Half of the Human Race Page 20

  ‘What you said before,’ Connie almost gasped, her voice gluey in her throat, ‘did you mean it?’

  ‘How can you doubt it?’ he replied gently, holding her gaze. ‘It is why I want you to be my wife.’

  She inwardly froze at this. In truth, she had wanted only to hear him say again ‘I love you’ – she had not expected the traditional consequence so precipitately. Will, construing her silence as maidenly modesty, tightened his hand around hers, and said, ‘So … will you, Connie? Will you marry me?’

  The uncertainty that had clouded his features when they sat in the garden was gone. He spoke as one emboldened by love. Catching his mood, Connie’s impulse was to yield – but she checked it. Quite apart from the misgivings about marriage which had oppressed her at the church, she realised that her involvement in the cause could only be distracted, if not altogether dashed, by bonding herself to a husband. Will was as eligible a man as she could hope to meet, but she was under no illusion as to his understanding her. If she now informed him, for instance, that on this coming Tuesday she was due to join a window-breaking delegation of suffragists in Belgravia, would he be quite so sanguine in his proposal of a life together? She looked at him now, his face alight with encouragement.

  ‘I – I hardly know what to say.’

  ‘What is the difficulty? You believe that I love you.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Then – you are doubtful of your love for me?’

  She paused. ‘No. If I understand what love means, I love you. But I’m afraid of making an agreement I can’t honour.’

  Will squinted at her. ‘I don’t quite follow …’

  Connie looked down, deliberating. ‘You said before that you loved everything about me. But there was an occasion not long ago when it became clear that not everything about me delighted you – indeed, you may recall, I was the cause of considerable embarrassment and exasperation. Now, as we’ve heard today, a woman must pledge to love, honour and obey her husband. Of the first two you would always be assured from me. But of the last … knowing that our sympathies may not be entirely compatible, would you place me under such an obligation?’

  Will might have taken offence that his proposal had not been received with quite the ardour he thought it merited: instead of falling into his arms, she was querying the small print. Yet his determination to win her overrode any slight puncturing of his self-esteem.

  ‘I’d hope to be able to count on your loyalty,’ he said, carefully, ‘just as you would count on mine. I have a respect for your … causes and so on. But if you love me as you say, I cannot imagine your doing something that would violate that.’

  It was a fair answer, but she doubted him still – ‘your causes and so on’ did not suggest a very thoughtful engagement with the fight for equality. She longed to feel his arms about her once more, but an instinct goaded her to resist. ‘William,’ she began, earnestly, ‘I’m very conscious of the honour you’ve paid me … I feel grateful that –’

  ‘I don’t want your gratitude,’ he cut in impatiently. ‘I only want your consent.’

  ‘I can’t answer you at once,’ she said, her eyes cast down.

  ‘And I must insist that you do – at once.’

  Connie, freeing her hand from his, stood up and walked over to the window. Outside, guests were still swarming over the lawn, the light twitter of female voices mingling with the odd hearty boom of male laughter. She kept silent while she examined the options before her. She was grateful for Will’s offer, but she was wary of accepting now what she might have cause to regret later. To calculate the chances calmly and value them correctly … She saw his reflection loom behind her. If she rejected him he might never ask her again, and she would be left to ponder a future without him. She thought again of the appointment with her suffragist comrades on Tuesday. An idea began to take shape in her mind. What if –

  ‘For the moment I must ask you to wait. Only allow me a little time, and I will give you an answer.’ Her tone was decisive, and Will, though chafing at the delay, sensed her heart was his. As she turned to him, he took her in his arms and fixed her with an appraising look.

  ‘A little time, you say. How long?’

  She met his look unflinchingly. ‘This time next week. Wait until then, and you will have an answer.’

  The slow pardon of a smile began to play over his face, and he nodded. His eyes gleamed as he bent to kiss her unresisting mouth.

  10

  STIRRED FROM SLEEP by the grainy half-light, Connie wondered why her bedroom felt so chilly. Barely opening her eyes, she clutched the blanket tightly to her, and started in surprise at its coarse, scratchy texture between her fingers. This was not her blanket, and this, she now realised, was not her bedroom. Peering through half-closed lids she began to discern the unfamiliar accoutrements around her: a wooden chair, a table fixed into the angle of the wall, a washing basin. Above her the dawn was seeping wanly through a high barred window. Her cell; and this her third morning in Holloway Prison. Outside she heard a pigeon cooing, and for some reason thought of Olivia, who would by now be en route to Venice, the second stop on her honeymoon, presumably oblivious of her sister’s disgrace back in London. She hoped that her mother would resist the impulse to telegraph the happy couple’s hotel with the news.

  The cell, airless during the day, got cold at night. A few minutes later she heard a metallic clunk at the door, and a face appeared at the spyhole. It was a wardress checking on – what, exactly? That the prisoner hadn’t hanged herself, perhaps. In the distance Connie heard a bell being rung; the prison reveille. She swung her legs out of the bed, shivering like a greyhound, and removed the linsey nightdress. She put on the underclothes issued to her on arrival, patched and stained, though reasonably clean, then the drab serge dress with its shoulder adorned with a broad arrow. Her bed sheets had these arrows, too, like the footprints of birds in the snow. The dress felt horrible, prickling against her skin, but at least it provided some warmth. Her boots were cracked and worn, the insoles lined with hard little ridges from their previous owner, or owners. She hoped she would be able to have a bath today, though she was beginning to realise that personal hygiene was not something the prison authorities set much store by. On the table were the prison-issue brush and comb, but without a mirror there seemed little use in trying to arrange one’s hair. When Connie had asked about this a sour-faced wardress had sneered at her, ‘Who’s going to look at you in here anyway?’ She blushed at the woman’s rudeness.

  Breakfast arrived about an hour later. There were no clocks here, so Connie would listen out for the church bells to mark the time. She spooned the lukewarm, lumpy porridge into her mouth, and swilled it down with the unspeakable beverage from the tin mug. (She assumed it was some kind of skilly – the taste made it difficult to tell.) Then, as she had been instructed, she folded up her bedclothes into a roll, stowed them away, and laid her plank bedstead against the wall. After that she cleaned her tin plate and mug and spoon with bath-brick. Another hour of waiting, and a wardress arrived to lead her and other inmates in the wing down to the chapel. Aside from a half-hour of exercise in the afternoon, it was the only time in the day she was allowed to step out of her cell. As they were filing down the corridor in silence, she caught the eye of a young wardress whose features had a shy affability she had not encountered in anyone since arriving. In an undertone, Connie said, ‘Excuse me, is it Saturday today?’

  The wardress looked so surprised she might have thought a statue had spoken, but before she could shape her mouth to reply, another voice boomed close behind them. ‘No talking!’ This was Mrs Tarrant, the ward matron, whose pinched face and rebarbative gaze had overseen Connie’s introduction to prison life some days before. On emerging, handcuffed and dazed, from the swaying interior of the Black Maria, she had been escorted up to an office whose brick walls were painted a sickly underwater green.

  Mrs Tarrant sat writing at her desk, and without looking up said, curtly, ‘N
ame.’

  ‘Constance Callaway.’

  ‘Occupation.’

  ‘Bookseller.’

  ‘Sentence.’

  ‘Six months. For breaking –’

  ‘I know what you’ve done. Take off those clothes and step onto the scales.’

  After being weighed, and measured, Connie was handed a prison uniform by an orderly. Another one was sorting through a box of boots. Nobody deviated from the strict impersonal mood of the room – she felt queerly like some farm animal that was being processed for sale. She remembered her advice from the delegation. ‘I gather I’m entitled to be put – in the first division?’ she said, trying to make it sound like a reasonable request. Mrs Tarrant stopped writing and, for the first time, looked closely at her.

  ‘You gather?’ she said, her voice steely with sarcasm. ‘Understand this. You are a convicted criminal. You have forfeited the freedom to choose. You will spend your sentence in whichever part of this prison we see fit to put you. Miss Boyle – take her down.’

  Nothing like getting off on the right foot, thought Connie, as she was marched off to solitary confinement.

  Now she was shuffling into one of the chapel pews, within touching distance of prisoners on either side, but nobody spoke. At one point Connie looked round at her neighbour, a thin, rheumy-eyed woman who seemed afflicted by a nervous tic; she kept jerking her head sideways as if trying to shoo a fly from under her nose. Her skin was wrinkled, pale as mushroom stalks, and so unhealthy-looking that Connie had to stop herself staring. As she lowered her weight onto the unforgiving wooden kneeler, she winced from the abrasions to her knees she had sustained on Tuesday afternoon.

  She had met the other two, by arrangement, at a small hotel in Victoria. One of them, Laura Scott, was a cheerful, clear-skinned, athletic-looking woman with mischievous eyes whom Connie took to immediately.

  ‘You know Marianne Garnett?’ Laura almost squealed, on learning of their mutual friend. ‘We’re near neighbours in South Kensington,’ she continued breezily, as if they were members of the same coffee circle rather than a cabal of suffragists plotting sedition. She glanced at her watch. ‘While we’re waiting for Ivy I suggest we have a drink. It might be the last enjoyable one we have before –’ She raised her eyebrows in wry complicity.

  Connie replied with a tense smile, which Laura was quick to read. ‘Your first time? Well, don’t fret. We’ll be shoulder to shoulder all the way through. So what’ll it be – gin?’

  They had moved on to a second glass by the time their tardy companion arrived. Ivy Maddocks offered an apology, though in a tone of such martyred exasperation that Connie felt it was somehow their fault for imposing on her time. Small and compact, Ivy had a beaky sort of look; her eyes were as bright as a bird’s, and her unsmiling face was all angles and points. She seemed to peck at her words, though in her brief moments of repose she was perfectly still. Connie was fascinated by her, and perhaps a little frightened.

  ‘A drink, Ivy, before we set off?’

  Ivy shook her head vigorously. ‘No, no. I’ve taken the pledge,’ she said, adding proudly, ‘henceforth, my body is a temple.’

  ‘Oh. Any particular denomination?’ replied Laura teasingly. Connie giggled, but Ivy looked blank.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Laura, draining her glass, said, ‘Nothing, just a joke. Well then … shall we?’

  Connie rose unsteadily. She had been too nervous to eat, and now the effect of two large gins was making her head swim. She was halfway to being drunk, which she supposed might be a blessing in view of what lay ahead. Outside the hotel, the afternoon sky had turned a strange, glowering grey-white, as if reeling from some meteorological sickness. Clouds of starlings swarmed overhead. Ivy was walking with a cane, prompting Connie to ask if she was injured. Ivy’s expression turned crafty.

  ‘No, but someone might be,’ she said, and showed Connie a little mechanism on the cane. She clicked it, and a small blade protruded at its end.

  ‘It’s a dagger-cane,’ Laura explained. ‘To be used only in self-defence. Isn’t that so, Ivy?’ It was lightly spoken, but there was a warning in Laura’s tone.

  ‘Of course,’ said Ivy, who fixed Connie with a significant look. ‘Though I’ve dealt with our constabulary often enough to know it pays to be armed.’

  As they proceeded through the seemly hush of Belgravia, Connie felt the weight in her bag bumping against her calves. It felt such an odd thing to be doing, and she had a fleeting sense of hovering above her own steps along the pavement, as though watching someone else walk abreast of these two strangers. Twenty yards ahead a policeman turned the corner and began strolling towards them. Ivy, who had been quietly humming ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, stopped mid-note, and then resumed. Laura glanced at Connie and murmured, ‘Don’t say anything.’

  The policeman, quite unsuspecting, tipped his helmet at the trio of respectable young ladies. ‘Af’noon,’ he muttered.

  ‘Good afternoon, Constable,’ Laura said, ‘I wonder, are we going the right way for Chester Square?’ While she was speaking Ivy had kept on with the hymn. The policeman stared at her for a moment, then turned to Laura.

  ‘Next turn right, ma’am – you can’t miss it.’

  Laura inclined her head graciously, and they walked on. Just as he was out of earshot, Connie heard her say under her breath, ‘Oh, we shan’t, Constable.’

  A few minutes later a navy tin plaque fixed high on the gable wall announced their arrival at Chester Square. Laura took out a little pocket-book and checked the address. ‘So, if that’s number 4, we should be …’ She walked on, counting off the door numbers, until she stopped in front of one of the identical porticoed fronts. ‘Here we are,’ she said, with the brightness of a house agent about to show prospective tenants around. ‘It’s the residence of one of Asquith’s junior ministers,’ she added musingly. The sash windows of the house gleamed black as oil. There seemed to be not a single other person in the vicinity. Connie, light-headed, put down her bag and opened the clasp. Inside were three bricks taken from a pile she had spotted at the front of a builder’s yard in Camden. Laura peered at them, and said, ‘Best to wrap them up. We don’t want to kill any servants who might be lurking about.’ She handed over some rags, which Connie took and began to wind loosely around the bricks. Ivy, in the meantime, had unbuttoned her coat to reveal a wide sash of green, purple and white across her chest. Having abandoned the hymn she was now humming the Marseillaise. She removed a large smooth stone from her own bag, and hefted it in her hand.

  ‘I brought this from the beach at Sidmouth,’ she said, almost wistfully. ‘It would have made a lovely paperweight.’ She looked up and down the street, then turned to Connie and Laura, who were still wrapping the bricks. ‘No time like the present,’ she said, and taking a step back launched her stone, quite gracefully, at the ground-floor window. It flew over the railings and went clean through the top half-pane, like a letter posted through the mouth of a pillar box. For some reason Connie thought of Tam smashing the ball over the walls of the Priory, and the distant tinkle as it fell through a window. The applause he would get! She felt the dumb weight of the brick muffled within the cloth. Up above, they heard the scrape of a sash being opened: someone had heard the crash, and as a face appeared, Connie shouted, ‘Votes for women!’ and heaved her ragged missile at the next window along. It broke against the glass with an outraged unmusical clang.

  ‘Oh, fine shot,’ cried Laura, who herself took a step back and, like a fielder in the deep aiming for the wicketkeeper’s gloves, she found the window above with a high, hard throw. Connie found herself laughing, rather giddily, as Ivy sent another stone skimming through the pane below the one she had previously holed. They might have been competing at a coconut shy. The noise by now had attracted some onlookers; a man had dismounted his bicycle and stood watching, hands on hips. A few doors along an aproned charwoman had stepped onto the street to investigate. Beyond her, Connie could see the p
oliceman they had passed some minutes before hurrying towards them. He had started to blow his whistle.

  ‘Let’s keep at it,’ called Ivy, and Connie obediently picked up her second brick and hurled it forward. It made another satisfying explosion against the startled pane. She had envisaged herself at this moment being quite terrified, and yet it was not so; perhaps the gin was to blame. She really did seem to be having the most tremendous fun. The policeman was now upon them, and had unwisely chosen Ivy as the assailant to wrestle down. She responded by beating him about the head with her stick. From round the other corner two mounted policemen came trotting, and Laura gripped Connie’s arm.

  ‘I think it’s time to make a run for it!’

  The constable trying to restrain Ivy now bellowed in pain, and fell clutching the foot which Ivy’s hidden blade had just speared. Connie, seeing the private garden gate open, hurried through and gained the opposite kerb when two more policemen came bolting along the street. She turned back round the corner and found one of the police horses galloping straight at her. As she swerved out of the way and dodged along its flank, she saw the rider raise his arm and a thin shadow descended towards her. The blow which caught the side of her head surprised her with its force, and then she was tumbling down, down, her stomach heaving violently. As she retched onto the cobbles, the last thing she remembered before the blackness closed over was the taste of juniper in her mouth.

  Connie joined the listless file of inmates traipsing out of the chapel, the scuff of their boot soles on stone the only sound to be heard. The corridors outside echoed with the muffled din of the prison cranking into life. She was becoming used to the smell of the place – a rank compound of ill-washed bodies, unclean hair, stale breath, boiled cabbage, limewashed walls, gas and damp, though far more oppressive than any of these constituents was the almost tangible atmosphere of defeat. It was no surprise to Connie that the women she passed looked so miserable and cowed; what was truly disconcerting were those faces that were empty of any expression at all. It was a curious blindfold look: the eyes were glassy but opaque, like a dead rabbit’s. She could not yet tell whether their blankness was the evidence of an inner crisis or simply a mask of animal indifference that had stuck fast through habit.