A Petrol Scented Spring

by Ajay Close

  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?

  TWELVE

  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.’

  THIRTEEN

  Three wardresses now sit with Prisoner Scott. Jeannie Thompson, Florrie Cruikshank and Lizzie MacIver. MacIver’s the malicious one. The most easily, and dangerously, bored. She likes to talk, and she doesn’t censor herself on the prisoner’s account. Thanks to her, Arabella learns about the screamer (‘Gone now and good riddance’), and the new one with the heart, Miss Maudie (she cups a breast, pulls a lewd face). Though initially diverting, this chatter soon becomes oppressive. There is no end to MacIver’s grievances. The smell in the wardresses’ sleeping quarters. The laziness of the other relief staff brought in from Dundee. Matron’s favourites and her pet hates, her efforts to cheat the three of them out of overtime payments. After a few hours of this, Arabella is desperate. Being in gaol is bad enough, without being locked inside her gaoler’s head.

  MacIver asks, ‘Wha’s on with wabbit Maudie the nicht?’

  ‘Jessie Cole,’ Thompson says.

  ‘Lucky besom. Maudie’s a good girl.’ MacIver puts on a Cockney accent borrowed from Marie Lloyd, ‘Yes doctor, no doctor, oooh doctor—’

  They laugh.

  ‘—echt hoors sleep on watch, then aff hame: that’d do me.’

  ‘If Doctor Watson didnae catch you.’ Thompson is less afraid of MacIver than the other wardresses.

  Cruikshank says, ‘He’s gone by ten.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrang. I’ve had him creep up on me past midnicht, when I’m resting my een.’

  ‘I wish I’d seen that.’

  ‘It wasnae funny at the time, I tell ye.’

  MacIver raises her eyebrows, ‘Ye think he’s putting in the overtime wi’ Maudie?’

  ‘Oh aye,’ Thompson says, ‘Maudie’ll be the dawtie noo.’

  MacIver moves her hand in an obscene gesture. ‘He must like ’em flat-chestit. You cannae say he’s no had a keek at the goods.’

  Cruikshank glances at the prisoner. ‘Wheesht!’

  ‘She needs to know.’ MacIver turns to Arabella, ‘You want to watch Miss Maudie, or she’ll steal the doctor frae under yer neb.’

  Abruptly they fall silent. Doctor Watson glowers from the doorway. She is glad to see him, glad to catch the whiff of tobacco on his coat and hear his baritone voice after hours of feminine jabber, but she is mortified that he has heard the wardresses’ innuendo. She would like him to rebuke them, but what could he say that would not be repeated behind his back, to sniggers and suggestive looks?

  He asks if the prisoner has slept.

  She interrupts Cruikshank’s reply, telling him she has not lost the power of speech since their last meeting. Nor has she gone deaf. He may address his questions to her.

  There is no softening as he turns his gaze on her. He is still sulking about her defiance this morning.

  ‘I can’t breathe, never mind sleep,’ she says. ‘Four of us – five now – inhaling and exhaling the same air. Is this a new torture?’

  He tells her he’ll have no suicides in this gaol.

  She almost laughs. Is that what he thinks she was doing?

  ‘You swallow neither food nor water, then you hurl yourself at the window.’

  ‘Did it not occur to you I might just want to look outside?’

  ‘I can’t read your mind.’

  Does she say it? And I can read yours so easily.

  The wardresses exchange glances. She notices him noticing, his upper lip tightening.

  ‘Send them away.’

  ‘You must be watched.’

  ‘Then you watch me.’ She looks up, into his face. ‘Just for an hour. So I can breathe more freely.’

  He has many more pressing things to do in the next sixty minutes, but he says, ‘One hour, then they return.’

  ‘One of them returns—’ Her voice so sly she hardly knows herself.

  He hesitates.

  The wardresses are watching their knees. Perhaps to stop themselves from smirking.

  ‘—you have my word I won’t move from the bed.’

  ‘And you will take a cup of tea?’

  So that’s what he’s after.

  ‘One cup of tea,’ she says.

  Because really, what does it matter? And she gets to sit up again. The sheer physical relief, after so long on her back. The miracle of stretching her spine, raising her arms up and out, all the little bones crunching with pleasure. To pull her shoulders back and look him in the eye.

  ‘They gossip about me?’

  ‘As you heard.’

  ‘And about my other patients?’

  ‘Hardly at all—’

  A pause while each hears again the ribald voice. Ye cannae say he’s no had a keek at the goods.

  ‘—you’ll just have to tell me yourself.’

  Silence.

  ‘Or not,’ she shrugs, ‘as you choose.’

  ‘It is not a situation of my choosing.’

  ‘But what is, in life?’

&nb
sp; ‘Plenty, for those with the wealth and social standing.’

  ‘And the right sex.’

  ‘Aye, women can always marry into money and position—’

  They smile to themselves, pleased by this fencing.

  ‘—How is it you’re not married?’

  She looks up, surprised. ‘I could not decide between my many suitors.’

  He thinks she means it, so now she has to clarify.

  ‘I have received one proposal, if you can call it that.’

  ‘What else would you call it?’

  ‘A case of mistaken identity.’ She waits for him to laugh. Perhaps the joke is too feminine. ‘We met at a Liberal Party meeting in Edinburgh. Mr Lloyd George was speaking. Muriel and I had chained ourselves up so they couldn’t eject us when we asked our questions. The stewards had to unscrew our seats from the floor and carry us out, seats and all. It was quite a comedy. Frederick took exception to the men who lifted me, though in the flurry of the moment I don’t think they knew where they’d placed their hands. He waited with me while they fetched the wire-cutters, to make sure there were no further outrages against my person.’

  ‘And then?’ A strangulated note in his voice. He needs to know everything, and at once. Does she recognise this as jealousy? Is that why she says, in a maddeningly inconsequential tone,

  ‘We went for a cup of tea—’

  The suddenness of their connection. This stranger who stepped out of the crowd taking her arm so naturally to escort her across the street.