A Petrol Scented Spring (8 page)

She does not guess there is a coda to the story. And yet he feels strangely lightened. As if she knows it all.

His mouth is dry after so much talking. He stands, jarring the nearer wardress's chair with his foot, jolting her awake. He could do with a cup of tea. Is it the sudden longing in the prisoner's face that puts it in his mind? Doctor Lindsay is away. He would rather not feed her without assistance. If she will take a cup of tea then he will suspend the procedure tonight. Suspicion narrows her gaze. Just a cup of tea, he says: a fluid ounce of milk, four of five of hot water, some leaves. If she wishes to starve herself, it seems to him that foregoing her usual three eggs in a pint and a half of sweet milk would be a victory.

‘And you would hand me victory on a plate?'

He smiles. That loose crimp of his lips I will see two years later from the far side of Aunt Nellie's parlour. And seeing it, I will feel his soft lips brush my neck, and after, the grind of five o'clock whisker. So sweet and sharp that my breath will catch. All this from across the room, before we have been introduced. So I know that smile and what it can do.

You
would hand me victory on a plate?

‘In a cup,' he says.

She drinks the tea.

On his way back from the hospital he meets a wardress come to tell him that Prisoner Gordon is dying.

His thoughts are still with Prisoner Scott. It takes him a moment to understand. That thump in his lower abdomen, the rush of blood to his face.
Get a grip
on yourself, man
. Every cell on this corridor is occupied. Twenty-three bored women. They can see nothing, but they know his tread, and they have a feral instinct for trouble. They call out to one another: ‘Doctor's here', ‘He'll no be pleased', ‘It's the minister she needs'. He pushes open the cell door and sees the guttering candle, a wardress dabbing at the prisoner's brow with a wetted cloth. The other wardress wringing her hands, not even enjoying the drama. That's how bad it is.

He sends Lindsay to fetch the Governor. A wardress goes with him to retrieve the prisoner's clothes. She must be liberated tonight. As soon as possible. The Governor protests there are procedures. He needs authorisation from the Commission secretary, who will have to contact the Chairman, who will have to contact the Secretary for Scotland. The doctor has to spell it out: the woman will die here, in his gaol, unless he gets her out right now. Is that what he wants? As it is, she may not survive the journey. There is no creditable outcome, it is a question of the least damaging course. Another half-hour might make all the difference. If they wait until morning he will not be answerable for the consequences. The Governor is not such an old fool. He knows he's being threatened with the blame for a mess that is not of his making. He reminds Doctor Watson that his authority has been flouted at every turn . . . The words die on his lips as the flaring lantern catches the doctor's expression.

So Prisoner Gordon is given a hasty bed bath and dressed in her own clothes. Only ten days since she wore them last, but the blouse hangs off her. The skirt has to be pinned, lest it drop from her shrunken hips. She looks like a rag doll propped in a chair. The wardress tries to make her tidy but has to stop when the comb comes away with clumps of hair. The Governor scuttles off to send his telegram. To have done everything that could be expected of him. Lindsay is on the street, trying to find a cab. The wardresses take the excuse of carrying away the reeking bedlinen, the pail of dirty water.

The doctor is alone with her.

The noise from the other cells has subsided. It's so quiet, he can hear her shallow breathing. He waits for the rattle that will surely come. If not with this breath, then the next.

‘You are being released.'

Does she hear him?

‘Prisoner Gordon. Frances. You are a free woman. You are going home.'

Those mouse's eyes open. She is listening.

‘You will leave here tonight. In a few minutes.'

What is she thinking? Or is she beyond thought?

‘You will wake tomorrow among friends. You will take a cup of tea, a little milk, for breakfast. Some toast, if you can. Not too much at first. Until you grow stronger.'

The eyes know he is lying.

‘Sit by an open window, but be sure to keep warm.'

She is dying. Even the Governor could see it.

‘It's a couple of hours by train to Edinburgh. Doctor Lindsay will go with you.'

What's that? A groan, a bubble of trapped air? Surely she cannot be
laughing
?

She stops breathing.

He is on her in an instant, one arm under her shoulders, the other under her thighs. Lifting her – so
light
– to lay her on the mattress. His ear to her chest, his mouth on her mouth, the air in his lungs poured into hers. Turning his head, waiting to feel her breath on his cheek, watching for the rise and fall. Nothing. Use the heel of the hand to compress the lower third of the breastbone by one third of the depth of the chest, taking care to avoid snapping the ribs. One hundred compressions a minute. Thirty for every two breaths. Compressions, breaths, watch, wait, compressions, breaths . . .

Her chest moves. Weakly, but it moves. Her heart beats. That's my girl. That's it. In and out. Come on.
Come on
. He lifts one rag-doll arm and chafes her cold hand. Her hold on life remains tenuous, but she is breathing.

Lindsay comes back. The hansom is in the yard. There's a train to Glasgow leaving at ten o'clock. The Governor has sent a telegram. Her friends will be waiting.

 

Prisoner Scott is still awake. She shows no surprise at seeing him. The wardresses are despatched to quell the excitement in the women's wing.

When they're gone she says nothing. It is exactly what he needs from her. A minute's peace. His breathing slows, his heart settles. Such a relief to close his eyes. It may be that he dozes for a few seconds. He dreams he is lying down while she sits upright in the chair. Her face is grave, but her eyes are warm. He feels the touch of her lips on his brow. He opens his eyes. She has not moved from the bed.

He asks her, ‘Do you pray?'

‘Of course. Don't you?'

‘Not since I was a boy.'

She receives this without comment.

He says, ‘What words do you use?'

*

 

Do they know? Or are they too preoccupied by how the world sees them to notice what's happening inside? In his case, I can believe it. But in hers?

I want her to have toyed with him – oh, entirely justifiably, wielding the only power she has left. Dropping confidences like bait: longings, betrayals, small defeats. Encouraging him to reciprocate, drawing him out, every switch from purring intimacy to shrieking insult coldly premeditated.

Is it too much to ask: for the one true passion of his life to have been a hoax?

I have lived in the shadow of a gaol. I have felt trapped and alone, and suffocated by a man who could not tell the difference between love and hate, but I have never been watched as she was, every micturition and defecation, twenty-four hours a day. And I have always eaten, or not eaten, of my own free will.

So I have to admit the possibility that Arabella is in no condition to manipulate her captor. The immobility, the stale air, her crusted lips and parched mouth, sore gums and chipped teeth, the hives from the itchy blanket, the constipation and the enemas, the cramp, the psychosomatic heart pains, the boredom and yet the agitation caused by the slightest departure from routine, the fighting and talking, talking and fighting . . . I have to concede, the strain of all this might break her spirit. For a while.

But she is the resourceful type, and she
is
being fed. Her young woman's body is metabolising the eggs and sugar and pints of milk into hair and fingernails and blood and tissue, renewing the dead cells, doing the miraculous business of living. Her ovary releases its monthly egg to slip down the fallopian tube and burrow into its cushion of blood. The scent given off by her skin changes subtly. A subtle change, too, in sensation: a warmth down below, a tension across her stomach first thing in the morning, anticipation in her throat. That suspended moment when everything is
just so
. It would be delicious, if she paid attention to it, but Arabella is not a sensualist. Her curiosity is strictly above the neck. She has never sniffed her own bloomers, never wondered why she leaned forward when her father sat her astride his horse, never fingered the nubble between her legs. And yet, when the doctor arrives in the hospital, she notices the way he pushes through the door. Despite the frock coat, she knows exactly what her hands would find if they came to rest either side of his waist. That muscular solidity. She watches the deft way he turns up his shirtsleeves, the glinting ginger hair on his arms, the freckled back of each scrubbed hand. These too are
just so
, as purely and unmistakeably him as his jaw or mouth or eyes. All this noticing is her body's doing, but sooner or later her head will catch up.

 

The morning after taking that cup of tea, she is furious. When he comes to feed her she demands to see the prison rules. This again! How many times have they been over this? She cannot see the rules, she is too excited, as her doctor he cannot sanction it. But he is
not
her doctor, and she is entitled to exercise. For a sick person, in her condition, it would not be wise. Wise! Oh he's
Solomon
now.

He tries to catch her eye with a look that asks ‘why are you doing this? Were we not friends last night?' But she will not acknowledge his glance. So be it. She had her chance. He feeds her by tube. Which is what he was going to do anyway.

In the afternoon she gets out of bed and makes a dash for the window.

The wardresses are caught off guard. Cruikshank grabs her round the middle. Thompson blows her whistle. MacIver arrives to help wrestle her back to bed. As their bad luck would have it, the doctor witnesses the end of the struggle. What's the matter with them? Don't they understand orders? The prisoner is to remain in bed, prone, at all times. MacIver is tasked to remain as a precaution. He is
not
having this again.

*

 

I spend that summer in Italy with my sister Hilda, who is nineteen and head-turningly lovely: hair, lips, eyes, blazingly vivid. I am twenty-four and pale as tripe, trailing after her through the streets of Florence. The sun bleaches me to transparency, like a photographic plate. To the men who call out to her, I am invisible. At least once a day some bent-backed crone will compliment me on
la bella
, as if I were her mother.

Bill is with us –
Billy
, as Hilda has taken to calling her, to her manifest pleasure. She swaggers alongside us in a cream linen sack suit from the Empire Stores, with a starched shirt and pink Leander Club tie. Street children run after us, calling ‘Signor, Signorina' and laughing, but the hotel staff don't turn a hair. To them, it's one of the milder strains of English eccentricity.

We tour the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace, promenade on the Ponte Vecchio, light candles in Santa Croce, drive up to San Gimignano. But what gives me most pleasure is creeping out of bed alone before dawn and climbing the four hundred and sixty-four steps to the top of the Duomo. There I watch the sun rise over the Apennines, the dark rock turning smoky mauve, the sky lightening to transparency before blushing rosy-gold. Deep blue shadows stipple the red pantile roofs. A breath of incense drifts up from the cathedral below. When I get back to the hotel the concierge is awake. The smell of coffee almost detains me, but I return to my room. Passing Hilda's door, I hear a sound. Low shared laughter, and a long busy pause with no words spoken, and a sudden sharp cry. Two voices, my sister's and Bill's.

I want to go back to London. But how can I suggest it? We are staying in one of the most beautiful cities on earth. We have Medieval palazzi, Renaissance basilicas, Giotto, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Fra Angelico, the divinely-scented shade of cypress groves. At dinner we eat lamb that has grazed on rosemary and drink wine that tastes of the sun.

And if I had insisted on returning? If I had swapped Italy for the handkerchief-white sky of home and the sort of wan light that shows women like myself to modest advantage, would I have taken a train north to stay with Aunt Nellie? Would I have seen the crowd of women gathered at the High Street port, and stayed to listen, and followed the procession, and sung hymns outside the prison wall? And if I had done all this, would I still have married him?

Maude Edwards is the one I met.

Mama bought all my underthings at Dickins and Jones. The saleswoman had your measurements at a glance. It was Maude's job to wrap the purchases in tissue, and then brown paper, tied with a specially printed ribbon. You sent the maid to collect it later. Maude was a cack-handed wrapper. You could see her wrestling with the whalebone, muttering under her breath, getting pinker and pinker, then she'd look up and catch your eye and grin. Among the dozens of girls who served me in shops across London, she's the one I remember. She had an engaging dauntlessness, but she was not my idea of a suffragette.

Despite which, she had the courage to march into the Royal Academy in Edinburgh and stick a hatchet in the King's portrait.

The court case is a triumph, or a farce, depending on your point of view. When the charge is read out, she cries ‘I will not be tried. I am not going to listen to you or anyone whatever.' In the public gallery, her supporters find this hilarious, and raise a cheer. The Sheriff orders the court to be cleared. There are twenty policemen, and thirty-odd suffragettes with no wish to leave. It takes three men to shift Doctor Grace Cadell alone. When order is restored, the Sheriff addresses the Clerk of the Court. Maude answers him. The Sheriff says he was not talking to her. ‘But I am speaking to you,' she replies, ‘and that makes all the difference.' The jury files in. ‘Blimey, mate, what happened to your hair?' Bald spot, hooked nose, wally eye, double chin: no defect passes unremarked. For the next half-hour she keeps up a barrage of cheerfully offensive backchat to the jurors, the Sheriff, the court orderlies, the policeman who arrested her and the witnesses attempting to testify. (‘You old liar.') She makes so much noise that the jury cannot hear the evidence. They convict her anyway.

Three months in gaol.

 

She arrives at Perth Prison in a state of elation. She has always been a comedienne, but never before has she brought the house down. Even the jury was laughing. Removing her supporters made no difference. Clapping, cheering. Much of it unfriendly, responding to those moments when she stumbled over a word or had to pause and clear her throat. But still, Court One was like a music hall, and she was top of the bill.

She has thought it all through. She gave up her job at Dickins and Jones with some cock-and-bull story about a sick aunt. Mr Hunter has promised her a glowing reference should her aunt,
ahem
, ‘should you need to seek a position in future'. The train fare up to Edinburgh was an investment. The case won't make the London papers. And even if it does, who's to say there are not other Maude Edwardses in Scotland? Prison holds no fears. She'll skip her meals and be out within the week, to be greeted as a heroine by the Edinburgh suffragettes.

 

‘Hello. Who are you?'

An impertinent question, delivered in a self-amused English chirp. The doctor has only just entered the cell and already he is irritated.

He turns to the wardress. ‘Undress her and put her to bed.'

‘Yes sir.'

‘
No
,
sir
. I go to my bed at eleven o'clock and not a minute before.'

‘You are in prison.'

She makes a pantomime of looking about her. ‘So I am! And here's me thinking it was the Ritz.' She offers her hand. ‘I'm Maude, Maude Edwards—'

He returns his most forbidding look.

‘—And your name is . . .'

‘I am the prison medical officer.'

She smiles to herself, yet not
for
herself. It's all a performance. ‘
Oh,
the forcible feeder. Well, you won't need to trouble yourself with me.'

‘You will eat normally?'

‘Oh
no
. But there's not a thing you can do about it.'

 

The timing couldn't be worse. He has not slept. The adrenaline which carried him through Prisoner Gordon's departure has now ebbed. The woman is out there, beyond his control. Whether she lives or dies, she will cause trouble. He will tell them he doubted she was a suitable case for feeding from the start, but he could not say for certain without making a careful trial. If only he had been more circumspect in his written reports. The one consolation is that the Commissioners, too, are incriminated. They read his words and did nothing. Dunlop saw the woman with his own eyes. Still, he knows he has not heard the last of Prisoner Gordon.

And now here's this other one.

The Governor has received a certificate signed by one GF Fleetwood Taylor MBChB, claiming Maude Edwards has a heart so weak that forcible feeding could prove fatal. It explains why she was so sure of herself. Smirking and mugging. You'd think she'd won a watch, not been sentenced to three months in gaol. That glint in her eye reminds him of Kitty.

If he is attracted to her, and I don't rule it out, he buries the impulse very deep. She is a shopgirl. He is a doctor. He'll stand no nonsense, and that includes a medical opinion referring to forcible feeding written long before the prisoner's arrest.

He lowers the stethoscope.

‘What?' she asks.

He is pleased to hear the chirp is gone from her voice.

‘
Is something wrong?' she prompts him.

He gives her imagination a few seconds to explore this possibility, then: ‘Doctor Fleetwood Taylor wouldn't be a lady doctor, by any chance?'

‘And if she is?'

He hears impudence in this retort. Without it, he might have been moved to pity her.

‘Ah, well, I don't attach much importance to her opinion. I am your doctor now.' He tells the wardress, ‘Bring the equipment.'

‘
What?'

‘You have a weak heart, but I don't agree with Dr Fleetwood Taylor that it rules out artificial feeding. Starvation would be more dangerous.'

He can see her meagre wits trying to think their way through this.

‘But the doctor told me it's not safe. I was on my back for four months last winter.'

‘I can't allow you to hunger strike. The chances are you'd be an invalid for life – a chairbound invalid. You'd never lie flat in a bed again.'

She cries out.

‘You cannot starve yourself and expect to thrive.'

‘But the feeding'll see me right?'

He has her on the hook, it's just a matter of reeling her in.

‘The feeding carries its own risks. It's less dangerous, if you co-operate, but I wouldn't call it safe—'

Her breathing grows laboured.

‘—Or would you rather eat normally?'

‘I can't,' she says in a new voice. Candid, broken. ‘I don't want to let them down.'

‘But you don't want to die.'

‘
Die?'
She presses both hands to her chest.

‘Starvation places a strain on the heart. Artificial feeding places a strain on the heart. Your heart is already weak. Do you think you're immortal?'

He doesn't notice the revulsion on the wardress's face. And it would make no difference, if he did.

All he has to do is turn that unblinking stare on her, and she starts to whimper. He finds himself drawing out the seconds, letting her work herself up. It is curiously gratifying, watching the boldness drain from her eyes, her lower lip start to quiver. When he breaks silence, he can feel the relief flooding her chest.

‘There is another way.'

Strange that this glimmer of hope should render her more abject than her terror. She is beyond speech, but her eyes plead
‘Anything'
.

‘We could administer the sweetened milk by feeding cup. Your hands will not touch it. The wardress here will bring the cup to your lips. You will still be fed, but by the least hazardous means.' He pauses, to let her take this in, ‘Do you agree?'

She nods, ‘Thank you, Doctor.'