A Petrol Scented Spring (3 page)

For twenty minutes nothing happens. The wardresses pass the time by gossiping, backbiting, moaning about the bacon they were given for dinner. Someone mentions the prison doctor, a name she recognises. A part of her was expecting this. Once Ethel Moorhead was forcibly fed, the writing was on the wall. She knew it would be her turn one day. But still, she is afraid.

‘I am Doctor Ferguson Watson, the medical officer here.'

I know what I saw, the first time I set eyes on him, two years later, but by that time his reputation had recovered. My aunt and uncle were aware of no stain on his character. There must have been people who shunned him still, but the war had intervened like a tide over a beach, sweeping the sand clear. In June 1914 he is notorious. Her dear friend Ethel has told her all about him. His abrupt manner, his choleric face, the complete lack of that courtesy she was brought up to believe innate in men's dealings with women. All this is already in her head. But what does she
see
?

How tall he seems from the bed, though no more than middling height. He was forty in March, but is built like a young man. Lean, athletic. Married life will put meat on his bones and widen his face, ageing him by twenty years, but in 1914 he eats his breakfast standing up. Blue eyes made for fervour, or fury. Skin that flashes from pallor to heat. The sort of sandy hair that the sun strikes into sparks.

Or is she so dehydrated and sleep-deprived she sees nothing beyond the equipment set out on the table?

He examines her. Pulse, temperature, respiration, heartbeat. As yet, he has not looked her in the face. He uncaps his fountain pen and writes on the chart. Later, in the endless opportunity for reflection afforded those in prison, she will wonder if there is something too brusque about his indifference. His manner says she is just another prisoner, one of several hundred under his care, but can this be true? The eyes of the nation are upon her. He nearly killed the last one. He cannot afford a second mistake.

He is not a connoisseur of women. It may be hard to believe of any man of forty, let alone one who looks like him, but he has not kissed a girl in twenty-five years. He keeps a tight rein on his appetites. It has not always been easy, but he has his reasons, and after so long it has become second nature. So it may be that he, too, sees nothing. Only the ruby streak on her inner thigh. The vein to which he applies his fingertips. The sclera exposed when he lifts an eyelid. The heaving swell of her left breast as he listens to her heart.

No, I don't believe it.

She is no passive carcass under his hands. She has struggled every inch of the journey from London, it is now forty-eight hours since she last had food or drink, but somehow she finds her second wind. Spits out the thermometer. Flails and kicks at the wardresses who try to restrain her. Knocks the glass of milk to the floor. Ethel Moorhead was no less violent, but Ethel was a stringy harridan of forty-five. Arabella is twenty-nine, and lovely, and naked as the day she was born, screaming and twisting in his hands. So yes, he looks.

He says the minimum required in a level voice that for all his qualifications retains a trace of the Ayrshire farmyard. When did she last eat? Drink? Open her bowels? How many days has she been menstruating? She is tall but her physique is poor. He cannot allow her to weaken herself further. She will remain prone in bed for the good of her health, kept away from any source of excitement. This includes books, newspapers, visitors and letters.

She answers him with furious questions. Why has she been brought to Perth instead of Edinburgh? How is she to petition the prison commissioners if she is forbidden to put pen to paper? By whose order is she to be forcibly fed? Is he aware that she has been imprisoned and released repeatedly on this charge
without
feeding? How dare he call himself a doctor, after what he did to Ethel?

She has been disrupting public meetings and resisting arrest since she was twenty-three. The decent types will restrain her as gently as possible. While she shouts, they hold their tongues. But there are others who will take advantage of the situation. Her breasts have been handled, her buttocks grabbed, hands jammed in her crotch. Less common, yet not
un
common, are the men whose secret desire is violence. Punching her, throwing her to the ground, dragging her by the hair.

What she has not yet encountered is a man who shouts back.

Even as he's talking to her in that infuriatingly even manner some instinct tells her he can be provoked. She's no snob, but this is war, and a soldier uses every weapon at her disposal. She can't help noticing the farmboy accent, and now she's enunciating more crisply, the righteous timbre of her voice close to patrician scorn. Her late father held the modest rank of captain in India. The doctor's father is a tenant farmer. Not the widest social gulf, but enough. He reminds her that while she remains in prison he is her physician, and she is his patient. This is the one remark of his she answers directly. He is
not
her physician. If he touches her, it is an assault. She knows all about him. The ambitious mad-doctor not content with torturing lunatics. So bent on advancement he is ready to do the government's dirty work. What a distinction: the only doctor in Scotland willing to defile his vocation.

That does it. His colour darkens. She is gratified, and terrified. It is a shocking thing, to have a man raise his voice to you. A man like him. When he opens his lungs, it's like a battering ram against the sternum, his breath harsh on her face, the roar vibrating in her bones.
He will not permit her to harm herself
. Either she drinks the milk or he feeds her by tube. She has five seconds to make her decision.

Do your worst, she says.

 

Here my mind flinches. I have cut out cancers and severed gangrenous limbs. To break the sacred seal of human flesh with the point of a scalpel is to breach a taboo. By comparison, inserting a greased tube down the throat to the stomach is nothing. But a nothing I cannot bring myself to imagine. I know the wardresses will have pinned her down. I can list the equipment. Jug. Funnel. Vaseline. Rubber tube. And the gag, a deformed pair of scissors, designed to keep the mouth fully open. I can say what is used, and in what order. But then Arabella starts to resist with every last ounce of her strength, and the doctor puts all his force into overcoming her, and of course he is rough in the struggle, if she won't hold still it stands to reason that she will be hurt and cry out in pain and fear and call on her maker to help her, and his face will show . . .

I cannot.

 

When he is gone, taking all but one of the wardresses with him, the soaked bedding is removed. For subsequent feedings they will use rubberised sheets to save on laundry. She is dressed in a hospital nightgown and given a coarse woollen blanket. She shivers uncontrollably. The wardress seems to think she is pretending. Later it will occur to her that the woman feels guilty, even shamed, for her part in this, and that it is natural to turn such guilt into hostility, but at this moment Arabella is incapable of reflection. The moon streams bright through the uncurtained window. She turns her face away, draws her knees up in a foetal curl. The wardress prods her until she lies flat on her back again. Doctor's orders. Her stomach is ravaged with acid after vomiting up the rich mixture he poured down the tube. Her gums are tender. She tastes blood in her throat. There are bruises all over her body from being pinioned by the wardresses. But worse than all her many pains is the violation. She will not give in to self-pity, but is this any better, this impotent anger?

When she sleeps, it colours her dreams.

 

And now it is the morning.

‘Has she retained the feed?'

‘Some of it, sir.'

When the thermometer touches her lip she flinches.

‘Are you in pain?'

No answer.

‘Prisoner Scott?'

The wardress tells him ‘She's not said a word all morning, sir.'

He places the thermometer under her arm, lifts the other arm to take her pulse. He's finishing the count when she speaks.

‘I am entitled to write and receive letters.'

Pulse: 90
.

‘Healthy prisoners are entitled, but you are sick.'

‘It is my right.'

‘You're very weak. Writing would weaken you further, and the mental effort would hinder digestion. As your doctor, I cannot allow it.'

‘You are
not
my doctor.'

‘If you eat, I'll think about it. '

He extracts the thermometer.
Temperature: 97.4.

She raises herself off the mattress.

He pushes her back down. ‘Sitting up promotes regurgitation.'

‘
I will not be
touched!'

Her scream rings in the silence. The wardress looks unnerved.

He says, ‘The examination is finished for now.'

But the prisoner is not finished with him. ‘When Ethel told me what you did to her, I didn't fully understand. You could have killed her.'

He has been over this so many times with the Commission, he has the words off pat. ‘She caught pneumonia by breaking her cell window and walking about in her nightdress, throwing water over herself . . .'

‘It wasn't the water.'

‘. . . behaving like a madwoman.'

‘You drove her to it.'

‘She was a prisoner, convicted of fire-raising.'

‘A political prisoner.'

‘A criminal.' But why should he explain himself to her? ‘For the last time, will you eat?'

‘I will not.'

‘Then you'll be fed artificially.'

She sneers at the scientific term, ‘You mean forcibly.'

‘As you wish,' he says.

 

They put a man on the moon today. What a fuss. Beefy would have loved it. My second husband. Devoted to me, as I was to him. He would have relished the technical complexity.
‘Ah
but what about the hoojimaflip, will it withstand the stress
of the thingimajig – have they thought of that?'
The Telegraph has been full of it for days, I've been doing the crossword and throwing the rest out unread. But come the hour, for Beefy's sake, I turn on the television. As I watch those giant maggots bouncing across the lunar desert, my thoughts stray to Australia. Is she watching this now, another widow rattling around a house too big for her, wearing her dead husband's dressing gown over her clothes, wondering if it's just the cataracts or did she put odd stockings on this morning? Thinking how strange that there should be men on the moon in her lifetime, and yet how little it changes the things that really matter.

Is she, too, telling herself, I bet I don't live long enough to see a woman up there?

Over the fourteen months since her arrest at Kelso racecourse, Arabella has been gaoled four times, but never for more than five days. She thinks of prison as a short-lived, necessary evil. The cold stone, the stinking air, the hard-eyed wardresses, the filthy blanket, the lice: all these can be endured because it will only be for five days. And after comes the triumph of liberation. The defiant speeches she will make. The letters she will write to the newspapers. The women in white dresses with their arms full of flowers. All of which depends on her being able to starve herself. If she takes food, there is no risk of her dying in prison, no reason for them to release her. Her stomach rejected most of what was forced into her last night, but some nourishment was retained. Her headache has gone. Noticing this, her heart sinks.

Yet she's no masochist. I've seen a few anorexics in my surgery. Those straight-A perfectionists with their ironed jeans and their hang-ups about Daddy, so proud of their oh-so-tiny wrists. Arabella is not one of them. There is a pleasure to be had from fasting, once you get past the hunger. The senses sharpen, the gap between you and the corrupt world widens. These physiological reactions help her towards her objective, but – and this is the big difference – she is doing it for the cause. In a just world she would eat her meals and smile at the mirror. She doesn't hate herself, or love herself so mercilessly that it amounts to hate. She doesn't want to suffer, but suffer she must.

The lower down the social ladder you look, the worse it gets. Women work long hours in factories. If men fall sick or lose their jobs there is government help. Women go on the streets. It is said there are towns in India where British officers march whole regiments to the brothel to release themselves in the vaginas of white women. (To the sisterhood, in 1914, it seems worse that these women should be white.) On the rare occasions when a wife beater comes before the court, the sentence is derisory. The government could put a stop to all this, if it cared to, and the government would be made to care, if women had the vote. But Mr Asquith and his cabinet believe that women's brains are not as developed as men's, and must not be so, for this would drain vital strength from their wombs. Their superior tender faculties are best exercised in the home. Their role is to provide a steady supply of healthy children to serve the empire. They may rely on their menfolk to vote in their best interests.

Arabella and her friends would laugh, were the consequences not so serious. They will show the government their
tender faculties
. They will bomb and burn and, when caught, they will prove their courage by forcing the authorities to choose between releasing them and watching them starve to death. So far, this strategy has worked. Self-sacrifice has brought victory, weakness has been strength. But now the game has changed. Nine months. Two hundred and seventy days. No. She won't do it. She would rather die.

But would she? Would she really?

The campaign for women's votes reveals so many character defects in a newly-useful light. Neurotics make meticulous planners. The vulgar are happy to insult cabinet ministers in public. The obsessional streak that drove Ethel Moorhead to write thirty letters complaining about the loss of a brown travelling rug in Dundee gaol tied the prison bureaucracy in knots. There are women in the movement who thrill at the sight of their own blood. The English suffragette Emily Davison attempted suicide in Holloway three times before she was trampled by a racehorse last year. Arabella can't get the thought out of her head: the jockey trying to pull up the panicked horse as the girl's soft flesh was mashed by galloping hooves. To her, it seems a desecration of the cause.

 

The way the wardresses jump to attention at the sound of the doctor's footsteps tells her that they, too, fear him. Freshly-shaven in the morning, by late-afternoon his jaw shows a gingery shadow. His breath smells of tea. She feels a little foolish, struggling after spending so many hours so passively in the wardress's company. The doctor is grim-faced. She will be fed twice a day. How that happens is entirely up to her. She can resist, and put herself through the experience she had last night and this morning, or she can eat and drink in the normal way. For her sake he hopes she will take the sensible course, but it makes no difference to him. Now, which is it to be?

She says ‘The infamous Doctor Watson . . .'

His face shows a dismissal that undercuts the satisfaction of provoking him. ‘Prepare the mixture. Three eggs in a pint and a half of sweetened milk.'

‘. . . Doctor Watson, the hired brute and torturer of women . . .'

‘Dr
Ferguson
Watson is my name.'

‘You're just as Ethel described you. The face of an executioner . . .'

‘If you resist, I shall have you restrained.'

‘. . . a criminal sadist . . .'

‘
I will
not have you sitting up!
'

This is to be their pattern. The shouting match. His team of wardresses moving forward to hold her down while he puts on his long oilcloth apron. The greasing of the rubber tube. Her frantic, futile efforts to resist.

Morning and evening.

Her hair is soaked in vomit but he does not tell the wardress to bathe her, and she is too proud to ask.

 

It seems he is not the only doctor in Scotland willing to feed suffragette prisoners, after all. He has a medical assistant, Doctor Thomas Lindsay, a young man of around Arabella's age. His pores secrete grease as if he is still in the throes of adolescence. He has the adolescent's lubricious eye, too; the ready smirk, finding a prurient second meaning in the most innocent words.

Since that first night she has worn a nightgown at all times. Doctor Lindsay seems tantalised beyond measure by this garment. He stares as if his gaze would burn through the fabric. When she kicks, sometimes, her legs are revealed. Once, as she bucks and writhes in the wardresses' grip, the gown rides up to her waist. Doctor Lindsay's beady eyes nearly start out of his head. The awareness of his scrutiny is making her self-conscious. This is fatal to resistance. For all her advanced views, she was born in the reign of Queen Victoria and raised with the ideal of modesty. More than an ideal: a young woman's only shield. Compromise modesty in any way, even by the awareness of another's impurity, and your invulnerability, too, is compromised.

She grits her teeth and continues to struggle. Never more violently than when being fed. Her aim is to make them spill the mixture. Doctor Watson will only tell his assistant to prepare more, but the delay is a victory of sorts. The problem is, even with the rubber sheets, more often than not the mixture spills over her. Her nightgown is soaked. It might be June outside, but within the stone walls of the prison hospital the air is cold. Her nipples stand proud under the wet cotton gown. Doctor Lindsay's stare is like a spider's web holding her in its tension. She feels its loathsome silken touch on her skin, sees the bubble of saliva at the corner of his lips.

She is not certain Doctor Watson notices. Her great fear is that one day he will absent himself, sending Doctor Lindsay in his stead. And then? Rape is what Zeus did to Leda in the guise of a swan, not a verb she can associate with herself. She does not care for the wardresses, but surely no woman would stand by and watch a man like Doctor Lindsay . . . So no, not that. But still, the thought of his hands in her mouth as he inserts the gag, his beady eyes seeking some acknowledgement in hers, is more than she can stand. Doctor Watson too is loathsome, but not like that.
Rather a poor physique
. His words have returned to her more than once in the endless hours since she arrived here. In her childhood she had rheumatic fever. Could it have marred her growing body in some way that is obvious to others, though invisible to herself? Or was the remark, perhaps, a tactic? This is her preferred explanation, though disturbing enough in its way. If it was said to undermine her, to attack her feminine vanity, then she should have challenged him. Failing to do so has handed him a victory. If he is capable of such a ploy, she has underestimated him.

 

Time flows differently in captivity, all the more so if you're fasting and may not rise from your bed. The wardress only speaks when she turns onto her side or raises her arms above the blanket. She drowses, crossing seas and climbing mountains in long complicated dreams, only to snap awake and find her keeper still contemplating her bunions. Hours seem to pass, but the shadows hardly move across the stone floor. The immobility is worse than the boredom. She is terrified by the thought of day after day without exercise, losing touch with her own limbs. Closing her eyes, she tries to name every part of her, starting with her little toe, moving along to the ball of each foot, then up to the Achilles heel, ankle, shin bone . . . Before she reaches her knees she has cramp. The wardress finds it funny, but it's more than her job's worth to let the prisoner walk it off. Ethel has the knack of turning her gaolers, persuading them to carry messages outside the prison. But the thought of sucking up to women paid to spy on her sticks in Arabella's throat. And besides, they are wary of her. She gave one of them an almighty kick in the face last night.

On the third day, when the sun is high enough in the sky to suggest it is close to noon, Doctor Watson comes back, dressed normally, without his apron and his posse of extra wardresses. She regards him with suspicion, but any distraction, even this, is welcome.

He draws a chair up to the bed. The wardress's face turns to stone.

He speaks in the level tone he used on the first night, but with a difference. A just perceptible softening. Nine months is a long time. He raises his voice to override her protest.
She will be in his care
for nine months
. It would be better for both of them if they reached an understanding. Her unhappiness with the situation is a given. There is no need for her to demonstrate it continually. His position as her doctor –
as
her doctor
– requires him to conduct regular physical examinations. She can resist him if she chooses, in which case he will summon the assistance of as many wardresses as it takes to subdue her, and she will tire herself needlessly. If he had his way, she would serve out her sentence quietly. Since she will not, it seems to him she would be better to offer resistance on a selective basis. No one, however strong, can put up a physical fight every hour of every day for nine months.

He sits back in his chair, awaiting her answer.

‘And if I agree not to struggle when you examine me, what is my reward?'

He quizzes his eyebrows as if he doesn't understand her.

‘Will I be permitted to write to my family?'

‘No letters.'

‘May I hear from them?'

‘Reading interferes with the digestion.'

‘Visits, then?'

‘I will not have you excited.'

Two choices here. The words are already in her throat,
I'll tell
you what excites me.
Or she can keep her voice low and her wits cool.

‘So I get nothing. And you get your job made easier.'

‘I don't barter with criminals.'

This is new. So far the traffic in insults has been all one way.

‘I am a political prisoner.'

‘A fire-raiser.'

‘A political act. As you, here, feeding me, is a political act.'

‘I am your doctor . . .'

‘A hired thug.'

‘. . . charged with keeping you alive.'

‘Keeping me quiet, more like.'

‘About women's votes,' he says dismissively.

‘I pay taxes like you. Why should you vote when I cannot?'

‘I don't vote—'

She is too surprised to speak.

‘—They're all as bad as each other. Why would I vote for them?'

‘Because I am ready to die for the right you discard.'

The decision is taken: she will educate him. If he can't be stopped, at least he will understand what it is he does.

 

Or it may be the intention is his.

This is long before the National Health Service. Doctors are small businessmen, in private practice. They acquire their patients by social connection. The poor get as sick as the rich, if not sicker, but they cannot be relied on to pay. As soon as he qualified, he threw in his lot with the mentally bereaved, whom everyone wants off the streets. The mad who can afford seventy-five pounds a year, or whose relatives think it a price worth paying to loosen the madman's grip on his estate, receive moral treatment. Essentially a behaviourist technique. They are trained to say please and thank you and sit quietly at table and, if they seem sufficiently rehabilitated, they are released. The mad poor end up in the public asylums, where they are straight-jacketed or strapped to their beds or thrashed by their infuriated keepers and, should they become so crazed that they will not eat, they are forcibly fed. This is the expertise that has brought Doctor Ferguson Watson to his present position.

As well as treating Perth's convicts, he is in charge of Scotland's collection of criminal lunatics. Mad, bad and diseased are not so very different in his eyes. The thieves and killers and female alcoholics are all deplorable physical specimens. Many of them cretins, from birth or by pickling their brains in bad hooch. Ethel Moorhead might have spoken with a tottie-peelings accent, but she was just another menopausal hysteric.

Prisoner Scott as a type is new to him.

Her face is pleasingly proportioned, the features regular. Her hymen is intact. She holds a degree from Edinburgh University. She has a tendency to constipation. She is a school teacher. Her nasal passages are usefully wide, allowing the tube to be inserted in her throat without troubling her breathing. She set fire to a racecourse stand. She has a smaller heart than is normal due to
mitral
phursis
. Her arguments are rational, her abstention from food and water is not. Her brain is overdeveloped at the expense of her reproductive organs, but she menstruates, which is a healthy sign.