Cat and Mouse (3 page)

Then she saw it. A green, white and purple banner waving above the crowd outside Bow Street Police Station, with a small, determined knot of suffragettes underneath it. As she was marched past they saw her, and a ragged cheer went up:

‘Votes For Women!’

‘Free Mrs Pankhurst!’

‘Don’t let them get you down, dear! We'll be out here, waiting!’

She didn’t know them, but it didn’t matter. Only a few seconds, but it was the most wonderful moment of the day. She was not alone, she was understood. And it was true, they would support her, just as she had slashed the painting to support Mrs Pankhurst. If they all hung together, and dared enough, they would win in the end — they had to! It was only justice.

Justice in Bow Street Police Station was bluff, calm, matter-of-fact. The sergeant at the desk raised an eyebrow briefly at her name and address, but no more. The details of the charge were taken and written down in a big ledger with a sigh. The constables were busy, they had seen it all before, they were ready for their tea. Sarah was taken down underneath the station to the cells.

She had seen cells before, too, many of them. This one was dark. There was a high window at the far end, but it was closed and black with grime. On the right was a wide, long plank raised from the floor, with a sort of wooden bolster for a pillow. Under the window, in the corner, a toilet. Nothing else. No light, no bedclothes.

It was cold, and there were shouts and banging from cells further down the corridor. It was what she had expected. Nothing would happen now for some time. Sarah felt suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion. I haven't recovered from starving myself the last two times, she thought, and now it's all going to start again. Her legs trembled and would not hold her, and she had an irresistible urge to cry. But even that took too much energy — she could not sustain it long. When the weeping fit was over, she slumped down on the plank bed, put her hands over her ears, and tried to sleep.

Despite the noise, she must have slept for some time, for when she awoke she could see a light burning in the corridor through the little judas window in the door. And there was something else — a voice, a familiar sound — which had woken her.

Keys clanked in the lock, the door opened, light flooded in. And in the light, the silhouette of a man — tall, thin, bearded, in top hat and coat.

‘Jonathan!'
Of course, he would have to come. But she did not want to face this. Not now.

She had slashed the picture to avoid facing him.

‘My God, it's dark enough in here! Can we have a light, man?’

‘I'll fetch you a candle, sir.’

The door was left open behind him — clearly the constable did not fear she would run away. Sarah sat up, on the edge of the bed. She felt her face flushed, her hands trembling. Jonathan stood, the light behind him, as though waiting for her to get up and run towards him. As she had done when they were younger and still in love . . . If I run towards him now, she thought, I’ll scratch his eyes out.

The constable returned with a candle.

‘I’ll have to lock you in, sir, I’m afraid. Regulations. But there’ll be someone down at the end of the corridor. Just bang on the door when you want to come out.’

‘I hope you can distinguish my bang from those of these other poor wretches, then.’ But the urbane sarcasm was lost on the policeman. The heavy door closed behind him and they were alone.

They had been married eleven years and at first it had seemed a brilliant match. But they were both forceful people and over the past few years there had been increasing strain. Partly because they had no children. Sarah had had three miscarriages and she could not bear to try again. She knew how much he wanted children but she was afraid to let him near her, now. The love she had once felt for him had been tarnished by the pain.

She was glad of that now, after what she had discovered. He was no better than her father, after all. Perhaps no men could be trusted.

He said: ‘Why did you do it? You broke your promise.’

‘
I
broke
my
promise?’

‘Yes. Sarah, you know you did. After the last time, you promised you wouldn't do anything like this again for three months. Damn it, you're not well, Sarah!’

‘It's
my
body! I should be the judge of how well I am.’

Jonathan sat down on the hard bed — there was nowhere else — and put the candle between them. He was a slim, handsome man, still lithe even at the age of thirty-eight and he moved with the grace of an athlete. He had always defied convention by keeping a full beard, trimmed short like a radical. Lit from below by the candlelight, his face, usually kind, sensitive, curious, looked eerie and ghostlike. Like that of a stranger in the night.

He said: ‘You destroyed one of the most beautiful paintings in the world.’

‘Yes. You've seen it, then?’

‘Seen it? I didn't have to. It’s all over the evening papers.
Mad Suffragette slashes Rokeby Venus. Vandals strike again. MP's wife in scandal
. Here, look.’

She glanced briefly at the newspaper he gave her, then laid it aside. ‘I gather you don't approve.’

‘Approve?
For God's sake, Sarah!’ He stood up, took two fretful paces to the toilet under the window, then came and sat down again. Very carefully and pedantically, he asked: ‘Do you really think that destroying a priceless work of art is going to make people respect the suffragettes, and regard women as responsible adult people who deserve the vote?’

It's the prison warders who are supposed to torture you, Sarah thought, not your own husband.

She said: ‘Yes, I do. Jonathan, you’re a man. You probably don’t see that picture in the same way as I do. I am sure it is a great work of art but it degrades women, too, because it invites men to see us as sexual attractions and nothing more. We want to be citizens, not odalisques!’

You didn't always want that, Jonathan thought. In the early days, when I used to come home late at night, and you would be waiting up for me, in that long silk gown . . . he sighed. This situation seemed to him to be a culmination of everything that had gone wrong in the eleven years of their marriage. It was not just the miscarriages, it was the way their minds no longer met. But it was not at all clear to him, even now, how they had got here. Still less about where it would lead.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You tell me, then. How am I to defend this in the House when the question comes up? My wife regards Velasquez as a pornographer, is that it?’

‘No! Just say your wife regards paintings as less important than people. If they free Mrs Pankhurst and give us the vote, all these things will stop tomorrow. Jonathan, you know that! Until then, justice is more important than art.’

For a moment the coldness of her slogan hung in the air between them. Then the silence was shattered by a drunk battering his cell door with his boots further down the corridor.

Jonathan tried again. ‘Of course I understand, you know that, but …’

‘Do you? Do you really understand, Jonathan?’

‘Look, you're my wife — I don't want you in a place like this! When they let you out under the Cat and Mouse Act last time I did my damndest to protect you — I even wrote to McKenna and told him you'd promised to stay out of trouble, in the hope they wouldn't arrest you. And now this!’

She hadn’t known that but it made sense, like so many other things she was finding out about him. Jonathan was a Liberal MP, ambitious, eager for office; her suffragette activities were an embarrassment to him. He would do a deal behind her back if he could. Even with McKenna, the Home Secretary, who loathed all suffragettes.

She flicked her head back, to toss a loose curl away from her eye. ‘A deal cooked up by men!’

His blue eyes widened, as they did on the edge of anger. ‘For God's sake! It was a gentleman’s agreement to protect you, Sarah! You're my wife. Am I not entitled to do that?’ He reached out his hand, round the candle, and squeezed her shoulder. She flinched — it was the site of one of many bruises she had received that afternoon.

‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ She jerked away from him, got up, and stood by the wall under the high barred window. The dim candlelight made it hard to see, but he thought she was trembling.

‘Sarah? Why ever not?’

‘Don't you
know?’

He thought back over the past few years — the miscarriages, the frustrations, the way he had been banished from her bedroom. This was not the first such scene. Rage flared in him.

‘No, I do not know. You are my wife and I have come here expressly to bring you comfort. If my offer is to be spurned then I . . .’

‘You liar!’

She ran towards him suddenly and before he could get up from the bed she knocked the top hat from his head. He felt a hot, searing pain as she raked her nails down his cheek, near his eye. He lashed out to defend himself, pushing the palm of his hand against the first thing that he found, which was the soft flesh of her nose and mouth. She bit him, hard, near the base of his thumb. He yelled, lurched to his feet, and shoved her away. As he got up the candle fell over and went out. For a moment they both stood, blinded by the sudden pitch black. Each could only guess where the other was by the sound of laboured, frightened breathing.

He said: ‘Sarah, please!’

‘Leave me alone!’

A hand came suddenly out of the darkness and caught him a stinging crack across the cheek. He staggered and cried out: ‘What the devil are you doing?'

A sound between a laugh and a sob came from somewhere just ahead of him, to his left. ‘It serves you right! You know why!’

This time he had his own hands raised like a boxer, so when her hand came out of the darkness he managed to shield himself from the blow with his forearm and catch hold of her wrist before she could move away. He pulled her roughly forward and reached out with his other hand, trying to catch her other arm, but instead he found her hair. He wound his fingers in it and held on.

‘Sarah, stop this. What are you doing?’

‘Let go of me, you betrayer!
Guard! Help! Get this man out of my cell!’

As she screamed he felt a sudden hard, agonising blow on his right shin, just below the knee. He let go of her hair and wrist and stumbled back, trying to get away from her. Then the door opened and a burly policeman stood framed in the yellow gaslight flooding in from the corridor. He coughed.

‘Yes, sir? Madam? You called?’

Jonathan fumbled for a handkerchief and dabbed it across his cheek, to cover the blood. ‘Yes, man. The candle . . .’

‘Get this man out of here!’

‘Beg pardon, madam?' It was not easy to see without a candle in the gloomy cell, but the policeman could make out the silhouette of the lady, shaking in the middle of the cell, and the gent, dabbing at his face with a handkerchief. She was a prisoner of course, but not the usual sort. ‘But he’s your husband, ain’t he, ma’am?’

‘He may be — but I don't want to see him! Get him out, can't you? I can't bear him near me!’

‘Well, sir . . .’ The constable hesitated. ‘We usually only allow minutes as a rule . . .’

‘Don’t trouble yourself.’ Jonathan fumbled for his hat on the floor, and dusted it off against his sleeve. ‘It seems my wife is not well.’ He stepped out, past the policeman into the corridor. Then, before the door was closed, he turned.

‘I have no idea what is the matter with you, my dear, but I hope you recover. In the meantime, for God's sake be sensible in prison — and eat!’

Sarah’s answer was not hysterical, as the constable had expected. Instead her words were very soft and determined, and they stayed in Jonathan's mind all night.

‘Jonathan, go away, and let me face these horrors on my own. If I eat a single mouthful in here, you know I shall have betrayed the cause.’

W
HEN JONATHAN had gone, Sarah paced the dark cell restlessly until the violence of her emotions began to subside. The drunk down the corridor sang in a loud, bleary monotone until a policeman hammered on his door to shut him up. In another cell a woman was cursing steadily, repetitively, with sudden loud bursts of fury when she shook the bars. In the occasional moments of silence Sarah could hear the hiss of the gas-lamp in the corridor outside, and somewhere, far away, another woman crying.

The top pane of her window was open and she guessed it must be just below the level of the pavement. Once, she heard the clatter and rattle of a tram approach, and the
ding!
of its bell As it stopped outside; at another time, the clop of a horse's hooves, and the shout of a man hailing a cab.

She thought of Jonathan, getting out of a similar cab a few miles away. In her mind she saw him drop coins into the hand of the driver. He would have to use his left hand, she thought. She had bitten his right! He would have a handkerchief round that and another to dab at his face. The cabman would notice but he would ignore it. He would raise his cap in gratitude for the tip, Jonathan would nod, the driver would shake his reins, and the cab would clop quietly away around Belgrave Square. Jonathan would sigh, and walk slowly up the steps to the front door. The door would open, and he would hand his top hat and gloves to Reeves, their butler, and go into his study, alone.

I wonder how he will explain those scratches to Reeves, she thought. Spot of bad luck, he might say, I picked up a cat and it scratched my face. Something like that . . .

And it’s true, too, she thought grimly, except that this cat is his wife. The woman he promised to share his whole life with.

I don’t feel like a cat, I feel like a coward, she thought. I should have told him what I know, why didn’t I dare?

A little voice in her mind answered
: because you're not sure it’s true.

Of course it’s true, it all makes sense, no one would send me a letter like that if it wasn’t true. And it’s not just the letter — I saw him with my own eyes. Anyway I don't want to think about it. I can't remember it all.

Remember it. You must. All of it.

She remembered what had happened two days ago. Two days! It seemed like a hundred years . . .