Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  The woman, Sarah Becket, was clearly demented, even if she was not clinically insane. Crazed, perhaps, by jealousy of her husband, or by the suffragette ideology. Perhaps I could make an appeal to her, explain the damage she would do to her own husband if she exposed him.

  That’s no good. She’s too emotional to understand logic. All women are like that. Even if she grasped the point at first it would be swept away in a flood of jealous rage the next.

  So as soon as she gets out, I’m in trouble. And so is Jonathan.

  How long is she in for? Six months. But she’ll never stay in that long because she’s refusing to eat. If I do as Jonathan asks and stop the forced feeding, she’ll continue to starve herself and be free in a couple of days.

  And if I don’t do as he says, and keep on forcibly feeding her, and Jonathan finds out, he will kick up the most appalling row. There’ll be questions asked in Parliament. The stupid man is still fond of her — I could see that when he came here yesterday.

  So I’m damned if I feed her, damned if I don’t.

  What the devil am I going to do?

  For a moment Martin’s habitual calm deserted him. He sat at his desk in the large, comfortable office, sweating, staring with unseeing eyes out of the window across the grey slate roofs of Holloway. In one hand was a handkerchief, which he crumpled between his fingers and used occasionally to mop his brow.

  The thick, hairy fingers of the other hand drummed on the desk in front of him, moving restlessly back and forth like an angry, tethered tarantula.

  Deborah’s arrival had complicated things for Jonathan. He was glad to see her, of course, but . . . she added another dimension to the sense he had that his life was becoming a series of roles, which had to be played out with care and caution. There was the successful lawyer, the astute, up and coming Member of Parliament on the one hand; and the wounded, hard-done-by, tolerant husband of a militant virago on the other. The husband who did, however, know where to draw the line in the end, as he had done yesterday in Parliament. He hoped he had gained respect for that, at least from the people who mattered.

  There were other roles in his life, though, and Deborah’s arrival had focussed on some of these.

  He had always been genuinely fond of her and, over the years, had enjoyed meeting her and writing to her. He had used his letters to explain almost all his difficulties and, in doing so, he had created a persona, almost as though he were writing a diary. The frank, honest brother-in-law who bares his heart and tells his sister-in-law everything . . .

  Almost everything.

  He had not expected to try to seduce her. Until recently, he would not even have dreamt of it. But over the past two years his relationship with Sarah had deteriorated so badly that he had found himself taking up a completely different role — a despicable, wicked, wonderful role — that gave him a quite new attitude to women. All women — even respectable married ladies like his own sister-in-law.

  It was something he could never admit to publicly. Something that terrified him whenever he thought of it. Something that ran up and down his spine like thin streaks of red and silver lightning while all the rest of him was grey and sober and black.

  It was the real reason he had come to Kensington this afternoon.

  The ostensible, obvious reason was to find out about Sarah. That was what he had told Deborah this morning at breakfast. He had been relieved, and also slightly amused, to find that, although she appeared slightly wary of him, she appeared to bear him no grudge.

  ‘I have some business in chambers this morning, and then I am going straight on to meet Dr Armstrong this afternoon. He will have seen her today — he must — and he will be able to tell me how she is and when she is likely to come out. If she is refusing food it cannot be long now. We’ll have her home within the week.’ He hesitated, stirring sugar thoughtfully into his tea. ‘I, er, I’m not quite sure what time I’ll be there, though, so it might be a touch tricky for us to meet.’

  ‘Where, Johnny? At Holloway?’

  ‘No, at his consulting rooms in town. You can come if you want, of course, but as I say . . .’

  ‘I’d be in the way? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t, Debbie! It’s only the timing, really. I can’t guarantee it. And . . .’

  She smiled. It was a strange, rather enigmatic smile, he thought much later, when he came to reflect on it. As though she were somehow very distant from him and his concerns. And at the same time tense, full of excitement, like a woman in a dream, almost. At the time he thought it had to do with last night.

  She said: ‘It doesn’t matter, Johnny, I’m sure you can deal with the man on your own. He looked to me as though he hates women, anyway. And I’ve got some shopping to do, I’ll be all right. You’ll tell me all about it when you get back, though, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, of course,’ he lied.

  It was a lie, not because of what he hoped to learn about Sarah, but because of the place he was going to before. Jonathan was very regular and organised in his infidelity. He made appointments days, sometimes weeks ahead, and wrote them in his diary. Often they were like the notes Sarah had found: Dr Armstrong, 6 p.m, but there were others too. Dentist 2.30. Or Visit tailors for first fitting. All very drab, uninteresting to anyone who might pick the book up. But to Jonathan, the entries glowed with secret meaning.

  When he walked up the steps and rang the bell outside the quiet, respectable house in Kensington, a maid opened the door. She smiled demurely, took his top hat, coat, and gloves, and showed him up the pink-carpeted stairs into a small sitting room. Everything here was furnished in comfortable bourgeois taste. There was a thick soft blue carpet, net curtains on the windows, pale pink and yellow flowery overstuffed armchairs, a piano, standard lamps with tasselled fringes, expensive china dogs on the mantelpiece, a comfortable warm fire burning in a black-leaded grate.

  The maid smiled at him. It was a friendly smile, not in the least inappropriate to their surroundings. Unless one counted the way her gaze held his for a little too long, as though she were measuring, assessing what he would be like.

  ‘If you will wait a moment, sir, I’ll tell Mrs Burgoyne that you’re here.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Jonathan sat down, feeling the excitement spark up and down his spine. Of course he should not be here now, with Sarah in prison, but the appointment had been made over a week ago. What difference could he make to her in the next hour or two? Anyway, if it had not been for Sarah, he would never have been here at all.

  And he would have missed so much.

  He had been married to Sarah for eleven years now, and for the first nine of those years he had not been unfaithful to her once. Indeed, he had not even considered it. He knew how much she had been hurt, as a child, by the death of her father. The cause of that death — syphilis — seemed to him, as to her, a dreadful, terrifying scourge. At first he thought it a punishment of God on the wicked — a cruel Old Testament punishment which afflicted not only the man who sinned, but also his family. A man could infect his own wife, his children could grow up riddled with the disease, die of it. Sarah and Deborah were lucky not to have inherited it from their own father. Jonathan had promised Sarah it would never, ever, happen to their children because of him.

  But they had had no children. Three times Sarah had miscarried. That, Jonathan felt sure, was why everything had gone wrong.

  In the early years of their marriage there had been no question of unfaithfulness. Aware of her fears about sex, he had been kind and caring and gentle in bed, and she had responded more than he had hoped. He had been helplessly in love with her — with her long dark chestnut hair and her smooth soft skin and the way she responded to his kisses and caresses. At first she had been shy, skittish, trembling like a young deer. Then, after a few weeks, she had nestled into his arms more trustingly, purring softly like a cat. Finally, as the months went by, she had come to respond to him with a passion that was equal to or g
reater than his own, wrapping her long, slender legs round him and pulling him down on to her while her hands roved up and down his back and she covered his face with kisses and then arched her back and moaned . . .

  Jonathan had thought God must have singled him out to be especially blessed among men.

  Then Sarah had become pregnant. He had watched her body change and bloom as their child grew inside her. He shared the excitement of laying his palm on her stomach to feel the first kicks, and he had worshipped her more than before. She had wanted him to make love to her more than before, too, and they had found ways to do it which seemed safe and gave her greater satisfaction than ever before, and then...

  The baby had been born dead.

  Sarah had descended into a sudden, black depression. Jonathan tried to help her but it was as though she was in a deep pit with smooth sides and no way out, and she was deaf as well so she did not hear what he said. She rejected him because she felt he was part of the cause. I should never have allowed you to make love to me like that, she said, we killed our baby with our lust. One doctor they visited said this was nonsense, but another one, a portentous man with a long beard and rheumatic eyes and horrible pickled things in jars on shelves behind his head, said it might indeed be possible. And he was the one Sarah believed.

  So when she had become pregnant the second time she had resisted all Jonathan’s advances, and he had kept away from her and slept in his own room. But once or twice this abstinence was too much for him, and he persuaded her to relent. He came into her room to feel her stomach reverently and cup her ripening breasts, and she allowed him to slide gently into her once again.

  The day after the third time they did this, her waters broke and her nurse helped her to deliver a six-months’ child in great agony on the floor of the bathroom, in blood and screams and bitter, bitter, tears.

  Jonathan had been delivering his maiden speech in the House of Commons. When he left the Chamber, to warm handshakes and pats on the back from his fellow Liberals, he was handed a note by his secretary.

  After that it had been as though the child’s open grave lay in bed between them. It had been two years before she conceived again. During those two years Jonathan had been as gentle and kind as he could, but it made no difference. Sarah appeared to feel that God had cursed her for her earlier wanton passion. He spent more and more time away from home, in court or in the House. When they did make love it was an embarrassing parody of their former passion, which left them hot, irritable, and ashamed.

  Nonetheless, she became pregnant a third time. Praying that the baby would bring them together again, Jonathan moved out of her room entirely, and did not come near her bed once.

  Perhaps because of this, she did not miscarry until the eighth month.

  Since then they had lived in the same house for three years, but she had not let him touch her. They had tried to discuss the matter, but neither could see any way forward. She could not bear the pain and disappointment again, and he did not want to inflict it on her. So they slept apart.

  Their marriage became a matter of respect and politeness and regret, for something beautiful that was dead. Sarah was silent, bitter, aloof. It was like sharing a house with a ghost. Jonathan found more to occupy him in Parliament and in court, and there were long, empty absences. He was aware of her suffrage activities and, at first, he supported the women’s vote in the House, but the issue did not move him as it did her. It was one of many issues of social justice. It would not bring back their love.

  There were times when he was very depressed. He knew that many men of his social standing had quite open affairs with other men’s wives but he found the idea contemptible, cruel. He knew that it would not take long for news of such an affair to get back to Sarah — and that would destroy her. Besides, she was his wife, he did not need another one. He still liked and admired her from a distance. He had no desire to court some other man’s wife, buy her flowers or jewellery or spend time going to the theatre with her. All that would just provide material for gossip which would hurt and destroy everyone involved, in the end.

  But he was lonely and restless in bed.

  One day he sat up late in his club with his friend, Martin Armstrong, and somehow the conversation made its way from the headaches he had been suffering to sex. Martin explained to him, man to man, that in his view this was a medical matter. Men were different to women: to maintain a satisfactory state of health they needed regular sexual intercourse. It was a common problem, Martin said. There were ways it could be solved. He understood absolutely the need for total discretion.

  That was why, now, Jonathan was here in this living room in Kensington. Martin had been right, up to a point, he thought. Over the past two years his sex life had become almost as interesting, as exciting, as it had been in the early days of his marriage. With this crucial difference — he hardly ever made love to the same woman twice.

  This made for tremendous, tearing excitement beforehand, and also avoided the slightest possibility that Jonathan might fall in love with anyone else. Emotionally, Jonathan was still married to Sarah. But sexually, his needs were taken care of by others.

  There was a slight danger of disease, but Martin assured him that all the girls were regularly checked by him personally. This, and the constant turnover, made it very expensive, but Jonathan could afford it.

  It was a pleasure that had entered his bloodstream now. He did not want to give it up. He had made love to so many women that he now looked upon all of them — shop assistants, waitresses, typists, actresses, servants, fashionable housewives, debutantes, even his own sister-in-law Deborah — in an entirely different way.

  Mrs Burgoyne came into the room.

  Mavis Burgoyne was the lady who looked after the girls for Martin. A rather blowsy middle-aged woman, in a flowery pink dress that went with the furniture and wallpaper. Very feminine — a little too much powder and frills perhaps for his taste, but then she was well past her prime. An ordinary face; nothing hard even about the eyes. Certainly nothing lewd or suggestive. Everyone’s maiden aunt.

  ‘Tea, Mr Becket? With perhaps a little something, to take out the chill?’

  ‘Please.’

  She smiled and pulled a scarlet bellrope behind her.

  ‘A busy week in court?’

  ‘So-so.’ For a few moments he entertained her with an edited version of a recent, rather amusing case, and then the maid brought in the tea. It was on an elegant wooden tray, with a single red rose in a jar and bone china tea service. Mrs Burgoyne poured, adding a slight dash of whisky from a silver flask beside the milk jug. She sipped, her little finger crooked elegantly.

  ‘So now, to business. The young lady whom I told you about has arrived, and is waiting to meet you. I will send her down in a moment. In the meantime, perhaps you would like to consult the book for your next appointment. It is fully up to date. Here.’

  She put her cup down, and took a thick, leather-bound volume from a shelf behind her. It was one of the few things in this feminine, chintzy room that looked out of place. Like a lawbook, perhaps, or a volume of Parliamentary reports.

  ‘Have a look through. I’ll be back in a moment.’

  She handed him the book and went out. Jonathan put down his teacup and lifted the book on to his knee. His hand was trembling slightly with suppressed excitement. So foolish, he thought. Such wicked fun.

  Inside, the book was more like a photograph album. On every page there was the photograph of a young woman. Some of them Jonathan recognised, others he had not seen before. Most wore skimpy, suggestive dresses. One or two wore nothing at all. Besides each photograph was a brief biography, and a description of the things each girl, apparently, liked doing.

  All the things were shocking. Some of the things were very shocking indeed. Jonathan thought he might like doing them all.

  He leafed his way slowly through the book. One or two of the girls were extremely young, he noticed. At first he had felt qualms of conscience abo
ut these, but then one day he had tried one, and found a strange pleasure in it. The child had been young, skittish, afraid, anxious to please — it was not necessary to be cruel, just gentle and firm. It was like breaking in a young horse; there was a pleasure in bending the creature to your will. And, after all, these were girls born to the life, who would profit by it. They could become richer this way than in any other that was open to them, and most of them knew it.

  Bernard Shaw had a play on in London this year, called Pygmalion. It was about a gentleman — a professor — who picks up a girl from the streets, and takes her to his house to teach her the King’s English, so that she can enter high society. Jonathan had gone to see it, and laughed all the way through with the rest of the audience. But all the time he had been thinking: of course there are plenty of girls from poor backgrounds who rise in society this way. But it is not by exercising their vocal organs that they do it.

  Mrs Burgoyne came back in, and Jonathan gave her the book, open at the photograph of a young woman of about eighteen. She had dark curly hair, a mouth with soft pouting lips, and a very generous bosom indeed.

  Mrs Burgoyne glanced at the book and put it back on the bookshelf behind her.

  ‘Certainly, Mr Becket,’ she said. ‘Next Friday, at six-thirty, as usual?’

  Jonathan nodded.

  Mrs Burgoyne smiled. ‘I’ll note it down, then,’ she said. ‘Now I must leave you to finish your tea in peace.’

  Again she left the room, tugging the long red bellrope as she went. For a moment Jonathan sat there, feeling the blood course through him. He did not feel guilty. He had got into the trick of leaving thoughts like that behind him like an umbrella at the door. In this place he was a different man.

  A maid came in to collect the tea tray. It was a different maid, but, like the last one, she wore a frilly mob cap and a starched white pinafore. The pinafore looped over her neck and was tied with ribbons behind her waist.

  But under the pinafore, Jonathan noticed as she smiled at him, she had no other clothes on at all . . .