Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [78]
“I honestly believe,” said Treves slowly, “that John will find a way of killing himself before he goes back there. It must not happen. It would have been bad enough to send him back weeks ago when he first came in here—but now, when he’s beginning to believe in himself as a human being, as a man … if you could see the change that’s come over him …”
“I should like to visit him again. You must make me an appointment. From all I hear Mr. Merrick’s days are crowded now.”
“Ever since Mrs. Kendal came to see him he hasn’t stopped having visitors. She came back for a second visit the other day. That pleased him more than anything else, I think. Most people don’t come a second time, but when they go away they tell their friends about him, and the friends come. So there’s always a new stream of guests. He receives them like royalty. Mothershead found him a tea set from somewhere, and he’s even learned to pour tea with his good hand.”
“But what on earth do they talk about?” said Carr-Gomm, puzzled at the picture that was being conjured up for him.
“Mrs. Kendal talks to him about the theater. He loves that. He sees the theater as a child would see it—a magic place where you can dream of being or doing whatever you like …”
“Dangerous …” muttered Carr-Gomm.
“What?”
“Nothing. Go on. They talk about the theater. What else?”
“They—er—read Shakespeare together.” Treves stopped abruptly, feeling the impossibility of describing the strange and touching scene when Mrs. Kendal had been Juliet to Merrick’s Romeo. He himself had been an intruder at that moment. Carr-Gomm gave him a sharp glance but did not press the matter.
“And the others?” he queried.
Treves grinned suddenly. “Mr. Merrick is getting adept at the niceties of conversation,” he told Carr-Gomm. “He asks them to tell him about their lives and he tells them about his. Since their experiences are so widely different there’s usually plenty to talk about.
“What pleases me most is that he’s losing his shyness—not just with his formal visitors, but with everyone. He spends a lot of time at the window during the day, and the men who work in Bedstead Square have got used to him. They pop across to chat to him as though he was just anyone, and gradually I think that’s how he’s beginning to think of himself.”
“But surely, that’s not possible. Every time he sees himself …”
“I don’t allow mirrors of any kind in that room, sir. Since he can’t see himself, and people treat him so normally, he’s starting to forget, or at any rate to think that his deformity isn’t so very dreadful.”
“Let us hope that nothing happens to remind him violently that it is.”
Both men fell silent as though a shadow had fallen across them. After a moment Carr-Gomm seemed to force himself to speak cheerfully.
“So Mr. Merrick is now used to conversing with the very cream of society. How exceedingly dull he will think me after the Countess of Warwick, who I understand came calling yesterday.”
“That’s right. John admires her greatly, though not quite as much as the Duchess of Manchester.”
“What! Are you telling me, Treves, that one of the most notorious women in London has been visiting here?”
“Yes, and she brought Lord Hartington with her.”
“Good grief!”
In an age when the indiscretions of the aristocracy were successfully concealed from anyone outside their own immediate circle, the German-born Duchess Louisa had flouted convention to an extent that could not be kept a secret. She had been married for nearly thirty years to the Duke of Manchester, and had borne him five children. But this had not prevented her, when a young woman, from having an affair with Lord Derby, in the course of which she extracted a written promise from him that should he ever become Prime Minister he would get her appointed to the Queen’s household, as Mistress of the Robes. In due course he had become Prime Minister, and been as good as his word; something which, when she discovered it, infuriated Queen Victoria so much that she excluded her Mistress of the