THE MAN WHO IS SUPPOSED TO BE SITTING BETWEEN Edie and Bea that night is late. The dining room is filling up with silk and fur stoles, and there’s a mumbling from the far side of the table that they should put their orders in. As good as the Ritz is, the service can slow down and they’ll be late for the Adelphi. Not that it will matter much if they skip the first act. The show’s been on for months and they must have all seen it at least twice. Even Bea has.
Edie leans across the gap and tells Bea she can see something different about her. What is it? A new admirer? Already? Edie’s eyes light up with the suggestion. So she holds the same view, thinks Bea, as Mother. For a moment Bea wonders whether she should tell Edie, but before she has had time to think any more of it a well-fed man not much older than Bea is sitting down between them.
‘Sorry, chaps,’ he says to the table. ‘Those damn women blocking the road.’
Bea feels a flutter of pride, then her stomach tightens. My God, the thought that any of them might find out. They’d think she’d lost her mind, at best. Even worse, they would think it was all caused by John. Which it is not, she tells herself quite firmly, it is because of Mrs Pankhurst and, well, because she wants more to her life than sitting around a table at the Ritz, even if her hands are so worn out they feel as though they’re made of wood. It is harder work than she’d have thought, doing the same task over and over again. She fumbles a little with her knife and fork as she eats and blames it on playing the piano, praying that none of them register that they have never seen her near the keys. ‘Seamstress’s fingers,’ says a girl on the other side of the table. They all laugh, and Bea wishes Edward were here to smile across the table at her.
The chorus holds its last note a little longer than the rest. The first act is coming to an end and Bea looks up from the stalls to the circle and boxes, hoping to see a woman stand up and leaflets flutter down. There is no one. What a pity, she thinks.
She ducks out of dancing afterwards, it’s the last thing she feels like; she’s done quite enough for the day. There’s a couple sloping off early with her and they offer to drive her home. Is she all right, they ask over the rattle of the motor, not blue? Bea cringes at the question. It is as though she is thought of not only as heartbroken, but as some kind of invalid as a result. Then the couple fall into a complicit silence. Bea senses them continuing to talk to each other, a thread connecting the two, and she tries to remember whether she ever did this with John.
It’s almost midnight when Bea patters into the house. The hall is still, as though the place is deserted. The buzz of the day vanishes from her and Bea feels quite alone. She takes the steps one at a time, her head full of pictures of carbon paper and piles of envelopes she can barely see over, the voice of that woman in brown vowing to raze the country to the ground still vibrating in her ears and she wonders whether, if she goes back to Lauderdale Mansions again and again, she will end up like that. Bea checks herself. There is a clear line to be drawn and, dammit, Beatrice, you are jolly well going to do so.
As Bea reaches the first floor she sees the lights are on in the red drawing room. She walks around the gallery to turn them off but when she enters the room she is met by a waft of cigar-smoke and brandy. Mother is sitting at one end of the green sofa with her back to the door, staring at the drawn curtains.
‘Who’s that?’ Mother doesn’t turn around. ‘Come in here.’
Bea obeys. She walks around the sofa until she is standing in front of her mother.
‘Beatrice.’ On the side table is a decanter half full, and a tumbler half empty. ‘Sit down, come and talk to me.’
‘Are you all right, Mother?’
‘Sit down, Beatrice.’
‘Actually, I was feeling a bit—’
Mother reaches forward and grabs Bea’s arm. ‘Don’t go.’ Her grip is tight, almost pulling Bea down, and she gives way. Next to her Bea sees another tumbler, full, on the side table at the far end. Mother has had a visitor. But that, thinks Bea, is not strange. Mother often has visitors at this time of night. Politicians leave Parliament late.
‘What’s wrong, Mother?’
‘Oh, nothing. Everything.’
‘Come, Mother—’
‘No, I’ll not come, come. For forty-five years, since I first drew breath, I’ve put my all into everything I’ve done. I am the engine, Beatrice, of everything that happens around me, inside this house and out. I make people be heard, all those men with causes and ideas and not a chance, without me, of airing their views in the right rooms.’
Mother is not even looking at Bea, just at the fireplace, as though the flames will provide an answer to her woes.
‘And one by one they leave me. I can’t even persuade’ – she looks down towards the full tumbler – ‘that our way is the only way, the only way, Bea, to make things change. And that we must stick with it. We just have to be patient. It matters so much to me, Bea, so, so much. These half-crazed harpies will push us back years, of that I am sure, I’ve been told it quite directly – and more than once. Why do people either give up or lose control? It always seems to be one or the other. You would have thought that holding firm wasn’t that hard a task, staying loyal to a person you care about, or at least professed to care about. But what sort of fool am I?’ She reaches for the tumbler beside her. ‘Sentimentality is ruin. And then there’s all of you. Everyone gone, or going. Edward will crack off on some adventure soon, and where will I be then? Clemmie appears now and then, but, rather thanklessly, is paddling as fast as she can in the opposite direction. In any case, she’s hardly been a supporter. You have been, though, my darling Beatrice. Thank God you’re not going yet.’
Mother’s grip has moved to Bea’s hand which, even though it seems she could hardly be holding tighter, she now squeezes. Bea thinks she can hear her mother’s voice tremble. She can count on her fingers the number of times she has heard this and she is struggling to remember the last time Mother was so emotional towards her. How much she has wanted this but, now, when at last it comes, Bea is betraying her. A lump rises in her throat. Mother releases her hand to reach for the tumbler beside her and Bea has a sudden, visceral fear that Mother, Mother whose iron will has dictated Bea’s entire passage through life, is in tears.
Bea draws herself in. If Mother can fall, well, anybody can. She sees her mother lift a handkerchief to her eyes and it feels as though the certainty that Bea has always relied upon is crumbling in front of her.
‘Don’t desert me, Beatrice. Promise. I need you with me.’
The words hover on Bea’s lips: ‘Of course, Mother.’ She believes both that she will never, can never, desert her mother, and that she may be lying through her teeth. As she prepares herself for the deceit, footsteps come up behind them, and both of them are engulfed in a waft of alcohol. The back of the sofa dips under the weight of a pair of arms and a shadow falls over Bea. Edward’s voice, slurring slightly, deepens behind her.
‘My two favourite ladies.’
Bea steels herself for the gush of praise from Mother but what comes next is quite the opposite, for Mother is standing up and shaking as she speaks.
‘Good God, Edward, you’re half cut.’
‘Mother dearest, that is slander. I am fully cut.’
‘You, too, Edward. You whom I least thought would let me down. Your life is a mess, Edward. You are out at all hours, the friends you bring back wreck the billiard room, and Lord knows where you’ve been beforehand. You should be down at Beauhurst, or anywhere in the country, getting some fresh air on a horse. Hunt, shoot, fish, Edward, isn’t that what you’re supposed to be doing? Frankly, I’d rather see you in the cavalry, or going off on some expedition. I shan’t miss this new Edward, if the one I used to know has vanished. God knows what your father would have thought if he were still alive.’
Even Bea feels knocked about by this tirade, but the phrase that is ringing around her head is the last, ‘if he were still alive … if he were still alive …’ Mother is talking about Father as if he were dead. Then, of course, he is as good as dead to Mother, if not to all of them. Perhaps it is the thought of why that has made Edward so inflame her.
Bea passes the next few days with her mind a jumble of stuffed envelopes, Mother and the question of whether she can go back to Lauderdale Mansions. Christ, she spends half of her waking time railing to herself about Mother, and then a few tears and Bea is back at the apron-strings. She could give up on it, do her dutiful round of dances and branch meetings of comparatively docile suffragists, recover from the hideousness of the John business and marry somebody her family actually liked. Part of this, to be frank, doesn’t sound so unappealing.
However, Celeste has held out the proverbial apple and Bea has sunk her teeth in. She’s not betraying Mother for some idle thrill but for a belief that will achieve precisely what Mother is struggling for. Mother, if you knew what I was doing, she reasons, then you would respect me more, you’d be damned proud of me, that I am doing something.
Mrs Pankhurst’s words are still in Bea’s head – Can you keep your self-respect any longer? – and Bea feels a tingling from her chest to her cheeks. Mrs Pankhurst, she thinks, and in her rises a swirl of desires to hit back where she is being hit, and giddy herself up to yesterday’s high. If Bea believes, and she does, then things will change and she, Beatrice, will leave her mark on the world. She will have made something of her life, rather than have drifted through it.
She can’t not go back to Lauderdale Mansions. That single bite of enthusiasm has made her feel as though she would wither away without it. Mother, well, Mother simply must not find out.
By nine o’clock on Tuesday Bea’s walking in through the door at Lauderdale Mansions and she’s clearly not the first. Maybe none of these women here sleeps. She passes the typing room, which is already exhaling muggy air, and reaches the door of the room-of-the-satisfying-envelopes. It is empty and she pauses in the doorway.
‘Go!’ The voice behind her is hard and angry, as though she has done something terribly, terribly wrong. My God, it occurs to her that it’s not a question of Mother knowing about Bea, but of these women knowing about Mother, and if they know she is Celeste’s niece, they must surely have realised. They must think her either a traitor or a spy, and what do they do with spies here? Bea feels slightly sick. Whoever it is speaking to her is about to tell her, at the very best, that she never wants to see Bea here again.
Bea has to turn round. She really doesn’t want to, but she has at some point to face the door. Or walk out backwards. Which is not, right now, so terrible a proposition.
It is the woman with the devilish eyebrows. Bea looks down at the floor, waiting for the next words ‘… and never come back …’ They don’t come. Instead the woman sighs, her whole chest heaving up and down as though she’s expelling the spirits from her.
‘… into the typewriter room … We’re doing the advertisements today.’
Bea pulls herself up, whispers ‘Thank you’, then ‘Good morning’, and quicksteps along the passageway and into the mauve room, where she drops into an empty seat in front of a typewriter with a feeling of relief. There is something rather reassuring about being told how to go against the grain instead of having to think it up for yourself at every turn.
The relief does not last long. Advertisements; Bea is staring at her hell on paper. For a start, she has to decipher some handwritten scrawl, and then even these personal requests have rows of capitals that appear in the middle of sentences, and after yesterday’s exertions she needs two fingers to hold down the shift key. Even then she’s pushing down hard to keep it in place. She needs to build up the strength in, of all things, her fingers, and finds some respite from the morning in imagining binding miniature Indian exercise clubs to each digit.
It is eleven o’clock. Bea is longing for a cup of tea, but is not up to ferrying back the inevitable half-dozen. She’s parched, though, and starts to count the number of tea-drinkers in the room, but as she does so her typewriter darkens and there’s somebody leaning over her. Bea feels the warmth of another face, and then a whisper blowing into her ear.
‘Come with me.’ It is Celeste.
Bea, hoping this will involve a detour via the kitchen, follows Celeste, who walks down the passageway towards the end but stops short of the kitchen. She can see the kettles boiling through the door ahead and considers stepping past her aunt. Celeste, however, is turning towards the closed door on their right. Without pausing to knock, she opens it and walks straight in, beckoning Bea to follow.
Bea finds herself in a floral-papered bedroom, at most twelve foot square, still containing a pair of twin beds. In front of the window is a small table with a chair behind, occupied by a woman of around fifty years old. Her greying hair has been set around her face, her white silk blouse fastened by a large pearl brooch. Celeste steers Bea ahead.
‘A new recruit. My niece, Beatrice Masters. Tight lips. I’ll vouch for her.’
The woman nods and Celeste moves back towards a space on one of the beds. There are perhaps a dozen women in here, their faces a disturbing mix of the radiantly healthy and others just twigs of women, some not more than thirty yet their faces already sagging skin and bone. If a window were opened, thinks Bea, it would blow them away. Their heads, however, are held high, the heads held highest of all sporting purple cheekbones and jaws.
‘From the force-feeding,’ Celeste whispers as Bea sits down where her aunt pats the counterpane.
Bea is at the pillow end of a bed and she peers forward through the trees of necks topped by waves of pinned hair: some are emaciated, others thick trunks of flesh.
‘Bodyguard,’ Celeste breathes into her ear.
To the left of the woman behind the table, just to the side of the window, is an incongruously red velvet tasselled wing chair. In it sits another small woman with high cheekbones and a square jaw. Her hair is greying, too, and she looks about the same age as the woman sitting behind the table. Bea thinks back to the evening in Campden Hill Square. She can remember the hat, of course, the straight shoulders, and a flash of jawline. However, the dark and distance had kept the detail of the face from her. Now she can see that it is thinner than it should be. The skin is tired, there are the traces of dark circles under the eyes, but the eyes themselves glow as they survey this small crowd jostling for space, each woman leaning forward towards her. Of course, Bea has seen the photograph more times than she can remember, but here, glimmering in the flesh, almost close enough for Bea to reach out and touch her skin, is Emmeline Pankhurst.
It is not Mrs Pankhurst who speaks first, but a younger woman, aged around thirty, who emerges from a corner.
‘I should start by thanking Mrs Hall for lending us her flat. Thank you, Pattie. I hope we are all aware that this arrangement will only work for as long as it is kept secret. Nobody needs reminding of what happened at Lincoln’s Inn House.’
The woman’s cheeks are rounded with a healthy blush etched years ago on school hockey fields. School, thinks Bea, was not a place she was allowed to go. Had she gone, would she, like this woman, be able to stand up and address such a crowd without flinching? The woman is continuing, ‘… a special welcome to Mary Fuller and Sarah Hodson, our comrades-in-arms, and “mice” most recently released from Holloway. Not only are they recovering but they are still managing to evade rearrest.’
One of the women with a bruised face whispers back: ‘Still in fine fettle. Only our first time …’
Another voice, a familiar voice that makes Bea catch her breath, cuts in, ‘What your bodies feel is irrelevant. Your spirits can always stay strong.’
It is Mrs Pankhurst, Emmeline, speaking out from her wing chair. She doesn’t wait for a formal introduction, for determination and impatience are pushing against the walls of this room and there are other things that need to be done. While women are sitting here typewriters are empty, piles of envelopes untouched and suffragettes being force-fed.
‘The government thinks it can ignore us,’ she continues. ‘We need to do something that it cannot forget.’
‘Fire …’ Bea can’t see who the voice is from, but it is not such a strong voice, perhaps from one of the women weakened by a stay in Holloway.
Mrs Pankhurst does not wait. ‘Another burning church won’t do it. Those that need to have their minds changed must feel the heat a little closer to home.’
‘Home?’ Another voice, this one stronger.
‘Women are laying down their lives. They need to be honoured. Nothing, nobody, is beyond bounds while we are not allowed a voice in this country. This is the only way to speak left open to us.’
As the words come out of Mrs Pankhurst’s mouth, Bea looks round the room at the women with their straight backs and perfect hair, and bruises.
‘Who then?’ Another voice.
‘It is the moment, not the person, that matters most. When that comes, the “who” will be clear.’ Emmeline Pankhurst’s voice croaks, and she is silent.
The hearty chairwoman takes over.
‘Don’t worry, ladies, Mrs Pankhurst simply has a slight chill. We all agree, I am sure, on the need for extreme action. I particularly agree that timing and planning are of the essence. In the meantime we need to continue with ordinary business. Any volunteers for handing out leaflets and chalking up pavements?’
‘Remember,’ says Mrs Pankhurst, ‘even that has danger attached.’
What easy price danger, thinks Bea.
After two hours at Speakers’ Corner, Bea is straining to remember what it was like not to be cold. She didn’t feel the temperature at first, she was looking around, left, right and back again, as she had been told to. Not for the police; Bea isn’t doing anything illegal. It was, and is, for the anti-suffragists that she’s been told to watch out, especially the men, burly men, though even the small ones can be vicious. The women don’t come right up to your face, they said in Lauderdale Mansions.
Bea feels flushed, and her breastbone is tingling. She’s enjoying the sensation, and almost wishes for a small mob of aggressors. Around her are the usual half-dozen soapbox speakers competing for attention. Religion, of course, the Salvation Army positioning itself the other side of the open area from the exhortations of the Evangelists. A Theosophist is reasoning calmly in between the Socialist Party of Great Britain demanding revolution and the anti-Home Rule propagandists arguing for no change at all in Ireland. No anti-suffragists this afternoon. Not even any of Mother’s crowd. Thank God.
Bea’s gloves are not thick enough to keep her fingers warm yet she cannot commit the cardinal sin of slipping them into the pockets on her coat, for her hands are still clutching the last few leaflets. Reticence, she has discovered, is not the key. Nor is announcing what the leaflet says before she hands it out, though her purple, green and white sash gives it away. Instead she has learnt the tactic of approaching a passer-by and smiling as she thrusts the paper into his or her hand. It makes the men, of course, more likely to take it, though they are hardly likely to read it. Still, it must be better to push out as many as possible, even if these men’s sons simply make paper aeroplanes with them. In any case, Bea has to keep up with the battleaxe who came with her.
From here Bea can see home, just. With her binoculars trained spot on, Mother could possibly see her. Yet, instead of being frightened, after last night Bea feels a calm certainty that Mother would not actually throw Bea out of the house, leaving herself yet more alone.
Even if she did, Edie would take Bea in. Well, perhaps – newly-weds can be so conventional. Of course, on the outside it’s all fun and games but challenge them a little and they are nervous of change. Or there’s Celeste. But Celeste has other house guests. A perpetually rotating list of ‘distressed’ women and ‘artistic’ men. According to Celeste, the most reliable among them are the just-released hunger-strikers, of whom there are usually at least two languishing upstairs. She once picked up a woman off the streets whom she installed in the best spare and who charmed the other guests for a fortnight while yelping at any staff who tried to touch her possessions. After two weeks of complaining that ‘those lot will have it all off me given half the chance’, she vanished with two silver sugar shakers and a teapot.
‘Funny,’ said Celeste when she told the story to Bea. ‘She didn’t drink tea.’
This will not happen, however. People talk and Mother doesn’t, she surely doesn’t, want a scandal; she has enough to irritate her already and any more might weaken her standing with the Union. She cares about that more than anything, well, apart from Edward. Until Edward marries, Mother is the most important woman in his life. Even when he does marry, it is not a position, Bea suspects, that Mother will readily surrender.
It is five thirty before Bea has handed out the last of the leaflets. It’s almost dark. The lamps are on and the park suddenly feels quite empty. She has to be at dinner by seven in order to make the theatre. It will take her more than a quarter of an hour to walk home – which of course she should not be doing after dark. Not the walk, nor the alone, nor the park. Bea smiles to herself as she sets off down the avenue of trees leading south.
It’s funny how, after dark, even if there is still traffic, you can hear footsteps ring, especially the ones behind her right now. They come closer, making Bea feel a little uncomfortable, and she speeds up, but not as fast as they do, for a pair of silhouettes and pale faces pass on her right. She relaxes a little but moves to the centre of the path, as far as she can from the shadows of tree trunks. As she approaches the bottom of the avenue the path ahead empties of approaching figures and behind her she hears a steady knock keeping pace, a heavy one, too. She walks a little more briskly, but the steps copy hers. She glances to the left. Through the bars of the trees she sees her home, but there is a spiked wall of railings and a road in between. Fast now, Beatrice, but don’t run, it would be far too impolite. Not to mention inelegant; she has never been a good runner.
Fifty yards to go. If the man behind her – and surely it is a man – is going to rob her, or ‘even worse’, as Clemmie used to whisper when Bea crawled into her bed at night, then he will grab her now. But, just in time, thank God, Bea can see someone turning into the park ahead of her, walking in her direction. Bea could run to this figure but just cannot bring herself to, and so she walks steadily and quickly ahead. As the bowler hat and ruddy face of the figure loom into view, she turns towards him and beams a smile. But the man does not smile back. Instead, he leans forward and hisses. Bea can feel the heat of his breath.
‘Only a woman.’
It’s not much, but Bea feels as though she has been slapped and her legs lose their direction. She wants to go forward but she finds herself slowing down right by this hissing, spitting person. Flecks of the half-rotten-meat smell from his mouth are landing, she is sure, on her face. As she stops she feels a heavy hand reach out from behind her and take her arm.
‘Excuse me.’
It is a strong south London accent, one that, in the circumstances, does not make Bea relax. That’s it, she’s surrounded. The stranger behind her will ask her to hand her money over, quite rightly assuming that she must have some tucked in somewhere. Or worse, he could take her for the sort of woman who walks here alone. But that is not what he says at all. Instead he turns to the hisser, who has also stopped, and says, ‘Would you mind leaving this young lady in peace.’
Bea tries to look the hisser in the eye imploringly. Don’t go, she is trying to say, you may be rude, but you aren’t about to rob me. It is, of course, too dark for him to see anything but the rim of her hat.
‘She should be home,’ splutters the hisser, ‘asking her husband what he thinks.’
And he walks off, leaving Bea with this stranger behind her whom she can’t yet see.
‘Do you often walk alone through the park after dark?’
Bea gasps. He does think she is one of those women. How on earth is this happening to her? All she has done is hand out a few leaflets. Bea waits, dreading what he will say next, but he is telling her that she is still wearing her sash, perhaps asking for trouble. He’s been trying to catch up with her for a while, but she’s a galloper. Where is she going? Can she at least let him walk her out of the park?
Can she? Can she not? If she continues alone she may be accosted again, and she would rather have her belongings removed charmingly than roughly – if, if anything else, then she will run, properly this time. Bea slips her sash over her head, folds it and tucks it under her elbow. It can go under her coat before she reaches the house. Beside this stranger, she walks out of the park. This is, she thinks, becoming a habit and one which, though a little terrifying at stages, breaks at least half a dozen of the most serious rules she has been brought up with – satisfactorily so.