Cat and Mouse by Tim Vicary Read Free Book Online Page B

relish and emphasis and one of the other women grinned as he went out.
    ‘Must have hurt his pride, dearie, when he had to carry you down. Or did you catch him a good one in the cockles?’
    ‘What? No — no, I don’t think so,’ said Sarah dazedly. Six months! She could never survive that long! But then she wasn't going to have to. They would let her out because she wouldn't eat.
    She gazed at the woman vaguely, wondering what such a large, blowsy, motherly-looking woman could be doing here. ‘What are you charged with?’
    The woman laughed, her double chin wobbling up and down. ‘Solicitin',’ she said, shortly. ‘Picked me up in Piccadilly Circus.’
    ‘Oh, I see,’ Sarah said bitterly. What man could possibly pay to make love to a woman like that? She must be at least forty, and plump in all the wrong sorts of places. Did Jonathan betray me with a woman like that, she wondered. Or with a child? Both ideas were equally grotesque.
    Something in her expression seemed to offend the woman. ‘There’s no need to turn up yer nose, milady. Suffragette, are yer?’
    ‘That's right.’
    ‘Going to starve yourself to get out?’ The rest of the women in the cell were watching with interest now. Previously, when Sarah had been arrested, she had had other suffragettes around her. She had never been quite alone like this before.
    ‘Yes, I am. I shan’t be in here for six months, whatever they say. I’m not going to do anything they tell me.’
    The woman raised her eyebrows. The others in the cell contemplated her with a flat, incurious stare. Not exactly hostile, but there was no sympathy there, either. No sense of sisterly solidarity.
    ‘I wouldn't like to do that,’ the woman said. ‘Hunger strikin' an' all that. They’re pretty bitter about that in Holloway now, you know. Some of the doctors used to be sorry for the suffragettes once, but they left. Governor slung 'em out.’
    Sarah had no response to this, and for a while the conversation lagged. More women came in as the court continued its process up above, and by midday the cell was quite full. There were women of all ages — a grandmother of sixty with wrinkled face and black teeth, convicted of stealing fruit; a young servant girl with wide, scared eyes and a pinafore over her drab grey dress, who had taken the spoons and a silver teapot from her employer's house; shop-girls who had stolen from the till or walked out with clothes stuffed under their skirts; a middle-aged woman with a swollen lip and black eye who sat in a corner and glared at a girl with a scratched cheek on the far side of the room, ostentatiously ignoring her.
    And then there were the prostitutes. As well as the fat blowsy woman who had spoken to Sarah earlier there were half a dozen girls aged between about sixteen and twenty-five who had been picked up for soliciting in the streets. Most still wore their finery, splashed round the hems with the mud of the gutters and crumpled after a night in the cells. Most had hard, strained faces, some garishly covered with too much make-up, smeared from the night before. None of them were in the least bit beautiful. The make-up made it worse.
    Two of the older ones were crushed up against Sarah as the cell filled. They glanced at her curiously, taking in her fine, good quality clothes, the plain gold ring on her finger.
    ‘Lady, are yer?’
    ‘Yes. I'm a suffragette.’
    The fat woman on the other side of the cell laughed, a deep, throaty, suggestive chuckle. ‘Not just any suffragette, neither! She slashed the picture in the National Gallery, she did! You mind your manners, Sal — we got a top-notch dafty 'ere!’
    ‘You may think it's crazy, but I did it out of principle. You ought to understand.’
    ‘Oh yeah? Go on, tell us, then.’
    For a while Sarah tried to explain. The oppression of women, the low wages, the exploitation, the futility of their lives, the way the whole of society worked to the advantage of men. She was not a great