Affinity

by Sarah Waters

It is as if the prison had been designed by a man in the grip of a nightmare or a madness—or had been made expressly to drive its inmates mad.

It was broken by a sigh, a single sigh—it seemed to me, a perfect sigh, like a sigh in a story;

Deep, I call her.’ Deep? ‘As the ocean.’

Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.

There have come fogs, too—yellow fogs and brown fogs, and fogs so black they might be liquid soot—fogs that seem to rise from the pavements as if brewed in the sewers in diabolical engines.

a book may be on any queer subject, but one can at least always be certain how to turn a page and read it.

Mrs Silvester I don’t much care for—she reminds me of my mother. Her daughter, however, I hate: she reminds me of myself.

But she was not changed—it was I who was changed, by my new knowledge. It had worked upon me, secretly and subtly—as a drop of wine will work upon a cup of plain water, or as yeast will leaven simple dough.

I shall grow dry and pale and paper-thin—like a leaf, pressed tight inside the pages of a dreary black book and then forgotten.

It was then she said I had grown cynical. I said, that I had always been cynical—she had only never called it that. She had said rather that I was brave. She had called me an original.

‘We are not here to help them, ma’am. We are here to punish them. There are too many good women who are poor or ill or hungry, for us to bother with the bad ones.’

But people, I said, do not want cleverness—not in women, at least.

Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same. It may be that the husband your sister has now has that other soul, that has the affinity with her soul—I hope it is. But it may be the next man she takes, or it may be neither. It may be someone she would never think to look to on the earth, someone kept from her by some false boundary . . .’

‘How will a person know, Selina, when the soul that has the affinity with hers is near it?’ She answered, ‘She will know. Does she look for air, before she breathes it? This love will be guided to her; and when it comes, she will know. And she will do anything to keep that love about her, then. Because to lose it will be like a death to her.’

Why do gentlemen’s voices carry so clearly, when women’s are so easily stifled?

But my spirit does not love yours—it is entwined with it. Our flesh does not love: our flesh is the same, and longs to leap to itself. It must do that, or wither!

I thought dying was simple, once; but it was very hard.

Then—now—I gaze at my own flesh and see the bones show pale beneath it. They grow paler each day. My flesh is streaming from me. I am becoming my own ghost! I think I will haunt this room, when I have started my new life.