Affinity by Sarah Waters Read Free Book Online Page B

their mutton with their teeth, solemn as savages.
    They stood and took it readily enough, however; some only seemed to gaze rather mournfully at the soup as it was ladled out, others to finger their meat as if with suspicion. ‘Don’t you care for your dinner?’ I asked one woman I saw handling her mutton like this. She answered that she didn’t care to think whose hands might have been upon it, in the men’s gaol.
    ‘They handles filthy things,’ she said, ‘then jiggles their fingers in our soup, for sport . . .’
    She said this two or three times, then would not talk to me. I left her mumbling into her mug, and joined the matrons at the entrance to the ward.
    I talked a little with Miss Ridley then, about the women’s diet and the variations that are made in it—there being always fish served on a Friday, for example, on account of the large number of Roman Catholic prisoners; and on a Sunday, suet pudding. I said, Had they any Jewesses? and she answered that there were always a number of Jewesses, and they liked to make ‘a particular trouble’ over the preparation of their dishes. She had encountered that sort of behaviour, amongst the Jewesses, at other prisons.
    ‘You do find, however,’ she said to me, ‘that nonsense like that falls away in time. At least, in my gaol it does.’
    When I describe Miss Ridley to my brother and to Helen, they smile. Helen said once, ‘You are exaggerating, Margaret!’, but Stephen shook his head. He said he sees police matrons like Miss Ridley all the time, at the courts. ‘They are a horrible breed,’ he said, ‘born to tyranny, born with the chains already swinging at their hips. Their mothers give them iron keys to suck, to make their teeth come.’
    He bared his own teeth—which are straight, like Priscilla’s, where mine are rather crooked. Helen gazed at him and laughed.
    I said then, ‘I am not sure. Suppose she wasn’t born to it, but rather sweats and labours to perfect the role. Suppose she has a secret album, cuttings from the Newgate Calendar. I am sure she has a book like that. She has put a label on it, Notorious Prison Martinets , and she takes it out and sighs over it, in the small dark hours of the Millbank night—like a clergyman’s daughter, with a fashion paper.’ That made Helen laugh louder, until her blue eyes brimmed with water and her lashes grew very dark.
    But I remembered her laughter to-day, and thought of how Miss Ridley would gaze at me, if she knew how I used her to make my sister-in-law smile—the thought made me shudder. For on the wards at Millbank, of course, Miss Ridley is not comical at all.
    Then again, I suppose that the matrons’ lives—even hers, even Miss Haxby’s—must be very miserable. They are kept as close to the gaol, almost, as if they were inmates there themselves. Their hours, Miss Manning assured me to-day, are the hours of scullery-maids: they are given rooms in the prison in which to rest, but are often too exhausted from their day’s patrolling of the wards to do anything in their leisure time but fall upon their beds and sleep. Their meals are prepared in the prison kitchen, just like the women’s; and their duties are hard ones. ‘You ask to see Miss Craven’s arm,’ they said to me. ‘She is bruised from her shoulder to her wrist, where a girl caught her a blow, last week, in the prison laundry.’ But Miss Craven herself, when I did encounter her a little later, seemed almost as coarse as the women she must guard. They were all ‘as rough as rats’, she said, and she was disgusted with the sight of them. When I asked her would the work ever be so hard as to drive her to some other occupation? she looked bitter. ‘I should like to know,’ she said, ‘what else I am fit for, after eleven years at Millbank!’ No, she will be walking the wards, she supposes, until she drops down dead.
    Only Mrs Jelf, the matron of the highest wards, seems to me to be really kind, and half-way gentle. She