Beside her, Paul kept his eyes half closed and his breath came slowly, as if he was visibly trying to calm himself after his outburst moments earlier. But the grip of his hands on the steering wheel hadn’t relaxed and the whites of his knuckles showed through. Yet Mary remained impervious, her mind concentrated on preparing for the ordeal ahead. The first day of the trial was always going to be stressful, and the prison intimidated her for some reason-more each time she came. But that only increased her resolve to go through with the visit. She’d promised, and she wasn’t one to break her word, however much Paul pressed her to stay away.
Pulling down the mirror in the sun visor above the dashboard, she inspected herself closely. She was wearing no jewellery or cosmetics, but she didn’t need to. She had good, regular features, yet there was more to her face than just that. The fullness of her lips and the curves of her figure spoke of a sensuality that was half belied by something watchful, almost withdrawn in her eyes. It made her mysterious and somehow challenging, and at times it almost made her beautiful.
Mary knew this, but the knowledge gave her no particular pleasure. She was a person entirely without vanity. Her pretty face was an asset to be exploited in her career. Nothing more. It got her better parts than plainer girls could hope for. And for that she was grateful. She certainly had no wish to be a poor actress. The life was difficult enough without being unsuccessful.
Satisfied with her appearance, Mary ran her hand through her thick chestnut-brown hair one last time, took a deep breath, and opened the door of the car. It was cold outside and she walked away quickly without a word to Paul or even a backward glance.
Inside the prison Mary waited with the other visitors in a whitewashed room dimly lit by a dusty tube of fluorescent lighting that flickered overhead as if it was just about to give up the ghost. All the walls were decorated with poorly typed notices about what could not be brought into the prison and what could not be taken out, and the biggest sign over on the far wall listed the penalties for assisting a prisoner to escape. Underneath it a young mother with an old face was trying to calm a screaming undernourished baby, while a warder sat behind a metal desk near the door reading a tabloid newspaper with his blue cap tipped down over his wide forehead.
Time passed slowly, and Mary counted out the minutes on the old black institutional clock hanging above the warder’s head. One, two, three, four, five, until exactly half past six when an invisible bell rang and everyone got to their feet, shuffling out into the main courtyard of the prison. It was almost dark now and Mary stayed at the back, following behind two local South London women who seemed to know each other well.
“That’s where it happens. That’s where they do it. Florrie told me when I was last here,” said one, adopting a theatrical stage whisper as she pointed excitedly over toward a two-storey red-brick building close to the west side of the perimeter wall. Its ordinariness was what made it noticeable. That and the lack of windows. There was only one, high up near the roof.
The unit, as it was known, was approached through a door in a wire fence, to which had been affixed a prominent “No Entry” notice. The instruction did not seem necessary. Everyone in the courtyard, prisoners and warders alike, seemed to instinctively avoid going anywhere near the death house.
“I know all about it. I’ve been here a lot more times than you, you know,” said the other woman irritably. “I’ve seen them putting up the notices on the prison door in the early morning, and I’ve watched the families waiting outside, which is more than you have, Ethel. Huddled up in their cars in the cold. Some days they don’t let us in when there’s been a hanging. The prisoners get restless and the screws can’t control them properly. My Johnny’s told me what happens.”
“Is that when they do it then? At dawn?” asked Ethel, who was obviously used to accepting her friend’s sharp words without complaint.
“No. It’s usually seven or eight o’clock in the morning, after the poor sod’s been nicely softened up by a night in the death cell, vomiting up his last meal if he was stupid enough to eat it in the first place. And stop bloody talking about it, Ethel. People don’t do that in here. You should know that.”
Ethel was silenced, and the two women covered the rest of the walk to the visitors’ block in silence, leaving Mary alone with her thoughts. She had known, of course, that they carried out executions here, but she had successfully managed to avoid identifying the actual place where it happened during her previous visits. She’d somehow assumed that it would be out of sight, but now she knew better. Ethel and her friend had seen to that, and Mary accepted the knowledge like an obligation.
At the door to the visits hall she paused, blinking in the sudden bright artificial glare of the overhead lights. There were no dark corners here where contraband could be passed across, under, or around the wooden tables, which were ranged in long rows from one end of the hall to the other. And along each wall warders in blue serge uniforms stood watching, occasionally stepping forward to enforce the rules forbidding any form of physical contact between inmates and outsiders.
Waiting in line for her pass to be checked at the front desk, Mary thought that the ceaseless unified drone of all the voices in the hall made the place seem like a vast beehive, but then she realized the comparison was far from apt. There was nothing productive happening here, and for most of the people in the room the short time together only made the subsequent separation from their loved ones even harder to bear. In the grip of a sudden claustrophobia, Mary half wished she hadn’t come.
Directed to a table at the far end of the hall, Mary caught sight of Stephen before he saw her. His bright blue eyes were wide open but clearly unfocused on his present surroundings. Always the dreamer, she thought as she walked toward him down the aisle.
He had changed out of the suit he’d worn for court into the standard-issue prison uniform of blue-and-white- striped shirt and jeans, and he was now sitting in a characteristic pose: his elbows resting on the table, his head resting on his hands, and his long, tapering fingers interlaced as if in prayer, while his thumbs rhythmically caressed his Adam’s apple and the stubble on the underside of his chin. The top of his shirt was open, exposing the whiteness of his throat, and Mary suddenly stopped in her tracks, fighting to hold back images of the executioner fitting a noose around her lover’s neck, of the snap as the trapdoor opened beneath his feet, of Stephen hanging in the air, twisting and turning this way and that. All trussed up and dead. Everything around her suddenly seemed too real, too brightly lit, and she steadied herself for a moment against an empty chair.
I shouldn’t have listened to those bloody women, she thought as she caught Stephen’s eye and drew the outline of a smile across her suddenly pale face.
But for Stephen there was no effort. His face lit up as soon as he saw her. And the sudden glow transformed his features. The stubborn line that sometimes seemed fixed around his mouth disappeared in the radiance of his smile as he got up to pull out the chair on the other side of his table and instinctively brushed it down with a prison-issue handkerchief extracted from the pocket of his trousers.
“Quite the gentleman,” said Mary.
“It’s the training,” said Stephen. “English public schools, dinner parties at home, you know.”
“Not exactly the ideal preparation for life inside this place,” she said, looking around her at the lines of broken-down men in their ill-fitting prison uniforms. Stephen’s, surprisingly, fitted him quite well. He seemed to have the knack of making any clothes he wore seem like they were tailor-made.
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said, smiling. “My school had a lot in common with prison as a matter of fact. Lousy food, endless rules and regulations, an all-male population thinking about what they can’t have. And a whole lot of men in uniforms making sure they don’t get it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mary, laughing. “This is Wandsworth Prison, for God’s sake.”
“True. And I’m sorry. I’m not thinking as usual. I hate you having to come here. It’s a horrible place. I wish they’d let me see you at court.”
Instinctively Stephen stretched out his fingers and touched the top of Mary’s hand for a moment. She looked up into his eyes for the first time since her arrival and thought how strange it was that he should be so concerned for her welfare when he was the one shut up inside this God-forsaken place, on trial for his life. He’d changed since Oxford, she realized. He wasn’t a boy anymore; prison had made him a man.
“Kissing’s not allowed, I’m afraid,” he said, holding her gaze. “Strictly against the rules.”
Mary could understand why. She could hardly fail to have noticed the lust in many of the prisoners’ eyes when she’d walked past them. Sexual frustration hung in the air like a cloud of atmospheric pressure.
“You looked good in court today,” she said. “I liked the suit.”
“I’m glad. Can’t say I did much. Made me feel like I was going to my own funeral.”
They were silent for a moment, both back in the courtroom with the dwarflike prosecutor relentlessly outlining the evidence against the accused.
