‘So you didn’t plan to kill him?’
‘The poison was for the dogs.’
She hitched herself up the bed and propped her head against the wall. It was possible in this position to see how emaciated she was, how waxy her skin. Her hair, which had been brown the last time he saw her, was now almost entirely white. Thin strands escaped from the bun at the back of her head and straggled about her neck. He started to speak, but she interrupted him. ‘What are you here for, Billy?’
‘To help you.’
She smiled. ‘So what was all that about information?’
‘I had to say that. She was listening.’
‘But you are from the Ministry of Munitions?’
“Course I am. How do you think I got in? Doesn’t mean I’m here for information, does it?’ He leant forward. ‘Think about it, Beattie. What information have you got?’
She bridled. ‘You’d be surprised. People coming in and out.’ Then she pulled a face. ‘Actually, there’s not that many politicals in here. They’re all on about their fannies. You lose patience.’
‘I want you to tell me what happened.’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘I haven’t got a transcript of the trial.’
‘Haven’t you? You do surprise me. Why don’t you go and talk to Spragge?’
‘I will. I want your version first, because I haven’t heard your version.’ He waited. ‘Look, Beattie, whatever damage was done was done at the trial. I’m not asking you to name any names that didn’t come out then.’
She brooded for a moment. ‘You know Tommy Blenkinsop’s dead?’
‘Tommy –’
‘The deserter I had stopping with me. Hettie had gone away to live, you know, she was teaching over at Middleton, so I had this spare room, and I said I’d put Tommy up. Eeh, poor little Tommy, eleven kids, and do you know to look at him you wouldn’t’ve thought he had a fuck in him? He says to me, “You know, Beattie, I only joined up for a bit of peace.” Poor lad. Anyway, that night we were sat over the fire, Tommy and me, and there was this knock on the door, and I says to Tommy, “You go on upstairs, love.” I answered it and there was…” She sighed, looking into the distance. ‘Spragge. Rain pouring off him, it was a terrible night. And he said he had a letter from Mac, so of course I asked him to come in. I’ve had time to think since then. It was Mac he was after. He was the big fish, we just got caught in the net. And the letter was genuine enough, he’d took Mac in as well as me, so he must’ve been convincing, mustn’t he? Anyway, he explained he was on his way to Liverpool, and he says, “Can you put me up?” and I says, “Well, no, not really.” And then I thought, we-ell, and I says, “Unless you don’t mind sharing a bed,” and I told him about Tommy. “Is he of the homogenic persuasion?” he says. Well, I just looked at him. I says, “No, I shouldn’t think so, he’s got eleven kids, do you want the bed or not?” So he decided he was stopping and we sat down round the table, and after a while he notices the photograph of our William on the mantelpiece. I don’t know whether he knew about our William, I think he must’ve done, though, because he kept bringing the conversation round, and saying what a fine lad he was and all that. And you know I was worried sick about our William, because I knew what was going on, you see, he’d managed to get a letter smuggled out.’
‘What was going on?’
‘Well. You see, William didn’t get exemption. He… Partly he was unlucky with the Board, but you know they don’t like moral objectors anyway. If you’re religious – doesn’t matter how batty it is – you can say you’ve got the Holy Spirit in a jamjar on the mantelpiece – that’s all right, that’s fine. If you say, “I think it’s morally wrong for young men to be sent out to slaughter each other,” God help you. The Chairman of the Board actually said to our William, “You can’t be a conscientious objector because you don’t believe in God, and people who don’t believe in God don’t have consciences.” That was the level of it. Anyway, if you’re refused exemption you get handed over to the army. The military police show up and take you off to the barracks and you get given your first order, generally, “Get stripped off and put the uniform on.” And of course the lads refuse, and then it’s the detention centre. Our William was sent to Wandsworth, and it was really tough. He was stripped and put in a cell with a stone floor and no glass in the window – this is January, mind – and then, he says, they just put a uniform beside you and they wait to see how long it’ll take you to give in. Of course I was worried sick, I thought he was going to get pneumonia, but actually he said in his letter it wasn’t the cold that bothered him, it was being watched all the time. The eye in the door.’ She laughed. ‘I didn’t know what he meant.’
She looked past Prior’s shoulder, and he turned to follow her gaze. He found himself looking at an elaborately painted eye. The peephole formed the pupil, but around this someone had taken the time and trouble to paint a veined iris, an eyewhite, eyelashes and a lid. This eye, where no eye should have been, was deeply disturbing to Prior. For a moment he was back in France, looking at Towers’s eyeball in the palm of his hand. He blinked the image away. ‘That’s horrible,’ he said, turning back to Beattie.
‘’S not so bad long as it stays in the door.’ She tapped the side of her head. ‘You start worrying when it gets in here.’
‘Anyway, go on. He was talking about William.’
‘Yes, he kept bringing the conversation round, and of course I was worried, and out it all came. It wasn’t just our William that was bothering me, it was all of them.’
‘All the conchies?’
‘You know I don’t mean that.’
No, he thought. She was one of those who felt every death. She’d never learnt to read the casualty lists over breakfast and then go off and have a perfectly pleasant day, as the vast majority of civilians did. If she had learnt to do that, she mightn’t have been here. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘He could see I was getting upset and he says, “Why don’t we have a drink?” Well, money was a bit tight, you know, with feeding Tommy as well, but he says, “Don’t you worry, love, this one’s on me.” And he went into the scullery and came back with two bloody great big jugs, and off he went. Eeh, special brew. Well, you know me, Billy, two glasses of that, he was me long-lost brother, and I did, I talked, I played me mouth. I cussed Lloyd George, I cussed the King, I don’t know what bugger I didn’t cuss, but I was lonely, Billy. I’d had nobody to talk to except Tommy for months, and he was no company, poor little bugger, his nerves were gone. And of course at the trial it all got twisted. He said I kept dropping hints Lloyd George was going to die. I can remember exactly what I said. I says, “That bloody, buggering bastard Lloyd George, he’s got a head on him like a forty-shilling pisspot, but you mark my words he’ll come to rue.” There. That was it. That was the death threat.’ She shook her head. ‘It was nowt of the sort. Anyway we were half way down the second jug – or I was – and he says, “Can I trust you?” I says, “Well, you’re in a pretty pickle if you can’t.” And then he starts telling me about this detention centre where the regime was very bad. Worse than Wandsworth. And you know all the stuff he was telling me was stuff I’d told him, about being naked in the cells and all that, but I was too daft to see it. And then he says, him and some of his mates had found a way to get the lads out. They had a contact inside the centre, one of the guards it was supposed to be. But, he says, the problem was the dogs. They had these dogs patrolling the perimeter fence. I says, “Well, poison.” He says, well, yes, but there was a problem about that. It had to look like an outside job because of the guard. You see, they didn’t want the detention centre to twig about him. So I says, “Curare.”’
‘Fired through the fence in a blowdart?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fired at the dogs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course,’ Prior said, ‘you do realize, don’t you, a lot of people wouldn’t know about curare?’
For the first time she l
ooked uneasy. ‘Yes, well, I read about it in a book on South America, and then I happened to mention it to Alf – our Winnie’s husband – and he says, “Oh, yes, we’ve got some of that in the lab.” That’s the only way I knew about it.’
‘No previous thoughts of killing Lloyd George? They said at the trial you’d plotted to kill him before, when you were in the suffragettes.’
‘The suffragettes never threatened human life. That was a point of honour: property, not life. It just shows Spragge’s ignorance, does that. Couldn’t even think up a convincing lie.’
‘He seems to have convinced the jury.’
‘You know what was going on there as well as I do. You put a pacifist – any pacifist – in the dock – could be Jesus Christ – and the biggest rogue unhung in the witness-box, and who do you think they’re gunna believe?’
‘What did he say when you mentioned curare?’
‘He says, yes, but how on earth was he going to get his hands on that? I says I knew where to get it, but it was too risky. And then he says if I helped him, he’d help me. He’d get little Tommy across to Ireland, and that clinched it for me, because you know Tommy was getting really weird. I mean, to be honest, I thought if I didn’t get him out I was gunna have a loony on me hands, like Lily Braithwaite’s husband. You know what a state he was in when he come back.’
‘So you agreed to get the curare?’
‘Yes, he give me an address and told me to write to him when I got it. I wrote to our Winnie’s Alf, and he mentioned dogs in his letter back to me, but that letter was never produced, I think it slipped down a crack in the pavement. And Alf said, yes, he’d get it. He works in a big medical laboratory, and he had to sign for the poison. But he wasn’t worried, see, because the dogs’d be dying at the other end of the country and nobody would make the connection. But can you imagine him signing his name like that if he’d thought it was for Lloyd George?’
‘Then what?’
‘I waited. The post seemed to take such a long time, but of course unbeknownst to us all the letters were being opened. The parcel was opened. And then when it was finally delivered the police were on the doorstep in a matter of minutes. And I was charged with conspiracy to murder Lloyd George, and others. That’s the other thing they dropped. It wasn’t just Lloyd George they were on about. To begin with it was hundreds of people I was supposed to be plotting to kill. And, of course, all I could say was; “The poison was for the dogs,” but I couldn’t prove it, it was Spragge’s word against mine, and he was working for the bloody Ministry of Munitions. Oh, and the trial. You know he read all the letters out in court?’
‘Smith did?’
‘Yeh, Smith. The Attorney-General. Oh, I was honoured, they wheeled out all the big guns. And he read me letters out in court, about Winnie’s period being late and all that. And you know he read the words the way I’d wrote them. Just to get a laugh out of me, because I can’t spell, I never have been able to. But I wonder how good his spelling’d be, if he’d left school when he was eight?’
‘He shouldn’t’ve done that.’
‘I was fair game. Language too. He couldn’t get over the language, this dreadful, coarse, lewd, vulgar, low woman who kept using all these words his dear little wifie didn’t even know. I’ll bet.’
Prior sat back against the wall. He was finding the eye in the door difficult to cope with. Facing it was intolerable, because you could never be sure if there were a human eye at the centre of the painted eye. Sitting with his back to it was worse, since there’s nothing more alarming than being watched from behind. And when he sat sideways, he had the irritating impression of somebody perpetually trying to attract his attention. It tired him, and if it tired him after less than an hour, what must it have done to Beattie, who’d had to endure it for over a year? He noticed that the latrine bucket had been placed where it could be seen from the door. ‘Why’s the bucket there?’ he asked.
‘Because some poor bloody cow drowned herself in her own piss.’
‘My God.’ He stared at her. ‘You’re not as bad as that, are you?’
‘No, I keep going. Trouble is, you’re punished if you go on hunger strike, so I can’t have any visitors. I haven’t seen our Hettie for… oh, I don’t know, it must be two months.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘That’s what Spragge said. When I told him about not being able to get Tommy across to Ireland, he says, “I’ll see what I can do.”’
‘The difference is I’m not asking for anything back.’
She touched his sleeve. ‘We were close once, Billy. You were like a son to me.’ She waited. ‘I’m not going to ask whose side you’re on because you mightn’t tell me the truth, and if you did, I wouldn’t believe you. But just tell me this. Do you know whose side you’re on?’
He looked at her and smiled, but didn’t reply.
FOUR
The Ministry of Munitions was housed in the Hotel Metropole. The reception desk, now guarded by armed police, had once been manned by smooth-faced young men, trained not to look surprised when the sixth couple in succession turned out to be called Smith, or when prosperous-looking gentlemen, entertaining their curiously unprosperous-looking nephews, requested a double room. No such innocent frolics now, Prior thought, crossing the foyer. Goodness how the moral tone had declined.
On the third floor he tapped on Major Lode’s door. Lode looked up from the file he was reading, dabbing, as he always did when confronted by a new situation, at the outer corners of his large, silky, red-gold moustache. In defiance of biology, Prior saw this moustache as a feminine adornment: perhaps because it seemed to require so much protection from the outside world.
‘How did it go?’ Lode asked.
‘Quite well, I think. She was… fairly hostile to begin with, but I think towards the end she was starting to open up.’
‘Did you mention MacDowell?’
‘Only in passing. I thought it better not to… focus on him.’
‘Hmm, yes, quite right. So what’s the next step?’
‘I’d like to see Hettie Roper. The younger daughter. You remember she was walking out with MacDowell?’
Lode smiled. ‘Walking out? Yes. I was just thinking, what a quaint expression. But I thought that was over? That’s what she told the police.’
‘I don’t believe it. They were too close.’
‘Yes, well, do what you need to do. Good.’
And now, Prior thought, closing the door quietly behind him, you can fumigate your fucking office. ‘What a quaint expression.’ I could buy and sell you, he told the closed door. Lode had no idea. He’d spent his entire adult life – boyhood too, for that matter – in uniformed, disciplined, hierarchical institutions, and he simply couldn’t conceive of the possibility that other people might function differently. It was all a great big chessboard to him. This rag-bag collection of Quakers, socialists, anarchists, suffragettes, syndicalists, Seventh Day Adventists and God knows who else was merely an elaborate disguise, behind which lurked the real anti-war movement, a secret, disciplined, highly efficient organization dedicated to the overthrow of the state as surely and simply as Lode was dedicated to its preservation. And on the other side of the board, at the head of the opposing army, elusive, tenacious, dangerous: the Black King himself, Patrick MacDowell. It wasn’t complete nonsense, of course. Mac was certainly a more effective opponent of the war than most, if only because he was not in love with suffering. Poor Mac, he’d had enough of that by the time he was ten.
Prior walked down the corridor to his own room, tiny in comparison with Lode’s, hardly more than a cupboard. Evidently, in pre-war days this room had been reserved for those obliged to sin on a budget. He felt dirty, physically dirty, after the long train journey, and when he looked into the small glass above the washbasin he saw that his face was covered in smuts. He washed as much of himself as he could reach without undressing, and then began searching through the filing cabinet. He’d made a list of a numbe
r of files that contained reports from Lionel Spragge, and it took him only a few moments to gather them together and dump them on his desk. He had an hour to read through them before Spragge arrived. Spragge had been reluctant to come to the Ministry at all, suggesting they should meet outside, at some pub or other, but Prior had wanted this first meeting to be on his own ground.
He’d read the reports several times already, so it was merely a matter of refreshing his memory. When he came to Beattie’s file, to Spragge’s reports on the Roper affair and then to his deposition, he read more slowly. After a while he looked up, puzzled by the sense of something unfamiliar in the room. He stared round him, but could see nothing different, and then he realized that the change was in himself. He had not been angry until now.
LIONEL ARTHUR MORTIMER SPRAGGE
on his oath saith as follows:
2 February 1917. I am employed at the Ministry of Munitions. I entered the employ of the Ministry on 1 July 1916. I have been engaged making certain inquiries concerning various organizations amongst others the Independent Labour Party and the No Conscription fellowship. I reported to Major Lode. He was the officer from whom I chiefly got my directions.
Between October and December 1916 I was sent to Liverpool to make inquiries concerning one Patrick MacDowell. He had been the leading organizer of the Sheffield strike in the Munitions factories. I told MacDowell I wanted to go to the Manchester area. MacDowell gave me a letter to give to Mrs Beatrice Roper. On the night of I think the 23 rd December I went to Mrs Roper’s shop, at 11 Tite Street, Salford, and gave her the letter. After reading the letter Mrs Roper agreed that I could stay with her and we shook hands very heartily indeed. She sat at one end of the table, and I sat next to her. There was another man staying in the house at the time who was introduced to me as Tommy Blenkinsop, a deserter. He did not come downstairs until later. Mrs Roper asked me about myself. I told her I had been refused exemption and that I had been on the run since September as a moral objector. I told her about being locked up in a detention centre and I think I told her something of the treatment I had received there. At that she said, ‘That is just like my William,’ and she got up and fetched a photograph from the dresser. It was a small photograph of her son, William Roper. As she was showing me the photograph she told me that before the war she had been active in the suffragettes and that she had burnt down a church. I think her exact words were, ‘You know about St Michael’s? We were nearly copped, but we bloody well did it.’ She laughed and said, ‘You should have seen the flames go up.’ She then said, ‘And that was not all we did.’ She told me she had been party to a plan to kill Mr Lloyd George, by inserting a curare-tipped nail through the sole of his boot in such a way that it would pierce the skin when he put his weight on the foot, causing instant lassitude followed by seizures. They had been planning to do this on the Isle of Wight where Mr Lloyd George was staying at that time. There was a waiter in his hotel sympathetic to the suffragette cause. I do not recollect the name of the hotel, or of the waiter. I asked her why the attempt had not succeeded. She replied, ‘The bloody, shitting, buggering old sod pissed off to France, didn’t he?’ Mrs Roper’s language was fairly good most of the time but when she spoke of Mr Lloyd George she used bad language. I then made diligent inquiries as to the nature of Mrs Roper’s attitude to Mr Lloyd George. She several times expressed the opinion that he ought to be killed. I then asked her whether there was anybody else who ought to be killed and she replied, ‘Yes, the other George, that poncing old git in the Palace, he’d not be missed.’