all, Miss Le Neve. But the Market made so strong an impression on me. There's a broad, tumbling Styx flowing into the heart of London,' he said dramatically. 'None of those beasts will ever return to their lush fields and flyblown byres, no more than we can reverse the torrents of the River Severn.'

'Yes, it is sad,' said Ethel. 'Ever so.'

Frascati's was large and handsome, a cafe and grill-room with the plush-curtained, palm-fringed winter garden upstairs. Ethel was prettier than Eliot remembered. She wore a plain cream blouse and a navy serge skirt, befitting the desk rather than the dinner-table. Her pearl necklace Eliot assumed a sham. When Crippen had introduced her with muted effusiveness, she shook hands in a ladylike way, whole arm delicately raised. Her expression seemed consciously subdued, a lively young woman wrapping herself tightly in a mantle of modesty to suit the company. She differed from Belle as a bunch of violets from a bunch of bananas.

Conversation continued untaxingly with Ethel's enthusiasm for her new typewriter. 'A Smith Premier, with complete control from the keyboard,' she explained triumphantly. 'It has a combination paragrapher and column finder, with removable and interchangeable plattens, a stencil key, a ribbon-colour change and a back-spacer.'

Eliot gravely congratulated her on command of such advanced machinery. Then Crippen said unexpectedly, 'Did you know, Dr Beckett, that Belle is my second wife? I was married to an Irish girl from Dublin, called Charlotte Bell,' he reminisced pleasantly. 'A student nurse at the Manhattan Hospital. I was an intern. A pretty usual combination, isn't it?'

'Peter has a son,' Ethel added.

'Yes. Otto. He's in California now. My wife had a fit and died in her next pregnancy. That was in Salt Lake City, in the winter of '91.'

'Peter makes the perfect husband,' Ethel said with sudden spirit. 'He had no vices, and Belle can do what she likes with him. Their house is an absolute disgrace, Dr Beckett. She won't keep a servant, you know. The gas stove's rusty and the kitchen's covered with cooking stains, there's dirty dishes, knives, flat-irons, saucepans everywhere, mixed up with Belle's false hair and even her precious jewellery. And as like as not, some beautiful white chiffon gown that Peter's paid a fortune for, tossed over a chair with his collars and shirts. Once she even took in lodgers,' Ethel said indignantly. 'Germans,' she emphasized the horror.

Crippen murmured in mitigation, 'Four young students.' He paused. 'I had to black their boots.'

'Why, she's even had Peter make a cage for the cats, for fear they'll be put in the family way.' Ethel stopped abruptly, pink from the outburst. She added firmly, 'Of course, Belle and I get along very well together. Sometimes we're like sisters.'

'Belle has an extravagant temperament,' Crippen excused her. 'She's Polish.'

'Really?' exclaimed Eliot. So she was one of a million Central Europeans who had jumped out of the frying-pan into the melting-pot.

'Her father had a fruit-barrow in Brooklyn-as we'd say in London, a costermonger. Her mother was German. She called herself Cora Turner, and only after we married did I discover she was really Kunigunde Mackamatzki,' he revealed in a mild voice. 'She was nineteen. I had to win her from the protection of a man called Lincoln-'

Crippen broke off his sentence. The orchestra began the waltz from Franz Lehar's _Merry Widow,_ which gave George Edwardes a _succиs fou_ at Daley's in Leicester Square in 1907. Crippen put his hand on Ethel's and exchanged a look of dreamy sentimentality. 'Our favourite tune,' he explained to Eliot. 'All that is needed to put the crowning touch on our happiness.'

Eliot stared down at his plaice-rather than sole, it was the five shilling dinner-to avoid laughing at a pathetic little doctor who created romance from a tinselly restaurant, a banal tune and a commonplace typist with pretty eyes. He had a talent for Gemutlichkeit, Eliot thought. He suspected suddenly that Crippen had invited him to meet Ethel, had indulged in such confidences, to enrol him as an ally against Belle. He remembered his father's advice, never be inveigled into marital conflicts or the beds of young married women. He spent the rest of the meal talking mostly about the House of Lords. It bored Ethel, but Crippen seemed to draw from it intellectual uplift.

Over the fruit-salad, Crippen passed Eliot the promised cheque. He saw it was for a guinea. 'You're very generous,' he said warmly.

'The most generous man in the world,' Ethel agreed. 'You've only got to look at Belle's dresses and jewels, haven't you?'

It was approaching midnight when Crippen hailed a hansom. Ethel lived in Constantine Road on the southern edge of Hampstead Heath, barely a mile beyond Hilldrop Crescent. Eliot avoided a lift on the excuse of some excitement in the streets of Westminster. He strode towards the river down Kingsway, intending to take a tram along the Embankment to the Houses of Parliament. He heard the newsboys shouting a special edition. He thrust a ha'penny at a ragged urchin for the _Evening Times,_ eagerly scanning the front page under a street lamp in the rain.

On Lord Lansdowne's resolution, the House of Lords had rejected the House of Commons' Finance Bill by 350 votes to 75. Eliot crammed the paper into the pocket of his raincoat. 'There'll be a general election,' he exclaimed excitedly. 'A general election as soon as the year's out.'

He walked with a springier step, seeing himself as Dr Eliot Beckett, MP.