Cat and Mouse (7 page)

It can't happen.

It does. Those women were talking about it, just now. Men pay extra because the girl is pure, a child, a virgin. Some of these men must be fathers, with daughters of their own. As that woman is a mother, who is selling her girl.

Not my Jonathan. Please God, let it not be him.

Let there be some mistake. Oh dear Father in heaven —
why is God a father, would He have done this too?

My father did . . .

Sarah sat very still, trembling, her hands clasped so tightly in her lap that her fingers were white and bloodless. She closed her eyes and tried to pray, not knowing what she believed in any more.

Certain only that hell was all around her . . .

At four o'clock they were marched out, thirty women together, to the Black Maria. Sarah had been arrested twice before, but for some reason she had always been taken to prison in a cab, never in one of these until now. The Black Maria was a motor coach, a little longer than an omnibus, but with a single deck and no windows. One by one, two policemen ushered the women in through the doors at the back.

When it came to Sarah's turn, panic seized her. There was no room inside! The door at the back opened into a long narrow corridor, almost entirely filled by the bulk of the policeman crouching in it. His head was bent because of the low roof, and he was holding open the door to a small cubicle, a cupboard, on the right.

‘Here you are, Ma'am. First class passengers step this way!’

‘But — I can't!’ She began to back out. It was too small, too cramped!

‘Here, George, catch her back! This one's leery!’

The policeman behind caught her waist, and between the two of them they manhandled her through the little door into the cupboard, like grooms dealing with a skittish horse. ‘It's all right, dear, you'll get used to it!’

‘But I can't! I can't breathe! I . . .’

The door closed in front of her. They had sat her on a small plank, facing the closed door and the corridor she could no longer see. She had to sit, there was no choice. The cubicle was not high enough for her to stand up, or wide enough for her to turn round in. Her knees touched the door in front of her. And it was quite dark. She heard the door at the back of the vehicle slam shut, and total darkness enveloped her.

There were women all around her, in other cubicles, but she could not see them. One or two were cursing and crying, but several called out mockingly to each other. They have been here before, they are not afraid, Sarah thought. If they can bear it I can — I must. I can't set out to battle for women's rights and then not be able to bear what a common streetwalker can.

It was the darkness that saved her. After a moment's panic she found it relaxing, comforting even. Do nothing, she thought. Feel nothing, don't move. And then, as her eyes grew accustomed to it, she saw a marvellous thing.

On the back of the door in front of her, an image appeared. Very faint at first, a blur of light where there had been utter blackness before, but then it grew clearer. It was round, about the size of her hand, and there were shapes moving in it. As she felt the Black Maria lurch out of the gates of the police station into the street, the shapes of the images in front of her changed, growing one minute dark, then lighter again, and with little blurs of different colours moving this way and that.

It fascinated her, and she forgot to be afraid. What could it be? The images seemed to be moving along the top of the picture, while the lower part was brown or red, like the upper stories of buildings. Very like . . . In fact, they even had square shapes like windows which moved across them. And below, something blue, like a streak of sky — except that it was right at the bottom of the picture instead of at the top!

Then something clicked in her memory and she realised what she was looking at. She had seen something like this before, as a child. Her father had taken her and her little sister Deborah to an exhibition of photography, and there had been something — what was it called? A
camera obscura
— that was it! She had sat inside one with Deborah, he had drawn the curtain, and when their eyes had become accustomed to the darkness the same thing had grown on the wall in front of them — a picture of the world outside, but upside down, because the light came in through a pinhole in the wall behind them and changed places somehow.

Sarah laughed, and the panic drained out of her like bathwater. She felt clear, clean, relaxed. That was it — the little figures moving busily across the top of the picture were people on the pavement, and there were vehicles bustling past them, upside down! For a while she watched them, entranced, smiling to herself in relief. The discovery had released her from fear, like a children's story at the edge of night.

But it was like childhood in another way too. It came back to her now, with the pain of a memory that had not been released for over twenty years, what it had been like in that
camera obscura
. At first she and Deborah had been fascinated by the tiny figures; but just as now, they had been blurred, difficult to make out clearly. And when you did make them out, they were only ordinary people in the street, after all. So she and Deborah had started to talk, in hushed whispers, about a secret they had learnt about their father.

What was it, that secret? The memory came back to her with such painful clarity — she could even feel the print dress with ruffled sleeves she had worn, feel the way her feet only just touched the floor from the high seat. How old had she been? Eleven? Yes, she had had her birthday a few days before and Deborah had given her the butterfly brooch she was wearing. She could see it now, so painfully clear! And outside the booth, her father, in tweed coat and flannels, for it was a holiday, and he was trying to be jolly. She could even smell his cigar.

But what was the secret they had talked of?

The Black Maria lurched over a bump in the road, and the picture on the back of the door in front of her changed. They were going over the river, Sarah realised. She could see ships. But for the moment it didn't matter. Her mind made this memory seem immensely important.

Deborah had . . . met someone, that was it! A woman — the two girls had been watching a woman in the pinhole picture inside the
camera obscura
, going along upside down in front of them, and she had been wearing a purple coat — that was what had reminded Deborah of it. Deborah had seen this woman a week or so before, and she had been totally mad. Deborah hadn't actually spoken to the woman — she had been playing with a hoop in the park at the time — but she had seen the woman come up to their father and speak to him. She was rather a poor woman, Deborah could see that, but she had been wearing this gaudy purple coat which made her stand out. And she had called her father by his Christian name — George — just like that, as though she knew him! She had even put her arm through his, tried to walk down the path with him; it was terribly funny!

And all the time Deborah had been bowling her hoop along between the trees, watching, and seen their father go awfully red, because of course it made him look ever so silly. Then he had given the woman some money and spoken sharply to her, to make her go away. When Deborah had asked him about it he had said she was a poor madwoman, who didn't know who she was, and ought to be in hospital.

Yes, that was it! It came back to Sarah now, all in a rush. She remembered Deborah telling her about it in the
camera obscura
, and the two of them had started giggling. Their father had pulled back the curtain to ask what was so funny and they had danced out, still giggling, linked his arms, one on each side, and dragged him away to the ice-cream stall. They were both pretending to be that silly woman, without letting their father know. What a strange daddy he was! All you had to do was come up to him, link his arm, call him George, and he would give you money. Or ice-cream.

It was an exquisitely painful memory. Sarah could even see her father — young, as he had been then, with brown hair and slim waist instead of the paunch and bald head he developed later. No sign of that embarrassing rash on his neck which he had covered up with a scarf as he grew older.

The rash that was the first visible symptom of the syphilis that killed him when she was nineteen . . . The shock had turned her mother into a permanent hypochondriac who always wore black and hardly ever left the house until she died too, nine years later. It had made Sarah fear and distrust all men, until she had met Jonathan.

The most painful thing of all, was how she had once loved her father. So long ago; she had been so innocent. He had been a jolly man who bought them ice-creams and swung them up on his shoulders and made them laugh, and never looked worried or tired or ill as their mother often did. That was before she had learned what men were really like. Before she had learned what he had done to her mother . . .

Because he did what Jonathan was doing now.

The Black Maria stopped in a traffic jam under a railway bridge, and the tiny pinhole of light failed utterly. Sarah Becket sat hunched on the wooden seat in her cubicle, rocking from side to side to calm herself. A thin shabby woman crushed into a box in a coach full of boxes. Some small boys, passing outside, casually threw handfuls of gravel onto the vehicle, and it thundered on the roof like hail . . .

H
OLLOWAY. SARAH knew they had arrived even before the door at the back of the Black Maria was opened and light began to seep in. This time, when the vehicle stopped, the engine was switched off, and in the sudden quiet she heard the distant thud of a heavy gate shutting outside.

The first of many, she thought with a grim shudder. She pictured the massive, metal-studded gates she had seen when she had been imprisoned here before, and remembered how she had felt then. Hopeless, forgotten, alone. But she had starved her way out and she would do it again. She took deep, steady breaths, to calm herself for the struggle ahead.

Her compartment door was thrown back with a crash and she was hustled out with the others into the dazzling grey daylight of the prison yard. She stumbled, hands in front of her eyes, blinking, and before she could fully recover she was led through a prison door, down a noisy echoing corridor, to a room where her name was entered in a ledger.

Here the policemen delivered her, like a parcel, and the prison wardresses took over. She looked at these women curiously, searching for the least trace of sympathy. On her last two visits there had been none. And yet, she thought, wardresses need the vote too. We are all women here, it is the men who are the enemy. But these wardresses did not even look at Sarah or the other prisoners. They stared somewhere above her head, or to the side, and spoke in loud harsh voices as though addressing someone who was deaf, or stupid, and far away.

‘Out of the door, turn right, down the stairs to the washroom!’

‘Will I be allowed to . . .’

‘Button that lip! No one to speak unless spoken to!’

All this in that rude, harsh, impersonal voice, with no eye contact at all. A shove on the shoulder — from a
woman!
— and Sarah was out in the corridor. The wardresses seemed worse than she had remembered, harsher, as though those with any hint of sympathy for the suffragettes had been weeded out. There has been a change here, she thought, this place is worse than it was . . .

In the washroom the wardress took her into a cubicle with a large enamel bath. She turned the taps on with a quick, assertive flick of her wrist and then stood facing Sarah with her hands on her hips. She was a young woman, Sarah noted, not more than twenty-five, well-built, with strong arms and a rather wide, plain face. She was staring at a point slightly to the right of and above Sarah's head.

‘Right then, you. Strip!’

Sarah considered. She had submitted to this last time but it had left her feeling foul, humiliated. The bath had evidently not been cleaned for some time. There was a grimy ring around the sides and a broad streak of rust leading to the plughole. The water coming out of the taps had a yellowish tinge, and a froth of grey bubbles was forming on its surface.

If I am going to resist at all this time, this is where I start, Sarah thought. If my maid had run me a bath like this she would have been sacked on the spot. And this surly girl is no more than a jumped-up maid, even if she has power over me. I must win her over. After all, my protest is for women like this, too. She decided to try humour.

‘Is this really necessary? It doesn't look as though I shall derive much benefit from it.’

The young woman's eyes flickered for an instant in her direction, then resumed their stony stare at the wall.

‘All prisoners wash on arrival. Regulations.’ The wardress stepped slightly to one side and Sarah saw the usual torn, greyish towel on a chair behind her, next to a green chemical-looking bottle. ‘Make sure you wash your hair, too. Nit shampoo.’

‘There is absolutely no need for that, young woman! The idea is absurd!’

The grey bubbles on the surface of the water were now halfway up the side of the bath. Splashes and groans came from some of the neighbouring cubicles, but no words. Sarah did not move. Surely this young woman realised that she was talking to a lady — a Member of Parliament's wife, no less! Perhaps that was why she was rude and abrupt; it was a sign of nervousness. She looked as though she might have a pleasant face, if she did not scowl.

Sarah smiled and said: ‘You know I am a suffragette, don't you? I am only here because of a protest to get votes for all women. You should support me in that, you know. If you oppress me, you only oppress yourself.’

The wardress glanced at her, briefly, and something like fear or fury flickered behind her eyes. Then she reached down to her belt, raised a whistle to her lips, and blew The sound in the small echoing room was piercing, an assault on the ears. Before it was over the door was flung open and a second wardress appeared. She was slightly older and shorter than the first, with iron-grey hair and the forearms of a washerwoman.