In London, at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, Victoria Ormorod, with other members of the League for Peace, is in her usual Sunday morning place, arguing the case against continuing the war.
‘…and a multitude of men uselessly lost. I was at The Hague congress where women of every nation supported the notion that in the twentieth century governments must give up the notion that disputes are settled by brute force. It is honourable to work for peace.’
A young woman, standing in the crowd that is gathered around the stool Victoria stands upon, raises her fist triumphantly. ‘And so it is honourable for Our Boys to die for their country.’ She receives cheers from some supporters. Later in the day the woman will be speaking, whipping up a jingoistic frenzy; then it will be the turn of Victoria and her friends to give this heckler as rough a time. Hecklers are the stone on which wits are sharpened.
Victoria is not thrown off-stride, but raises her voice above the cheers for the interrupter. ‘This lady says that it is honourable for them to die for their country. Those men –I will not abuse them by addressing them as “boys” with such false sentimentality – it is true were no age at all. It is true also that they were the sons and husbands of women who had no right to vote. When it came to electing the government who decided that this country should go to war, no woman and scarcely any of those young men who have died had any say in it – the very people who have most to lose have the least power.’ She pauses as a male voice cuts in singing, ‘Here we go, Here we go, Here we go again…’
As she waits, her eyes slide over the crowd until she sees, standing at the back, the tall figure of Jack Moth. It is a while since she has seen him, and she hopes that he will not go before she can speak to him.
The singing man’s regular cronies at Speakers’ Corner take their lead from him and join in. Victoria rolls her eyes heavenwards, indicating that this is an old joke, but she will humour them. When they have finished, they move off to perform before another gathering further along in Hyde Park.
She continues, trying, at the same time as keeping a hold on her crowd, to keep Jack in view. Ever since the night when she sat and comforted him after his mother’s death, her memory has kept insisting that experience upon her. ‘The names of men in those shocking and ever-growing fists of the casualties of Flanders have not died for their country, they did not die for Canada, or India, or Wales, or Ireland, or Scotland, or England…’
The woman interrupts again, ‘No! They have died for gallant little Belgium.’
Victoria turns on her. ‘No! No! The young men in Flanders are dying for the pride and honour of incompetent generals, and for war-loving people like you. You tolerate 60,000 casualties in a few weeks rather than tolerate what you think of as defeat. I am not a general or a politician, I am a midwife – yet even I can see what the war lords could not or would not see – that it would have been sensible to withdraw from the Salient, to abandon Ypres and re-form a stronger line beyond the canal.’
For the moment the crowd has fallen silent. Jack is looking directly at her, and she wonders whether he has come purposely to see her.
‘If we are not to continue pouring the very best of our young men down the barrels of the German guns, there is only one course open to us, and that course is to negotiate for peace.’
For a moment the Sunday morning crowd listens, but soon closes its ears to the unthinkable. Peace? Just when its blood is up, the whip raised and the fox in sight? No matter what, the crowd wants nothing except to lash out – even though it might lose its limbs in the attempt.
The British public does not want to hear the words ‘negotiated peace’, and these are at the heart of Victoria Ormorod’s message.
The woman and her friends will go out with their white feathers, and join in the singing: ‘We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go, Your King and your Country they need you so…’
Young men, filled with nationalistic fervour, will listen to the whine of shells and the thunder of guns, believing that they hear bugles and drums.
There is an excitement in the air that comes when a country that has been spoiling for a fight is in the throes of fighting it. The crowd, whose attention Victoria has had for thirty minutes, knows how much blood is being spilled; it sees itself as part of a Nation in Mourning, and so wants no part of a negotiated peace – it wants vengeance.
When Victoria’s supporters hand out leaflets these are rolled into balls and shied at the members of the League for Peace.
Victoria has not been home for weeks. Her way of life has for years been almost nomadic, a few days here helping to set up a local organization, a few days there speaking at rallies and meetings, sleeping wherever a supporter of the cause had room to spare. Her cause now was peace as well as suffrage.
Within the circle of supporters of the League, it was easy to believe that there was urgent and growing support, and it is true that their numbers grew steadily from the parents and relatives of soldiers. Young men who had been blithe-spirited youths when they were shipped to France, but who had come back on leave changed; or been sent home injured, withdrawn and racked, not speaking of what it was that filled the night-time with nightmares. Or had not come back at all.
There were, too, many Quakers and other religious sects whose pacifist beliefs pushed them into speaking out against the continuance of the war. And some who believed that there were no circumstances in which they could go armed with the intention of killing another human being.
As Jack Moth watched Victoria Ormorod, he felt the same thrill of attraction that he had felt that balmy summer in Southsea before the war. He wanted her. Had wanted her since their first meeting. He longed for her fine body, longed to sit quietly with her, to sit and talk with her, to sit and listen. As he listened now, he resented the passion she expended on the crowd.
He watched the crowd with disgust. A man of about Jack’s own age was gathering up leaflets and compressing them into a hard ball. As he aimed, Jack snatched the ball from him, caught his collar, jerked him back and spun him around so that he was facing into Jack’s broad chest. ‘Exactly what were you going to do?’
‘They’re damned traitors the lot of them. She should be locked up.’
‘Because she speaks her mind? I should have thought you would be for that.’
‘They are all in the pay of the Germans…’
‘You are not only ignorant, you are contemptible with it.’ And so saying, Jack Moth stuffed the paper ball into the man’s breast pocket and slapped it hard, twirling him away as he did so.
‘Excuse me.’ The girl who addressed him was beautifully and expensively dressed, link-armed with another girl equally well got up. ‘I just wanted to say how brave of you that was.’ She reached up as though to embrace him, and as she did so her companion deftly slipped a white flight feather into his lapel. In a second they had gone.
‘Oh Jack, what a rotten thing.’
He had not noticed Victoria until she was standing before him. She reached up to remove the obnoxious badge of cowardice. ‘No, Victoria, leave it. It is just a feather.’
‘They are spreading so much awfulness, these women. To them it is a bit of entertainment to fill their bored lives. Who are they to tell one man to go out and kill another man?’
Smiling, he laid a hand across her lips. The soft feel of them was an aphrodisiac. ‘I have been listening to that argument for thirty minutes.’
‘I saw you. I hoped that you would wait.’
‘May I walk with you?’
‘I am free until this evening.’
‘Lunch?’
‘So long as it is somewhere cheap… the V and A?’
‘Tramcar or walk?’
‘Oh, I prefer a walk every time.’
They had walked along the autumn pavements of London, the air smelling more of leaves than of the more usual combustion-engine fumes and horse-droppings. They were warmly polite and friendly to each other, Jack asking questions about her work, but not saying much about his own life. From time to time, as he turned sideways to speak, he let his gaze rest upon the movements of her body as she strode along, swinging her arms.
‘I am still a country girl,’ she said when he laughingly feigned breathlessness. ‘I cannot trit-trot as city women do.’ Her figure was firm and beautiful, and he remembered again his surprise, when she had put her arms about him at Southsea, to discover warm softness instead of the whalebone and steel hooks that shaped most female forms. He felt a great desire to smooth his hand over her round hip and cup his hand beneath the curve of her breast.
When they reached the Victoria and Albert Museum, the smell of hot food from the gentlemen’s grill in the Poynter Room made them realize how hungry they were, so they ordered a grill.
Victoria pushed her coat back from her shoulders and looked around her with satisfaction. ‘Isn’t this the most wonderful room to come in to from the old, drab world? I always feel when I come here that I could have my appetite assuaged by the light and colour.’
Jack smiled at her. ‘Shall I cancel our order then?’
‘No, let’s be greedy and have the food as well as the room.’
The Gamble Room in which they sat being polite to one another was indeed a satisfying room, highly decorated mainly in white, warm orange, blue and gold. Skirting around their sudden, unexpected intimacy, Jack, pointing to a frieze, said, ‘Do you agree?’
She craned her neck to decipher the letters of a highly decorative alphabet. ‘It runs off. I can read…“There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink…” and then it runs off.’
‘“There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. ” Ecclesiastes, 2.’
‘Goodness, I am impressed.’
‘Gleanings of a child too smart for its own good.’
Victoria threw back her head and laughed. ‘Oh, how well I know that child.’
When their food arrived, Jack, looking at a fairly meagre portion, said, ‘Is this sufficient that we shall make our souls enjoy good in our labour?’
‘It is not a bit of good asking me, I eat only to enjoy good in my person.’ She pointed to the frieze with the handle of her fork. ‘“There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour.” That is a perfect example of the invisibility of women in our society. All messages are addressed to the man.’
‘Dear Victoria, do you carry your soap-box everywhere?’
She smiled, quite unabashed. ‘I have never used a soapbox – much too insubstantial. Bottle-crates are the thing. There, now I have had my say, tell me of the recent life and times of Jack Moth.’
‘Since we last met, I have become a qualified and fully paid-up member of the legal profession.’
‘That is wonderful news. I dare say your father and sister are very proud of you.’
When he had told him, his father had said: ‘Well then, that’s one up for the Moths, the first lawyer this family has ever known.’
He had not congratulated, or complimented. Jack knew that he had done extremely well to have been taken into a practice so soon. Junior though he might be, it was an achievement, and he would have liked his father to have acknowledged it. Jack knew that had he asked: ‘Aren’t you pleased, Father?’ his father would have looked puzzled and said: ‘Pleased? Why do you need to ask? You know that I am pleased, what else should I be?’
‘Oh yes, I believe that he is. But I think that he would have preferred it if I had joined the police force.’
He watched her eating. Her lips were full and red, her white teeth grew slightly forward at the front of her upper jaw and peeped from her mouth, often giving her expression a slightly surprised look. He liked the way she bit honestly into her food. She did not toy or fiddle with what she was eating.
He imagined that this was how she would be with physical love. When she was hungry, she would accept and enjoy fulfilment. How amazingly wonderful if that were true. He heard such tales of failed marriages. Of husbands who were shocked into celibacy to discover that the angelic creatures they imagined they had married had proved to have carnal appetites. And wives who had been trained from girlhood to expect nothing except that men were born to lustfulness and fornication, and had discovered that it was indeed the truth.
Today, beneath a wide hat, she wore her heavy copper-coloured hair piled on the crown of her head. All around her hairline the new hair curled and twisted and gave her head a delightfully opulent look. It suddenly occurred to him that this room – with its exotic columns of white and dark orange, its warm, tan-coloured frieze and floor tiles, the fresh luminescence of its wall panels and the beautiful north light coming in through the bluely decorated figured glass of the arched windows – was, if such a thing was not wildly fanciful, a Victoria Ormorod of a room. Exotic, striking, unforgettable. And as he had been drawn back to the room again and again since he was a young boy, so he felt drawn by this enigmatic woman.
She must know that I am examining her. Any other woman would blush and fuss and be coy. He wondered now, as he had done on other occasions, why he felt a slight tingle of apprehension in her company. He longed for her, was sure that what he felt was love, so why did he have that little niggle of unsuredness? Had she not been the splendid Victoria Ormorod, he would have flirted with her.
‘Victoria. It wasn’t chance that brought me to Hyde Park this morning. I came looking for you.’
‘Well, and so you found me.’
‘Marry me, Victoria.’ He had known that this was what he wanted to say; and now it was said, inelegantly blurted out. ‘I want nothing more in the world than that you be Jack Moth’s wife.’
‘Oh Jack!’ She reached out and laid a hand upon his. Her green eyes looked at him straight on, and then, as their truth-seeking gaze penetrated him, he suddenly realized that those tingles of apprehension she caused him were because she brought to mind a tutor he once had as a young boy. The man had been kindness and understanding itself, and in character so straight that little Jack was never able to hide anything bad on his conscience and had always confessed without pressure.
‘And…’ He took her hand in both of his. ‘And I have to tell you so that you will not think that I have deceived you. I have… Oh, Victoria, I am sorry… no, not sorry, that is the wrong word, but I wish that my conscience did not lead me to do it.’
She seemed to look right into him; when she spoke it was with a wry chuckle deep in her throat. ‘Aren’t consciences the very devil, Jack? Mine leads me to stand up in public and harangue passers-by, and I guess that yours has led you to enlist.’
Again he remembered his boyhood tutor: ‘I say this to you more in sadness than anger, young Moth.’
I can’t take her on. He thought that she was like a client who, in the interest of truth, refuses to plead ‘Not Guilty’, even though that plea is the way the game is played to get a hearing.
‘Yes… Yes, it is true, how did you guess?’ The Gamble Room was now almost full. China and cutlery clattered and people’s voices hummed. Occasionally the musky smell of the gallery wafted in to mingle with the aroma of tea and grilled food. She bent forward slightly so as not to raise her voice above the level of background noise.
‘I can think of nothing else that you would feel it necessary to confess to me.’
‘I am not a poor man, Victoria. I recently inherited a house from an uncle. My sister lives there, but it would be yours if anything were to happen to me.’
‘Jack, Jack. Is this what war does to people? You ask me to marry you in one breath, and in the next you tell me of the arrangement for widowhood. Come, let us go outside.’
They walked out into Exhibition Road, across Kensington Road, through the Alexandra Gate and on towards the Round Pond where they sat and watched small boys guiding model boats with hooks, and small boys watching them.
‘Sundays are changing, Jack. Would you have been allowed to sail a boat on a Sunday?’
‘It was a serious proposal of marriage, Victoria.’
‘I know that, and I do not know what to say to you. I can give you none of the conventional replies.’
‘A simple “Yes” would do.’
‘I am sorry, Jack. I like you very much. I have since the first time I set eyes upon you.’
‘You surely don’t think that the difference in our ages…?’ He thought of Esther and Bindon, Esther being years his junior, and yet their marriage was as solid as could be. They were deeply in love. When they had returned from their honeymoon, he had envied them their evident ecstasy. He longed for the same between himself and Victoria.
‘No, no.’ She squeezed his arm in emphasis. ‘Age is an irrelevance. If you were fifty and I eighteen, it would still be an irrelevance.’
‘And the opposite age difference?’
‘It would still be only a matter for ourselves. I shall not marry, Jack. I made up my mind to that when I chose my own name – I knew that I would never change it. We women have few enough rights as it is, even fewer rights within marriage. In law, a wife has little except the right to be got out of debt by her husband – she has not even the right to her own body.’
‘But these husbands are not me. I adore you, Victoria. And I adore your body so much that I should respect it to the nth degree.’
‘My dearest, Jack, of course you would. I like the kind of man that you are, but I should make you no sort of a wife. In the first place, I have my work in the movement which I shall never give up until men have equality with one another and women have equality with men. But within the law as it now stands…’ She broke off and laughed her free, deep-throated laugh. ‘Goodness! Listen to the Ruby Bice coming out in me. I had quite forgot I was talking to a fully paid-up member of the legal profession.’
He faced her. ‘Marry me. Forget Ruby Bice and become Victoria Moth.’
She touched his cheek affectionately. ‘Would you care to become Jack Ormorod?’
He smiled at the notion. ‘Change my name to yours?’
‘More than that. I mean would you give up entirely who you have been for twenty-odd years? Would you marry me and become Mister Victoria Ormorod, so that you have no status except what is given you by virtue of being married? Would you care not to be Jack Moth any more, but Mrs Victoria Ormorod’s husband?’
He leaned a little away from her, not understanding her expression. ‘Are you serious?’
Wryly smiling, she shook her head. ‘No, dear Jack. I wouldn’t ask a man to be subjugated to such an extent. Equally, neither shall I. My grandmother taught me the skill of midwifery and left me a little money in order that I should not need to rely on a man to provide for me. I shall never marry.’
‘How can you be so sure? You may well fall so much in love that…’
Unheedful of the Sunday afternoon promenaders in Kensington Gardens, she pulled Jack Moth’s head down to her own level and kissed him on the lips as expressively as she had done when he was a youth.
‘Jack Moth. I quite fell for you when we met at Southsea, but on that last night you were in too much of a state of anguish for me to be able to tell you.’ She held on to his hand tightly. ‘You have no idea of the nervous energy that is required to keep people with my convictions going. We’re harassed by police, we’re lonely and the world is hostile to us. I wouldn’t inflict myself upon you. If you want me, be content to have me as I am, separate and independent.’
For a while he was silent, then he said, ‘I have only a short time before I must report to my unit. Will you come to Dorset with me?’
‘To Dorset?’
‘Mere, the house that was left to me, it is on the outskirts of Lyme Regis.’
‘I… Yes, all right, I have not had a break from campaigning for months. I am sure the group will agree to my going.’
‘My niece is to be christened, you could meet my family.’
The awful feather that the woman had stuck in his lapel that morning had been there ever since. Now he removed it and was about to throw it in the gutter when she stopped him. ‘No, give it to me as a token.’
He threaded the quill end through a buttonhole of her bodice. ‘A token of what?’
She considered. ‘Of the many kinds of love that people can experience.’