by Vicary, Tim
My husband? Does the man think I know, and don't care? A fog began to swirl in Sarah's head, and she thought, I'm too weak, I can't cope with this. ‘Why should my husband speak of you?’
‘He and I were at college together, you know that. You surely remember the night I came to dinner with you, last autumn? We spoke of the work I do amongst the destitute families of prisoners? The hostels I work in — for orphans and the children of prisoners? They have been most favourably spoken of in Liberal circles. Your husband has even visited a few, and praised them most kindly. It is charitable work, that brings its own rewards.’
She thought: so Jonathan actively helps this man! Praises him for work he does with young children. Oh God — what if those hostels are where the girls came from! The woman in the collecting cell said something about that, didn't she? It's too dreadful.
‘And so when I read of your case in the papers I was interested, and when your husband asked me to visit you I was happy to do so.’
‘My husband asked you to . . .’
‘To visit you, Mrs Becket, yes. In my official capacity, of course. Though I hope I may be of some help to you if I can, for old acquaintanceship's sake.’ He sat down, on the foot of the bed, his heavy trousers an inch from her feet. Smiling, as though enjoying the power he had over her. She shrank away from him, her hands pressed flat against the hard surface of the bed beside her, to still their trembling. Did Jonathan send this monster here?
‘May I feel your pulse?’
‘Why?’ She kept her arms where they were.
‘I am a doctor, Mrs Becket. I have come to examine you.’
‘Why do I need to be examined?’
‘You have refused food and my colleague has prescribed treatment for that. Your husband is very concerned. Naturally, I need to know what the results of that treatment are, and if you are capable of withstanding some more.’
‘Treatment! Is that what you call it?’ She had meant to scream, but her throat was so dry with shame and fear it came out as a croak.
‘Treatment, yes. Give me your wrist.’ He took it. She snatched it back. ‘Really, Mrs Becket, I cannot act as your medical adviser if . . .’
‘Don't you dare touch me!’
The smile faded, the thick lips pursed together disapprovingly in the round fleshy face.
‘Really, Mrs Becket, I assure you . . .’
‘Save your assurances for the wretched little girls you molest in the house where you have your consulting rooms!’
‘I — I beg your pardon ?’
‘You heard.’
To her surprise, he had gone quite white. If she had not been so afraid she would have noticed it more, but even in her rage she saw that his normally ruddy face had gone sickly white, as though he were suddenly afflicted with nausea. The wardress saw it too. It was the young one — the one built like a coalheaver, Miss Harkness. Sarah saw her glance at him with horror. She took a deep breath, drawing in courage.
‘You know what I mean! You're not a doctor at all., Martin Armstrong, you're a sham! I know about the brothel you keep above your consulting rooms in Kensington, the high-class prostitutes and whores you keep there for men like my husband! And you take little children in there, too, don't you — girls of fourteen and fifteen! Where do you get them from — your brothels in Hackney? Or those charitable hostels you talk about? You introduce them to prostitution, don't you? Or do you abuse them yourself first?’
He gazed at her, appalled. Sarah was aware of the watching eyes of the wardress, over his shoulder.
‘That — is a monstrous allegation, Mrs Becket!’
‘Is it? I don't care, it's true! You are a liar and a procurer and a hater of women. It is you who should be locked up, not me! When I get out of here I shall make it my business to bring round a party of suffragettes to your consulting rooms and we shall see for ourselves! We shall rescue those poor girls there and the children you torment, and print the story in our newspaper. I shall destroy your reputation altogether, even if I ruin my own husband's in the process! Tell him that, when you see him, will you?’
Martin Armstrong sat quite still. A little of the colour had come back into his face, but his big fleshy hands were opening and closing unconsciously on his lap, as though they wanted to squeeze something. He glanced briefly at the wardress, as though for support. Then he said: ‘That is the most ridiculous outburst I have heard in my life. I can only think you are affected by a form of collective insanity, like most suffragettes. It is a form of hysteria to which the female mind is uniquely susceptible.’
‘Nonsense!’ Sarah suddenly felt how trapped she was, helpless, quite unable to walk out and slam the door or call her servants and ask him to leave as she would at home. She had to listen to everything he said until he decided to leave. She was utterly in his power.
‘It is not nonsense. I am a medical man and I know. Your wild accusations prove it. I also know that if you continue to refuse to eat, you will suffer serious physical damage. Your brain will be starved of nourishment and may deteriorate further. It is my duty to ensure that your treatment continues while you remain in my care. So I must continue my examination. Give me your wrist.’
‘No!’
Every vestige of his ingratiating smile had gone now. Instead, there was a frown, dark brows scowling together, a slight flush on the heavy jowls. Why did men have to be so big! she thought. It's because of that, as much as anything else, that they bully us.
He beckoned to the wardress. For a moment Sarah thought the girl would take her side, but after a slight hesitation she obeyed. She stepped forward, sat on Sarah's legs and gripped her arms so tight Sarah thought they would bruise. The man felt her pulse.
‘A trifle fast, but normal in the circumstances. Let me listen to your heart.’
Oh God, Sarah thought, Jonathan sent this man and now he is going to force feed me. How could any husband treat his wife like this?
Martin Armstrong took a stethoscope out of his pocket. Miss Harkness pulled down the front of Sarah's dress, roughly, and he listened through her slip. She saw the slightly balding head bent in concentration, and thought, shall I spit? But her mouth was too dry with fear. If I had sharper teeth I could tear his skin like a tigress . . .
‘Fine sturdy heart. Good pair of lungs too. I congratulate you, Mrs Becket. Your mind may be deranged, but you are in excellent physical health, and if we continue with the treatment there is no reason why it should fail.’
He says that when he can look at my arm and nearly see through the skin, it is so transparent! Sarah's heart was beating so fast now that she could feel it pounding in her throat. Any minute now the trolley would come. To spin things out she said: ‘What do you mean, treatment?’
‘The forcible feeding, of course.’
This man is my husband's friend, she thought. He is savage, inhuman, a torturer. He is smiling, damn him! What is it that's wrong in men's brains?
She stared him straight in the eyes and said: ‘You are a devil! A murderer!’
‘Quite the opposite, Mrs Becket, I assure you. Your life is in my hands.’
He turned his back on her, and suddenly he was gone, his wide leather shoes scrunching heavily on the stone floor of the corridor outside. For a moment the young wardress, Miss Harkness, stared down at Sarah, shaking. Only a second, and Sarah thought the girl was about to hit her.
Then she, too, was gone.
The door crashed shut. The key clanked in the lock. Sarah slumped onto the end of her bed, and drew her knees up, trembling, to her chin. She thought: I thought I had a happy life before I came to prison but I was wrong. It was all a sham, an illusion. I thought I had married a gentleman but he turned out to be a monster, a grub who sent his slimy friends to feed off me as though I were a living corpse. It's only in here that I've learnt what he's really like.
She waited, listening, to the clanks and howls and rattles of prison life.
Waiting. For the clatter of the trolley in the corridor out
side . . .
Martin Armstrong prided himself on his ability to look calm at all times. Calm, avuncular, masterful — that was the image he aimed at. It was useful to him not only as a doctor, but in his other dealings with women. He was a big man and he used his size to dominate others, physically and morally. Most people were in awe of him. Patients especially, of course — they were worried about their illness, often tearful, nervous, afraid. His calm reassured them. Prostitutes were similar — often flighty, overtired, skittish, drunk, hysterically excited one minute and depressed the next. Martin was able to control them by his calm, his stolidity, and, occasionally, by his strength.
Most women were a little afraid of him, and Martin liked it that way.
He regarded women as basically inferior creatures. They could not control their emotions because of their monthly cycles. They were physically weaker and less intelligent than men. They were obsessively interested in foolish frippery, things like clothes and music and novels and flowers.
Some, of course, like his own wife, had to be treated with respect. He kept her in a pleasant house, with beautiful furniture and clothes and a piano and a nice garden to occupy her mind. She spent her time supervising the servants, playing with their two young children, going to bridge parties and coffee mornings and the theatre, and visiting her friends to talk about babies. He bought her presents, and she smiled at him like a happy child living in a doll's house.
He made love to her regularly, once or twice a week, but it was very boring. She lay on her back and thought, he supposed, of having children, while he tried to get as much enjoyment as he could without crushing her with his bulk. It never lasted long. Occasionally she became ill and then he treated her for a disease which he understood very well, and she didn't.
Gonorrhea. He didn't get it very often because he examined all the girls he let rooms to in his brothels, but even he could make mistakes. He fucked most of the girls he employed but usually only once or twice, because to establish any kind of closer relationship with them would undermine his authority.
He couldn't afford that. They were the other kind of women in Martin's world. Their own marketable asset was their ability to fornicate in all kinds of exciting and interesting ways, which respectable women like his wife would never believe, even if they heard about it. From this asset they made money, and he helped them. London was full of rich, respectable men who found making love to their wives excruciatingly dull. They wanted excitement, but needed discretion.
Martin provided the discretion and the premises, and the girls provided the excitement.
Apart from that he had no relationship at all with the girls. In fact, he despised them. They were like horses in a stable which he rode once to see if they provided a good ride, and then hired out. When his customers got bored with them he got rid of them. Presumably most of them in the end got married, or set up in business on their own, or found work in a shop or as servants or in a factory. Martin neither knew nor cared.
Suffragettes had no place in Martin's view of the world. They seemed to be interested in neither sex nor marriage; indeed, they did not behave like females at all. They neglected their homes, and ran around like screaming savages in skirts throwing stones and breaking windows and setting fire to things. Many of them, like Sarah Becket, appeared to actually hate men so much they could not bear to be touched. It seemed to him like a form of hysterical madness.
It was also very dangerous.
As he strode along the corridor in Holloway he appeared outwardly calm as always, but inside he was shaking with anger. That appalling woman Sarah Becket — he had not wanted to help her, but because of her husband he had tried, and she had more or less spat in his face. In front of the wardress too — God knows what gossip she would make out of this, in their grubby little common room downstairs. And the worst of it was, everything she said was true.
He marched into his office, slammed the door behind him, and paced furiously up and down the carpet. This was where he had agreed to help her husband Jonathan, against his better judgement — and now look what had happened! She and her wretched suffragette friends must have followed Jonathan to his consulting rooms; or spied on him somehow, and now they knew exactly what went on.
He was in no doubt what would happen. Even if Sarah only wrote about it in The Suffragette, enough respectable people would read it for questions to be asked, and if the police became involved other newspapers would follow the story up. He would almost certainly lose his job at the prison, and more importantly, a lot of his patients would probably leave him as well. Some of them, like Jonathan, knew exactly what went on in the rooms in Kensington, but others would be appalled if they found out.
Including his wife. This would make things very difficult at home.
But it was worse than that. The girls in Hackney and Kensington paid him a very high rent for their rooms, and if the police asked them they would probably cheerfully admit that many of their clients came to them through Martin. Living off immoral earnings was a crime. Particularly if some of the girls, as at present, were under sixteen.
I could go to prison, Martin thought. I could be shut in a cell like the ones here. All day behind a locked door and four stone walls. With filthy clothes and foul food and a bucket under the window.
He sat down at his desk abruptly. Sweat was prickling his forehead. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and thought, what shall I do?
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.
