The Misadventures of Margaret Finch, page 14
‘You must regret that now.’
‘Perhaps I should, but I know I tried my best. I gave her money, yes, but I gave her my friendship too. Good counsel. References for jobs. I was like a guardian to her. I became the one she turned to when she was in trouble.’
‘Trouble?’
‘Unsuitable men,’ he says wearily, as if that’s the only kind of trouble there is. ‘She took up with a street performer. A strongman. Dixie Din he called himself. He threatened to smash her face in so I went and asked him, perfectly politely, to stay away.’
She suppresses the urge to laugh; can’t quite picture David-son’s diminutive frame squaring up to a strongman, then remembers his bravery in stepping in to save her on the night they first met. ‘What happened?’
‘He was very understanding. Went back to his wife and left Barbara alone after that. Just as well or I would have had to fight him.’ He is perfectly earnest. There is no hint of humour. ‘The truth was that I did everything in my power but she didn’t want to be helped. Kept taking up with the wrong sort. I got her various jobs but she wasn’t prepared to get up in the morning. She wanted easy money. And yes, for a time I was giving it to her. Paying for her lodgings, taking her to the theatre to break the habits she was in. My only regret is that I failed to do so.’
Margaret believes him, at least about his feeling of failure. But his story doesn’t explain the court’s verdict. ‘If that’s all, then why did the Church …?’
He stands again, picks up a carpet bag from the corner of the room, and sits back down with it on his lap. ‘She stayed overnight in my room,’ he says. ‘A fact I have never sought to hide or deny. When she had nowhere else to go, I let her stay with me. I was naïve. But I am not a complete fool. I would never have … I was paying for her … treatment …’
‘Treatment?’
He looks away and rummages in the bag. ‘For a disease … an intimate matter. A woman of her profession is …’
‘Oh.’
‘What would compel me to attempt to sin with a woman whom I knew to be infected? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s all in here.’ He hands her a large book, something like a photograph album. She opens it to find page after page of newspaper cuttings. Headlines, photographs; Harold posing outside court wearing a silk top hat, looking as carefree as though he had backed a winning horse; nothing like a man who stood to lose his position and his reputation.
‘And the waitresses?’ Margaret points to an article about him pestering staff in a Lyons Tearoom in Walbrook.
‘Yes. Exactly!’ She had meant it as a question but he seemed to infer some understanding on her part, suddenly standing and starting to pace around the room. ‘Exactly that. Accused of making a nuisance of myself because I left them generous tips. Gave them theatre tickets. Because I was vocal in my calls for better working conditions and better pay. Those girls deserved more and I wasn’t afraid to say so. And some had a real chance. Just like Barbara. They could have had a career on the stage. And I was in a position to help them. I know what directors are looking for. I have a good eye.’ He stops in front of her chair and leans down towards her. ‘Show me your teeth, Margaret,’ he says, raising his finger as if he has just been struck by inspiration.
‘My …?’ She can make no sense of what her teeth have to do with any of this. She must have misheard him.
‘Smile!’
She does as she is instructed, too confused to muster the words to question him.
‘Very good. Now open wide.’ He reaches forward and takes her chin in his hand. She cannot make sense of it. She knows that she should be feeling something. Horror probably. The word is there in her mind but not the sensation. She is alone with him and he is going to try to kiss her. Her mouth is frozen in a grimace. She can feel him pressing on her jaw to encourage it open.
‘What’s the matter?’ he says, looking genuinely bemused. ‘I was looking for fillings. That’s the kind of thing that can be picked up on certain camera angles, you see. Or on the front row of a show.’
‘That’s what you did to those waitresses?’
‘Naturally,’ he shows no signs of embarrassment. ‘I was happy to give them my professional opinion. A good set of teeth is vital.’ He smiles broadly to reveal his own and taps them with a finger-nail. ‘The Lord help any women who has a set like these! It would not have been right for me to offer encouragement without being confident they had the necessary qualities … I simply wanted to help.’ He falls silent then sits beside her again. ‘Margaret, do you ever feel that, despite your best intentions, people—’
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ They are both misunderstood. Both failures when it comes to knowing what should be obvious. She can understand how his single-mindedness got him into trouble; his determination to continue on a righteous path no matter the cost. He is an infuriating man, that she cannot deny, but she admires his resolve. In certain ways she wishes she were more like him herself. He shares her clarity of judgement and purpose, but he does not seem to fear censure or disapproval. Instead of striving to understand the unwritten rules, Margaret observes, he simply makes up his own.
20
First, they solve the puzzle of how to get him inside. With Margaret’s help, Harold climbs a stepladder, before lowering a chair, and then himself, into the glass case. Barely a few minutes later, the paying public begins to arrive. She can hear feet running up the stairs. The early arrivals bursting through the door, smug to be at the front of the queue. Anything can be turned into a competitive exercise, particularly by men, who will take any opportunity to be the first, the best (and even the worst if the top ranks are already taken).
During the course of the day, she records in her notebook the number of people who file past Harold in their tens, hundreds, then thousands. He busies himself combing through the transcripts from his trial. For a time, the glass of the tank becomes clouded, and he is barely visible behind swirls of smoke, which coil lazily from the air holes at the top. Margaret solves the problem by opening a window to the street outside to create some draw. Aside from these moments of activity, she remains largely unnoticed by the spectators, all eyes trained on Harold until they are moved along by the push of those piling in behind. They study him for an average of eight seconds, the majority apparently content just to say they have seen him.
However, on six occasions someone tries to cross the rope cordon. The first time, when a thick-set man starts to bang on the tank, Harold shrinks back in his seat and looks to Margaret for rescue. She stands to go for help and is surprised to find the action is sufficient to deter the spectator from hitting the glass again. It must have spooked him: a movement at the corner of his eye. He must have thought she was someone far bigger, someone with authority, someone who would have stood a chance of stopping him. He was mistaken on all counts, but she feels a sense of achievement nonetheless.
When it happens a second time, simply getting up from the chair is not enough. She doesn’t know what to say; doesn’t want to speak at all because she knows her voice will betray her fear. But she follows an instinct to protect Harold and stands silently in front of the tank to shield him from view until the spectator steps back. The room falls quiet. All eyes suddenly on her. And she stays perfectly still, holds her ground, considers the looks on the faces of the line of people, separated from her only by a line of rope. She is not sure what their expressions mean. But no one is laughing.
By the afternoon she is polite but firm in her regular requests for onlookers to ‘keep moving please’ or ‘look but don’t touch’, and receives the occasional ‘yes, miss’ in reply. Perhaps it is the chair she is sitting in. Perhaps it endows her with an official role in their eyes. But no one seems to question that she has the authority to keep things running smoothly. And though the bare wood seat becomes very uncomfortable within only a few hours, there are short breaks when she is required to step outside and lock the door behind her so that Harold can make himself more comfortable (she does not ask for the details). She has five minutes to use the privy and eat one of the sandwiches she has brought in her bag. It wouldn’t feel right to take refreshments in front of a fasting man, but perhaps he is sneaking food when she leaves the room. She wouldn’t be surprised. She used to be so sure of what was right and what was wrong but she can no longer say who is exploiting who. Is he persuading people to part with their money to see a sham spectacle, or is he being drawn into making a spectacle of himself to feed a need in them?
A total of 7,681 people come. She calculates that they have paid just over £384 in admission. Only five make unpleasant remarks (not all who try to cross the rope are unkind) and only 162 look at him with what she considers to be obvious disapproval.
It is 9 p.m. when the shift finally comes to an end. Harold invites her to stay on after the last spectator files past. He wants to hear about her findings, what she plans to write in her report, but she is desperate to be alone, and more interested in the transcripts he has been reading than in sharing her notes with him. He does not argue when she suggests that she take his newspaper cuttings with her: ‘I’m good at spotting things that other people miss.’
With the album tucked under her arm, she follows the arrows to an exit onto the road outside. She should head straight to her lodgings to get some sleep but she feels so full of energy that she is agitated, her skin itching, legs desperate to take some exercise. Besides, she finally has something worth filing, data that her fellow researchers could only hope to record. Her absence can’t have passed unnoticed by the team. Since she embarrassed herself by falling asleep in James’s chair she has avoided going to HQ at all, certain that he would be relieved to be spared the awkwardness of seeing her. But at this time of night the offices should be empty – there’s a higher probability anyway. She can’t stay away for ever or she will lose her job.
The street is dark. She stands and counts the doorways until she can identify HQ, hidden in shadow. No chink of light seeping through any cracks between its curtains. Deciding she is safe to go on, she continues down the road and up the path, the glass above the front door as black as the painted step below it. She finds the key in its hiding place and lets herself in, standing still in the hallway and straining her ears for any sound of movement from the rooms upstairs. It’s still possible that one of the researchers has brought a woman back, but the silence satisfies her that she really is alone.
Setting to work under a desk lamp in her usual spot upstairs, she chooses not to turn on the main light in case it should give her away. Being here after hours alone makes her heart beat faster. Though she has never been told specifically that she should stick to particular office hours, she is not sure that she should be in the building so late. There’s a thrill to working in the darkness. She always adheres so strictly to the rules, takes refuge in boundaries and regulations, but it feels good to cross a line. Even a line so faintly sketched that she is not certain it exists at all.
With no distractions and no one to disturb her, the report should write itself, but she can’t settle to it. Halfway down the first page, she makes a mistake. It’s something she could cross out and correct but she rips it out of the typewriter, crushes it into a ball and begins again. She wants this to be perfect. But she finds herself unable to resist the urge to open the album of newspaper cuttings.
The reports grow in size, inch after inch stretching out along the length of the page then curling into the columns beside; paragraph after paragraph snaking around photographs of Harold, and Barbara, the young woman he was accused of associating with. And like serpents they twist and turn back upon themselves, swallowing their own tails. So that, just when Margaret thinks she knows what kind of story she is reading, she is sent back to the beginning of an altogether different one. One minute, a parable with Harold the hero: the Prostitutes’ Padre who devoted his life to helping unfortunate women escape from vice. The next, a bestiary of a predator who preyed on young girls in God’s name. ‘The defendant has, during the last five years, been guilty of an immoral habit in that he habitually associated himself with women of a loose character for immoral purposes.’ Habitually. Deliberately. Systematically. Meeting these women in bed-sitting rooms at all hours of the day and night. A wolf disguised as the lamb of God. What a story these reporters have found; men unsure whether to condemn or congratulate the audacity of such behaviour; men unwilling to let the mystery be solved either way. In Harold they have two stories in one and, even as they report the moment that the judge found him guilty on all four counts, they keep both possibilities alive: the saint and the sinner. Both just as compelling. Just as plausible. And that’s what makes Margaret so frustrated. Because he can’t be both. He is either guilty of the things he was accused of, guilty of inappropriate relations with women he purported to save, or he is not. There is one true story and one that is false. And, having come to know him, she can’t help but believe in his innocence.
She studies the speculation and finds very few facts. From what she can see, the trial was essentially Harold’s word against Barbara’s. He was charged under the Clergy Discipline Act of 1892 on four counts. It is only now that she realises he was tried not in a criminal court but at an ecclesiastical hearing: the prosecution and defence making cases directly to a judge, without a jury. There was testimony from some of the waitresses he allegedly pestered, but she has seen firsthand that, though inappropriate, his behaviour isn’t lascivious. And there is one detail that she finds particularly compelling: ‘Mr Davidson helped upwards of 500 girls but only one gave evidence against him.’ Just one. If he really was the sort of man that couldn’t control his urges, surely more would have complained?
His own suspicion that he had been the subject of surveillance by the Church is borne out by the reports, as well as his assertion that Barbara was given alcohol and money by private investigators. In fact, another woman, Rose Ellis, said she’d been persuaded to make unjust claims about him by the temptation of 40 shillings from a detective. Davidson confided that he set out to do one thing, only to be accused of another. Margaret concludes, from what she has read, that the Church’s misunderstanding was wilful, its manipulation deliberate. That its intention was to attribute a far more sinister motive to his actions.
It’s 2 a.m. before she has written what she came to and, though there is certainly room for improvement, she accepts that she will achieve nothing more tonight. At this moment she feels she could rest her head on the desk and fall asleep right there, too weary to make it back to her lodgings. But experience tells her that as soon as she gets into bed, her thoughts will sabotage any chance of rest.
Packing away her notebook in her bag, she arranges her typed sheets in a file, places them in the drawer she has been assigned in a tallboy in the corner, and switches off the lamp. There are no windows above the staircase to cast moonlight onto her path downstairs and she decides it would be reckless to attempt the descent in total darkness. Turning on the landing light, just long enough to make her way down, will do no harm. But the effect is glaring. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust and she sees her name on the noticeboard on the wall. It is here that the latest missives from London are posted (new areas of research or successes in other arms of the project); it is here that the researchers pin messages which may prove useful to another’s project.
Bill – met bare knuckle boxer who may be able to get you into a fight. Drinks in the Fisherman’s most evenings. Goes by the name of Stan. I can introduce you if you prefer.
– George
Joseph – betting ring operating out of the back of the fruit stall in Talbot Square. Worth making a note of how many men ask the seller where he ships his bananas in from. Seems to be a code of some sort. – Bill
Margaret doesn’t leave messages for her colleagues on the principle that they do not do so for her. But she finds three pieces of folded paper with her name on.
Dear Margaret,
I do hope you are feeling better. I would be grateful if you would pop in and see me.
James
Dear Margaret,
Perhaps we keep missing each other. Do come in during office hours. As you know, I am usually here. James
Margaret,
I have been reluctant to trouble you. However, it is important that we discuss your absence of late. Please come to HQ at your earliest opportunity or, if you are unable to do so, send word and I shall visit you at your lodgings. James
21
Margaret has no choice, not if she wants to have a hope of keeping her job. She has to go in and face James. It may be too late, of course. It would be just like him to explain, at great length, why he has to let her go. He would put himself through the ordeal, just to spare her the hurt of receiving the news by letter. What makes it worse is the knowledge that she wouldn’t do the same for him, wouldn’t be able to cope with the awkwardness.
She lay in bed last night and played the conversation in her head. It was only with the help of medicine that she was able to fall into a fitful sleep; feeling as though her head was slipping underwater, waking up gasping for breath as she was jolted back to the surface. She has started to visit other chemists’ shops now, has a route she takes to buy a bottle from each. She is careful to keep a note of which she has visited and when, so that she does not draw attention to herself; transferring the top layer of morphine straight into her hip flask and throwing the bottle and the kaolin away in a rubbish bin on the street, so that no one will hear glass chinking in her bag. It is no worse than drinking alcohol. In fact, one could make the strong argument it is better. She is nothing like the drunks she sees on the seafront benches, the young lads who fight and swear in the streets, or the women who let themselves be taken advantage of. Margaret drinks a little but often, taking the occasional sip to quell the sickness that is constantly creeping into her throat, and to calm her pounding heart. To make her better. That’s what medicine does. And goodness knows she needs a little help this morning. She takes a dose before she leaves her lodgings and another just before she turns into Shetland Road.
