A Pin to See the Peepshow

by F. Tennyson Jesse

  She had always been aware of time, and afraid of it. Leo’s fewer years had set his whole life at a different place in time from hers, and she had endeavoured, by setting a term for things—such as three years till she got her freedom—to make them match. Life was only time slipping past you; you tried to grab at it, but it went on from between your fingers. Leo had never been aware of any time but the present; he’d never seen that the present was always becoming the past, just as the future was always becoming the present.

  There he was again, right in her mind now, but not as himself; it was not for what he also might be feeling that she agonised. She thought of him with a deep and bitter resentment. It was his stupidity that had lost her; she saw him as her executioner. … As the awful word struck into her mind, her heart seemed to leap and almost stop, then went on thudding slowly, angrily.

  After all, she had not had so very much to do with Leo in reality; he was more terribly real to her now in this aspect than he had often been in real life. It wasn’t fair. Why, even the love that she and he had had—how rare it had been, what with the difficulties of meeting, and his voyages. Only those few days in Essex, and once at the shop. More often than not she had only possessed him through her husband’s flesh, or in the fastnesses of her own mind and body, lying on her bed alone.

  Now that imaginary Leo and the actual Leo of such physical contacts as had been theirs, had fused into the agent of her destruction. It was as though Leo’s hands were going to close about her throat. What did that remind her of? Some song … long ago, at school; she’d thought it beautiful then … something about sooner feeling your lover’s hands closing about your throat, choking out life, than bidding you farewe—hell. … Rotten nonsense. Nothing mattered but life. Not to have life choked out … that was all that mattered.

  Leo ought to have known that, would have known it if he hadn’t been drunk. He ought to have known she hadn’t meant it … not to that point. Nobody could. Life was what mattered, life. Not to be going to suffer such a horror. Oh, to be alone, unmarried, old, ugly, poor, sleeping in some doorway, dirty, cold, starving, for no one to be interested in one … but to be alive … just to be alive. How could people take that away from one? Stop all that that meant? They were killing everything: the trams down Chiswick High Road, the young trees in leaf, the bright winking faces of the shops, the clanging of the bells, all the sparkle and the glitter and the music.

  The papers said that Mrs. Starling was to be hanged on Tuesday, but that wasn’t really what was happening. Mrs. Starling was a romantic figure, who wrote passionate love-letters, a figure in an Italian officer’s blue cape and a helmet hat; a figure that had never really existed except as a pretence. They weren’t hanging that Mrs. Starling, they were hanging Julia, who cleaned her teeth night and morning, who went to the lavatory—who would have to even on this Tuesday morning—who ate and drank, and smoked, and dressed, and sent clothes to the wash; whose hair grew greasy and lost its wave, whose nails needed cleaning and filing, whose head sometimes ached, and whose feet always ached at the end of a long day; who kept count of her money in a shabby little leather purse, whose back hurt her every month so that she could hardly go to business, who stopped outside the cinema when the programme was changed twice weekly to look at the new posters. … That was what they were killing. … What had a person like that, a person just like the rest of them, done to be killed? You couldn’t kill a person who cleaned her teeth and went to the lavatory; you only killed romantic people. And no one was really a romantic person, no one. It was not worth this stark reality.

  True, Herbert had been killed, but that had really been an accident. He hadn’t had to know about it beforehand, hadn’t dreaded it. They hadn’t waked him at the chill hour of morning and told him that now—now—he had to dress, make use of the conduits of his body for the last time, go through the farce of putting something into his stomach that he and everyone else knew would never nourish him. People hadn’t looked at him with a dread apology in their sick eyes. …

  What was it the chaplain had told her? That we are all under sentence of death. … The sort of thing that sounds clever and isn’t a bit true. If you didn’t know when or how it was going to overtake you, what did it matter? It was this relentless knowledge that was so cruel; she wouldn’t have inflicted that upon her worst enemy. “Her own worst enemy” … wasn’t that an expression she had heard? Probably it was true, but it hadn’t been her fault. Everyone spoke of her, especially Herbert’s relations, as though she’d been a sort of spoiled darling, but that wasn’t true. She’d never had a chance of anything she really wanted. That was why she’d always pretended. She’d only pretended Herbert’s death, and it had suddenly come alive in spite of her. Now her own death was here, and she couldn’t pretend any more. If, when morning came, she were to stay lying on her bed, pretending something quite different, they’d pull her up; they’d make her stand on her feet, they wouldn’t let her go on pretending. She had come to that place where dreams fail.

  She struggled to her feet and the two women moved towards her anxiously. She needed their support, her legs failed her; it was as though they were made of straw. She began to moan and cry as they laid her back on the bed. She caught the hard, firm hand of one of them, held on to it desperately. Don’t let them do it, don’t let them do it … promise you won’t let them do it. … They soothed her, gave her more bromide, but she was not deceived. She lay biting her pillow, beating her hands beside her head.

  Oh, to sleep, to sleep. … But if she slept It would be upon her all the sooner, she mustn’t sleep. She must grab back the minutes and the hours. She sat up and held her hands to that unwinking light; she stared at those hands she knew by heart as though she had never seen them before. They were real and alive, there was the shiny oval nail of her left thumb, that had never given her any trouble, and there was the squat nail of the right thumb, with its unchanging ribbed band. … She spread out her fingers, held them higher towards the light, while the women watched her anxiously. The blood informed those fingers, she could see the rosy web of skin between them against the light.

  To-morrow people would use their hands for all sorts of things; for dressing, and opening train doors, and writing, and eating, and doing accounts, and for snatched love too, if they were lucky. They would use their hands for hanging her … hanging her … hanging her. Because of their hands her own, with their long capable fingers, her thumbs with the smooth nail and the ribbed, would be lying inert; the processes of decay already invisibly begun. No, no, it wasn’t possible that people would deliberately cause those hands, so alive and well and strong for years to come, to be dead and useless to-morrow. No one could do a thing like that. They would come and tell her of a last-minute reprieve in the morning, that was what always happened.

  Back she was at it again, hope—nay more, almost certainty, giving her the relief of relaxation for a brief minute. Hands, she thought childishly, were very dangerous; people oughtn’t to have them. If Leo hadn’t had hands he couldn’t have killed Herbert, she couldn’t have written those letters. But without hands she wouldn’t be able to hold on right up in this big plane-tree where she was, so high that it made her giddy to look down, and the tree shook so, too. … Even with hands she couldn’t hold on, she was going to fall. …

  She fell, screaming, and again the cell rushed up to meet her, the unwinking light and the unwinking pitiful eyes. Oh, it was true, it was true, they were going to hang her; she was going to fall just like that, with that awful sickening empty feeling, she was going to fall.

  It was true, it was true. She saw one of the women—Mrs. Horner, with the pale rigid face that looked paler than ever, look surreptitiously at her watch. That watch would go on ticking after she, Julia, had ceased to exist; after her pulses were still. There was more life in that watch than there was in her, because of the certainty that it would go on ticking. She was dead already, because she had to die at nine next
morning. Or was it this morning by now? Was that why Mrs. Horner had looked at her watch? The doctor was here now, and again she felt the needle thrust into her arm, and again she fell into a heavy sleep.

  The time, slowly for some, fast for others, continued to exist, and nine o’clock struck.

  Morning was fine for those who went to work and for those preparing for Ascot. The trees stood up into the sunlight, their full foliage still a deep untarnished green. Everywhere was the life of sunshine—flickering shadows and bright reflections. Soon the tinted wind-blown posters of the evening papers burgeoned along the streets. For it was ten o’clock, and the “noon” edition, playing its strange trick of forcing Time ahead, was on sale. The posters bore the legend: “Carr and Starling Hanged,” or “Double Hanging. Special,” but only the stop-press gave a bare statement, the papers themselves gave the latest betting and racing advice. The Lunch edition, on sale long before lunch, reported on its front page that: “Leonard Carr and Julia Starling were executed this morning for the murder of the latter’s husband, Herbert Starling. Death was instantaneous in each case. The usual notices were posted on the prison gates, where small crowds had collected.” But already the posters had dropped the stale news and replaced it by “Noon Wire and Double.” When, after lunch, the 6.30 edition was on sale, the first Ascot winners held pride of place. And when working London had finished brewing its tea in thousands of offices, the Late Extra was pored over by office-boys and heads of departments alike, it was the racing news that was read. Two lines in a column headed “News from Everywhere” and tucked away on an inconspicuous page, recorded the fact of a successful double execution. This item was sandwiched between two others; one saying that sixty police summonses for road traffic offences had been granted at Lambeth that day, the other recording that a Mr. and Mrs. Merritt, of Croydon, had celebrated their Golden Wedding. Mr. Merritt, though now retired, had been for thirty years in the service of the Metropolitan Water Board.

  The gleaming cars rolled back from Ascot, the workers of London went homewards in the towering scarlet buses, or the swaying trains. And, after supper, in the extra hour of sunlight man had re-parcelled from his older system, young people played tennis in leafy Greater London, and the older men worked in their gardens.

  AFTERWORD

  Like many novels, the first edition of A Pin to See the Peepshow starts with a disclaimer: ‘Every character in this book is entirely fictitious, and no reference whatever is intended to any living person.’ The note is more disingenuous than such notes usually are, but one part was true: neither of the two main characters on whom the novel is based were any longer ‘living persons’. Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters had both been killed by hanging eleven years before the novel was published.

  Not all the details of their lives match those of Julia and Leonard. Edith Thompson had a sister, and her father outlived her, for example, and Tennyson Jesse slightly closes the age gap between the lovers. But the gist of the case was the same: a husband was murdered by a jealous man in the throes of an adulterous affair, and a jury determined that both lovers were responsible and should be hanged. The trial was a cause célèbre that everyone was talking about and had an opinion on.

  Long before the murder takes place in the novel, it is not difficult to work out where Tennyson Jesse’s sympathies lie. Though Julia is a complex and flawed character, she is drawn so that the reader feels for her even before we realise we have cause to. She is sensitive and imaginative, knowledgeable about music and poetry, and the sense pervades that her class and upbringing are impediments to what she could have become.

  Julia’s lower-middle-class identity does give her the opportunity to earn a living that a woman of a slightly higher class might not have. A job is, for Julia, ‘at once escape and fulfilment’. Thompson’s first job came even earlier than Julia’s – aged 15, as ‘clerk, folding box manufacturers, cardboards’. But she was keen for progression, learning bookkeeping and starting at a milliners called Carlton & Prior aged 18. Her promotions continued: she became a buyer, was the only member of staff with her own office, and ultimately earned more than her husband. This was subtly held against her in the murder trial, during which the solicitor general purported not to understand why she should choose to continue working after marriage.

  Similar to Thompson, Julia finds work at a dressmakers – approved of by her future husband because it is ‘feminine’. The alternative, he suggests with horror, is that she “might have wanted to be one of those suffragettes and gone about burning churches and hitting policemen”. At this stage of the novel, the 1918 Act which gave some women the vote was not far off, though equal enfranchisement with men wouldn’t come until 1928, after the events of the novel but before its publication.

  Julia finds marriage to Herbert distasteful from the outset. She has been taught that ‘love-making was wrong unless you were married, and rather horrid when you were’, and ‘the gentlemen enjoyed it, and the women did not’. Her request for separate bedrooms would not have been considered completely outlandish, though. While middle-class married couples usually shared a room, it was common for them to have separate beds – considered both the fashionable and the hygienic choice. ‘Separate beds for every sleeper are as necessary as separate dishes for every eater’, wrote Dr Edwin Bowers in Sleeping for Health (1919). ‘They promote comfort, cleanliness, and the natural delicacy that exists among human beings.’

  Leonard (the Frederick Bywaters character) offers Julia not just physical attraction but romance. In reality, Bywaters lodged with the Thompsons; in A Pin to See the Peepshow Leonard is kept at more of a distance from the couple. Divorce is not an option for Julia. Even if Herbert committed adultery, he would need to commit another offence, such as incest or physical cruelty, for Julia to be able to successfully petition for divorce. Tennyson Jesse doesn’t incorporate the domestic violence that Thompson was subjected to. (Fanny Lester, another tenant of the Thompsons, reported seeing Edith’s arm ‘black from the shoulder to the elbow’ after her husband threw her across the room.) But the key obstacles were class and finances. ‘In Julia’s class, divorce was as unknown and difficult a luxury as a private aeroplane.’ Later in the novel, the same theme is referred to, in a narrative cri de cœur:

  … if only she had been higher or lower in the world! In the class above hers the idea of divorce would not have shocked, and a private income would even have allowed her and Carr to live together without divorce, and no one would have been unduly outraged. Had their walk in life been the lowest, had they been tramps or part of the floating population of the docks down London River, they could have set up in one room together, and no one thought twice about it

  Without these options, murder becomes somehow the most viable option of separating husband and wife. Interestingly, one of the details that Tennyson Jesse chooses to change is the murder weapon: in the novel, it is a spanner; in reality, Bywaters used a five-and-a-half-inch hunting knife. Tennyson Jesse is perhaps giving a little more assistance to the defence that the murder wasn’t premeditated, and that Julia/Edith should not be implicated.

  What did implicate Thompson (and thus Julia) were her own words. Much of the trial hinged on the letters that Thompson wrote to Bywaters. His to her were largely destroyed; she had asked him to do the same. Whether he preserved them for the underhand motives Tennyson Jesse attributes to Leonard is unclear.

  The letters, it was alleged, demonstrated that Thompson had several times tried to kill her husband by putting glass or poisonous substances in his food. Though the trial was not for these apparent attempted murders, it was argued that they showed intent, while her defence claimed they were nothing more than the words of an imaginative woman trying to show her devotion to the man with whom she was having an affair.

  Arguably more damning, at least in the eyes of the public, was the tone of Thompson’s letters to her ‘darlint’. It’s a tone that Tennyson Jesse seems deliberately to av
oid. Thompson’s letters had been scrutinised by the press, with their declarations and run-on sentences and general sense of having been written with more passion than precision. The eloquent, thoughtful, often measured letters that Julia writes in the novel frequently relate to the realities of the case, but seldom to the tone of the originals. Here, for instance, is a single sentence from one of Thompson’s: