face of imperialism’, which had enabled Europeans to discover passion in torrid climates. The narrator then sets the reader up for a tale in which ‘darker forces’ are at work and ‘the encounter of East and West, of the sensual and rational’ has a less satisfactory resolution (32). At this point the narrator displays the stylistic versatility of the parodist by adopting the language of romantic excess; Lucy becomes a ‘flower of Victorian maidenhood’, whose ‘dark eyes are misted and shining’ and whose ‘small pearly teeth gleam like stars’ from between ‘her soft lips’ (33).
Lucy is also represented as belonging to the tradition of intrepid colonial Englishwomen: she is ‘a girl of pretty stout kidney’ (34). Even for such a heroine, however, what follows is horrific. The erotic awakening implied by her expectations of her imminent marriage takes a most peculiar turn, when the reason for her fiancé Cecil’s reluctance to remove his pith helmet is revealed. Underneath it, a hand is growing out of his head. This is the result of the laying-on of hands by a mysterious little old man ‘with a bald head and a loincloth’, a figure that bizarrely evokes the image of Gandhi (36). Cecil has medication to keep the hand sedated; tragically, this seems ineffective on the night of Lucy’s arrival, so that she finds him dead in the morning, strangled by his uncanny appendage. She has dreamed about the hand, which had taken on an erotic agency: ‘it writhed and twisted and beckoned and pointed, it throbbed and undulated like a serpent, and performed gestures of an unspeakably lewd nature’ (38). What follows is an act that is comically abject: the hand consummates the relationship as Lucy ‘moan[s] in the shadows of the body of her lover’. When she recovers, she observes that ‘Cecil was beginning to go bad’ (40); the Victorians’ fear of female sexuality and their obsession with death are thus linked. The doctor’s diagnosis is ‘Black Hand of the Raj’, ‘some sort of wog curse’ that is always fatal (40).
At Cecil’s funeral the blackly comic effect is sustained by the observation, ‘she counted no fewer than seven Englishmen conspicuous for not having removed their headgear’. Lucy returns to England and becomes a nun, praying for her dead fiancé and ‘wondering, in her heart of hearts, what, exactly, was the nature of the sin she had committed’ (42). For the narrator, this is history, hence the quasi-objectivity of the story’s frame; Lucy had died twenty-five years earlier, having lived out the remaining half-century of her life within the convent, oblivious of the upheavals of history.18 Through its comic take on the violation of Victorian propriety and the Gothic autonomy of the wayward hand, ‘The Black Hand of the Raj’ constitutes a playful engagement with fears both of the exotic and of female sexu ality and serves to suggest the inherent instability of imperialism.
‘Blood Disease’ evokes the spectres of Empire through some of the other conventions of popular Gothic fiction, particularly that of the vampire, to create a story that confounds the reader’s expectations. The vampiric trope appears in various guises in McGrath’s later work. In contrast with developments in vampire fiction over the last thirty-five years that have made vampirism seem almost like an alternative lifestyle choice (by endowing the vampire with its own subjectivity and emphasizing its glamorous qualities),19 McGrath’s vampiric presences signify a negative and destructive otherness. In the later fiction, they tend to emanate from the minds of his characters or exist as traces written on human bodies, as in Port Mungo and Ghost Town (see chapter 3). ‘Blood Disease’ is both a vampire story and an anti-vampire story. Its narrative lays trails of false clues in a process of wrong-footing its reader, and refuting their expectations. It also demonstrates one of McGrath’s characteristic techniques, that of juxtaposing different discourses in order to highlight the shortcomings of each. Set in the mid 1930s, in the rural south of England, it reveals the practices of rustic English folk to be more bizarre and more violent than those of the pygmies of the equatorial rainforest, whom the returning anthropologist William Clack-Herman (otherwise known as ‘Congo Bill’) has left behind.
The dominant motif of blood in this story is represented through both scientific and Gothic discourses. While cautioning the reader with the opening line, ‘This is probably how it happened’, the opening paragraph accounts in scientific terms for the debilitated malarial state in which Congo Bill arrives at Southampton (84). What follows is a detailed account of what happens when someone is bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito. When a flea from the colobus monkey that Bill had brought back as a gift for his son Frank bites the boy, the reader is led to assume, therefore, that this is significant. Set against the scientific discourse is a set of markers that parody the vampire tale. The Clack-Hermans (Frank, Bill and his wife Virginia) stop for the night at an old inn called ‘The Blue Bat’. As its name suggests, this rustic hostelry, in spite of its reputation for ‘good beds, fine kitchen and … extensive cellar’ (86), is not to be regarded as a place of safety. Another guest arrives, a Ronald Dexter with whom Virginia has had an earlier relationship. His manservant, Clutch, is a grotesque figure who gives the impression of ‘a monstrous fetus’ (86) and who seems to fear the dangerous possibilities of the English countryside. Seeing him slip a crucifix into his master’s evening clothes, Ronald asks him if he imagines he will be set upon by vampires, to which his man servant replies, ‘One cannot be too careful … we are not in London, sir’ (87). Other false clues suggesting vampirism are given; at one point it seems possible that Ronald might be the victim of Virginia, who bears some of the markers of the vampire herself: ‘Her dress was of dead-white satin and cut extremely low. She was wearing a rope of pearls; her face was as white as her pearls, and her lips a vivid scarlet’ (90). Instead, as he leaves her bedroom, he is set upon by two men from the public bar, ‘flabby men with waxy skin and big, soft faces as round and pale as the rising moon’ (94). Virginia awakes to find herself, like Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, ‘surrounded by large pale women whose eyes glittered at her with an unnatural brilliance’ (101).
When the secret of ‘The Blue Bat’ is revealed to the reader, a secret that causes Ronald, Virginia and Frank to be dispatched and exsanguin ated in the cellar (events described in gruesome detail), scientific discourse then comes into the ascendancy again. The Gothic figure of Clutch has already realized that the strange appearance of the people in the public bar can be explained by the diagnosis of pernicious anaemia and has ‘hiked off toward Reading, where somebody at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, he felt sure, would take his story seriously’ (102). The appropriately named Dr Gland (‘who’d once read a paper on iatrophobia and sanguinivorous dementia [bloodlust] in pernicious anaemia’ (102)) confirms what the reader has already been told, that events at the inn are subject to rational explanation. As with malaria, there is a disintegration of the red blood-cells; unlike malaria, the condition produces a group identity, hence the ‘cell of untreated anaemics’ (98) at ‘The Blue Bat’ preying on unsuspecting travellers and their corollary, the unsuspecting reader.
Such rationalization, however, is also treacherous because elements of the uncanny remain in the story. In characteristic Gothic mode, the boundary between life and death is rendered unstable. The narrative is interspersed with Congo Bill’s malarial delusions, in which he is back in the paradise of the Congo forest. The narrative also describes how, in effect, he had been brought back from the dead by the pygmies, who have three categories of death: as well as ‘dead’, there is ‘dead forever’ and ‘absolutely dead’ (101). A similar resurrection takes place with the monkey, who appears to die in the course of the story. Frank has been befriended by the landlord’s daughter, Meg, who had initially terrified him with her approach, although the ‘slow, heavy clump-clump-clump’ is revealed to be created by an orthopaedic boot (93). It is Meg who dresses the monkey in a ‘tiny gown of white lace’ and helps him place it in a shoebox for burial – in the cellar where the murders are taking place. The monkey’s revival down in the cellar (it was ‘clearly not dead forever’ (103)) leads to Frank’s discovery and his murder alongside his mother. The story ends with Congo Bill coming out of his delirium and spotting Meg making for the woods with the monkey on her shoulder. The figure of the monkey plays an uncanny role. Not the hallucinatory spectre of LeFanu’s ‘Green Tea’, its status in this story is nonetheless liminal. It signifies the permeability of the boundary between life and death, as well as the frailty of human identity,
