by Ajay Close
He draws a chair up to the bed. The wardress’s face turns to stone.
He speaks in the level tone he used on the first night, but with a difference. A just perceptible softening. Nine months is a long time. He raises his voice to override her protest. She will be in his care for nine months. It would be better for both of them if they reached an understanding. Her unhappiness with the situation is a given. There is no need for her to demonstrate it continually. His position as her doctor – as her doctor – requires him to conduct regular physical examinations. She can resist him if she chooses, in which case he will summon the assistance of as many wardresses as it takes to subdue her, and she will tire herself needlessly. If he had his way, she would serve out her sentence quietly. Since she will not, it seems to him she would be better to offer resistance on a selective basis. No one, however strong, can put up a physical fight every hour of every day for nine months.
He sits back in his chair, awaiting her answer.
‘And if I agree not to struggle when you examine me, what is my reward?’
He quizzes his eyebrows as if he doesn’t understand her.
‘Will I be permitted to write to my family?’
‘No letters.’
‘May I hear from them?’
‘Reading interferes with the digestion.’
‘Visits, then?’
‘I will not have you excited.’
Two choices here. The words are already in her throat, I’ll tell you what excites me. Or she can keep her voice low and her wits cool.
‘So I get nothing. And you get your job made easier.’
‘I don’t barter with criminals.’
This is new. So far the traffic in insults has been all one way.
‘I am a political prisoner.’
‘A fire-raiser.’
‘A political act. As you, here, feeding me, is a political act.’
‘I am your doctor . . .’
‘A hired thug.’
‘. . . charged with keeping you alive.’
‘Keeping me quiet, more like.’
‘About women’s votes,’ he says dismissively.
‘I pay taxes like you. Why should you vote when I cannot?’
‘I don’t vote—’
She is too surprised to speak.
‘—They’re all as bad as each other. Why would I vote for them?’
‘Because I am ready to die for the right you discard.’
The decision is taken: she will educate him. If he can’t be stopped, at least he will understand what it is he does.
Or it may be the intention is his.
This is long before the National Health Service. Doctors are small businessmen, in private practice. They acquire their patients by social connection. The poor get as sick as the rich, if not sicker, but they cannot be relied on to pay. As soon as he qualified, he threw in his lot with the mentally bereaved, whom everyone wants off the streets. The mad who can afford seventy-five pounds a year, or whose relatives think it a price worth paying to loosen the madman’s grip on his estate, receive moral treatment. Essentially a behaviourist technique. They are trained to say please and thank you and sit quietly at table and, if they seem sufficiently rehabilitated, they are released. The mad poor end up in the public asylums, where they are straight-jacketed or strapped to their beds or thrashed by their infuriated keepers and, should they become so crazed that they will not eat, they are forcibly fed. This is the expertise that has brought Doctor Ferguson Watson to his present position.
As well as treating Perth’s convicts, he is in charge of Scotland’s collection of criminal lunatics. Mad, bad and diseased are not so very different in his eyes. The thieves and killers and female alcoholics are all deplorable physical specimens. Many of them cretins, from birth or by pickling their brains in bad hooch. Ethel Moorhead might have spoken with a tottie-peelings accent, but she was just another menopausal hysteric.
Prisoner Scott as a type is new to him.
Her face is pleasingly proportioned, the features regular. Her hymen is intact. She holds a degree from Edinburgh University. She has a tendency to constipation. She is a school teacher. Her nasal passages are usefully wide, allowing the tube to be inserted in her throat without troubling her breathing. She set fire to a racecourse stand. She has a smaller heart than is normal due to mitral phursis. Her arguments are rational, her abstention from food and water is not. Her brain is overdeveloped at the expense of her reproductive organs, but she menstruates, which is a healthy sign.
He is an intelligent man. More so than most doctors. There were some who graduated with better marks, but they were not combining their studies with supporting themselves as a grocer’s apprentice. Until now his grasp of what ails his patients has been swift and certain. Prisoner Scott is a challenge to his professional competence. He does not understand her. If she were ugly, or old, he would diagnose her easily, but if she were ugly or old she would be a different woman physiologically. No less than her undergrown heart or her locked bowels, her beauty is a piece of the puzzle, suggesting she is well suited to breeding, and likely to attract the most virile mate. Why, then, is she not married? Neurosis? Inversion? Or an inferior pool of masculine acquaintance?
He is aware of the talking cure. Unscientific mumbo-jumbo, in his opinion, but he is pragmatic enough to scavenge the useful techniques of any bankrupt methodology. And after that harpy caught pneumonia four months ago, he needs nothing less than a cure: Prisoner Scott, sleek as a farm cat, emerging from prison after serving the full nine months. She must be made to see the limits of feminine intellect and brought to her true womanly nature. She will be grateful, in the end.
FIVE
The Scott family know nothing. Harriet is reduced to writing pleading letters to the Prison Commission, asking the whereabouts of her daughter. For all the good that does her. The answer comes from elsewhere. Perth Suffrage Society boasts barely a dozen members but it’s a small town, word gets around. Muriel Scott packs her bag and boards the train. That night she addresses an open-air rally at Perth’s High Street Port, the first of many in these long, warm midsummer evenings. The crowd is volatile. Supporters from Perth, Dundee and Fife are outnumbered by purple-palmed dye-workers, laundry maids, bleachers, distillery hands, insurance clerks, barefoot children, and a gang of youths there to make a nuisance of themselves. After the speeches they march through town and across the grassy common to the prison. A smallish crowd at first, but growing bigger as folk get to hear of the nightly entertainment. Muriel will become adept at putting down hecklers. She’ll also get better at dodging flying vegetables. Feeling in the town is against the suffragettes, but not so much that the locals want the fun to stop. Doctor Watson is a blow-in – worse, a west-coaster – so they’re not overly partial to him either. They’re proud of Perth, and don’t care to see its name dragged through the dirt with lurid headlines about cruelty to women. And when all’s said and done, everybody likes a sing-song. Scots Whae Hae, A Man’s a Man for a’ That. What does it matter if the women change the words a wee bittie?
She hears sounds in the night, she tells him. Voices outside the gaol.
He says her mind is playing tricks on her.
Women’s voices, she says.
He tells her hallucination is one of the symptoms of starvation.
But she is not starving, thanks to his torture, so why should she hallucinate?
She arrived at the prison in a severely weakened state. By feeding her he has arrested her decline, but she will not recover fully without rest.
Rest! He has her flat on her back twenty-four hours a day. She is rested enough. It is exercise she needs.
His mouth sets. They have been over this before.
She demands to see the prison rules.
He says the rules are written for healthy prisoners.
She is being denied her right to regular exercise. By refusing to let her petition the Prison Commissioners, he thinks to conceal this fact from his superiors.<
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He says the Commissioners fully endorse his actions.
But they won’t like the presence of protesters outside the gaol?
He repeats, she is imagining things. Or dreaming them, perhaps.
Dreaming! How can she dream when she doesn’t sleep? When she counts every second of the hours through the night?
He insists she is mistaken. She sleeps soundly. He turns to the wardress: is that not so?
‘Aye, Doctor.’
She knows he is lying. Yet what if her longing could conjure voices out of the air . . .?
He tells her these fancies drain her strength. She must give them up.
In bed, prevented from reading or writing, every square inch of her surroundings scrutinised and committed to memory: how is she to get through the days? The temptation to change something, anything, is overwhelming. But the only change within reach, to start eating, would be self-defeating in every way. Yes, she’d exchange the hospital for a cell, but who would visit her? They would say they understood, but they’d be so disappointed, and afraid of putting themselves to the test. She would become an emblem of failure, and they would shun her.
She doesn’t know if she truly believes this. That’s the worst of isolation. To escape the boredom and the hostility of her captors, she retreats inside her head. But cut off from the world of facts and proof, her head too is a perilous space. At school, after the family moved back from Dum Dum, her classmates would titter at her accent, mocking her when she forgot and said ayah or memsahib or punkah wallah. Within a month they had tired of tormenting her but, for a long time after, she was prone to the fear that this or that friend had turned against her. Surreptitiously she would watch them, noting the way they whispered, their glances brushing hers but not connecting. Minutes later, she’d be laughing with them, and the others would never guess the passionate, recriminatory speeches she had made to them in her head. She has not thought of this in years, and still her chest is hot with remembered hurt. She must resist such childishness. It is just what the doctor wants. She is to look on him as a father figure, acting in her best interests. Ha! The cruellest man she knows. His harsh voice, his pitiless hands, the way his jaw grits when she resists. The rage she senses boiling within him.
She will not think of him.
When he comes, instinct takes over. She fixes her attention on what he is doing at that precise moment, and how to thwart him. The same with his speech. She pinpoints the weakness in what he has said, how the words can be turned or mocked. It’s a question of survival. There’s never time to look at the whole man, to wonder who is he outside this moment? And yet, when he has gone, she finds every mole, every fingernail, every stitch in his clothes, the grain of his voice in calm and in anger, all of it committed to memory. She rehearses what she will say to him, new ways of pouring scorn on him, reminding him that he is the tool of an immoral government. To act as he does, suppressing another’s freedom because he is told to, quite without political conviction, makes him the worst kind of slave. And in her head he replies that he has sworn an oath to keep his patients alive. As for her freedom: she knew the law. It was her free choice to break it. The argument goes back and forth until she defeats him, or until he leaves her tongue-tied and humiliated. Then the rehearsal seems less a preparation for ordeals ahead, and more a surrender to enemy occupation. Then she wonders if this, too, is part of his plan.
So she will not think of him. But she must think of something. It is too easy to let her thoughts trickle away, leaving a dull vacancy. Day, night, the same: abed but not weary, half in, half out of shallow sleep. Her dreams are as vivid to her as anything that happens while she is awake. Sometimes her body seems the prison. Some nights her soul slips free of its carcass to drift like thistledown in the air.
She compiles a list of all those who love her. Muriel, her mother, Isabella, Alice, Agnes, her brother William. Dear Ethel, Grace, Fanny, Annie, Janie, Flora . . . So many people. She must take heart from that. They admire her resourcefulness, the way she casts off her sober schoolmistress demeanour and makes herself such an infernal nuisance, with such a genius for righteous cheek. Her exploits are famous. That time she pulled the communication cord of the train taking her back to gaol in Edinburgh, then broke a window in the taxi, telling her captors to send the bill to the Home Secretary. She smiles at the memory. But it is lonely, being a heroine, obliged to generate an endless supply of witty and ingenious acts of defiance. Her fellow campaigners are sure she has the inner strength to withstand the feeding. Sometimes this thought lends her that strength. Other times she thinks: how can they sit at home with their mothers and sisters, their newspapers and letters and books, and think they know? She does not want them to worry over her, but their unshakeable confidence makes the loneliness much worse. In her reveries they place a hand on her shoulder, and even then she can’t admit the truth.
There are hours when she fears she is going mad.
SIX
The Doctor sees Arabella three times a day. At 8.00 am and 5.00 pm to feed her, and once in between, usually mid-morning, when he comes in his black frock coat to take her pulse and temperature and sound her chest.
On the fifth day – or is it the sixth? Already she’s not sure – she asks if she is supposed to pretend he is someone else when he comes in his frock coat? Does he think she will forget what he did to her this morning, clad in his butcher’s apron?
He asks the wardress if she has slept. (She has.)
She informs him that from now on she will call him Doctor Savage, so both of them can keep in mind what he is.
He asks the wardress if she has opened her bowels? (She has not.)
She says, by rights, he should be serving a prison sentence himself.
He tells the wardress to fetch the calomel from Doctor Lindsay.
The wardress is surprised. Matron’s instructions are to remain with the prisoner at all times. Matron and the doctor do not like each other. The Governor prefers Matron but is too spineless to back her in a fight.
For the first time since Arabella’s arrival, doctor and prisoner are alone.
Outside it’s a hot day. The north-facing windows show a cloudless blue sky, bleached by the invisible sun. The ward is bright. The mattress ticking on the unmade beds shows its stains very clearly. In her boredom, she has counted the shadowed indentations in the whitewashed walls. There is a smell of carbolic, to her ever-suggestive of the dirt it has been used to vanquish. The doctor takes the wardress’s chair. His face has acquired a few freckles.
‘You’re a schoolteacher—’
What is she supposed to answer to that? He knows full well she is.
‘—were a schoolteacher, I should say.’
‘I’ve been put on the reserve list, after agreeing to leave militant action to others.’
He exhales, the breath making a derisive sound in his nose. ‘And your word’s worth so little?’
‘Since Kelso I’ve done nothing illegal.’
‘You were arrested at a by-election meeting.’
‘Holding a political opinion is not yet against the law.’
She is waiting for him to make another derogatory remark about politics. Instead, he says, ‘Your sister, is she a teacher?’
Instantly she is on her guard. ‘One of my sisters.’
‘The one you live with—’
It was in the newspapers, but still. She says nothing.
‘—and she’s of your mind, about all this?’
‘She believes in votes for women.’
He takes the stethoscope out of his leather bag. ‘Dull brown hair, not so tall?’
‘You’ve seen her?’ She is horrified. ‘In here?’
He places the chest piece inside the neck of her nightdress. ‘Out there, on her soapbox.’
She is not going mad. The voices are real.
‘How did she look?’
‘Breathe in.’
She hesitates before complying.
‘Like you.’ His m
outh forms a judicious shape. ‘Less well-favoured.’ He pauses to move the chest piece around her breast, ‘And out.’
She breathes out. ‘Would you . . .’
‘No,’ he says, cutting her off.
‘Just send her my love.’
‘I said no. And again: in.’
He would not have mentioned Muriel for nothing. It’s a gambit. Well, she may give him what he wants, but only if he agrees to carry a message.
‘And out.’ He writes on the chart in his spiky, almost italic hand. ‘You have a presystolic bruit, a heart murmur. Your sister is healthy?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘She wouldn’t want you to put your life in danger.’
‘That’s exactly what she wants.’
‘If she loves you . . .’
‘She would have me remain true to my principles. That is what love means to us.’
‘And if somebody burns to death, out of your love?’
‘No one has.’
‘Yet.’ He tucks the thermometer under her arm. ‘So I’m a savage and you’re an instrument of love. For women.’
‘And for men who would take women as their equals.’
Another derisive breath. ‘You think men want to meet women as equals?’
‘Some men.’
‘They know you want to hear them say so.’
This stings as if she had a particular man in mind.
What is that smell? Something intimately foul. Too much to hope it might be him. What she wouldn’t give for a toothbrush to rid her mouth of this acrid taste. Or a bath. Even a bed wash. But what’s the use? In a few hours he will feed her, and she will be drenched in vomit again.
Out of nowhere he says, ‘Two sisters taught at the school I went to.’
‘And were they supporters of women’s votes?’
Snitting, Muriel used to call this sort of riposte when they were children. But if he gives her less autonomy than a two-year-old, what does he expect?