Affinity by Sarah Waters Read Free Book Online Page A

face before the glass, passing one gloved fingertip across her brow. She had made the brow a little darker with a pencil, for the portrait’s sake, and wore a light blue gown beneath her dark coat. Mother said it might as well be blue as grey, since no-one was to see it save the artist, Mr Cornwallis.
    I did not go with them. I went to Millbank, to begin my proper visits to the women in their cells.
    It was not so frightening as I had thought it might be, to be led, alone, into the female gaol: I think my dreams of the prison had made its walls higher and grimmer, its passage-ways narrower, than they really are. Mr Shillitoe advises me to make a weekly trip there, but lets me choose the day and hour of it: he says that it will help me understand the women’s lives if I see all the places and habits they must keep to. Having gone there very early last week, to-day I went later. I arrived at the gate at a quarter-to-one, and was passed over, as before, to dour Miss Ridley. I found her just about to supervise the delivery of the prison dinners; and so I walked with her, until this was completed.
    It was an impressive thing to see. As I had arrived there had come a tolling of the prison bell: when the matrons of the wards hear that they must each take four women from their cells and walk with them to the prison kitchen. We found them gathered at its door when we went up to them: Miss Manning, Mrs Pretty, Mrs Jelf and twelve pale prisoners, the prisoners with their eyes upon the floor and their hands before them. The women’s building has no kitchen of its own, but takes its dinners from the men’s gaol. Since the male and female wards are kept quite separate, the women are obliged to wait very quietly until the men have taken their soup and the kitchen is cleared. Miss Ridley explained this to me. ‘They must not see the men,’ she said. ‘Those are the rules.’ As she spoke there came, from behind the bolted kitchen door, the slither of heavy-booted feet, and murmurs—and I had a sudden vision then of the men as goblin men, with snouts and tails and whiskers . . .
    Then the sounds grew less, and Miss Ridley lifted her keys to give a knock upon the wood: ‘All clear, Mr Lawrence?’ The answer came—‘All clear!’—and the door was unfastened, to let the prisoners file through. The warder-cook stood by with his arms folded, watching the women and sucking at his cheek.
    The kitchen seemed vast to me, and terribly warm after the chill, dark passage. Its air was thick, the scents on it not wonderful; they have sand upon the floor, and this was dark and clogged with fallen fluid. Down the centre of the room were ranged three broad tables, and on these were placed the women’s cans of soup and meat and trays of loaves. Miss Ridley waved the prisoners forward, two by two, and each seized the can or the tray for her ward, and staggered away with it. I walked back with Miss Manning’s women. We found the prisoners of the ground-floor cells all ready at their gates, holding their tin mugs and their trenchers, and while the soup was ladled out the matron called a prayer—‘ God-bless-our-meat-and-make-us-worthy-of-it! ’ or some rough thing like that—the women seemed to me almost entirely to ignore her. They only stood very quietly and pressed their faces to their gates, in an attempt to catch the progress of their dinners down the ward. When the dinners came they turned and carried them to their tables, then daintily sprinkled salt upon them from the boxes on their shelves.
    They were given a meat soup with potatoes, and a six-ounce loaf—all of it horrible: the loaves coarse and brown and over-baked as little bricks, the potatoes boiled in their skins and streaked with black. The soup was cloudy, and had a layer of grease upon the top that thickened and whitened as the cans grew cool. The meat was pale, and too gristly for the women’s dull-edged knives to leave much mark upon it: I saw many prisoners tearing at