A Petrol Scented Spring

by Ajay Close

  ‘Andrew? He was driven mad by love.‘

  Dot frowns and Nellie knows she is thinking of Norman Atkins and what he would have to do, how far he would have to go, to separate her from her wits.

  ‘It is common enough in this place,’ Papa says, ‘though not so common as those sent mad with grief. Men and women. Otherwise we keep to our separate maladies. Women go mad with birthing, and praying, and looking in the glass. Men with dissipation, or being swindled. Or with pride, or the shaking sickness, or sunstroke, or self-hate, or sitting hour after hour without moving, or moving too excitedly.’

  ‘Or with drunkenness,’ Nellie says.

  Papa nods. ‘It’s carried in the blood.’

  Nellie’s dread returns.

  Dot too looks stricken. ‘But we’re not mad, Papa.’

  He seems to search her face for corroboration. ‘I thank God for it,’ he says at last.

  Dot is looking at Nellie. She is the elder sister. It’s her duty to ask the uncomfortable question.

  ‘Are you saying your madness waited within you all the years you were well?’

  ‘So they tell me, old girl.’

  The attendant brings his lighted spill to the lamp by Papa’s elbow.

  ‘Fiat lux,’ Papa says.

  Nellie would not dream of lighting a lamp before seven o’clock in late spring. It is a question of not wasting God’s good gifts. And Uncle John might think the less of her – Uncle John, who has said and done nothing since they arrived, unless she counts studying his boots. He, too, had reason to wish an end to his brother’s spendthrift ways. Silk waistcoats and neckties. Jewelled stick pins. Kid gloves so soft they made her shiver. To Papa these were necessities. It occurs to Nellie that the asylum, with its Rococo sideboards and gilt-framed panoramas, its Ormolu clocks and Persian rugs, is perfectly suited to his tastes.

  ‘Are you happy here, Papa?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You don’t feel imprisoned?’

  ‘No more than any spy,’ he says in such a reasonable tone that her mind flails like a landed fish, trying to find the sense in his words.

  ‘Why spy, Papa?’

  He leans forward confidentially, ‘They’ve not told you?’

  She shakes her head.

  Again he brings a forefinger to his lips, ‘I’m here in disguise, to ascertain how these pour souls are treated—’

  She looks at him, fascinated, appalled.

  ‘—We care for all our subjects. Even lunatics.’ His lower lip shines wetly through his mutton-chop moustaches. ‘The Queen sent me here on a special commission.’

  ‘No, Papa,’ she says gently.

  ‘My wife, the Empress Victoria.’

  Dot giggles, but Nellie does not think he is joking. And neither does Dot, deep down.

  ‘You’re still married to Kate Richmond, Papa.’

  ‘Oh yes. Her too—’

  Uncle John heaves a sigh as if wearily familiar with this line of talk.

  ‘—I have five hundred wives.’

  ‘Papa.’ Dot shoogles his hand as if to shake some sense into it.

  ‘Don’t be jealous, Donella,’ Papa says, kissing her full on the mouth.

  TWENTY

  Syphilis.

  That is why he won’t lie with me. He believes I have inherited my grandfather’s taint. That if we coupled I would pass it on to him, and our child would be a cretin. His heartless silence has been husbandly discretion, protecting me from his terrible knowledge. The price of my innocence was to be his lifelong burden: I would never need to know, so long as I posed no danger to others, so long as he kept me chaste. But he is not equal to the task. He cannot watch me every hour of the day. Already I have tried to conceal my friendship with the Governor’s wife. And so it is better that I know.

  My God, I say.

  He presses my head into his chest.

  It’s overwhelming. The shock. The grief. Being held in my husband’s arms. The smell of him. My complete misunderstanding of every day for the past two months. Not sadism but compassion. How my bitter thoughts have wronged him.

  At the same time I’m thinking, he never met my grandfather. How does he know for sure? A second-hand description of a man’s eyes and he relinquishes all his hopes. His hopes and mine. What gives him the right to decide? I’m not a child. My judgement is as sound as his, and I don’t believe it. I am not a carrier of disease. This crisis is a convenient conduit for his anger. Why he should be angry I don’t know, but I feel it, even as he seems to comfort me.

  When I question his diagnosis, his arms drop to his sides. It’s not just the disparity between my grandfather’s pupils. His grandiose delusions, the ingenious reasoning to explain his presence in an asylum, his companion’s stamping gait, the Superintendent’s policy of lodging like with like: it all points in the one direction. He reminds me that syphilis is his specialism. There are only a handful of people in the country whose knowledge equals his. But if I will not take his expertise on trust, if I wish to know beyond doubt, there is a test. He can do it here, at home. All he requires is a blood sample.

  No. I won’t take his test. His jaw grits as always when I defy him. For a moment I think he might try to force me. But then his lips crimp in that sadder-but-wiser half-smile. And this time I don’t beg his forgiveness, or rack my brains for some way of regaining his favour. When he retires for the night, no conciliatory word has been spoken by either of us.

  How have I lived to the age of twenty-seven without noticing the monotony of each day? Waking to the smell of Mrs Hendry’s porridge. Finding my husband already reading at the breakfast table. I do not ask if he slept well, having heard his snoring from the other side of the house. It amazes me how quickly meals pass without conversation. Ten minutes later he is gone. The Governor comes home for lunch, but Hugh eats at the prison. It is less disruptive to his work.

  Why not just take the test? I think about it. My husband coming in to tell me the result. The joy in his face. His open arms. The birth of our children. The months of mistrust overwritten by decades of family life. I picture our postponed wedding night. Approaching the bed in my virginal lace, reaching under my filmy nightdress and plunging a knife into his self-righteous heart.

  That is why I don’t let him test my blood.

  When I speak of symbolic meanings, he averts his face in disgust. The world is so straightforward to him: itself and nothing else. And for me, always this doubleness. My own vision and his, each as real as the other, and entirely incompatible. He would take mine from me, crumple it in his fist like a piece of paper and toss it into the fire. Gone! That’s what taking the Wassermann test would mean to me: seeing the world through his eyes forever. And why not, I hear Mama say, if you love him? Because I thought he loved me, head and heart, body and soul. But he loved a convalescent girl, weakened by long illness. He loved the way I bent in his hands.

  It’s not just myself I have to think about, but Mama and Pa and Gordon and Hilda and Uncle Tom’s family out in Canada, and Grandmother Kate’s sons, and Aunt Nellie and Uncle George. All of us with the same sentence hanging over us, the possibility that a filthy disease is eating into our brains. My husband hopes it is. Yes, really. For him Grandmother Kate’s news came as a reprieve. Why else was he single at forty-two in a country awash with unclaimed women? Oh no doubt a part of him was bitterly disappointed, but how easily that loving, loyal part accepted defeat. I look for him in my husband’s eyes, that are always sliding away from mine. In his hands, that never touch me. In his voice, that never speaks my name. What has happened to the man who serenaded me in the honeysuckle-scented garden?

  The sheets hanging on the line are more intimate with him than I.

  He eats as if his life depended on it. And there is nothing to eat. Mrs Hendry makes the most of the prison farm, and her sister’s eggs, and I bring back whatever I can find in the shops, but one day’s corned beef and boiled greens is indistinguishable from the next. And still he puts on weight. It seem
s an act of will, as if he is burying the boyish man I fell in love with, walling his lean bones in a prison of flesh. His face is quite different now, his once-expressive features trapped in great slabs of cheek and forehead. His eyes have shrunk, his mouth is a withholding slit. He gets the barber to shave his hair. Those coppery filaments that once caught the sun are now just pig’s bristle. He looks every one of his forty-three years, moves with the same blunt, brutish walk as the warders. Is it to punish me, this systematic destruction of his beauty? It’s too late now: even if he consented, even if that iron self-control were to relax for one night, I will never know the man I fell in love with. And still I wonder how it would feel to be pinned under this other’s weight. To have his bull’s head bear down on me, that tight mouth opening to mine. Is a man’s fat softly giving and smooth to the touch like a woman’s, or coarse and hard? I imagine it, alone in bed at night. Stroking the stubbled back of his neck, kissing those neat ears, finding the man under the layers of flesh. Even his smell is different now. Not that I am allowed near enough to inhale his skin, but sometimes when he has left for work and Mrs Hendry is safely occupied downstairs, I investigate his dirty linen. When I bury my face in his shirt, I can still smell the soap Mrs Hendry used to wash it, and the wind that blew it dry, filling the sleeves that punched and flailed so wildly I envied their abandon. Deep in the cloth is my husband’s own animal scent. Not the salty, smoky, earthy smell I remember from Pitlochry, but sweeter, slightly rancid, like preserved meat. The smell of our unhappiness.

  It’s surprising how little trace of himself he leaves in the bathroom. Pa’s whisker-flecked shaving lather was part of my childhood, but Hugh’s toothbrush and razor are always stowed in their leather case. His habits are regular. He evacuates his bowels before breakfast, leaving the window open to clear the air. He bathes on Tuesday evenings, never leaving so much as a stray hair in the bath. His towel is always neatly folded and quarantined from mine. I once found a fingernail paring on the linoleum and keep it, wrapped in a handkerchief in my top drawer, knowing there is a good chance it is Mrs Hendry’s.

  He makes his own bed every morning. Much as I would love to shed my clothes and roll in the last of his warmth, I do not trust myself to replace the covers with undetectable precision. But there’s the wardrobe with his Harris tweed suit, his heavy winter coat, the kilt he wore to marry me, a Homburg I have never seen on his head, and a cheap sack coat far too small for his swelling girth that must date from his student days. Am I wrong to search his things? Are we not one flesh, joined in the eyes of God and the law? But still I start at a tread on the stairs. Mrs Hendry. Carefully I shut the wardrobe door. I cannot be caught in here. Better to come out with my head high. She nearly jumps out of her skin. She must know we are not like other married couples, but we all pretend. Several days pass before I manage to search his chest of drawers. Shirts, collars, handkerchiefs, ties, flannel pyjamas, socks, woollen drawers. I’m hoping for a journal, with keepsakes slipped between the pages: an ox-eye daisy I plucked and threaded through his buttonhole in Pitlochry, a ticket from the concert we attended at the City Hall. Nothing. Until I think to look beneath the newspaper used to line the drawer and find an envelope. Inside it: a twist of hair the same colour as my own.

  One evening he announces that we are going to Ayrshire so I can meet his parents. We will stay two nights on the farm where he grew up, and spend an afternoon with his old teachers.

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘You have more pressing business here?’

  ‘You know I haven’t. I just wonder that we’ve not been before – have they not been curious until now?’

  ‘It has not been convenient. Of course they wish to meet the woman who married their eldest son.’

  ‘The mother of their grandchildren?’

  ‘Unless you’re cruel enough to rob them of that hope.’

  ‘Isn’t it more cruel to let it persist?’

  ‘Disabusing them would require an explanation. They would never forgive you.’

  ‘Because it’s my fault?’

  ‘If you wish to have this argument again, I do not.’

  ‘Then don’t – let us not. Can we not find some compromise? If we were . . . close, as other husbands and wives, I’m not saying I would change my mind, but I might. If I could feel I was granting a request made out of love. There are ways of coupling without bearing children.’

  ‘Not ways practised by decent folk.’

  ‘But if needs must?’

  ‘What need?’

  ‘My need not to be entirely sacrificed to your needs.’

  ‘I don’t have time for this.’

  ‘No time for your wife?’

  ‘For arguments about nothing. You may have inherited a disease. There is a scientific test which would end the uncertainty. You refuse to take it, depriving us of the chance of a normal married life. However you try to dress it up, those are the facts.’

  ‘Your facts.’

  ‘God in heaven!’

  ‘And if I take your test, and I carry the disease, what then? Will you let me into your bed, if we take precautions to ensure you’re not infected?’

  ‘I didn’t marry to bed my wife like a whore.’

  ‘Even if I wish it?’

  ‘Are you offering to take the test?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then this conversation is finished.’

  As the train approaches Mauchline I begin to understand why we have not been before. He says the soil is perfect for grass, the belted Galloways that graze here produce the richest milk in Scotland, but it is working land, I shouldn’t expect the picturesque. I say it looks pleasant enough, so very green. He tells me it is not so pleasant in the driving rain, the prevailing conditions three hundred days a year. But the sun is shining today, I point out. He replies that I needn’t look for shade: every tree has been felled to make way for pasture and to prop up the coal mines under our feet. Everything I say seems to irk him, but refraining from comment is taken as looking down my nose at the place. I tell him I’ve always wanted to visit Burns’ county. He says the man was a waster and a drunkard. Better he’d never set pen to paper, than to allow every Scotch sot to claim a poet’s soul.

  And yet, when we are met at the station by his brother, John Neill, there is no mistaking his pride in me. From the way he hands me up, you would think I’d never sat in a trap before. John Neill dusts the seat with his cap. It’s embarrassing, and funny, but I sense that laughter would never be forgiven, and so I play the gracious lady and feel a perfect ass. And that, more or less, is the tone of the visit. Meal times are a torture, with everyone cocking their pinkies and cutting their meat into absurdly dainty morsels. I have a vision of Hilda breaking wind at table just to see the looks on their faces, and have to stifle my amusement in a cough. How can I tell what they are really like? If they’re behaving half as unnaturally as I am, they’ll be unrecognisable to themselves. John Neill is painfully reserved with me. Disapproval or awe, I cannot tell which. His other brothers are still fighting overseas. I wish we had saved this first visit until their return, when I might have glimpsed the mischievous laddie in Hugh, the puller of pigtails and looter of nests. To his younger sisters, he is a stranger to be addressed with respect. And, oddly, to his parents too. They treat him like the factor, suspending their conversation when he enters the room. When we’re alone, I ask if he minds this. To my surprise, he doesn’t take umbrage at the question. His father is a proud man, he says, and proud of his eldest son’s achievements, but the fact remains that he opposed the decision to become a doctor. Hugh will never be forgiven for proving him wrong.

  This exchange takes place in our room. When Mrs Watson first shows us in, my heart leaps at that double bed. I cannot believe he has let this happen by accident. Surely this is our chance to undo all the unhappiness? The first night he sleeps on the floor. Or rather, does not sleep, and spends the next day wincing and rolling his shoulder. The following night I insist on taking my turn on
the wooden boards, and of course he will not permit this, with the result that we share the bed, placing the bolster as a barrier between us. This time I am the one who does not sleep, but lies all night pressed against the wall of feathers, listening to his breathing.

  On our last day his cousin Robbie arrives at the farm, to be greeted with teasing and backslapping and even some friendly rough-housing from Hugh’s young nephew, all of it very different from the stilted cheer the Watsons have shown to my husband. Robbie is a burly dairyman with thinning hair and snaggled teeth, but likeable enough. When he offers to take me up to the coppice where Hugh and his brother are shooting rabbits, I readily agree. On the way, we talk about Hugh’s nephews and nieces, the red-haired girls who speak a private language, John Neill’s eldest laddie who has just been up to Glasgow Fair. Grinning, he says I should ask Hugh about his visit to the fair. ‘Oh yes?’ I say, ‘do tell’. And after a little more persuasion, he does.

  So my husband was once a boy like any other. God help me, it gives me hope.

  Later, when Robbie stays to keep John Neill company, and Hugh and I are walking back to the farm, I make the mistake of joking about it. Hardly even a joke: one smiling reference. He stops dead on the path. At first I think he is annoyed with his cousin, and perhaps he is, but this incandescent anger is directed at me. What sort of hypocrite do I take him for? Oh yes, he knows what I’m insinuating. Do I honestly think he’d set such store by me taking the test if he was already poxed?

  I stare at him, too bewildered to defend myself.

  And at last my face convinces him I haven’t the faintest notion what he is talking about.

  He moves off, ahead of me. It seems entirely possible we will reach the farmhouse in silence and never allude to this again. But after a while he allows me to catch up and, once we’re walking in step, he starts to speak.

  Twenty-three years after he met the tinker girl at Glasgow Fair he was a doctor. Not yet qualified, but competent enough to work in Riccartsbar Asylum. He had been assisting the Superintendent in the male wards for a month when the women’s wing went down with rubeola. It was the first time he had been in that side of the building, though he had seen the female lunatics gathered on the benches outside. Like old men in skirts, wizened and balding and hairy-chinned, smoking their clay pipes. He had wondered once or twice where the younger ones were?