A Petrol Scented Spring

by Ajay Close

  I thought about saying it: I was more married to that diamond smuggler than I was to you.

  A slam as the door to the basement was pulled shut.

  ‘Where are you living?’ My words were loud in the silence.

  ‘Montgomery Street.’

  ‘Your own household?’

  ‘Lodgings. Though we’ve been together so many years we feel like family.’

  ‘A pretty widow, with children?’

  He gave me a long, unsparing look, ‘I’ve kept my vows, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘Because being married to me brought you such pleasure?’

  ‘Because you’re my wife.’

  We both heard the footsteps. Our heads turned. An angular woman in a tin helmet glared at us from the doorway.

  ‘Are youse deaf? Get in that shelter now.’

  The whitewashed cellar walls were lined with two tiers of bunks. On the lower tier sat the nuns; mothers with children; a few frail, white-moustached old men and their indestructible wives. Everyone else was on the floor. Electric light bulbs dangled at intervals from a cable running the length of the ceiling. Though he was quick to look away, the filaments were seared across his vision, still there when he shut his eyes. A crypt-like smell of underground mixed with the warmer stink of sour breath, unwashed armpits, flatus.

  We claimed the last vacant bunk, beyond the glare of the naked bulbs. From the look I gave the grimy blanket, he gathered I had not had much to do with shelters. I asked how long we would be down there, as if he could read the Luftwaffe’s minds. He saw I was worried about missing my train. No point getting myself into a state, since there was nothing I could do about it. I bridled, as I always did when he talked sense. Then, shrugging, I relaxed.

  Side by side, we watched the people on the floor. The upper bunk made a cave around us. He glanced down at my shoes, my still neatly-turned ankles. Something French-smelling in his nostrils, soap or scent. In a bunk on the opposite wall, the pregnant woman turned away to let her companion rub her back. Hugh had taken him for her father but, now he thought about it, the gap in their ages was no wider than the years between us.

  ‘When you went away to study, I’d listen for the postman. Friday evenings I’d meet every Glasgow train, just in case—’

  I turned to him, my eyes filled with amazement.

  ‘—Sundays were the worst. I’d get out to the Sma Glen or the Carse, walk as long as the light lasted, come back and write to you.’

  The look on my face. As if a stranger were importuning me on the street. ‘I received no letters.’

  ‘I didn’t send them—’

  He’d planned it last night, how he would put it to me incrementally, nudging me home. But having started, he had to get it all off his chest.

  ‘—I’ve enough put by to keep us comfortably in a house of our own. Bruntsfield, Morningside. Gullane, if you fancy the sea.’

  ‘Hugh,’ I said, with a gentleness he didn’t like the sound of.

  But if he stopped now it would never be said, so he ploughed on. He could arrange his affairs any way that pleased me. It was his habit to winter in Ayrshire, on his brother’s farm, but he’d thole the east coast wind for me if I preferred Edinburgh. I wouldn’t be short of invitations. The Royal Society of this or that, the Red Cross ball, dinners at the Surgeons’ Hall. He tried to make me see it: the stir I would create. By Jove, where’s he been hiding you?

  I didn’t smile or look at him, yet the air between us felt kinder. I sat very still, eyelids lowered, lips slightly parted. My lovely profile. Half in shadow like this, I could have been the girl he proposed to in 1916.

  There was one last thing he had to say.

  ‘I know you wanted children. I’ve no patience with them. I’ll play cards with John Neill’s weans at Christmas, but you can’t have an intelligent conversation . . .’

  My eyes snapped open. I sat up, straight-backed.

  ‘I took the Wassermann test,’ I said, ‘I did it myself, in the lab one lunchtime, my second year in Glasgow. It was negative.’

  His face showed nothing. No embarrassment or regret, not even the most basic recognition. He resumed what he’d been saying before I interrupted. ‘I paid for it, watching you sail off to Canada with nothing to keep you here. Knowing it could have been different.’

  I wasn’t letting him away with this. Since I’d had the courage to raise the subject, he could do me the courtesy of acknowledging it.

  ‘Is this the story you tell yourself: that our separate bed­rooms were a form of contraception—?’

  I kept my voice low, but he glanced round about us. And suddenly all my old resentment flooded back.

  ‘—You never loved me. We weren’t even married in the true sense. Other than one night, when you called me by her name.’

  His brow furrowed.

  ‘Arabella,’ I hissed.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  There was no mirth in my laughter. He remembered me in this mood. I’d keep at him hour after hour, following him from room to room, as he’d prodded the adder with a stick as a boy, trying to get it to strike. As if I wanted him to roar at me, wanted him to do something I could never forgive him for. God knows he had a temper, but he’d kept a tight rein on it.

  ‘Let me jog your memory,’ I said, ‘you had influenza.’

  He’d barely had a day’s sickness until that summer. The relief of giving in to it. His life such a struggle. Every rung of the ladder enjoyed no sooner but despised straight. Shakespeare, was it, said that? He’d buried enough patients to be fairly sure he wouldn’t be getting up again. Sore eyes, aching joints, parched throat. Time stretched and shrank. Hour after hour of waiting to hear my tread on the stair, to feel my cool hand on his brow, my care. He talked to me then as he had not before, but was I really there?

  All this he recalled well enough, but not what I told him now.

  It could have been a neurotic phantasy, but I was a doctor, qualified these sixteen years, so he had to consider the possibility. He grued, even as he felt a shameful twitch between his legs.

  ‘I was fevered, delirious.’

  I said it was not what he did then, but his determination not to do it every other day of our eleven years together that I found unforgiveable. That, and calling me by her name.

  ‘I hardly remember the woman.’

  I gave another brittle laugh. ‘You remembered her well enough to find yourself a wife who looked just like her.’

  ‘It was you I married.’ Too vehement. Heads turned towards us. He leaned into the shadow cast by the upper bunk and said it again, ‘It was you I married’.

  And now it all poured out of him. He’d had years to ask himself why I left. ‘Aye, we got off to a bad start, but that’s common enough.’ He felt such love for me whenever we were apart, yet in my presence felt the very opposite. Not hate, never that, but irritation. Fury, sometimes – though he hid it – and a kind of exasperated pity. Other women were happy enough as wives. He would think of me sometimes as he went about his duties in the prison, and his flesh would ache as if bound by invisible chains. He knew I blamed him. Tense as he found our speechless dinners, they were better than listening to my complaints. When I raised the idea of training as a doctor, there was a pinch of vengefulness in his assent: let’s see how you like hard work for a change. But I had liked it. The clinical practice no less than the studying. Those weeks between academic terms were the happiest of his life. A pile of books by my elbow, an eager light in my eyes. At last we had something to talk about. But what he’d taken for a new beginning was the beginning of the end.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  It may be he read my silence as a change of heart. He told me about the framed photograph kept by his bedside all the years we’d spent apart. The presents he bought every July, on my birthday. Brooches, rings, a blue silk scarf to set off my eyes. A dress, one year. The annual pilgrimage to Pitlochry, to the scenes of our courtship. Scouring the Lancet and each n
ew edition of the Medical Directory for news of me. Hours in the public library, reading up on the topography, climate, tribes, language of wherever I was working. Attending medical conferences in Edinburgh and London, seeking out the Syrian or Egyptian or African delegates, hanging on their talk like a dog waiting for scraps to drop from the table. And every week he wrote to me. Stiff, rather formal missives at first, but, as the years went by, unashamedly tender and emotional. Words he had never addressed to any other woman. The letters were mine if I wanted them. He had them in a suitcase under his bed, hundreds of pages spanning twenty-two years.

  But I didn’t need proof. I believed him. My heart unfurled as if he had reached inside me and touched the love-struck girl who’d accepted his proposal all those years ago. She lived in me yet, alongside the grown woman who saw all too clearly what had happened. He was incapable of loving me, so I left. And it turned out to be the one thing I could do that would bind him to me.

  ‘Hugh—’

  It was dreadful to see that loving, hopeful light leave his eyes.

  ‘—I’m going to marry someone else.’

  Had we not been trapped in a bomb shelter, he would have got up and walked out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I was, a little.

  I thought about Beefy, waiting for me on the Queen Street station platform. About the dinner he would buy us at Rogano’s later. About the porridge we would eat with our fellow boarders next morning, taking the edge off our hangovers before slipping back up to bed. Giggling under the eiderdown. Squalls of rain against the window. Then out for a quick gin and French before lunch. If the German bombs spared me.

  Hugh consulted his pocket watch. I gave him an enquiring glance.

  ‘Six o’clock,’ he said.

  He’d bought me a one-way ticket to Canada: he would give me my divorce.

  Despite the hour, there was a hushed, middle-of-the-night atmosphere in the cellar. Some people were drowsing. Others talked in murmurs. The hotel staff were playing cards. A ginger-haired waitress shuffled the pack one-handed before she dealt. A sharply-dressed young man offered around a packet of cigarettes. Half a dozen heads leaned in to the struck match. A couple of bunks away from us, a mother hummed a meandering tune to the child in her lap. The melody was taken up by the women around her, becoming a softly-crooned sing-song.

  I shivered and felt the weight of Hugh’s tweed overcoat settle on me. I looked sideways at him, at that crease in the lobe of his still-neat left ear.

  Resting my head on his shoulder, I waited for the all-clear.

  Afterword and acknowledgements

  Most of the characters in this novel are based on real men and women who left a trail in public archives, newspaper libraries and the memories of a few people I was able to question. That trail is necessarily patchy. Where there are facts, I have used them, drawing on my imagination to fill in the gaps. The National Archive of Scotland holds daily reports filed by Hugh Ferguson Watson while the suffragettes were in his care in Perth Prison, but I have found only the sketchiest record of his life with Donella. I know they were unhappy enough for the marriage to end in separation; that within a year of the wedding she was no longer mentioned in the diary of her uncle, the “Perth Pepys”, George Taylor Shillito Farquhar; that her grandfather died in a private asylum in Edinburgh; and that Hugh’s specialist subject was syphilis. The connection between these four facts is mine alone.

  So A Petrol Scented Spring is a work of fiction. Most of it is narrated by a character who is herself indulging in tormented guesswork. It should not be read as history. For that, we have the late Leah Leneman’s groundbreaking A Guid Cause: the women’s suffrage movement in Scotland and Martyrs in Our Midst. Without her scholarship, I would never have heard of Hugh Ferguson Watson and Arabella Scott.

  For those who wish to know more about Arabella, a biography is currently in preparation, based on interviews tape-recorded by her niece, the late Frances Wheelwright. Her family was kind enough to allow me a preview of some chapters.

  I am indebted to the late Hugh Ferguson Watson, nephew and namesake of the Perth Prison doctor, who shared vivid memories of his uncle with me; and to Hugh, John, Willie and Jean Watson. John McGie, Donnie Groot, Anthony and Guy Chapman, and Roy Balfour all helped with background information. None of them bears any responsibility for the fictional slant I have placed on the details they supplied.

  I am also grateful to Donald Macgregor; Brian Singer; Norman Watson (no relation); the National Archives of Scotland; the AK Bell Library in Perth; Perth & Kinross Archive; the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow library; Glasgow University archives; the Imperial War Museum; the State Library of Victoria, Australia; Perth Six Circle Project; and the Scottish Prison Service, which allowed me access to the older parts of Perth Prison.

  Before writing this novel, I explored aspects of the story in a play, Cat and Mouse. Muriel Romanes of Stellar Quines Theatre Company, Kirsty Duncan, and the Gannochy Trust provided invaluable support in developing the script through a series of rehearsed readings.

  Finally I would like to thank my agent Judy Moir for her unerring editorial judgement and sheer hard work; my brother Jeremy Close for IT help; my early-draft readers Geraldine Doherty, Siobhan O’Tierney, Fiona Thackeray and Alice Walsh for their insights; and Jim Melvin for everything.

  If you enjoyed this book from Sandstone Press you might enjoy:

  The Treacle Well by Moira Forsyth

  The Shouting in the Dark by Elleke Boehmer

  The Spice Box Letters by Eve Makis

  Gathering Carrageen by Monica Connell

  The Drum Tower by Farnoosh Moshiri