The Unseen (33 page)

‘No … you, all of you! Let her speak! Haven’t you the least common decency?’ Cat shouts.

‘Oh, Christ, here’s another one,’ the man mutters to a friend, stepping away from Cat and eyeing her coldly.

‘Let her speak!’ she shouts again, louder now. A few more people turn to look at her. The speaker struggles bravely on, but Cat can no longer hear her. There is a buzzing in her ears that has nothing to do with the jostling crowd or the rising tide of their voices. The stink of sweat and sweltering skin is everywhere. The air tastes used, soiled; commingled breath, hot vapours and sour mood. The man beside her and his friend begin to sing, linking their arms and tipping back their heads in music hall parody.

‘Put me upon an island where the girls are few; put me among the most ferocious lions at the zoo; put me in a prison and I’ll never, never fret; but for pity’s sake don’t put me near a bleedin’ suffragette!’ they carol, and fall about laughing at their own cleverness. At the mention of prison, Cat feels a black fury building in her chest, bitter as bile.

‘Shut up! Shut your mouths, you worthless whoresons!’ she spits at them.

‘Here, you want to watch that tongue of yours, slut. It’ll get you in trouble,’ the first man tells her bleakly, through tight lips. He
holds his finger, thick and dirty, right up to her face, and she slaps it away. Just then, a scream from the stage causes a momentary hush to fall. The speaker is looking down in horror at her white skirts, now streaked with red juices. Someone in the crowd has pelted her with a handful of rotting tomatoes, and they cling to the fine muslin; blackened seeds and flecks of skin and pulp.

‘Good shot!’ a man shouts, to much laughter.

‘Really, I …’ The speaker falters. ‘I have every right to come here and speak to you, and speak I shall!’ she rallies, but her voice lacks the courage of her words.

Cat pushes her way through the wall of people, and as she climbs onto the platform more missiles are launched. Eggs land with soggy little crunches, and one hits Cat on her arm as she straightens up, turns to the crowd. Breathing hard, she glances at the stranger, whose face is pinched and startled. The woman’s eyes dart nervously from Cat to the crowd. Cat grabs her hand and turns full face to the crowd’s contempt.

‘
Shame
on you! Shame on all of you! We’re
not
afraid of you! You can’t just shout abuse and expect us to go away! We’re not children!’ she shouts. She ducks to one side as more festering fruit is thrown, and an empty beer bottle, sticky and brown. ‘That’s your answer, is it, when a woman speaks up for herself? Attack her! Wound her! No doubt you treat your wives and daughters the same way, since that’s the only way men can continue to impose their illegitimate domination of women!’ Her voice grows louder, hoarse with fury. The speaker hangs from her hand, astonished.

‘Our wives have better sense than to stand about in public shouting about things they know nothing of!’ one man calls up at her.

‘And how can they know anything about it? About politics, or education, or their rights, when they spend all their time in the home, addling their brains with housework and the raising of children?’ she demands.

‘And who else should do those things, then? Their menfolk?’ This to general laughter.

‘I say—’ The speaker tries to interject, but Cat squeezes her hand tighter.

‘Why the bloody hell not?’ she shouts. But this is the final straw, and more objects and insults are thrown, and Cat cannot hear her own words for the cacophony of abuse and name hurling, though she knows she is shouting because her throat aches with it, and the speaker is pulling to free her hand, which Cat will not relinquish; and somewhere behind it all she hears police whistles blowing, and then a dead rat hits her legs, stinking, its eyes filmy and its tongue a dry curl between snarling teeth, brown fur matted with filth on which flies resettle, almost at once. It smells sweet and rank and putrid, so strong that for a moment Cat falters, clamps her teeth together to keep the stench out.

‘Oh, good Lord.’ The speaker quails, the blood draining from her face. She sits down heavily, her eyes sliding out of focus, legs splayed inelegantly. A smattering of laughter comes from the crowd, and Cat grinds her teeth in fury. Kicking the rat to one side she bends down, picks up what she can of the eggs and vegetables and hurls them back at the crowd, shouting furious curses at them all the while. She aims the beer bottle at the head of a man whose eyes are streaming with mirth, forcing him to duck hurriedly. It shatters into pieces on the street behind him, and he flinches as a fragment hits his cheek, makes a tiny cut there.

‘Let that wipe the smile from your face, you son of a bitch!’ Cat yells at him. She keeps it up as long as she can, trading insults and missiles with the raucous crowd until heavy hands clamp around her limbs and she is carried off, twisting like a snake.

Cat’s upper arms are tender, and she touches them tentatively. Rolling up her sleeves, she finds bruises shaped like finger marks, dotting her skin like tokens of some plague. The lock-up at the police house is cool, the walls constructed of thick stone and coated
in cream-coloured paint that bulges and cracks into craters in places; but Cat can’t appreciate the respite. She can’t even worry that she has jeopardised her position, has jeopardised everything, by losing her temper that way. All she can do is sit on the hard wooden chair and stare up at the tiny window with its dirty pane of glass behind strong metal mesh, and take her thoughts away, far away so that she does not panic. She must be anywhere, anywhere else but locked in a cell. The bitterness of bile burns in the back of her throat, and cold sweat trickles between her breasts to her stomach, seeping into the waistband of her skirt. If she were to pay attention, if she were to acknowledge her incarceration, she might lose her mind; burn out like a match in an instant of pure fear and be nothing but cinders, charred remains of herself. Frowning in concentration, she makes sure she is anywhere else but there …

She is in the house where she grew up, as they carry her mother downstairs and out to the waiting hearse. She had waited at first, and not told anybody that her mother had died. She didn’t know what she would do next; she didn’t want to start life again without her. Her mother had said somebody would come for her, when the time came. Cat had twisted and tried to turn away, but her mother had insisted, her eyes fever-bright, the whites gone grey, pupils huge in the shadowy room.

‘No, you must listen. This is important. When the time comes, somebody will come and collect you. You’re to go with her, and do as you’re told. Do you understand? It’s all arranged. It’s the best I can do for you. You will be looked after there. The Gentleman of the house …’ She paused, her voice little more than a whisper, and fought to keep a storm of coughing at bay. Cat willed her to succeed. She could not bear the agony these fits caused her mother. ‘It is a good place. The Gentleman of the house …’ she tried again, but this time succumbed to the fit, and was too exhausted afterwards to speak any more. So Cat, when she died, waited. She waited, and she wondered, but did not care, what would happen next. And when a neighbour had called round the next morning,
and found her alone, and when they had taken her mother out, a strange woman did appear in the doorway. Buttoned tightly into a black coat, her face motionless beneath steel-grey hair, looking as though it had never worn a smile in a lifetime.

‘You’re to come with me now, young lady. Do you understand?’ she asked. Mute, Cat nodded. ‘This is what your mother, God rest her soul, has arranged for you. Go now and pack up your things. Others will see to the rest. Go on, now,’ the woman said. Cat did not want to. She wanted to go with her mother, even with her shut away in a box, even with her body so very empty and silent and wrong. She did not want to go with this hatchet-faced woman with her thin, censorious lips or her spidery hands. Mrs Heddingly. But her mother had told her to, so she went …

When the door is opened some time later – she has little idea how much time – Cat does not break off her reverie. Only when the police constable shakes her shoulder, tentatively, as if she might explode, does she blink. She twists her head, hears him speak.

‘Come on, I haven’t got all day. Or do you want to stay in here, is that it?’ Behind him the door is open, and Cat is up in an instant, bolting through it without a word. She runs headlong into George.

‘Cat! Steady, girl! You’re all right, are you? Not hurt?’ he asks, holding her easily with one solid arm, though she would have run right by him, out into the sunlight.

‘George! They locked me in!’ she gasps.

‘Hush, hush, I know they did. But you’re out now. Slow down, Cat. Look around you,’ he says, softly. Cat does as she is told, taking a deep breath. She is in the front room of the police station, and behind George the door is wide open, the street dazzlingly bright.

‘You’re letting me go?’ she asks the constable who roused her just now.

‘This time. But just you stay out of trouble, you hear? I’ve heard
rumours about you, Miss Morley. We’ve no need for any more of your public exhibitions, understand?’

‘But … they wouldn’t let her speak. She had a right to speak! And … they threw things – a dead rat, for God’s sake! At two defenceless women!’ she cries. ‘Are you going to lock up the man who threw that, are you?’

‘If I knew who it was that threw it, aye, I would. And you hardly strike me as the defenceless type, I must say. Luckily, Mrs Hever has spoken up for you, and told us you were only trying to protect her from the crowd’s … hostility. And George Hobson here has … vouched for you. So you can go.’ He scratches absently at his moustache with one hand. Sweat glazes his face and is staining the stiff collar of his shirt. ‘This heat,’ he mutters. ‘It’s turning people frenzied, I do believe. Go on and begone with you, and I don’t want to see your face again. Things might not go so smoothly if I do.’ He dismisses them. George marches Cat from the room before she can speak again.

They walk in silence for a minute or two. The Broadway is all but deserted now; the sun dipping in the west, growing fat and glowing, honey-coloured. At the south end of the street a scattering of debris is all that remains of the trash that was hurled at the WSPU speaker. Cat can smell her own sweat, sharp and rank. She stinks of the fear that gripped her inside the cell, rather than from the heat. George walks with his eyes down and his shoulders tense. Cat peers up at him, tries to read him.

‘You vouched for me? What does that mean? What did you say?’ she asks him, hesitantly.

George shrugs, puts one hand in his pocket and then takes it out. ‘I said you were my woman,’ he says, gruffly. ‘I said I would keep you out of trouble.’

At this, Cat can’t help but smile. ‘Oh, really?’ She knocks him playfully with her elbow. ‘I’d like to see you try.’

But George does not smile back at her. His eyes are troubled.

‘Please, Cat. I can’t afford to bail you another time,’ he says, then pulls himself up short, and clamps his lips tight together.

‘You can’t
afford
to? What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Forget I said it.’

‘George – did you have to pay that man, to let me go?’ she whispers. George aims a kick at a pebble in the road, sends it bumping into the verge.

‘Perhaps he would have let you go anyway. Later today or tomorrow. Or perhaps not.’

‘How much?’

‘Never mind it.’

‘How much, George? Tell me,’ she demands.

‘I won’t. Enough,’ is all he says. Cat stops walking and hangs her head in shame, tears blurring the image of her feet in their dusty shoes.

‘But … your boat, George! You shouldn’t have done it!’ she says, the words sticking in her throat.

‘I had to, Cat. You were locked up! I knew … I knew how you would be feeling. I didn’t know if you could manage it … and I couldn’t bear the thought of it.’

‘But you shouldn’t have! I can’t repay it! We can’t get it back!’

‘I’ll make it back. It’ll just take more time,’ he says, grimly. ‘Perhaps I’ll sell that ring, as you suggested. If you’ll not wear it. A small sum, indeed, but a start, I suppose.’

‘George …’ she whispers, turning to face him. She puts her arms around his middle, not caring who might see; lays her face against his chest and feels the mass of him through his shirt, the deep, steady beat of his heart. ‘I’ll not be your wife, but I
am
your woman. Just as you said. If you still want me.’ The words muffled and sad.

George grips her shoulders, gives her a little shake. ‘Of course I still want you! I’ll always want you! I’ve never known anyone like you. But we
must
wed, Cat! I want you as my wife. And it’s sinful not to—’

‘Sinful? I don’t believe in it.’

‘Well, I do. And so does God. Marry me, Cat!’ he says, taking her face in his hands, not letting her look away. But he can read the refusal in her eyes, and she sees it, so she does not need to answer him. She is adamant.

‘I will find the money to give back to you, George – no, I will!’ she insists, when he shakes his head. ‘I will find it. And I am yours, whether you would have me or not,’ she adds; and finds, to her shock, that it’s the possibility he might say no that causes panic to flutter inside her.

Hester hears Mrs Bell’s voice, loud and sharp, coming up the cellar steps, so she knows that Cat has made it back to The Rectory at long last. It has been five hours since she was sent for meat, and to the post. Steeling herself, Hester goes down the steps and into earshot of the tirade.

‘… and after all of it, you come back with no beef! What am I supposed to make for dinner, with no beef? Answer me that, little miss good-for-nothing!’

‘I said I was sorry … I got held up! I couldn’t help it, and then the butcher had shut up shop—’

‘Sorry isn’t going to feed the five of us, now, is it? You’re a useless slattern, Cat Morley, and I’ll tell you another thing—’

‘Mrs Bell, that’s quite enough,’ Hester says, as calmly as she can. The housekeeper visibly bites her tongue, her nostrils flaring, and settles into her chins with a sulphurous expression. Faced with her glittering eyes, Hester feels herself flinch. Cat, in contrast, looks pale and exhausted, her clothes dusty and creased, her hair out of its pins, matted. ‘Cat, would you come with me, please?’ Hester says, and turns to go back upstairs. She thinks for a moment that the girl is not following her, but when she turns to look there she is, treading so softly that she makes no sound. More like a wraith than a person.