The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [100]
H. V. Carter, artist and date unknown
Despite the prestigious setting, Carter’s moment in the spotlight must have been rather bittersweet. In his personal life, he was now very much alone. Harriet had recently died (apparently suddenly, though the cause and date of her death are unknown), and during his twenty-three years away from England, Carter had lost not only the few close friends he’d once had but family members, too. Both his father and brother had passed away—Joe at just thirty-five and only three months after marrying his longtime love. And now, his own health was poor. While investigating the nature of relapsing fever, he’d “had the benefit,” as Carter once wryly put it, “of repeated personal experience of this fever.” What’s more, he had contracted pulmonary tuberculosis. But the trip would at least end on a high note. After spending several weeks in London, he would take the train to Scarborough to see his dear sister, now Mrs. William Moon and the mother of a small brood.
Carter did subsequently return to Bombay and resume his responsibilities with the college and hospital, but following his retirement at age fifty-seven in July 1888, he came back to Scarborough for good. Brigadier-Surgeon H. V. Carter, M.D., was granted the honorary rank of deputy surgeon general for his “eminent service to medical science” and appointed honorary surgeon to the queen. He bought a large house within a stone’s throw of Lily’s, and within a few years, he had a new family of his own to fill its many rooms. In December 1890, at age fifty-nine, he married Mary Ellen Robison, twenty-five years his junior. The couple had two children, a son named Henry Robison (born 1891) and a daughter, Mary Margaret (1895). But Carter’s late-blooming happiness was cut short. He had never fully recovered from tuberculosis and died at home on May 4, 1897, just shy of his sixty-sixth birthday.
OUR TIME IS almost up. We have been here four days in a row and are going home tomorrow. The library is closing in twenty minutes. The romance novelist has gone, leaving just Steve and me at the table. Still, we speak in whispers, purely out of respect for the reading room itself.
Sue, our favorite Ms. Wheat—a Mary Tyler Moore with an English accent—delivers two last archival boxes, one for each of us. We have already read everything—every page of every extant item, down to Henry Vandyke Carter’s last will and testament—but we cannot leave London without seeing H. V. Carter’s actual diary.
The second volume is slightly larger than the first, as if he had splurged on the extra half inch, but, my word, they are both so small. How did he fit so much life onto such tiny pages?
“Thank goodness we saw this on microfilm first,” I say to Steve, “or I don’t think I’d have gotten much past the first page.”
Carter’s handwriting, an endless series of trembling lines, looks more like an EEG reading, one that only we know how to interpret. There is his opening note on the fate of his first diary, how he’d had to destroy some of those early pages, followed on the next page by his peppy epigraph: “Let the same thing, or the same duty, return at the same time everyday, it will soon become pleasant,” which has always struck me as absurd.
Both volumes have been rebound, replacing what must have been tough original covers, for the pages show little wear and tear. Carter himself was not just neat but freakishly neat. There are no stains, scarcely a smear, and not a single dog-eared page. None of the ink has ever run, as if the man never shed a tear.
Steve and I trade volumes. I turn to Carter’s last diary entry, written on January 9, 1862, such a bleak, unhappy time. “The unfolding of the future—the immediate future—remains, and the present hardly improves,” it begins. The entry is a page long, the tone desultory. You can tell his heart’s not in it anymore. “Working incessantly—the only relief,” he writes in his closing paragraph.
It’s a wonder that the diary has survived, I cannot help but feel, that the volumes weren’t destroyed,