A Petrol Scented Spring

by Ajay Close

  ‘This comes from them, not you. You do what they tell you to.’

  ‘I’ve resigned.’

  He should never have told her. The soldier’s ear pricks up.

  ‘Why?’

  Does he admit it: ‘You’?

  She laughs. His eyes fill with dismay. The woman softens, but the soldier says wait.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Whatever it is, it will be nothing to do with politics.’ He swallows, ‘I might go overseas.’

  Canada. She blushes as if they are saying aloud the words she hears in her head:

  You spoke once of taking me there.

  And you never gave me an answer.

  Why not, she wonders now? Because it seemed too much like a dream, or a trick. Or because, even as the woman was tempted, the soldier knew this day was coming. He would not risk raising the subject if there was the slightest possibility of losing face. They are willing to let her out. She sees the agony in his features and her heart strains towards him, but she bites her tongue. Discretion was ever the better part of valour.

  Besides, there is the question of power. Hers returning, his diminishing. I have resigned. If it was done to win her favour, he made a mistake.

  When he has gone, she sends word to the Governor via a wardress. If the Prison Commission is minded to release her, she will hear what they have to say.

  Next morning she is given a bath. The Chairman himself enters the hospital. A balding, pouchy-faced fellow with a nose like something fashioned out of orange peel. He takes a fatherly tone, letting her sit up, patting her hand, which she tolerates because she has a schoolteacher’s forbearance with those less intelligent than herself. He wants her to break with the Women’s Social and Political Union, to give her word she will not organise or incite illegal acts. She refuses with such finality there is nothing more to be said. They sit in silence. He does not get up to leave. She nearly laughs aloud. Her tea and toast suppers count for nothing. She has beaten them.

  The Chairman returns the day after, having taken instruction from the Secretary for Scotland. He tells her he is her friend. Not everyone wishes to see her liberated. The prison doctor, for one, argued against it most vehemently. She tells him they can hold her until she is a hundred, she will never give up the cause.

  What can he do? The authorities want rid of her: no more questions in the House and headlines about indecent assaults on the nieces of national heroes. Whatever she says or refuses to say, they think it unlikely Prisoner Scott will return to militant action. They are prepared to release her unconditionally. At this news, she gives up her hunger strike.

  The doctor brings her a tomato. Firm, still green around the scar where it was so recently plucked from the stem. She sniffs it, holds it in her hand. Almost too beautiful to eat. But in the end, she bites. The skin bursts, spraying seeds down her chin.

  They laugh.

  She could be let out that very evening. Or the next day. The newspapers are predicting it. The wardresses are stood down. Muriel takes a posy of sweet peas to the prison gate. Within the hour, Arabella buries her face in their silky fragrance. She is out of bed all day, walks twice in the prison exercise yard, eats three good meals.

  The doctor assigns the rest of his duties to Thomas Lindsay. Time is short. All her talk is of liberty, the pleasures she has missed. Playing the piano. Visiting the theatre. Walking the shoreline at Gullane, opening her arms to the wind. The sea is in her blood. Great Aunt Charlotte was married to a harbour master. She takes her middle name from her. She pauses, distracted by a thought. Where does his middle name come from, that Ferguson?

  Does he answer? Would he lay himself so open to her?

  ‘I made it up. To lend me distinction.’

  Can he truly believe they will see each other again once she has left the prison? Does he imagine taking the train to Edinburgh, knocking on her mother’s door? ‘Come in, come in, delighted to meet you . . .’ Or is he reduced to childish fantasy? A fairy-tale coincidence many months later. Seated in the concert hall, half-drugged with Schubert. Glancing up to find her face, her shocked look reflecting his own, that same shaky smile. My God.

  Does she give him hope, let him hold her, touch her, murmuring promises between their kisses? Is she cruel enough to pay him back like that?

  There is one other possibility. They both understand this is all they will ever have. These two days locked away from the world.

  She is liberated discreetly at ten forty-five on Sunday morning. He makes one last physical examination, finding no mark on body or limb. Muriel and Ethel come in a cab, taking Arabella away to a dentist’s house on the moneyed side of town. The dentist’s daughter has become a good friend. That afternoon, the Trades and Labour Council hold a rally on the North Inch to condemn forcible feeding. Thousands cheer the prisoner’s release.

  Sun, air, pollen-drunk bees, the chatter of friends. A sister’s hands to wash her hair. Feather pillows, laundered sheets, warm scones with this year’s strawberry jam, as many hot baths as she cares to take. These dear women hanging on her words, gasping and exclaiming.

  Doctor Mabel Jones arrives to examine her. Does she stiffen, insisting ‘No need’? But her physical condition must be checked: who knows how that brute might have damaged her? Pulse, temperature, her chest. And now a departure from the familiar routine. Her petticoat is lifted. ‘No! You may not!’ Mabel assures her she will be very gentle, nothing like the assaults inflicted on Frances Gordon, Maude Edwards and Fanny Parker.

  ‘Assaults?’

  They explain.

  Arabella writes a letter to the newspapers. It is printed in the Glasgow Herald two days after her release.

  It is very clear that forcible feeding was inflicted upon me in order to extract an undertaking, and further on account of the part I played at the by-election in Ipswich, when Mr Masterman was defeated. To try to force a person to yield her opinions under pain is torture, and nothing else. The only effect it has had upon me is to strengthen my principles.

  Unlike most of respectable Perth, which favours the Edinburgh paper, the Scotsman, the doctor is from the West. He reads the Glasgow Herald.

  He likes to breakfast in the kitchen, as he did as a boy on the farm. While Mrs Hendry makes his porridge, he reads the paper and drinks a cup of strong, sugary tea. Even in summer he cannot abide it less than scalding, the thought of tepid liquid makes his gorge rise. He hears the porridge sucking and dimpling as it comes to the boil. An advertisement for liver pills catches his eye. These damned mountebanks! Mrs Hendry says something about the weather being set to break. And now he sees it. A letter to the editor. His heart bucks in his chest. He spreads the paper across the table, on top of plate, cup, cutlery, butter; sends Mrs Hendry to the shops. ‘But the porridge, sir?’ ‘Just go!’

  A message from her. His quick eye has taken it all in, but he reads it again, lingeringly, hearing the words in her voice, trying to squeeze some new meaning from them. There is none. A draining feeling in his arms, his fingers, the adrenaline ebbing.

  His tea goes cold. The porridge solidifies in the pan. He has not felt like this since his sister died. This bruised sensation around the eyes, the dull ache in his throat. But the tears won’t come. What has she done to him? He is still sitting there when Mrs Hendry gets back. She takes one look at him and turns around, claiming she has forgotten the bread.

  To gull him like that. After everything they have been to each other. Oh aye, she pulled the wool over his eyes. Had him mooning after her like a lovesick calf. Those damn fools at the Commission: they had to insist on letting her out, had to cave in to the Governor’s bleating about the cost and the strain on the staff. Did he not warn them they should keep her? He wasn’t so drunk with her he forgot his duty. They can’t lay that at his door.

  He writes to David Crombie, Secretary of the Prison Commission, his nib slicing across the paper. She has returned to militancy, as he predicted all along. He said from the first she would never give in. He
told them she should remain in prison for as long as possible. He knew she would defy all authority the minute she got out. She is about to do something desperate, of that he has no doubt. She is practically an anarchist. She believes every act of destruction draws attention to their cause. Should anything very serious happen, they may be certain it is done by the hand of Arabella Scott.

  He pauses, imagining it. Waverley Station ablaze. St Giles Cathedral. Holyrood Palace. They will catch her red-handed. She will come back to him. Raging, weeping, insulting him, writhing under his hands. It will begin again.

  All at once he pictures Crombie’s face, those bushy eyebrows lifting. He will need to go carefully if he is to retract his resignation. Is the letter too intemperate, even unprofessional? Will a copy be circulated to the Commissioners? And if to them, then to the Governor, who will take the opportunity to pass on who knows what low gossip from the wardresses?

  I have formed such opinions by allowing her to have her own say over long periods when I put the wardress out of hearing but never out of the hospital.

  He reads it through again. What has he to be ashamed of? Aye, he sounds angry – is he not entitled? He will not tear the truth up and drop it in the wastepaper basket. They have let her win. He alone stood up to her. Let them hear it. He addresses the envelope, attaches a stamp, then, at the last moment, scrawls across the top of the letter: though I offer this opinion I give it as a private man.

  She sets no fires. Within a week the nation is at war with Germany. The suffragettes suspend their campaigning and are granted an amnesty. Arabella goes to France as an officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

  It is over.

  HILDA

  If she had to prise her old bones out of Chelsea for six months, Hilda would have chosen Paris or Barcelona or Buenos Aires or New York. But no: it had to be South Yarra, where the art scene is all sausage-fingered Aussies brawling over figs or abs, and Billy can’t drink in the bars in case she starts a fight, so it’s night after night at Maisey’s or that old poofters’ coffee lounge, or back to the suburban box with its swing seat, barbecue and car porch.

  But that’s a subject best avoided for now. It doesn’t do to criticise the love nest, with the bowerbird not yet cold in the ground. Who would have thought it: the cosmopolitan Billy Bellairs swilling lager and swapping blue jokes with the convict stock in South Yarra? The famous artist’s business manager and bed-warmer. True love, Hilda has no doubt. Billy would have stared at that revolting wallpaper, going quietly doolally, for the next twenty years, if she hadn’t arrived to take charge. Weeding out the paintings to be kept, getting a contract drawn up so the gallery can’t flood the market with the rest. Selling the house and most of the furniture. Shipping the bed. She’s not completely heartless.

  Hilda liked Jan Cumbrae-Stewart well enough, but there was just too much of the Edwardian soap advertisement in her portraits. Those rosy-skinned, golden-haired nudes (so often painted from behind) that met with such acclaim, while Hilda had her hopes raised so cruelly by being shown in the British pavilion in Venice in twenty-four, and afterwards . . . nothing. Or worse: a badly-lit side room off a couple of Jan’s shows in Australia and a yawning paragraph tacked on to each of Jan’s gushing reviews. One critic noted the hard-edged quality in Hilda’s etchings, finding it not stark or unflinching but ‘rather unpleasant’. As if she had sneezed over the soup. As if art had to please, when she was capturing the moment, and doing it rather better than Jan Cumbrae-Stewart, if truth be told. Of course, the fact that Jan was decades out of date was just what they liked about her. Along with that broad hint of the bedroom, the fireside glow, the coy provocation of all those turned shoulders and plump young buttocks. Public taste was ever base.

  And to prove it, here they are at this Sunday painters’ jumble sale in Sydney. Mountains and seascapes. Vases of flowers. Still lifes. Soulful-eyed cats, for Christ’s sake. And this oddity, an abstract, crudely executed but with more feeling in its slashing diagonals than all the pretty-pretty figuratives put together. Just look at that bloody carmine, the bilious green, the sheer force in that line pushing down from the upper right hand corner. Hilda squints at the typed card, the old peepers not being what they were.

  ‘Body Politic,’ says a voice behind her. Scottish, if she’s not mistaken. ‘Rather pretentious, I’m afraid, but it sums up what I wanted to say.’

  She has all the marks of age, ivory teeth, mauve-tinted skin, fleshy grooves and folds, but it’s still an astonishing face. A quiet intelligence that says I am a person of consequence, if only to myself. ‘Arabella Colville-Reeves.’ They shake hands and Hilda’s heart gives a little thump, though she hasn’t gone home with a stranger in fifteen years, and Billy’s just the other side of the room, having her grief stroked by one of you-know-who’s many admirers. She turns back to the canvas. The body politic. She sees it now: oesophagus, stomach, intestines, painted with such anger. Those poor bloody queers in Soviet loony bins, being cured of what ails them. Aversion therapy. Electric shocks. But surely they’d leave the Brits alone?

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ the woman says, ‘I wasn’t trying to upset anyone. Let me find you somewhere to sit.’

  A return to civilisation is what Billy needs. England, where they drink proper beer and the spiders don’t bite and the sun doesn’t fry your brain in your skull. A fresh start in London. Or Surrey, if she must, but near the station, no more than an hour from Soho and Shaftesbury Avenue and old friends. In South Yarra, Billy conceded the wisdom of this but, now that they have landed at London Airport and are stuck in a very English queue, she is having second thoughts. Thank Christ for Dodo! Sweeping through passport control against the tide with a nod that says I know perfectly well I’m not supposed to do this. The years overseas have left her with an old colonial’s arrogance. Who can refuse that frizz of white hair, the sparkling gaze, the blend of sweet-old-lady charm and steely command? (‘It’s Doctor Coubrough.’) She has found some lackey to escort her into the arrivals hall with an empty wheelchair. Billy spots them first, tipping Hilda the wink to play up her limp. ‘Hilly!’ ‘Dodo!’ Hilda gives the smirkers an icy stare. Of course she’s a fossil, but she had the best of it, being young when the Modern carried a whiff of blood and madness, not refrigerators and drip-dry nylon. And being old’s not so bad when you’re whizzed through customs with your smuggled bottle of scotch and out into the blessed drizzle of good old Blighty.

  ‘Well.’

  Always this moment when the sisters stop and take a gander at each other. A few more liver spots on the backs of Dodo’s hands. Sun spots, apparently. And she’ll have to watch that stoop, it’s halfway to a dowager’s hump. Meanwhile Dodo sees what: the cripple’s walk, the tippler’s complexion? (But then, they both like a stiffener before lunch.) Perhaps just age. These days Hilda looks the older sister. Not that it matters any more, except with Dodo. The only person in the world Hilda still needs to best, and the fact that Dodo doesn’t feel the same only makes the struggle more compulsive.

  Billy knows exactly what’s going on and springs to the rescue with gallantry all round. The only thing better than spending time with one of the Atkins gels is being in the company of both. A celebration is in order! A late lunch at the Ritz? Or is the old place in Sloane Square still open? Hilda quite fancies the Gay Hussar, but Dodo is wearing the colonial smile that brooks no contradiction. They’re going back to Langstone Manor where the daily is cooking roast lamb and apple pie. A weekend of sea air and good English food (and drink) to recover from the flight. Beefy will drive them back up to London on Monday.

  And talk of the Devil, here he is: waiting outside in the Consul. Beefy Bill Coubrough. If it’s sausage fingers you’re after, he’s your man. Hands like shovels. Big head, big shoulders, big feet. Probably big where it matters, too, but Hilda finds these Frankenstein types utterly sexless. No nuance. The booming voice and hearty guffaw. Not so different from Billy B at first glance, but with Billy it’s ironic. Beefy spent thirty y
ears yelling at the natives in words of one syllable before coming home to play lord of the manor. Plus fours and an alcoholic bulldog. A character. And a bit of a bully behind closed doors. The way he growls at Dodo sometimes. To marry one overbearing oaf may be regarded as misfortune. To marry two looks like perversion. Not that Hilda would say it. At least, not outright. Though who knows where the conversation may wend once she passes on her news?

  Design a hideous home for returning colonials. A Rayburn under a shelf of brass preserving pans; twelve-seater dining table; crewelwork curtains; fire dogs either side of the roaring grate. A Jacobean settle opposite a grandfather clock with an echoing tick and a chime like the knell of doom. All inside a redbrick villa built for the local brewer in 1904.

  Beefy’s a parvenu. Forever bragging about growing up in Old Ballikinrain. (And so he did, in the staff quarters.) A Tory, like all those I pulled myself up by my bootstraps types. Still, he’s not stingy with the drink. Hilda has stayed with them before, she knows the form. Down to the pub at eleven so Bobby the bulldog can have his beer; gin and tomato juice at lunch; whisky in their afternoon tea. They’ll all be three sheets to the wind hours before they sit down to the serious drinking at dinner.

  And so it goes.

  The lamb is burned and the mashed potato lumpy, but it soaks up the booze. Beefy delivers his party piece: faint heart never won fair lady. How he was turned away by the houseboy, though he knew damn well Dodo was in: he could hear her in the bath. Did he get to be inspector of works for one of Africa’s biggest public building programmes by taking no for an answer? He did not. Crawled under the house, found a hatch to climb through. Planted himself on the end of her bed. You should have seen her face when she came out of the bathroom! Hilda has heard this tale at least three times, and finds it more sinister with every retelling, but Dodo twinkles with wifely satisfaction, says she had to marry him, just to bring him under control. Which is Beefy’s cue to ask when Hilda is going to settle down with a nice chap? ‘I’m waiting for Dodo to tire of you, Bill.’ Laughter all round. Then that revolting dog tries to roger the ginger cat, and Billy B tells a couple of the riper stories doing the rounds in South Yarra, to much ho ho-ing and table-slapping from their host. Dodo clears the table. Hilda picks up the gravy boat and follows her out.