Affinity by Sarah Waters

is desperately pale and careworn, might be any age between twenty-five and forty; but she had no complaint to make of prison life, except to say that many of the stories she must hear, upon the wards, were very tragic.
    I went up to her floor at the end of the dinner-hour, just as the bell was sounding that sends the women back to their work. I said, ‘I must begin really to be a Visitor to-day, Mrs Jelf, and I hope you will help me do it, for I am rather nervous.’ I should never have admitted such a thing at Cheyne Walk.
    She said, ‘I will be happy to advise you, miss’, and she took me to a prisoner she said she knew would be glad to have me go to her. This proved to be an elderly woman—the oldest woman in the gaol, indeed—a Star-Class prisoner named Ellen Power. When I went into her cell she rose, and offered me her chair. I said of course that she must keep it, but she would not sit before me—in the end both of us stood. Mrs Jelf watched us, then stepped away and nodded. ‘I must lock the gate on you, miss,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But when you are ready to move on, you must call me.’ She said a matron can hear a calling woman, wherever she is upon the ward. Then she turned and drew closed the gate behind her; and then she fastened it, I stood and watched the key turn in the lock.
    I remembered then that it was she who had had the keeping of me in my frightening dreams of Millbank, last week.
    When I gazed at Power, I found her smiling. She has been three years at the gaol, and is due for release in four months’ time; she was imprisoned there for managing a bawdy-house. When she told me this, however, she tossed her head. ‘Bawdy-house!’ she said. ‘It was a parlour only; boys and girls would sometimes like to come and kiss in it, that’s all. Why, I had my own grand-daughter running in and out of there, keeping it tidy, and there was always flowers, fresh flowers in a vase. Bawdy-house! The boys must have somewhere to take their sweethearts, mustn’t they?—else, they must kiss them in the very road. And if they was to hand me a shilling when they went out, for the kindness, and the flowers—well, is that a crime?’
    It didn’t sound like much of one, when put like that; but I remembered all the matrons’ cautions, and said that sentencing of course was something I could have no opinion on. She lifted her hand, which I saw was very swollen at the knuckle. She answered: Yes, she knew it. It was ‘a subject for the men’.
    I stayed with her for half an hour. Once or twice she drew me back again towards the niceties of bawdiness; at last, however, I nudged her to less controversial topics. I remembered drab Susan Pilling, the prisoner I had spoken with on Miss Manning’s ward. How, I asked Power, did she like Millbank routines, and the Millbank costume? She looked thoughtful for a second, then tossed her head. ‘The routines I cannot answer for,’ she said, ‘as never having been inside another gaol; but I imagine they are harsh enough—you may write that down’ (I had my note-book with me), ‘I don’t care who reads that. The costume, I will say right out, is very nasty.’ She said it bothers her that they send their suits to the prison laundry, and never get the same set back a second time—‘and some come very stained, miss, yet we must wear them or go cold. Then again, the flannel under-things are awful rough , and tend to scratch; and they are that washed and beaten that they ain’t like flannel at all, but like some awful thin stuff, what don’t warm you but, as I say, only makes you scratch . The shoes I have no quarrel with; but the want of stays, if you’ll pardon my saying it, is a trial to some of the younger women. It don’t bother an aged creature like me so much, but the little girls—well I should say they do feel the want of stays, miss, rather bad . . .’
    She went on like this, and seemed to like to talk to me; and yet, too, talking was troublesome to her.