No Greater Love (24 page)

‘Oh Maggie!’ He grimaced at the fortress walls in frustration. He lit a cigarette. It pained him to think of how he had scorned her suffragism, of how they had parted so acrimoniously because he would not take her political activities seriously. He had tolerated her ideals because he fancied her and wanted her company, but now he could see how his condescension had angered her.

He had gone to the court for revenge, hoping to see her suffer because she had rejected him. Instead, he had been shamed by her courage. Watching her contemptuous silence in the police court and her defiant cry when being led away, he had been filled with admiration. Maggie Beaton, lowly clerk and working-class girl of no more than twenty, had taken on the Establishment - the Prime Minister, the Pearsons, the police - and lost, but lost with dignity.

George shook his head. She had not cared how unpopular her suffragism made her with her family or workmates, or with him, she had still gone ahead and done it. He knew of no brothers in the union or at work who were so single-minded and it made him feel shame for the way he and other unionists belittled the concerns of women like Maggie.

Grinding the cigarette beneath his boot, he came to a decision. It took him half an hour to find where Rose Johnstone lived, the suffragette friend Maggie had often talked about. It turned out to be not far from where he lived in Rye Hill. A diminutive, pink-faced woman answered his knocking, who turned out to be Rose’s mother.

‘Rose is out,’ she told him cautiously.

He asked if he could wait. She left him to sit in silence in a neat, threadbare parlour, spotlessly clean and smelling of lavender. George was unnerved enough to rest his boots on his cap for fear of dirtying the red and gold patterned rug.

Rose appeared just as he was contemplating flight. He stood as she came in, rescuing his soiled cap. She regarded him suspiciously.

‘Have you seen her - Maggie?’ he asked immediately.

‘No, they won’t allow visitors.’ Rose remained standing. ‘Probably because of the state they’ll have reduced her to.’

She watched his face pucker in concern. It was a handsome, square face, dominated by a thick moustache and hooded eyes that hinted of sensuality. Rose could understand what had attracted Maggie to this man, yet she was jealous to think he had tried to win away her protégée and distract Maggie from her work.

‘What state?’ he asked anxiously.

Rose decided to be brutal; why should he be spared the anguish that ate away inside her? ‘She’ll have been without food for a week - they’ll be force-feeding her by now. Don’t you know what that does to a woman?’

George gave an exclamation of horror and sat down, covering his face with his dirt-ingrained hands.

Rose felt a twinge of pity. ‘What is it you’ve come for?’ she asked.

George looked up at the severe schoolteacher and shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know. I just wanted to do something for her - makeup for...’

‘For not taking her seriously before?’ Rose demanded ‘You hurt her greatly by scorning her beliefs. She wanted your approval, couldn’t you see that?’

‘No,’ George admitted quietly. ‘I didn’t see the half of it.’ He looked at her accusing bespectacled eyes and felt the awkwardness of a scolded child. He did not much like Maggie’s friend, but it would do no good to argue with her. He imagined few people did.

He stood up to leave.

‘Wait,’ Rose suddenly stopped him. ‘Have some tea with us.’

‘No, ta,’ George replied, eager to be gone.

‘Please,’ Rose insisted. ‘I didn’t mean to be so sharp with you - it’s just the worry over Maggie. It’d be nice to talk to someone about her. Her mother and sisters won’t have anything to do with me, you see. Please stay.’

George nodded. ‘They’re a stubborn lot, the Beatons,’ he grunted.

Rose smiled at him for the first time. ‘And Maggie’s the most stubborn of them all.’

George sighed. ‘Aye. And look where it’s got her.’ They were silent for a moment, each contemplating Maggie’s ordeal. ‘I just want you to know, Miss Johnstone,’ George spoke with sudden passion, ‘that when she comes out I’m here to help if she needs me. You will tell her that, won’t you?’

***

Maggie was filled with dread at the ominous rumbling sound of the trolley approaching her cell. The first time she had not known what it signified, but she had barricaded the cell door with her chair and bed anyway. It had taken them twenty minutes to break in and four irate wardresses to pin her to the floor. Burdon, the hard-faced wardress who had taunted Maggie on her arrival, had shouted at the others, ‘Lie on the stupid bitch!’

Panting and swearing, they had finally overcome their writhing victim and the four hefty women had her spread-eagled on the ground. Then two doctors had entered the cell, dragging the grim trolley with them. While Burdon gripped her shoulders, one of the doctors had wrenched her head back by the hair and begun to ram the stiff nozzle of a rubber tube up her left nostril.

Maggie had screamed in agony as the tube was shoved further and further in, until it felt as if it had reached inside her eye and would force it from its socket.

‘You don’t have to endure this,’ the doctor told her coldly. ‘If you behaved yourself and took your food, you’d save us all a lot of trouble.’

Maggie had been in too much torment to answer. All she could do was to stare in wide-eyed terror as the other doctor calmly lifted up the funnel attached to the other end of the tube and began to pour in his evil concoction of cocoa and Bovril and medicines designed to keep her alive.

As the liquid gushed up her nose and down her gullet, Maggie had felt sure she would choke and drown in the brown liquid. It seemed to go on for an age. She wanted to vomit, but could not.

Finally the torture stopped and they all left abruptly, leaving her sick and dazed and quivering on the cell floor. She had lain bruised and aching for what seemed like hours, before dragging herself onto her bed and crying herself to sleep. That had been two weeks ago and they had come every day since. Now Maggie listened with fear and disgust for the sound of the doctors’ trolley and prayed feverishly for delivery.

She heard the cell door being unlocked and gripped the pipe that ran along the floor with what strength she could. She knew the wardresses found her resistance weakening with every visit, so this time she had planned a surprise for them and the disdainful doctors.

‘Bloody hell, there’s a stink in here!’ the young wardress, Stevens, cried as she entered.

‘Look what she’s done, Dr Shaw!’ Burden shrieked in disgust. ‘She’s worse than an animal.
^’

Maggie watched them move aside like worried sheep to make way for the stout, balding figure of Dr Shaw. She felt a moment of triumph as a look of appalled distaste creased his jowled face.

‘My God!’ he exclaimed.

The other doctor, the younger one who stood and dispassionately poured liquid down the tube, came in to look. He stared curiously as if she were some outlandish species he had never studied before.

Here she was, exhausted but still defiant, her prison clothes smeared in the liquid faeces that her force-feeding had produced. She could hardly smell her own excrement for her sense of taste and smell appeared to have wasted away with her appetite and strength. But she could tell that this time, for a brief, triumphant moment, she had defeated them.

‘I’m a political prisoner, Dr Shaw,’ Maggie croaked. ‘I demand the right to be treated differently. I want visitors. I want justice. How do you sleep at night after your dirty work, Dr Shaw? I thought doctors were healers not torturers...’ Her voice broke.

‘Oh, you’ll be treated differently,’ the furious doctor snapped. He turned to young Stevens. ‘Fetch a bucket of cold water and wash her down. You,’ he spoke to Burdon, ‘summon the head wardress. After we’ve fed this Jezebel I’m sure your superiors will see fit to lock her in the punishment cell.’

Burdon moved at once, but Stevens hesitated, aghast at what she was being asked to do.

‘Couldn’t we just leave her for a bit, doctor?’ she asked, her plump cheeks scarlet.

‘Do as Dr Shaw says,’ Burdon ordered with a shove, ‘or you’ll be hoyed out on the street.’

They all left and locked the door, leaving a half-hysterical Maggie rocking with laughter. She began to sing
The Women’s Marseillaise.

‘To Freedom’s cause till death - we swear our fealty. March on! March on!’ The effort made Maggie breathless. ‘Face - to the Dawn. The dawn ... of... Liberty!’

By the time the feeding party returned, grimly determined to have their way, Maggie had little energy to resist. Stevens drenched her in a deluge of cold water that left her spluttering and gasping for breath and then the women grabbed her arms and legs and held her down.

Dr Shaw seemed to take a delight in forcing the tube up her swollen and bloodied nose and Maggie screamed as if the pain would kill her. The brutality of the feeding and the shock of the cold water made her faint. She could feel consciousness ebbing from her in sickening waves. At one moment she was acutely aware of the young doctor’s pale, emotionless face above her and the relentless trickle of liquid down her throat; at the next, her hostile attendants were wavering and indistinct.

Maggie wondered if this was what it felt like to die. At least the pain will stop if I do, she thought. Her whole body shuddered and ached in an uncontrollable spasm and she could not recall what it felt like to be intact. Her battered body had no memory of a time before this violation. She cried out to be left alone, but no words came from her flooded throat.

Then the tube was wrenched out like a hot knife and Maggie passed out with the pain.

Mabel Beaton laboured half-heartedly with a wooden spoon in the large cracked bowl. She sighed and put down the cake mixture, her arms aching from the effort. Why was it, she thought with vexation, that she was not more pleased with Susan’s engagement to Richard Turvey?

The young Londoner had approached her and asked for her daughter’s hand in marriage with all his usual charm. These days he wore a new air of prosperity about him since he had secured a new office job down on the quayside. Susan had been delighted with his move from what she saw as insecure and dubious employment in the entertainment world to respectability, and Mabel was encouraged by this show of responsibility too. Richard had been vague about his new job, but from what she could gather, she understood it was to do with exporting armaments for one of Pearson’s subsidiary companies. Yet she had never quite trusted him after Maggie’s attack in town in which she privately suspected he had been involved in some way.

But perhaps it was just the upset over Maggie’s arrest and the exhaustion of the past weeks coping without her wages that had left her feeling weak and depressed, Mabel thought. At first she had been worried at Maggie’s disappearance, then furious at her brief notoriety at the launch and in the local press after her court appearance. Mabel had refused to let any of the family attend and had given Jimmy a severe beating for conspiring to get clothes to Maggie. She had refused to speak to Granny Beaton for a fortnight on discovering she had squandered her expensive cape on the escapade and told the old woman that she did not care if she froze this winter as a result. Her mother-in-law was becoming an increasing burden since Maggie’s arrest, with her mind withdrawing into a haunted past.

But it was now two months since Maggie had been imprisoned and Mabel’s anger was spent. She missed her daughter and fretted over her treatment and knew that old Mrs Beaton did too. Yet it still perplexed her why Maggie had so readily given up her good job and secure future for this obsession with women’s rights. Mabel had invested all her hopes in her brightest daughter and now they were as spent as the ashes in the grate.

‘Let me finish that, lassie,’ Granny Beaton interrupted her thoughts, hobbling across from the fire where she had been sitting in a reverie.

Mabel took up the spoon and began to beat again.

‘I can manage,’ she said shortly.

‘Why don’t you go and lie down for a wee bit?’ her mother-in-law suggested gently. ‘You look tired.’

‘I’m all right,’ Mabel answered crossly, hating attention being drawn to her ill health. Last week she had taken to her bed for two days with pains in her chest and arms, and Susan had to help Helen with the clothes business. Her thick hair, of which she had been so proud, was now completely silver and thinning on her scalp. When she looked in the mirror she saw a puffy grey-faced woman of nearer sixty than her forty-eight years. These days she felt old as well as looking it.

‘What are you making, dearie?’ Granny asked, staring half-blindly at the bowl.

‘The cake for Susan and Richard’s betrothal party,’ Mabel said, pausing again. ‘I told you before.’

Granny Beaton looked at her vacantly for a moment.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already, Mrs Beaton?’ Mabel said in irritation.

‘Susan’s getting married?’ Granny Beaton asked.

‘Aye, to Richard Turvey, the lad from London.’

‘Richard?’ For a moment the old woman seemed to struggle with her memory, then, ‘Och, aye. The boy from London.’

The old wife! Mabel thought impatiently. She doubted her mother-in-law would remember Maggie when she finally came home. Then the older woman surprised her with a moment of lucidity.

‘I think we should’ve waited for Maggie to be with us before having a party. They’re just young and it wouldn’t harm them to wait a wee bit. You won’t let them marry while Maggie’s still in prison, will you, Mabel?’

‘Don’t fuss, Mrs Beaton, they’ll not be marrying before next summer,’ Mabel answered shortly, though she silently shared the old woman’s concern. Susan was full of haste and seemed to have rubbed Maggie from her mind, for she never spoke about her absent sister.

The next moment Susan bustled in at the back door, putting a stop to Granny Beaton’s anxious questioning.

‘Look at this, Mam!’ she cried breathlessly, tearing at a package she was carrying before even unbuttoning her coat. ‘Richard bought it for me - at Fenwick’s!
^’