Affinity by Sarah Waters Read Free Book Online

descriptions of Millbank, and of the prisoners in it. What they have asked for, however, are dreadful details to make them shudder; and though my memories of the gaol have stayed very crisp, those are not at all the kind of points that I recall. I have been haunted, rather, by the ordinariness of it; by the fact that it lies there at all, two miles away, a straight cab’s ride from Chelsea—that great, grim, shadowy place, with its fifteen hundred men and women, all shut up and obliged to be silent and meek. I have found myself remembering them, in the midst of some plain act—taking tea, because I am thirsty; taking up a book or a shawl, because I am idle or cold; saying, aloud, some line of verse, merely for the pleasure of hearing the fine words spoken. I have done these things, that I have done a thousand times; and I have remembered the prisoners, who may do none of them.
    I wonder how many of them lie in their cold cells, dreaming of china cups, and books, and verses? I have dreamt of Millbank this week, more than once. I dreamt I was among the prisoners there, straightening the lines of my knife and fork and Bible, in a cell of my own.
    But these are not the details people ask me for; and though they understand my going there once, as a kind of entertainment, the thought of my returning there a second time, and then a third and fourth, amazes them. Only Helen takes me seriously. ‘Oh!’ cry all the others, ‘but you cannot mean really to befriend these women? They must be thieves, and—worse!’
    They look at me, and then at Mother. How, they ask, can she bear to have me go there? And Mother, of course, answers then: ‘Margaret does just as she pleases, she always has. I have told her, if she wants for employment there is work that she might do at home. There are her father’s letters—very handsome letters—to be collected and arranged . . .’
    I have said I plan to work upon the letters, in time; but that for now, I should like to try this other thing, and at least see how I do at it. I said this to Mother’s friend Mrs Wallace, and she looked at me a little speculatively; I wondered then how much she knows or guesses about my illness and its causes, for she answered, ‘Well, there’s not a better tonic for dismal spirits than charity-work—I heard a doctor say that. But a prison ward—oh! only think of the air! The place must be a breeding-ground, for every kind of illness and disease!’
    I thought again of the white monotonous passage-ways and the bare, bare cells. I said, on the contrary, the wards were very clean and orderly; and my sister said then that, if they were clean and orderly, why did the women in them need sympathy from me? Mrs Wallace smiled. She has always liked Priscilla, she thinks her more handsome even than Helen. She said, ‘Perhaps you will think of charity-visiting, my dear, when you are married to Mr Barclay. Have they prisons, in Warwickshire? To think of your dear face amongst those convict women’s—what a study that would make! There is an epigram for it, what is it? Margaret, you will know it: the poet’s words, about women and heaven and hell.’
    She meant:
For men at most differ as Heaven and Earth,
But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell
    and when I said it she cried, There! how clever I was! If she had been put to read all the books that I had, she would have to be a thousand years old at the least.
    Mother said it was certainly true, what Tennyson said about women . . .
    That was this morning, when Mrs Wallace came to breakfast with us. After that she and Mother took Pris for her first sitting for a portrait. Mr Barclay has commissioned it, he wants a picture of her hanging in the drawing-room at Marishes for their arrival there after the honeymoon. He has found a man to do the work, who has a studio at Kensington. Mother asked me, Would I go and sit with them?—Pris saying that, if anyone should like to look at paintings, I should. She said it with her