“War will make us irrelevant.”
Stella’s ill health had made her despondent. Audrey had gone to see her in London, saw how depressed she was. She’d had to give up her flat to move in with her sister, her financial situation so diminished.
“At least the flat has a decent warm water supply,” she’d said to Audrey. “Though my sister refuses to install a telephone. How can I do campaign work when I am so cut off?”
Audrey had begun to take Stella’s place at lectures, pressing on with the campaign, hardly able to keep up. Letters to MPs and the newspapers between lectures; exhausted, she began to wonder if she had the true stuff required of an agitator.
“I’m not ready for irrelevance,” she told Stella. Theirs, she believed, was not so much a struggle between man and woman, but between those who were gripped by the past and those with forward-looking minds. She held on to this idea of progression. It allowed her to preserve the belief that war could not happen again in Europe. “There are still some rational people in Europe that don’t want this war to happen.”
Rational people? Frank had warned her against this kind of thinking.
She’d been in the river the day before, usually a place that was like a steady hand at her shoulder, but this time when she swam up past the willow tree, she saw that a large branch had fallen into the water. Still attached to the tree, tendons stretched like a lifeline to the fallen branch. The destruction jolted her as if she herself had been struck. The savage tearing away of bark and sinew, leaving the tree raw, exposed, left her with a great sense of unease, and she’d stayed in the river for some time gripping the branch as if trying to save it somehow. The rook, too, seemed distressed, flittering about, unable to settle on one tree or another. The tree had been a marker for her, the point in the river to rest before continuing on or turning back. To see it torn like that spoke of a kind of disintegration.
Disintegration. How could she think of such a thing? She was overreacting, taking everything too keenly, seeing disaster where there was nothing to see. There was something else that was troubling her, the true reason she’d gone to the river.
Another trip to London a week ago, this time to see her brother to try to determine how serious he was about opening Wentworth House to the public. The usual hustle of the city so familiar to her was marked by the escalating signs of pending war, trenches dug in city parks, the preparation of shelters, a sense of disquiet in the streets.
The meeting with her brother was its own kind of disaster. She knew he dismissed her work as a passing fad; he made her feel like some relentless bluebottle spoiling the gin and tonic he took on the terrace. She would find something else, eventually. That was his view, and until then she must be endured. He’d come to the restaurant in a bluster, which she later understood to be connected to an earlier meeting. He had, it turned out, financial concerns, so the timing of their meeting was inopportune.
She, too, had come to the meeting in a bit of a state. She’d taken an early train to London with a plan to meet Stella, but that had fallen through when Audrey had received a note saying Stella was too ill to meet with her. She had retreated to a tea shop near the train station, and, with her mind already full of arguments she would make to her brother, she wasn’t fully aware of the immediate world around her. So when she swung open the door to the tea shop, she barged in without noticing the couple coming toward her.
“Peter,” she said, after apologies were blurted out. “Peter, what are you doing here?” Peter, shocked, alarmed, flustered, unable to come out with anything so that it was the woman behind who stepped forward. “I’m Helena.” And this seemed to prompt Peter. “Yes, yes, Helena, and this is Audrey Wentworth.” But there needed to be more of the dangling introduction that left them outside the tea shop, standing on the pavement as if waiting for a bus.
“I’m Peter’s wife,” Helena offered, and just then a bus did come by, and Audrey stepped back as though she meant to catch it.
“Oh. How nice to meet you.” Audrey recovering, unable to look at Peter, suddenly feeling in her chest the pain she now saw would come to Frank.
“She arrived two days ago.”
“From Canada.”
As if she were a parcel that had come in the post.
Peter’s look of alarm did not leave him, his face sober, earnest, as if constantly searching for some word or phrase that he was meant to utter.
Disintegration.
Audrey had come home from London needing to reclaim something of herself and so immediately went to the river. She would not solve the problem of her brother’s insularity, his arrogance; she would not solve the problem of Frank’s broken heart. She could do little for them, but she needed to replenish something of herself. She swam the river like an otter, up and down until her arms could only dangle. None of this was fair, yet she’d been tested on fairness before.
“I’ve been communicating with a colleague in America,” Stella told her, holding a note for her to read. “Will you post this for me?” Audrey nodding, taking it from her. I so want to urge all our friends outside Europe to keep on with the good work of general and social reform, all the harder. We here are probably doomed—in this generation anyway. But let us at least feel we’ve lighted a torch!
“Copies of all our ALRA literature should be forwarded for record purposes to sympathizers in North America, Australia, and New Zealand,” Stella said, easing into her chair. “We need to have some record of our achievement, that we did have progress.”