A Petrol Scented Spring

by Ajay Close

  We are standing above the lair where my grandparents are buried. I hope he will find it touching, their bodies lying together for eternity.

  He frowns at the inscription on the polished granite stone. Donella Anna. Grandmama’s name, and Mama’s, and mine. ‘I thought he married again?’

  To Catherine Stewart Allan, a very old lady now. She lives in Birkenhead.

  ‘Did they not agree?’

  Now he has drawn my attention to it, it is odd that Grandmother Kate did not have him buried in a double plot in England, where she could join him one day. I shrug and say I never knew him.

  He nods at the date, 1898. ‘You were eight years old when he died.’

  Each time he sees me I am different from the picture he holds in his head. If he could pin it down to my eyes or nose or chin he could adjust his expectations, but it’s a matter of . . . innocence, for want of a better word. Like looking into a dark pool and discovering it is a puddle. He drags the unwieldy burden of his feelings towards me and finds something disconcertingly other reflected back. Yet there are things about me that please him greatly. My smallness, always holding myself very erect so I seem queenly at a distance, until my face tilts up at his. The sparkle in my eyes. That way I have of being absolutely open to him one minute, and remote the next. He is learning how to bring me back. The look, the tone of voice, that will make me yield to him. And he loves the airy, exhilarating fact that I was born in America.

  He notices I am never hungry. He can’t stop trying to fatten me up, bringing me fiery purple radishes, plump gooseberries, warm brown eggs. I tell him, love fills my stomach, but still he urges the fork to my lips. For a long time I tolerate it, because it seems to give him pleasure, but I don’t understand. If I comply, he’ll have no reason to tempt me, the game will be over. Am I meant to eat, or not? Finally I tell him: stop.

  And glimpse a side of him I have not seen before.

  We are in the drawing room at Balhousie Bank. Aunt Nellie has had Agnes bring us a light supper of shortbread and cheese. A great treat. I know my uncle has had his eye on that cheddar, so I have good reason to refuse. And it’s true: love has quite banished my appetite. The doctor cuts a slice of cheese, raising it to my mouth, and I have the queerest sensation, a stirring as I anticipate his fingers touching my lips and, in the same moment, violent revulsion. ‘Don’t,’ I hiss, mindful of Uncle in his study next door. He persists. I grab his hand in both of mine, but he’s too strong for me and, dropping the cheese, he pinions my wrists in his painful grip, forcing them down into my lap, while his free hand seizes my jaw. I have a bolus of fear in my throat and, at the same time, this feeling, as if he has slit me open from breast to belly, this craving for . . . I don’t know what.

  Hilda walks in.

  I almost laugh at the surprise on her face. Though it’s no laughing matter, of course.

  ‘Something in my eye,’ I say, ‘thank you, Hugh, it’s gone now.’

  One Sunday he asks me to tea at his house. For propriety’s sake, Hilda comes too. Her eyes bulge at the nearness of the gaol. Like living under a great black cliff. The first time I saw the cell blocks, the fierce blue sky gave them a diabolical glamour. Today the sky is dirty-white. The gaol looks like a factory. And so it is, I suppose. A place to turn the raw material of crime into despair.

  The doctor’s house is opposite the Governor’s. Smaller than the Governor’s, but clean and adequately proportioned. He asks me if it will do, and I say very well, sliding my eyes away from Hilda’s satiric look. He tells me the furniture belongs to the prison. He has not bothered to make changes, having no interest in such matters. He understands women feel differently, I shall have money to replace anything I don’t like. I nod, and say that’s very generous, but all I can think is please let us not live here.

  When he goes to fetch the sandwiches and scones prepared by his housekeeper, Hilda whispers ‘There’s still time to call it off’. For a moment, I imagine it. The scandal, and relief, and the lifelong regret at my own cowardice. I love him. If I’m the only one of my season of debutantes to be marrying into a prison, well, let it be a matter of pride. This is when the idea of helping him in his work first comes to me. Aesthetically, yes, living next to a prison is depressing, but he is not depressed, having a role here. Instead of fussing over swatches of wallpaper and upholstery fabric and net curtaining to veil the dreadful view, I could be of genuine use to him. It’s my first lesson in wifehood: selfish unhappiness can be turned to shared joy. But my future husband does not see it that way. Prison is no place for a woman. There are women staff and inmates, I say. And you are neither. Hilda is watching with her cat’s eyes. I pour the tea and bide my time.

  He says no, but I keep asking. Is it fair to expect me to live by a gaol, virtually within its grounds, and have no notion of what goes on inside? There are prisoners in cells, he says, what more do I need to know? A tour, I suggest, so I can meet the staff and acknowledge them if we pass on the street. He doesn’t want me hobnobbing with wardresses: I have no idea of the kind of people employed, some of them little better than criminals themselves. But that’s just it, I say! I have no idea, and ignorance leaves me prey to worry. My days will be that much longer if I cannot picture him with my mind’s eye. After a couple of weeks of this, he gives in. It’s not unprecedented, the Governor’s wife has been shown around. And a little knowledge now will limit the need for explanation later. What else are we going to talk about when he gets in from work?

  When the day comes I dress carefully. Remembering the whistling soldiers around the patriotic barrow, I take no chances, choosing my longest skirt and a shirt from the days when the suffragettes had us all dressing like men. Hugh seems startled by my appearance but, when I enquire, says I look perfectly suitable. The gatehouse reminds me of a cardboard fort of Gordon’s I coveted when we were children. The guard eyes me suspiciously. Hugh takes out a heavy ring of keys, explaining that every door must be unlocked and locked behind us again. It seems nothing to cross from freedom to captivity, a single step, but as the iron-clad door slams shut behind me, a weight presses on the back of my neck. I watch the grim set of Hugh’s lips as he turns each key. First anticlockwise. The rusty clicking of the tumblers, the grating sound of metal dragged across stone, that awful echoing clang as the door slams shut again. Then the clockwise turn. There is violence in this sequence, the brute force of the men held in the gaol, and the equal and opposite force required to constrain them. It excites me, but frightens me too. The inner yard is completely deserted. We cross the stone flags, skirting a black octagonal tower, its lancet-shaped recesses holding not glass, but stone. I wonder if the prisoners are watching us from the cell block windows. A pain, at once dull and precise, declares itself behind my eyes. In through a locked door, across a corridor, and out to an empty yard marked with three concentric circular paths. Mowed grass. Queer little wooden sentry boxes for the guards. Walls within walls: the inner topped with metal spikes to keep the inmates away from the perimeter. The weight on my neck spreads to my shoulders. My eyes ache. If only I could sit down . . .

  He tells me this is one of two exercise yards. Each prisoner is entitled to thirty minutes a day. At the appointed hour, eighty-eight inmates walk round and round these paths, exactly nine feet apart, hands behind their backs, pacing and stopping at the barked command of the guards. How desolate it is. I look up at the leaden clouds, so hot and still. In the distance, a roll of thunder. Hugh looks at me with the same startled expression he wore when I arrived, then says it’s going to rain, we should go inside. More unlocking and locking. More creaking and scraping. However unfair it is to expect him to be conscious of an activity he performs fifty, sixty, times a day, his automatic gestures disturb me. For the first time, I consider the obvious fact that he must be hated by the men locked up in here.

  It is cooler in the block. Stone corridors run off the lobby in three directions, each sealed by a barred gate. There is a roof over our heads, yet it feels more like outsi
de than inside. As if whoever built this place had tried to get rid of every sentimental association with shelter.

  ‘What’s that?’ I point through the window at a two-storey building.

  ‘The women’s hospital,’ he says.

  Carbolic mingles with a smell of damp, and something more disgustingly animal. He won’t expose me to contagion by letting me see the patients on the ground floor, but there is an empty ward above. Climbing the stone stairs, I hear another roll of thunder, nearer now. Hugh shows me into a long room lined with unmade beds. The door clangs shut behind me. The key grinds in the lock. The pain behind my eyes throbs. A vibration high in my nose, like needing to sneeze, and yet not. Since the gatehouse we have not seen a living soul. This ward is just one more unpeopled space, but different enough to trigger the thought that we should not be shut in a room together.

  I turn to find him looking at me. The pain is worse, a metal filament spearing me between the eyes. I sink down on one of the mattresses, waiting for him to ask what’s wrong, am I unwell? But he just stares at me. Outside the window the sky has darkened. The approaching storm feels like two thumbs pressing on my eyeballs. The filament twists. Lie down, he says. But it doesn’t help, the walls turn around me, my vision flares and dims. I sit up again, holding out my hand so Hugh can pull me to my feet, but he misunderstands and pushes me back down onto the bed. So ill I can hardly speak. Lie still, he says, his hands on my shoulders, his weight forcing me. A flash lights the shadowy room. The thunder directly after. I start to struggle. It’s like drowning, his weight pushing me down, and some force in me, some buoyancy, bringing me back to the surface. Now he’s lying on top of me. His eyes as blind as the windows of that tower. I say his name. His fingers buried in my hair, his lips kissing my brow and cheeks. A great thrill rips through me. My sore head, my shrieking sinuses, are nothing to this. His hot hands and fervid lips, his body hard on mine. All the old feelings awaken. The cleaving in my chest, and below. The fusing of our two bodies, moving together, the key turning, tumblers clicking . . . Stop! A voice in his brain. Quite clearly I hear it. At last our eyes meet. His head rears back, his weight lifting from me. He apologises. Offers a hand to help me up. On my feet again, I squeeze his fingers, whisper ‘Soon’ in his ear.

  He loves me.

  HILDA

  All day every day. They jaw about nothing else. Lilies or roses; white satin or silk; Highland or morning dress; the nineteen-fourteen Heidsieck versus the nineteen-fifteen; partridge or ptarmigan; oysters or lobster; until Hilda is ready to scream who cares?

  ‘It’s the most important day of your sister’s life, so try not to spoil it, Hilly, will you?’

  Dodo came south in late September. A brisk peck on the eyebrow from her beloved at the railway station? Or did he shake her hand? Two and a half months is no time at all to arrange a society wedding, m’dear. The guest list stands at three hundred and fifty, and rising. The extended Atkins and Richmond clans, all the debs Dodo came out with, and their families, and the matrons from Mama’s season (but not the spinsters: too depressing), and Pa’s business chums, and Gordon’s Cambridge pals who are home on leave, and the people we know in Devon, and anyone the Doc cares to invite, of course. Some third parties (Hilda, for one) might find all this expense rather bad taste in the middle of a war. Which just goes to show how wrong a girl can be: holding a really splendid wedding is the least we can do to lift everyone’s spirits at this dreadful time. And it’s hardly your sister’s fault that she has fallen in love when the Kaiser’s being so beastly. After which the conversation reverts to corsages, cake recipes, court trains, and trinkets for the bridesmaids.

  Still, they’re back in London until the New Year.

  Uncle George will do the honours in Saint Cuthbert’s, a cod-Medieval cod-cathedral with compound pillars and cherubs and stations of the cross and every shade of veined marble, and the most hideous artsy-craftsy copper lectern, and a clock on the wall just like a railway station! It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone (except Hilda) that all this Anglo-Catholic, smells-and-bells palaver might not be to the taste of a Kirk-christened farmer’s son.

  The bridegroom arrives with Aunt Nellie a week before the wedding and is given a scratcher in Earls Court Square, while Dodo is stowed round the corner at Mrs Curtice’s private hotel (because heaven forfend they should spend a night under the same roof before being chained in matrimony). The Doc happens to be bunked across the hall from Hilda, so of course she’s going to make the effort of getting to know her future brother-in-law.

  He pretends not to hear at first, but she knows he can’t be kipping, he’s only just turned in. She taps again, soft but persistent, ready to continue for as long as it takes. The door opens a crack. You should see his eyes pop at her nightie, though only a couple of buttons are undone. He’s quite the buck in his shirtsleeves. There’s some tedious argy-bargy about the lateness of the hour and won’t-it-wait-till-morning, but in the end: open sesame.

  She stalks the room, peering out of the window to see what sort of view he has, fingering his hairbrushes (wood, not silver-backed), unscrewing and sniffing his bottle of bay rum, opening his top drawer and finding – crikey! – the most enormous sporran she has ever seen. It weighs an absolute ton when she puts it on over her nightie. Though she can see he’s not happy, he raises no objection, the spoilsport. She says they should get better acquainted. There’s been no time today, and it’ll be twice as frantic tomorrow. He must be simply done in, poor him, padding the hoof round London from Earls Court to Kensington to Regent Street and back. She has noticed no one asks his opinion about the arrangements. The guests getting blotto on all that pricey fizz, and him a bun-strangler. He smiles to himself in a way Hilda finds most discourteous. As if he knows her game, when she doesn’t have a game, or rather, she has several, and she hasn’t yet decided which to play. There’s the game where he thinks she’s trying to seduce him, and she tells him he couldn’t be more wrong. And the game where he admits to the collywobbles – or even to second thoughts – and she tells Dodo. And a similar game where she doesn’t tell because they become fast friends, and Dodo never guesses that Hilda’s is the invisible steadying hand on her marriage. And the game where he tries to kiss her and she shoves him away and remains coldly aloof ever after, and Dodo never knows why.

  He tells her he’s glad not to be running the show. And your kin, she says: how do they feel about bending the knee at a nuptial mass? Two of his brothers are fighting in Turkey. The rest of the family is needed on the farm, and the school can’t spare his teacher-cousin Jeannie for the three days she would have to be away from Glasgow, so his only guests will be a couple of retired schoolma’ams, a poobah from the prisons hierarchy and one Professor Browning, at whose name he seems to think Hilda should bow down in awe. Four guests. Hilda surprises herself by taking the hump. What on earth will people think? Does Mama know? She must have had an absolute fit. And now the penny drops: he’s a Russian vine, a fast climber, and he doesn’t want the peasants dragging at his roots. Won’t his chums in Perth hold it against Dodo – he does have chums, doesn’t he? How’s he going to keep her entertained in that dead-and-alive hole? She can’t spend every afternoon with Aunt Nellie. He’s going to have to get himself promoted toot sweet, engineer a move to fashionable Edinburgh. She closes in, walking her fingers up his shirt front: Dodo may worship the ground he treads on at the minute, but bored wives have a habit of looking elsewhere for amusement. Or won’t he mind that, if he’s going into the thing quite heart-whole?

  He turns away from her and opens the door. Very rudely. But she smiles and wishes him a gracious goodnight.

  Hilda has never known Dodo so dizzily distrait, but even the bride-to-be notices that relations between her fiancé and her sister have cooled. And they were pretty tepid to begin with. The next afternoon, between ordering the hothouse roses and rehearsing the page, she draws Hilda aside. ‘You haven’t been telling tales, have you?’ What tales, Hilda would like to kn
ow? ‘It’s not funny, Hilly.’ Ah, but it is. So funny that Hilda wouldn’t dream of spoiling the jest too early. Not that she has positively decided to tell him, but she may allow herself some delphic hinting when Dodo is around.

  The day dawns, shiversome but bright. The groom, Uncle George, Aunt Nellie, Pa and Hilda have brekkers in the little morning room on the ground floor, so the servants can rig up the wedding feast. Everything else has been done. It feels positively skivey, sitting here with no tasks to discuss. Mama has disappeared to Mrs Curtice’s to steady Dodo’s nerves. Hilda has been warned to steer clear. ‘Keeping a lookout for Gordon’ is the preferred euphemism. The Engineers have given him a five-day pass. The Doc takes another slice of toast. Aunt Nellie passes the marmalade. No one can think of anything to say. ‘The lull before the storm,’ Uncle George intones, which only makes the silence more deadly. The doorbell rings. A maid patters down the hall.

  ‘I say, is this the wedding party?’

  ‘Is that Argemone?’ Aunt Nellie asks, while Hilda shrieks ‘Billy!’ And after that she has the most whizzing time. Billy takes her up to dress in her moss-green velvet, and tells her about the Front, and the wounded Tommies always ready with a quip, and the awkward Frenchies, and the Fritz who was so bamboozled by the shelling he didn’t know he’d walked into the enemy’s camp, and how the Major was going to shoot him as a spy until Billy talked some sense into him. Hilda is laughing so much she doesn’t hear Aunt Nellie tapping at the door, so Pa marches upstairs to bellow that if they hang about for one more minute they’re going to be late.