The Best of Gerald Kersh (19 page)

At this point, Mrs Madge was called. She remembered everything. She had let Mrs Tooth in on the evening of the murder. She knew at exactly what time she had let that party in. How did she know the time? She had every reason to know the time because it was time for Mrs Madge to go home and she had paid a certain amount of attention to the clock. She was not a
clock-watcher
but she did her duty, and was not paid to stay more than a certain number of hours. On this particular evening she had an appointment with a friend, Mrs Glass, with whom she had arranged to go to the pictures in time for a certain performance. Therefore she had particularly desired to get away in time to change her clothes and make herself decent. Therefore – give or take half a minute – she could fairly exactly say at what time the lady came to the door and asked for Mr Sidney Tooth and she could swear to the lady: she was in the habit of keeping her eyes open; it was her hobby, sizing people up. Mrs Tooth was wearing a very old loose black coat, the sort that the Jewish shops sell for a guinea, and one of those black hats you could get for
three-and-six-pence
at Marks and Spencer’s. She was carrying an old black handbag, and her shoes must have been given to her by a lady, a bigger lady than Mrs Tooth who had worn them out and was about to throw them away. She could take her oath on it that Mrs Tooth was the person she had let in on that fatal evening.

Then came Mr Wainewright. He had bought a new
suit for the occasion – a smart, well-cut suit, with the first double-breasted coat he had ever worn. He had gone to the West End for a shirt that cost eighteen shillings. His tie must have cost as much again, and there was a pearl pin stuck into the middle of it. An equilateral triangle of white handkerchief protruded from his breast pocket. He looked respectable and intensely
uncomfortable
as he gave his evidence, which was as he had outlined it to John Jacket that evening in the ‘
Fire-drake
’.

Cross-examined, he gave the defence nothing to work on. It was apparent that Wainewright was telling the truth. Then came the turn of the defence.

To the astonishment of the public, Mr Sumner
Concord
did not attempt to break down the evidence for the prosecution. There was no doubt at all, he said, that the unfortunate Mrs Tooth had called on her husband at that time. But he happened to know that she had called in order to plead with him. Tooth had callously deserted her and his two children. He was earning a good salary and substantial sums in commission, which he devoted entirely to dissipation. Mrs Tooth, the deserted woman, had been compelled to support the children and herself by menial labour. Medical evidence would indicate that it was necessary for this lady to undergo a serious
internal
operation in the near future. She had visited her husband merely in order to beg – to beg on her bended knees if necessary – for the wherewithal to feed their children, his children and hers, until such time as she could find strength to go out again and scrub other women’s floors to earn the few shillings that she needed to maintain them.

Sumner Concord drew the attention of His Lordship
and the jury to the fact that Mrs Tooth had a
separation
order but had never received a penny: her
forbearance
was inspired by mercy and also by fear, because Sidney Tooth, as he was about to prove, had been one of the most murderous bullies and unmitigated scoundrels that ever polluted God’s earth. This poor woman, Mrs Tooth, did not care whether she lived or died – her husband by his persistent brutality and
ill-
treatment
had beaten the normal fear of death out of her. Evidence was forthcoming which would prove that this wretched, persecuted woman had for many years gone in terror of her life and had frequently interposed her broken and bruised body between the drunkenly raging Sidney Tooth and the undernourished, trembling bodies of his children. Mother-love was stronger than the terror of bodily harm. Knowing that in a little while her exhausted frame could no longer support the strain imposed upon it – knowing that the time was fast approaching when she must go into hospital – Martha Tooth went to plead with her husband, and he mocked her. He laughed in her face. He struck her. She, driven to desperation, God forgive her, driven to
self-destruction
, picked up that pair of scissors to stab herself. In doing so she wounded her hand. Then Tooth, who was drunk and who – a brute at the best of times – was
murderous
when drunk, as evidence would prove, took her by the throat and began to strangle her. She struck out blindly and he let her go. She went weeping, she ran out blindly into the night. Mr Sumner Concord did not deny the validity of the evidence of Mr Wainewright and Mrs Madge. Mrs Tooth believed that she must have killed her husband, and she was horrified at the very thought of it. As for killing him by intention – she could never
have thought of that, she loved him too much and she feared him too much. She wanted to kill herself. There was medical evidence to prove that the blood in the hand-basin was her own blood from her own hand which she cut in so blindly snatching the scissors with which Tooth had been killed. That her life was in danger might be indicated by the evidence of eleven witnesses, three of them doctors….

Mr Wainewright, wondering at the complexity of it all, looked away. He looked away from the face of Sumner Concord, scanned the faces of the jurymen (one of them was surreptitiously slipping a white tablet into his mouth) and blinked up at the ceiling. A piece of fluffy stuff, such as comes away from a dandelion that has run to seed, was floating, conspicuous against the panelling. It began to descend. Mr Wainewright’s eyes followed it. It came to rest on the judge’s wig, where it disappeared. Mr Wainewright was conscious of a
certain
discontent.

After that nothing of the trial stuck in his mind
except
Sumner Concord’s peroration, and Mr Justice Claverhouse’s verdict.

The peroration was something like:

‘Here was a beast. He tortured this woman. She trusted him and gave him her life. He accepted it brutally and threw it away. She had been beautiful. He had battered her with his great bony fists into the woman you see before you. That face was offered to Tooth in the first flush of its beauty. He beat it into the wreck and ruin of a woman’s face – the wreck, the ruin that you see before you now. She did not complain. He mocked and humiliated her. She was silent. She wept alone. He made her an object of pity, this mad and murderous bully,
and she said nothing. He deserted her, leaving her with two young sons whom she loved very dearly: she was sick and weak, and still she never spoke! The prosecution has raised its voice: Martha Tooth suffered in silence. She worked for her children, happy to bring home a little bread in her poor cracked hands.

‘You have heard the evidence of those who have known her. She was a woman without stain, a woman undefiled. But when, at last, she went ill – dear God, what was she to do? She wanted nothing for herself. But there were her children. Her husband was
prosperous
. She asked him only for bread for his children – he laughed in her face. He struck her and ordered her to go. She pleaded – and he beat her. She cried for mercy and he abused her, reproaching her for the loss of her beauty, the beauty he himself had savagely beaten away.

‘At last, driven mad by despair, she picks up the first thing that comes to hand, a pair of scissors, and tries – poor desperate woman – to kill herself. Laughing, he takes her by the throat. These hands, strong enough to break a horseshoe, are locked about her frail throat. Imagine them upon your own, and think!

‘She struggles, she cannot speak, she can only struggle while he laughs in her face, because these murderous thumbs are buried in her windpipe. She strikes out blindly, and this great furious hulk of bestial manhood collapses before her. Sixteen stone of bone and muscle falls down, while seven stone of wretchedness and
sickness
stands aghast.

‘And looking down she sees the scissors embedded in that bull neck. By some freak of chance – by some act of God – she has struck the subclavian artery and the great beast has fallen. She runs blindly away, weeping
bitterly, half demented with anguish, and when the police find her (which was easy, since she had not attempted to conceal herself) she is crying, and the blood in the basin is her own blood. The children lie asleep and she begs the police to take her away, to take her away anywhere out of this world. She asks for nothing but death, and there, there is the pity of it! …’

After an absence of twenty-five minutes the jury
returned
a verdict of Not Guilty.

*

Then, although everyone said he had known from the beginning that Martha Tooth would be acquitted, London went wild with delight. The
Sunday
Extra
sent Munday Marsh to offer the bewildered woman five
hundred
pounds for her life-story. Pain of the
Sunday
Briton
offered a thousand. She shook her head wearily and dispiritedly. ‘Twelve hundred and fifty,’ said the
Sunday
Briton.
The
Extra
said: ‘Fifteen hundred.’

‘I can’t write stories,’ said Martha Tooth. ‘
Anyway
——’

‘I can,’ said Pain.

‘Calm, gentlemen, calm,’ said the sardonic voice of John Jacket. They turned, and saw him dangling an oblong of scribbled paper between a thumb and a
forefinger
. ‘I’ve got it.’

The
Sunday
Special
had given Jacket authority to pay as much as two thousand pounds for Martha Tooth’s story. Ten minutes before Munday Marsh arrived, Jacket had bought the story for six hundred pounds.

‘Oh well,’ they said, without malice, and went away. Pain said: ‘To-day to thee, to-morrow to me, Jack,’ and they shook hands. Ainsworth of
The
People
said
nothing: he knew that in a year’s time the whole business would be forgotten, and then, if he happened to need a human-interest murder-feature, he could re-tell the story from the recorded facts.

So John Jacket wrote fifteen thousand words – four instalments, illustrated with photographs and
snapshots
– under the title of
DIARY
OF
AN
ILL-USED
WOMAN.
What Jacket did not know he invented: Martha Tooth signed every thing – she still could not understand what it was all about. Soon after the first instalment was published she began to receive fan-mail: half a dozen religious leaflets, letters urging her to
repent
, prophecies concerning the Second Coming, and proposals of marriage, together with frantically abusive notes signed
Ill-used
Man.
She also received parcels of food and clothes, and anonymous letters enclosing postal orders. An old lady in the West Country, saying that she had wanted to kill her husband every day for forty years, enclosed sixty twopenny stamps.

Martha Tooth was taken in hand by a lady reporter, who carried her off to a beauty parlour, compelled her to
have her hair waved, and showed her how to choose a hat. In three weeks she changed; paid attention to her finger-nails and expressed discontent with the Press. The press, she complained, wouldn’t leave her alone, and everyone wanted to marry her. Before the fourth
instalment
appeared she had received eleven offers of marriage. Martha Tooth had become whimsical, smiled one-sidedly, and took to lifting her shoulders in a sort of shrug. ‘Men,’ she said, ‘men! These men!’

After the fourth week, however, she got no more letters. She was out of sight and out of mind.

She went to the offices of the
Sunday
Special
to see
Jacket. Someone had told her that she ought to have got thousands of pounds for her story, and that there was a film in it. When she told Jacket this, he drew a deep breath and said:

‘Mrs Tooth. Your story is written, read, and wrapped around fried fish, and forgotten. You forget it too. Be sensible and forget it. You’ve lived your story and told your story. Go away and live another story.’ He added: ‘With a happy ending, eh?’

She went away. Soon, a paragraph on the gossip page of an evening newspaper announced that she had married a man called Booth. Her name had been Tooth – there was the story. Mrs Tooth married Mr Booth. He was a market-gardener, and, strangely enough, a widower. Mr Booth had proposed to her by letter.

John Jacket had forgotten the Tooth case when Mr Wainewright came to see him for the second time, twelve weeks later.

*

It struck Jacket as odd that Mr Wainewright was
wearing
a jaunty little green Tyrolean hat and a noticeable tweed suit.

‘Is it fair?’ asked Wainewright. ‘Where do I come in?’

‘Come in? How? How d’you mean, where do you come in?’

‘Well,’ said Mr Wainewright, shuffling his feet, ‘I mean to say … I hear that Tooth’s good lady got
thousands
and thousands of pounds.’

‘A few hundreds, George,’ said Jacket.

‘It isn’t that, Mr Jacket. It’s——’

‘The credit?’ asked Jacket, twitching an ironic lip.

‘Who is
she
to be made a heroine out of?’ asked Wainewright, looking at his finger-tips.

‘What exactly are you trying to get at, George?’ asked Jacket.

‘Get at? Who, me? Nothing, Mr Jacket.’

‘Then what do you want? What do you want me to do?’

Mr Wainewright looked at the ball of his right thumb and shook his head. ‘There was nothing about me at all in the papers,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a story, too.’

‘Be a pal,’ said Jacket, ‘and go away. I’ve got work to do, George, old man, work. So be a pal.’

‘Right.’ Mr Wainewright got up.

‘Don’t be angry with
me.
Things come and things go,’ said Jacket, ‘and a story is a nine-days’ wonder. Wash this murder out of your head.’

Mr Wainewright said: ‘Well, you know best. But I’ve also got a story——’

A telephone bell rang. ‘See you some other time,’ said John Jacket, lifting the receiver. ‘So long for now, George.’