‘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 looked 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?’