BEA IS LYING ON HER BED WITH JOHN’S VOICE FILLING the room. She didn’t hit her head, he is saying, just slumped … shaken … carried her back … I’m so sorry.
‘Sorry for what, John? You’ve been a hero,’ says a female voice.
‘Oh, I can’t imagine being that.’
More female voices are saying that what she needs is rest, and she wonders how many of them are in the room. Thank God you found her, John … But until she’s better … She’s fine … Thought you said earlier you had to go back up to town … Don’t get into trouble … We’ll cable you. A few minutes later she hears his footsteps leave the room, in that oh so measured pace.
Only they’re not John’s footsteps, it’s a servant knocking at the door, and she’s not down in the country at Beauhurst, she’s in Park Lane. Her room is empty; she must have fallen asleep again after ringing the bell, if it can be called sleep when your dreams are memories, not good ones at that. Oh, Beatrice, it’s February, she tells herself. That’s two months, and you still can’t get that man out of your head.
They’d been down at Beauhurst, Bea had invited a crowd for a few days and they were in the drawing room with the dregs of coffee after lunch. Bea was sitting on one of the window seats with John, looking over his shoulder as he made cartoons of their friends around the room. Halfway through one of Edie, he put his pencil down and turned around to look at Bea. Let’s go for a walk, he whispered, his eyes full of something he wanted to say. Yes, she replied, her heart in her mouth. She stood up, excused herself from the room on the grounds of needing a nap, and near dashed upstairs to change into a walking dress. She pulled a couple out on to the bed but they looked such passion-killers, so she took a coat better suited to Mayfair than the country, but at least she looked like the girl of someone’s dreams.
She met him at the gate to the walled nursery garden and he led her away up into the woods and pine air, their feet sinking into the dead leaves underneath as they walked. For five beautiful minutes they walked hand in hand until they came to the curved white lovers’ seat by the little waterfall. They sat on either side of the bench, leaning across the divider so that their noses were almost brushing. John took her hand again, and squeezed it.
‘Beatrice,’ he said, ‘I’ve something I want to say to you.’
‘Yes,’ she replied, wondering why he was saying and not asking.
‘Beatrice, I can’t marry you.’
She remembers feeling as though she were a stone that would sink into the earth if she didn’t stand. So she did, and moved away from him, she thinks, and then she fell.
It is Susan who comes into Bea’s room in Park Lane. Good Lord, Bea isn’t sure she’s up to Susan this early. Right now she’d like a tender hand, not one that looks as though it would sooner whip your face.
She has pointed this out to Mother, who pooh-poohed her. ‘She’s first housemaid. If anyone should help you dress it should be her. At least she’s honest; it’s such a bore when servants steal. You feel you never know where you’ve put something and that you must be going insane. Then there’s the residue of guilt for God knows what becomes of them without a reference. Really, I don’t mind a rocky countenance if you can find things where you set them down last.’
It isn’t, thinks Bea, Mother who has to have her scalp jabbed by the Woman with Iron Fingers. Mind you, with Suthers as a benchmark, Mother would be unlikely to notice.
Susan is fast. Bea will give her that, and Bea is still ahead of the others when she comes down to breakfast. She noses her way along the sideboard of poached eggs, kidneys and half a dozen other offerings. She takes nothing. At the end the newspapers lie folded like fallen dominoes. She takes one and makes for a chair, not seeing Joseph until he slides it in behind her.
‘Miss Beatrice?’
‘Oh, coffee, please. And maybe toast.’
He nods, and vanishes.
The usual silversmith’s window of sugar shakers and coffee pots squat on the white tablecloth in front of her. She pushes both them and the empty place settings next to her out to the side and spreads the newspaper flat.
The announcement is easy to find:
Mrs Pankhurst, who has returned to England in order to resume her work for the vote, has taken up residence at Campden Hill Square, where she will address a public open-air meeting tonight, at 8.30.
Bea glances over her shoulder. There’s nobody to see her. The box around the notice and the letters themselves seem to thicken and darken before her eyes. Keep away from it, she tells herself. You’ll only find yourself caught up in something and everyone will think all that business with John has gone straight to your head. At least, that is no doubt how Mother would present it, as the only explanation why her daughter could have joined ‘a bunch of half-crazed lunatics’.
It was hardly an invitation to a riot, though. ‘Address a public open-air meeting …’ It is, on the face of it, no different to the summons to Mother’s meetings and it’s not as though Bea would be taking a bat with her.
The alternative is another dinner in another hotel, another show, and the familiar recipe of whiskies and the gramophone after, all of which suddenly sound dull.
The person she wants to talk to, perhaps even reveal her plans to – for he is always on her side – is Edward. But he will not emerge until noon. Mother is, in the circumstances, perhaps not the best conversational foil. That leaves Clemmie, who was back in the house last night. Tom has stayed down in the country and, in a surprising gesture of sentimentality, Clemmie declared she didn’t want to hear her voice echo around her and Tom’s London home and she would prefer to stay at Park Lane, in her old room.
Clemmie must be awake, should jolly well be awake and ready for talking, if, Bea pauses, if she is speaking to Bea yet. She could go around to Edie’s but Edie won’t be up for hours. She has recently joined the ranks of those who don’t see the morning sun. Bea starts to push back her chair and it is now Bellows who gently moves it out of her way as she pulls herself up and her skirts down, and strides out of the room taking the newspaper with her.
Clemmie is sitting at her old dressing table, silver-topped glass jars opened, cream thick on her face, wrestling a hairbrush through her waves. Bea flops down across her sister’s bed. Clemmie’s room is lighter and brighter than Bea’s and decorated in a rather gloriously feminine lilac and white. Bea is more than a teeny bit envious of this, especially since, if Clemmie keeps returning to claim it, Bea will never be able to move in, which is jolly unfair because Clemmie rather owes her the room now she is married. After all, it was Bea who orchestrated the ‘inexplicable’ flood in one of the bathrooms above so that Clem’s room would be redecorated for the first time in half a century. Short of a house fire, Bea’s room will remain looking as if Queen Victoria still had decades to reign.
Bea speaks to the back of her sister’s head. ‘I’m sorry about Sunday.’
‘It’s all right, but don’t blame me if you’re still living here at fifty.’
‘It won’t be here, Clem.’
‘Then where would it be?’
‘Oh, New York.’
‘Do you still miss it, Bea, America? Even after living there only a year?’
‘It was rather exciting leaving so suddenly, on some whim of Mother’s.’
Clemmie hesitates. ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘On some whim of Mother’s.’
‘Once we were there, it felt as though we could do what we liked, rather than being locked in by all these silly rules. We just ran wild on the banks of that river. Life’s different there, Clem. There’s more, more’ – Bea searches for the word – ‘possibility.’
‘You talk about it as if it is some sort of Promised Land.’
Bea pauses.
‘In a way, Clem, I think it is.’
Clemmie turns around to face her. ‘Why don’t you go over? You could have a glorious dance.’
‘On the Hudson? Only our neighbours would make it that far. It’s in the sticks, Clem. That was the heaven of it.’
‘Not bad neighbours, Bea. But I meant in Manhattan, silly.’
‘Yes,’ says Bea, ‘in Manhattan.’
John is there, she is thinking. Maybe she could so dazzle him with a dance in her mother’s family house on Madison Avenue that he would come running back to her. She imagines herself dressed up, flowers all over the hall, her standing at the foot of the wide wooden staircase, John approaching her with a pleading expression on his face.
However, that is exactly why she cannot go. You can’t chase a man across the Atlantic. In fact Bea can’t go there until he is back. Damn you, John Vinnicks, why couldn’t you have gone to Africa instead of heiress-hunting … and as this last thought comes into her head, Bea feels slightly sick.
Clemmie’s voice is back in Bea’s ears. ‘Now, Bea-Bea, help me choose what to wear tonight.’
Beside her on the bed are two dresses: one black and white satin, with a jacket designed to tie around the waist. The other, a pale grey net tunic embroidered with a vast beaded butterfly that must be nearly a foot across.
‘You’ll take off with those wings. Are you dancing?’
‘Just dinner.’ Clemmie twists to look at Bea. ‘It is being given for me. And Tom. He’s coming up this afternoon.’ She quickly turns back to her dressing table, her eyes away from Bea as she clips out, ‘Sorry, don’t mean to brag.’
Brag, thinks Bea, brag? She rolls on her back and studies the pale lace canopy strung over Clemmie’s bed. Brag about the dinner, or the husband? She envies neither. She can think of little she would like less to do this evening. Was that what her life was to be, dinners, shows and gramophones, and then, then what? A ruddy-faced sportsman with a decaying house in the country?
‘Wear either.’
‘But I’ve hardly been in town since Freddy was born. Rural hibernation really, and one is so examined when one reappears. Is she still attractive, did she hook above her weight, et cetera? Whether it was just for the money.’
Bea sits up and swivels around.
‘Clemmie, you don’t think that?’
‘Not on the dresses …’
‘Clemmie, please. Do you think that Tom married you for your money?’
‘No, no, of course not. He’s mad about me.’ Clemmie pauses. ‘But, you know, it could happen to any of us.’
‘There’s not much money. Not for us girls.’
‘That’s not what people think, unless they dig around.’
‘Because of the railways?’
‘And because of Mother’s mother being American. Countless pots of gold, people reckon. I mean look at …’ Bea feels as though a vice is tightening around her stomach, and decides that she will not spend this evening with the people who must have been examining her.
Celeste responds to Bea’s note, her maid addressing the envelope, as ever, to disguise it from Mother. She says that she will come by in a taxi, and be waiting in it just to the right of the front door at half past seven. Bea has told Mother she’s going with Edie to a musical recital at the Bechstein Hall, which leaves her with a niggling uncertainty as to whether Mother’s and Edie’s paths might cross elsewhere that evening. Mother at least does not come downstairs to notice that Bea is heading out for the evening in a public taxi.
Avoiding Joseph’s eye as she leaves alone, Bea walks straight out of the door and climbs blindly into the taxi waiting outside, which, to her relief, does contain Celeste, who is immaculately dressed for battle. She is wearing a high-collared coat buttoned up to her chin and is carrying a walking stick. Bea thinks at first, how odd, she doesn’t need it, and shortly afterwards starts to wonder what she does need it for. Bea looks down at her own clothes. On the offchance that she saw Mother on her way out, Bea has dressed for a musical recital. However, at least her overcoat is heavy, though whether it will protect her silk petticoat during whatever evening lies ahead, is in the lap of the gods. She feels a shiver of fear, and enjoys the sensation.
Campden Hill Square is dark. It is not well lit, and between the houses on either side a railed garden falls down the hill to the thoroughfare of Holland Park Avenue. The trees in front of the houses meld into those growing over the fence of the garden’s iron rails, forming a leafless canopy.
Bea feels the crowd before she is in its infectious mass of hot breath and expectation. Hundreds of people are jam-packed up the narrow slope of a road on the east side of the square and rise up the hill in a dark swarm. Bea’s heart quickens as it engulfs her and she and Celeste are swept down Holland Park Avenue by a tide of new arrivals. The two of them are bobbing about excitedly in the centre, which is moving quickly enough to keep them there. Bea is pushed in the back and tries to look around, but is knocked forward again as she does so. She is surprised by this roughness and lets out a small gasp. Buck up, old girl, she tells herself, these are the suffragettes.
The crowd carries them on and past the eastern side of the square, where the mass is densest. Celeste makes an effort at pushing her way back to the edge but the steady movement forward keeps her locked in line. ‘Dammit and blast it,’ says Celeste. ‘Just go with it, Beatrice, we’ll go up the far side of the square with this lot and then make it down from the top. Aim for the third tree from the bottom.’
Bea is not as certain as Celeste. She can’t see who’s at the top of the square, but she doubts it’s empty. Or that they have much choice as to where they are going. The crowd turns up the far side of the square towards the grand terrace at the top, carrying them along with its burble of clipped ‘Hold on theres’ and thick miaows of ‘Oi, that’s my foot yer on’. Bea shuts her eyes for an instant. It will hardly make any difference to the direction in which she is travelling.
God, the smell. Bea has never smelt perspiration like this. Some of it smells as though it has settled indelibly not just on the skin, but on the medley of both stiff and worn serges, tweeds, fine wools, the odd mackintosh that Bea is being knocked against. Or rather squeezed against, for the stream feels as if it is tightening around her, and sticks are digging into her sides.
Bea is now frightened by this. If the crowd goes on tightening how will she breathe, how will any of them breathe, how will any of them get away from here? But all that they can do, any of the hundreds of people jammed around her and Celeste, is move wherever they are taken. The crowd surges forward in stops and starts, each jolt throwing Bea against her neighbours. She may have escaped Park Lane this evening, but she is again in a place where she cannot make an independent decision as to where she is going. At least she decided to come here. Yet is it inevitable that, however many decisions you make, at some point you find yourself again being swept along by events? Thank God she’s not here alone; if she could, she’d stitch her coat to Celeste’s, which is drifting in and out of reach. On they are pushed, right along the terrace to the corner, and back down the hill, where the weight of the crowd descending behind her becomes worryingly heavy. Then they stop. She and Celeste have reached a wall of bodies so densely packed that they cannot be pushed any further.
Below them spread the darkened curves and corners of ladies’ hats and gentlemen’s bowlers, nearly all pointing in the direction of a single lit window on the first floor of a house near the bottom. Celeste starts to pick her way down towards it, moving into gaps ahead of her invisible to Bea. Instead Bea moves sideways down the hill, ‘sorry’ by ‘sorry’, and sharp-elbowed hiss by hiss. She stumbles, they’re bloody well sticking their feet out, maybe Mother is right that they are lunatics. Bea is losing Celeste and fluttering a little, the light is jolly poor and the crowd is heaving and pushing and she’s struggling to keep upright. Celeste, unhampered by manners, is moving far faster. Bea tries to track what she thinks is her aunt’s hat through the jostling ahead but the wall of bodies tightens. That’s it, no further, she’s done rather well, though Celeste’s ‘third tree’ is still twenty yards out of reach. For the first time in her life, Bea is alone at night and in a crowd of strangers, her heart is racing and she feels breathless with the excited fear of riding towards a high hedge with a complete lack of control. She tries to push again, caring less about whom she knocks on her way – the lesser evil to being seen, or even being, on her own – but the shoulders in front respond by rising more firmly against her. This at last fires some push into Bea herself. Well, damn them, she’s jolly well going to get through.
‘Not a chance,’ says an overly cut-glass female voice behind her. ‘You won’t get any closer. But you can see the house from here. Well, some of it. Don’t I know you? I’m sure I do.’ Bea stiffens. Good God, who is it, one of Mother’s friends? But one of Mother’s friends would not be here, and it is a voice that means well. Right now that is worth the risk of being discovered. Bea can always say she is engaged in some kind of espionage, just here to find out what the other side is up to. The woman behind this voice might be able to help her. Besides, there’s a limit to how long you can stand practically in somebody’s arms and ignore them.
So Bea turns, or rather twists her head until she feels she has the neck of a giraffe. The woman is using her umbrella to steady herself as she stands on tiptoe – she is wearing make-up, and a little too much of it. What a relief; not a chance that Bea knows a woman like that.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘First time?’
‘No,’ lies Bea. She doesn’t want this stranger to latch on to her in sympathy.
‘A thousand here, I should say,’ the woman continues, nodding back up the hill. ‘Hours ago, some of us came. It’s so pleasing to have a good position, isn’t it?’
Bea does not feel as though she has a good position. She has failed to reach the tree, and she has lost Celeste, which makes her position, if anything, precarious. She has a sudden dread that this is going to be one of those evenings when the police come rushing out. That would be more that Bea bargained for, she’s heard about what can happen then; now nervous, she starts to count the number of walking sticks she has seen. But surely, surely, nothing bad can happen to her on her first time.
‘Are the police here?’ she asks.
‘Oh, I couldn’t be sure. I haven’t seen any uniforms. Maybe they’ve popped into the bushes. What a lark!’ The woman lowers her voice and leans over to whisper into Bea’s ear. ‘But of course as long as she’s in the house they can’t lay a finger on her.’
The crowd has become suffocating. Bea has survived more than her fair share of crushes in houses too small for the numbers invited. This, however, is both more threatening and, well, dammit, more thrilling, even though – or perhaps because – there is no sign of Celeste. The night air is setting in and people are moving from foot to foot as the sway of the crowd pushes them to and fro, shaking the wet-dog smell of damp wool into Bea’s nostrils. She has another go at moving towards the tree but the shoulders in front of her tighten further and a voice growls back, ‘Should have come ealier if you wanted to be up front.’
Closer to the house, a group of women are starting to chant: ‘Em-mel-ine, Em-mel-ine.’ In front of Bea is a small figure dressed in pale grey, an expensive pale grey. This is not the place to dress up, thinks Bea, and she’s tiny, can’t be more than a girl who should be in bed by now. Christ, she’s getting old to have thoughts like these. Bea, Celeste is right, you really do need to do something with your life. The figure turns to glance behind her and Bea sees, to her astonishment, a flash of pearl earrings, a face that has seen seven decades and a grey gloved hand gripping the handle of an umbrella. What, Bea asks herself, makes all these women come?
On the dot of eight thirty, a silhouette appears at the lit window and the crowd roars. A small dark figure climbs between the open panes and on to a delicate wrought-iron balcony. It can be barely wide enough for her feet, thinks Bea. The woman stands up, a feathered hat black against the light, like a potentate’s, and extends her hands. The crowd rustles into silence and in the minutes that follow Bea forgets she has lost Celeste, forgets she is alone, and forgets she is surrounded by strangers.
‘Bravo! Bravo!’ She hears the sounds coming from her own lips.
‘God bless you, Mrs Pankhurst.’ A man’s voice. Well, there are enough of them here, though half of them probably plain-clothes policemen. That is how, Celeste has warned her, some of the police come.
Then Mrs Pankhurst speaks. A thousand people stare at the silhouette moving above them, their heads tilted back, chins up. Mrs Pankhurst raises her arms until her hands are level with her shoulders, palms facing her congregation. She will, she says, come down to join them, but first she must tell them what needs to be done. Her voice is clear. It carries over the dark swell of bodies as it declares that, by fighting, women can ‘show to the manhood of this world the kind of stuff we are made of’.
‘If,’ Mrs Pankhurst continues, ‘our violence is wrong then the violence of Christ is wrong.’ Then she lists a stream of violent New Testament references. Bea feels herself listening with a single, collective ear that is the crowd drawing in every word of this Christ-like figure who is feeding them, the one thousand, with encouragement alone. ‘Nothing,’ she says, ‘can put down this movement. They may kill us, but they cannot crush this movement.’
Celeste has told Bea that in prison Mrs Pankhurst hunger-strikes so that she has to be released until she is well enough to be re-arrested, then she moves constantly, her whereabouts secret. It is only when she is out of the country that she can spend more than one night in a single place. Now she is ‘manifesting herself’, thinks Bea, to her disciples. As Mrs Pankhurst speaks of hope and right, and struggle that must shy from no act, whatever the price it takes, exhilaration emanates out through the crowd, passing from touching shoulder to touching shoulder. When it reaches Bea, she finds her lips tingling.
‘When your forefathers fought for their liberty, they took lives …’ And then a heckle, another man’s voice, pushed loud. ‘But you are only a woman.’ This is immediately followed by half a dozen other voices telling him to be quiet. Bea feels her shoulders tighten, he has made a direct shot, this voice, and the comment grates under her skin. ‘Only a woman.’ Bea thought of Tom’s friends at Gowden. How was she ‘only’ compared to people like that? What did ‘only’ a woman ‘only’ do? After all, she goes to lectures, she is here, too, out in a crowd, alone, surrounded by strangers, listening. But ‘do’? Listening could not be stretched to doing. If she were not to exist, thinks Bea, what acts would be undone? She has lived for twenty, almost twenty-one, years without making a mark. Her embarrassment curdles into anger against the heckler, against his little pack of chums, against every single person who thinks a woman is an ‘only’.
Mrs Pankhurst does not fear that she has done nothing. She turns the comment back.
‘That is what we are fighting, my friends. We women are fighting not as women, but as human beings, for human rights.’ She defies the police to arrest her again, and taunts them for cowardice in not keeping her in jail. Cowardice for force-feeding her, head pulled back, strapping her down. They stick a tube through her mouth or nose, and push it right down to her stomach. All the women scream, Celeste has told Bea, in detail, and over lunch, which somewhat stalled Bea’s appetite. The warders pour in a liquid. ‘All futile, really,’ said Celeste. ‘They only vomit it back up with the blood from their gums.’ Last time Emmeline had had enough and when the warders came in, she held a clay jug above her head and threatened to hit them, and they’d released her before she had died from starvation. ‘A martyr ain’t good for politics. They’re just going to take her back when she’s well enough. Ruddy Parliament and their Cat and Mouse Act.’
And now, thinks Bea, the police, the Cat, want their Mouse back and here she is, standing right above their noses, mocking them, and untouchable, even if she is ‘only a woman’. Ha, thinks Bea.
Mrs Pankhurst is exhorting her listeners to lay down their own lives, for what, she asks, ‘is life? At best it is very short. Would it not be well, when we leave this life, as leave it we must, to leave it having struck a blow for what is truer life; having struck a blow for the freedom of our sex; having struck a blow against subjection; having struck a blow against the vicious conditions into which the majority of our sex is born; having struck a blow against the disease and degradation of the masses of our country? Can you,’ asks Mrs Pankhurst, ‘keep your self-respect any longer?’ And Bea, standing there, wonders at her own life, its lunches and dinners and dances. Mrs Pankhurst, Bea realises, makes her tremble.
Mother calls herself a suffragist, and Mrs Pankhurst ‘a proponent of lunacy’. Mother believes that every step Mrs Pankhurst takes makes women appear less suitable to be given the vote. She is far from alone. There are middle-class men who don’t believe women should vote, working-class men who fear that women may be given the vote instead of them, and women like Mother who are quite convinced that only their approach can succeed. She expects Bea and Clemmie to fall in line with her point of view, and upon the very first meeting of the National Union branch down near Beauhurst – which she co-founded – dragooned the pair of them to come along. Clemmie begged Mother not to put her name on the list.
‘This is ridiculous, Mother, it is simply embarrassing for us all, don’t you see that?’
‘That’s not a wise comment, Clementine, from a young lady who is supposed to be about to come out into society. You need my help to find a husband.’
‘Aunt Celeste escaped without a husband,’ Bea interrupted.
‘She was asked to leave. It became inappropriate to have her with us any longer. Anyhow, there’s little joy in being the spinster sister in the attic. Or anywhere.’
‘Surely,’ returned Clemmie, ‘I’m hardly going to find a husband if I appear to be some ranting banner-waver.’
That was a little unfair, for Mother’s National Union protests are peaceful and efficient – if ineffective, thinks Bea. After last June’s Derby and Emily Davison’s miserable death that followed it, the National Union had rallies rippling up and down the country for weeks. The climax was a great march into Hyde Park, a blistering day and an ocean of a hundred thousand men and women marching from almost every town you could put a name to. Bea stood by Mother at the drawing-room window, the field glasses printing rings on her cheeks. Below streamed an armada of boaters and the odd bowler, sails of banners above them. The two of them went down into the sea of people, and floated along with the fluid, almost graceful, movement. The march was magnificent, yet almost a year later appeared to have achieved nothing at all.
The crowd here in Campden Hill Square is very different to those marchers – there’s a hardness and an urgency to them. And they are jam-packed into a narrow street, ready to explode.
Mrs Pankhurst vanishes and the balcony is empty, though the crowd is still shouting and cheering. In a minute she’ll return, she must return, for the encore. Instead Mrs Pankhurst comes out of the front door. One advantage of being this distance off is that Bea is far enough up the hill to have a view. At least Bea thinks Mrs Pankhurst comes out of the front door, because all she can see is Mrs Pankhurst’s infamous ‘bodyguard’, a dozen battleaxes of women brandishing Indian clubs as if they were swords. No, there’s a black feather in there, poking up between the clubs. Behind Bea, a band starts up and the crowd in front of her pushes back to make space for their leader and her bodyguard. The hat of the lady in grey is against Bea’s chest, brim digging in. Bea in turn is pushing into the people behind her and gasping for air and she wonders whether this will stop before she can no longer breathe. She is pushed forward again as the crowd surges towards the house with the balcony, taking Bea with it. Umbrellas, walking sticks, there’s a forest of them around her ankles and Bea is tripping with every other step, her arms are pushed into her sides and her breasts are being squashed flat against whosoever is in front of her. Bea finds herself swallowing again and again, as though she is trying to keep down the fear rising inside her.
Now there’s a whistling and shouting, a new sort of shouting. Police! My God, they’re here. What has Bea done, coming here? Blast Aunt Celeste, she must have realised this would happen; what’s she trying to achieve – Bea in handcuffs? Mother devastated? For a moment, Bea is upright and can see down the hill to where, closer to Holland Park Avenue, a cohort of arched helmets and raised thin batons are slowly but steadily pushing their way through the crowd towards the Indian clubs. A helmet sinks into the crowd to a cheer.
Something hard and round-ended is digging into Bea’s back and she twists around. God almighty, it’s a club, and the woman holding it is lifting it high in the air as she tries to push past Bea. Bea lets her squeeze past, almost pulling Bea’s coat off her in the process. Let her go forward, Bea mutters, please keep that as far away as possible. But there’s another club, and another, there’s no keeping away from them, even umbrellas are being raised. Oh, God, some of the women around Bea are being pulled back by what must be police, and it’s not just pulled back but pulled right down for they are on the floor, thick-coated men standing over them. A woman has her arms twisted behind her as she is being held down by one man while another wrestles to fit what must be a pair of handcuffs. In front of her another woman is shoved towards the ground, her body falls first against a neighbour’s and rests there for a short moment until a pair of thick tweed arms reaches out again and she is pulled down flat, as if ready for the world around to trample on her.
Bea feels an urge to grab at the coat of the man in front to bring him down too so that he knows what it feels like, so that he shares the same bruises as the woman he has, well, manhandled. Do you understand, Bea wants to shout, that it hurts?
Then Bea is moving again, the crowd at the top is pushing towards the house and she’s off downhill. She staggers and regains her balance as the wave of movement stops, leaving her crammed so tightly between strange coats that she can’t fall. However, the crowd is not going to be motionless for long and God knows where the next push will come from. Where is Celeste? Bea is both furious with her aunt and quite desperate to see her.
As Bea struggles to hold her place, she realises that she is no longer terrified, instead she is wide awake, buzzing almost. It is now as if she is in a new motor, rattling along flat out, knowing the road will suddenly vanish into a bend ahead. Her breath shortens. She can no longer see the small figure in pale grey in front. No, there she is, her umbrella is up. My God, they’re trying to pull even her away. Bea tightens her hand around her own umbrella and pushes forward against the person in front – who steps away suddenly, and Bea is falling.
She braces herself for the pain of the impact, but instead a thick hand is tightening itself around her right arm, dragging her up and back. That’s it, then, she is being arrested; will he wait for both hands before the cuffs go on, or is it just one at a time? Then there will be a cell and bars, though it will be Celeste’s turn to be impressed if she knows Bea is there. But, God, how on earth will Celeste have a clue, and if she doesn’t fish Bea out of jail, then … what if the police keep her there all night? Bea starts to struggle.
‘Don’t be a fool.’ It’s more of a bark than a sentence, and the accent is thick.
The hand clamps tighter. Second charge against her, she thinks, resisting arrest.
‘Do you want me to let you go?’
Bea is now upright enough to twist her head around in the direction of her captor but only sees that there are no stripes on the cuff. Plain-clothes police, then. She does want him to let go, and she nods but he doesn’t relax his grip. So she shouts, perhaps more of a scream, though as she can’t face him, it is probably lost in the chaos around her. ‘At once! Let me go. Do you hear?’
The fist releases suddenly, and Bea trips but pulls herself upright. She is facing uphill and sees the crowd that is now a mob descending towards her at speed, behind them, a row of uniformed policemen.
‘Take my hand.’
Bea doesn’t move.
‘Take my hand.’ His voice is angrier, more urgent. Bea finds herself obeying and puts her hand in his, which envelops it, dwarfing her own.
He’s tugging her sideways, that’s all the space there is to squeeze through, and Bea twists her head up in his direction. The policeman is wearing a mackintosh and, even in the dark and the hurry, she can see that it looks as if it’s been slightly too pressed, perhaps starched by mistake, and then crumpled in parts. It’s February, he must be frozen, even his neck is bare, as are his hands. His grip tightens and she couldn’t escape even if she wanted to. He will surely arrest her when they reach the bottom of the square. There is a high-pitched scream to their right and Bea’s policeman glances in its direction. As he does so, Bea sees the shadow of a jaw straight as a girder. A fist would break on that.
Then they’re out at the bottom and he pulls her towards the garden square railings where he lets go of her hand and leans back against the iron. After a moment or two he nods towards the railings next to him. Then, head straight up, he turns to look at her, holding himself dead still. Now for the handcuffs, and if one is going to be arrested, it may as well be suffered with as much style as can be mustered. Bea pulls her chest up, pushes forward what her corsetière has managed to make the most of, and turns her face away, to look as uninterested as she can.
No handcuffs emerge. It occurs to Bea that he is perhaps not a policeman. She cannot see a great deal of him: his face isn’t shining in the lamplight and his eyes are hidden by the shadow of his bowler hat. Yet he somehow has a sense of, well, strength to him, and it is making Bea feel more than a little protected in this bedlam. Even if, dammit, his hands are in his pockets and he’s looking across the road, his interest elsewhere. How can he be so rude – and what is he looking at that is so much more interesting than her? Even given, she reflects, the state she must now be in.
Bea turns to follow the man’s gaze across Holland Park Avenue and then she’s back against the railings like lightning, putting herself right next to him and leaning as far back as she can to avoid a tornado of fists, legs and batons. At the front two or three policemen are carrying a small, inert figure wearing a black hat with a large feather, and heavily veiled. For disguise, Bea guesses, little good that it did her. Bea blinks to keep away the tears. My God, she thinks, just one speech by this woman, a woman whom Bea has been brought up to believe is crazed, and Bea has fallen for her. Perhaps it was that Bea expected so little that it was easy to be impressed, or was she simply infected by the crowd around her? Even without all that, it is sad. To see any frail, brave person lose a fight is, well, sad.
The tornado is still whirling, Mrs Pankhurst’s bodyguard, and any others who might be caught in there, have not given up. One of the policemen at the front has lost his helmet and both police and women keep falling and hauling themselves up again. Another policeman staggers out of the fight towards Bea, one side of his face dripping with blood. She recoils further, into something soft, and jumps. It’s the man. She’s leant right against him and Bea feels her cheeks grow hot. What sort of woman will he think she is? Particularly as he wasn’t paying her a blind bit of notice beforehand. She may want his attention, indeed now that he has feigned indifference she needs it, but she would never behave like that, pushing herself up against a man. She’s forward again, quicker than she went back and now she’s standing two feet in front of the railings, her elbows squeezing her waist. She can’t turn around again now, not ever. Beatrice, my God, you’ve been embarrassed into being coy.
The whirligig has moved on down Holland Park Avenue.
‘Ladbroke Grove police station.’ He has at last spoken. How awkward. Does that mean she needs to reply? But he continues. ‘A couple of hundred yards down that road there.’ His voice is strange, not an accent she hears often but she does know it, or maybe it is him she knows. That would explain … but how, and where? She tries to think through her visits to friends’ houses, but really, her mind is too addled at present. In any case, this man is not a servant. Indeed, there is nothing whatsoever subservient about him.
Bea replies, ‘Do you think she can escape now?’
No answer comes. He’s looking straight across the road again, simply not bothering to speak. It was a silly question, but you can at least damn well give me an answer, she thinks. He really is ill mannered and blast being embarrassed, he may have dragged her out of a stampede but who does he think she is? Bea has never been shown so little respect before, well, perhaps a jostle in a street, being shouted at by a cart driver when she has rushed across his path, but not by someone she knows.
But she doesn’t know him, she doesn’t know him from Adam. It is the first time in her life that she has found herself standing with a man to whom she has not been introduced and, of course, out at night unchaperoned – if she is seen here, like this, then she will be assumed to … Good God, the thought of it. Thankfully, she will not ever have to see him again. She should go, she really should, but where is Celeste, and how is either of them ever to find the other in this mayhem? However, if Bea walks away from this man then she is obviously alone, and perhaps that is worse than being seen with him. At least she has some sort of explanation for standing here, in that she has been rescued, and if she waits just a little more, Celeste should emerge, Celeste must emerge, or even that woman wearing too much make-up. There is also, Bea thinks to herself, quite sharply, a chance that this man might at some point address me in reply.
People are dispersing, some hurrying away, others plodding a little, heads bowed with the loss of their leader. Bea looks around for Celeste. Those who remain are brushing themselves and others down or they are carrying bowls of water out of the house and washing the blood from faces. The street is littered with hats and helmets, umbrellas, batons, shreds of fabric, but no Celeste. With the realisation that she has been abandoned, Bea feels herself shrink to the size of that woman in grey. The lure of Mrs Pankhurst dulls; it has not been the perfect introduction to her aunt’s cause, and the sooner she’s at home the better. But how is she to take her leave of this man? She should thank him but it needs to be short and brusque, and it would help if he were paying a jot of attention to her. She considers stepping on his foot – he’d have to turn towards her then.
Bea is coming to a decision that the foot-stepping is a viable way forward when a woman runs back into Holland Park Avenue from Ladbroke Grove and crosses the road to the remnants of the crowd. Her hat is gone, the pins have been pushed and pulled out of her hair and her clothes are torn and bloodstained.
‘It’s not her,’ she cries.
The reply comes back from the front of the house.
‘It was a decoy. Mrs Pankhurst left through the rear.’
‘Yes!’ Bea’s heart is knocking at her windpipe. Her cheeks are burning quite properly now. ‘Isn’t that capital news!’
Bea waits for a reply. If he doesn’t speak now then she’s off without another word. She’ll give him five, no, ten seconds.
‘Yes.’ Not an iota of excitement in it, just deadpan matter-of-fact as though what’s done is done and why should he, in particular, care? Barely audible, too, above the whoops and cheers of those still standing around embracing their neighbours. ‘I’m going home,’ she says.
‘Why?’ Bea hasn’t turned around and his voice is in her ear. ‘How’d’you come here?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Where,’ he pauses, ‘from?’
Bea hesitates. There is something about the way he is speaking that is deliberate, as though whatever she is thinking, he is one step ahead of her. She smiles to herself. If they lived in other, or rather, similar worlds, this man would be a challenge. However, in the circumstances, she can at least salvage her pride.
‘Find me, please,’ she says, holding her voice as steady as she can, ‘a taxi.’
He nods, looking ahead still, walks forward and reaches into the road, one broad shoulder leaning over the tarmac. As the headlights swing into the side, Bea can see more of his face: he is younger than she expected, and his skin is a little darker, too. She’s seen that face before, she knows she has, but struggles to think where, and it occurs to her that perhaps it was drawn in a newspaper and stories of men who follow ladies after dark fill her mind. Oh God, Bea, get away as quick as you can.
‘You got all the fare?’ he asks.
Bea nods. Even if she had to beg for it in the street outside her house, she would have said yes. The taxi pulls up and he opens the door for her. She steps in, sitting deep into the far side of the rear seat. His hand is on the door and he leans in. Bea presses a smile across her face and pushes out a ‘Thank you.’
He looks straight at her, at last.
‘It’s not some form of entertainment,’ he says, and closes the door. Well really, blast him, and blast him again. What does he think she is, some spoilt little rich girl? She’ll show him. But she won’t, will she, for he’s fifty yards behind her now, and she’ll never see him again.
And, just for an instant, Bea feels a little sinking of regret.