iv
Last Weeks
It was over. Her screams had died. She was being helped along the Tube passage, she was again in a cell. This was a different sort of cell. It had a big table and a bench that ran round the walls. Miss Bendon and another woman were with her. She was being given brandy and water. There seemed a stir in the passage beyond the door. She heard a strange noise, like an animal in pain, that echoed down the Tube passage, and realised that she had finished gulping the brandy. It was she herself who was making that noise. When she realised that the noise stopped.
A sudden cold reality seized hold of her like a grip of frost. She realised with a dreadful exactitude what had happened. She was somehow different. Even this different cell was a sign of what she was henceforth to be put in—places that might look the same, but that bore a different significance—the places where the guilty found themselves. She was guilty: they had found her guilty. Of course, it was all a mistake, a hideous mistake. Somebody would come along and put it right, because mistakes like that simply didn’t happen; but, nevertheless, for a time she must put up with it.
She was asked if she felt better. She nodded, and then there came upon her again the brown and white Tube corridors, the odd artificial air, the stone stairs, the iron-barred door; the outer door, but not the door to freedom. Overhead in the yard the sky held the lilac colour of spring; within the yard a taxi, an ordinary taxi, such as she had always been conveyed in back to prison, was waiting. She was half pushed, half lifted in. The officers got in with her and the taxi set off, the noises of London all about it, taking her back to prison and its sour smell. That sour smell of prison. She’d never get it out of her nostrils, even when she was free again. It was like the smell of a very old person. The old person might be spotlessly clean—but still that sour smell clung to them both. It seemed to have become part of the membrane of her nostrils.
The taxi jolted on. Next time, so her solicitor had told her, she might come out to her appeal. All hope wasn’t lost yet, so he had told her. Hope—what did he mean by hope? Of course, nothing could be going to happen to her. Life couldn’t be like that. This nightmare couldn’t be true. She felt very weak, and fell about against the walls of her little compartment. Vaguely she heard the sound of the trams, and knew they were back at the prison. She heard the unlocking of the great gates and the taxi started again, then stopped.
Ridiculous, but she seemed to have no legs. She had to be lifted out.
This was the same prison, but it was a different part of the prison. She was guilty now. It was the infirmary, but the infirmary of the convicted instead of that of the technically innocent. Well, it was very much the same to her. It had to be unlocked and locked behind her, and as Miss Bendon took her by the arm to help her along the corridor, she heard a sound of laughter; and so strange did it seem in that place that it penetrated even to her numbed consciousness. A baby about two years old, looking like a little clown in a pink knitted wool suit, was stumbling down the corridor towards her, his face thrown back, his mouth open with laughter, his hands outflung. A prison officer and his mother were pursuing him smilingly. He was going too fast to stop, and ran against Julia’s knees. She stood, frozen, while the officer picked him up and dropped him into his mother’s arms. Two other mothers came along, their babies in their arms, looking as pleased and proud as any ordinary mothers might have done. They had been taking the babies for an airing.
Miss Bendon’s grip tightened on her arm: somebody came on the other side of her. She was helped up a flight of stairs, and taken into a bare little cell painted green and white. Thank God they weren’t putting her into a ward full of dreadful women. There was a narrow little iron bedstead, three hard wooden chairs, a table, and, high up in the wall, a tiny window of thick-ribbed glass criss-crossed into panes.
She was put to bed. As in a dream she felt them taking the clothes off her. It wasn’t her own night-gown they put on, but a strange night-gown, a prison night-gown that the other women wore. She was guilty.
She lay back on her hard pillow and looked around at the white little room. All she could see was the grey line of a near-by roof, wet and gleaming like a pigeon’s breast from a passing shower. Two women came in, in dark blue uniforms, two women she hadn’t seen before.
Miss Bendon whispered something to them, and left. One of the women said, “Wouldn’t she like a nice cup of tea?” Julia shook her head. She couldn’t bear their tea. There came the usual question, Would she like some milk or some bovril? She shook her head. But the milk appeared, and she drank it for the sake of peace.
Life went on again with her much the same as it had before, except that now she was more frightened. Also the days had assumed a very regular measure. Dr. Ogilvie came every morning and asked what she would like to eat and drink. She remembered that sometimes, when she had been ill, she had been ordered red wine, but she felt that wouldn’t be much good to her now; so she just asked for whiskies and sodas with her meals, and for some help to make her sleep at nights. For sleep was becoming more and more difficult.
Dr. Ogilvie would look at her and ask her the usual questions that doctors always asked, but the terrible part of these questions was that it seemed they were being asked about a dead body instead of about a living one. He would look at the report: “A little constipated … we’ll see to that. You shall have something to put that right. It’s a fine day—sit out until your dinner-time.”
Her solicitor came, of course, and she signed something called “The Appeal Papers,” and after she had signed them her spirits rose again: but not as they had risen before the trial. The appeal stood between her and the terror of which she dared not think.
Now there were always two women with her, night and day. She had six officers in all. She grew to know them all by name, to know their different personalities. Only one was a married woman, Mrs. Cartwright, and she, oddly enough, looked the least married of the lot—a thin, dry, pinched woman, whose flesh seemed to have withered. Then with her was Miss Pither, gruff, kindly, chubby-cheeked, inarticulate, whose main idea of life seemed to be to suggest a game of draughts. She said it passed the time so nicely, as though the time were not passing much too fast. She had glossy brown hair, the colour of a horse-chestnut, and her eyes were shy, and somehow ashamed behind her gold-rimmed glasses. Julia felt she would have liked to help her, but didn’t know how. She and Mrs. Cartwright were with her from five until ten o’clock at night. Then came Miss Paramore and Miss Quint. Miss Paramore had been a school-mistress, and still carried the tones of brisk authority in her voice. She tried to take Julia out of herself, to talk to her about books. Miss Quint was small and grey. She seemed almost mouse-like, and yet she had immense authority of a quiet sort—much more than Miss Paramore. Julia always felt she had to take her bovril, or her milk, or her whisky and soda, or her medicine when Miss Quint presented it, almost shyly. Miss Quint was the only one who Julia felt really knew what she was feeling; the fright that was gnawing at her heart the whole time.
At six-thirty in the morning Miss Paramore and Miss Quint were replaced by Miss Harper and Miss Purvis. Miss Harper was fat to overflowing. She had to have her uniforms specially made for her. She looked as though she had been the mother of at least ten children. Her consolations were frequent, but they sounded like balls rolled along a groove. She was much more comfortable than Miss Quint, but nothing like as real, somehow. Julia felt that Miss Harper would go away and be jolly, but that Miss Quint would always be thinking of her and wishing she could help her. Nothing within Miss Harper was hurt, as something within Miss Quint was hurt. Miss Purvis was brisk and very bright. She was intensely religious, with a cut-and-dried religion, in whose efficacy she entirely believed. She had burning eyes and a pale face, and she seemed consumed with an intense inner happiness that tried to enwrap even Julia. But Julia felt this was a fire which gave light without warmth, and she shivered in its white rays.
Always a pair of these women were with her, always the light burned in the cell, though she was allowed to tie a dark handkerchief over her eyes when she slept; for light had always waked Julia even more easily than noise. Always there was the offer of books, of milk, of bovril, of a walk—she now walked in a different garden from the first one, and alone, save for the officers; a garden from which she could see still more clearly the roofs of free and ordinary houses. She felt it would be something if she could just go back and walk as she had done before, with the other remand women, in the garden with the circular path and glass-houses; but now, in an irregularly shaped garden with a railing, she wandered aimlessly about and about, on a fine day.
There were beautiful pigeons that flew about and came down to strut over the earth beside her. They were free, fat and tame. They preened themselves and looked sharply this way and that, so that the light reflected from their beautiful iridescent necks. Julia would watch them walking about, pecking at the grass, eating the bread that she was encouraged to save up for them. She soon gave up this occupation because of the anguish that was hers when the pigeons, with a whirring of wings, rose into the air and were gone. The pigeons might go, but there was something that could not; and that was the view always before her eyes when she exercised—the roofs of houses quite close to her just beyond the prison wall. The roofs of real houses … the devilish cruelty of that glimpse of roofs. It oughtn’t to be possible to see smoke coming up from the chimneys of homes. There were people in those houses, people who ate and slept and took baths and clothed themselves after their fancy, who went in and out as they chose, who were so used to seeing the prison as they looked out of their back windows that they thought nothing of it. They might have an increased interest now, as they looked at those grim walls and thought: Julia Starling is in there. She hasn’t got much longer.
There were people there whose children went to school, whose husbands came home from work; people who made their laundry-lists, who did their shopping, who went to the pictures. Oh, Christ! if only she could be one of them, she wouldn’t want a lover, she wouldn’t want anything but to go in and out of an ordinary house and do ordinary things.
Every day, when she waked, the roofs of those houses, and the thin spirals from their hearths, hurt her as nothing else hurt her. From the first moment in the morning when she was wakened at half-past six till the last moment at night when she tied the dark handkerchief over her eyes and tried to sleep, after the salty dose of bromide that helped her so little. The night would go in a succession of dozes and nightmares; of patches of bare, bald watchfulness. There would be the change of officers, the pint of tea, the porridge and bread and margarine. Did she want anything extra? Would she like jam, would she like marmalade, or an egg? Anything she wanted, that was the cry. She was allowed whisky and soda with her meals, as many cigarettes as she liked, and a sleeping-draught at night. She could have anything she wanted to nourish and soothe the body they were going to destroy. It was too absurd. Prayers in the chapel … nobody had to go to unless they wanted to, and Julia didn’t want to.
Then each morning the Lady Superintendent, dignified, quiet, her brown hair heavily streaked with grey, her eyes kind and sorry, would come and talk to Julia. An ordinary conversation … how had she slept? … how was she feeling? Good, good. And always Julia knew—for prison routine becomes known by some strange added sense to the people within prison walls—that the Lady Superintendent had come from seeing those women discharged who had served their sentences. Always there lurked in Julia’s mind the memory of that soiled pink suspender-belt. That would have been cleaned and ironed, as all the clothes would have been cleaned and ironed of the women to whom they belonged, and one morning she would be seen off at the great gates by the Lady Superintendent.
Every day women went through these great gates, clean from top to toe, made new, except for that strange inner thing called the soul, which went out exactly as it had come in. But the women went out—that was all that mattered. They went out … they could walk in their clean artificial silk stockings down the road; they could board a tram, pay a fare out of the purse that had been restored to them; go to their homes or back to the gangs of which they had been members.
It was nothing that these women could go out free to love—love mattered nothing to Julia. What mattered was that they went out free to eat when and what they chose, to sleep where they chose. Free to go to the lavatory without having to ask the officer. They went out into a world that was free; a world of trams and eating-houses and small homes, and business legal and illegal, and casual contacts and chance encounters, and relationships renewed. The thought of this free world beat like a great bird about Julia’s mind each morning as she met the eyes of the Lady Superintendent, and the thought of those unknown women who had gone free some quarter of an hour before, were more real than the Lady Superintendent’s presence.
Then the walk if it were fine, the attempt at needlework or a game, or sewing if it were not. Perhaps a visit from her solicitor, then dinner, the perpetual meat and two vegetables—perhaps she would like a little custard?—and after, would she like to sleep a little, or would she like to change her book, or would she like to sew, or would she like a game of draughts? Then tea, the dreadful tea, the light lit: and would she like to sew, or would she like to play draughts, or would she like another book, or had she a letter to write? And supper: would she like milk and bread and butter, or bovril, and would she like to change her book? Sometimes she did change her book, and instead of tying the dark handkerchief over her eyes she would sit up and try to read through the endless light white night, that was like the northern nights she had read of in novels. Nights where the sun never set; could anything be more dreadful? Then they would bring her salty bromide, and again would come the thin, drifting sleeps, the waking to the same round again, again.
The rhythm of the white days and white nights beat itself out, slow, slow, slow, yet quickening almost unnoticed to a dread velocity; day, night, day, night, a week —Sunday, chapel? No, she’d rather not. She had been there once when she was on remand, but she felt differently now.
Indeed, she felt differently about everything. Ill with sleeplessness, in spite of the kindly drugs, ill with fear, ill with bewilderment, she was, to look at—as she could see for herself—quite a different person from the confident Julia who had gone to her trial. When her solicitor told her it would be better if she did not attend her appeal, that there was nothing to be gained by it, she agreed almost listlessly. For the attack of her personal presence, on which she had counted all her life, had failed her. It had failed her utterly in the box. It had proved a thing as brittle as spun glass. She had no confidence now with which to meet men. Living in her endless white light of days and nights, it seemed simpler to her to stay where she was and let the appeal be heard without her.
About five days after that there came the worst day of all. The appeal had failed. The Governor came in to see her. At first she could not understand what he was telling her. He told her very simply, very clearly, and as kindly as he could.
Julia stared and stared at him, and then she began to scream. She screamed and cried, she threw herself on the bed. She listened to nothing that the wardresses tried to tell her; she could not listen to the Lady Superintendent; she could not listen to anyone, and the Governor had gone. Now and then she fell almost unconscious upon her bed, but when nature had restored itself slightly by this relaxation she began to cry out again; to beat against the wall; to claw at it with her fingers, so that her nails became filled with plaster and broke. Then the doctor came, and a nurse. The nurse rubbed something on her arm, while the doctor spoke to her soothingly. Then she felt the prick of a needle. Still she went on crying hopelessly; but her limbs began to feel more and more heavy, her head began to nod. One of the women came in and slipped the dark handkerchief over her eyes, and presently she was asleep.
The next day the chaplain came and talked to h
er of the love of God, but that meant nothing to Julia. The love of God, said his tongue, but Oh, God! have pity on helpless human beings, said his eyes, as they looked at her.
One day her mother came to see her. She had not wanted to see anybody else, not even Gipsy. She had not really wanted to see her mother. They were left alone together. Mrs. Almond stared at her daughter hopelessly.
“Oh, Julia, Julia,” was all she could say.
“Don’t, Mum,” said Julia.
“If your Dad could only see you now,” said Mrs. Almond helplessly.
“He would have been no good,” said Julia. “He never was any good. Nobody’s any good.”
“Oh, Julia,” said Mrs. Almond again.
Then they talked a little about quite stupid things, about how the Beales were behaving, about the messages they had sent, about what the sycamores were looking like in Love Lane. Neither of them mentioned Saint Clement’s Square.
“It may still be all right, Julia,” said Mrs. Almond.
“Oh … oh … yes … yes …” said Julia. “Sorry … I wasn’t thinking, Mum.”
Mrs. Almond thought: She’s not taking it to heart. She never had much heart. I suppose it’s a good thing. She did not recognise the signs of complete mental exhaustion when she saw them.
Then the officers were in the room again, and it was time for Mrs. Almond to go. And at that last moment all the maternal feeling which she had never, as far as she knew, even felt, much less shown, welled up in Mrs. Almond. This was her child, her only child. She caught Julia in her arms and cried helplessly. Julia stood, without moving, except that she put her arms around her mother and leaned her head against her dress.
“It’s all right, Mum,” she said dully, and then she, too, began to cry, and Mrs. Almond was taken away.
A Pin to See the Peepshow Page 42
