Affinity by Sarah Waters

purposes other than labour or prayer. Even here, however, they must be silent. There is a matron whose role it is to stand and watch them as they lie, and keep them from talking; and there are separate cells, and beds with straps, for the sick when they grow troublesome. On the wall there is a picture of Christ bearing a broken fetter, and a single line of text: Thy love constraineth us .
    They have beds, I think, for fifty women. We found perhaps twelve or thirteen there, most of whom seemed very ill—too ill to raise their heads to us, they only slept, or shuddered, or turned their faces into their grey pillows as we passed by. Miss Ridley gazed hard at them; and at the bed of one, she stopped. ‘Look here,’ she said to me, gesturing to a woman who was laid out with her leg exposed, her ankle livid and wrapped with a bandage, and so swollen it was as thick, almost, as the thigh above it. ‘Now, this is the kind of patient I have no time for. You tell Miss Prior, Wheeler, how your leg came to be so hurt.’
    The woman ducked her head. ‘If you please, miss,’ she said to me, ‘it got cut with a dinner-knife.’ I remembered those blunt knives, and how the women had had to saw away at their bits of mutton, and looked at Miss Ridley. ‘Tell Miss Prior,’ she said, ‘how your blood came to be so poisoned.’
    ‘Well,’ said Wheeler in a slightly meeker tone, ‘the cut got rust worked into it, and turned bad.’
    Miss Ridley gave a snort. It was marvellous, she said, what things got worked into cuts and turned them bad, at Millbank. ‘The surgeon found a piece of iron from a button, bound to Wheeler’s ankle to make the flesh swell. Indeed, so well had it swollen, he had to take his own knife to it, to get the button out! As if the surgeon is employed here, for her convenience!’ She shook her head, and I looked again at the bloated ankle. The foot below the bandage was quite black, the heel white and cracked as the rind of a cheese.
    When I spoke to the infirmary matron a little later, she told me that the prisoners will ‘try any sort of trick’ to get themselves admitted to her ward. ‘They will fake fits,’ she said. ‘They will swallow glass if they can get it, to bring on bleeding. They will try and hang themselves, if they think they will be found in time and taken down.’ She said there had been two or three at least, who had attempted that and misjudged it, and so been choked. She said that was a very hard thing. She said a woman would do that out of boredom; or for the sake of joining her pal, if she knew her pal was in the infirmary already; or else she might do it, ‘purely to create a little stir with herself at its centre’.
    I did not of course tell her that I had once tried a similar ‘trick’ myself. But, listening to her, my look must have changed, and she saw that and misinterpreted it. ‘Oh, they are not like you and me, miss,’ she said, ‘the sort of women who pass through here! They hold their lives very cheap . . .’
    Near us stood a younger matron, making a preparation for disinfecting the room. They do it with plates of chloride of lime, on which they pour vinegar. I watched her tip the bottle, and the air at once turned sharp; then she walked along the line of beds, carrying the plate before her as a priest might bear a censer in a church. At last the scent of it grew so bitter I felt my eyes sting, and turned away. Then Miss Ridley led me from there, and took me to the wards.
    These we found not at all as I have come to know them, but filled with movement and murmuring voices. ‘What’s this?’ I said, still wiping at my eyes to take the itch of disinfectant from them. Miss Ridley explained it to me. To-day is a Tuesday—I had not visited on a Tuesday before—and on this day, and on Friday, every week, the women are given lessons in their cells. I met one of their school-mistresses, on Mrs Jelf’s ward. She shook my hand when the matron introduced me, and said she