Without Consent

Epigraph

‘It is an offence for a man to rape a woman.

A man commits rape if (a) he has unlawful sexual intercourse with a woman who at the time of the intercourse does not consent to it; and (b) at that time he knows that she does not consent to the intercourse, or is reckless as to whether she consents.'

Contents

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

About the Author

Also by Frances Fyfield

Copyright

About the Publisher

H
ome was where the heart was.

She smelt. Stank. The rank smell of perfume mixed with grass and sweat, city smells and those of harvest, soil beneath her fingernails. Shivering in the heat of the night with the jacket round her shoulders which she wanted to shake off although she needed it for warmth. Needed it, needed it, the lapels damp with saliva, and oh yes, there had been real tears in her eyes as she stumbled home. Look, we don't have to do it this way, she'd said. We could do it nice and ordinary in your car; take me away from all this and I'm all yours, she'd said, and he'd laughed. A lovely laugh, he had, low and sexy and full of promise. Jesus. There was nothing to fear. But she had been so frightened, like now, feeling the air had been punched out of her. She could imagine the fingerprint bruises on her ribs. You're perfect, he'd said; a few bruises won't harm you. Bruises to the sternum where he'd held her down. They'll fade soon, he'd said. I'll make them in the shape of a flower.

S
he heard footsteps coming down the stairs, imagined, accurately, a young man in carpet slippers coming down to put out the rubbish, closing the door quietly, knowing that what he did was important. Then she began to cry.

S
ilence. Only a kind of semi-silence in this man's room, high above the street. The slight vibration of anxious traffic but no voices.

It was not enough for him, the ordinary way of doing anything, or so he told himself. Or maybe it was the humiliating fact that it was shameful and undignified to be so obsessed by anything at any time. Sex is not life, simply a part. For some, he supposed sex was a necessary release of tension, instead of this idle curiosity of his in which he could never admit that necessity ever played a part. Bearing in mind what women submitted themselves to all the time, he could not see that he did any harm.

Such women. The shapes and sizes of them filled him with wonder; each body as unique as its own fingerprint, each set of reactions different, each set of needs and stimuli unquantifiable if broadly similar. The thought of so many of them blundering through life without anything amounting to satisfaction filled him with pity. He saw himself as a man who loved women and wished that they could understand and value themselves more, and also take themselves a little less seriously; appreciate a joke, perhaps. God knows, there had been enough jokes played on him to last a lifetime, and he was still smiling. In his view, a feminist was a person who considered it morally indefensible to cause pain to any woman; the object was to cause pleasure;
there was no point otherwise. Of course, if the life were already so diminished, so beyond the prospect of pleasure, it might be as well to cause pleasure in the ending of it, but he was not sufficiently practised to consider himself in the role of God. One of these days, he might perfect the most poetic form of death. A sublime accident.

You were born to make women happy, his own mother had told him. Also for the healing arts. Yours is a double vocation, my child. The ice clinked in the glass beside his desk. There were flowers in the vase, variegated carnations, rather sterile in their perfection, he thought. A box of chocolates. He sipped the drink reflectively. Alas, ice and lavender oil were not sufficient for every kind of burn. Nor were drink, pleasure and the exercise of power always sufficient antidote for life's crueller reversals. So many of his ageing women acquaintances could have told him that.

He pondered these and other matters in front of his computer. The blankness of the screen did not alarm him at all; it was hardly the same as facing an empty page with nothing better to do with himself. He could copy onto this space sections of alarming medical and legal text, although the latter, with all its Gothic splendour, always made him regret his choice of career. Medical science was not ennobling. In his experience, doctors were worse liars and rogues than their legal counterparts who tended to be at least more guarded in their promises.

Physician, heal thyself.

The vase holding the flowers was an artful sculpture of female genitalia. The broad base represented the uterus; the ridge at the base, by which he would lift it, the cervix, opening out realistically into a flower-like shape of the
labia minora and labia majora. An artist's slightly fanciful impression of the vulva, in other words. A frivolous creation which the girl who cleaned consistently and typically failed to recognize for what it was. He often found it helpful to explain anatomy if one began from the outside in. In actual life, as he knew, the labia closed with the tidiness of a bud, concealed beneath a convenient mound and carried round as normal by women who scarcely knew how any of the reproductive and sexual machinery worked. This polished wood structure was hardly a useful educational tool for hopeful men either, but it was warm to handle and looked, without the flowers, like a decorative candle holder.

He could not explain why he was as he was or did as he did. The random development of his own tastes astounded him as much as the history of his life, but he felt saintly and worthy in comparison to some mindless procreator of the aggressively macho sort.
He
would never foist some unwanted, unsupportable, screaming child into the world; that indeed was a sin, raw and unadorned in its sheer wickedness. He nodded at the screen; the screen agreed.

He smoothed his already smooth pate, tapped it with the middle finger of his right hand. He had his own rationality, that was all; along with the conventional overtones which were enough to show him he was not really mad in his entirely sane fear of retribution. His was the fear of an innocent man who can never really be understood.

What was it they could ever say that he had done wrong? Nothing! And who would give evidence? No one? Nothing was done, my dears, without consent.

He looked at his watch. It was not a distinguished implement but a type made by the million. Dark outside now, but still warm. His lovely little girl would be home. Fearless about the dark. Safe in the hands of a man who would never awaken her.

Almost a soul mate. Not a friend.

Almost a lover.

L
isten, Bailey said.

Once upon a time, there was a girl, going out.

Dressing for the party, she had felt she was worth a million dollars. Somehow that phrase meant more than the sterling equivalent of the day – the last of her life as she had known it – and she might have been worth more. Coming down for a moment from the quarrel with her mother, the third this week, and putting a jacket over what her father called her itsy-bit skirt and the skimpy top, wearing it as if she would never part with it, rather than shed it as soon as she got there, she had a sudden surge of rebellious love for her repressive parents. They weren't so bad, some of the time. For a brief moment, she knew that she was safe as houses, because she had this room to come back to and this number to call, although the only reason she was worth so much to herself was the fact that after three weeks' diet, her waist was where she wanted and her ribs stuck out. Not a milligram of surplus flesh, although,
if she ate as much as a bread roll, her stomach came out like a balloon. The answer was not to eat.

‘Bye, Mum. Bye, Dad …'

‘Let's see you,' he called. She stepped into the living room, pretending great haste even though she was early. The jacket was buttoned. She had on a prim little choker round her neck, which would go from throat to handbag before she had reached the end of the road. The make-up would go on in the bus.

‘Very nice,' he said, reassuringly, thinking nothing of the kind. Why did this child have to look so fierce and why on earth was she so addicted to black? Why did she go about with that girl who was so much older and prettier? One quick peck on the cheek, given and received in an overpowering atmosphere of multilayered perfume, and she was off before Mother came out of the kitchen. Because Mother was harder to fool.

Later on, when they picked her up after the police had called, she stank of booze. The itsy-bit skirt was torn and stained. The child whimpered, but did not hug; could not bear to touch. Her thighs were scored with scratches; there was detritus under her nails. She was scantily dressed; it was presumed she had been stripped prior to her foetal curl in the gutter where she was found. A few bruises.

No knickers, no jacket. In the presence of her parents, she said she had lost them. That was all she uttered, apart from sobbing. Even after hours with a sympathetic woman in a nice little house with pictures on the wall.

‘Well?'

Helen West, Prosecutor, sat on Bailey's sofa, still listening. They did this sometimes, a kind of dress rehearsal for
tomorrow's challenges, both occasionally mourning the coincidence of their professions. Senior police officer, experienced crown prosecutor. It was not a relationship she would recommend, but she was stuck with it, like the fly which had fallen into her drink. Bailey had a creased face and a fine way of telling a story. He animated his narrative with verbal cartoons and embellished the whole thing with gestures, but as soon as he said, ‘Once upon a time', she knew the story was going to be doctored with his own opinions and recounted in a style he would never use in front of a judge.

‘Drugs?' She questioned crisply

‘Negligible, from her demeanour. I'd guess not.'

‘Booze?'

‘Plenty.'

‘Semen?'

‘Saliva, yes. Here and there; not there. Semen, no. Several abandoned condoms around, but a lovers' trysting place. Bodily fluids also in the gutter. And no, she isn't a virgin. Not quite.'

‘That's not enough,' Helen said.

Bailey watched the graceful figure of his betrothed cross the broad expanse of his living room and thought of his ex-wife, for whom his traveller's tales from the police force had always taken second place to what they should do with the bathroom in preparation for the first child. He might as well have been out to stud. Oh, silence, he told himself, don't fall into clichés as if you were obliging someone on the psychiatrist's consulting couch. That woman had her needs, you had yours, which coincided at the time and might still if the child had not died. A child who would be
the same age, give or take a year or two, as the girl in the story. He found himself repeating, what a pity, the trite words hiding a multitude of sins. His stomach growled. The last year of his life had seen the development of an ulcer.

‘The way you tell it,' Helen said, settling easily into the big fat settee he would never have possessed in his married life, ‘gives me all the clues to the verdict. Silly little seventeen-year-old goes out to party, as described to parents, to whom she lies habitually, about dress code, about everything. Goes shimmering in there, dressed in nothing.' He was silent.

‘The bloke for whom she's wearing all the glitz does not pitch. So she salves her disappointment by drinking a bit more and then a bit more and ends up in a scrum with a stranger. She doesn't have the faintest idea what a half-naked, flirtatious girl risks.'