Affinity

by Sarah Waters

  No daisies, no violets, he answered; not even so much as a dandelion clock. They would not grow in Millbank soil, he said. It is too near the Thames, and ‘as good as marshland’.

  I said that I had guessed as much, and thought again about that flower. I wondered if there might be seams between the bricks that make the walls of the women’s building, that a plant like that might thrust its roots through?—I cannot say.

  And, after all, I did not think of it for long. The warder led me to the outer gate, and here the porter found a cab for me; and now, with the wards and the locks and the shadows and reeks of prison life behind me, it was impossible not to feel my own liberty and be grateful for it. I thought that, after all, I had been right to go there; and I was glad that Mr Shillitoe knew nothing of my history. I thought, His knowing nothing, and the women’s knowing nothing, that will keep that history in its place. I imagined them fastening my own past shut, with a strap and a buckle . . .

  I talked with Helen to-night. My brother brought her here, but with three or four of their friends. They were on their way to a theatre, and very brilliantly dressed—Helen conspicuous amongst them, as we were, in her gown of grey. I went down when they arrived, but didn’t stay long: the crowd of voices and faces, after the chill and stillness of Millbank and of my own room, seemed awful to me. But Helen stepped aside with me, and we spoke a little about my visit. I told her about the monotonous corridors, and how nervous I had grown being led through them. I asked her if she remembered Mr Le Fanu’s novel, about the heiress who is made to seem mad? I said, ‘I did think for a while: Suppose Mother is in league with Mr Shillitoe, and he means to keep me on the wards, bewildered?’ She smiled at that—but checked to see that Mother could not hear me. Then I told her a little about the women on the wards. She said she thought they must be frightening. I said they were not frightening at all, but only weak—‘So Mr Shillitoe told me. He said I am to mould them. That is my task. They are to take a moral pattern from me.’

  She studied her hands as I spoke, turning the rings upon her fingers. She said I was brave. She said she is sure this work will distract me, from ‘all my old griefs’.

  Then Mother called, why were we so serious and so quiet? She listened shuddering when I described the wards to her this afternoon, and said that I am not to tell the details of the gaol when we have guests. Now she said, ‘You mustn’t let Margaret tell you prison stories, Helen. And here is your husband waiting, look. You will be late for the play.’ Helen went straight to Stephen’s side, and he took her hand and kissed it. I sat and watched them; then slipped away and came up here. I thought, If I may not talk of my visit, then I can certainly sit and write about it, in my own book . . .

  Now I have filled twenty pages; and when I read what I have written I see that, after all, my path through Millbank was not so crooked as I thought. It is neater, anyway, than my own twisting thoughts!—which was all I filled my last book with. This, at least, shall never be like that one.

  It is half-past twelve. I can hear the maids upon the attic stairs, Cook slamming bolts—that sound will never be the same to me, I think, after to-day!

  There is Boyd, closing her door, walking to draw her curtain: I may follow her movements as if my ceiling were of glass. Now she is unlacing her boots, letting them fall with a thud. Now comes the creak of her mattress.

  There is the Thames, as black as molasses. There are the lights of Albert Bridge, the trees of Battersea, the starless sky . . .

  Mother came, half an hour ago, to bring me my dose. I told her I should like to sit a little longer, that I wished she would leave the bottle with me so I might take it later—but no, she wouldn’t do that. I am ‘not quite well enough’, she said. Not ‘for that’. Not yet.

  And so I sat and let her pour the grains into the glass, and swallowed the mixture as she watched and nodded. Now I am too tired to write—but too restless, I think, to sleep just yet.

  For Miss Ridley was right to-day. When I close my eyes I see only the chill white corridors of Millbank, the mouths of the cells. I wonder how the women lie there? I think of them now—Susan Pilling, and Sykes, and Miss Haxby in her quiet tower; and the girl with the violet, whose face was so fine.

  I wonder what her name is?

  2 September 1872

  Selina Dawes

  Selina Ann Dawes

  Miss S. A. Dawes

  Miss S. A. Dawes, Trance Medium

  Miss Selina Dawes, Celebrated Trance Medium,

  Gives Séances Daily

  Miss Dawes, Trance Medium,

  Gives Dark Séances Daily - Vincy’s Spiritual Hotel,

  Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC.

  Private & Pleasantly Situated.

  DEATH IS DUMB, WHEN LIFE IS DEAF

  & it says that, for an extra shilling, they will make it very bold & give it a border of black.

  30 September 1874

  Mother’s injunction against my prison stories did not, after all, last long this week, for every visitor we have had has wanted to hear my descriptions of Millbank, and of the prisoners in it. What they have asked for, however, are dreadful details to make them shudder; and though my memories of the gaol have stayed very crisp, those are not at all the kind of points that I recall. I have been haunted, rather, by the ordinariness of it; by the fact that it lies there at all, two miles away, a straight cab’s ride from Chelsea—that great, grim, shadowy place, with its fifteen hundred men and women, all shut up and obliged to be silent and meek. I have found myself remembering them, in the midst of some plain act—taking tea, because I am thirsty; taking up a book or a shawl, because I am idle or cold; saying, aloud, some line of verse, merely for the pleasure of hearing the fine words spoken. I have done these things, that I have done a thousand times; and I have remembered the prisoners, who may do none of them.

  I wonder how many of them lie in their cold cells, dreaming of china cups, and books, and verses? I have dreamt of Millbank this week, more than once. I dreamt I was among the prisoners there, straightening the lines of my knife and fork and Bible, in a cell of my own.

  But these are not the details people ask me for; and though they understand my going there once, as a kind of entertainment, the thought of my returning there a second time, and then a third and fourth, amazes them. Only Helen takes me seriously. ‘Oh!’ cry all the others, ‘but you cannot mean really to befriend these women? They must be thieves, and—worse!’

  They look at me, and then at Mother. How, they ask, can she bear to have me go there? And Mother, of course, answers then: ‘Margaret does just as she pleases, she always has. I have told her, if she wants for employment there is work that she might do at home. There are her father’s letters—very handsome letters—to be collected and arranged . . .’

  I have said I plan to work upon the letters, in time; but that for now, I should like to try this other thing, and at least see how I do at it. I said this to Mother’s friend Mrs Wallace, and she looked at me a little speculatively; I wondered then how much she knows or guesses about my illness and its causes, for she answered, ‘Well, there’s not a better tonic for dismal spirits than charity-work—I heard a doctor say that. But a prison ward—oh! only think of the air! The place must be a breeding-ground, for every kind of illness and disease!’

  I thought again of the white monotonous passage-ways and the bare, bare cells. I said, on the contrary, the wards were very clean and orderly; and my sister said then that, if they were clean and orderly, why did the women in them need sympathy from me? Mrs Wallace smiled. She has always liked Priscilla, she thinks her more handsome even than Helen. She said, ‘Perhaps you will think of charity-visiting, my dear, when you are married to Mr Barclay. Have they prisons, in Warwickshire? To think of your dear face amongst those convict women’s—what a study that would make! There is an epigram for it, what is it? Margaret, you will know it: the poet’s words, about women and heaven and hell.’

  She meant:For men at most differ as Heaven and Earth
,

  But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell

  and when I said it she cried, There! how clever I was! If she had been put to read all the books that I had, she would have to be a thousand years old at the least.

  Mother said it was certainly true, what Tennyson said about women . . .

  That was this morning, when Mrs Wallace came to breakfast with us. After that she and Mother took Pris for her first sitting for a portrait. Mr Barclay has commissioned it, he wants a picture of her hanging in the drawing-room at Marishes for their arrival there after the honeymoon. He has found a man to do the work, who has a studio at Kensington. Mother asked me, Would I go and sit with them?—Pris saying that, if anyone should like to look at paintings, I should. She said it with her face before the glass, passing one gloved fingertip across her brow. She had made the brow a little darker with a pencil, for the portrait’s sake, and wore a light blue gown beneath her dark coat. Mother said it might as well be blue as grey, since no-one was to see it save the artist, Mr Cornwallis.

  I did not go with them. I went to Millbank, to begin my proper visits to the women in their cells.

  It was not so frightening as I had thought it might be, to be led, alone, into the female gaol: I think my dreams of the prison had made its walls higher and grimmer, its passage-ways narrower, than they really are. Mr Shillitoe advises me to make a weekly trip there, but lets me choose the day and hour of it: he says that it will help me understand the women’s lives if I see all the places and habits they must keep to. Having gone there very early last week, to-day I went later. I arrived at the gate at a quarter-to-one, and was passed over, as before, to dour Miss Ridley. I found her just about to supervise the delivery of the prison dinners; and so I walked with her, until this was completed.

  It was an impressive thing to see. As I had arrived there had come a tolling of the prison bell: when the matrons of the wards hear that they must each take four women from their cells and walk with them to the prison kitchen. We found them gathered at its door when we went up to them: Miss Manning, Mrs Pretty, Mrs Jelf and twelve pale prisoners, the prisoners with their eyes upon the floor and their hands before them. The women’s building has no kitchen of its own, but takes its dinners from the men’s gaol. Since the male and female wards are kept quite separate, the women are obliged to wait very quietly until the men have taken their soup and the kitchen is cleared. Miss Ridley explained this to me. ‘They must not see the men,’ she said. ‘Those are the rules.’ As she spoke there came, from behind the bolted kitchen door, the slither of heavy-booted feet, and murmurs—and I had a sudden vision then of the men as goblin men, with snouts and tails and whiskers . . .

  Then the sounds grew less, and Miss Ridley lifted her keys to give a knock upon the wood: ‘All clear, Mr Lawrence?’ The answer came—‘All clear!’—and the door was unfastened, to let the prisoners file through. The warder-cook stood by with his arms folded, watching the women and sucking at his cheek.

  The kitchen seemed vast to me, and terribly warm after the chill, dark passage. Its air was thick, the scents on it not wonderful; they have sand upon the floor, and this was dark and clogged with fallen fluid. Down the centre of the room were ranged three broad tables, and on these were placed the women’s cans of soup and meat and trays of loaves. Miss Ridley waved the prisoners forward, two by two, and each seized the can or the tray for her ward, and staggered away with it. I walked back with Miss Manning’s women. We found the prisoners of the ground-floor cells all ready at their gates, holding their tin mugs and their trenchers, and while the soup was ladled out the matron called a prayer—‘God-bless-our-meat-and-make-us-worthy-of-it! ’ or some rough thing like that—the women seemed to me almost entirely to ignore her. They only stood very quietly and pressed their faces to their gates, in an attempt to catch the progress of their dinners down the ward. When the dinners came they turned and carried them to their tables, then daintily sprinkled salt upon them from the boxes on their shelves.

  They were given a meat soup with potatoes, and a six-ounce loaf—all of it horrible: the loaves coarse and brown and over-baked as little bricks, the potatoes boiled in their skins and streaked with black. The soup was cloudy, and had a layer of grease upon the top that thickened and whitened as the cans grew cool. The meat was pale, and too gristly for the women’s dull-edged knives to leave much mark upon it: I saw many prisoners tearing at their mutton with their teeth, solemn as savages.

  They stood and took it readily enough, however; some only seemed to gaze rather mournfully at the soup as it was ladled out, others to finger their meat as if with suspicion. ‘Don’t you care for your dinner?’ I asked one woman I saw handling her mutton like this. She answered that she didn’t care to think whose hands might have been upon it, in the men’s gaol.

  ‘They handles filthy things,’ she said, ‘then jiggles their fingers in our soup, for sport . . .’

  She said this two or three times, then would not talk to me. I left her mumbling into her mug, and joined the matrons at the entrance to the ward.

  I talked a little with Miss Ridley then, about the women’s diet and the variations that are made in it—there being always fish served on a Friday, for example, on account of the large number of Roman Catholic prisoners; and on a Sunday, suet pudding. I said, Had they any Jewesses? and she answered that there were always a number of Jewesses, and they liked to make ‘a particular trouble’ over the preparation of their dishes. She had encountered that sort of behaviour, amongst the Jewesses, at other prisons.

  ‘You do find, however,’ she said to me, ‘that nonsense like that falls away in time. At least, in my gaol it does.’

  When I describe Miss Ridley to my brother and to Helen, they smile. Helen said once, ‘You are exaggerating, Margaret!’, but Stephen shook his head. He said he sees police matrons like Miss Ridley all the time, at the courts. ‘They are a horrible breed,’ he said, ‘born to tyranny, born with the chains already swinging at their hips. Their mothers give them iron keys to suck, to make their teeth come.’

  He bared his own teeth—which are straight, like Priscilla’s, where mine are rather crooked. Helen gazed at him and laughed.

  I said then, ‘I am not sure. Suppose she wasn’t born to it, but rather sweats and labours to perfect the role. Suppose she has a secret album, cuttings from the Newgate Calendar. I am sure she has a book like that. She has put a label on it, Notorious Prison Martinets, and she takes it out and sighs over it, in the small dark hours of the Millbank night—like a clergyman’s daughter, with a fashion paper.’ That made Helen laugh louder, until her blue eyes brimmed with water and her lashes grew very dark.

  But I remembered her laughter to-day, and thought of how Miss Ridley would gaze at me, if she knew how I used her to make my sister-in-law smile—the thought made me shudder. For on the wards at Millbank, of course, Miss Ridley is not comical at all.

  Then again, I suppose that the matrons’ lives—even hers, even Miss Haxby’s—must be very miserable. They are kept as close to the gaol, almost, as if they were inmates there themselves. Their hours, Miss Manning assured me to-day, are the hours of scullery-maids: they are given rooms in the prison in which to rest, but are often too exhausted from their day’s patrolling of the wards to do anything in their leisure time but fall upon their beds and sleep. Their meals are prepared in the prison kitchen, just like the women’s; and their duties are hard ones. ‘You ask to see Miss Craven’s arm,’ they said to me. ‘She is bruised from her shoulder to her wrist, where a girl caught her a blow, last week, in the prison laundry.’ But Miss Craven herself, when I did encounter her a little later, seemed almost as coarse as the women she must guard. They were all ‘as rough as rats’, she said, and she was disgusted with the sight of them. When I asked her would the work ever be so hard as to drive her to some other occupation? she looked bitter. ‘I should like to know,’ she said, ‘what else I am fit for, after eleven years at Millbank!’ No, she will be walking the wards, she suppo
ses, until she drops down dead.

  Only Mrs Jelf, the matron of the highest wards, seems to me to be really kind, and half-way gentle. She is desperately pale and careworn, might be any age between twenty-five and forty; but she had no complaint to make of prison life, except to say that many of the stories she must hear, upon the wards, were very tragic.

  I went up to her floor at the end of the dinner-hour, just as the bell was sounding that sends the women back to their work. I said, ‘I must begin really to be a Visitor to-day, Mrs Jelf, and I hope you will help me do it, for I am rather nervous.’ I should never have admitted such a thing at Cheyne Walk.

  She said, ‘I will be happy to advise you, miss’, and she took me to a prisoner she said she knew would be glad to have me go to her. This proved to be an elderly woman—the oldest woman in the gaol, indeed—a Star-Class prisoner named Ellen Power. When I went into her cell she rose, and offered me her chair. I said of course that she must keep it, but she would not sit before me—in the end both of us stood. Mrs Jelf watched us, then stepped away and nodded. ‘I must lock the gate on you, miss,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But when you are ready to move on, you must call me.’ She said a matron can hear a calling woman, wherever she is upon the ward. Then she turned and drew closed the gate behind her; and then she fastened it, I stood and watched the key turn in the lock.

  I remembered then that it was she who had had the keeping of me in my frightening dreams of Millbank, last week.

  When I gazed at Power, I found her smiling. She has been three years at the gaol, and is due for release in four months’ time; she was imprisoned there for managing a bawdy-house. When she told me this, however, she tossed her head. ‘Bawdy-house!’ she said. ‘It was a parlour only; boys and girls would sometimes like to come and kiss in it, that’s all. Why, I had my own grand-daughter running in and out of there, keeping it tidy, and there was always flowers, fresh flowers in a vase. Bawdy-house! The boys must have somewhere to take their sweethearts, mustn’t they?—else, they must kiss them in the very road. And if they was to hand me a shilling when they went out, for the kindness, and the flowers—well, is that a crime?’