A Petrol Scented Spring

by Ajay Close

  ‘I take no satisfaction . . .’

  ‘“I have given it up. It dulled the mind.”’

  ‘Aye, you are a woman no man can love.’

  ‘You humiliate me?’

  ‘You humiliate yourself. You and your sisters. I have learned about women, these past weeks. I never thought to see them behave as I’ve seen here. Fighting like hellcats, screaming like banshees, barely clad but quite without modesty. I expected shame, a proper aversion. In fact, you cannot get enough of my company.’

  ‘By God, when they let me out of here, I will get my father’s gun and shoot you.’

  Another day she springs out of bed. The wardresses have left their post outside and are gossiping in the water closet. There is no one to intervene. He is heavier, it should not be hard to overpower her, but he is afraid of hurting her. Or afraid of some other urge. He catches her wrists. She uses her head, her feet, the tensile strength in her back but, in the end, she exhausts herself. They stand face to face, hand to hand, sweating, their breathing ragged. She says it again.

  ‘I swear I will shoot you.’

  He has never felt more alive.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A Captain Parker strikes a deal with the Secretary for Scotland and his sister is released. The pretext is ‘obtaining a second opinion of Prisoner Arthur’s condition’.

  A few days later the doctor is summoned to the Governor’s office where he is handed a three-page medical report written by an Edinburgh practitioner in cahoots with the suffragette doctor Mabel Jones.

  ‘You may be interested in page two. Severe bruising on the arms and legs.’

  ‘She had the bruises when she arrived.’

  ‘It wasn’t in your reports.’

  She received them at the hands of Doctor Dunlop, in Ayr Gaol. He sees the way it will go. A courtesy to his Prison Commission colleague will be made to look like covering his own tracks. And there is worse. Pain in the genital region; raw surfaces on the mucous membrane; distinct swelling of the vulva in its posterior part.

  Disgust rises in his throat.

  The Governor asks ‘Could it have been an honest mistake?’

  Of all the fatuous remarks the doctor has heard him make over the past four months, this is the most asinine.

  The Governor grows pale under his whisky flush. ‘You know who she is?’

  ‘A Miss Parker, it says here. Unless that, too, is an alias.’

  ‘Who her uncle is.’ The Governor’s voice drops to a whisper, the old ham. Only this time the drama is justified. Frances Parker is the niece of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, former commander-in-chief of the British Army in India, the general who delivered victory in the South African War.

  ‘What the hell did you think you were doing? A woman in that condition should never have been in a cell.’

  All very well to say that now. Where was this wise counsel when it mattered? The doctor re-reads the first page of the report. Lindsay let his mouth run away with him when handing the prisoner over. It’s all here in black and white, much of it untrue. For all the difference that makes, now it has been circulated in triplicate.

  ‘Dr Lindsay says she fainted. Is he lying about that too?’

  ‘I let her sit on the chanty. It was a mistake.’

  ‘I thought Dr Ferguson Watson did not make mistakes.’

  ‘I have been under some strain.’

  ‘Strain? I have to find the money for seven temporary wardresses, and twenty-six days’ leave my own wardresses have not taken so you can be sure Prisoner Scott comes to no harm. This place is like a powder keg. When the staff aren’t at each other’s throats, they’re doing God knows what to the inmates. The Trades and Labour Council has called a meeting on the North Inch to condemn us: no hall is big enough for the crowd they’re expecting. And why is that?’

  ‘The newspapers.’

  ‘Aye, the newspapers − but what is it they’re printing? Your doings. I’ll have no more mistakes in this gaol, Watson. You’ve been allowed to run the hospital as your own private fiefdom. I warned them, but I was overruled. From now on you will take orders from me. The Chairman is coming tomorrow to discuss the terms of Prisoner Scott’s licence.’

  Bull’s-eye. The old bastard knows it.

  ‘Prisoner Scott has eight months left to serve.’

  ‘Five weeks has brought this prison to its knees.’

  ‘She will claim it as a victory.’

  ‘We cannot keep her.’ The Governor’s eyes glint with malice, ‘And even if we could, she’ll never give you the satisfaction you’re seeking.’

  The doctor could fell him with one punch. He can feel his body rebalancing to maximise the power behind his fist.

  ‘Tell the Chairman he can find a new medical officer.’

  It is out of his mouth before he has time for second thoughts. He pictures his father, who has never said boo to the factor.

  ‘Oh no. You think you can create this bloody mess and just walk away?’

  ‘My probationary period expires at the end of the year. I do not wish my position confirmed.’

  His head is light with a sort of vertigo. The worst has happened. He almost laughs. The Captain can marry them on board ship. A ten-minute ceremony and then down to her cabin. No need for shame. The two of them free to do everything he cannot let his waking self imagine. Everything his dreaming self has done night after night since he first set eyes on her. The emission a cold patch on his pyjamas next morning. Sometimes more than one.

  It will happen in mid-Atlantic, on deck, after many talk-filled evenings under the stars. She will feel the pull between them, night after night of holding her breath for his touch, so that finally, when he lays hands on her, she will shudder with fulfilled longing.

  ‘And what reason am I to give the Commission?’

  ‘Tell them, circumstances that have arisen since I came to Perth.’

  The Governor gives him a cockeyed look and for a moment his nerve wavers. He is counting on the Colonial Office finding him a post with a house and a decent salary somewhere far from ice and summer mosquitoes. But what if he is wrong? He is giving up four hundred pounds a year, for what? Has she ever said, in so many words, I will go with you to Canada? He could spring her from gaol and never see her again. She could tell the world. His integrity in tatters, the butt of every music hall joke, cartoons in the newspapers depicting him as a salivating lecher.

  He turns to leave, but the Governor has not finished. The Chief Constable of Edinburgh telephoned this morning to pass on some intelligence.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Arabella’s father took seven years to die. Apoplexy. Heart seizure. Malignant growth. A series of blows from which he rallied less and less convincingly. His face shrank to a skull’s concavities. That big soldier’s body with its meaty neck and barrel chest dwindled to a bundle of bones. She glimpsed him once without his pyjama jacket, when her mother was washing him. The blueish ball and socket of his shoulder was like a five-year-old boy’s. But it was his mind’s dwindling that afflicted her most. He became, not someone else – even that might have been endurable – but no one. A scarecrow’s head stuffed with leaves and straw. He knew he was dying but didn’t take it personally, while she sat by his bed, exhausted with the effort of willing him to be himself.

  Now she knows exactly how he felt.

  Random words rise to her lips, phrases divorced from any conscious intent. She knows it is important not to voice the babble in her head, but sometimes the stale hospital air seems to ring with the echo of her thoughts. Has she spoken aloud, or is it a figment of her brain? She has acquired the knack of not hearing the wardresses’ gossip. Once in a while she will catch them staring, as if waiting for her to answer a question or react to a taunt. How strange it is to smell their greasy hair and sweaty armpits, the particular stink of an unwashed uniform ironed into yet another day’s service, and to feel so detached.

  And then she hears his footsteps. Ah God, how good it will be to clash with
him, to feel strength re-entering her limbs, anger firing her blood. To become real again.

  I have hated her for fifty years. I have thought of her so often it’s hard to remember we have never met. I feel closer to her than I did to Hilda. We both know how two hearts can yearn to beat as one and still every word spoken leaves its scarring of hate. At least they had an excuse. Or was it not like that for them, did she take him by the hand and lead him to a place where he could let himself be loved?

  The prison swelters in the grip of a heat wave. When Thomas ventures out, the town is stricken. Lassitude in the empty streets, pavement strays prone and panting, blinds three-quarters drawn to protect the shopkeepers’ wares. Back at the prison, the doctor’s face shines with sweat, but he will not shed his frock coat and walk about in his shirtsleeves like a labourer. On any other day he would be doing the rounds of the Criminal Lunatic Department by now. This departure from routine irks him but cannot be helped. He has twenty-four hours. It must be settled before the Chairman arrives to start haggling over her release. She must be told how to play it, what to ask for: her passage to Canada and the wherewithal to make a new life. She will not like the idea of taking their money. He will convince her of the necessity. But first, he must declare himself.

  He has been adding meat juice to her feeds. It makes her less drowsy, but more argumentative. Her eyes flash when he walks in. The wardresses know this mood of his. They scramble off their backsides and out into the corridor.

  ‘Up,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘On your feet—’

  She stares at him.

  ‘—don’t you want to?’

  ‘Of course I want to.’

  He extends a hand to help her off the mattress, but she ignores it, using the bedframe to lever herself up.

  He smiles.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘You look different, standing. When you’re not in a temper.’

  ‘I may walk about?’

  He nods. She takes a step and staggers. He steadies her. Her legs are weak after so long in bed, but she won’t give up. She tries again with his hand supporting her upper arm. Reaching the empty stretch of floor in the middle of the ward, she gives a gasping laugh.

  ‘You can’t imagine how I’ve hungered for this. Sharper than hunger. It’s movement the body craves, more than food.’

  This is his chance. All he has to do is keep hold of her arm and, with his other hand, draw her waist towards him. He even has the words to breathe in her ear. This is what I have hungered for.

  He is unnerving her, standing there with that queasy simper. Smiling is not part of his repertoire, unless she counts the occasional sarcastic grimace. Something has happened. She should have paid more attention to the wardresses’ gossip.

  ‘Yesterday . . .’ he begins.

  ‘You insulted me.’

  ‘You said you would kill me.’

  ‘I said I would shoot you. I did not say I was a dead shot.’

  ‘Your friends would kill me. That mob out there.’ He pauses, ‘The police have word of a plot to bomb my house.’

  Ethel. She knows beyond doubt. Who else would think up such a crack-brained scheme? Under the noses of the authorities: what a coup for the cause! She has a history of outrageous stunts. Three grand houses in upper Strathearn in a single night. They say the blazes lit the sky. She is not squeamish about human targets either, marching into that schoolmaster’s classroom to attack him with a dogwhip. He had strong-armed her out of a meeting. What might she do to a doctor who almost killed her with the feeding tube in Calton Gaol?

  He watches her closely, ‘It is to happen at night, when I’m in bed, asleep.’

  ‘But you’ll sleep inside the prison, now you know.’

  ‘I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.’

  Her stomach turns over. He will be blown to pieces out of stubbornness. Ethel will be hanged. ‘The Governor will overrule you.’

  ‘The Governor would like nothing better than to be rid of me.’

  ‘Then don’t give him the satisfaction.’

  She seems worried. He did not foresee the annoyance mixed in with her alarm, but still, this is promising.

  ‘I knew what I was taking on. I didn’t expect to be popular.’

  ‘They’re going to blow up your house. You think they’re not capable of it? Don’t be too sure.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Whoever it is. We do not always fail.’

  ‘You side with them even in this.’

  ‘We’ve never killed anyone.’

  ‘But for me they might make an exception, eh?’

  She looks away. ‘Accidents happen.’

  ‘They might kill me by accident?’

  Her voice cracks, ‘It‘s not funny.’

  ‘Not for me, perhaps, but what is it to you?’

  Her eyes are lowered. Only the shallowness of her breathing gives her away. He waits. Will she touch him? Plead with him? Weep for him?

  ‘I don’t want anyone’s death,’ she says at last.

  ‘Not even mine?’

  She lifts her eyes to his.

  Seven days from this moment she will be released. Tomorrow she will meet with the Chairman of the Prison Commission and the horse-trading will begin. The texture of her encounters with the doctor will change. This giant who has blocked out the light, dominated her thoughts, coloured her dreams, will shrink to man-size. Their volatile intimacy will end.

  But today, in her ignorance, she wants to write a letter. To warn Ethel. And to protect him. His neat ears, the freckled backs of his hands, his precious flesh.

  He says no. She argues with him, a tremor in her voice, her hands reaching towards him, before dropping to her sides. A thrill in his blood as he refuses, like the pleasure he felt toying with Prisoner Edwards, but with the complication that Arabella’s desperation is for his sake. And so at last he says yes. But he will not let her use the pen. They sit side by side on the bed, eyes fixed on the notebook in his lap, both of them remembering that other letter he wrote at her dictation, both thinking how far they have come since then. As always, she is naked under her nightdress. He takes off his coat. The smell of her skin. His breath on her cheek. Her hair brushing his ear. It has to happen. Why else let her stand and walk about? He is changing the rules, letting her know that what was forbidden is now possible. Desire can be acted upon. She may bite him, strike him, claw at him, or open her mouth to his. The choice is hers. She pretends not to know, but he can see her palpitating heart through the cotton of her gown. She wants the letter to name him, to forbid his harming above all others’. She turns her face towards him. Their eyes, mouths, inches apart. Her soft lips. Who closes the gap? The pen drops from his hand. She moans, yielding. Is it now? Do they lie down on the bed?

  Thomas could not tell me.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Doctor Lindsay takes a day off to visit his parents, and when he returns the doctor tells him he will be more useful in the men’s hospital. His daily contact with the prisoner and the wardresses who attend her is at an end.

  Almost everything I know he told me that day in the prison garden. I have gleaned a few details from newspapers stored in public libraries. My friend Patrick in the Colonial Office pulled some strings and got me a glimpse of the Scottish Office files. But what passed between them from Tuesday to the following Sunday, when she was released, is not recorded.

  It is like being locked out of my own life.

  Yes it was so long ago, and almost everyone is dead and it can’t be so many years before I’m among them, but for now it still matters. I walked down the aisle to become the sort of smiling woman whose home smells of warm biscuits and rings with children’s laughter, and that hope turned to ashes. Yes, I had adventures. Egypt, Syria, India, the Gold Coast. I saved so many lives, and found a man to spend the rest of his days with me. I would not want to have missed any of that. But the price of making a new life was exile. I had to train as a doctor in G
lasgow, then turn my back on Britain, leaving behind mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, all the friendships I had forged since leaving Perth. And I had to turn my back on him, too. My husband.

  Half a century has passed and I still don’t know whether he was done for before we met; whether his heart was already claimed, or smashed; the exact quality of his regret; whether another wife, more selfless and forgiving, or ruthless, or vainglorious, might have redeemed him. Whether the love story pieced together in these pages is mine, or hers.

  Some things I do know. He could stare at her with his eyes full of wanting but, unless she pushed the moment beyond ambiguity, nothing would happen. The crucial question is, what was she capable of?

  I have read about prisoners kept in solitary confinement. How it erodes the personality. The way they come to depend on their captors. The demoralising effects of harsh treatment interspersed with kindness. Far worse than unstinting brutality. But Arabella is a political prisoner. Even as she suffers, the soldier in her sleeps with one ear open.

  ‘What if I said you’d had all you could take—?’

  She squints at him.

  ‘—the prisoner has been on hunger and thirst strike for the past five weeks. She does not appear any the worse for her treatment . . .’

  ‘I am very much the worse for it.’

  ‘. . . at the same time, it seems desirable some cases should not be fed in this way over too long a period.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘All good things come to an end.’

  She does not even think about it. ‘No—’

  He looks at her as if she has taken leave of her senses.

  ‘—I won’t go.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It will be made to look like surrender.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’

  She wavers. Will she look back on this moment and curse her wrongheadedness? He seems well-disposed to her today, almost fond. But when has he acted in her best interests?