‘But every time you do something it’s the last time you’ll ever do it,’ Imogen remarked. We had walked to the village; it would not be the last time we walked that far – not quite. ‘This afternoon is never going to happen again, the same as every afternoon,’ she said, serenely. That evening, however, she was distraught.
I am drinking more than I used to, and more than I should. I read and I drink. I watch films and I drink. I drink as I try to write. Grammar and syntax help to keep me in order. Charles Perceval’s laudanum is something I would like to try. It gave him wonderful visions: the garden became a lake of viscous liquid, emerald green; he roamed across glaciers that were the colour of amber and yielded to the pressure of his feet; impossible animals, monstrous yet benign, fed from his hand; voices spoke from the leaves of trees.
In a letter to Adeline, Charles Perceval quotes admiringly the writings of Thomas Sydenham (1624–89), the ‘English Hippocrates’: ‘The physician who earnestly studies – with his own eyes – and not through the medium of books – the natural phenomena of the different diseases, must naturally excel in the art of discovering what, in any given case, are the true indications as to the remedial measures that should be employed.’ Writing in his journal after Adeline’s death, Charles Perceval cites Sydenham again: ‘Of all the remedies it has pleased almighty God to give man to relieve his suffering, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.’ And, five years before Charles’s death, another line from Sydenham: ‘The arrival of a good clown exercises a more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than of twenty asses laden with drugs.’
I have found certain materials and instruments conducive to this rituaclass="underline" ivory high-grade vellum paper, manufactured in France, unlined, of optimal smoothness, absorbency and opacity; my grandfather’s pen; Italian ink, profoundly black. The words are produced more easily this way; perhaps too easily, sometimes. There is an element of fetishism at work here, one could say: the French paper; the antique pen; the Italian ink, in its elegantly functional bottle. That would be Emma’s analysis: fetishism and a wilfully eccentric devotion to antiquated technologies, akin to our father’s loyalty to vinyl records and his unreliable old watch. A mechanical watch is an absurdity nowadays, Emma insists, though she can appreciate that the elegant sweep of a mechanical second hand is more pleasing to the eye than the stuttering of a quartz-regulated item. Nonetheless, why squander money on something that tells the time less competently than a battery-powered watch that costs a fraction of the price? We discussed the subject in her kitchen, amid an array of high-end culinary equipment and appliances. The point, I tried to explain, was that the mechanism of the flatteringly costly watch had been manufactured and assembled with great care and precision, to impose a structure on the flux of reality. The divisions of the day are a human creation, and it is fitting that they should be measured by a hand-made mechanism, a compact and complex machine that functions by means of the precise interaction of extraordinarily delicate cogs and levers and springs, rather than relying on the mere quivering of a crystal. ‘But the fact is,’ Emma answered, ‘mine is more accurate than yours. And that’s what a watch is for.’ But she was impressed by what the gift represented. ‘She really must think a lot of you,’ she remarked, on first seeing it; as I recall, there was some amazement in her voice.
The sense of sight – the insatiable philanderer of the senses.
Maston House, flagship hotel of the group that intends to create the Perceval House Hotel, offers ‘the perfect balance of authentic Georgian style and contemporary living’. In each of its rooms and suites, ‘classic antique pieces and stunning period features’ are found alongside examples of ‘superlative modern design’. Discreet luxury is the keynote. In the Ridotto Bar of Maston House guests can relax with a bottle selected from the hotel’s ‘world-class’ cellar of French, Italian and New World vintages, or a glass from the vast menu of spirits. The Ridotto Bar offers whiskies such as the Springbank 30 Year Old 1965 and the John Walker, of which a mere 330 bottles have been produced. ‘Crafted from specially selected casks to create a whisky as close to the nineteenth-century style as possible’, the John Walker represents ‘the epitome of exclusivity’. The mirrored room will be rebranded as the Silver Lounge.
Today’s attendance: thirty-seven. ‘Pricy for what you get, but a shame it’s closing down,’ someone writes in the visitor’s book. ‘Loved the gross stuff,’ writes another. A quick calculation: a single bottle of the John Walker costs four hundred times the admission charge for the Sanderson-Perceval museum. Retail price, not bar price.
On the night before he was due to undergo the amputation of his cancerous leg, Peregrino Laziosi, the future Saint Peregrine, wonder-worker and patron saint of those afflicted with cancer, experienced a vision of the crucified Christ, who came down from the cross to touch the diseased limb. The following day, the surgeon could find no trace of any tumour. There have been many cases of apparently spontaneous recovery from cancer. In New York, in the 1880s, a man by the name of Fred Stein endured several operations to remove a sarcoma from his neck. The operations failed, but when Stein developed erysipelas, a bacterial skin infection that produces a severe fever, the tumour disappeared. Stein was interviewed by a doctor named William Bradley Coley, who reasoned that the sarcoma had been destroyed by the patient’s over-stimulated immune system. Coley went on to treat successfully a number of tumours using a mixture of bacterial toxins. Recently, researchers have examined cases in which acute myeloid leukaemia has apparently regressed of its own accord, and have found that the great majority of the patients in question had suffered from pneumonia or some other serious illness prior to the regression. Diphtheria, syphilis, gonorrhoea, hepatitis, malaria, influenza, measles and smallpox have all been associated with the sudden disappearance of tumours.
A fever was recorded in the case of Dinah Morley, who was examined by Cornelius Perceval in the spring of 1818. She presented with a goitre, for which the doctor may well have prescribed ‘blue pill’. Many of Perceval’s contemporaries prescribed this toxic compound for a variety of illnesses and disorders, a practice decried as ‘quackery’ by one Erasmus Schütz, to whom Dinah Morley took her goitre when it became apparent that it was not responding to Cornelius Perceval’s treatment. Schütz was an acolyte of Samuel Hahnemann, the creator of homeopathy, and was thus, in the eyes of Perceval, an arrant charlatan. Mrs Morley bought a phial of one of Schütz’s fraudulent liquids. The growth of the goitre seemed to stop. She bought more, then fell ill with a fever. And the goitre vanished, for reasons that – as Erasmus Schütz gloated – were beyond the comprehension of the city’s physicians. His triumph was temporary. A few months after Dinah Morley’s recovery, Schütz was obliged to flee the city, having been discovered in flagrante with the wife of one of his patients.
This might make a good story; even a book.
Imogen’s mother made mention of a woman who had lived in the village for five or six years, with her elderly sister, and who had only taken note of young Imogen, it appeared, on days when Imogen was on her bike or taking one of the dogs for an extended walk. On the basis of a few sightings, the lady had decided that this girl was a happy-go-lucky child, a description that she employed, without fail, every time she happened to encounter a member of Imogen’s family. It was as if her happy-go-luckiness were as incontrovertible as the colour of her eyes. ‘Every single time,’ said her mother, who now found it more amusing than she had used to, though she still did not know, said Imogen, quite how inapposite the label was. ‘Who we are has so little to do with us,’ said Imogen, as if quoting, and her mother considered the remark, and smiled, seeming to find in the observation some pertinence to herself.