Affinity (10 page)

‘Well,’ said Wheeler in a slightly meeker tone, ‘the cut got rust worked into it, and turned bad.’

Miss Ridley gave a snort. It was marvellous, she said, what things got worked into cuts and turned them bad, at Millbank. ‘The surgeon found a piece of iron from a button, bound to Wheeler’s ankle to make the flesh swell. Indeed, so well
had
it swollen, he had to take his own knife to it, to get the button out! As if the surgeon is employed here, for
her
convenience!’ She shook her head, and I looked again at the bloated ankle. The foot below the bandage was quite black, the heel white and cracked as the rind of a cheese.

When I spoke to the infirmary matron a little later, she told me that the prisoners will ‘try any sort of trick’ to get themselves admitted to her ward. ‘They will fake fits,’ she said. ‘They will swallow glass if they can get it, to bring on bleeding. They will try and hang themselves, if they think they will be found in time and taken down.’ She said there had been two or three at least, who had attempted that and misjudged it, and so been choked. She said that was a very hard thing. She said a woman would do that out of boredom; or for the sake of joining her pal, if she knew her pal was in the infirmary already; or else she might do it, ‘purely to create a little stir with herself at its centre’.

I did not of course tell her that I had once tried a similar ‘trick’ myself. But, listening to her, my look must have changed, and she saw that and misinterpreted it. ‘Oh, they are not like you and me, miss,’ she said, ‘the sort of women who pass through here! They hold their lives very cheap . . .’

Near us stood a younger matron, making a preparation for disinfecting the room. They do it with plates of chloride of lime, on which they pour vinegar. I watched her tip the bottle, and the air at once turned sharp; then she walked along the line of beds, carrying the plate before her as a priest might bear a censer in a church. At last the scent of it grew so bitter I felt my eyes sting, and turned away. Then Miss Ridley led me from there, and took me to the wards.

These we found not at all as I have come to know them, but filled with movement and murmuring voices. ‘What’s this?’ I said, still wiping at my eyes to take the itch of disinfectant from them. Miss Ridley explained it to me. To-day is a Tuesday—I had not visited on a Tuesday before—and on this day, and on Friday, every week, the women are given lessons in their cells. I met one of their school-mistresses, on Mrs Jelf’s ward. She shook my hand when the matron introduced me, and said she had heard of me—I thought she meant, from one of the women; it turned out she knew Pa’s book. Her name, I think, is Mrs Bradley. She is employed to teach the women and has three young ladies to assist her. She said it is always young ladies who help her, and a new crop each year, for they no sooner start with her than they find husbands; and then they leave her. I could tell from the way she spoke to me that she thought me older than I am.

When we met her she was wheeling a small trolley down the wards, stacked with books and slates and papers. She told me that the women come to Millbank generally very ignorant, ‘even of the Scriptures’; that many prisoners can read but not write, that others can do neither—she believes they are worse, on that score, than the men. ‘These,’ she said, indicating the books upon her trolley, ‘are for the better women.’ I bent to look at them. They were very worn, and rather limp; I imagined all the work-roughened fingers that had pinched and twisted them, over their term at Millbank, in idleness or frustration. I thought there might be titles there that we had had at home, Sullivan’s
Spelling Book
, a
Catechism of the History of England
, Blair’s
Universal Preceptor
—I am sure Miss Pulver made me recite from that when I was a girl. Stephen on his holidays would sometimes seize such books and laugh at them, saying they could teach one nothing.

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Bradley as she saw me squinting at the ghostly titles, ‘it does not do to give the women very new texts. They are so careless with them! We find pages torn out, and put to all manner of uses.’ She said the women use the paper for putting curls in their shorn hair, beneath their caps.

I had taken up the
Preceptor
; now, as the matron admitted Mrs Bradley to a cell nearby, I opened it, to pick a little through its crumbling pages. Its questions, in that particular setting, seemed bizarre ones—yet they had, I thought, a curious kind of poetry to them.
What sorts of grain best suit stiff soils? What is that acid which dissolves silver?
From far off down the passage came a dull, unsteady murmur, the crunch of stout-soled shoes on sand, Miss Ridley’s cry: ‘You stand still and say your letters, like the lady asks you!’

Whence come sugar, oil and India rubber?
What is
relief
, and how should shadows fall?

At last I returned the book to its trolley and moved off down the passage, pausing as I did so to gaze in at the women as they frowned or muttered over their pages of print. I passed kind Ellen Power; and the sad-faced Catholic girl—Mary Ann Cook—who stifled her baby; and Sykes, the discontented prisoner who pesters the matrons for news of her release. And when I reached the archway at the angle of the ward I heard a murmur that I recognised, and walked a little further. It was Selina Dawes. She was reciting some Biblical passage to a lady, who listened and smiled.

I forget which text it was. I was struck by her accent, which sounds so oddly on the wards, and by her pose, which was so meek—for she had been made to stand, at the centre of her cell, with her hands clasped neatly at her apron and her head quite bowed. I have been imagining her—when I have been thinking of her at all—as the Crivelli portrait, lean and stern and sombre. I have thought sometimes of all she said about her spirits, their gifts, that flower—I have remembered her unsettling gaze. But to-day, with her delicate throat working beneath the ribbons of her prison bonnet, her bitten lips moving, her eyes cast down, the smart lady teacher looking on, she seemed only young, and powerless, and sad, and underfed, and I was sorry for her. She did not know I stood and watched until I took another step—then she looked up, and her murmurs ceased. Her cheeks flamed red, and I felt my own face burn. I had remembered what she said to me, about how all the world might gaze at her, it was a part of her punishment.

I made to move away, but the school-mistress had also caught sight of me and now rose and nodded. Did I wish to speak with the prisoner? They wouldn’t be a moment. Dawes knew her lesson quite by heart.

‘Go on,’ she said then, ‘you are doing splendidly.’

I might have watched and listened as another woman made her halting recitation, and then was praised for it, then left to silence; but I did not like to look at Dawes do that. I said, ‘Well, I shall call on you another day, since you are busy.’ And I nodded to the school-mistress, and had Mrs Jelf escort me to the cells of the further ward; and I passed an hour visiting the women there.

But oh! that hour was a miserable one, and the women all seemed dreary to me. The first I went to put her work aside and stood and curtseyed, and nodded and cringed while Mrs Jelf refastened her gate; but as soon as we were alone she drew me to her and said, in a reeking whisper: ‘Come close, come closer! They mustn’t hear me say it! If they hear me, they’ll nip me! Oh, they’ll nip me till I scream!’

She meant
rats
. She said that rats come in the night; she feels their cold paws on her face as she lies sleeping, and wakes with their bites upon her; and she rolled up the sleeve of her gown and showed me marks upon her arm—I am sure the marks were of her own teeth. I asked her, how could the rats get into her cell? She said the matrons bring them. She said, ‘They pass them through the eye’—she meant the inspection slit, beside her door—‘they pass them through by the tails, I see their white hands passing them. They drop them to the stone floor, one by one . . .’

Would I speak with Miss Haxby, to get the rats taken off?

I said I would, only to pacify her; and then I left her. But the next woman I visited seemed almost as mad, and even the third—a prostitute named Jarvis—I took to be feeble-minded at first, for all the time we spoke she stood and fidgeted, not meeting my gaze, yet sending her lustreless glance slithering over the details of my costume and my hair. At last, as if she couldn’t help herself, she burst out, How could I bear to dress so plain? Why, my gown was as dull, almost, as the matrons’! It was bad enough that they must wear what they must; she thought it would kill her to wear a frock like mine if she was only free again and might dress how she pleased!

I asked her then, what would she choose if she were me? and she answered promptly, ‘I would have a gown of Chamberry gauze, and a cloak of otter, and a hat of straw, with lilies on it.’ And for her feet?—‘Silk slippers, with ribbons to the knee!’

But that, I protested gently, was a costume for a party or a ball. She wouldn’t wear such a costume there, would she, to Millbank?

Wouldn’t she! With Hoy and O’Dowd to see her in it, and Griffiths and Wheeler and Banks, and Mrs Pretty, and Miss Ridley! Oh, just
wouldn’t
she!

In the end her enthusiasm grew so wild it began to trouble me. She must lie in her cell every night, I should think, imagining her gown, fretting over the fancy details. But when I made to step to the gate and call for the matron, she jumped forward to join me, and came very close. Her gaze was not at all dull now, but rather sly.

‘We have had a nice talk, miss, haven’t we?’ she said. I nodded—‘We have’—and moved to the gate again. Now she came even closer. Where, she asked me quickly, was I visiting next? Was it to be B ward? For if it was, Oh, would I please just pass a message, to her friend Emma White? She advanced her hand towards my pocket, towards my book and pen. Just a page of my book, she said, I might slip it through the bars of White’s cell, ‘quick as winking’. Only half a page! ‘She is my cousin, miss, I swear, you may ask any matron.’

I had drawn away from her at once, and now pushed her pressing hand away. ‘A message?’ I said in surprise and dismay. Oh, but she knew very well that I mustn’t carry messages! What would Miss Haxby think of me if I did that? What would Miss Haxby think of
her
, for asking? The woman drew back a little, but still she kept on with it: it couldn’t harm Miss Haxby, for White to know that her friend Jane was thinking of her! She was sorry, she said, that she had asked me to spoil my book; but mightn’t I just pass a word on?—mightn’t I just do that?—mightn’t I just tell White that her friend Jane Jarvis was a-thinking of her, and wished that she might know it?

I shook my head, and rapped at the bars of the gate for Mrs Jelf to come and free me. ‘You know you mustn’t ask,’ I said. ‘You know you must not; and I am very sorry that you have.’ At that, her sly look became sullen, and she turned away and hugged her arms about herself. ‘Damn you then!’ she said, quite plain—though not so plain that the matron could catch it, above the rasp of her prison boots upon the sanded passage-way.

It was curious to know how little her curse moved me. I had blinked to hear her say it, but now I only gazed levelly at her; and she saw that, and looked sour. Then the matron came. ‘On with your sewing now,’ she said gently, as she released me from the cell and locked the gate. Jarvis hesitated, then drew her chair across the floor and took up her work. And then she looked, not sullen or sour but—as Dawes had—she looked only miserable, and ill.

There were still the sounds of Mrs Bradley’s young ladies, working their way through the cells of Ward E; but I left that floor now, and went down to the First Class wards, and walked along them with their matron, Miss Manning. Gazing in at the women in their cells I found myself wondering, after all, which one of them it was that Jarvis was so eager to send word to. At last I said, very quietly, ‘Have you a prisoner named Emma White here, matron?’—and when Miss Manning said that she had, and should I like to visit her?, I shook my head, and hesitated, then said that it was only that another woman was keen for news of her, on Mrs Jelf’s ward. Her cousin, was it?—Jane Jarvis?

Miss Manning gave a snort. ‘Her cousin, did she tell you? Why, she is no more cousin to Emma White than I am!’

She said that White and Jarvis are notorious in the gaol as a pair of ‘pals’, and were ‘worse than any sweethearts’. She said I would find the women ‘palling up’ like that, they did it at every prison she ever worked at. It was the loneliness, she said, that made them do it. She herself had seen hard women there turn quite love-sick, because they had taken a fancy to some girl they had seen, and the girl had turned the shoulder on them, or had a pal already that she liked better. She laughed. ‘You must watch that no-one tries to make a pal of
you
, miss,’ she said. ‘There have been women here who have grown romantic over their matrons, and have had to be removed to other gaols for it. And the row they have raised, when they get taken, has been quite comical!’

She laughed again, then led me a little further down the ward; and I followed, though uneasily—for I have heard them talk of ‘pals’ before, and have used the word myself, but it disturbed me to find that the term had
that
particular meaning and I hadn’t known it. Nor, somehow, do I care to think that I had almost played the medium, innocently, for Jarvis’ dark passion . . .

Miss Manning brought me to a gate. ‘There’s White for you,’ she murmured, ‘that Jane Jarvis thinks so much of.’ I gazed into a cell to see a stout, yellow-faced girl, squinting at a row of crooked stitches in the canvas bag she had been set to sew. When she saw us watching her she rose and made a curtsey. Miss Manning said, ‘All right, White. Any news yet of your daughter?’—and then, to me: ‘White has a daughter miss, left in the care of an aunt. But we think the aunt a bad one—don’t we, White?—and are in fears she will let the little girl go the same way.’