A Petrol Scented Spring

by Ajay Close

  ‘—we spent most of that summer in each other’s company. Plays. Concerts. Out of doors, visiting ancient sites.’

  ‘But you refused his offer of marriage?’

  ‘It was not me he asked, but a doll with my face. So I disappointed him early, to save him from graver disappointment when it was too late—’

  He has no idea what she means. She is tempted to explain: how insulting it is to be adored by a man who refuses to know you. But already she has said too much.

  ‘—And you? Have you ever proposed?’

  His face stiffens. ‘I have not been in a position to support a wife. My father’s a tenant farmer. I qualified late, before that I worked as a grocer’s apprentice.’ He watches her reaction closely. ‘I had brains, but no private means. I had to find employers who offered board and lodging. Asylums, prisons. My classmates had the money to buy themselves into a practice. They’d sneer at me. As you sneered just now. As any woman looking for a husband would sneer.’

  She flushes, feeling the injustice of the accusation. ‘I was just surprised.’

  ‘That a tradesman who might have sold your kitchen maid a pound of sugar should now lay a physician’s hands on you?’

  She imagines Effie placing her shopping basket on the counter. What is she supposed to say: that his origins make no difference? But they do. To rise so far, exchanging the grocer’s apron for a frock coat: she could believe it of Lindsay, just about. He has a tradesman’s manner. But she cannot picture the doctor in a shop.

  She smiles to herself, finally understanding that, for all the freedom she has lost, she still has a choice. ‘Was it the beasts gave you the idea?’

  ‘The beasts?’ he echoes coldly.

  ‘Calving, lambing.’

  ‘You confuse doctoring with veterinary science.’

  She can cling to her gentility, horrified by this shameless, sordid, locked-in world. Or she can match its shamelessness with her own.

  ‘You don’t want to marry,’ she says.

  He does not contradict this.

  ‘You study the human body, yet deny your own—’

  He looks at her.

  ‘—the bromide.’

  ‘I’ve given it up,’ he says. ‘It dulled the mind.’

  Twenty years ago, Arabella and her sisters played a game they called Grandmother’s Footsteps. One turned her back. Inch by inch, the others crept up on her. When Granny turned to look, they had to appear frozen. The delicious tension worked both ways, the terror of being hunted by stealth mirrored by the terror that the quarry would turn round and find you moving.

  And now, Arabella and the doctor. Hearts in their mouths. Neither sees the other encroaching. Each fears being caught mid-step. Exposure and rejection. The dread of it alive on their skin.

  Three years later, newly married and living thirty yards from the prison gate, I will discover that, for Doctor Hugh Ferguson Watson, professional obligation always comes first. Before love, kindness, even common civility. Will we manage fifteen minutes’ talk a day? Certainly no more.

  How different he is at work.

  When he comes to examine Prisoner Scott in the middle of the day, the wardresses know to retreat out of earshot. After catching his eye once or twice, they also turn their backs. Matron would be scandalised – and delighted – to learn that they are being paid to gaze out of the window, but imagine telling tales, only to discover he is acting with the Governor’s approval. He would skin them alive!

  The prisoner has taken tea on two occasions. He tells the Commissioners he is confident of persuading her to give up her fast, but she will need careful handling. No representative of the outside world is to be permitted inside the women’s hospital. Not chaplains nor prison visitors nor Commission officials. He changes the wardresses at the first hint of intimacy. She has a woman’s instinctual need of friends. If she turns to anyone, it must be to himself. He remembers his classmates in Glasgow havering about the importance of bedside manner, the soothing murmur, the professional advantage of blue eyes. Finally, he has a use for all this.

  They have been talking daily since she arrived, but with a sense that every minute brings them closer to the evening feeding. When she is tube-fed only in the morning, it alters the whole day. They still talk at eleven, when he comes to examine her, but more casually than before, saving themselves for six o’clock – the hour he will return home to me, as a married man. What is it that makes these evenings of theirs so pleasurable? His visible relief, as he sheds the cares of the working day? The stories they exchange? The caffeine flooding their veins? The echo of all the men and women who have raised a cup together since time began?

  All of these, and something else. The golden key to his heart. And, fortuitously, to hers. He is sanctioned by duty. Every glance, every thickening in the air between them, the sudden dryness in their mouths, the throbbing and the vortex, all these symptoms of growing attraction might also be a ploy, the latest twist in their power struggle. How intoxicating it is, this meaning it and not meaning it, at once overcome by feeling and ruthlessly calculating, wide open and helpless and cold-bloodedly controlled.

  What a mistake I made in loving him.

  Sometimes, with the taste of blood still in her mouth from the morning feed, she will be sarcastic. He schools himself to suffer these barbs, but not with too much forbearance. She hates his implacability most of all. If she scores a hit, he shows it, and may hit back. She will reveal herself to him, but only reciprocally. He must woo her, seduce her, for the sake of her health. He won’t use these verbs, even to himself, but what else is he doing? And in order to seduce her, he must also be seduced.

  This is where it starts. Daydreams is putting it too strongly: they’re no more than idle thoughts. Of taking her out of this unclean place. A sea voyage, surrounded by indifferent strangers. Hour after hour to talk, and watch the swell, and see her grow plump on sea air and the sweets he will bring to her lips. And at night, at night . . . Even in the privacy of his bed, he cannot bring himself to picture it.

  My poor Hugh.

  FOURTEEN

  The first day Prisoner Edwards is fed, he stays to talk her through it. When the wardress tilts the cup too much, making her cough, he takes over, holding it to her mouth himself. Next day he is busy and leaves the procedure to the wardress. The prisoner blocks the feeding cup with her tongue. Most of the mixture ends up on her nightdress. The doctor is called back to feed her by tube. This happens again and again. She will only take milk from the cup in his presence. The price of her compliance is his constant attendance. She seems to enjoy provoking his intervention, then sinking into a warm bath of masculine reassurance. Well, he too has a trick up his sleeve. He reports to the Commission that she shows congestion of the stomach due to cardiac dilation. Let’s see her make doe-eyes at him when she’s being fed through her backside.

  I feel for her, this young woman assaulted from both ends by a man who seems now cruel, now kind. She thought they understood each other, that he’d found a compromise between his duty and her convictions, a way she could keep both dignity and health. She nearly died last winter. Doctors are life-givers, their word is second to God’s. When he barks at her to lie still and forces the gag between her teeth, the unfairness stuns her. The needlessness. It dawns on her that he offered her the feeding cup to test her resolve. He has no interest in compromise, only victory. He thinks, because she has given in once, she will always give in. She begins a thirst strike.

  The doctor reports that Prisoner Edwards is fed by tube twice a day and by Enule four times a day. She flushes beforehand, but he talks to her to gain her confidence. She is giving no trouble. There is not the slightest chance of causing her death by feeding as long as she cooperates. If she resists, he will stop and report back. Since the feed is liquid, her thirst strike is irrelevant. She seems set to serve every day of her three-month sentence.

  Against all expectation, Frances Gordon survives. After five days in a nursing home, she is strong
enough to receive visitors. One morning the doctor is summoned to the Governor’s office. The Governor’s face has a yellowish tinge. His eyeballs, too. Some days his skin reeks of last night’s whisky. If he were the doctor’s patient, he would take the pledge.

  ‘Ah, Watson,’ he says, ‘what do you propose to do about this?’

  The doctor takes the newspaper, folded to the relevant page, and scans the contents.

  ‘Well?’ the Governor says, before he has finished reading.

  ‘It’s a suffragette propaganda sheet.’

  ‘It’s not true, then?’

  Even by the Governor’s standards, this is an idiotic question. Of course it’s true.

  The Governor thumps his desk. ‘For God’s sake, man, they’re going to crucify us.’

  The revelation that Miss Gordon’s treatment included injections into the bowel causes national outrage. Headlines in all the papers, letters to the editor, questions in the House. Coming close to killing his patient is as nothing to submitting a lady to this most degrading of obscenities. It does more to win support to the suffragettes than any number of banners and processions. By noon Doctor Ferguson Watson finds himself the most reviled man in Scotland. But he will never admit he is wrong. Not in 1914, and certainly not when he is married to me. Criticism merely strengthens his determination. His first act after leaving the Governor’s office is to feed Prisoner Edwards by rectum.

  The doctor sits at his desk, writing a point-by-point rebuttal of Doctor Mabel Jones’s allegations about Prisoner Gordon’s treatment. As if he doesn’t have enough to do. The Commissioners have his daily reports, what more do they need? Something to release to press and parliament, seemingly. Something tailored to the situation. Face to face with Dunlop he could have said it: you’re asking me to lie. But they’re canny enough to keep him at arm’s length.

  Far from being drugged in prison, Prisoner Gordon arrived at the gaol showing evidence of systematic drugging to induce continual retching. The Enules used to keep her alive contained a very small dose of institutional opium to secure rectal tolerance, as has long been standard practice in hospitals and asylums. At no time was the prisoner stupefied. Nothing but very great patience was observed with her. Her only complaint was that the tube had a bitter taste. She left the prison in a healthy enough state to sit up and talk with Doctor Lindsay all the way to Glasgow.

  It is not easy for him to write this. He is a truthful man. He can only do it in a bitter fury with his employers. He delivers his statement to the Governor, who reads it through and nods. So now they are bound by a falsehood. Evidently this troubles the Governor less than it does himself.

  Arabella does not understand how it is possible to resist, and surrender, hate and need, now cleaving like soft butter, now impregnable as steel. To fight her enemy in the morning, and open her heart to him at night.

  She hates herself for those evening cups of tea. And yet he’s right: they hold less nourishment than a feed. Unless the energy she expends in fighting the tube cancels the calorific benefit, in which case a cup of tea taken placidly is more perniciously sustaining. When did her thoughts become this pendulum: yes, no, good, bad, this, that? She knows when. That first sip. To hold out for so long, refusing to eat or drink, was no small achievement. And she just threw it away, gave him a victory at the very moment when he must have been close to despair. Why did she do it? Who would have guessed that character could be shrugged off like an ill-fitting dress, leaving her naked, a shape-shifter who can take a hundred forms, all of them true to this moment and false to the next?

  She prays, reciting the comforting words she has reached for since childhood. Our Father who art in Heaven. The Lord is my shepherd. I lift up mine eyes unto the hills. The song of songs which is Solomon’s . . .

  Her mind is rudderless, her body assailed by sensations. An oily feeling in her stomach, breathless, dizzy, lightheaded, the pain like a stone in her chest, this fluttering in the base of her throat, her racing pulse and pounding heart. Terror. Elation. Terror. A dropped glass shattered into a thousand shards.

  Such hubris, to think she could endure a prison sentence. The justice of the cause, the debt of loyalty she owes her comrades, the love of family and friends are just words to her now. They belong to the iron-willed Arabella Scott, not to the nameless creature she has become.

  He walks into the hospital. The hinge of his jaw. His Adam’s apple. His blue eyes. He washes his hands. Even immersed in water, the ginger hair on his forearms won’t slick down. The slither of his soaped palms. The fastidious way he plies the linen towel. The thousand fragments reassemble, she can breathe again.

  At school, he basked in the approval of his teachers. Such discipline. No other pupil came close. He was thirty-two when he enrolled at St Mungo’s College to study medicine, a man among boys. His classmates were callow but quick, their wits not dulled by grocery, their minds impressionable as wet cement. More than half his year were born overseas. India, Ceylon, Jamaica, Trinidad. Sureswar had seen the treasures of the ancient world. Madan had watched great actors, heard celebrated orchestras. Phiroga had eaten at the same table as famous scientists and philosophers. His first chance to learn from his peers. Another man would have sought out common ground. Not Hugh. The more he coveted their knowledge, the more he shunned them. But they’re still there, in his head, holding their brilliant conversations, giving their names to new diseases. For a farmer’s son, he has done very well for himself. But when all’s said and done, he is forty years old and treating criminals and lunatics.

  He is capable of so much more.

  A pulse jumps at his temple. Arabella remarks on it. These days she mentions everything she would once have pretended not to notice. Pert, her mother calls women who do this. Meaning, too eager to draw masculine attention.

  He says it is an effect of the heat.

  She supposes the ladies are all walking around Perth in their summer whites.

  He has no idea. He has not left the prison precincts since she arrived.

  ‘Then we are both imprisoned here.’

  Sometimes his neat ears redden when she takes this ironic tone. Today he looks disapproving. Her stomach shrinks, her shoulders brace for a fight.

  ‘You have to start eating,’ he says, ‘I cannot justify foregoing the nightly feed for a cup of tea—’

  She remembers last night, after he had gone. Awake in the dark. Her promise to herself.

  ‘—I am answerable to the Commissioners. They want to see some progressive increase. Even a piece of toast.’

  ‘No.’

  The vein jumps. ‘Do you want me to go back to feeding you in the evenings?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  Thompson, sitting by the window, glances towards them.

  ‘Get out,’ he barks. It has happened a couple of times since he overheard them joking about Maude Edwards. Thompson and Cruikshank depart, closing the door behind them.

  He takes off his frock coat, laying it on the chair, waiting for her to move across the mattress, making space for him to sit down. Under the blanket, she digs her fingernails into her palms. After a moment, he brings the other chair to the bed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks in the voice he uses when they are alone. It takes her like a drug, diffusing through her blood. Her eyes close. She forces them open again.

  ‘I am on hunger and thirst strike—’

  He quizzes his eyebrows. She knows him so well, she can hear his thoughts.

  ‘—This has nothing to do with my bowels, or my menses, or an imbalance of bodily salts. Our interests are irreconcilable. It is in my interest to remember that.’

  ‘You had a bad dream last night,’ he says.

  ‘I’ll have no more cups of tea.’ But she cannot leave the question unasked, ‘You were here?’

  Their eyes lock. An outrageous breach of privacy, and yet, this stirring inside her.

  ‘You spoke in your sleep—’

  Rise up, my love, my fair one, and
come away.

  ‘—you were panting, clutching at the air.’

  Her body burns inside her skin. ‘What did I say?’

  ‘I caught your hands. It seemed to calm you.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  He moves from chair to bed. The horsehair mattress creaks. Her body slides into the dip made by his weight. Four layers of cloth between them, but each feels the other’s heat. He peels back the blanket, unbuttons her gown. Usually she averts her gaze, but today she watches his face.

  How many hundreds of breasts has he seen as a doctor, reading the fatty tissue for clues to the fascinating machine within? Now it is the surface that fascinates, the curve of pearly skin, the rosy pucker that is not rose-like at all, but a delicate shade of coral. His fingers rest on the stethoscope pad. He does not tell her to breathe in.

  ‘Are you often here, in the night?’ she asks.

  Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.

  ‘It’s the one place I can get peace.’

  ‘No more cups of tea,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We are not friends. You have made me—’ careful now ‘—an enemy to myself.’

  ‘I’ll not let you die.’

  ‘You must do what you’re paid to do.’

  His eyes flinch. ‘You think I like it?’ His voice barely a whisper, ‘It’s worse for me than for you.’

  She stares at him, dumbstruck. Did he really say that? She sits up in bed. Worse for him? Disbelief turns to fury. Worse than a dozen hands pinning her to the mattress, MacIver’s fingers digging into the tender crook of each elbow, Thompson’s iron grip on her legs, Cruikshank’s dead weight on her breastbone, Doctor Lindsay’s popping eyes roving across her flesh? Worse than having her head forced back, the tube scraping away the lining of her throat, the gag reopening the cuts in each corner of her mouth, a scalding wave passing through her body as she fights for breath, spasms in her throat, a blinding pressure in her skull? Worse than the chorus in her brain: Oh God, save me! Oh God, let me die! Let me live to kill him with my own hands?