Belle Moral: A Natural History (14 page)

D
R
R
EID
. The asylum?

V
ICTOR
. We’re going curling with the lunatics. They’ve got up a bonspiel.

D
R
R
EID
. Pearl –

P
EARL
. I’ve no plans to marry at present, Doctor, thank you all the same.

D
R
R
EID
. You realize that in the absence of an heir, Belle Moral must revert to the Kirk. I am not a rich man, but I am far from poor and I pledge to provide for you all.

P
EARL
. Thank you, Mr Abbott.

D
R
R
EID
. You’ll be out in the street, the lot of you. Who will you depend upon then, eh? Your brother? He isn’t fit to black my boots. Your aunt? How will you live on the few pennies she’d eke out as a seamstress or washerwoman? That leaves you, Pearl, and whatever special talents you may have discovered of late.

V
ICTOR
. But Doctor, there is an heir.

D
R
R
EID
. Where?

P
EARL
. Claire.

F
LORA
. I’m ready, Pearl, how do you want me?
[sees
D
R
R
EID
,
stops]

V
ICTOR
. Auntie, you are
ravissanti
.

P
EARL
[to D
R
R
EID]
. My sister is quite competent. Despite twenty-seven years of privation she has, in a matter of months, learned to eat with a knife and fork, mastered the alphabet, and ceased to growl.

D
R
R
EID
. She can’t inherit.

P
EARL
. Why not? You said yourself she’s not a lunatic.

D
R
R
EID
. She’s an animal!

F
LORA
. We’re all of us animals.

D
R
R
EID
. You won’t find a physician with a scrap of integrity willing to certify her human much less sane.

V
ICTOR
. That leaves you, then.

D
R
R
EID
. I’ll sign nothing. In the eyes of the law, this creature does not even exist, she hasn’t so much as a birth certificate.

P
EARL
. In the eyes of the law, you as attending physician were responsible for registering the child’s birth.

A
BBOTT
[reading from a law book through his pince nez]
. “It shall be the duty of every qualified medical practitioner attending at the birth of any child, to give notice thereof forthwith to the Division Registrar of the Division in which the child was born –”

D
R
R
EID
. I am aware of the law.

A
BBOTT
. “Any physician making a false statement –”

D
R
R
EID
. I said –

A
BBOTT
. “– as to the cause of
death
of any person shall be subject to discipline by the Medical council of –”

D
R
R
EID
. This is my recompense? This, my due?

P
EARL
. You falsified Mother’s death certificate to conceal her suicide.

D
R
R
EID
. For you. For the sake of your family name–

A
BBOTT
. “– shall, on summary conviction therefor, be liable for every such offence to a penalty of –”

D
R
R
EID
. Enough!

A
BBOTT
. See under “humane”.

D
R
R
EID
. See under “sex”.

P
EARL
. What I carry, is a gift.

D
R
R
EID
. When you see it you will beg me to take it from you.

P
EARL
[going to her camera]
. Are we ready? Gather round, now.

D
R
R
EID
. You’re mad.

P
EARL
[unable to rouse him]
. Well, gather round Young Farleigh then.

D
R
R
EID
. What are you doing?

P
EARL
. I’m taking a family photograph.

D
R
R
EID
. This is your notion of family? This is not a family, this is … a menagerie.

P
EARL
. The tree of life is a family tree and we are all part of it.

D
R
R
EID
. Even him?
[YOUNG
F
ARLEIGH.]

P
EARL
. Even you, Doctor. Would you care to be in the picture?

D
R
R
EID
. He’d’ve killed your precious sister. He was on the point of casting her from the cliff when I stopped him.

P
EARL
. But he hadn’t yet, had he?

D
R
R
EID
. Nay, but –

P
EARL
. So we’ll never know.

D
R
R
EID
.
He
knows.

P
EARL
. He doesn’t. He hopes he would not have. But he doesn’t know.

D
R
R
EID
. You think he’s atoned for that? How? By bringing her sweets in the asylum?

P
EARL
. He taught her her name.

D
R
R
EID
. And that exonerates him?

P
EARL
. No. But it’s the best we’ve got.

F
LORA
. I don’t know that we’re any of us fit to cast the first stone. Heaven will judge him.

V
ICTOR
. He’s coming back in his next life as a winkle. [to P
EARL]
Tell him to stop looking at me like that.

P
EARL
. Who?

V
ICTOR
. Pan. [to W
EE
F
ARLEIGH]
Pick on him, he’s the one wearin’ the skirt.

A
BBOTT
. It is a
kilt
, sir.

D
R
R
EID
. Pearl, how do you propose to live? An unmarried woman with an illegitimate offspring, surrounded by a pack of lunatics, sodomites, and vegetarians.

P
EARL
. I am a scientist. I shall observe and document us. Belle Moral shall be my laboratory and we, my subjects.

D
R
R
EID
. But you’re part of the experiment.

P
EARL
. Aren’t we all.

D
R
R
EID
. You’re not dispassionate.

P
EARL
. True. As it turns out I am terribly, terribly passionate.

D
R
R
EID
. Your results will be corrupted. You cannot be both an observer and participant.

P
EARL
. I cannot but be both. “Observation is participation”.

V
ICTOR
. Who said that?

P
EARL
. No one; but someone really ought to. Was I to work and dwell at your side, never knowing my true relation to the subject?

D
R
R
EID
. Knowing who she was would have hindered your ability to discover what she is. What is the good of such knowledge?

P
EARL
. “Knowledge is power” said Francis Bacon. I too am a child of the Enlightenment.

D
R
R
EID
. I fear you are its bastard.

P
EARL
. Was it rational to deprive me of the crucial fact?

D
R
R
EID
. A fact that would have destroyed your objectivity.

P
EARL
. What is objectivity but the ability to consider every influence on our powers of observation? Facts, uprooted, can tell us only so much. A fact out of context is like a fish on a slab, inexplicable without water.

V
ICTOR
. Like an ear in a jar, inexplicable without a head.

P
EARL
. Facts do not float in sterile solitude, they are embedded in reality, tainted with everyday life, stained with history; inextricable, like Darwin’s web. How am I to know Claire and other marvels of nature as ordinary as a dust mote, if I do not admit to being part of that exquisitely, well-nigh infinitely, complex web? The remains of Julius Ceasar may
be in that speck of dust. I shall be in that speck of dust one day.
[ambushed emotionally]
We are all here so briefly. Awake, for a moment. Unique, for a moment. Able to look and to love, for a moment. And then we return. To the generosity of this universe and its great making power. That is love. And nothing, not even the merest particle, reveals itself without it.

A
BBOTT
. I have seen the face of God in a three hundred thousand year old trilobite.

P
EARL
. Seamus, you look at us and see an incoherent jumble. I look and see affinities. Patterns.

V
ICTOR
. A story.

P
EARL
. That’s right. A plot. You’re probably right, Seamus, we’re probably quite a bad idea, really. We don’t matter a great deal, we’re on the fringes; of empire, of science, art and culture. We cannot even claim the weight of oppression that might yield a diamond eons from now. But perhaps, simply by thinking our thoughts and living our lives with passionate curiosity and unreasonable kindness, we do our part in the slow universal accumulation of – of critical mass, to coin
a phrase – that crystallizes in true discovery.

F
LORA
. Pearl, it’s nigh on four o’clock, your friends will be faimished, come Wee Farleigh and help me –

P
EARL
[going for her camera]
. Don’t you dare move, either of you.

F
LORA
. Your sister’s faint with hunger, look at her.

P
EARL
. Of course she’s half-starved, Victor’s turned her into a vegetarian.

V
ICTOR
. How can you talk of kindness, Pearl, and still eat other animals?

P
EARL
. Don’t start, Victor.

V
ICTOR
. You started it.

P
EARL
. I didna –! V
ICTOR
. Did –!

F
LORA
. I’ve a lovely leg of lamb, you’re all to stay; and for the vegetablists, we’ve a … what’s it called, Wee Farleigh?

W
EE
F
ARLEIGH
. A medley of beans. Baked savoury squash. A casserole of wild champignons and nuts. A milles-feuilles of goat cheese, grilled aubergine, slow-roasted tomato mousse and toasted garlic on a bed of kelp. And for dessert: chocolate éclaires.

P
EARL
. The éclaires are for everyone, surely.

V
ICTOR
. No, you get a black-pudding for dessert.

P
EARL
. Seamus, will you stay to tea?

D
R
R
EID
. You are stubborn, clannish and benighted. An apple falls from a tree and you do not shout, “Eureka!”, you eat the apple. You have no real conscience, only sentiment: you’d save the one to the detriment of the many, and call it “kindness”. You lack the mental rigour for true kindness. You shrink from inconvenient facts, preferring a retreat to your hot-house of exotic half-truths; your ramshackle relativism; your primordial swamp; your bog, your blur. You haven’t the strength to withstand the whirlwind, or the unflinching gaze required to see into it. One look at the face of God and you would be annihilated. It is dearly to be hoped that you occupy an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Otherwise, heaven help us all.

P
EARL
. Ready?
[About to press the plunger.]
And –

C
LAIRE
. Ainaibh ri chelie.