Affinity Read online

  All the time we walked there came, from beyond the windows of the cells, the steady tramp, tramp of the women in the prison yards. Now, as we reached the furthest arm of the second ground-floor ward, I heard another ringing of the prison bell, that made the marching rhythm slow, then grow uneven; and after a moment there came the banging of a door, the rattling of bars, and then the sound of boots again, crunching on sand this time, and echoing. I looked at Miss Ridley. ‘Here come the women,’ she said, without excitement; and we stood and listened as the sound grew loud, then louder, then louder still. It seemed, at last, impossibly loud—for we of course had turned three angles of the floor and, though the women were near, we could not see them. I said, ‘They might be ghosts!’—I remembered how there are said to be legions of Roman soldiers that can be heard passing, sometimes, through the cellars of the houses of the City. I think the grounds at Millbank might echo like that, in the centuries when the prison no longer stands there.

  But Miss Ridley had turned to me. ‘Ghosts!’ she said, studying me queerly. And as she spoke, the prisoners turned the angle of the ward; and then they were suddenly terribly real—not ghosts, not dolls or beads on a string, as they had seemed before, but coarse-faced, slouching women and girls. Their heads went up when they saw us standing there, and when they recognised Miss Ridley their expressions grew meek. Me, however, they seemed to study quite frankly.

  They looked, but went neatly to their cells, and then sat. And behind them came their matron, locking the gates on them.

  This matron’s name, I think, is Miss Manning. ‘Miss Prior is making her first visit here,’ Miss Ridley said to her, and the matron nodded, saying, they had been told to expect me. She smiled. I had taken on a pretty task, she said, calling on their girls! And should I like to speak with one of them now?—I said I might as well. She led me to a cell she had not fastened yet, and beckoned to the woman that had entered it. ‘Here, Pilling,’ she said. ‘Here is the new Lady Visitor, come to take a bit of interest in you. Up, and let her see you. Come on, look slippy!’

  The prisoner came to me and made a curtsey. Her cheek was flushed and her lip slightly gleaming from her brisk circling of the yard. Miss Manning said, ‘Say who you are and why you are here’, and the woman said at once—though stumbling slightly, over the pronunciation of it—‘Susan Pilling, m’m. Here for thieving.’

  Miss Manning showed me then an enamel tablet that hung from a chain beside the entrance to the cell: this gave the woman’s prison number and class, her crime, and the date she was due to be released. I said, ‘How long have you been at Millbank, Pilling?’—She told me, seven months. I nodded. And what age was she? I thought she might be two or three years short of forty. She said, however, that she was twenty-two; and I hesitated at that, then nodded again. How, I asked next, did she care for the life there?

  She replied that she liked it well enough; and that Miss Manning was kind to her.

  I said, ‘I am sure she is.’

  Then there was a silence. I saw the woman gazing at me, and think the matrons also had their eyes upon me. I thought suddenly of Mother, scolding me when I was two-and-twenty, saying I must talk more when we went calling. I must ask the ladies after the health of their children; or after the pleasant places they had visited; or the work they had painted or sewn. I might admire the cut of a lady’s gown . . .

  I looked at Susan Pilling’s mud-brown dress; and then I said, how did she like the costume she must wear? What was it—was it serge, or linsey? Here Miss Ridley stepped forward, and caught hold of the skirt and lifted it a little. The gown was of linsey, she said. The stockings—these were blue with a crimson stripe, and very coarse—were of wool. There was one under-skirt of flannel, and another of serge. The shoes, I could see, were stout ones: the men made those, she told me, in the prison shop.

  The woman stood stiff as a mannequin as the matron counted off these items, and I felt myself obliged to stoop to a fold in her frock and pinch it. It smelt—well, it smelt as a linsey frock would smell when worn all day, in such a place, by one perspiring woman; so that what I next asked was, how often were the dresses changed?—They are changed, the matrons told me, once a month. The petticoats, under-vests and stockings they change once a fortnight.

  ‘And how often are you allowed to bathe?’ I asked the prisoner herself.

  ‘We are allowed it, m’m, as often as we like; only, not exceeding two times every month.’

  I saw then that her hands, which she kept before her, were pocked with scars; and I wondered how often she was used to bathing, before they sent her to Millbank.

  I wondered, too, what in the world we would discuss, if I was put in a cell with her and left alone. What I said, however, was: ‘Well, perhaps I will visit you again, and you can tell me more about how you pass your days here. Should you like that?’

  She should like it very much, she said promptly. Then: did I mean to tell them stories, from the Scripture?

  Miss Ridley told me then that there is another Lady Visitor who comes on Wednesdays, who reads the Bible to the women and later questions them upon the text. I told Pilling that, no, I would not read to them, but only listen to them and perhaps hear their stories. She looked at me then, and said nothing. Miss Manning stepped forward, and sent her back into her cell and locked the gate.

  When we left that ward it was to climb another winding staircase to the next floor, to Wards D and E. Here they keep the women of the penal class, the troublesome women or incorrigibles, who have made mischief at Millbank or been passed on or returned from other institutions for making mischief there. In these wards, all the doors are bolted up; the passage-ways, in consequence, are rather darker than the ones below, and the air is more rank. The matron of this floor is a stout, heavy-browed woman named—of all names!—Mrs Pretty. She walked ahead of Miss Ridley and me and, with a sort of dull relish, like the curator of a wax museum, paused before the cell doors of the worst or most interesting characters to tell me of their crimes, such as—

  ‘Jane Hoy, ma’am: child-murderer. Vicious as a needle.

  ‘Phœbe Jacobs: thief. Set fire to her cell.

  ‘Deborah Griffiths: pickpocket. Here for spitting at the chaplain.

  ‘Jane Samson: suicide—’

  ‘Suicide,’ I said. Mrs Pretty blinked. ‘Took laudanum,’ she said. ‘Took it seven times, and the last time a policeman saved her. They sent her here, as being a nuisance to the public good.’

  I heard that, and stood gazing at the shut door, saying nothing. After a moment the matron tilted her head. ‘You are thinking,’ she said confidentially, ‘how do we know she ain’t in there now, with her hands at her own throat?’—though I was not, of course, thinking that. ‘Look here,’ she went on. She showed me how, at the side of each gate, there is a vertical iron flap which can be opened any time the matron pleases, and the prisoner viewed: they call this the ‘inspection’; the women term it the eye. I leaned to look at it, and then moved closer; when Mrs Pretty saw me do that, however, she checked me, saying that she oughtn’t to let me put my face to it. The women were that cunning, she said, and they had had matrons blinded in the past. ‘One girl worked at her supper-spoon until the wood was sharp and—’ I blinked, and stepped hurriedly back. But then she smiled, and gently pressed the flap of iron open. ‘I daresay Samson shan’t harm you,’ she said. ‘You might just take a peep, if you are careful . . .’

  This room had iron louvres across its window and so was darker than the cells below, and instead of a hammock it had a hard wood bed. On this the woman—Jane Samson—was seated, her fingers plucking at a shallow basket that she had placed across her lap, that was heaped with coir. She had unpicked perhaps a quarter of the bundle; and there was another, larger, basket of the stuff beside the bed, for her to work on later. A bit of sun struggled through the bars across her window. Its beams were so clotted with brown fibre and with swirling particles of dust, she might, I thought, have been a character in a fairy-tale—a princes
s, humbled, set to work at some impossible labour at the bottom of a pond.

  She looked up once as I observed her, then blinked, and rubbed at her eyes where the coir-dust prickled them; and then I let the inspection close, and stepped away. I had begun to wonder, after all, whether she might not try to gesture to me, or call out.

  I had Miss Ridley take me away from that ward then, and we climbed to the third and highest floor there and met its matron. She proved to be a dark-eyed, kind-faced, earnest woman named Mrs Jelf. ‘Have you come to look at my poor charges?’ she said to me, when Miss Ridley took me to her. Her prisoners are mainly what are termed there Second Class, First Class and Star Class women: they are permitted to have their doors fixed open as they work, like the women on Wards A and B; but their work is easier, they sit knitting stockings or sewing shirts, and they are allowed scissors and needles and pins—this is considered, there, a great gesture of trust. Their cells, when I saw them, had the morning sun in them, and so were very bright and almost cheerful. Their occupants rose and curtseyed when we passed by them, and again seemed to study me very frankly. At last I realised that, just as I looked for the details of their hair and frocks and bonnets, so they looked for the particulars of mine. I suppose that even a gown in mourning colours is a novel one, at Millbank.

  Many of the prisoners on this ward are those long-servers about whom Miss Haxby had spoken so well. Mrs Jelf now also praised them, saying they were the quietest women in the gaol. Most, she said, would go on from there, before their time, to Fulham Prison, where the routines were a little lighter. ‘They are like lambs to us, aren’t they, Miss Ridley?’

  Miss Ridley agreed that they were not like some of the trash they kept on C and D.

  ‘They are not. We have one here—killed her husband, that was cruel to her—as nicely-bred a woman as you could ever hope to meet.’ The matron nodded into a cell, where a lean-faced prisoner sat patiently teasing at a tangled ball of yarn. ‘Why, we have had ladies here,’ she went on. ‘Ladies, miss, quite like yourself.’

  I smiled to hear her say it, and we walked further. Then, from the mouth of a cell a little way along the line there came a thin cry: ‘Miss Ridley? Oh, is that Miss Ridley there?’ A woman was at her gate, her face pressed between the bars. ‘Oh, Miss Ridley mum, have you spoke in my behalf yet, before Miss Haxby?’

  We drew closer to her, and Miss Ridley stepped to the gate and struck it with her ring of keys, so that the iron rattled and the prisoner drew back. ‘Will you keep silence?’ said the matron. ‘Do you think I don’t have duties enough, do you think Miss Haxby don’t have business enough, that I must carry your tales to her?’

  ‘It is only, mum,’ said the woman, speaking very quickly and stumbling over the words, ‘only that you said you would speak. And when Miss Haxby came this morning she was kept half her time by Jarvis, and would not see me. And my brother has brought his evidence before the courts, and wants Miss Haxby’s word—’

  Miss Ridley struck the gate again, and again the prisoner flinched. Mrs Jelf murmured to me: ‘Here is a woman who will pester any matron that passes her cell. She is after an early release, poor thing; I should say, however, that she will be here a few years yet.—Well Sykes, will you let Miss Ridley pass?—I should step a little further down the ward, Miss Prior, or she will try and draw you into her scheme.—Now Sykes, will you be good and do your work?’

  Sykes, however, still pressed her case, and Miss Ridley stood chiding her, Mrs Jelf looking on, shaking her head. I moved away, along the ward. The woman’s thin petitions, the matron’s scolds, were made sharp and strange by the acoustics of the gaol; every prisoner I passed had raised her head to catch them—though, when they saw me in the ward beyond their gates, they lowered their gazes and returned to their sewing. Their eyes, I thought, were terribly dull. Their faces were pale, and their necks, and their wrists and fingers, very slender. I thought of Mr Shillitoe saying that a prisoner’s heart was weak, impressionable, and needed a finer mould to shape it. I thought of it, and became aware again of my own heart beating. I imagined how it would be to have that heart drawn from me, and one of those women’s coarse organs pressed into the slippery cavity left at my breast . . .

  I put my hand to my throat then and felt, before my pulsing heart, my locket; and then my step grew a little slower. I walked until I reached the arch that marked the angle of the ward, then moved a little way beyond it—just far enough to put the matrons from my view, but not enough to take me down the second passage. Here I put my back to the limewashed prison wall, and I waited.

  And here, after a moment, came a curious thing.

  I was close to the mouth of the first of the next line of cells; near to my shoulder was its inspection flap or ‘eye’, above that the enamel tablet bearing the details of its inmate’s sentence. It was only from this, indeed, that I knew the cell was occupied at all, for there seemed to emanate from it a marvellous stillness—a silence, that seemed deeper yet than all the restless Millbank hush surrounding it. Even as I began to wonder over it, however, the silence was broken. It was broken by a sigh, a single sigh—it seemed to me, a perfect sigh, like a sigh in a story; and the sigh being such a complement to my own mood I found it worked upon me, in that setting, rather strangely. I forgot Miss Ridley and Mrs Jelf, who might at any second come to guide me on my way. I forgot the tale of the incautious matron and the sharpened spoon. I put my fingers to the inspection slit, and then my eyes. And then I gazed at the girl in the cell beyond—she was so still, I think I held my breath for fear of startling her.

  She was seated upon her wooden chair, but had let her head fall back and had her eyes quite closed. Her knitting lay idle in her lap, and her hands were together and lightly clasped; the yellow glass at her window was bright with sun, and she had turned her face to catch the heat of it. On the sleeve of her mud-coloured gown was fixed, the emblem of her prison class, a star—a star of felt, cut slant, sewn crooked, but made sharp by the sunlight. Her hair, where it showed at the edges of her cap, was fair; her cheek was pale, the sweep of brow, of lip, of lashes crisp against her pallor. I was sure that I had seen her likeness, in a saint or an angel in a painting of Crivelli’s.

  I studied her for, perhaps, a minute; and all that time she kept her eyes quite closed, her head perfectly still. There seemed something rather devotional about her pose, the stillness, so that I thought at last, She is praying!, and made to draw my eyes away in sudden shame. But then she stirred. Her hands opened, she raised them to her cheek, and I caught a flash of colour against the pink of her work-roughened palms. She had a flower there, between her fingers—a violet, with a drooping stem. As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow . . .

  She did that, and I became aware of the dimness of the world that was about her—of the wards, the women in them, the matrons, even my own self. We might have been painted, all of us, from the same poor box of watery tints; and here was a single spot of colour, that seemed to have come upon the canvas by mistake.

  But I didn’t wonder, then, about how a violet might, in that grim-earthed place, have found its way into those pale hands. I only thought, suddenly and horribly, What can her crime have been? Then I remembered the enamel tablet swinging near my head. I let the inspection close, quite noiselessly, and moved to read it.

  There was her prison number and her class, and beneath them her offence: Fraud & Assault. The date of her reception was eleven months ago. The date of her release was for four years hence.

  Four years! Four Millbank years—which must, I think, be terribly slow ones. I meant to move to her gate then, to call her to me and have her story from her; and I would have done it, had there not come at that moment, from further back along the first passage, the sound of Miss Ridley’s voice, and then of her boots, grinding the sand upon the cold flags of the ward. And that made me hesitate. I thought, How would it be, if the matrons were to look at the girl a
s I had, and find that flower upon her? I was sure they would take it, and I knew I should be sorry if they did. So I stepped to where they would see me, and when they came I said—it was the truth, after all—that I was weary, and had viewed all I cared to view for my first visit. Miss Ridley said only, ‘Just as you wish, ma’am.’ She turned on her heel and took me back along the passage; and as the gate was shut upon me I looked once over my shoulder to the turning of the ward, and felt a curious feeling—half satisfaction, half sharp regret. And I thought: Well, she will still be here, poor creature! when I return next week.

  The matron led me into the tower staircase, and we began our careful, circling descent to the lower, drearier wards—I felt like Dante, following Virgil into Hell. I was passed over first to Miss Manning, then to a warder, and was taken back through Pentagons Two and One; I sent a message in to Mr Shillitoe, and was led out of the inner gate and along that wedge of gravel. The walls of the pentagons seemed to part before me now, but grudgingly. The sun, that was stronger, made the bruise-coloured shadows very dense.

  We walked, the warder and I, and I found myself gazing again at the bleak prison ground, with its bare black earth and its patches of sedge. I said, ‘There are no flowers grown here, warder? No daisies, no—violets?’