Women of Courage (2 page)

As the seconds lengthened into minutes, the boys’ attention deepened, hunters sure of their quarry. Once or twice she swayed, as though almost too weak to stand, then checked and held herself rigidly upright. But still she did not move.

When nearly three minutes had passed, the elder boy turned to his mate, a broad grin on his face.

‘You wait, Jem,’ he said. ‘This one’s going to be good.’

Sarah Becket did not know she was standing still. Her mind was too busy. It was focussed on one ridiculous, irrelevant thought that got in the way of everything she had planned.

She thought: the Gallery is too big.

She had seen the National Gallery many times before but never really looked at it. It was a place she had visited as a child in school parties to learn about art, and later, with Jonathan when they were courting, because it was a convenient, respectable place to meet unchaperoned.

She had never looked at the building itself before.

But today, with the meat knife scratching her wrist inside her muff, she saw it for the first time.

It had been built while Queen Victoria was still a child, three-quarters of a century ago — a huge, confident, proud building. There were two sets of stone steps leading up to the portico and the main entrance. The pillars supporting the entrance were as tall as forest trees. They were linked by a long balustrade to similar rows of columns away to the right and left. In the middle of the roof was a beautiful glass cupola. Everything about the building proclaimed the glory of culture and education. It looked as solid and immovable as the Establishment of the British Empire itself.

And she, Sarah Becket, a woman who had learnt all her life to obey and reverence everything this building stood for, was about to attack it.

I could always go home, she thought. No one need ever know, this is not planned or sanctioned by the movement as the other things were. I don’t have to do this. I could go to meetings and large demonstrations where I would have the support of other women around me. That would be easier. I could do that as I have done before. Or I could just turn round now and go back to Jonathan and smile and keep my promise to stay out of prison and try to be a good wife and pretend I know nothing at all about where he goes when . . .

That’s not the real reason. It’s because I can’t just do nothing, and leave Mrs Pankhurst to die.

She broke out of her trance and stepped off the pavement into the road. A bicycle bell rang furiously in her ear and a baker’s delivery boy swerved round her, cursing and clutching at the loaves in the basket over his front wheel. Sarah stepped back, took a deep breath, and looked around her.

If I cannot even cross the road I will never manage it.

She waited for a gap in the traffic, walked across, went up the left-hand set of stone steps to the main entrance. It was like walking through water . . . At each step the air resisted her, her muscles weakened, she wanted to turn and run or just fall down and weep.

Mrs Pankhurst was arrested again yesterday, she thought — the seventh time for the same offence. She could hardly stand last time I saw her. In prison she doesn’t eat and walks up and down her cell for hours every night. She will be dead soon — she is giving her life for feeble creatures like me. I know what it’s like in prison, I’ve been there. I must force them to let her out. I’m doing this for Mrs Pankhurst.

Not Jonathan. Forget
him.

She walked through the great oaken doors. A uniformed commissionaire bowed stiffly to her. She found herself looking at his arms and face, thinking, he doesn’t look an unusually strong man, or cruel. Will he hurt me very much, when I have done it?

Something not quite so polite, a little suspicious, came into the man’s eyes. Women were suspected everywhere these days and Sarah realised she had stared at him a moment too long.

The shock gave her courage, made her begin to think clearly at last. It would be too, too stupid to come this far and fail, just because I acted feebly and looked like an idiot. After all, this man is just a servant, for heaven’s sake.

She turned back and spoke to him. Her voice came out cool, distant, quite normal. A well-bred lady used to the deference of menials.

‘Good morning. I’ve come to see the Spanish exhibition. It is here, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right, ma’am. Upstairs, in room 17. Would you like a catalogue?’

‘I would, thank you.’ Then, as he turned to reach for one on the desk behind him, she realised the difficulty. How could she pay for and accept the catalogue while she was carrying the muff with the knife inside it? She had a small purse in there too, in a pocket in the lining, but the knife was two inches wide and over a foot long — far too big and heavy to fit into her purse. And if he saw it!

It was too late to back out now. Carefully, trying not to look as though she was fumbling, she withdrew the purse from the pocket inside the muff and held purse, muff and knife all in the left hand together, while she fished the money out with her right.

‘Thank you,’ she said. Even to herself her voice sounded small, nervous, flustered.

The commissionaire took her money and held out the catalogue.

It was a big catalogue, with expensive reproductions of the paintings. Oh God, she thought. I don’t need this at all. But to go in without one would look abnormal, surely? And people everywhere are on the lookout for suffragettes. This is much harder than throwing stones or marching in a demonstration.

Clumsily, she stuffed the purse back inside the muff and took the wretched catalogue with her right hand. I should have planned this more carefully, she thought. In a minute I’m going to drop something or blush and then I shall have failed and look an utter, utter fool!

The commissionaire frowned, looked at the muff, and held out his hand.

‘Let me take that for you, ma’am. I can keep it safe here while you’re inside.’

‘No! No — thank you very much, but I have — a disease of the hands. They get — unusually cold, even in this weather, and the doctor has ordered me to keep them warm at all times.’

Jonathan had once told her she had a devastating smile. She tried it out now, hoping that it would have the required effect and not display the sick, panicky desperation she felt inside. The point of good manners, her mother had always told her, was to shield the world from what you really felt.

‘As you wish, Madam.’

The man bowed and turned away and Sarah walked swiftly into the gallery, up the stairs under the great glass cupola, and left and then right towards room 17. The incident had galvanized her. She felt rage begin to flow through her. Rage at herself for being so weak and foolish as to be nearly caught out at the entrance like a naughty schoolgirl, and rage, too, at the hundreds of thousands of ways in which women were put down, humiliated, treated like children every day until their only response was to fight back in some desperate way like the one she had planned. We are not trained for this, she thought, we have to learn it all from the beginning. It’s mad, wicked, foolish even, but its only justification is that it must succeed! If I am going to do this thing I must do it well, carry it through to the end.

Room 17, to her dismay, was small and quite crowded. Ten or twelve people strolled about, consulting their catalogues, inspecting the pictures carefully. Nearly all of them were men; there were just two women. The women were listening attentively to a young man in frock coat and top hat, who was reading to them from his catalogue in a pompous, authoritative voice. What does
he
know? Sarah thought. Why should
he
have such a loud voice? If I spoke like that in here Jonathan would hush me — and yet those women are far older than that young man! And look at the pictures — nearly all of them are women! Women as nymphs and goddesses, half-clothed, looking seductive, tended by cherubs. They are pictures of naked women and this young man is explaining them to his lady friends!

And they are very, very beautiful . . .

Don’t think of that now, Sarah told herself. It’s not a matter to concern yourself with. Just find the one you came to see and do it.

But, just for a moment, she couldn’t help it. She had not seen the exhibition before and the rich colours, the size of some of the canvases, overwhelmed her. Paintings that were hundreds of years old, and better, more self-assured than anything people did now. Their value was literally priceless — not only could no one reproduce one that was destroyed, no one today possessed the skill to produce anything remotely similar. At another time, Sarah would have walked slowly round the room, entranced.

But they are only canvas and oil paint, she told herself. People matter more. Real women who are denied things because of their sex, exploited because of their bodies. And especially Mrs Pankhurst, who is a saint, and who is being tortured and killed by men like these.

There were three men in front of the picture Sarah had come to see. One of them was small and fat, with a huge round paunch and a large spade beard that spread halfway down his chest. He stood with his legs apart, contemplating the picture with his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his bright yellow waistcoat, and his top hat pushed to the back of his head. Beside him was a young man, thin and stooped, possibly his son. The boy kept glancing nervously from the picture to the catalogue and back again, as though to decipher something important he had not fully grasped.

The third man was tall, well-built, clearly affluent. His striped trousers and tailcoat sat on him comfortably, and he leant on a silver-topped cane with one foot crossed in front of the other, gazing at the picture with deep satisfaction.

Sarah hated him on sight, because he reminded her of her husband.

The picture itself, the
Rokeby Venus
, was of a naked woman. She lay on a couch with her back to the men in the room, gazing at herself in a small mirror held by a winged cupid. Her face could be seen in the mirror, calm, half-shadowed, relaxed. But the real beauty of the picture was the long, sensual, voluptuous portrayal of her back, which the artist had made so real that it seemed if one reached out and touched it, it would come alive.

A celebration of female beauty, Sarah thought.

She had read that phrase in
The Times
, and now that she saw the picture she understood what it meant. It was, undeniably, beautiful. It was also, because of its size, overwhelming. It frightened her.

It says, this is what women are, Sarah thought. I expect Jonathan would like
me
to be like that. I suppose I was for him, once ...

The tall man sighed, turned from the painting, and glanced at the short fat man in the yellow waistcoat beside him. Their eyes met. The tall man nodded. ‘Fine piece of work, old boy, wouldn’t you say?’

Pleased to be noticed, the fat man grinned back jovially. ‘Indeed! Most lifelike. Odd that the artist painted her with her back to the audience though, don’t you think? I was just wondering to myself — if I tapped her on the shoulder, do you imagine she might oblige by turning this way for a second? The boy here is interested, you know, and would like to see more …’

Delighted by his own wit, the fat man began to wheeze and chuckle, his belly under the yellow waistcoat heaving and wobbling with amusement. At first the tall man seemed undecided how to respond to this unexpectedly indecent suggestion, but then he saw the joke and smiled conspiratorially.

‘Anything to educate the young, eh?’

I expect that is the sort of thing Jonathan says when I’m not around, Sarah thought bitterly. And I’m sure father thought like that too. It was thoughts like that which destroyed mother’s life, sent her scurrying to the doctor again and again. But I never thought Jonathan would go the same way. Until that letter.
Oh Jonathan! Jonathan! How could you?

She glared at the tall man, thinking: I hope you die slowly like father did, mad, disgraced, covered with weeping sores! Christabel Pankhurst is right: the only way for women to get justice is to change the way men think. Make them chaste.

Her anger sent the blood flowing fiercely through her, but at the same time she felt quite calm. Time seemed to have slowed down. She dropped her catalogue on a seat and walked slowly forward towards the picture, both her hands inside her muff. The men glanced at her incuriously as she passed them, still absorbed in their joke. There was a uniformed attendant sitting on a chair near the door, ten, twelve yards away.

Everything was perfectly normal in the room. No one was taking any notice of her.

The picture was on an easel in the corner of the room. It was framed in glass. There was a red rope hung on short wooden poles a yard in front of it, to stop people getting too close.

Sarah stepped over the rope.

She thought:
Now.
Don’t stop now.

She pulled the heavy knife out of her muff, lifted it, and swung it at the painting.

It was a heavy meat knife and it smashed clean through the glass. Jagged splinters flew everywhere, bouncing off Sarah’s skirt and jacket. She ignored them, dragging the knife down across the Venus’s back. There was a small tearing sound.

‘Hey! What the devil?’

She pulled the knife out and stabbed again. The canvas was surprisingly hard, but the knife was in and she began to pull, dragging it along the canvas to the right, forcing it in all the time so that it tore the canvas open. She was disappointed that she was now cutting the couch rather than the woman’s body, so she took it out and jabbed again and again. Each time she tried to force the knife up higher, but it was heavy and her shoulder was aching with the strain. She was aware that people were moving, that she had no time left for another attempt. But that didn’t matter — she had already cut it several times and this last slash was already a foot long . . . eighteen inches . . . two feet . . .

The seconds seemed to go so slowly. Sarah watched the knife blade ripping through the canvas and thought of nothing else, only that, I am doing it, it is cutting further . . .

Hands grabbed her shoulders roughly and snatched her away. The knife fell from her fingers. She spun round and saw it was the tall man like her husband, and then the short fat man had her arm too. They dragged her away from the painting and she tripped over the rope, stumbling against them.