thought about putting this desire into action. For years after Rose died, I would often catch myself in apothecaries, contemplating a purchase of arsenic. And recently I was back in that state. Standing on bridges, dreaming of non-existence.
And I possibly would have gone through with it, were it not for the promises I had made to Rose and my mother.
I just didn’t like my condition.
It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.
You see, in total, there had been three people I had properly loved in life: my mother, Rose and Marion. Of those, two were dead, and one was alive only as a possibility. And without love as an anchor, I had drifted. I had gone to sea, on two different voyages, drowning myself in drink, driven only by the determination to find Marion, and hopefully also myself in the process.
I walked through the blizzard. I was hungover. It took a lot to make me hungover, but I was always sure to put in the effort. The city seemed only half there, because of the snow, as if I was walking inside one of Monet’s fuzzy depictions of London, which he was soon to paint. There was no one about, except outside the Christian Mission where men in ragged, ill-fitting suits and flat caps waited for food. They were so still, so quiet, so despondent, stiff with cold.
There was a very good chance, I realised, that my journey would be wasted. Yet what could I do? I was quite desperate to see Dr Hutchinson, for if anyone in the world could tell me about my condition I was sure it would be him.
I had no idea if he would even be there, given the weather.
As soon as I arrived a nurse, Miss Forster, assured me that Dr Hutchinson was always here.
‘Never missed a day’s work in his life, I’d dare say,’ Miss Forster told me, as I am sure she had told many before. She looked so pristine and white with her immaculate cap and apron that she seemed to have been something made by the blizzard itself. ‘You are lucky today,’ she said. ‘Everyone in London seems to want to speak to Mr Hutchinson about their ailments.’ She studied me, trying to work out exactly what kind of skin complaint I had.
I followed Miss Forster up three flights of stairs and I was told to wait in a well-furnished room, full of expensive high-backed chairs with red velvet seats and damask wallpaper and a stately wall clock. ‘He’s still seeing someone,’ she told me, in the kind of reverential whisper you’d use in church. ‘You might have to wait a fair time, Mr Cribbs.’
(I was now Edward Cribbs, in honour of a former Plymouth drinking buddy.)
‘Waiting’s my speciality,’ I said.
‘Very good, sir,’ she said earnestly, and then left me. I remember sitting in that room with people whose faces were colonised by terrible blotches and rashes.
‘Awful out, isn’t it?’ I said to one woman, with a livid purple rash covering her face.
(One thing that has remained constant, across four centuries, has been the desire for a British person to fill a silence with talk of the weather, and whenever I have lived there I was no exception to this rule.)
‘Oh yes, sir,’ she said, but didn’t expand on this.
Eventually, the door I was waiting beside opened and out came a male patient. He was well dressed, like a dandy, but his face was covered in rough, raised blotches like a microscopic mountain range.
‘Good day,’ he said to me, smiling as broadly as his face allowed, clearly having experienced some miracle (or the promise of one).
There was that quiet lull unique to waiting rooms and the clock ticked away the silence until it was my turn.
I entered the room and the first thing I noticed was Dr Hutchinson himself. Jonathan Hutchinson was a very impressive-looking man. Even in the ultimate era of impressive-looking gentlemen, he was formidable. He was tall and smart and had a long beard. The beard, in particular, earned admiration. Neither Greek philosopher nor shipwrecked castaway, this was something very carefully thought out and pre-planned, the beard getting narrower and wispier as it descended until it reached a thin white line, a tail that faded imperceptibly into nothing. It may have been the intense nature of the morning that made me see in that beard a metaphor for mortal existence.
‘Thank you for agreeing to this meeting,’ I said, and instantly regretted it. It made me sound desperate.
Dr Hutchinson checked his pocket watch. He would do this a few times more, during this meeting. He probably wasn’t really bothered about the time. It just seemed like a habit. It was quite a common one, actually. The way people check smartphones today.
He stared at me. He picked up a letter from his desk. It was the one I had written. He read excerpts back to me.
‘Dear Dr Hutchinson’ – his voice was rich and dry, like port – ‘I am a great admirer of your work, and happened upon an article you had written on the subject of the new disease you discovered, whereby the body ages before its time . . . I myself have a strange condition, one similar in nature, though – if anything – even more unfathomable . . . it appears to me that you are the only man in all of Christendom who might be able to give me an explanation and thereby put a lifetime’s mystery to rest . . .’
He carefully folded the letter and put it aside on his desk. Then he studied me carefully.
‘Your skin is illuminated with health. It is the skin of a healthy man.’
‘I am healthy. In body. Healthier than most people.’
‘Where is your problem?’
‘Before I speak I must have assurance that I can remain unidentified. That if you were to publish any findings that arise due to what you discover my name will not be found in any journals. This is of the utmost importance. Do I have that assurance?’
‘Of course. Now, you have aroused my curiosity. Tell me what is your problem.’
And so I told him. ‘I am old,’ I said simply.
‘I don’t—’
‘I am older than is meant to be.’
It took a second, but then he seemed to absorb it. His voice changed after that. Became a little less sure of itself. The question demanded to be asked, even though I could see he was scared to ask it. ‘How old?’
‘Older than is possible,’ I said.
‘Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is. Once it was impossible that this globe we are on wasn’t flat. It is not for science – and certainly not for medicine – to flatter our expectations of Nature. Quite the opposite.’ He looked at me for a long time. Then he leaned forward and whispered something. ‘Rotten fish.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
He sat back, pursed his lips. There was a mournful look to him. ‘No one sees the connection between rotten fish and leprosy, but it is there. If you eat too much rotten fish you will develop leprosy.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’
(Of course, now, from the twenty-first century I can positively say that if you eat rotten fish you won’t get leprosy, though I have lived long enough to know that in another two hundred years it may be proven that eating rotten fish actually does cause leprosy and that Dr Hutchinson was actually right about this. If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again. When I was little, the average person, outside the scientific community, still believed the Earth was flat because they walked around and that is what they saw. Then people began to finally get to grips with the idea that the Earth was spherical. But then the other