A Petrol Scented Spring (19 page)

Some days Prisoner Scott takes tea, some days tea and toast. The doctor boasts of achieving this by
much argument and persuasion tempered with firmness
. The truth is more complicated.

The protests outside are noisier than before. He worries they will strengthen her resistance but, the louder her supporters shout, the more she withdraws into herself. Each night they give her three rousing cheers. She claws at the backs of her hands. His stomach clenches as if he is the proper object of her raking nails.

‘I heard a woman call your name last night.'

‘My sister Muriel.'

‘“Fight on Arabella. You must win”—'

She makes an ironic sound in the back of her throat. A comment on her sister? Or is it self-disgust?

‘—there must have been thousands of them out there. Just for you.'

She shakes her head. ‘Not me.'

‘They shout your name.'

She says again, ‘They're not here for me'.

Lately she seems to talk in riddles.

‘Who else?' he says.

‘An impostor. She was plausible, even I believed in her, but she is gone.'

‘Then who is this?'

‘A woman I would not wish on my worst enemy.'

A grain of humour thickens his voice, ‘Nonetheless I have you in my care.'

‘You do your best, but she is my real punishment.'

‘Is she so disagreeable—?'

She looks at him, her eyes full of hostility and yet, somehow, imploring.

‘—Because she drinks tea and eats a slice of toast?'

‘Because she is weak and vain and treacherous and . . .' She stops herself.

‘And?'

‘She is a woman no one can love.'

‘But Muriel loves you.'

She cuts across him. ‘No
man
can love.'

‘Ah.'

She looks away with a wintry smile.

‘Try to sleep. You'll feel better when you're rested.'

‘
Oh God
.'

‘What's the matter?'

‘Nothing. I commend your honesty.'

‘
What are you talking about?'

She turns towards him and his stomach dips, his bowels loosen. Not an unpleasant sensation.

‘The woman they cheer cares nothing for people's opinions, and wins admiration at every turn, while I . . .'

‘What?'

She gives him another hard look. ‘The woman you see before you uses words like “freedom” and “justice” but has a slave's heart. She cares too much what . . .
others
think of her. And when she shows it, I too am repelled by her.'

Is she saying what he thinks she is saying? And if she is, why so bitter?

 

Six o'clock. The wardress delivers the tray with its pot of tea and two slices of toast (one for her, one for him).

‘A cup and saucer,' she says, ‘can I be trusted with china now?'

He is so rarely abstracted with her, she so seldom has the chance to study his face like this.

‘I was thinking of my sister,' he says.

‘Annie or Mary?'

‘Jane.'

This is the first she has heard of Jane.

‘I had a brother too, Robert. He died before his fourth birthday. Croup. Jane was younger, still talking gibberish, but she seemed so . . .' The skin around his eyes darkens. He is gone again, lost in some other time. Unexpectedly, he smiles. ‘She could walk for miles on those wee legs. She'd get herself to the milking shed and stand there, roytering away—'

Who else has Arabella heard him speak of with such affection?

‘—the kye all watching her. Such a fierce wee character. The other weans were given tin cups until they were old enough, but not Jane: she had to have china.'

‘What happened to her?'

‘Drowned. In the trough. They think she knocked herself out.' He blinks twice, thrice, rapidly, ‘I was in the haybarn with a book, keeping out of sight. I thought I heard her, but she'd never called my name before . . .'

‘So you assumed you were mistaken.'

In the silence Arabella can hear the wardresses gossiping on the landing.

After a while, he says, ‘I was the eldest of eight, all my cousins living round about. When a new one turns up, it's just another bairn. When Robert died I hardly noticed. But Jane . . .' he takes a breath, ‘I paid her more heed after she was dead than all the months she was running about the place.'

Arabella lays her hand on his.

He looks down at her white fingers, the long, dirty nails.

‘She could have been a teacher,' he says.

 

Arabella used to be brave, constant, her strength of purpose blazing like a beacon to weaker souls. Now she swithers this way and that. Scorn. Self-abasement. Violence. Tenderness. Fury. Need. Each contradictory impulse as urgent as life itself, until overtaken by the next. She hates him for outwitting her, loathes herself for being his dupe. But what a miracle that they should find each other. How unbearable that, having beaten the odds, they should still be kept apart. These feelings drop away, leaving a small hard self like a blackbird's beady eye, watching, waiting. She will weaken on her diet of tea and toast which, when all is said and done, is only bread and water. She will bribe him with intimate talk, flatter him with seeming surrender. His mind will equate a return to forcible feeding with failure. He will not notice her decline until too late, when the tube will kill her. Death will be victory. He will be disgraced.

She loves him.

He has planted a seed in her mind, and his. A life together. Ridiculous. Impossible. They know it. But still it germinates in the dark.

 

An inmate dies in the Criminal Lunatic Department. A Glasgow drunk, no madder than the rest of his kind, but he had the good fortune to fire a shotgun at a statue of William Gladstone and has eaten three square meals a day for the past five years. Until the infection took hold. No possibility of foul play, but there will have to be a public enquiry in the sheriff court. The doctor must take statements from all the warders who had care of him, making sure their evidence is tidy. No point in muddling the court with loose ends.

For forty-eight hours he leaves the care of Prisoner Scott to Lindsay.

When he returns, she is cold.

‘You are busy these days.'

‘I have other patients.'

‘They've never detained you before.'

‘There was an emergency.'

‘Of course. Such an important man.'

She infuriates him. Her unpredictable moods, the talkative afternoons that end with him pushing the rubber tube down her throat.
Why
does she make him do it, when what he wants more than anything is to be at peace with her? And yet there's an inexplicable satisfaction in their quarrels. A voluptuary's abandon.

‘I think you find me dull lately. You liked me best when I screamed and fought.'

He turns to the wardress, ‘Bring two cups of tea.'

‘Don't trouble yourself on my account—'

The wardress goes out, locking the door.

‘—You p
retend to want my compliance, but actually you prefer me to resist. Now why should that be?'

‘I don't know why it
should be
, I know it is not.'

‘No? Then your visits were merely a means to an end. Having achieved that end − you think − no more visits.'

‘I made no secret of wanting you to eat.'

‘And when I would not, you resorted to subterfuge.'

‘What
subterfuge
?'

‘The pretence that you were my friend.'

‘God's truth! What is wrong with you?'

‘I wasn't the one who suggested a voyage across the Atlantic.'

‘What?'

‘You heard—'

A knock at the door, the turning of keys.

‘—That'll be your tea. I hope you're thirsty. I shan't be touching it.'

‘You have been excused one feed a day in exchange for a steady increase in food taken voluntarily.'

‘That is your understanding, not mine.'

‘You cannot live on one cup of tea and one slice of toast a day.'

‘Which is exactly why I agreed to them.'

The wardress sets the tray down and leaves.

A change comes over her. Quietly she says ‘Why did you ask me?'

‘Ask you what?'

‘To go to Canada.'

He could tell her, confess the immense effort of will it takes not to think about her when he is with his other patients. A different story after hours. Medicine taught him all bodies are the same. Working in prison, he has learned that men's minds, too, are depressingly similar. And women's. He remembers how adults looked to him when he was a boy. Their mystery and grandeur. She brings it all back. When he is with her, the world is transformed.

Why did you ask me?

Ask you what?

To go to Canada.

‘For the sake of your health.'

It seems he was wrong: the quarrelsome fit is still upon her.

‘And sitting with me day after day, reminiscing about your gypsy love, weeping as you described your sister's drowning: all that was for my health, was it? Until two days ago.'

‘
I have a job to do
. Unfortunately.'

‘Then resign, if you do not like the work. Leave it to someone who finds it more congenial. Ah but of course, there is no one else. You and the butcher's boy were the only doctors in Scotland willing to violate your oath.'

He turns to go, ‘Good day.'

This panics her, as he intends. ‘Just tell me what I did.'

‘
What you did?
This prison is under siege. I've got lunatics dropping dead on me, the Governor plotting against me, the Commissioners on my back, women shrieking and clinging to me in their neurotic craving for attention . . .'

‘I beg your pardon, I thought that was one of the consolations. I should have trusted my first instinct: you are a savage, you enjoy inflicting pain.'

They should stop now, he must know it.

‘Then what does that make you, who are so eager for the company of such a savage?'

‘You are disgusting!'

‘And you are a fraud. Oh aye, you're full of passion. A passionate remorse for compromising your hunger strike? No: a tantrum thrown by slighted vanity.'

‘You took away my clothes. No man, or woman, not even my sister, has seen me as you have seen me. Nor touched me as you have. If I resisted, you used force. I was completely alone.'

‘You're not a child. You put yourself in this position.'

‘But I had not reckoned on the cruelty of my worst enemy masquerading as my friend.'

‘I am
your doctor
.'

She laughs, ‘It is you who are the fraud,
Doctor
.'

‘Meaning what?' He takes her by the shoulders. ‘
Meaning
what?
'

‘Hiding behind the skirts of the government. It is your duty. Ha!
You liked it
. Clad in your white overall, handling women stripped of clothes and dignity. Forcing us to submit. Making us weep, and soothing us, only to come with violence again.'

‘I take no satisfaction . . .'

‘“I have given it up. It dulled the mind.”'

‘Aye, you are a woman no man can love.'

‘You humiliate me?'

‘You humiliate yourself. You and your
sisters
. I have learned about women, these past weeks. I never thought to see them behave as I've seen here. Fighting like hellcats, screaming like banshees, barely clad but quite without modesty. I expected shame, a proper aversion. In fact, you cannot get enough of my company.'

‘By God, when they let me out of here, I will get my father's gun and shoot you.'

 

Another day she springs out of bed. The wardresses have left their post outside and are gossiping in the water closet. There is no one to intervene. He is heavier, it should not be hard to overpower her, but he is afraid of hurting her. Or afraid of some other urge. He catches her wrists. She uses her head, her feet, the tensile strength in her back but, in the end, she exhausts herself. They stand face to face, hand to hand, sweating, their breathing ragged. She says it again.

‘
I swear I will shoot you.'

He has never felt more alive.

A Captain Parker strikes a deal with the Secretary for Scotland and his sister is released. The pretext is ‘obtaining a second opinion of Prisoner Arthur's condition'.

A few days later the doctor is summoned to the Governor's office where he is handed a three-page medical report written by an Edinburgh practitioner in cahoots with the suffragette doctor Mabel Jones.

‘You may be interested in page two. Severe bruising on the arms and legs.'

‘She had the bruises when she arrived.'

‘It wasn't in your reports.'

She received them at the hands of Doctor Dunlop, in Ayr Gaol. He sees the way it will go. A courtesy to his Prison Commission colleague will be made to look like covering his own tracks. And there is worse.
Pain in
the genital region; raw surfaces on the mucous membrane; distinct
swelling of the vulva in its posterior part.

Disgust rises in his throat.

The Governor asks ‘Could it have been an honest mistake?'

Of all the fatuous remarks the doctor has heard him make over the past four months, this is the most asinine.

The Governor grows pale under his whisky flush. ‘You know who she is?'

‘A Miss Parker, it says here. Unless that, too, is an alias.'

‘Who
her uncle
is.' The Governor's voice drops to a whisper, the old ham. Only this time the drama is justified. Frances Parker is the niece of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, former commander-in-chief of the British Army in India, the general who delivered victory in the South African War.

‘What the hell did you think you were doing? A woman in that condition should never have been in a cell.'

All very well to say that now. Where was this wise counsel when it mattered? The doctor re-reads the first page of the report. Lindsay let his mouth run away with him when handing the prisoner over. It's all here in black and white, much of it untrue. For all the difference that makes, now it has been circulated in triplicate.

‘Dr Lindsay says she fainted. Is he lying about that too?'

‘I let her sit on the chanty. It was a mistake.'

‘I thought Dr
Ferguson
Watson did not make mistakes.'

‘I have been under some strain.'

‘Strain?
I have to find the money for seven temporary wardresses, and twenty-six days' leave my own wardresses have not taken so you can be sure Prisoner Scott comes to no harm. This place is like a powder keg. When the staff aren't at each other's throats, they're doing God knows what to the inmates. The Trades and Labour Council has called a meeting on the North Inch to condemn us: no hall is big enough for the crowd they're expecting. And why is that?'

‘The newspapers.'

‘Aye, the newspapers − but what is it they're printing?
Your
doings. I'll have no more mistakes in this gaol, Watson. You've been allowed to run the hospital as your own private fiefdom. I warned them, but I was overruled. From now on you will take orders from me. The Chairman is coming tomorrow to discuss the terms of Prisoner Scott's licence.'

Bull's-eye. The old bastard knows it.

‘Prisoner Scott has eight months left to serve.'

‘Five weeks
has brought this prison to its knees.'

‘She will claim it as a victory.'

‘We cannot keep her.' The Governor's eyes glint with malice, ‘And even if we could, she'll never give you the satisfaction you're seeking.'

The doctor could fell him with one punch. He can feel his body rebalancing to maximise the power behind his fist.

‘Tell the Chairman he can find a new medical officer.'

It is out of his mouth before he has time for second thoughts. He pictures his father, who has never said boo to the factor.

‘
Oh no
. You think you can create this bloody mess and just walk away?'

‘My probationary period expires at the end of the year. I do not wish my position confirmed.'

His head is light with a sort of vertigo. The worst has happened. He almost laughs. The Captain can marry them on board ship. A ten-minute ceremony and then down to her cabin. No need for shame. The two of them free to do everything he cannot let his waking self imagine. Everything his dreaming self has done night after night since he first set eyes on her. The emission a cold patch on his pyjamas next morning. Sometimes more than one.

It will happen in mid-Atlantic, on deck, after many talk-filled evenings under the stars. She will feel the pull between them, night after night of holding her breath for his touch, so that finally, when he lays hands on her, she will shudder with fulfilled longing.

‘And what reason am I to give the Commission?'

‘Tell them, circumstances that have arisen since I came to Perth.'

The Governor gives him a cockeyed look and for a moment his nerve wavers. He is counting on the Colonial Office finding him a post with a house and a decent salary somewhere far from ice and summer mosquitoes. But what if he is wrong? He is giving up four hundred pounds a year, for what? Has she ever said, in so many words,
I will go with you to
Canada
? He could spring her from gaol and never see her again. She could tell the world. His integrity in tatters, the butt of every music hall joke, cartoons in the newspapers depicting him as a salivating lecher.

He turns to leave, but the Governor has not finished. The Chief Constable of Edinburgh telephoned this morning to pass on some intelligence.