A Petrol Scented Spring

by Ajay Close

  ‘Twice in thirteen months?’ In his relief he forgets his resolve not to goad me.

  ‘So it means nothing? There is no reason why it pops out of your mouth in moments of extreme feeling, this name and no other?’

  ‘It rhymes with yours, it’s a slip of the tongue.’

  ‘It’s a slip of something—’

  The clock on the mantel chimes the hour.

  ‘—your unconscious desires.’

  Contempt crosses his face. ‘Are you a Freudian now? I would advise you to read his tosh before you start bandying words like unconscious.’

  ‘You love her.’

  ‘You’re drunk. Go to bed.’

  ‘You love her – as far as you are capable of loving anyone. It may be a poor enough passion, but it is more than you feel for me.’

  He blinks as if I have hurled the brandy in his face. (It did occur to me, after his gibe about Freud.)

  Why doesn’t he speak?

  He ducks his head, a very slight and, yes, unconscious, gesture. The grown man at a loss, moving aside to show a glimpse of the little boy. I have hurt him. Too late now to say I did not mean it, that I am a little drunk after so many months without spirits, that I said the very worst purely to make him deny it.

  ‘Hugh.’

  He looks at me from a thousand miles away. ‘Don’t feel obliged to get up with me in the morning.’ He turns to leave.

  I think of all the days, weeks, months that have had to pass before I grasped this chance to speak honestly. Any other man would see that the very least he owes me is an honest reply. But not Hugh. ‘All right, then: go,’ I say. ‘Sleep well. I’m sure you will, now you can tell yourself I’m in the wrong: your drunken wife who disgraces you in company. You retire to bed with your frigid passion and think about how much happier you would be with her, how much more dignified she is, how she would never drink a thimbleful of brandy once in seven months. So why isn’t she your wife: did she prefer someone else, or did she just not care for you? Did she find your judging silences uncongenial, perhaps? Tell me, I’m curious. Or do we have more in common than I have guessed? Did she too make the mistake of loving you, and open her heart to you only to discover that your blood runs cold . . .’

  The door clicks shut. I hear his footsteps climbing the stairs.

  It is not the end of us. Marriages are not so easily unmade, or they weren’t then. I have no further contact with the Society for Combating Venereal Disease and Arabella’s name is not mentioned again. But something changes after that evening. A stranger has witnessed our marriage. He has not seen anything like the worst of it, but enough to make me understand that the way we live is shameful. I have tried, however clumsily, to talk to my husband about what is wrong between us, and he has refused. That night I lie awake for hours in my solitary bed, while the pigeon takes its revenge, and by morning I am resolved. Hugh and I are at war. If I pretend otherwise, I have already lost. From that day I stop biting my tongue and make it a point of honour to speak my thoughts. It does not always please him, but I am no longer in the business of pleasing. He finds a thousand ways of fighting back. Many a night he must hear me weeping. An objective observer might come to the conclusion that relations have taken a turn for the worse, but that is not my view. The chief casualties are my uncle and aunt. They can’t understand how a marriage cannot be happy, how I can tolerate that unhappiness being plain for all to see. And I suppose Uncle George takes it hard, being the one who joined us in God’s sight. I regret that, but feel no compunction towards my husband. Whatever the situation, he would have salvaged unhappiness from it. He has had forty-three years to mend his character: what can I hope to do?

  The months pass. The Kaiser abdicates. Germany signs the armistice. The streets are lit again, flags flying from all the buildings. Flu has closed the schools and there are children everywhere, ringing bells and setting off firecrackers. Hugh and I go out to watch the show, and I am struck by a thought no less strange to me now than it was then. We understand each other. Certain sights move us to the same sceptical smile, we share coded glances, even one or two sardonic jokes, and still we are enemies.

  The Governor dies and his widow, my friend, moves away to live with her sister. The following month I see servants unloading boxes outside their old house. When a car draws up I go out to welcome my new neighbour. I will charm the Governor’s replacement before my husband queers the pitch with his sour looks. And if there is a wife to become my new conspirator, so much the better. The last person I expect to see emerging from the car is Doctor Lindsay.

  We clasp hands before it occurs to us that we lack the history to justify such warmth. Still, I am glad to see him home safe from the war, and he is glad of this sign that my husband is sanguine about the, ah, awkwardness of his position. Awkwardness, I ask? The fact that Doctor Lindsay will resume his former duties as my husband’s assistant jointly with acting as Governor. I laugh. After a moment’s uncertainty, he joins me. The more we think about it, the more hilariously unfortunate it seems, and though I did not care particularly for Thomas Lindsay the evening I had him to dinner, from that day onwards we are friends.

  Thomas was no longer the smirking braggart I had met in 1917. He had lost almost all his hair and, even without that, he had watched too many young men die not to feel old. I had never had a male friend, and I have had so many since it is hard to remember all the skills I had to learn. To hide the tenderness I felt. To crowd the would-be quiet moments with words, ideas, pawky observation. Even at my most sexlessly cerebral, to remember that very different feelings might be stirring in his breast. Maybe I should have slept with him, as I would sleep with a fair few others ten years later, but it did not even cross my mind. My youthful indiscretion was forgotten. The minute I discovered my husband did not care, I became the wronged virgin wife. I was not about to throw that away on a hasty encounter with Doctor Lindsay. And besides, my sexual longings were still for Hugh.

  White bread and prunes are back in the shops, but food is still scarce. Thomas has the groundsman make an allotment in the prison village garden, and since our strips are side by side, it can happen that he and I are hoeing or sowing at the same time. Who could begrudge us passing the time of day? We talk about potato blight and cabbage root fly, the meals we will eat if our tender shoots survive, the dishes we have not tasted since 1914, and how the salty rations they ate in the field hospital had all the patients begging for water. I tell him Hugh cannot abide the smell of fish in the house, so I have had to reconcile myself to a lifetime without kippers. We muse over returned soldiers with both legs blown off who seem to be living cheerful lives; and others, shell-shocked but intact, who have not spoken in three years. I wonder if Thomas agrees with Hugh that the influenza epidemic is nature’s way of purging the weak? Gradually it becomes clear that what interests us both is medicine, the bloody detail no less than the discovery of new cures. He lends me books that I read in my bedroom. I do not consciously keep this new hobby from my husband, but nor do I discuss it with him.

  In the autumn of 1919 Hugh is appointed deputy commissioner of His Majesty’s Board of Control. I hope we might move to Edinburgh, but his fiefdom is lunacy, and all Scotland’s criminal lunatics are held in Perth. Still, the promotion eases the friction between him and Thomas, a hostility that has nothing to do with me. Hugh has no inkling of the hours I spend with the Governor. There is no one to tell him out of friendship, and no one who would take such a risk maliciously.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Uncle George caught influenza in 1918. He was one of the lucky ones. Like everybody in Perth, I know of at least twenty others who did not survive. Hugh treated George and several of Doctor Stirling’s patients and took it for granted that he was immune. Now it is high summer and his lungs are creaking. He stops eating. Headache. Sore throat. Pains in his bones. So far the prison has been spared. He gets me to send word to Thomas through Mrs Hendry: our house is to be quarantined. Meat, milk, vegetables, eggs should be left on the
doorstep. No one is to cross the threshold. In or out. Mrs Hendry goes home to her sister. I could go to stay with Aunt Nellie, but then everyone would know that I am no more intimate with my husband than our cook. So I stay. For the first time in our marriage Hugh and I are alone. I become his servant, companion and nurse.

  I am terrified he will die and take me with him. How could I not be? And yet I feel strangely calm. I know we are doomed, and I trust we are not. A miracle will save us. But before then, at his lowest ebb, he will turn to me and beg forgiveness and we will be reconciled. The illness will do what our stubborn wills cannot. Make us one flesh, man and wife.

  It doesn’t quite happen like that.

  He is a difficult patient, demanding, always at me to smooth the sheet under him or plump up his pillows, or remove his disgustingly clogged and sodden handkerchiefs. The virus makes him sweat. Years since I have touched his hand, and now I have to remove his soaking pyjamas, lean across his naked chest (hairless, quite different from my imaginings), work my hands under his rump. He snaps at me when I try to feed his arm into a fresh jacket: what’s the point of clean clothes if he is dirty? So I must bed bathe him too. What a performance I make of it, scared of being too intrusive. He has to tell me to wash his genitals. The first I’ve seen. I take his scrotum too roughly, have no idea the foreskin can be pulled back. We are both close to tears by the time I have finished. But I think about it later, that peeled pink prawn in its nest of copper hair. He is too weak to get out of bed. I try helping him up, but he must weigh two hundred pounds. When his bowels move, I manage with the same hand that twitched my skirt when I curtseyed to the King.

  Day and night I sit by his bed. Help him to sips of water, wipe his brow with a cooling cloth, spoon mutton broth into his mouth. (Not so bad for a first attempt at cooking.) His aching eyes cannot focus on print, so I read to him. Articles in his medical periodicals, Hugh correcting my pronunciation of the long Latinate nouns. After ten days of this I am dog-tired but symptom-free. He sleeps for hours at a stretch, only to wake the instant I rise from my chair. Once I get as far as my own bed and fall into a dead sleep. His terrified cry rouses me. When I stumble through the darkness to his bedside he clutches my hand. His breathing labours, his brow burns, the sweat courses down his face. He does not respond to questions, yet I think he draws some comfort from my crooning reassurance. At first light his temperature drops and he starts to shiver. Dragging the blankets from my bed makes no difference. His teeth chatter, his moans distorted by uncontrollable shaking. I tell him what I propose to do, give him the chance to forbid me. Who can say whether he understands? I take off my clothes and crawl between the sheets, strip away his saturated pyjamas and give him my body’s heat, skin to skin.

  How can he shiver? It’s like a jungle under the covers. Hot, damp, aromatic with his smells and secretions. To think we have been married three years and I’ve never tasted them.

  The shivering fit passes. His body relaxes. He lies, weakened but awake. I sense his growing awareness of my presence, his body’s awareness. I understand the basics of anatomy and am not completely astonished by the change in him in that place.

  I touch it.

  He groans.

  I know he is delirious. It would never happen were he in his right mind. I could claim an equal confusion, sleeplessness and emotional strain affecting my judgement. It’s not true.

  The bliss of easing my aching spine in a stretch. My belly rubs against him. His eyes open. Recognition in his face. I place his hand on my breast, watching his mouth. Yes. My lips on his ear, making him shudder. The beard he has grown in bed is silky. This soft spot under his jaw, the weathered skin of his throat, his plump white chest. His nipple a bead under my tongue. The wiry hair on his belly. An unfamiliar scent coats the roof of my mouth, stronger as I move down. Goodness. All I have to do is breathe on it.

  I push down the bedclothes, straddle his thighs.

  It hurts. The shock of it makes me recoil. A mistake. I can’t inflict this on a sick man, or on myself. But as I withdraw he grips me with surprising strength. Struggling, I try to prise us apart. He pulls me in, forces us together. Involuntarily I grunt, which seems to madden him, spurring him to move more urgently, grip more tightly, push deeper into me, again and again, until he gives a great shuddering cry and lets me go.

  Next morning the sweats and the shivers are gone. I assume he has slept. I spent the night in my own bed. His eyes are closed when I come in. I pick up his dirty pyjamas, lay a clean pair over the chair, bring him a fresh glass of water. I’m creeping out again when he opens his eyes.

  ‘Stay.’

  ‘You sound better.’

  ‘Somewhat.’

  ‘Could you manage some breakfast?’

  He looks at me. ‘Last night . . .’

  My heart gives a guilty jump. ‘I shouldn’t have got into bed.’

  ‘I didn’t want to.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s no excuse.’

  ‘You didn’t know what you were doing.’

  ‘I should have had more self-control.’

  ‘You were delirious.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  He can’t want me to tell him.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  I stare at the wooden headboard. ‘You said you would make me pay.’

  ‘Pay?’

  ‘Suffer for . . .’ I think better of this. ‘You were confused.’

  ‘And what was I doing, when I said this?’

  I look him in the eye. ‘You know.’

  He looks away.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say.

  ‘All right?’ he echoes, as if I am the source of his disgust.

  ‘I’ll make you some toast.’

  But he won’t leave it at that. ‘Are you marked?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Bruised?’

  ‘A little bleeding.’

  He looks pained. It occurs to me it is my pain that matters here. My pain, my bleeding, my disgust.

  He closes his eyes as if he cannot bear the sight of me. ‘I’ve never . . .’

  ‘Lain with a woman,’ I say, ‘or forced her?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘Not even Arabella?’

  He seems genuinely shocked. And as suddenly as I blamed him I feel nothing. Just the need to get this over with. ‘You said her name. Then you cradled my head against your chest and wept.’

  At last I have shamed him.

  ‘I will take that toast,’ he says.

  ‘With some beef tea?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I’ll get Mrs Hendry back from her sister’s. She’ll bring it to you.’

  What should I do? Fetch him his breakfast, wash his sticky crotch, as if nothing has happened? Shout, call him names? It was something we did between us. The regret, too, is a shared burden. The shame.

  I walk across town to the North Inch and sit watching the river, let the merciless thoughts empty out of my mind. Swallows draw their criss-cross lines above the water. It occurs to me I could be pregnant. A sin to inflict such a father on a child. And yet I have this shaky feeling in my chest, as if I’m teetering on a high wall and could fall to either side. Despair. Joy. We will live away from the gaol, in Craigie. He can afford it. We will find Mrs Hendry another position, and I will hire a girl, the eldest in a large family, good-natured and tireless and used to babies. In a year or two we will make a little brother or sister. His children will be midwives to a new Hugh, playful, tender, grateful.

  By the time I next speak to him, he hates me.

  He has got himself dressed, dragged himself to his surgery in the prison, drawn a blood sample, isolated the plasma. Negative. My relief comes out in a laughing gasp: then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t . . . He cuts me off. The test shows he is not infected. It proves nothing whatsoever about me. And if I am carrying a child? Strangely, this has not occurred to him. The aversion in his face will stay with
me forever. In that unfortunate eventuality, he says, the child would be tested. Depending on the result, he would urge me strongly towards sterilisation.

  I nod, yes, trying to salvage dignity if nothing else. We have reached a limit. Not of anything in him. I see now that the key has always been in my possession. The power to say enough.

  ‘What did she do?’ I ask, ‘your Arabella? Did she curse you, strike you, spit in your face, tear at you with nails and teeth—?’

  His face flames. He tells me to hold my tongue, but I talk over him.

  ‘—Did she call you devil, scoundrel, sadist?’ He flinches, I’ve hit the mark. ‘Is that what you want from me? Does it seem to you the proper response? What you did to me last night, that animal satisfaction taken by force, was nothing to the daily cruelty you have inflicted on me since we married—’

  The idea is born in that moment, but who can say how long I have been pregnant with it?

  ‘—I am going to see a solicitor to have our marriage annulled on the grounds of non-consummation—’

  I watch him weigh the damage this will do his reputation. And so much worse if he contests the annulment, fighting me through the courts, obliging me to tell the world what happened last night.

  ‘—or you will pay for me to train as a doctor, and I will remain your wife in name but practice overseas.’

  ‘You haven’t the application.’

  How I would like to strike him. I can almost feel the whip in my hand, see the line it would cut across his cheek.

  ‘Don’t underestimate the strength of my desire to get away from you.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  It took seven years of study to qualify as a doctor, and yet, looking back, the change seems instantaneous. My every waking moment had been spent trying to guess my husband’s thoughts, now the burden was lifted from my shoulders, the worry lines vanished from my brow. I had reason to be thankful for our uncommunicative life: all those unreproached hours with my nose in a book. I smiled more readily, walked with a new purpose in my step.