So I played the role of obedient wife and waited for my husband to return every day. Quite literally, I waited for the man I married to return. But, instead, it was this other Thomas, the one with the cold eyes and distant nature, who came back home, on occasion, if only to give the house a sense of purpose. The Thomas who adored me, who begged to touch me and lusted after me like a lovestruck hero, had disappeared – probably the minute we boarded the train back from our Brighton honeymoon. This new man was unknown.
When he did come home, he barely spoke, least of all to me. He did converse with Mrs Wiggs, whose ears were conditioned to sense his footsteps on the pavement long before he reached the door, as if she were a loyal dog. I refused to race her for his attention. When he and I found each other in the same room, I would make efforts to start a conversation and be bright and cheerful, but he was always distracted and often ignored me. The black lashes and charming humour, I learned, were reserved for those with whom he was less well acquainted. I became another piece of furniture lying dormant about the house, waiting to be made use of. And use me he did.
We had flown into bed in our first few days as husband and wife, when all our built-up desire was released in a furious passion. Now, though, all that was left was frustration and anger. I wasn’t sure if it was his size or the rough texture of his skin that felt so strange, but I explained it away: I was unfamiliar with men and I knew no better. Thomas had an insidious need to control events in the bedroom, quite beyond what I’d anticipated in a dominating male. I can only describe it as an urge that couldn’t be satisfied. Rapidly, it went from us pleasuring each other to his entertainment being the only concern. It became a duty that had to be executed; my only one, really. I began to dread hearing his footsteps coming down from the attic study, because that was the only reason he bothered to seek me out. My stomach lurched every time. I became anxious before each performance.
My body stopped responding through sheer nerves. I had to imagine he was somebody else. He spent little time on me, only pushed and pulled me in different directions, paying no heed if I complained I didn’t like it. I became very sick of the press of his hand on the back of my head, of me gagging and him laughing. He issued orders as if he were leading an operation. I joined him in the brandy and drops and soon I was taking them alone in anticipation of him coming down the stairs. It was easier to imagine he was someone else when edges were blurred. He liked to make me yelp or wince in pain and then ridicule me. He accused me of being lazy, of being a stuck-up prude, of being no more fun than nailing a plank. He told me what to do and when, and how to do it. Make more noise! Not that noise – it’s as if you’re a corpse. At least act like you’re enjoying it.
He squeezed my throat until I couldn’t breathe. He enjoyed the sensation of me fighting him, I think. I didn’t know what he liked. I did not try to understand it. When I told him it hurt, he was dismissive and said that he was only playing. I was oversensitive. I was dramatic. I was overreacting, as usual. I assumed this was how all husbands were.
*
On a rainy Sunday in the middle of August we attended a hospital benefit. The weather was strange: dark the whole day, like dusk on the cusp of a storm, even in the morning.
I had been to an event like this once before with Thomas, but this would be the last I would attend with him. He may have gone to others after that, I don’t know, but he didn’t take me. I understood why: I was a terrible conversationalist, had no family to speak about, and no estates in Surrey, trips to the theatre or friends getting married to discuss. I could talk about the biggest goitre I had ever seen, what babies with congenital syphilis looked like, and how every nurse dreaded assisting an inexperienced surgeon for fear he’d faint on his first amputation, but these were not deemed suitable topics for polite conversation. I found myself on the fringes, forever wondering how to find a way in. Thomas watched me, shaking his head, as he talked with his peers, one of whom was Dr Lovett, the man from my wedding, with whom I’d still not had the pleasure of becoming familiar. Though I smiled and waved when I saw him, felt his face friendly compared to the rest, he simply nodded and continued his conversation. I felt so conspicuously tall; the burning maypole. Parties were things to be endured, like wet weather and stomach aches, and that day I suffered all three.
It was an elaborate house on the edge of Holland Park in Kensington and belonged to one of the governors of the hospital. I would never have been invited as a nurse. The reed-thin hostess with silver hair explained how Kensington used to be a small village but now felt positively part of the city, with the railway so near and the omnibuses flying around like cannonballs. When she asked where I came from, I hesitated and almost said Whitechapel. I opened and closed my mouth like a fish. She looked at Thomas, who told her I came from Reading, then ushered me away.
As he walked past, I heard her whisper to him, ‘Can she speak English?’
Thomas smiled and said how absolutely astute of her, how clever she must be, for, yes, my parents were Hungarian and had emigrated; they were merchants. She seemed pleased with this. Something about me had told her as much, she said, although she’d guessed me to be Greek or French.
I was indeed foreign. I came from the invisible class, the non-existent, and she couldn’t even see it when presented to her on a platter.
In better weather we could have made use of the garden, but it rained all day, so we were trapped inside, hemmed in like poor people. Gentlemen bumped shoulders with each other, and the beads on ladies’ dresses caught as they passed. The rain beat like stones against the windows and a string quartet gallantly played something even I knew was Beethoven. The chaotic rhythm on the glass, the furious way the musicians attacked their instruments, and the continual jostling and bumping as if we were sheep queuing at an abattoir made me hot and nauseous. I tried to concentrate on the conversation of the group next to me and take deep breaths.
A grey-whiskered man was holding court, attended to by a cluster of brightly dressed elderly ladies and gentlemen who had all been leached of the colour of youth: white skin, milky eyes and silver hair. The man spoke his opinions with great confidence, as if they were indisputable facts. ‘The people who inhabit that part of London,’ he declared, ‘acquire a taste for thieving and violence when still in their mothers’ arms. You cannot remove criminality any more than you can extract bad breeding from a dog.’
His audience nodded in agreement.
‘Well, they are different, are they not? You only have to look at them. They are short and have terrible complexions. They are simply not well bred,’ said a woman who appeared to be missing a chin, her lower jaw an apathetic bridge to her neck. All those generations of good breeding had bred out the ability to fold a tablecloth, but then if you never had to fold your own, what use was a chin?
The better classes tended to talk of money as if there was a finite amount of it, as if it were a cake. They had their slice and didn’t want to part with it. But they kept adding extra slices to their plate, using their first portion to justify why they were entitled to a second, and a third. Before long, the original cake was twice the size – a celebration cake! what a triumph to be British! – and yet the rest of us were still waiting obediently for a single piece.
I wanted to interrupt, inform them that gentlefolk were only taller because they were better fed, that bad skin could be fixed with good food, fresh air and decent hygiene. I wanted to talk to them about the children who left the hospital in better condition than when they were admitted but who would certainly get sick and malnourished again, their parents being too poor to cover the rent and feed them. But I didn’t. I was a coward. I disliked myself. I had been disgusted by the patients and happy to marry upwards myself, yet here I was, piously offended by the wealthy and their assumptions that their status was due to their innate superiority and nothing at all to do with luck, or greed, or theft. All this as I drank wine and ate creamed sweetbreads and cold boned turkey, served to me by a waiter who heard everything and kept his eyes nailed to the floor.
The group went on to discuss the murder of Martha Tabram.
‘Have you heard, my dears, that there were three cases of infanticide and another murder in Whitechapel this week alone!’
‘Indeed. But the latter was a straightforward case, was it not? The man beat his wife to death with his fists, I understand. Nothing like as dramatic as that poor unfortunate found cut to pieces in a stairwell.’
The ladies gasped into their silk handkerchiefs and leaned more closely into the conversation. They appeared thrilled, overtaken with a macabre fervour.
There followed theatrical descriptions of the ‘howling wilderness’ of the East End and the savages that lived in its criminal corners. How the subversive Jews made blood sacrifices and were conspiring to drive down wages and undercut English tradesmen.
‘There are far too many foreigners coming in. It’s like a flood!’ a portly gentleman opined. ‘They will overrun us all.’
‘And the socialists will drag us into the middle of Trafalgar Square and guillotine us. Let us not forget the poor French.’
‘And the whores! What shall we do with all the whores? Why can they not keep their skirts down? Those women are not women at all. They infect married men and send diseases into good, middle-class homes. Someone should stop them. No wonder they end up murdered and disembowelled in stairwells. Why do they not stay at home?’
My stays felt as if they were shrinking, pulling tighter and tighter, and I thought my ribs would crack. The press of the room was preventing me from taking my breaths deep down into the bottom of my lungs. I needed air. I was scared I would have another experience like I had when Emma Smith was brought in. There was a thunderstorm in my chest. I had to get out. I pushed through the crowds, apologising and trying not to look at the disgruntled faces as I shoved past them. I put a hand on the French doors, and the expressionless waiter approached.
‘Madam, it’s raining.’
‘I know,’ I said, and pushed open the doors and ran out into the cold blue rain. The chill shocked my skin and calmed me down.
I must have stood there one, maybe two minutes when Thomas called out.
‘Susannah! What are you doing? Get back in here at once.’
He was in the doorway, the waiter beside him. One angry face, one bemused. My hair stuck to my cheeks, dripping wet. Pallid faces stared back at me as if I had gone mad.
In the cab on the way home, Thomas lost no time telling me how humiliated he was.
‘I told a few choice people who won’t be able to stop themselves from gossiping that you have been in despair ever since you… are no longer… You understand. It was an odd display, Susannah. You are growing stranger by the day. I think perhaps you are unwell.’
I said nothing, but there it was again: unwell.
After that, Thomas talked incessantly of me seeing a doctor. He kept suggesting there was something wrong with me, that I was depressed and listless. He urged me to make an appointment with his friend, Dr Lovett. When I insisted that there had been no child to lose, for it had been too early to tell and I’d been foolish to speak of it, he told me I was in denial. I countered that I was only being scientific, to which he called me cold and unfeeling, saying it was not natural for a woman to say such things about her own child. I began to doubt myself. His obsession with finding a mechanical error with my body made me responsible for everything, so I stopped arguing; everything I said only seemed to prove his theory anyway. It dawned on me this was the most attention I’d had from Thomas in weeks. He appeared to take pleasure in talking about my insides as if they were defective, as if I was a rusty old machine that could be taken apart, assessed and reassembled, this time with younger parts.
At the end of August, when I could no longer avoid it, I did see a doctor, but I made damn sure to pick my own.