Affinity

by Sarah Waters

  ‘Ghosts!’ she said to us. ‘To think of ghosts, in this house! To think of your poor father’s memory being sullied, like that, by a creature like Boyd.’

  Priscilla said she did think it rather queer that, if Pa’s ghost should walk anywhere, it should be in the tweeny’s attic. She said, ‘You sit very late, Margaret. Have you heard nothing?’

  I said that I had heard Boyd snoring; and that where I had thought her only sleeping she might, after all, have been snoring in fear . . .

  Mother said then, she was glad I found it comical. There was nothing comical about the task she had now, getting another girl and training her up!

  Then she sent for Boyd again, to bully her a little more.

  The rain having kept us all so close at home, the argument has dragged miserably on. This afternoon I could not bear it any longer and, despite the weather, I drove to Bloomsbury—I went to the reading-room at the British Museum. I called up Mayhew’s book on the prisons of London, and the writings on Newgate of Elizabeth Fry, and one or two volumes recommended to me by Mr Shillitoe. A man who stepped to help me carry them said, Why was it that the gentlest readers invariably ordered such brutes of books? He held the volumes up to read their spines, and smiled at them.

  It made me ache a little with the loss of Pa, to be there. The reading-room is very unchanged. I saw readers I last saw two years ago, still clutching the same limp folio of papers, still squinting over the same dull books, still fighting the same small, bitter battles with the same disobliging staff. The gentleman who sucks his beard; the gentleman who chuckles; the lady copying Chinese characters, who scowls when her neighbours murmur . . . They were all there still, in their old places beneath the dome—like flies, I thought, in a paperweight of amber.

  I wonder, did anyone remember me? Only one librarian gave any sign of it. ‘This is Mr George Prior’s daughter,’ he said to a younger attendant as I stood at his window. ‘Miss Prior and her father were readers here for several years—why, I seem to see the old gentleman now, asking after his books. Miss Prior was assistant to her father while he worked on his study of the Renaissance.’ The attendant said he had seen the work.

  The others, who do not know me, call me ‘madam’ now, I noticed, instead of ‘miss’. I have turned, in two years, from a girl into a spinster.

  There were many spinsters there to-day, I think—more, certainly, than I remember. Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.

  I didn’t stay many hours there, but was restless—and, besides that, the rain made the light very poor. But I did not want to come home, to Mother and to Boyd. I took a cab to Garden Court, on the chance that the weather would have kept Helen there, alone. It had: she had had no visitors since yesterday, but was sitting making toast before the fire, feeding the crusts of it to Georgy. She said to him when I went in, ‘Here is your Aunt Margaret, look!’ and she held him to me, and he braced his legs against my stomach and kicked. I said, ‘Well, what great fat handsome ankles you have,’ and then, ‘What a great red crimson cheek.’ But Helen said his cheek was only crimson because of a new tooth, that hurt him. After a little time in my lap he began to cry, and then she passed him to his nurse, who took him away.

  I told her about Boyd and the ghosts; and then we talked of Pris and Arthur. Did she know they mean to honeymoon in Italy?—I think she had known it for longer than I, but would not admit to it. She said only, that anyone might go to Italy if they liked. She said, ‘Would you have everyone stop at the Alps, because you were meant to go to Italy once, and were kept from it? Don’t make Priscilla miserable over this. Your father was her father too. Do you think it hasn’t been hard for her, to have to hold her wedding off?’

  I said that I remembered how Priscilla had cried herself into a fit when Pa was first found to be ill—that was because she had had a dozen new gowns made, that must be all returned and sent back black. When I wept, I asked her, what did they do with me?

  She answered, not looking at me, that when I had wept it had been different. She said, ‘Priscilla was nineteen, and very ordinary. She has had two hard years. We should be glad that Mr Barclay has been so patient.’

  I said, rather sourly, that she and Stephen had been luckier; and she answered levelly: ‘We were, Margaret—because we were able to marry and have your father see it. Priscilla won’t have that, but her wedding will be finer without your poor pa’s illness to rush the planning of it. Let her enjoy it, won’t you?’

  I stood, and went to the fireplace and put my hands before the flames. I said at last, that she was stern to-day; that it was dandling her baby and being a mother that did that to her. ‘Indeed, Mrs Prior, you sound like my own mother. Or would do, if you were not so sensible . . .’

  When she heard me say that she coloured and said I must hush. But she also laughed and put her hand across her mouth, I saw her in the glass above the mantel. I said then, that I had not seen her blush so since she was plain Miss Gibson. Did she remember, how we laughed and blushed? ‘Pa used to say your face was like the red heart on a playing card—mine, he said, was like the diamond. Do you remember, Helen, how Pa said that?’

  She smiled, but had tilted her head. ‘There is Georgy,’ she said.—I had not heard him. ‘How his poor tooth makes him cry!’ And she rang for Burns, her maid, and had the baby brought again; and I did not stay long with her, after that.

  6 October 1874

  I feel not at all like writing to-night. I have come up, pleading a head-ache, and soon I suppose Mother will follow, to bring my medicine. I have had a dreary day, at Millbank Prison.

  They know me there now, and are jolly with me at the gate. ‘What, back again Miss Prior?’ said the Porter when he saw me come. ‘I should’ve said you might have had enough of us by now—but there, it is remarkable how fascinating the penitentiary is, to those that do not have to work here.’

  He likes to call the prison by that older name, I notice; and he sometimes calls the warders turnkeys, the matrons taskmistresses, on the same principle. He told me once that he has been porter at Millbank for thirty-five years, and so has seen many thousand convicts pass through his gate and knows all the most desperate and terrible histories of the place. Today being another very wet day, I found him standing at the gate-house window, cursing the rain that made a slurry of the Millbank earth. He said the soil holds the water and makes the men’s work in the grounds very miserable. ‘This is an evil soil, Miss Prior,’ he said. He made me stand with him at the glass, and he showed me where there had once, in the first days of the penitentiary, been a dry trench, that must be crossed like the moat of a castle, with a drawbridge. ‘But,’ he said, ‘the soil would not have it. As fast as they set convicts to drain it, so the Thames could seep; and they would find it, every morning, full of black water. At last they had to earth it in.’

  I stayed a little while with him, warming myself before his fire; and when I went in to the women’s gaol I was passed on, as usual, to Miss Ridley, that she might take me round some of its sites. To-day she showed me the infirmary.

  Like the kitchen, this is situated away from the body of the women’s building, in the prison’s central hexagon. It is a bitter-smelling room, but warm and large, and it might be pleasant, for it is the only chamber in which the women associate for purposes other than labour or prayer. Even here, however, they must be silent. There is a matron whose role it is to stand and watch them as they lie, and keep them from talking; and there are separate cells, and beds with straps, for the sick when they grow troublesome. On the wall there is a picture of Christ bearing a broken fetter, and a single line of text: Thy love constraineth us.

  They have beds, I think, for fifty women. We found perhaps twelve or thirteen there, most of whom seemed very ill—too ill to raise their heads to us, they only slept, or shuddered, or turned their faces into their grey pillows as we passed by. Miss Ridley gazed hard at them; and at the bed of one, she st
opped. ‘Look here,’ she said to me, gesturing to a woman who was laid out with her leg exposed, her ankle livid and wrapped with a bandage, and so swollen it was as thick, almost, as the thigh above it. ‘Now, this is the kind of patient I have no time for. You tell Miss Prior, Wheeler, how your leg came to be so hurt.’

  The woman ducked her head. ‘If you please, miss,’ she said to me, ‘it got cut with a dinner-knife.’ I remembered those blunt knives, and how the women had had to saw away at their bits of mutton, and looked at Miss Ridley. ‘Tell Miss Prior,’ she said, ‘how your blood came to be so poisoned.’

  ‘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 g
et 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.’