A Petrol Scented Spring Read Free Page A

privileged, yes, that’s the word, privileged to be watching this, to have the breath snatched from my lungs and still to want it to go on and on. And strangest of all, when I look back, Bill has her arms around Hilda, who is weeping.

TWO
    I was seventy-nine last birthday. I feel it in the knees mostly, and in the mirror. My neighbour’s daughter calls me the leopard lady. She’s doing the Victorians at school. Her mother sends her round to ask about chimney sweeps and long dresses. I tell her, when I was her age the little boys dressed just like little girls, and she laughs. But when I say ‘Inside, I don’t feel any older than you’, she looks embarrassed for me.
    I give her a biscuit and send her home. Perhaps she’ll come back one day when she’s old enough to sit and listen without her knee jiggling up and down. I tell her mother I’ve a fund of stories about the suffragettes.
    â€˜You were a suffragette?’
    â€˜No, but my first husband had a lot to do with them.’
    In a little while, I shall tell you how I met him. How the very first time I saw him, in the garden, he seemed plucked from my dreams. How else could I have felt that recognition? Five months later, when he stood at the altar and looked me in the eye, I thought ah yes, my love, my fate . Well, I was right, and wrong, about that. He was drawn to me, but if I retrace the path that brought us together, taking it back to the very beginning, I find myself unknown, undreamt of, quite superfluous.
    If you want to hear my story, we must start with a drama in which I played no part.
    Â 
    I think of her as I saw her that day in Kensington, while Bill stopped Hilda from using the hammer she had brought.
    That swan-like beauty. Serene amidst shattering glass.
    Have you ever really looked at a swan? Curiously self-conscious. They hold their lovely necks so stiff it makes my shoulders ache. But if you rile them and they go for you with their stabbing beaks, they’re not so elegant.
    I can’t be certain it was her. But this is my story, and hers was the face that floated into my head when I finally put two and two – or should I say, two and one – together. Hers or another’s, it doesn’t really matter. She’ll have felt the same blend of terror and elation. The suddenly-dilating capillaries. A kick-start from the adrenal gland. I went through something similar ten years later, the first time I performed an amputation, so I know how it feels to bluff your way through the unthinkable. And afterwards, to look in the glass and see the self you always hoped you’d become.
    How could he not fall for her?
    How can I not imagine myself in her shoes?
    Â 
    Arabella Scott.
    Second sister in a brood of female brainboxes (with one petted baby brother) but, unlike so many other ambitious, intelligent Scotswomen, not a doctor. She can’t have been squeamish about gore, given what she put herself through, so why follow the more conventionally feminine path of teaching? Why else but ego? All those young hearts in love with her. Or am I being unfair?
    She was used to taking a lead. That was the difference between us. The whole country was her classroom. She would instruct, and so improve, us all. What a marvellous chance she was given: to shout and smash and insult and burn in the name of high principle. All the petty irritations, the boredom – and God knows, it was boring, being a young woman then – all of it rolled up into a great yell of injustice. She saw the opportunity, and grasped it, while I went about coveting other women’s hats, and drinking myself lightheaded on Darjeeling, and flirting with young nincompoops, thinking myself quite the heartbreaker.
    Â 
    It starts at university. The old story. A new self. New friends. No one to pull you down, recalling that time the minister caught you watching his spaniel mounting Mrs Lawrie’s pug. If you want to be the very embodiment