Authors: Tim Vicary
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 outside . . .
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.
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.