Authors: Tim Vicary
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.
‘What the devil do you think you're doing, woman?’
Only then did she realise she must speak, explain the act as well as do it. With one arm twisted behind her and the rope tangled round her feet, she leant forward against the man and stared up into his face. Her eyes were near his chin, she could see a vicious, angry twist to his mouth. She took a deep breath and shouted as loud as she could.
‘Free Mrs Pankhurst! Mrs Pankhurst is dying in prison. You must set her free!’
‘She's a damned suffragette!’
‘My God, look what she's done!’
‘Get her over here!’
‘Hold her arms!’
There were men all round her now, pulling, clutching, shoving, shouting angrily. The uniformed attendant had the fingers of one hand digging tightly into her arm and was blowing a whistle near her ear. Sarah continued to shout wildly, conscious that this was the last thing she had to do before they took her away.
‘Votes for Women! Free Mrs Pankhurst! Votes for Women!’
Shouting was easy. Once she had started, her screams went on without conscious thought because they were only slogans. As she screamed she twisted her head to look back at the painting and exulted. There was a gash nearly two feet long right down the woman's back, with the ragged edges of torn canvas hanging down like flaps of skin from a wound. And half-a-dozen smaller slashes from neck to rump. Now they would see what real women were like — fighters, not their whorehouse picture!
‘Free Mrs Pankhurst! Votes for Women!’
They manhandled her out of the room, through the other galleries, and down the stairs. Her clothes were ripped and stretched all ways across her body as it seemed every man in the place exerted himself to get a handhold. Halfway down the stairs they met the commissionaire who had sold her the catalogue. There were people everywhere, pointing and staring — even young coster boys from the street. Another attendant was blowing his whistle outside on the grand stone steps, waving to attract a policeman.
Then, mercifully, they marched her into a little office and shoved her roughly into a chair. A row of angry male faces glared at her. She gasped for breath, her face hot, her pulse racing angrily.
‘What . . . what happens now?’ she asked feebly.
‘We’re waiting for the constable, miss,’ the commissionaire said firmly.
For a moment no one else spoke and Sarah thought: I've done it now — nothing matters any more. Then she saw the fury on the faces in front of her, and remembered Mrs Pankhurst walking endlessly, up and down her cold cell, all day and all night without food or friends or water. And the torture so many women had endured.
Her body shrank a little inside her clothes, and a shiver passed through her. Cold, like gooseflesh.
And she thought: this has only just begun . . .
T
HE POLICE cells were noisy, crowded, and squalid. But for Sarah they were the first refuge she had had all day.
She had probably waited for only a quarter of an hour in the room at the National Gallery, but it had been a frightening time. Every few minutes someone burst in from outside, to stare at her, shake a fist, or scream abuse. The manager, a small, dark, excitable man, had been near to tears. He had stood in front of her, shaking with rage, saying that the painting was a priceless,
priceless
, work of art, and that in his opinion she was a vandal and should be whipped — no,
hanged
, for such an act of desecration. The commissionaire had scowled also, and then there had been a stream of indignant men — and women too — some of whom had had to be restrained from spitting at her. And all the time the noise outside the door rose from a murmur to a menacing hubbub, and Sarah had begun to fear that she would be beaten or even lynched for what she had done.
Then the two policemen had come in.
They were big men, with impressive moustaches and shoulders that completely filled the doorway when they came through it. They exuded an air of calm and solidity. They were totally unexcited by what had happened. They contemplated Sarah with interest, and no anger whatsoever.
Her heartrate began to slow down.
She knew the drill, now. She had been through it several times before. There was nothing personal in it for the police. Many of them actually liked suffragettes. Within half an hour they had taken most of the preliminary details and were ready to take her away. One fastened the bracelet of a pair of handcuffs carefully round her right wrist. He attached the other bracelet to his own.
‘You don’t mind, I hope, ma'am? Just a formality really, but it's for your protection as much as ours. There's a biggish crowd out there.’
He was right about that. The entrance hall and the steps outside the Gallery were packed, and no one, so far as Sarah could tell, had a good word to say for her. People jeered, cat-called, spat — one or two pieces of fruit even came her way. She felt an intense gratitude for the calm solidity and bulk of the two constables beside her. Coster boys and street urchins followed them along the street, and women —
women!
— screamed abuse.
Surely someone will cheer, she thought. I did it for justice, for all womankind. There are so many of us — surely someone will understand?