Affinity (7 page)

‘What a foolish old creature you must think me,’ she said. ‘You must think me hardly able to say my own name! Mr Power used fairly to curse my tongue—said it was quicker than a whippet with the scent of a hare. He’d smile to see me now, miss, wouldn’t he? So many hours, and not a soul to speak to. Sometimes you wonder if your tongue ain’t shrunk up or dropped clean off. Sometimes you
do
fear you will forget your own name.’

She smiled, but her eyes had begun to gleam, and her gaze was miserable. I hesitated—then said that she would think
me
foolish, for not guessing that the silence and the solitude were so hard. ‘When you are like me,’ I said, ‘you seem to hear nothing about you but chatter. You are glad to be able to go to your own room and say nothing.’

She said at once that I must go
there
more often, if I wanted to say nothing! I told her I would certainly go to her, if she wished it; and that then she must talk to me for as long as it suited her. She smiled again, and again she blessed me. ‘I shall watch out for your coming, miss,’ she said as Mrs Jelf unlocked the gate. ‘Let it be soon!’

I visited another prisoner, then, and again the matron picked her out for me, saying quietly, ‘This is a poor sad girl I am very afraid for, as finding the habits of the prison very hard.’ This girl
was
sad, and trembled when I went in to her. She is named Mary Ann Cook, and has been sent to Millbank, for seven years, for murdering her baby. She is not yet twenty, was put in there at sixteen, may have been handsome once but is now so white and wasted you would not recognise her for a girl at all, it is as if the pale prison walls have leached the life and colour from her and made her drab. When I asked her to tell me her history she did so dully, as if she has told it so many times before—to the matrons, to Visitors, perhaps only to herself—that the telling has made a kind of story of it, realer than memory but meaning nothing. I wished I could tell her that I know what such a story feels like.

She said she had been born to a Catholic family, that her mother had died and her father remarried; and that then she had been put to work as a maid, with her sister, in a very grand house. There, she said, were a lady and a gentleman and three daughters, who were all very kind, but there was also a son—‘and he, miss, was not kind. While he was a boy he used only to tease us—he used to listen at our door while we lay in our bed, and call into us, to frighten us. We didn’t mind that; and soon he went to school, and we saw him hardly at all. But after a year or two he came back, quite changed—as big as his father, nearly, and slyer than ever . . .’ She claims he pressed her into meeting him in secret, offered to set her up in a room as his mistress—she wouldn’t have that. Then she found that he had begun to offer money to her sister and so, ‘to save the younger girl’, she had submitted to him; and soon she found herself with child. She left her place then—says that, after all, her sister turned against her for the sake of the young man. She went to a brother, whose wife would not take her, and was confined in a charity-ward. ‘My baby came, but I never loved her. She looked so like
him
! I wished she would die.’ She took the baby to a church, and asked the priest to bless it; when the priest would not, she says she blessed it herself—‘We may do that,’ she said modestly, ‘in our Church.’ She took a room, passing herself off as a single girl, hiding the baby in her shawl to stop its cries; but the shawl fell too close about the baby’s face, and killed it. Her landlady found the little body. Cook had placed it behind a curtain, and it had lain there for a week.

‘I wished she would die,’ she said again to me, ‘but I never murdered her, and when she was dead, I was sorry. They found the priest I went to and made him speak against me at my trial. It looked then, you see, as if I had meant to harm my baby from the start . . .’

‘A terrible story, that one,’ I said to the matron who released me from her cell. This was not Mrs Jelf—who had been obliged to chaperon some prisoner to Miss Haxby’s office—but Miss Craven, the coarse-faced matron with the bruised arm. She had come to the gate when I called, and gazed at Cook, and Cook had gone meekly back to her sewing and lowered her head. Now, as we walked, she said briskly that she supposed some people might call it terrible. The prisoners that were like Cook, however, and hurt their own little children—well, she never wasted her tears on
them
.

I said that Cook seemed very young; but that Miss Haxby had told me that sometimes they had girls, in the cells, that were little more than children?

She nodded: They had, and that
was
a sight. They had had one there once that used to weep every night for the first two weeks, for her dolly. It was cruel to have to walk the wards and hear her. ‘And yet,’ she added, laughing, ‘she was a demon when the mood was on her. And her tongue—what a foul one! You would never hear such words as that little creature knew, not even on the men’s wards.’

Still she laughed. I looked away from her. We had walked almost the length of one whole passage, and ahead of us was the archway that led to one of the towers. Beyond that was the dark edge of a gate, and now I recognised it. It was the gate at which I stood last week, the gate to the cell of the girl with the violet.

I slowed my step, and spoke very quietly. There was a prisoner, I said, in the first cell of the second passage. A fair-haired girl, quite young, quite handsome. What did Miss Craven know of her?

The matron’s face had grown sour when talking of Cook. Now it grew sour again. ‘Selina Dawes,’ she said. ‘A queer one. Keeps her eyes and her mind to herself—that’s all I know. I’ve heard her called the easiest prisoner in the gaol. They say she has never given an hour’s trouble since she was brought here. Deep, I call her.’

Deep?

‘As the ocean.’

I nodded, remembering a comment of Mrs Jelf ’s. Perhaps Dawes, I said, was something of a lady? That made Miss Craven laugh: ‘She has a lady’s ways, all right! Yet none of the matrons, I think, much care for her, excepting Mrs Jelf—but then, Mrs Jelf is soft, and has a kind word for everyone; and none of the women will have much to do with her, either. This is a place for “palling up”, as the creatures call it; yet no-one has made a pal of
her
. I believe they are leery of her. Someone got her story from the newspapers, and passed it on—stories
will
get passed, you see, for all our pains! And then, the wards at night—the women fancy all kinds of nonsense. Someone gives a shriek, says she has heard queer sounds from Dawes’s cell—’

Sounds . . .?

‘Spooks, miss! The girl is a—a spirit-medium they call them, don’t they?’

I stopped, and gazed at her, in surprise and also a kind of dismay. I said, a spirit-medium! And then, again: a spirit-medium—and there, in gaol! What was her crime? Why had they got her there?

Miss Craven shrugged. A lady, she thought, had been harmed by her—also a girl; and one of them afterwards had died. The harming, however, had been of a peculiar sort. They hadn’t been able to make it out as murder, only as assault. She had heard, indeed, as the charge against Dawes was all trumped-up nonsense, all put together by a clever barrister . . .

‘But there,’ she added with a snort, ‘you
do
hear that, at Millbank.’

I said that I supposed you did. We had begun to walk again along the passage, and as we rounded the angle of it I saw the girl—Dawes—herself. She was seated, as before, with the sun upon her, but this time her eyes were lowered to her lap, where she was teasing a single thread from a tangle of wool.

I looked at Miss Craven. I said, ‘Might I, do you think—?’

The sun grew brighter as I stepped into the cell, and after the shadowy monotony of the passage-way its whitewashed walls were dazzling, and made me put my fingers to my brow, and blink. It took me a moment, then, to realise that Dawes had not stood and curtseyed, as all the other women had; nor had she set her work aside, nor did she smile, or speak. She only raised her eyes to gaze at me in a kind of patient curiosity—her fingers all the time plucking slowly at the ball of yarn, as if the coarse wool was a rosary and she was telling off the beads.

When Miss Craven had fastened the gate on us and moved away I said, ‘Your name is Dawes, I think. How do you do, Dawes?’

She did not answer, only stared at me. Her features are not quite so regular as I thought them last week, but have a slight want of symmetry—a little tilt—about the brows and lips. One notices the faces of the women of the gaol, because the gowns are so dull and so regular, and the caps so close-fitting. One notices the faces, and the hands. Dawes’s hands are slender, but rough and red. Her nails are split, and have spots of white upon them.

Still she did not speak. Her pose was so still, her gaze so unflinching, I wondered for a moment if she might not after all be simple, or dumb. I said I hoped she would be glad to talk with me a little; that I had come to Millbank to make friends of all the women . . .

My voice sounded loud to me. I imagined it carrying across the silent ward, saw the prisoners pausing in their work, lifting their heads, perhaps smiling. I think I turned from her, to her window, and gestured to the light that glanced from her white bonnet and from the crooked star upon her sleeve. I said, ‘You like to have the sun upon you.’—‘I may work,’ she answered quickly then, ‘and feel the sunlight too, I hope? I may have my bit of sunshine? God knows, there is little enough of it!’

There was a passion to her voice that made me blink, then hesitate. I looked about me. Her walls were not so dazzling now, and even as I looked I seemed to see the patch of light in which she sat grow smaller, the cell grow greyer and more chill. The sun, of course, was edging on its cruel way, away past Millbank’s towers. She must watch it do so, fixed and mute as the post on a sun-dial, earlier and earlier each day as the year moves on. One whole half of the gaol, indeed, from January to December must be dark as the far portion of the moon.

I felt awkward, realising this, standing before her while she sat still pulling at her wool. I moved to her folded hammock and placed my hand upon it. She said then, that if I was only handling that for curiosity’s sake, she would rather I handled something else, perhaps her trencher or her mug. They must keep the bed and blankets in prison folds. She said she wouldn’t like to have to fold them all again, after I had left her.

I drew my hand away at once. ‘Of course,’ I said again. And: ‘I am sorry.’ She lowered her eyes to her wooden needles. When I asked, what was she working at? she showed me, listlessly, the putty-coloured knitting in her lap. ‘Stockings for soldiers,’ she said. Her accent is good. When she stumbled over a word—which she did, sometimes, yet not quite as often as Ellen Power or Cook—I found myself flinching.

I said next, ‘You have been here a year, I think?—You may stop your knitting while you talk to me, you know: Miss Haxby has allowed it.’ She let the wool fall, but still gently teased it. ‘You have been here a year. What do you make of it?’

‘What do I make of it?’ The tilt to her lips grew steeper. She gazed about her for a second, and then she said: ‘What would
you
make of it, do you think?’

The question took me by surprise—it surprises me again, when I think of it now!—and made me hesitate. I remembered my interview with Miss Haxby. I said that I should find Millbank a very hard place, but I should also know I had done wrong. I might be glad to be so much alone, to think on how sorry I was. I might make plans.

Plans?

‘To be better.’

She looked away, and made no answer; and I found that I was rather glad of it, for my words had sounded hollow, even to my own ears. A few dull gold curls showed at the nape of her neck—her hair, I think, must be paler even than Helen’s, and would be very handsome if properly washed and dressed. The patch of sun grew bright again, yet still inched on its remorseless way, like a counterpane sliding from a chill and troubled sleeper. I saw her feel its warmth upon her face and raise her head to it. I said, ‘Won’t you talk a little to me? You might find it a comfort.’

She did not answer until the square of sun had faded. Then she turned, and studied me a moment in silence, then said, that she didn’t need
me
to comfort her. She said she had ‘her own comforts’ there. Besides, why should she tell me anything? What would I ever tell her, about my life?

She had tried to make her voice hard, but had not managed it, it had begun to tremble; and the effect was not of insolence but of bravado and, behind it, plain despair. I thought, If I were to be gentle with you now, you would weep—I did not want to have her weep before me. I made my own voice very brisk. I said, Well, there was a variety of things I was forbidden, by Miss Haxby, to discuss with her; but so far as I knew, myself was not one of them. I would tell her any little detail she cared to hear . . .

I told her my name; and that I lived at Chelsea, at Cheyne Walk. I said, I had a brother that was married, and a sister who would be married very soon; that I was not married. I told her I sleep badly, and spend many hours reading, or writing, or standing at my window looking out upon the river. Then I pretended to consider. What else was there?—‘I think you have it all. There is not much . . .’

She had been blinking at me. Now, at last, she turned her face away and smiled. Her teeth are even, and very white—‘parsnip white’, as Michelangelo has it; but her lips are rough and bitten. She began to talk with me, then, more naturally. She asked me, how long had I been a Lady Visitor? And, why did I want to do it? Why did I want to come to Millbank, when I might stay idle in my house at Chelsea . . .?

I said, ‘You think ladies should stay idle, then?’

She would stay idle, she said, if she was like me.

‘Oh,’ I said then, ‘you would not, not if you were really like me!’

My words made her blink: they had sounded louder than I meant them. She had let her knitting fall at last, and sat carefully watching me; and I wished, then, that she would turn her head, for her gaze was very still and somehow unsettling. I said, the truth of it was, idleness did not suit me. I had been idle for two years—so idle, indeed, that I had grown ‘quite ill’ with it. ‘It was Mr Shillitoe suggested I come here,’ I said. ‘He is an old friend of my father’s. He came to visit at my house, and spoke of Millbank. He spoke of the system here, of Lady Visitors. I thought—’