Reputation Read online

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  To Ella and Anna

  O! I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal

  Part of myself, and what remains is bestial.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  Othello, act II, scene III

  I am Duchess of Malfi still.

  JOHN WEBSTER,

  The Duchess of Malfi, act IV, scene II

  Prologue 8 December 2021

  The body lay at the bottom of the stairs. An untidy heap in this house that had been gentrified beyond all recognition. A jumble of clothes just waiting to be tidied away. His trouser leg had ridden up, and his ankle glowed under the beam of my iPhone’s torch. I couldn’t bear to look at his face: turned away as if refusing to acknowledge that something like this could have happened to him.

  There was no banister at the top of the stairs: just sleek white walls in keeping with the shiny oak steps, and the halogen spots that, once switched on, would reveal just how he had fallen. I touched the wall, pressing hard to gain traction; conscious of the need to ground myself, to stop myself from beginning to sway. My heart was ricocheting, but my mind spiralled too.

  Why was he here? How did this happen?

  More than anything: had he felt much pain?

  For a sliver of time, so brief I later refused to acknowledge it, I allowed myself to imagine that he had.

  PART ONE

  One 11 September 2021

  EMMA

  Looking back, it was the interview in the Guardian Weekend that started everything. Or rather, the fact I was on the cover. Exquisitely photographed, I looked more like an Oscar-nominated actress than a Labour MP.

  It was hard not to be seduced by it all. The designer trouser suit elongated my legs, as did the suede heels: something I resisted at first because I always wore flats – pristine Stan Smiths, or brogues if I felt the need to appear more formal. But heels connoted power, according to the stylist, and it was a trope I chose to accept in that one reckless moment (the first of several). In any case, I hoped the heels were balanced out by the message on the crisp white T-shirt: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. I’d seen no reason not to scream this sentiment from the rooftops: it was something I vehemently believed. Only, when I saw myself on the front cover – with that defiant slash of red lipstick, my armour against a hostile world, and my thick bob blow-dried into a dark halo – I hardly recognised myself. I’d morphed into someone else, entirely. Sex and power: that was the not-so-subtle subtext of that photo.

  Sex, power, and unequivocal ambition.

  Even before the publication, I’d felt uneasy.

  ‘Crikey!’ I said, when Dan, the photographer, showed me a couple of images through the preview screen on the back of his camera. They were tiny – 6 cm by 4 – and yet they were arresting. The back of my neck prickled. ‘I look pretty formidable,’ I said.

  ‘You look strong,’ Esther Enfield, the paper’s newly appointed political editor, reassured me. ‘Strong and determined. It fits the interview. Illustrates what you were saying perfectly. You didn’t pussyfoot around with your message, and neither does this.’

  ‘I don’t know. Can I see it again?’ I leant towards Dan, suddenly conscious of his physicality: the fact he towered over me; was long-limbed and energetic, like a teenager oozing testosterone though he must have been in his early thirties. His breath smelt of artisan coffee.

  ‘You look great.’ He was brisk and I sensed his eagerness to get on.

  ‘I just look a bit… hard?’ I lingered on a shot of me in a butter-soft black leather jacket, the collar framing my unsmiling face. He’d captured a side to me I didn’t like to acknowledge. Was I really as ruthless as he’d made me appear?

  Esther shrugged, which made me feel foolish. In her mid-forties, like me, she knew what she was talking about and had sound instincts. I was a good contact – we’d lunched several times and had been discussing the possibility of this interview for several weeks. Besides, this was the Guardian, not the Daily Mail.

  ‘We won’t stitch you up, I promise.’ She seemed to read my mind, and then she gave me a proper, warm smile. And so, because this was my first national newspaper feature; because I didn’t want to look weak; because I was flattered, I suppose, that the Guardian thought me sufficiently interesting to put me on their magazine’s front cover, I let myself be swayed by her arguments. I let myself believe what I wanted to believe.

  Besides, as Esther said, the photo would be balanced by what was inside: a sharp attack on the government’s austerity measures, apparent in my Portsmouth South constituency where the need for food banks had proliferated in the last couple of years; a critique of my party leader, Harry Godwin, as ‘ineffective and prone to self-indulgence’; and details of my private members bill calling for anonymity for victims of revenge porn – the reason I’d agreed to this piece. It was a serious interview, worth doing, despite knowing it would irritate more established colleagues, and the photos would be seen through this lens.

  ‘It’s a fantastic shot,’ Dan, stubbled and artfully dishevelled, said. Later, I wondered if this was the reason I caved in so easily, this simple flattery from a younger man who had coaxed me into being photographed like this. ‘Just a couple more; head up; that’s it. That’s perfect. Sweet.’ Was I subliminally so desperate for male admiration? At forty-four, so conscious of becoming sexually invisible that, despite everything I stood for, I let myself be flattered by and play up to his uncompromisingly male gaze?

  ‘OK. Let’s go for it,’ I told Esther. ‘As you say: no point pussyfooting around.’

  ‘Absolutely. Honestly, the pics are arresting, and it’s precisely because of this that readers will spend time over this interview, and your colleagues will have to listen to what you say.’

  And so I quashed my critical inner voice: the one that used the waspish tones of my late grandmother, with a smattering of my ex-husband David’s caution, and that always gathered in volume and intensity until I felt like shaking my head to be rid of it.

  Pride comes before a fall.

  Of course, later I would regret this, bitterly, deeply, because that cover shot would be used repeatedly: the stock image that would accompany every Emma Webster story from that moment on. It would be the picture used when I was arrested, when I was charged, when the trial began. And this would rankle because, far from capturing the true me, it was a brittle, knowing version: red lips slightly parted in a way that couldn’t fail to seem distinctly sexual; gaze defiant; a clear, almost brazen challenge in what the article would describe as my ‘limpid, dark eyes’. A far cry from how I thought of myself, or who I’d ever been: an A-level history teacher at South Hampshire College; Flora’s mum; or a Labour backbencher who tried so very hard to serve her constituents while campaigning on feminist issues more generally.

  A picture paints a thousand words. And yet this one reduced me to nothing more than a glamorous mugshot: my challenge to the camera not so different from the insolent expression captured in every custody photo snapped by the police.

  Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards get you down. I had an old T-shirt with that message. Perhaps I should have suggested to the stylist that I wear it?

  It would have been incendiary, of course. A clear two fingers to the trolls, the media, the critics in my own party – let alone my political opponents – who, I suspected, were poised, even then, to see me s
tumble.

  Had I known what would happen, I might have put it straight on.

  Two 11 September 2021

  EMMA

  FiremanFred @suckmycock

  WTF! Look at the publicity whore @emmawebsterMP. A £450 leather jacket while hard-working folk r going to food banks.

  Richard M @BigBob699

  Get back to work, love and remember who pays your wages.

  FiremanFred @suckmycock

  Put it away, luv. No one’s going to shag u.

  Dick Penny @EnglandRules

  Shag her? Wouldn’t touch that cunt if she was the last woman standing.

  Richard M @BigBob699

  Agreed. Wouldn’t even rape her. What a fucking disgrace.

  The backlash to the interview was immediate. 7am on a Saturday morning and my Twitter feed was already clogged with notifications. The need to check was stupid but compulsive. Vanity? Validation? A foolish, fleeting hope that my fears wouldn’t be realised, and I would find overwhelming support?

  I tended to think of the trolls as sad little men, whipping each other into an irate frenzy as they cowered in their basements. But then it was just one step away from imagining them masturbating furiously and I had to remove them from their subterranean setting and see them as upstanding members of the community, instead. The type of men who had spent their entire careers in positions of authority. Retired policemen or headmasters, perhaps. Men who would otherwise be tending to their allotments, or fundraising for local charities; who, perhaps, had wives and daughters. (Though I wondered how someone could hurl highly sexualised abuse at me and then behave civilly to their family. Perhaps the truth was, they didn’t.) I tried not to think of them as irredeemably bad.

  It helped to remind myself that each could be responsible for hundreds of the notifications. That @borisshagger was a bot, for instance – I’d checked: he had no followers and a grey egg as an avatar; @BrexitBill123 and @TrumpRules4Eva were the same. So it wasn’t that thousands of people thought I was un-rapeable: just that a few misogynists voiced it from numerous accounts. The interactions needled me, though, because while one person could have numerous accounts – multiple alter egos answering each other to create the effect of a pile-on – several people still thought this with a venomous intensity. Keyboard warriors, they called themselves. Such a pathetic term. Laughing at them, even if the laughter was hollow, helped a little – though it did nothing to unpick the knot in my stomach.

  What worried me – besides the fact I might be missing cries for help from constituents – was that the volume meant I couldn’t see the real threats. My fear was that there would be something that should be acted on – a rape or a death threat – buried deep in the torrent of bile. Then there was the frustration that this overwhelming hatred could remain unchecked. Rape threats made on Twitter, or more usually in emails, could be referred to the police. But negative claims – ‘I wouldn’t rape her if she was the last woman on earth’ – didn’t contravene any law. Neither Hampshire Police nor the Met could act on a claim I was un-rapeable. Even if the open threat of rape was hiding in full sight.

  I looked at the cover again, as I stood in the kitchen of my Portsmouth home. This unfamiliar version of Emma Webster mocked me: her formidable expression, her way of holding herself, even her elegantly cut suit was so at odds with me in my furry dressing gown, my eyes still sticky with sleep. I couldn’t relate to her and yet I felt a certain, shameful pride. I’d never thought I could look that fierce. And it wasn’t just that. I looked hot, as Flora’s best friend Leah might say. Should I want to look like this? Wasn’t it anathema to everything I was trying to teach Flora: the idea that you could make an impression, as a woman, without being sexualised? The appearance of strength was good but the eroticisation of it? Surely not. Young feminists might celebrate their hotness, but I didn’t think of myself like that. I hadn’t had sex for four years. Most of the time I barely thought of myself as sexual. And yet, here I was.

  On autopilot, I flicked through more messages. For many, it was my attack on my party leader that was most incendiary. Maybe describing him as ‘lazy, and too reliant on a sycophantic coterie of hardliners’ was reckless, though it was only what many of us in the parliamentary party believed. The sooner Harry kicks her out of the party, the better, said @Laboursympathiser, and there were several others in this vein – almost a relief after the tweets that criticised my appearance then described quite how they’d like to punish me. I let the terms flow over me, the hard c’s and t’s, the b’s and h’s, the softer but insidious p’s and y’s, telling myself none of it meant anything. Sticks and stones and all that.

  An early frost had coated my small garden, turning each blade of grass into a small, hard spear, and I tried to imagine being similarly protected. A line from the text popped out: Close colleagues say she’s focused and hard-working but somewhat humourless. Who on earth thought that? Then I looked at the photos, again: particularly the one of me perched on the edge of a chair, back ramrod straight, my expression unsmiling; my expression not just formidable but aloof. I’d thought I’d looked serious; realised, too late, that I just looked as if I took myself seriously (a cardinal sin for a woman). Or, worse, too seriously. I didn’t look like the sort of woman you’d confide in; the sort of woman you’d gravitate towards at a party; the sort of woman with whom you’d want to share a glass of wine, a hug or a joke.

  I poured myself the remains of the coffee from the pot on the hob and sipped the thick dark liquid; turned my phone face down on the counter. Let it go, the Disney refrain that Flora had once listened to incessantly, filled my head. Let it go. The 300-odd emails I received a day were bad enough, let alone the WhatsApp messages and texts from supportive – and, increasingly frequently, unsupportive – colleagues. I couldn’t contend with any more electronic noise, let alone this barrage of Twitter abuse. More coffee, that’s what I needed. I drained the dregs and turned my phone to silent, but not before reading a kind message from Claire, the younger of the two female MPs I shared a house with during the week, in London. (Julia, our other housemate, had been conspicuous in her silence.) Ignore the bastards.

  ‘You shouldn’t keep looking at your phone. Isn’t that what you tell me?’

  Flora had sidled up behind me, quiet as a cat. Her yawn was feline, too: wide and luxurious.

  ‘Hello darling.’ The dull despair that had weighed me down since I’d woken wired, just after five-thirty, eased as I saw my daughter. ‘Some breakfast?’

  ‘I’ll get it.’ She went to the fridge and pulled out some milk.

  I wanted to slip an arm around her slight waist, to drop a kiss on her pimpled forehead, but my fourteen-year-old had grown as tall as me in the past few months, and with this new height had come a new reserve.

  ‘Sleep well?’

  She shrugged, too tired to answer, or maybe she thought it an unnecessary question. She’d been sleeping badly: finding it hard to drop off, and often waking with dark shadows beneath her eyes.

  ‘Is that the interview?’

  She was looking at the magazine cover and pulled it closer, her index finger hovering over my image.

  ‘What do you think?’ My breath was caught high in my chest.

  ‘It doesn’t look like you.’

  ‘It doesn’t, does it?’

  ‘Have they airbrushed you or something?’

  ‘No.’ I half-laughed with relief: thank God she didn’t see this as the real me.

  ‘You look good,’ she said, at last, as if she knew this was the answer she should give. Like an old scab, I longed to pick it; to dislodge it; to find the potentially painful truth. Obviously, I resisted and moved the magazine to one side, signalling that it was something we didn’t need to discuss further. I wiped the surface briskly, vaguely dissatisfied.

  Flora poured a glass of milk and filled a bowl with Cheerios which she ate dry. Better not tell her to eat properly: she was particularly prickly at the moment. Then she draped herself over a bar stool,
her long T-shirt swamping her slight frame. Despite her new height of five foot eight, there were still hints of a little girl. Her features had been softened by sleep, and her cheeks were flushed in contrast to her general paleness. ‘You’re an English rose,’ I frequently told her. ‘I burn,’ she always replied – and yes, her freckled skin would turn an angry red if she missed a patch of suntan lotion; a burn that would feel like a rebuke because it was my job to protect my redhaired child from the sun, even if Flora hated me to fuss. She scooped her hair behind her ears and stared at the back of the cereal packet. Then she scowled, revealing a flash of necessary, ugly metal, and I felt helpless. Something was wrong, and I didn’t know how to make it better.

  I started asking her about her plans for the day. We agreed I’d pick up a forgotten PE kit from her father’s, but then she slipped into silence.

  ‘Did you hear what I said, Flo?’

  She blinked through strawberry blonde lashes.

  ‘I’ve a constituency meeting this morning. I should be home by one-thirty. Do you want to stay here, or shall I drop you in town?’

  ‘Here’s fine. I’ll get my homework done.’ She took her bowl and put it by the side of the sink, then finished her glass of milk.

  ‘Good girl. I’ll be back by lunchtime.’ As ever, I felt I had to make amends for working, though I did every Saturday. ‘I’ll get something nice for us to eat.’

  * * *

  The Saturday surgery, where members of the public came to complain about issues ranging from applying for Universal Credit, to cancelled benefits, to bin collections to the current state of politics, was held in a primary school in one of the more deprived parts of my constituency. Paint peeled from window frames that couldn’t be opened and the displays of children’s self-portraits barely masked the chipped skirting and scuffed walls.