Half of the Human Race Read online

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Marianne. ‘Even those blackguards at the Home Office wouldn’t refuse us that. I dare say your family will be eager to see you.’

  She nodded, reluctant to speculate on the matter. Only Fred had visited her since her sentence began; she had received fretful letters from her mother; from Olivia she had heard nothing. She was surprised to find how much that upset her. She and Lionel were now at Bayswater, in a large house with four servants, a cook and a gardener – ‘They’re awfully grand,’ said Fred, who looked mortified when Connie had asked him if Olivia intended to visit her. On his second visit it wasn’t mentioned. But it was another’s absence that had most preoccupied Connie these last months. She now looked upon her initial hopes of a letter from him as merely naive. Fred had told her about Will’s visiting the house back in September, and his thunderstruck reaction to the news. Give him time, she thought. When his silence began to lengthen she was compelled to admit to herself that her gamble had been a failure. She supposed that the offence to his pride had been too severe; perhaps he had given way to resentment, to indignation. At times, she could understand why – her behaviour could be construed in one light as the most callous rejection of him. At others, she grew reproachful and thought him irresolute, cold, unfeeling. If kindness were beyond him, wouldn’t simple curiosity have induced him to write? It seemed not. He was not going to yield an inch.

  Her visitor had risen from the chair at her bedside. Connie held her hand for a moment.

  ‘I’m sorry to presume further on your kindness, Marianne, but could you find me some writing paper?’

  Christmas had come and gone by the time Connie was strong enough to get out of bed. She had heard carols being sung by suffragettes outside the walls, but she was still too feeble to partake of the small festive cheer that smuggled its way inside the infirmary. Her mother had sent gifts of a woollen shawl and soap. Fred, permitted a fifteen-minute visit, had also brought in a plum pudding, which she didn’t feel up to eating and had passed on to Miss Ewell. Her brother had looked so mournful on seeing Connie in bed that she found herself having to cheer him up.

  ‘Mother and I have been invited to spend Christmas with Olivia and Lionel,’ he sighed, picking at the wax candle on the bedside table. Connie gave a grimacing expression.

  ‘That makes me almost grateful to be in here,’ she said, and was pleased to hear Fred’s tittering laugh. Then he looked suddenly serious again.

  ‘We won’t half miss you, Con – really.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘I think even Olivia’s softening. She said the other day it was high time she had a talk with you.’

  ‘She knows where to find me,’ said Connie drily.

  ‘I wish there was something I could do for you.’

  Connie looked down the ward to check the matron’s whereabouts. ‘There is one thing, actually,’ she said, feeling under her pillow and drawing out a thin letter. ‘Deliver this for me.’

  Fred had a quick look at the envelope before secreting it in his breast pocket. ‘Maitland? Has he written to you?’

  Connie shook her head. Fred looked nonplussed.

  ‘He once – he once fancied himself in love with me.’

  Fred nodded slowly, and when Connie looked away he took the hint that she didn’t want to talk about it. A few minutes later the matron came round to call time on his visit.

  Will did not return to his flat in Devonshire Place until the new year. He had spent Christmas on the south coast, and had managed to appease his mother by inviting Miss Ada Brink to lunch in the restaurant at Gildersleeves, the town’s venerable department store. Will had reasoned that this would be more congenial than a lunch at home, where he and the young lady would be under his mother’s scrutiny. They had a table by the window, overlooking the seafront and, beyond it, the swaying grey expanse of the Channel. He found it no imposition to let Ada do most of the talking, for over the years he had learned an eye-contact technique whereby he could appear to be good-naturedly attentive to his interlocutor while communing exclusively with his own thoughts. He felt guilty, sometimes, about the use of this counterfeit social polish, but reckoned that feigning interest in another’s conversation was more gracious than showing none at all. He could tell that Ada was quite beguiled by his expressions of involvement – his hmms and is that so?s were carefully timed – and while he watched her talk his mind returned to that fireside conversation with Eleanor. They had not spoken of Connie in the days since, but Will realised that his sister’s gentle rebuke had made a tiny hairline crack in the carapace of his righteousness. At first he ignored it, and clutched his grievance to him as tightly as a miser to his coin. Then he began to probe at it, and once he had, infuriatingly, he couldn’t stop.

  Ada had almost reached the end of an intricate anecdote whose point Will was still trying to determine when she broke off, her gaze distracted by something just beyond his shoulder. In an undertone she said, ‘There’s a gentleman with a large moustache who’s been staring at us …’

  Will shifted round in his chair and there, seated at a distant table, were Tam and his sister Beatrice. Feeling a sudden jolt of embarrassment, he waved to them. He hadn’t seen a great deal of Tam these last months, having holed up in London for the autumn; he now remembered that he owed him a letter. Yet his stab of conscience was related to something quite different. As his friend rose and ambled towards their table, Will, arranging his features into a mask of cheerfulness, made the introductions.

  ‘Compliments of the season,’ said Tam, after shaking hands with Ada. Something in his expression prompted Will to explain his relation to Miss Brink; he would have liked to assure him that he barely knew the lady, but of course there was no opportunity for such candour. They talked briefly of their respective families, and Will, displaying an ease he didn’t feel, invited Tam to bring Beatrice over to Silverton House one evening soon. He hoped the mention of his sister would compel Tam to return to his table, where she still waited, but there was in the older man’s eye a gleam of enquiry, and Will knew too well what it concerned.

  ‘I wonder if you’ve had any news of Miss Callaway?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Will replied, pursing his lips. Tam looked puzzled, and his gaze flicked to Ada for a moment before it settled back on Will.

  ‘I thought p’raps you might be curious,’ pursued Tam, who knew nothing of what had passed between Connie and Will in the days before her imprisonment. Will, beginning to blush, could only offer a weak shrug; for some reason he felt very reluctant to make reference to Connie in front of Ada, or to discuss her present whereabouts. He could not quite trust himself to speak of her. Tam, who had perceived the awkwardness without understanding its cause, looked at Will searchingly. ‘Well … I’d best make my own enquiries, then.’

  Will canted his head slightly. ‘As you wish.’ He knew he was handling it poorly, but he wanted this little encounter done with. ‘Do pass on my regards to your sister.’

  Tam nodded, and with a bow to Ada, he withdrew.

  Will had shuddered on recalling this scene in the days following. What a cad he must have appeared to Tam. Now he was back in Marylebone, pulling back the concertinaed metal door to the lift at Devonshire Place when the porter put his head round the door of his office. He offered Will seasonal greetings, and handed over a letter.

  ‘Young feller called with it. He was very pertickler about me handing it personally to you.’

  Enclosed in the clanking lift, Will examined the envelope. He didn’t recognise the handwriting, which was unsteady, like an old person’s – and who but an old person or a child would write in pencil? Opening it, he took out the single folded sheet, and flinched as he saw the two words at the top of the page. Holloway Prison.

  20 December, 1912

  Dear Will,

  It has become evident that you don’t intend to write. It grieves me to presume, therefore, that my arrest and incarceration have only provoked your disapproval, perhaps even your disgust. I
f so, I am sorry for it. I write not from a wish to pain you further but from the feeling of a debt unpaid – a debt of gratitude. I suppose you might just cast this letter into the fire, but I hope your sense of fairness will allow me a brief hearing. When we last met in September (how long ago that now seems!) we made avowals that could only have been spoken by people who loved one another. I don’t regret a word of them. That day you also made a proposal which even now, even here, I can’t recall without feeling the great honour you did me, and, conversely, the great injustice I did you. While I could make an excuse of the turbulent emotion which my sister’s wedding day had brought on, or of the suddenness with which you offered your hand, I ought to have recognised the duty of answering you directly instead of obliging you to wait. In the light of what happened you might suppose that I disdained your proposal, or thought light of it, or – I dread to think what. Believe me, Will, when I say the opposite was true. My comrades and sisters would be astounded to hear it, but I went to prison not only in the assurance of a great cause to sustain me – I went emboldened by the secret solace of your love. This, I knew, would lend me the courage to endure. To live, even. You’ll probably think me deluded, but I had imagined the day when you would visit me in this place to seek an answer, at last, to the offer you so generously made me. I now see that I asked too much of you.

  Perhaps you’re wondering why I bother to write this now. For a time I wondered myself. The hours of prison life pass slowly, and solitude renders the habits of contemplation inescapable. I would have resisted the temptation but for a recent experience that forced me to acknowledge the fragile tenure we hold on life. It seemed suddenly vital not to leave unsaid all the things I ought to have said. Since that day we last spoke I have changed in ways I could hardly have conceived; but the love I had for you then I have for you still. Of your feelings for me I daren’t guess. Your silence would indicate that I have wounded you deeply, and for that, again, I most humbly beg your pardon. Please know it was never my purpose to do so.

  I hope that your sister and mother are well, and that your Christmas is a peaceful and joyous one. I will only add – God bless you.

  Constance

  He stood in the cage of the lift, staring at the letter, unable to move. He read it again, and would have remained there still had not another resident on the way out interrupted his trance by pulling back the folding door. With the mechanical step of a sleepwalker Will exited the lift and gravitated across the landing to his flat. Once inside, he threw his travelling case on the bed and sank into an armchair. As one compulsively touches a wound, he returned to the quavery pencil-written text again and felt – it could not have been otherwise – horribly moved. He could not quite take in the meekness of spirit that seemed to inflect every line, and her noble reluctance to accuse or even to complain induced an unwelcome flush of shame at his own indignation. She had not betrayed him, after all. As for the ‘recent experience’ that had prompted her to write, he could only make conjecture. Had there been a death in the family? He stood up and wandered to the window, from which he gazed down upon the sluggish traffic tooling along Devonshire Place. He remained standing there, ruminating, until the lamplighter could be seen on his rounds, bringing little points of illumination to the January afternoon’s encroaching shadows.

  12

  OUTSIDE THE GATEHOUSE at Holloway Prison he stamped his feet to keep the circulation going. It was another unforgivingly cold January morning, the sort when everybody’s breath plumed like a dragon’s in front of them, and Will was trying not to catch the eye of any of the other visitors waiting there. They were a piteous assembly: a raw-boned young woman in a shawl whose face was pinched and careworn; a couple of dowdy-looking loafers in flat caps and jackets too thin for the cold; and a brawny older woman, her grey hair pulled back in a ragged bun and a pipe clenched in her mouth. Will felt uneasily self-conscious in his grey topcoat and Balmoral boots. His first concern on waking that day was to decide upon the appropriate dress. How ought a man to present himself at one of His Majesty’s prisons? He had discarded the black overcoat and respectable homburg on the grounds that they made him look like a hired mourner at a funeral. But among this company he still felt indecently prosperous.

  Behind him he heard the iron-studded door creak open, and the porter stood there in soundless invitation. The castellated gatehouse with its battlements and turrets reminded Will of the entrance to a medieval fortress, an effect heightened by the carved winged griffins flanking either side, each bearing a key and shackles. Once inside the prison grounds any such whimsical associations fell away. The walls rose forbiddingly tall and gaunt, their stern Gothic brick interrupted by sequences of mean barred windows. He walked at a slight distance behind the others along a narrow path towards the central concourse, where they were again obliged to wait. Presently a wardress approached him to check the name of the prisoner he was to see, and then he was following in her wake, stopping at doors that sounded to the screech of a bolt and the shivery rattle of keys. As they proceeded up the clanging staircase to a first-floor gallery, Will could hear, from somewhere above them, a choir singing the Marseillaise. The wardress announced, over her shoulder, that the song was a regular favourite of the suffrage prisoners.

  ‘Are all those … ladies kept on the same ward?’

  The woman nodded. ‘As far as possible we try to separate them from the rest. They make a nuisance of themselves, you see, and excite the ordinary prisoners to troublesome behaviour.’

  The rousing sweet-voiced anthem sounded incongruous to his ears; this was not at all like the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ demonised in the press. There seemed almost an innocence to their singing. Holloway itself, on the other hand, had measured up to his gloomiest foreboding. The atmosphere alone would have been offensive enough, a sour, unwashed stench mingled with blocked drains and boiled vegetables that transported him, reluctantly, back to the dinner hall of his public school. His own experience of an enforced institutional life had not been happy, and he felt sometimes that only his cricketing prowess had enabled him to survive it. He recalled his first days there – the sudden shouts, the peremptory bells, the implacable thunder of footsteps, the noxious odours – and the sickening realisation that this would be his life for the next five years. Yet it now seemed positively benign in comparison with the infinite drear of this vast, echoing enclosure, and he felt a hollowing sensation in his stomach that this – this – was the place she had been shut up inside for the last four months.

  The wardress had come to a halt outside a cell whose door stood open, ready to receive him; she tilted her head, and said, ‘You have half an hour.’ Will looked through the doorway and saw a woman sitting on a bunk, her face in profile. At first he thought that there had been a mistake, and he turned to explain to the wardress that this was not the prisoner he had come to visit – when he heard a voice call his name. Her voice. He looked into the cell again, and saw, with an inward shock, that it was Connie. He stepped across the threshold, and she stood up to greet him. In those first few moments he took in her sallow skin, the sunken eyes, the visible depletion of her frame, though it was the cropped hair, seemingly cut by a blind man, that had caused his initial failure to recognise her. It sprouted unevenly on her head in tufts and spikes, and even the colour appeared to have changed from its natural chestnut to a dull, nondescript brown. She was wearing her own clothes, which was a mercy, though even they had lost most of their colour and shape.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said, shyly extending her hand. Will wondered if he should kiss her, but did not. Her hand felt bony in his. He was mute and motionless, with the air of someone not quite sure what he was doing there. ‘There’s a little chair behind you,’ she added, sensing that it behoved her to establish some small impression of hospitality on the proceedings. She now sat down opposite him, with her hands in her lap. They looked at one another in silence until Connie said, ‘How are you?’

  Will, swallowing, found his voice at last. ‘Your ha
ir … what – what happened?’

  Connie instinctively ran her hand over her scalp. ‘Oh …’ she sighed, and grimaced. ‘Head lice, I’m afraid – caught from the hairbrush that was here. I didn’t realise – it was difficult to get them out, so one of the girls cut it for me.’

  He nodded, and looked about the cell, uncertainly. Then he returned his gaze to her. ‘How are you?’ Given her unhealthy pallor, he sensed the awkwardness of his question.

  She smiled, and shrugged. ‘Better than I have been. I was quite ill, just before Christmas – did I mention it in my letter?’

  ‘No, you didn’t. What was wrong?’

  ‘I caught an infection –’ She paused, and decided that it would be kinder to spare him the details. ‘A throat infection, which led to rheumatic fever. It became quite severe …’

  She watched his brow darken as he digested this information. ‘You wrote something about a “recent experience” – I thought you were referring to a bereavement …’ He looked at her almost in panic. ‘How ill were you?’

  Connie looked down for a moment, then lifted her eyes to his. ‘As you can see, I survived.’

  Something horrific had now begun to insinuate itself, and he felt torn between conflicting urges to know and not to know. She read his perturbation in the sudden draining of colour from his face. ‘Am I to understand …’ he said, in a voice barely audible, ‘you’ve been forced …?’

  She only looked at him, and Will lowered his head into his hands, the same appalled attitude he had last adopted, unknowingly, when Fred had told him of her prison sentence in September. He remained in that position for a long minute, unmoving. When he finally raised his face again she saw that his eyes were glassy and red-rimmed, and it seemed possible that he would cross the narrow space between them and take her in his arms. That was her hope. But he remained seated, his expression frozen with pity while, within, he tried to master a shiver of fright. For in spite of the love that still scrambled for a hold on his heart, he could no longer pretend to himself that he was not scared by her. Some terrible derangement must have brought her to this pass – how else could she have exposed herself to such a violation? He stared at her, at her poor shredded hair, and recoiled. A woman must indeed be graciously endowed if her outward appearance can defy the toll of prison life. He might have anticipated her condition, and armed himself to face it, but his imagination was not sufficiently developed to do so.