Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [8]
‘Assistant lithotomist,’ Paris said gravely. ‘That was before entering into private practice in Norwich.’
‘And he is, er was, a member of the Royal Company of Surgeon Apothecaries. And he has writ a treatise, entitled Syllabus of Anatomy, which has been published by Blackie and Son of Paternoster Row in London. I trust I have these details right?’
Early in this recital Kemp’s face had commenced to glow. There was nothing like a qualified man. Each item was a rivet, a strong bolt for the ship’s timbers. ‘Ah, yes, I almost forgot, he obtained the Bishop of Norwich’s licence as a physician and ran his own practice, with his own premises for retail transactions. Is that not so, Matthew?’
‘H’m, yes.’ Those who knew Paris would have recognized the quality of his hesitation now, and the sudden prominence of his cheekbones. He had enjoined humility upon himself, or, failing that, caution; but he had felt both receding during this catalogue of his virtues. That he was taking his uncle’s charity did not oblige him to take his commendations too, though he was amused in a way to see these enlisted as commercial assets. But it was the unexpected reference to this cleric who had so damaged his life that caused him to break his promises to himself. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘you must have your piece of paper with the bishop’s scrawl upon it, there is no doing without that. Though why it should be so I cannot see, as the man knows even less of medicine than of theology. His scrawl was on the paper that sent me to prison too – he knows something about prisons, at least. He owns Norwich Jail at present; not the building, of course – that belongs to good King George. No, the revenue from it, which is quite considerable, you know: people will pay for their comforts inside prison just as they will outside, if they have money.’
Some moments of silence followed this. Erasmus could not fully credit what he had heard. That Paris should so gratuitously refer to his experience of prison struck him as in such execrable taste that it almost deserved pity. It was as if his cousin had made some terrible blunder which he needed to be saved from. And it was with some sense of coming to the rescue, some urge to cover the offence, that he cast around now for a new topic. ‘What is a lithotomist exactly?’ he said at last.
‘Lithotomy is the operation of cutting for stone in the bladder,’ Paris said, in his deep, unhurried voice. His face relaxed in a rueful, slightly lop-sided smile that narrowed one eye more than the other. ‘As for the premises your father speaks of,’ he said, ‘it was a shop.’ He raised a large hand in a gesture of repudiation. ‘My wife and I kept an apothecary’s shop and had rooms above it.’
The words were merely modest in intention; but they gave Erasmus what he needed, a reason for legitimizing his dislike, giving it official status, so to speak. Antipathy for a fellow-being, like love, is a story that we relate to ourselves, varying in the elements that feed it but always the same in its need for a formal opening, so that it can become properly conscious of itself and not remain for ever inchoate, mere vague repugnance or resentment or prejudice. This opening Erasmus found in the twisted smile, in what seemed a sardonic belittling of his father’s enthusiasm; and with the opening once found things proceeded apace, as always: what right had this pauper, this recipient of charity, to correct his benefactor, to choose the way he was to be regarded?
A little later, in the drawing-room, where his mother joined them for tea, he found himself adding his cousin’s strangely unfashionable shoes to the count against him. They were large, black, square-toed, with big square buckles – this at a time when buckles of any sort were quite out – and they creaked slightly. They somehow completed the suggestion of the necktie, with its two straight folds, and the black, low-crowned