A Petrol Scented Spring

by Ajay Close

  It made me a better wife.

  I passed the entrance exams and went away to Queen Margaret College in Glasgow. I had been so lonely in Perth I had started to shun my own face in the mirror. I would watch people strolling on the South Inch, couples gazing into each other’s eyes, mothers and daughters, groups of friends, and wonder what on earth they found to talk about? But now I had an occupation, a subject of endless interest to my fellow students, all of us attending the same lectures, asking the same questions, afraid of or in love with our teachers, desperate to impress. It was like being young again, like the carefree years I spent with Bill. I was so rich with company, once in a while I craved my old solitude. Putting aside my books, I would walk through the Botanical Gardens, delighting in the squirrels that took acorns from my hand, the waxy leaves and trumpet blooms in the humid air of the Kibble glasshouse. There was a sweet terror in thinking how easily I might have missed all of this, the frail web of chance that had saved me.

  At the end of my first term, I wept.

  *

  I am sitting in the parlour of our house in Perth, poring over Osler’s Principles and Practice of Medicine. The recess is half over. In a fortnight I will start my second term in Glasgow. Mrs Hendry has gone to her sister’s for Hogmanay. There is a knock at the door, a warder with a message from my husband. I am to join him in the prison hospital.

  Hugh is dressed in a white back-to-front gown and surgical gloves, his hair hidden by a white cap. He explains that the wardresses he has trained to assist him are marking the holiday with their families. I am to follow his orders without question. The experience should prove instructive, allowing me to compare the cutting of living flesh with the cadavers I have dissected in Glasgow.

  The patient is a convict, though now is not the moment to ask his crime. A hairy, suet-faced man of around fifty, he lies on the operating table, dumb with fright. The stink of rotting flesh catches in my throat. The left leg is gangrenous, so swollen the skin is tight. There is an open sore the size of a half crown on the ankle, the source of that stench. Three of the five toes are black, and so shrivelled they look charred. The foot and ankle are purplish, as if stained with bramble juice. Towards the calf, the staining turns nicotine brown. Gently I touch its fiery heat, then the blackened big toe, which is quite cold. Hugh watches me closely for a few seconds, then asks ‘Where would you make the incision?’ Glancing up at him, I catch a glint of intent behind his neutral expression. Like a cat watching a bird. Avoiding the eyes of the terrified patient, I try to read the limb as I would a page in a medical textbook. At first my mind is blank, my only thought the unfairness of being tested on a subject I have not yet studied, but slowly this gives way to professional interest. It occurs to me a prosthesis will be required. Didn’t old Tom Waters, Pa’s insurance colleague, have a wooden leg? I remember watching its outline through his trousers.

  ‘The leg should be severed below the joint,’ I say, with more confidence than I feel.

  ‘How far below?’

  ‘Six inches.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Better function.’

  He nods, and for a moment I think I have passed the test.

  ‘So you’re proposing to retain dead tissue. Do you think you can work miracles, bring it back to life?’

  I look at him.

  He raises his eyebrows, ‘Well?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘so how is the stump to heal?’

  ‘It should be cut above the joint,’ I say.

  ‘How much above?’

  ‘Two inches.’

  Since I have answered correctly at last, Hugh sets me a new test:

  ‘How will you prepare it?’

  This I know. ‘A tourniquet above the amputation point.’

  He points to a leather strap. A terrible suspicion takes root in me. My heart picks up speed. Surely he would not take such a risk with a patient’s life? I am fourteen weeks away from complete medical ignorance. Even under his supervision, it would be madness. I look into his face and all doubt is dispelled: he means for me to carry out the procedure.

  The convict is watching us. I tell myself I can refuse, it would be the responsible course. It is my husband who is in the wrong. But if he is looking for proof that I lack the necessary temperament, if he wants an excuse to stop paying my fees, it would be playing into his hands. I have no choice. The exigency is oddly calming. My pulse steadies. If I glanced in the mirror, would I recognise this woman, the resolute look in her eyes? In the years ahead this transformation will become second nature. All doctors do it. Some of us find it so intoxicating, we never return to our fallible human selves.

  ‘The patient must be anaesthetised,’ I say.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Chloroform.’

  Hugh indicates a trolley behind me. On it stands the bottle, along with a dropper, a wire-framed nose mask, a box of gauze and another of Gamgee tissue. I fit the gauze to the mask and reach for the dropper. I know this look of Hugh’s. I put down the dropper and pick up the Gamgee, but for the life of me I cannot think what to do with it.

  ‘Do you want to give your patient chloroform sores?’ he asks.

  I cover the face and eyes with Gamgee, leaving an aperture over the patient’s nostrils. Hugh’s expression says it is not the neatest job he has seen, but he refrains from comment. I open the bottle and fill the dropper. Having no idea how much is required, I squeeze a couple of drops onto the mask and look at Hugh, release another two, check his reaction, continuing in this way until he tells me the chloroform will have evaporated if I don’t get on with it.

  I place the mask over the patient’s nose. After a minute or so I tap his swollen leg. He yelps.

  ‘Try not to cause the patient unnecessary pain,’ my husband says, ‘it will be several minutes before the anaesthetic takes effect.’

  We wait. I can tell from his face there is something else I am supposed to do.

  ‘Might it be a good idea to keep the incision sterile?’ he asks acidly.

  Asepsis. I can picture the word in my textbook, but not the paragraph that surrounds it. ‘The instruments?’

  ‘Have been boiled in the autoclave.’

  ‘Gown and gloves—’

  He gives me a pitiless look. I rack my brains.

  ‘—the limb. It must be washed and shaved.’

  The right answer, thank God. Hugh passes me an open razor.

  Shaving the leg takes care and concentration. When it is done I feel more in control. I wash my hands, dress in the surgical gown, hat and mask laid out for me, and pull on a pair of rubber gloves.

  This time when I tap the swelling, the patient does not cry out.

  Hugh hands me the knife, taking a step back from the table, as if I need reminding that the responsibility is mine.

  I move the blade up from the knee, not quite touching the patient’s skin, until my husband’s face shows a subtle change. ‘Here?’ I ask, to make absolutely sure. He nods. Heat flashes through me, soaking my chest and armpits under my clothes, and yet my fingers are like ice. I have never cut into living flesh. Even now I hope Hugh will relent, but of course he does not. I take a deep breath and, saying a silent prayer, press down with the point of the blade.

  In the dissecting room, the first time I cut into a cadaver, I thought of carving a cold joint of undercooked beef. Living muscle is raw meat, a very different matter: warm, where the other is cold, and elastic, not stiff, harder to cut, shifting under the pressure of the knife. It bleeds, forming a red pool in the incision.

  I stop, fearing the tourniquet is not tight enough, testing the strap. I can sense Hugh’s impatience, the near-irresistible urge to snatch the knife out of my hand. I almost want him to. But he limits himself to moving round to the other side of the table and applying a swab to the seeping blood while I hack away. I spot a glimmer of yellowish-white amid the scarlet pulp. The neurovascular bundle. What I do next will leave the patient relatively comfortable or condem
n him to a life of pain. The stakes are too high for pride.

  I tell Hugh, ‘We have not yet studied the nervous system.’

  ‘Cut above the amputation site,’ he says, ‘sew the endings individually into surrounding tissue, away from large blood vessels and areas of motion.’

  I find the stitching a relief. Not that it is particularly easy, but at least I am repairing something. Hugh continues to swab the wound, allowing me to see what I am doing. We work together, head to head. When did we last stand this close?

  ‘The quicker the better,’ he says, ‘or are you trying to make the patient lose as much blood as possible?’

  When the nerves are secured, I resume my butchery. Towards the back of the leg I proceed more carefully. Soon enough I find the vein, the walls thin enough to show its red cargo, and the whitish artery, fat as my little finger.

  ‘Tie off the blood vessels,’ I tell him, as if he were my nurse, and to my relief he does as I ask. How deft he is. How often I have cursed his coldly pragmatic soul; now I could weep with gratitude. I cut through the artery without a qualm.

  Hugh passes me the amputation saw.

  If there is an art to cutting through muscle, the severing of bone is a matter of brute force. I have found it stressful enough amid the gallows humour of the dissecting room. Now I am mutilating the skeleton of a living man. Even with my husband keeping the muscle out of my way, it is a struggle. The bone wobbles under the blade. The saw jumps and catches, I have to pull it free and relocate the groove I have made before continuing. Back and forth I push. Hugh must see how hard this is for me. Would it hurt him to take the saw back and finish the job himself?

  After five minutes’ hard labour I feel a telltale loss of tension under the blade, but my ordeal is not yet over. The rough bone must be filed smooth, the flaps of muscle arranged to pad the stump. Hugh directs me in this, his instructions clear and concise. Finally, the stitching: catgut for the internal stitches that will dissolve over time, black silk on the surface. How tough human skin is, how hard I have to press before the needle breaks through. Hugh watches in silence. As a woman, I should know how to make a neat job of it.

  Doubling the last stitch, as I would if finishing a seam, I cut the silk. Air rushes into my lungs. I must have been holding my breath. When I look down at myself, the white surgical gown is mostly red.

  This has been the longest, most traumatic half-hour of my life, and yet, washing my hands in the sink, I feel strangely lightheaded. I have successfully amputated a leg. Which of my fellow first years can say the same? And now a new thought comes to me. If Hugh has tested my resolve, he too was put to the test. What did it cost him to stand and watch, to trust me?

  It is almost midnight when we return to the house. I make a pot of tea and a plate of buttered toast. St John’s clock strikes the first of its twelve bells. Raising our teacups, we toast the New Year.

  In that moment I am glad to have kept to myself what I have known for sixteen months. Not, as hitherto, because the knowledge gives me power over him, nor out of fear – because he would never forgive me for knowing – but because allowing him his secret is the one thing I can do for him, my last gift as a wife.

  The morning Hugh recovered from his bout of influenza, I knocked at Thomas’s door. He was both pleased and alarmed to see me there in plain view of anyone passing. He picked up a trug and we made for the garden to harvest his tomatoes. How was Hugh, he asked? Excellent news, Mrs MacNeill had also recovered, it might be the virus had mutated to a less deadly strain. The look on my face silenced him, but he showed no surprise at my question. He had been waiting for me to ask ever since we became friends.

  ‘The first time I set eyes on you, I thought: I’ll be damned, he’s made an honest woman of her.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  On July 10th 1914 the King and Queen arrive in Perth to open the town’s new infirmary.

  The streets are lined with loyal subjects dressed in their gayest clothes. Brass bands and pipers, High Constables and Atholl Highlanders, children belting out the National Anthem. Floral garlands, streamers, flags and banners, three decorative arches, a temporary fountain, a dazzle of gas and electric light – in daytime, in high summer! Weeks of preparation, to be glimpsed in a blur as the royal car speeds past. Earlier in the week, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Where are we today again? Every place looks the same when it’s painted gold and festooned with roses. Though something catches the eye. That banner unfurling from a second-floor window. We implore Your Majesty to stop forcible feeding in Perth Prison. A missile flies towards the open-topped car. What the devil? It is twelve days since Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and the pregnant Duchess of Hohenberg were shot dead in Sarajevo. Princess Mary stoops to retrieve a tennis ball slit and stuffed with messages. Free Arabella Scott! Fifty extra policemen have been drafted into Perth, but they’re not quick enough to confiscate that placard. Visit Your Majesty’s torture chamber in Perth Prison! A woman dressed in black waits in the crowd at County Place. A bundle of suffragette literature strikes the royal windscreen. She darts forward, trying to climb on board the moving car. In the front seat, the Chief Constable grabs hold of her. She staggers. The crowd gasps. The chauffeur jams on the brakes so suddenly that the car slews in a half-turn. The King finds himself face-to-face with her. How still it is suddenly. George V, ruler of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, Emperor of India, shrinks in his seat. Such an ordinary man, with his ruddy-whiskery face and his swimmy eyes that slide away from hers. ‘Free Arabella Scott!’ The police are pulling at her. She screams, lashing out. The crowd hisses. She is dragged away, only just saved from a lynching.

  The vote campaigners of Glasgow and Edinburgh understand only too well why the government has chosen Perth for the feeding of suffragettes. Many have husbands and children, some have jobs. They can’t be uprooting themselves to this backwater, it’s practically in the Highlands! But nor can they let the King come so close to the barbarity perpetrated in his name without making some sort of protest. And Perth is not at all what they expected. The crowds, the lights, the quiver of anticipation in the air. So gratifying to find the natural history museum, public library and swimming pool all closed for fear of arson. Such fun to saunter around town in a gang with a policeman at your heels, to cast significant looks at the post office or use a tape to measure the prison wall and, glancing over your shoulder, find the constable noting it all down. The town is alive with rumour. That police spies have infiltrated the protesters, that some spectacular act of violence is planned, that government agents provocateurs are plotting to discredit the movement. It’s all so thrilling. How can they go back to their indoor lives? Dundee Suffrage Society rents a third-floor flat in a tenement overlooking the prison. It becomes the headquarters for those who stay on. They soon learn to recognise the Governor, the two doctors and Matron. You should see them jump when their names are called through a speaking trumpet.

  The rallies at the High Street Port and the nightly vigil outside the prison gate attract crowds of three thousand, but always of a certain sort. A plan is devised to reach the more respectable citizens. Groups of soberly dressed women seat themselves in churches and cinemas. No tricolour ribbons, nothing to give the game away. When the minister begins the intercession, when the heroine is kidnapped by her wicked guardian, they rise to their feet.

  Thomas thought prison doctoring would be a quiet life. Who cares whether convicts are healthy? But now Perth Prison is front-page news. One evening, after opening a parcel from his sister, he smooths out the brown paper it came wrapped in and draws a man and a woman in a circle, with lines radiating outwards enclosed by a larger circle, like the spokes of a wheel. In his small, neat hand he labels each tapered box. Newspaper readers (scandalised by rectal feeding). Herbert Asquith and his cabinet, at war with – three more boxes – female suffragists, Ulster Protestants and the House of Lords. McKinnon Wood, the Secretary of State for Scotland, whose wife it is said has not shared his bed since becomi
ng president of the Shetland Suffrage Society. John Lamb, his Machiavellian secretary. The Chairman of the Prison Commission (a nice man, many leagues out of his depth). Matron, nursing her sense of grievance. The Governor, slandering the doctor to his masters. Flag-wavers cheering the royal car. Startled worshippers in the Episcopalian cathedral. Courting couples in the Kings Cinema. The nightly rabble at the High Street Port. The hymn singers outside the prison gates and their reluctant audience: the sleep-deprived wardresses quartered along Edinburgh Road. He names a compartment for each one: Florrie, Jeannie, Lizzie, Bella, Greta, Catherine, Mary Jane. Their lives a round of drudgery, petty injustice, marital wallopings, the bairns they’ve watched die, the hungry days when the bastard rolls in blind drunk. And now they’ve to put up with those snifty bitches from Edinburgh preaching about equality and going home to have their bloomers washed by some poor slavey. And aye, all right, the world’s no fair, but how come ah’m always on the rough end o’ it?

  All this electricity in the atmosphere. And at the heart of it, though apart from it, two people.

  The wardresses are flagging. They have not had a day off for five weeks. Just the one afternoon to see the King and Queen. The day shift can get away in the evening but the minute they show their faces outside the gaol the crowd starts booing. Not just those Edinburgh bitches. Locals too. No knowing when you’re going to stop a stinking egg. Not that they feel much safer in the gaol. Having to stand like stookies on the landing outside the women’s hospital. They can hardly say no to the doctor, but if Matron catches them they’ll rue the day.

  Florrie Cruikshank cracks first. She is meant to be getting the new one, Prisoner Arthur, into her nightgown. They have been in the cell twenty minutes and she is not even out of her boots. Some cheek, belting out Scots Whae Hae when she’s in here for trying to blow up Rabbie Burns’ hoose. Florrie sings over the top of her. Green Grow the Rashes-O. That shuts her tattie-trap. But only for a wee minute. Then she starts into a lecture about forcible feeding. ‘As infamous as the sjambok of the South African prison or the bastinado of the Turkish torture chamber. That man who calls himself a doctor is a blood brother of the Medieval skin-flayers, the ghouls of the Inquisition, the witch doctor who sticks red-hot needles into his victim’s brain . . .’ On and on in that cockapentie voice until Florrie lifts her hand and catches her a great whack across the face. You should hear her yell, fit to raise the dead. But there’s no consequences. And even though Thomas is glad for Florrie’s sake, he knows it’s not right. If they can skelp a member of the quality like that, they can get away with murder.