The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [50]
They pick up the same conversation several days after Carter has begun the studentship, and this time, the subtext is much clearer. Perhaps Gray knows that the position won’t be as challenging as Carter might want and, knowing his friend as well as he does, believes he needs a fixed goal to work toward. Gray presents his concern in “a considerate and encouraging way,” but Carter is still in wait-and-see mode.
Already, though, Gray seems to be right. Over the previous six days, Carter had done nothing beyond a little dissecting and had yet to even see Mr. Queckett, the professor he was meant to assist. One person he had not been able to avoid, however, was an insufferable chap named Sylvester, the first-place winner in last year’s exam. Now the senior student to Carter’s junior, Sylvester sounds like the anti-Gray. “Hasty and spiteful,” he had made nasty little digs at Carter, telling him, for instance, that the dissections he had done for the exam were inferior to another candidate’s.
Making an uncomfortable situation worse, Carter is under the impression that Caesar Hawkins and the other higher-ups at St. George’s are upset with him for taking a studentship at what is essentially a competing school. But this is sheer poppycock, as Lily might say, another instance of Carter’s letting a neurotic sense of propriety get the better of him. Henry Gray, to whom he turns for counsel, assures him likewise.
Always there to buck him up, Gray is the ever-friendly port in a storm, whether said storm is imagined or not. He makes everything seem, well, not easy by any means, but within reach, so long as one works hard. To someone as impressionable as Carter, however, there is a clear distinction between an everyday role model and a paragon, a being kissed by destiny, and, as of July 25, 1853, Henry Gray appears to have crossed over. Of his friend, Carter writes that evening, “Gray got [the] Astley Cooper prize—beating good men.” He seems a bit incredulous, as if thinking, How does Gray do it? “Clever fellow,” he cannot help but marvel.
Along with the £300 cash prize, Gray would be accorded an even greater reward. His treatise on the spleen had attracted the attention of a London publisher who would release it as a book the following year. In a small way, Carter shares in this victory because, of course, he had created the illustrations for the project.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t hear the good news from Gray himself, for Gray has been “down in [the] country—[He] has been very ill.” Ill with what, and how serious the affliction, Carter does not say, but, as I’ve learned through St. George’s administrative records, Gray’s illness was serious enough that he requested a leave of absence from his curator duties. Further, he arranged to defer receipt of the Astley Cooper Prize until he had recuperated.
Hardly two weeks pass before Carter loses another anchor in his life, his brother and roommate Joe, who suddenly falls ill and is bundled off to recuperate in Hull, with the boys’ aunt, uncle, and grandfather. “Somewhat alarmed—choleric symptoms,” he jots that night in his diary.
Joe, now eighteen, had rejoined H.V. upon his return from Paris to continue studying art, and the two shared expenses. “Joe and I get on pretty well,” H.V. told Lily in a letter from February 1853, but then backpedaled. “His malpleasantries, however, stick to him like pitch and make me too sharp perhaps.”
Perhaps? Lily surely got a giggle out of that. H.V. and Joe, polar opposites, annoyed the hell out of each other in a way only brothers who love each other can. Joe was free-spirited and fun-loving and did not seem to have a religious bone in his body. Mostly, what was