Old Baggage

BENDING TO FASTEN her shoes had left The Flea a little short of breath. She sat at the dressing table and rubbed cold cream into her hands and watched the morning light slide round the curtains; a bird was singing in the ivy, though she’d never been able to tell one birdsong from another – ‘A goldfinch,’ Mattie would announce, cocking an ear to an indistinguishable twittering. ‘Surely you can hear the sweesweesweeswee?’

This song, though, seemed particularly distinctive, reminiscent of a street-corner fiddler tuning up, each line repeated with an identical flourish. Or perhaps it was simply that she had never properly listened before; there had always been reports to write and to read, buses to catch, appointments to meet, lists to be compiled, tasks completed and tasks begun. And now that she could no longer work, there was both plenty of time, and not enough.

Mattie listened for perhaps half a second. ‘That’s the wise thrush,’ she said. ‘He sings each song twice over, lest you think he could never recapture that first, fine, careless rapture. Now, I’m boiling you an egg. Would you like your breakfast brought up here?’

‘Norwich,’ said Mattie, pre-empting her. ‘I imagine it’s from Roberta. Oh, and there was a note from Aileen as well, addressed to both of us, though I’m surprised the postman could read it without recourse to a cryptographer. I’m afraid she can’t come after all.’

‘I imagine that’s either the butcher or the baker,’ said Mattie. ‘The order from the candlestick-maker isn’t due for a couple of days. You don’t have to laugh,’ she added over her shoulder, heading for the stairs.

The Flea opened the envelope and withdrew a card that flashed as it caught the morning sun, the broad, gold ‘X’ on the front surrounded by hand-painted garlands in purple, green and white.

TO MISS FLORENCE LEE

THE LONG OVERDUE GIFT OF

A VOTE!

Inside, Roberta had written, ‘Happy Polling Day,’ and signed it from the whole family, adding, ‘Sorry I can’t come for the party, but do come and see us – I will drive down and collect you!’

As if on cue, a motor-car hooted outside, and there was the sound of raised voices. The Flea stood up, her heart hopping a beat or two before pattering back into its usual rhythm. ‘You have some medical knowledge, of course,’ the physician had said, ‘so I shan’t need to use the usual lay analogies of water pipes and village pumps. Your mitral valve has been damaged by rheumatic fever and you have resulting atrial dilatation,’ – but all the same, she couldn’t help but think of her heart as a faulty clockwork bird, the sort that pecked on the spot when wound up but which faltered if tipped or turned. And slowly, inevitably, ran down.

‘Was it the fever you caught from that baby?’ Mattie had asked. ‘The one you carried halfway across London.’

‘But it can be treated, presumably?’ It was odd how firmly Mattie, never ill herself, trusted in the efficacy of medicine.

‘Treated to a certain extent, but not cured.’ She rattled with pills, but every month an ordinary walk seemed a little more effortful, as if the streets of London were slowly tilting upwards.

‘Give me a chance! What’s your bloody hurry?’ someone was shouting. The Flea parted the curtains and saw a large vehicle with a loudspeaker bolted to its roof, and a brace of Unionist posters in the window; it was being driven by a young woman, while another was gesturing from the passenger seat at the butcher’s boy as he slowly wheeled his bicycle through the ruts towards the Wimbournes’ house.

‘I think they’ve taken a wrong turn,’ shouted Mattie from the front hall. ‘Unless there’s been a sudden surge in the squirrel vote.’

Every newspaper article was calling it ‘The Flapper Election’, and certainly almost every canvasser who had called at the Mousehole had been young and female. ‘We know that politics can seem awfully dull and complicated for us ladies, but we’ve come to talk to you about the Liberal Party,’ one innocent had chirruped. The Flea, seated in the drawing room, had caught only the odd word of the subsequent conversation, but afterwards Mattie looked as if she had just won a hundred-yard dash against all-comers, and they had received no further visits from the Liberals.

The Flea herself had answered the door to George Balfour, the sitting Conservative and Unionist MP, and had heard herself say, ‘Not today, thank you,’ as if he were the milkman, before closing the door on his astonished, walrus face. When she’d heard about it, Mattie had laughed until she cried. Almost every other house on the lane was sporting Balfour’s card in their front window, and the Allard-Browns had a poster showing a respectable lady and gentleman being throttled in the coils of a giant snake labelled ‘SOCIALISM’ while a Jew, a woman in a tie and a girlish-looking man stood by and laughed. ‘As usual,’ said The Flea, ‘the enemy consists of those who do not fit the mould.’

‘Though there’s nothing very pythonish about the Labour candidate,’ said Mattie, who had been to the hustings. ‘He looks like a stockbroker.’

‘Nevertheless, I shall be voting for him,’ said The Flea. ‘Imagine if we had a Socialist Government!’ She saw parity spreading across the land, like sun after the passing of a cloud; healthy children in school, hot running water and a WC in every dwelling, the sick and the elderly no longer terrified of penury, every baby welcome and warm.

‘You’ll never guess who else I saw at the hustings,’ Mattie said. ‘Jacko and her husband, distributing leaflets.’

‘No. Jacko was preoccupied with the contents of a baby-carriage and Richard made me the sort of stiff little bow that rival beaux give each other in the novels of Austen; I’m sure if we’d been near enough he’d have slapped me with a glove.’

Outside in the lane, the motor-car disappeared towards the dead end of the Vale of Health, and The Flea sat down again at her dressing table. Her normally pale face was marked these days by a flare of red along the cheek bones – her heart’s attempt to perfuse the peripheries. At a casual glance she might be thought to be looking well. She brushed her hair and then opened her jewellery case, actually an old watercolours box that Mattie had found in the attic; The Flea kept her brooches and necklaces in the brushes tray, and items of paperwork in the space beneath: her certificate from the Sanitary Institute, her will, a birthday card from her mother, Mattie’s letters tied with a ribbon, the invitation to her friend Etta’s wedding, a photograph of herself as a solemn child, another of her at her desk at the WSPU offices in Kingsway, with Alice Channing as a passing blur in the background. Alice would be coming to the Mousehole in the afternoon, together with Ethelwynne and Dorothy and half a dozen others – old comrades all. Mattie had been practising the piano in anticipation, crashing out ‘March of the Women’ with variable accuracy. ‘I have noticed,’ she’d shouted yesterday, above the climbing chords of the bass, ‘that the newspapers seem to regard this election as the line drawn under female ambition. “Thus far and no further. You have gained an equal vote and must now be forever content.” No hint that it is merely a springboard.’ Though Mattie had not yet settled on the particular pool into which she would be diving next. ‘Perhaps a return to studies,’ she’d said. ‘Macbeth, amongst others, hath murdered sleep, and I’ve been doing a great deal of midnight reading. Slaking an old thirst. And if I decide to drink more deeply, Bedford College is apparently accepting doctoral students.’

It seemed, to The Flea, a good plan; suitably ambitious, yet lacking the inevitable scrapes and collisions of Mattie’s usual grand schemes – a plan that could safely be carried out solo, without the necessity for someone to precede her with a red flag.

From the lane came a sudden crackling roar, a brutal brick of sound which shattered into words as it came nearer.

‘BALFOUR. VOTE FOR BALFOUR. SAFETY FIRST. PLACE YOUR TRUST IN BALFOUR. YOU’LL NEED FIRST GEAR FOR THIS STRETCH, VERONICA.’

The motor-car ground past again, heading this time towards the metalled road to Hampstead.

‘Safety first!’ called Mattie derisively up the stairs. ‘What a stunningly retrogressive slogan! With that as his motto, Early Man would have rejected the wheel. Your egg is nearly ready.’

The Flea picked out the brooch of enamelled violets that had been her mother’s, and held it against her leaf-green dress to check the effect, before pinning it on. She stood carefully, and smoothed down her skirts. Breakfast of an over-boiled egg awaited. She was, for the first time in her adult life, being looked after – with strong tea and nips of crème de menthe, with fires built and windows closed in case of draughts, with interesting items read out of the newspaper and dreadful puns to make her laugh. If she hadn’t absolutely insisted that she was still capable of cooking the dinner, then she would also have been the recipient of meals consisting mainly of inadequately peeled potatoes and chicken roasted to the consistency of a bale of wool.

‘It only takes a second or two longer to take the eyes out of the potatoes, you know,’ she’d said to Mattie. ‘It’s not difficult.’

As have I, thought The Flea. She missed work far less than she would have imagined; the entertainments that had previously been fitted into odd moments had expanded to fill the whole. She had become, as Mattie put it, ‘mad for the wireless’, with a particular fondness for the Morning Play. Her erstwhile colleague Etta, married now, but not yet pregnant, and monumentally bored, had decided to write a novel about her experiences as a health visitor, and was regularly consulting The Flea about its contents. There were visits from friends, there were letters to write and there were outings; at the recent Hampstead Oil-painting Association exhibition that she’d attended with Mattie (‘Clearly the art of perspective has yet to percolate these regions’) they had encountered Winnie and Avril, trailing round after their parents. Avril had darted away, but Winnie had lingered.

‘So do I,’ said Mattie. ‘Its demise is entirely my fault, and I’m sorry.’

‘Whereas I would counter that learning to apologize is part of growing up. Do you ever see any of the other girls?’

‘I meet Elsie in Chalk Farm Library on Saturday afternoons. I’m helping her with her arithmetic.’

‘Yes, that’s what she says,’ said Winnie, complacently. ‘But I don’t mind. And she’s doing quite well.’ Patronage suited her; she seemed somehow less squashed.

They had not seen Ida. Pomeroy had written recently to say that he’d heard from her aunt that she was attending classes again, at an afternoon school in Silverdale.

‘I’ve sent her a note,’ said The Flea. ‘Just to say that we’re thinking of her, and that we’re pleased she’s studying.’ She had not yet received a reply.

The Flea closed the jewellery box. She herself had never replied to the three letters she’d received from Mattie. They had arrived at the Public Health Department after she had already been forced to take sick leave, and for some reason had not been forwarded to her lodgings. So when Mattie had knocked on the door of 19, Greenwood Road, Finchley, it had come as a complete shock. ‘A friend of yours is here, Miss Lee,’ the landlady had said, and in had come Mattie, like a storm blast.

‘But this place is frightful,’ she’d announced, after Mrs Crewe was out of earshot.

‘Nevertheless, it smells of boiled cod. And’ – she’d looked around, aghast – ‘what are all these?’

‘It’s the Last Supper,’ said The Flea, slightly defensively. Mattie let out a shout of laughter.

‘I said in my last letter that I would come and fetch you, unless instructed to the contrary. Alice coughed up your address.’

‘Ah.’ The Flea, who had stood when Mattie arrived, saw the room begin slowly to rotate. ‘I haven’t been into work for a while,’ she said, sitting. ‘I’ve been unwell.’

‘I—’ For the first time, Mattie seemed discomposed. ‘They contained home news. And my profound apologies. After the events of the summer, I did a great deal of thinking, much of it rather chastening.’

‘I’m not sure if it’s one you know, but it is both true and apposite.’ She paused before speaking, her grey eyes on Florrie’s. ‘He said, A good friend is my nearest relation.’ Her expression was wholly serious, even humble; a supplicant’s.

In the sudden blurring of her vision, The Flea felt, rather than saw, Mattie’s hand clasp her own.

‘Please come home,’ said Mattie. ‘We do very well together, don’t we?’

The Flea could only nod and then untuck her handkerchief from her sleeve, and watch as Mattie cast around the room for something.

‘Do you have a carpet bag, or a suitcase? Ah!’ She stooped and pulled The Flea’s valise from beneath the bed.

The thrush had started singing again. The Flea paused to hear it repeat itself and then closed the bedroom door and followed the smell of burned toast along the landing. She could hear music coming from the wireless – ‘The Blue Danube’, an orchestral version that seemed to sway the air with gaiety and colour, so that, although she was walking down the stairs with careful slowness, she might almost be descending to a ballroom, like one of the twelve dancing princesses. Oh really, Florrie, she thought, how fanciful! But as she walked along the passage towards the kitchen, she could still feel herself being swung through a waltz, the world a bright blur, the music playing.