Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life (22 page)

'As for those men Rhoda consorted with in bars, they wouldn’t have been a bunch of conservative suburbanites. They’d have accepted her as just another oddity in a world of freaks. Before you came in, sir, I mentioned three names. Isabelle Eberhardt, James Miranda Barry and Martha Jane Burke. What they had in common was that they were all eonists.'

'Isabelle Eberhardt became a nomad in the North African desert where she was in the habit of sporadically passing herself off as male. James Barry went to medical school as a boy in the days before girls were eligible to do so, and served for a lifetime as an army doctor in the British colonies. After her death she was found to be a woman, and a woman who had had a child. The last named is better known as Calamity Jane who lived with men as a man, chewed tobacco, was proficient in the use of arms, and was only discovered to be a woman while she was taking part in a military campaign against the Sioux.'

‘The Chevalier d’Eon was a physically normal man who successfully posed as a female for thirty years. For half that period he lived with a woman friend called Marie Cole who never doubted for a moment that he also was a woman. She nursed him through his last illness and didn’t learn he was a man until after his death. I will quote to you Marie Cole’s reaction to the discovery from the words of the Notary Public, Doctors’ Commons, 1810: “She did not recover from the shock for many hours.”

‘So you can see that Rhoda Comfrey had precedent for what she did, and that the lives of these predecessors of hers show that cross-dressing succeeds in its aim. Many people are totally deceived by it, others speculate or doubt, but the subject’s true sex is often not detected until he or she become ill or wounded, or until, as in Rhoda’s case, death supervenes.’

The Chief Constable shook his head, as one who wonders rather than denies. ‘What put you on to it, Reg?’

‘My daughters. One saying a woman would have to be an eonist to get a man’s rights, and the other dressing as a man on the stage. Oh, and Grenville West’s letter to Charles West - that had the feel of having been written by a woman. And Rhoda’s fingernails painted but clipped short. And Rhoda having a toothbrush in her luggage at Kingsmarkham and West not having one in his holiday cases. All feelings, I’m afraid, sir.’

‘That’s all very well,’ said Burden, ‘but what about the age question? Rhoda Comfrey was fifty and West was thirty-eight.’

‘She had a very good reason for fixing her age as twelve years less than her true one. I’ll go into that in a minute. But also you must remember that she saw herself as having lost her youth and those best years. This was a way of regaining them. Now think what are the signs of youth in men and women. A woman’s subcutaneous fat begins to decline at fifty or hereabouts, but a man never has very much of it.'

'So even a young man may have a hard face, lined especially under the eyes without looking older than he is. A woman’s youthful looks largely depend on her having no lines. Here, as elsewhere, we apply a different standard for the sexes. You’re what, Mike? In your early forties? Put a wig and make-up on you and you’ll look an old hag, but cut off the hair of a woman of your age, dress her in a man’s suit, and she could pass for thirty. My daughter Sheila’s twenty-four, but when she puts on doublet and hose for Jessica in The Merchant of Venice she looks sixteen.’

Remarkably, it was the Chief Constable who supported him. ‘Quite true. Think of Crippen’s mistress, Ethel Le Neve. She was a mature woman, but when she tried to escape across the Atlantic disguised in men’s clothes she was taken for a youth. And by the way, Reg, you might have added Maria Marten, the Red Barn victim, to your list. She left her father’s house disguised as a farm labourer, though I believe transvestism was against the law at the time.’

‘In seventeenth-century France,’ said Wexford, 'Then, at any rate, were executed for it.’

‘Hmm. You have been doing your homework. Get on with the story, will you?’

Wexford proceeded: ‘Nature had not been kind to Rhoda as a woman. She had a plain face and a large nose and she was large-framed and flat-chested. She was what people call “mannish”, though incidentally no one did in this case. As a young girl she tried wearing ultra-feminine clothes to make herself more attractive. She copied her aunt because she saw that her aunt got results. She, however, did not, and she must have come to see her femaleness as a grave disadvantage.'

'Because she was female she had been denied an education and was expected to be a drudge. All her miseries came from being a woman, and she had none of a woman’s advantages over a man. My daughter Sylvia complains that men are attentive to her because of her physical attractions but accord her no respect as a person. Rhoda had no physical attractions so, because she was a woman, she received neither attention nor respect. No doubt she would have stayed at home and become an embittered old maid, but for a piece of luck. She won a large sum of money in an office football pools syndicate. Where she first lived in London and whether as a man or a woman, I don’t know and I don’t think it’s relevant. She began to write. Did she at this time cease to wear those unsuitable clothes and take to trousers and sweaters and jackets instead? Who knows? Perhaps, dressed like that, she was once or twice mistaken for a man, and that gave her the idea. Or what is more likely, she took to men’s clothes because, as Havelock Ellis says, cross-dressing fulfilled a deep demand of her nature.'

‘It must have been then that she assumed a man’s name, and perhaps this was when she submitted her first manuscript to a publisher. It was then or never, wasn’t it? If she was going to have a career and come into the public eye there must be no ambivalence of sex. By posing - or passing - as a man she had everything to gain: the respect of her fellows, a personal feeling of the rightness of it for her, the freedom to go where she chose and do what she liked, to walk about after dark in safety, to hobnob with men in bars on an equal footing. And she had very little to lose. Only the chance of forming close intimate friendships, for this she would not dare to do - except with unobservant fools like Vivian.’

‘Well,’ said Burden, ‘I’ve just about recovered from the shock, unlike Marie Cole who took some hours. But there’s something else strikes me she had to lose.’ He looked with some awkwardness in the direction of the Chief Constable, and Griswold, without waiting for him to say it, barked, ‘Her sexuality, eh? How about that?’

‘Len Crocker said at the start of this case that some people are very low-sexed. And if I may again quote Havelock Ellis, eonists often have an almost asexual disposition. “In people”, he says, “with this psychic anomaly, physical sexual urge seems often subnormal.” Rhoda Comfrey, who had had no sexual experience, must have decided it was well worth sacrificing the possibility - the remote possibility - of ever forming a satisfactory sexual relationship for what she had to gain. I am sure she did sacrifice it and became a man whom other men and women just thought rather odd.'

‘And she took pains to be as masculine as she could be. She dressed plainly, she used no colognes or toilet waters, she carried an electric shaver, though we must suppose it was never used. Because she couldn’t grow an Adam’s apple she wore high necklines to cover her neck, and because she couldn’t achieve on her forehead an M-line, she always wore a lock of hair falling over her brow.’

‘What d’you mean?’ said Burden. ‘An M-line?’

‘Look in the mirror,’ said Wexford.

The three men got up and confronted themselves in the ornamented glass on the wall above their table. ‘See,’ said Wexford, putting his own hands up to his scanty hairline, and the other two perceived how their hair receded in two triangles at the temples. ‘All men,’ he said, ‘have to some degree, but no woman does. Her hairline is oval in shape. But for Rhoda Comfrey these were small matters and easily dealt with. It was only when she paid a rare visit to Kingsmarkham to see her father that she was obliged to go back to being a woman. Oh, and on one other occasion. No wonder people said she was happy in London and miserable in the country. For her, dressing as a woman was very much what it would be like for a normal man to be forced into drag. But she played it in character, or in her old character, that, but perhaps she ought to see the old man first and find out how the land lay.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘I mean that if he was very seriously incapacitated she would know that her greatest fear, that her father might have to be parked on her one day, would be groundless and she could go off to France with a light heart. But she had to go down there and find out, even though this would mean putting off her holiday for a day or two. Never mind. That was no great inconvenience. She phoned her aunt to tell her she would be coming and when she did so Polly Flinders was in the flat, but not all the time in the room.'

‘Now, if no one else did, Polly knew that Grenville West had once or twice before disappeared mysteriously at weekends. I think we can assume that Rhoda rather enjoyed keeping her in the dark about that, and guessed she was giving her cause for jealousy. On that Friday evening Polly had very likely been troublesome - she may, for instance, have wanted West to take her away on holiday with him and Rhoda vented her annoyance by calling Lilian Crown “darling”. Polly overheard, as she was meant to overhear, and believed that West was involved with another woman living in the country. No doubt she asked questions, but was told it was no business of hers, so she determined to go to Stowerton on the Monday and find out for herself what was going on.’

Burden interrupted him. ‘Why didn’t Rhoda or West or whatever we’re going to call him or her - it gets a bit complicated - go to Kingsmarkham that day? Then there wouldn’t have been any need to postpone the holiday. Where does the Trieste Hotel come in?’

‘Think about it,’ said Wexford. ‘Walk out of Elm Green in make-up and high-heeled shoes and a dress?’

‘I should have thought a public lavatory . . .’ Burden stopped himself proceeding further with this gaffe, but not in time to prevent Griswold’s hoot of laughter.

‘How does he manage to go in the Gents’ and come out of the Ladies’, Mike?’

Wexford didn’t feel like laughing. He had never been amused by drag or the idea of it, and now the humorous aspects of this particular case of cross-dressing seemed to him quenched by its consequences. ‘She used hotels for the changeover,’ he said rather coldly, ‘and usually hotels in some distant part of London. But this time she had left it too late to pick and choose, especially with the tourist season at its height. On that Saturday she must have tried to book in at a number of hotels without success. The only one which could take her was the Trieste which she had used once before - on the occasion of the visit to Dr Lomond. You can see, Mike, how she walked out of the Trieste on that day, crossed Montfort Circus, went up Montfort Hill, and chose an address from a street name and an advertisement.'

‘So back to the Trieste she went, with her car packed up for the French holiday and allowing Vivian to believe she was leaving directly for France. The car was left in a garage at the hotel with her passport and French currency locked up in the boot. On her person she retained the car keys and her new wallet, and these went into her handbag when on the following day she left the hotel as Rhoda Comfrey.’

‘That must have been as bad as walking out of Elm Green. Suppose she’d been seen?’

‘By whom? An hotel servant? She says she’s calling on her friend, Mr West. It would have been easy enough to mingle with the other guests or conceal herself in a cloakroom, say, if Hetherington had appeared. As a respectable middle-aged lady, she’d hardly have been suspected of being there for what you’d call an immoral purpose.’

‘Hotels don’t take much notice of that these days,’ said the Chief Constable easily. Forgetting perhaps that it was he who had told Wexford to get back to the nitty-gritty, he said, ‘This passport, though. I’m still not clear about it. I see she had to have a man’s name and a man’s identity, but why that one? She could have changed her name by deed poll or kept Comfrey and used one of those Christian names that will do for either sex. Leslie, for instance, or Cecil.’

‘Deed poll means a certain amount of publicity, sir. But I don’t think that was entirely the reason. She needed a passport. Of course she could have used some ambiguous Christian name for that. And with her birth certificate and her change of name document she could have submitted to the Passport Office a photograph that gave no particular indication of whether she was male or female . . .’

‘Exactly,’ said Griswold. ‘A British passport isn’t required to state the holder’s home address or marital status or,’ he added with some triumph, ‘the holder’s sex.’

‘No, sir, not in so many words. If the holder is accompanied by a child, that child must be declared as male or female, but not the holder. Yet on the cover and on page one the holder’s style is shown. It wouldn’t have helped her much, would it, to have a man’s Christian name and a man’s photograph but be described as Miss Cecil Comfrey?’

‘You’re a shrewd man, Reg,’ said the Chief Constable.

Wexford said laconically, ‘Thanks,’ and remembered that it wasn’t long since that same voice had called him a foolish one. ‘Instead she chose to acquire and submit the birth certificate of a man who would never need a passport because he would never, in any conceivable circumstances, be able to leave this country. She chose to assume the identity of her mentally defective and crippled first cousin. And to him, I discovered yesterday, she left everything of which she died possessed and her royalties as long as they continue.’

‘They won’t do poor John West much good,’ said Burden.

‘What happened when Polly encountered Rhoda on the Monday evening?’

Not much caring what reaction he would get, Wexford said, ‘At the beginning of Apes in Hell, two lines are quoted from Beaumont and Fletcher’s play:

Those have most power to hurt us, that we love;

We lay our sleeping lives within their arms.

‘Rhoda wrote that book long before she met Polly. I wonder if she ever thought what they really meant or ever thought about them again. Possibly she did. Possibly she understood that Polly had laid her sleeping life within her arms, and that though she might have to repudiate the girl, she must never let her know the true state of affairs. For eonists, Ellis tells us, are often “educated, sensitive, refined and reserved”.