A Petrol Scented Spring

by Ajay Close

  Prisoner Janet Arthur − real name Frances Parker − is thirty-nine. Short, curly-haired, charming to those she wants to charm. People tend to remember her voice. Not just because she can’t pronounce the letter R. Where the well-spoken Englishwoman swallows her words in a throaty drawl, she booms. Because she’s so small? To counter the rather sweet impression of her mangled diction? Whatever the reason, Doctor Watson finds it every bit as aggravating as the wardresses.

  She is no fonder of him. He almost killed her lover, Ethel Moorhead, never mind poor Fanny Gordon. And Lord alone knows what he is doing to Arabella and Maude. But at least they are convicts. Prisoner Arthur has not even been tried and he is depriving her of visits and letters, forcing the feeding tube on her. She won’t stand for it. Is there due process of law in this country or not?

  It is old-fashioned influence, not the law, that will save her. But not just yet. Janie Allan, suffragette organiser and Glasgow shipping heiress, lets it be known that Prisoner Arthur is the niece of a very distinguished person, is determined to die in prison, and the government can expect trouble if she does. The authorities neglect to pass this warning on to the Governor. They are slow to uncover the prisoner’s true identity. Events overtake them. Mistakes will be made.

  The prison has acquired another suffragette, Helen Crawfurd, a hunger striker who was liberated from Glasgow and failed to return as licensed. The doctor is not unduly concerned. She is drinking water and could do with losing a few pounds. The Governor feels differently. Four of them now! He doesn’t have the staff. Especially with Doctor Watson insisting on such unnecessary precautions to make sure Prisoner Scott comes to no harm. The gaol’s resources are taxed to the limit. Prisoner Edwards signs an undertaking not to engage in further militant action and is liberated. A day later Prisoner Crawfurd is freed. Anyone can see the Scottish authorities are losing their enthusiasm for force-feeding suffragettes − anyone but Doctor Watson, that is.

  The Commission suggests Prisoner Arthur’s own doctor might be allowed into the gaol. (Doctor Watson won’t hear of it.) If the prisoner shows any resistance, the case should be considered unfavourable for feeding. This broad hint, too, he ignores. Something about her imperious manner rouses his thrawn streak. Who does she think she is? Then there’s the target of her crime: Burns’ cottage in Alloway. He’s an Ayrshire farmer’s son who has risen by his wits: how can he not take it personally? She was carrying a bomb. Such a masculine form of destruction. Fire has its own horrors, the low crackle, the inexorable creep building to a roaring, leaping, all-consuming apotheosis, but there is something recognisably womanly about its fury. The bomb is cold. One minute everything is normal. Then boom! He’ll be damned if he’ll let her out. Not even when she falls off the chamber pot in a dead faint. Since she refuses to open her mouth, he uses the nasal tube. When this goes badly, he resorts to nutrient suppositories. Preceded by enemas. The wardresses have seen it done so many times that he leaves the procedure to them.

  ‘You dinnae recognise me, do you?’ MacIver says.

  Prisoner Arthur looks surprised. ‘Have we met before?

  ‘Have we met before?’ Philp mimics.

  But MacIver’s the ringleader. ‘No socially, as you might say. We werenae introduced. But I ken you, Miss Parker.’

  The third one, Cruikshank, laughs, ‘Oh aye, she’s paying attention the noo.’

  And she is. This could ruin everything. At this very moment her brother might be opening a telegram. They could let her out within the hour, and the past five days will count for nothing.

  ‘Do your superiors know my name?’

  ‘No yet,’ MacIver says, ‘shall I tell them?’

  The craven one, Philp, says, ‘Mebbe, mebbe not . . .’

  They are playing with her as a cat torments a mouse. She tells herself they cannot help it, it’s in their nature.

  ‘Still no recognised me?’ MacIver says in that needling voice, ‘aw, you’ve hurt my feelings. I thought I’d a made a wee bittie o’ an impression.’

  Cruikshank shuffles her chair closer to the bed. ‘Go on: hae a guess. It’s no sae hard.’

  Another prison, but which? ‘Dundee . . .? Craiginches?’

  Philp smirks at her colleagues. ‘Nae idea.’

  MacIver puts on a parodic toff’s accent. ‘My darling Fan, I haven’t slept a wink since hearing. When I think of your dear curls lying on a grimy mattress . . .’

  Ethel. For a moment she is afraid they have caught her, but no: this was a couple of years ago. She remembers now. They discussed it after she was liberated. ‘You were the one she trusted with her letters.’

  The mood turns. Suddenly there is nothing playful in their cruelty.

  ‘I was the one she bribed.’ MacIver sounds angry, affronted.

  Philp’s tone is vicious: ‘But she didnae pay her enough to deliver that filth.’

  ‘So you destroyed them?’

  ‘Oh no,’ MacIver tells her, ‘I kept them safe.’

  Cruikshank leans forward, ‘Ye never know when they might come in handy.’

  A possible solution occurs to the prisoner. ‘Are you asking me for money?’

  Maciver sits on the bed. ‘I might be,’ she croons in a new, soft, insinuating voice, ‘I might be asking you for something else.’

  ‘What do you think it’s worth,’ Philp says, ‘keeping your dirty wee secrets?’

  The prisoner looks towards the door.

  Cruikshank smiles. ‘Expecting somebody, are you?’

  ‘The doctor.’

  A look passes between the three wardresses.

  ‘Aw, did they no tell you?’ MacIver says, ‘Doctor won’t be coming this morning. He’s gi’en us the job o’ feeding you.’

  Three on one. MacIver lifts her by the hair and drops her at the bottom of the bed. Philp sits on her knees to stop her getting up. Cruikshank kneels on her chest, makes her promise to behave. Not that she is strong enough to cause them any trouble: she has not eaten or drunk for almost a week. They offer her a deal. If she promises not to resist, two of them will leave and Wardress MacIver will do what she is tasked with as gently and decently as possible. The prisoner agrees, so there are no witnesses when MacIver rapes her with a metal syringe.

  Someone should put a stop to this.

  Where is the doctor?

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Some days Prisoner Scott takes tea, some days tea and toast. The doctor boasts of achieving this by much argument and persuasion tempered with firmness. The truth is more complicated.

  The protests outside are noisier than before. He worries they will strengthen her resistance but, the louder her supporters shout, the more she withdraws into herself. Each night they give her three rousing cheers. She claws at the backs of her hands. His stomach clenches as if he is the proper object of her raking nails.

  ‘I heard a woman call your name last night.’

  ‘My sister Muriel.’

  ‘“Fight on Arabella. You must win”—’

  She makes an ironic sound in the back of her throat. A comment on her sister? Or is it self-disgust?

  ‘—there must have been thousands of them out there. Just for you.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not me.’

  ‘They shout your name.’

  She says again, ‘They’re not here for me’.

  Lately she seems to talk in riddles.

  ‘Who else?’ he says.

  ‘An impostor. She was plausible, even I believed in her, but she is gone.’

  ‘Then who is this?’

  ‘A woman I would not wish on my worst enemy.’

  A grain of humour thickens his voice, ‘Nonetheless I have you in my care.’

  ‘You do your best, but she is my real punishment.’

  ‘Is she so disagreeable—?’

  She looks at him, her eyes full of hostility and yet, somehow, imploring.

  ‘—Because she drinks tea and eats a slice of toast?’

  ‘Because she is weak and vain and
treacherous and . . .’ She stops herself.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She is a woman no one can love.’

  ‘But Muriel loves you.’

  She cuts across him. ‘No man can love.’

  ‘Ah.’

  She looks away with a wintry smile.

  ‘Try to sleep. You’ll feel better when you’re rested.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. I commend your honesty.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  She turns towards him and his stomach dips, his bowels loosen. Not an unpleasant sensation.

  ‘The woman they cheer cares nothing for people’s opinions, and wins admiration at every turn, while I . . .’

  ‘What?’

  She gives him another hard look. ‘The woman you see before you uses words like “freedom” and “justice” but has a slave’s heart. She cares too much what . . . others think of her. And when she shows it, I too am repelled by her.’

  Is she saying what he thinks she is saying? And if she is, why so bitter?

  Six o’clock. The wardress delivers the tray with its pot of tea and two slices of toast (one for her, one for him).

  ‘A cup and saucer,’ she says, ‘can I be trusted with china now?’

  He is so rarely abstracted with her, she so seldom has the chance to study his face like this.

  ‘I was thinking of my sister,’ he says.

  ‘Annie or Mary?’

  ‘Jane.’

  This is the first she has heard of Jane.

  ‘I had a brother too, Robert. He died before his fourth birthday. Croup. Jane was younger, still talking gibberish, but she seemed so . . .’ The skin around his eyes darkens. He is gone again, lost in some other time. Unexpectedly, he smiles. ‘She could walk for miles on those wee legs. She’d get herself to the milking shed and stand there, roytering away—’

  Who else has Arabella heard him speak of with such affection?

  ‘—the kye all watching her. Such a fierce wee character. The other weans were given tin cups until they were old enough, but not Jane: she had to have china.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Drowned. In the trough. They think she knocked herself out.’ He blinks twice, thrice, rapidly, ‘I was in the haybarn with a book, keeping out of sight. I thought I heard her, but she’d never called my name before . . .’

  ‘So you assumed you were mistaken.’

  In the silence Arabella can hear the wardresses gossiping on the landing.

  After a while, he says, ‘I was the eldest of eight, all my cousins living round about. When a new one turns up, it’s just another bairn. When Robert died I hardly noticed. But Jane . . .’ he takes a breath, ‘I paid her more heed after she was dead than all the months she was running about the place.’

  Arabella lays her hand on his.

  He looks down at her white fingers, the long, dirty nails.

  ‘She could have been a teacher,’ he says.

  Arabella used to be brave, constant, her strength of purpose blazing like a beacon to weaker souls. Now she swithers this way and that. Scorn. Self-abasement. Violence. Tenderness. Fury. Need. Each contradictory impulse as urgent as life itself, until overtaken by the next. She hates him for outwitting her, loathes herself for being his dupe. But what a miracle that they should find each other. How unbearable that, having beaten the odds, they should still be kept apart. These feelings drop away, leaving a small hard self like a blackbird’s beady eye, watching, waiting. She will weaken on her diet of tea and toast which, when all is said and done, is only bread and water. She will bribe him with intimate talk, flatter him with seeming surrender. His mind will equate a return to forcible feeding with failure. He will not notice her decline until too late, when the tube will kill her. Death will be victory. He will be disgraced.

  She loves him.

  He has planted a seed in her mind, and his. A life together. Ridiculous. Impossible. They know it. But still it germinates in the dark.

  An inmate dies in the Criminal Lunatic Department. A Glasgow drunk, no madder than the rest of his kind, but he had the good fortune to fire a shotgun at a statue of William Gladstone and has eaten three square meals a day for the past five years. Until the infection took hold. No possibility of foul play, but there will have to be a public enquiry in the sheriff court. The doctor must take statements from all the warders who had care of him, making sure their evidence is tidy. No point in muddling the court with loose ends.

  For forty-eight hours he leaves the care of Prisoner Scott to Lindsay.

  When he returns, she is cold.

  ‘You are busy these days.’

  ‘I have other patients.’

  ‘They’ve never detained you before.’

  ‘There was an emergency.’

  ‘Of course. Such an important man.’

  She infuriates him. Her unpredictable moods, the talkative afternoons that end with him pushing the rubber tube down her throat. Why does she make him do it, when what he wants more than anything is to be at peace with her? And yet there’s an inexplicable satisfaction in their quarrels. A voluptuary’s abandon.

  ‘I think you find me dull lately. You liked me best when I screamed and fought.’

  He turns to the wardress, ‘Bring two cups of tea.’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself on my account—’

  The wardress goes out, locking the door.

  ‘—You pretend to want my compliance, but actually you prefer me to resist. Now why should that be?’

  ‘I don’t know why it should be, I know it is not.’

  ‘No? Then your visits were merely a means to an end. Having achieved that end − you think − no more visits.’

  ‘I made no secret of wanting you to eat.’

  ‘And when I would not, you resorted to subterfuge.’

  ‘What subterfuge?’

  ‘The pretence that you were my friend.’

  ‘God’s truth! What is wrong with you?’

  ‘I wasn’t the one who suggested a voyage across the Atlantic.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard—’

  A knock at the door, the turning of keys.

  ‘—That’ll be your tea. I hope you’re thirsty. I shan’t be touching it.’

  ‘You have been excused one feed a day in exchange for a steady increase in food taken voluntarily.’

  ‘That is your understanding, not mine.’

  ‘You cannot live on one cup of tea and one slice of toast a day.’

  ‘Which is exactly why I agreed to them.’

  The wardress sets the tray down and leaves.

  A change comes over her. Quietly she says ‘Why did you ask me?’

  ‘Ask you what?’

  ‘To go to Canada.’

  He could tell her, confess the immense effort of will it takes not to think about her when he is with his other patients. A different story after hours. Medicine taught him all bodies are the same. Working in prison, he has learned that men’s minds, too, are depressingly similar. And women’s. He remembers how adults looked to him when he was a boy. Their mystery and grandeur. She brings it all back. When he is with her, the world is transformed.

  Why did you ask me?

  Ask you what?

  To go to Canada.

  ‘For the sake of your health.’

  It seems he was wrong: the quarrelsome fit is still upon her.

  ‘And sitting with me day after day, reminiscing about your gypsy love, weeping as you described your sister’s drowning: all that was for my health, was it? Until two days ago.’

  ‘I have a job to do. Unfortunately.’

  ‘Then resign, if you do not like the work. Leave it to someone who finds it more congenial. Ah but of course, there is no one else. You and the butcher’s boy were the only doctors in Scotland willing to violate your oath.’

  He turns to go, ‘Good day.’

  This panics her, as he in
tends. ‘Just tell me what I did.’

  ‘What you did? This prison is under siege. I’ve got lunatics dropping dead on me, the Governor plotting against me, the Commissioners on my back, women shrieking and clinging to me in their neurotic craving for attention . . .’

  ‘I beg your pardon, I thought that was one of the consolations. I should have trusted my first instinct: you are a savage, you enjoy inflicting pain.’

  They should stop now, he must know it.

  ‘Then what does that make you, who are so eager for the company of such a savage?’

  ‘You are disgusting!’

  ‘And you are a fraud. Oh aye, you’re full of passion. A passionate remorse for compromising your hunger strike? No: a tantrum thrown by slighted vanity.’

  ‘You took away my clothes. No man, or woman, not even my sister, has seen me as you have seen me. Nor touched me as you have. If I resisted, you used force. I was completely alone.’

  ‘You’re not a child. You put yourself in this position.’

  ‘But I had not reckoned on the cruelty of my worst enemy masquerading as my friend.’

  ‘I am your doctor.’

  She laughs, ‘It is you who are the fraud, Doctor.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ He takes her by the shoulders. ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Hiding behind the skirts of the government. It is your duty. Ha! You liked it. Clad in your white overall, handling women stripped of clothes and dignity. Forcing us to submit. Making us weep, and soothing us, only to come with violence again.’