Affinity

by Sarah Waters

Her quiet voice, that only I can hear, is the most frightening voice of them all.

Pa used to say that any piece of history might be made into a tale: it was only a question of deciding where the tale began, and where it ended.

The shadows there, flung from the jaundiced bricks, are the colour of bruises. The soil in which the walls are set is damp and dark as tobacco.

Unnerving, too, is the dreadful clamour of the place. Where the warders stand there are gates, that must be unfastened, and swung on grinding hinges, and slammed and bolted; and the empty passages, of course, echo with the sounds of other gates, and other locks and bolts, distant and near. The prison seems caught, in consequence, at the heart of some perpetual private storm, that left my ears ringing.

now I felt more fearful than ever. For a moment I wished only that they might see the weakness in me, and send me home—as Mother has sent me home sometimes when I have grown anxious at a theatre, thinking I should be ill and have to cry out while the hall was so still.

Perhaps it was only the association of the chain of keys—which still swung, and sometimes tumbled unmusically together, on the chain of her belt—but her voice seemed to me to be tainted with steel.

I gazed again at the circling women, saying nothing, thinking my own thoughts. ‘You like to look at them,’ Miss Haxby said then. She said she had never had a visitor yet that didn’t like to stand at that window and watch the women walk. It was as curative, she thought, as gazing at fish in a tank. After that, I moved from the glass.

all along the opposite wall were doorways: doorway after doorway after doorway, all just the same, like the dark, identical doorways one sometimes has to choose between in terrible dreams.

I saw many prisoners tearing at their mutton with their teeth, solemn as savages.

The tilt to her lips grew steeper.

Not a smile, but wryer.

The patch of sun grew bright again, yet still inched on its remorseless way, like a counterpane sliding from a chill and troubled sleeper.

‘You have come to Millbank, to look on women more wretched than yourself, in the hope that it will make you well again.’

To forget words, common words, because your habits are so narrow you need only know a hundred hard phrases—stone, soup, comb, Bible, needle, dark, prisoner, walk, stand still, look sharp, look sharp!

Did I think it not a punishment, because a spirit sometimes came to her—came and put its lips to hers, then melted away before the kiss was done, and left her, with the very darkness darker than before?

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.

I asked her then, what would she choose if she were me? and she answered promptly, ‘I would have a gown of Chamberry gauze, and a cloak of otter, and a hat of straw, with lilies on it.’ And for her feet?—‘Silk slippers, with ribbons to the knee!’

Now the rain made my coat heavy, and my dark skirts grew darker at the hem, where the wet earth clung to them.

He does not care for lady authors. All women can ever write, he says, are ‘journals of the heart’—the phrase has stayed with me.

Miss Ridley asked her then, did she wish the hair to be kept?—The prisoners, it seems, may have their shorn hair bound and stored with their things, to take with them when they are freed. The girl gazed once at the quivering pony’s tail, and shook her head. ‘Very well,’ said Miss Ridley. She carried the tresses to a wicker basket, and there let them fall. ‘We have uses for hair,’ she said to me, darkly, ‘at Millbank.’

‘You think spiritualism a kind of fancy,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t it seem to you, now you are here, that anything might be real, since Millbank is?’

My locket hangs in my closet beside the glass, the only shining thing among so many shadows.

Now Arthur held her wrists, her two slim wrists in one of his great hands.

She smiled and showed her teeth—which have fine, dark, vertical cracks to them, like old piano keys.

I saw Helen watching us. There were pearls at her ears—they looked like drops of wax, I remember seeing them upon her in the old days and imagining them melting with the heat of her throat.

Her hands were pale, and very clean. One finger ended at the second knuckle—she said the tip of it had been ‘bitten clean off, by a butcher’s dog, while she was quite a baby’.

How long have you been seeing spirits?’ ‘Ah.’ She smiled. ‘For as long, I think, as I have been seeing anything at all . . .’

I told her then that I take my note-book with me wherever I go—that it was a habit I had fallen into when helping my father with his work. I said I should feel very strange without it, and that what I wrote in it I sometimes later put into another book, that was my diary. I said that that book was like my dearest friend. I told it all my closest thoughts, and it kept them secret.

‘Quickly!’ I said—for my heart had begun to beat so fast in my breast, I saw the cloth above it give a quiver, like a drum-skin.

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

Her hands are large, like my own—the hands of a woman rendered lean and angular, through labour or through loss.

Her voice had fallen, and I had leaned to catch it.

calm as a skiff at the eye of a storm.

Someone said then ‘Why have you moved the cabinet to the alcove with the door in it?’ Mrs Brink told them about the magnetism being better there, & said that they must not mind about the door, that it was never opened since the housemaid lost the key to it, & besides that she had put a screen before it.

Foreshadowing?

When all the wedding guests had gone I found her wandering about the house, shaking her head and sighing—‘How quiet it seems!’—as if my sister had been a child, and she missed the sound of her shrieks upon the staircase.

she said, another time; and then, turning to gaze at the spot where the parrot had used to sit: ‘How quiet it is, now Gulliver has gone.’ She said that that was the disadvantage of bringing creatures into the house: one grew used to them, and then, one had the upset of their loss.

am twenty-nine. In three months’ time I shall be thirty. While Mother grows stooped and querulous, how shall I grow? 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.

I have seemed to see our kisses there sometimes, I’ve seen them hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop. Now, I thought, I might jolt the post and they would only fall, and shatter, and turn to powder.

I said, Had they nothing in grey?—the lady looked doubtful. Had they anything slim and plain and neat?—They showed me a girl in a cuirass gown. She was small, and shapely—she looked like an ankle in a well-shaped boot. I knew I would put the same gown on and look like a sword in a scabbard.

her eyes grew bright. I knew then how hard it had been to keep, not just from Millbank, but from her. I felt that little quickening. It was just as I imagine a woman must feel, when the baby within her gives its first kick.

But people, I said, do not want cleverness—not in women, at least. I said, ‘Women are bred to do more of the same—that is their function. It is only ladies like me that throw the system out, make it stagger—’

‘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.’

They think that kisses from Peter Quick don’t count.

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

to-day, there being no new prisoners, the bath was empty save for half a dozen blackjack beetles, that were nosing at the lines of grime.

Selina Dawes! The name was passed from woman to woman, cell to cell, as if upon a ripple of filthy water.

I shall have to lose one life, to gain another. It will be like death. I thought dying was simple, once; but it was very hard. And this—surely this will be harder?

I once meant to take flowers with Pa, to the graves of Keats and Shelley, in Rome; to-day I put a wreath of holly on his own grave. The snow settled on it and hid the crimson berries—though the points upon the leaves stayed sharp as pins.

She was so earnest, so grave, I began to be terribly afraid. I said, ‘How shall you do it? Oh, Selina, how can it be true? How shall you come to me, through the empty air?’ She looked at me and smiled, then reached and took my hand. She turned my fingers and eased back my glove, and held my wrist a little way before her mouth. She said, ‘What is there, between my mouth and your bare arm? But don’t you feel me, when I do this?’ Then she breathed upon my wrist, where the blood shows blue—she seemed to draw all the heat in me to that one spot, and I shivered. ‘Just so will I come to you, tomorrow night,’ she said.