by Ajay Close
He will not speak, and she cannot with the mercury in her mouth. At last he removes it, checks the reading, writes it down.
‘Silent today?’ she says drily.
He closes his bag and moves towards the door, nodding at the wardress to indicate that he is finished here.
The wardresses complain about the stink. Her stink. By now she barely notices it. The window has a small casement to allow the circulation of air. Although suspicious of her suddenly breaking silence, they decide it can do no harm. Once the glass is pushed open she hears the singing, faint at this distance, but evidently a crowd. Florence, the stout one, slams the window shut. She assures them she will not tell. Besides, Doctor Watson has admitted these nightly gatherings take place. They exchange glances. Jean (thinner, with the beginnings of a moustache) says, ‘Ach, open it, afore we’re poisoned,’ and Arabella spends a pleasant hour feigning sleep, straining her ears to pick out Muriel’s off-key mezzo.
Two days since Dunlop’s visit, and still the doctor holds his tongue when he comes to examine her. His thumb remains bandaged. She must have bitten deep. He behaves as if she had betrayed him. As if she were not his prisoner, but his friend. If she has shamed him in front of his employers, he has only himself to blame: she did not ask him to bring Doctor Dunlop to see her. Though she’s glad he did. The visit has left her with a new sense of power, new insight into her captors. Now they have someone to gossip with, the wardresses have Christian names and personalities. They like to gang up on Doctor Lindsay, teasing him, sometimes so roughly that his cocksure grin slips. He reminds her of the boys who sit at the back of her class laughing at Willie McKelvie’s jokes: if you call out their names, they’re petrified.
She knows she can beat them: Lindsay, the wardresses, Doctor Watson, the Government, all of them. The trick is to make the most of the cards that are dealt to her. No knowing when opportunity will present itself. She must watch and wait and keep herself ready.
Today, after the morning feed, one of the wardresses sponges her face. When Doctor Watson enters the hospital, he is accompanied by a tall man in an exquisitely tailored coat. She can’t help comparing him to the doctor. Softly fleshy where the other is lean. Both of them white-skinned but, where the doctor’s pallor calls to mind a switch stripped of bark ready for a thrashing, the visitor’s is milky, with two faint spots of colour that, in a girl, would be called rosy cheeks. A lack of definition around the jawline, those boneless-looking hands. But Councillor Stewart is man enough to notice that she is a woman. His little eyes seek hers, his pink lips pursing and parting like some creature anchored to the seabed. She meets his look, feeling her eyes grow large and sorrowing like those portraits of Arthurian maidens so popular when her mother was a girl. He introduces himself as a representative of Glasgow Corporation, surprising the doctor by bending over the bed to take her hand. Though his touch is clammy, she doesn’t pull away. The doctor’s face reddens. She can well imagine the objections he raised with the Governor. Interesting, that he can be overruled.
Councillor Stewart says she must not think herself forgotten. The Lord Provost himself awaits news of her. This will be Janie Allan’s doing. Her father is one of Glasgow’s wealthiest citizens. He has pulled strings with the Corporation, or perhaps Janie persuaded the councillor herself. Either way, his presence here proves him a friend. Yet the air between them is charged with something more than simple friendship. She looks into his eyes, and sees the roses in his cheeks shade into a blush. Every cell in his body is attuned to hers. The heat of this knowledge spreads through her like brandy. She fills her lungs and lets the breath out in a shuddering sigh. His grip on her fingers tightens, his gaze quite naked. Her eyes bore into his, sensing his longing to change places, to lie prone as she looms above him. She tells herself she does not understand this intuition, but some demon inside her extends her tongue-tip to her lips as she complains of thirst. Councillor Stewart murmurs a faint ‘dear lady’. The doctor’s voice is loud as he says it is her own free choice not to eat or drink, his face showing the immense effort of will that keeps him from breaking their hands’ clasp.
Councillor Stewart asks if there is anything that could be done to make her more comfortable? A bath, she says. The doctor replies that she is washed according to prison regulations. Her lips form a fleeting moue as if to say you see how it goes with me here. Doctor Watson’s eyes flash, but what can he do? She holds the power now. She asks the councillor to arrange for her to petition the Commission. She cannot expect the doctor to breach regulations, but if she could address his masters directly, she is sure they would exercise compassion. Councillor Stewart says she may consider it done. At last she smiles at him. The blush spreads to his ears. Rather rudely, the doctor says they must move on. He steps aside at the door, allowing the visitor to go first. She knows he means to follow without a backward glance, but he can’t help himself. His head turns. She raises her eyebrows at him before he closes the door with a slam.
Next morning he informs her that she may dictate her petition to Doctor Lindsay.
Prisoner Gordon is still losing weight. She screams in her sleep, dreaming of the feeding tube. Awake, she is never less than hysterical. She flinches at the mere sight of the doctor. He tells himself he’ll give her something to flinch about, but he won’t. Her nearness disgusts him like matter under his fingernails. He prescribes liquid bismuth to stop the diarrhoea that is making rectal feeding so problematic. It tightens her bowels, but makes no difference to the unspeakable odour she gives off from every orifice. When Doctor Dunlop visited, somehow she summoned the strength to insult him. This remarkable show of vitality gave the medical adviser a misleading impression, and it is not the doctor’s place to introduce doubts into his mind. He was appointed as a firm hand in a faint-hearted profession. He cannot show weakness now. He must continue with the regimen and hope the minuscule traces of nourishment she retains will get her through her sentence.
He thought the disruption caused by Dunlop’s visit would put paid to further interference, but no: that ass Stewart must be given the run of the gaol and touched to the shallows of his sentimental Weegie soul by Prisoner Scott’s comely suffering. So now her hopes are raised by this damn-fool petition. After all he has said about the inadvisability of such a step. In his daily report to the Governor, he writes ‘She told me afterwards that the man did not show any sympathy’. He surprises himself with this fiction, but it cheers him up.
Matron continues to make trouble. She waits until he is across in the criminal lunatic department, and barges her way into the women’s hospital. Prisoner Scott complains about not being allowed to sit up, giving the meddling hag just the ammunition she is looking for: where’s the sense in taking six wardresses off the rota, leaving her short-staffed, merely to see that Prisoner Scott lies flat on her back? The Governor requires him to answer this point in writing, which means the Commission has been informed. The doctor explains, for the umpteenth time, that sitting up brings on sickness, in which case he is wasting his time feeding her, they might as well let her go now. He understands the Commissioners wish her to serve the full nine months, or is he mistaken? ‘That remains to be seen,’ the Governor says.
After due consideration, the Commissioners refuse Prisoner Scott’s request for early release.
She looks stunned when he tells her. Her eyes darken with the threat of tears. He says he knew it would come to this, he tried to protect her from needless disappointment, but she would have her own way. She screams at him to get out. The wardresses stare at the floor. He says he will return when she takes a more rational view.
But that doesn’t happen. She sinks into a decline, her lustrous eyes dull, the ripe push of her lips pinched with misery. He hates this shrivelling, as he hated her triumphal glow after Dunlop’s visit, both ways of getting back at him. When he examines her, she yields like a sleepwalker, absent, unseeing. She even submits to the evening feed, then cries out, complaining of heart pain. He examines her, finding an a
pex beat one inch inside the left nipple line. He could tell her this heart murmur is aggravated by distress, what she calls pain is actually fear, she is in no immediate physical danger. But explaining anything to her is a waste of breath, she’ll only find some means to turn it against him, so let her lie there and worry.
The night of the storm, a wardress comes to his door just as he’s sitting down to the cold tongue supper his housekeeper has left for him. It’s Thompson, one of the relief staff transferred from Dundee Gaol. Prisoner Scott is very bad, sir. Talking queerly. He must come quickly. He leaves the meal on the table, quits the house in his shirtsleeves. The air is dense with electricity, thickly humid, the sky like a sheet of lead. And now, in a flash, magnesium white. Thunder grates above him as he crosses the prison yard. The first fat drops of rain spatter his white shirt. He takes the stone stairs two at a time, bringing the smell of outdoors in with him, the unearthed charge. She looks up from the bed and the current jumps between them. He wants the wardresses out. Impossible. There would have to be a reason, and even he does not know why. But they seem to catch his mood, backing away from the bed.
‘What’s the matter?’
He asks the prisoner, but it is Cruikshank, the other wardress, who answers. ‘She says she’s in pain, sir.’
‘Where?’
In a listless voice, as if speaking of someone she hardly knows, Prisoner Scott says, ‘My chest.’
Cruikshank says, ‘Her heart, sir.’
He ignores her, addressing the prisoner, ‘Palpitations?’
She nods.
He sits on the side of the mattress, touching the back of his hand to her brow. Her skin is sweaty, but not fevered, her pulse uncharacteristically faint. The energy kindled by that sprint up the stairs still fizzes in his chest. He takes out his stethoscope. Thompson moves to help him but he waves her away and unfastens the nightdress himself. There is no question of indelicacy, a doctor’s hands are God’s instruments, yet some breach is involved in this act of undressing. A compromising of professional detachment.
As ever, the hospital is several degrees cooler than the air outside. Gooseflesh rises under his damp shirtsleeves. He raises the stethoscope pad to his mouth and breathes on it, as he was taught to do at medical school, not a courtesy he observes habitually. The metal kisses her skin.
The wardresses open the casement windows. The warm air smells of wet earth. Lightning flashes, followed by an almighty clap of thunder. The prisoner’s face pales. Fasting purifies the complexion, and artificial feeding has not changed the blemishless gleam of her skin. How lovely she is, stretched out on the bed like this, her body soft and unresisting. He cannot allow himself to think this, not here, not now. But a shiver passes through him.
She says, ‘Does this gaol have a lightning conductor?’
‘I expect so.’ His eyes follow the stethoscope’s progress over her breast. ‘Are you afraid of the storm?’
‘I’m praying for it to strike me dead.’
One of the wardresses tuts.
‘Come now,’ he says in a bluff voice, ‘the pain’s not that bad.’
She turns her face away from him. At temple and nape, her hair is damp. His tongue prickles with the taste of salt.
The stethoscope tells him nothing new. And yet he doesn’t like this listlessness. He has seen patients let go of life, their heartbeat weakening, their lungs refusing air. He has closed their eyes and signed the death certificate with no medical diagnosis, no reason but despair.
She asks, ‘How long have I been here?’
‘Almost two weeks.’
The eyelid visible to him flutters. ‘Is that all?’
‘Thirteen days.’
A memory surprises him, surfacing from a quarter-century ago. His sister Jane playing keek-a-boo. The silky-gingery back of her head. She is only just walking. Tottering, really. She will drown in the cattle trough before she is old enough to talk.
‘Sister, let me see your face—’
He starts. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the wardresses’ hands touch. He hates their superstition as he hated his mother’s, feeling its tug within him. The prisoner’s eyes stare up through the ceiling.
‘—I go home. Past the cracked tile in the close mouth. Up the stairs. Through the storm doors . . . ’ Her voice drops to a whisper, ‘There she is, at the window. But she will not turn round.’
How to cut a path through the thicket of another’s mind without destroying what we would reach? Yet to enter the tangle unarmed, ducking and twisting through the thorns, is to risk being lost forever.
He asks Thompson if Prisoner Scott is often like this.
‘It’s the loneliness, sir. A night-time thing. It comes and goes.’
‘With the palpitations?’
They all hear the urgency in his voice.
The wardress shrugs. He turns his back on her. ‘Have you pain elsewhere?’
Prisoner Scott’s eyes roll towards his, then away. When Dunlop came she was an Amazon. He wants to shock her into life, put the spark of fury back in her voice, but to speak harshly to her would be like kicking a dead thing. At once monstrously cruel, and useless.
‘How am I to help you if you won’t tell me?’
At last she turns her gaze on him. ‘There is nothing you can do for me.’
He touches her cheek. ‘Never say that.’
The wardresses are watching.
The lightning comes again, the thunder immediately after. She moans.
‘Arabella?’
He has never spoken her name before.
A sudden wind drives a volley of rain against the window. Her eyes close. She is beaten. What else has he striven for? And he can’t bear it.
TEN
The crisis passes. Next morning she resists the feeding again. He envies her capacity to recover. For forty years his body has been a tireless and uncomplaining servant, now it nags at him with aches and pains. He cannot remember when he last felt rested. His mental stamina, too, suffers. Nothing that others would notice, but a slackening in his former rigour. He knows he can cure Prisoner Scott, but how can he give her the attention she needs? Three new suffragette prisoners are about to arrive, all hunger strikers. There is so much to keep control of, one emergency after another. He is losing weight, too preoccupied to taste the food he puts in his mouth. A couple of bites are all his clenched stomach can take. He works every hour he is awake. Past midnight he returns to his tied house outside the prison gate, falls into a dead sleep, and opens his eyes at dawn, unrefreshed, to begin the next day.
He falls into the habit of visiting the women’s hospital at night. The wardresses think he’s trying to catch them sleeping on the job, but it’s Prisoner Scott’s sleep he comes to watch, her humid skin and softly-rasping breath. Experience has taught him that the more guarded the patient is by day, the more helplessly exposed at night. Sooner or later, she will give herself away. She’s a sleep talker, but in scribble, like infants just on the threshold of speech. Her noises have the tantalising rhythm of adult conversation but, no matter how close he brings his ear, he can make no sense of them. Sometimes she laughs, sometimes whimpers, or writhes or flails her arms or thrashes her legs like a dog that dreams of running. It is maddening, to be shut out of this night-time world of hers, this secret life of mirth and sorrow and flight.
Next morning, he will use the force required to feed her, no more, no less. If it involves bruises and blood and broken teeth, that’s her decision. She has the wherewithal to end it. But in the night, bending over her sleeping form, squinting with the effort of trying to read the movement of her lips, he has this feeling. A tunnel opening inside him, a flower blooming. No. Even at night, these are not his thoughts. He reminds himself to avoid cheese for supper.
One evening she opens her eyes. His skin jumps.
‘You should be asleep.’
Her expression says this is too fatuous to merit a reply.
‘You need rest.’
‘Why
? Am I gaunt with fatigue, jittery with exhaustion?’ She looks up into his face. ‘Like you.’
‘I’m not sleeping much,’ he admits.
‘Troubled by a bad conscience?’
Both wardresses are slumped in their chairs, mouths agape, dead to the world. At mention of the Doctor’s conscience, one of them snorts. Doctor and prisoner smile. Then realise that the other, too, is smiling.
‘What day is it?’ she asks.
‘Monday. July sixth.’ For a moment his face belongs to another man.
‘What?’
‘It’s Glasgow Fair next week.’
She smiles, ‘I always wanted to go, when we lived in Dunoon—’
He had forgotten that she, too, hails from the west coast.
‘—is it as thrilling as they say?’
‘I only went the once.’
‘Something happened to you there?’
This catches him off guard. For a moment he stares at her. And then it is too late to deny it.
‘Something bad?’
Perhaps it’s the tiredness. He answers honestly, ‘I didn’t see it like that at the time.’
She slides to the edge of the mattress. He sits down.
‘Begin at the beginning,’ she says.
It’s going to rain. Every woman who’s ever hung her washing out knows it, the same as every farmer’s son, but still they say ‘Braw day, the day’. Their smiles sharper than the wifies back in Ochiltree, as if they’re in on a secret. A gang of keelies down the street who’ll snatch his cap and call him teuchter. A dipper waiting round the next corner to take the pennies from his pooch. He slides his hand in there to touch the coins, and saliva fills the hollow under his tongue the way it did when he was wee and put a ha’penny in his mouth. An old ha’penny, browny-black and worn, with the head chopped off at the neck. Not like the shiny new bun penny his teacher has given him to spend at the fair, the copper so fresh-minted he can see the pleats in the Queen’s coil of hair and the plump breasts pushing out of her dress.