by Rosie Thomas
‘I would like to go and hear Mosley speak. I would like to offer to help him. I could do that, couldn’t I?’
Grace swung her feet down on to the floor. Her glass was empty now. ‘Yes, you could do that. Only what will Nathaniel say if he discovers you marching in uniform with the fascist youth bands?’
‘I don’t wear a uniform and I shan’t march.’ Alice frowned and her solemn face went red. ‘Anyway, Nathaniel isn’t a Bolshevist, you know.’
‘Of course he isn’t. But I don’t believe he is a great admirer of Hitler or Mussolini either.’
‘I know that. But I must find out what I believe in myself, mustn’t I? Pappy would defend my right to do that, he would defend anyone’s.’
‘Yes, he would. And so would I,’ Grace said softly.
Alice went to hear Mosley speak.
The first time was in Trafalgar Square, and she walked there from Vincent Street through the mild London sunshine. There was only a small crowd; Sir Oswald Mosley stood on the plinth at the foot of Nelson’s Column and a little corps of eight young men wearing black shirts and grey flannels surrounded him. Alice was able to come close to him, and he seemed to speak directly to her. She found that she could not take her eyes off his face.
‘We must be the movement of youth,’ he told the crowd. He had an orator’s voice, rising and falling as rhythmically as music. ‘We must gladly accept discipline, and the effort, and the sacrifice, because only by accepting these can great purposes be achieved. By these alone can the modern state be built.’
His words seemed to enter Alice’s blood.
After the rally was over she walked home again alone, wishing that she could have followed Mosley and his young men. The streets she passed along seemed to glimmer with a light as hard and bright as diamonds, and all the soot-stained buildings were cleaner and sharper and seemed to stand higher against the colourless sky.
It came to her suddenly that she did have something to be proud of in being British, and that she was ready to defend it against apathy and degeneracy and the creeping tide of Bolshevism. She lifted her head and swung her arms as she walked.
Grace was, as usual, not at home, but Alice met Cressida on the landing outside her bedroom.
‘How was the great rally?’ Cressida asked.
In the flush of her excitement Alice said warmly, ‘It was marvellous, utterly marvellous. You should have come, I wish you had heard what he had to say.’
Cressida blinked. Her pale, short eyelashes gave her a myopic appearance, although she saw perfectly well. ‘You wish I had been there? I wouldn’t go anywhere near muck like that. I am a socialist.’
Cressida had recently adopted a left-wing stance. Grace was amusedly tolerant of her political posturing – when she took any notice of it at all – but Alice found it deeply irritating. Alice was too serious and too literal-minded to be amused by the notion of a twelve-year-old socialist.
‘You only claim to be one because you want to oppose Grace.’ Opposing Grace was the most incomprehensible aim, to Alice.
‘Not just Mummy. Grandfather and good old Uncle Hugo with their feudal notions and military-minded Uncle Thomas as well, actually.’
‘What do you know about anything?’
‘As much as you, dear Alice. I can read, can’t I? And listen and make up my own mind.’
‘You’re just a stupid little girl.’
‘I’m not stupid, stupid.’ Cressida lashed out with a clenched fist. With all her weight behind it the blow connected with Alice’s arm, and Alice gasped with pain. She was ready to hit back, but then with an effort she regained control of herself. She was always conscious of her own dignity, and she didn’t want Grace, or even Nanny or Mabel, to hear that she had been fighting with Cressida like an infant in the schoolroom. She turned and walked away, still quivering with anger.
Cressida watched her go. Her fists were still clenched, and her stolid face was mottled with hatred.
Alice learnt to be circumspect about her new-found zeal. There were more meetings and rallies to be attended as the British Union of Fascists slowly emerged under Mosley’s leadership, and Alice slipped away to join the swelling, uneasy crowds whenever she was able. Her work for Grace didn’t fill all her time, and she was often able to absent herself from Vincent Street. But she did not talk much about what she saw and heard. She kept the fire of her devotion well shielded, away from the crass misjudgements of those who would not understand it.
There began to be scuffles and then full-blown fights at some of the meetings, between Mosley’s supporters and bands of hostile anti-fascists. Alice watched the battles indignantly, but she was proud when hecklers and communists were thrown out by the Blackshirts.
At one meeting there were persistent interruptions from a trio of men up in the gallery of the hall. Mosley raised his arm and pointed his finger. Alice shivered, as if he pointed at her instead.
His accusation rang out. ‘There you see three warriors of class war, all from Jerusalem.’
It was the first time Alice had heard him single out the Jews as a target. He said afterwards, to qualify his words, ‘Fascist hostility to Jews is directed against those who finance communists, and those who are pursuing an anti-British policy.’
Alice believed what he said. Of course, anyone who gave money to support communism or worked against the national good should be a target, whatever his faith or nationality. If any Jews did such things, then they must be prevented from doing so.
After that meeting there was a march. Mosley and seventy of his young men marched along Fleet Street and down Whitehall to their headquarters. The men wore their black shirts, and they strode along without coats or hats, singing and calling out the Union’s rallying cries. There were no women with them, but Alice slipped along in their wake, almost a part of the rabble of anti-fascists that scuffled at the tail of the march.
The singing and the sound of marching feet and the sight of Tom’s handsome head held high at the front of the column were almost unbearably stirring. There were tears in Alice’s eyes. She would have done anything for the cause at that minute.
The pain was in the reality that there was nothing she could do except run along behind the men.
Perhaps her chance would come. She watched the bareheaded young men swarming into the party headquarters in a great burst of cheering before she turned away and made her way back home.
Clio and Jake saw what was happening, but they also did not see.
Alice had discovered a vein of secrecy within herself. When she met her brother or sister it was easy to convince them that she cared about nothing but being Grace’s secretary-assistant, eagerly hanging on at the outer fringe of her cousin’s political life. The pretence that it was not important, did not even exist, made the flame of her new devotion burn brighter and sweeter inside her.
There was sly excitement in coming back from a Blackshirt rally with the Leader’s oratory like a bell in her head, to Gower Street or Islington or just to Vincent Street, and seeming to be the same Alice that she had always been.
The knowledge that she was not the same nourished her more richly than any food could have done.
She had always been the baby of the Babies, the youngest one of all the brothers and sisters and cousins, the last to arrive at the table when all the knowledge and wisdom and experience were being dished out, but now she felt herself growing big and strong. She alone knew where the future must lie. She was superior to all of them. Superior even to Grace. Alice thought that in her heart Grace understood and believed in the right way, but she was weak enough to let political expediency dilute her intentions.
As it happened, Alice underestimated what Clio and Jake did know. Separately, they were aware of their sister’s growing fanaticism, but for different reasons they were unwilling to admit it to each other, or even to themselves.
To Jake, Alice was still partly a little girl. He cherished the memory of her as an innocently demanding toddler in the last sum
mer before the war. Alice had slept on a rug with her curls damp against her flushed face whilst he was importuning his cousin Grace in the angle of a hawthorn hedge. Alice belonged in those pre-war days, when the world had seemed to Jake to be a sunny and equable place. That was before the trenches and the stretchers, and the rare quiet times between bombardments when he had sat reading Donne by the light of a paraffin lamp.
He ruined me and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
The words came back to Jake with peculiar resonance now. The world had not regained its sunniness for long, and darkness and death had become over-familiar presences in his medical practice. There was a particular bitterness in the possibility that Alice might be affected by this darker world, and so he chose to convince himself that she was not.
Jake was repelled by the anti-Semitism of the Blackshirt movement. There was a bad evening at Islington, when Alice was sitting down to a family supper with him and Ruth and the children, Rachel and Lucas. Out of nowhere, out of nothing more than the small currency of exchanged news and domestic opinions, had come a disparagement of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in Germany.
Alice had laid down her knife and fork. She lifted her head and Jake saw that her eyes were wide, and very bright, the pupils like black glass.
She began to parrot the old propaganda. There were good Jews, like Nathaniel. Like Levi and Dora Hirsh and Ruth’s mother and father. And there were bad Jews, corrupt financiers who embezzled and stole and who undermined the economy and gave money to the communists. The bad Jews must be punished. They must repay what they had stolen. Stolen from us, Alice said.
Ruth had gasped. For once, she was at a loss for words.
Looking from his Jewish wife to the round, smooth faces of his Jewish children, Jake had felt sick. He had felt as if the ground shivered along some fault under the floorboards, under the folds of the cloth that covered his dining table, and that at any moment a fault might crack open and they would be pitched in different directions, some of them landing on one side of the chasm and some on the other, and some of them vanishing into the blackness itself.
And yet … Alice was his sister, and he loved her as he loved all of his family. He felt that they were all bound together by threads that spun out of the Woodstock Road and held them tight for ever. It was because he loved his mother and father that he couldn’t tell them that their beloved Alice had joined the Women’s Movement of the British Union of Fascists. It hurt him that he did not know for certain that she had, that she left him to guess and to imagine the worst. And it cut him that she could come to his house, and say such things in front of Ruth and the children. Yet he loved her as much as he loved the children. More, perhaps, than he loved their sharp and combative mother these days. Jake was not sure how the gulf had opened between Ruth and himself, or how long ago, but now that it was there he had no idea how to bridge it again. They went through all the rituals of living a domestic life together, but the sharp pleasure that they had once known in being together had now entirely faded. They existed side by side, and curbed their irritation with one another as best they could.
He found some inadequate words. ‘That is enough of that talk at my table, Alice.’
Ruth had glanced at him, a hard look that seemed to say, Is that all?
And Jake had looked away from her to his sister, who coolly met his eye. Then she had smiled. Her top lip lifted, showing her white teeth and her gums, making her look like some healthy and utterly unquestioning farm animal.
The excuse that Jake chose to make to himself for his sister’s sudden and frightening allegiance was male, and doctorly. He knew that Mosley was a handsome and charismatic man, and that the youths who marched behind him were mostly well setup, and shown off to their best advantage by the buttoned-up black shirts and fascist insignia of their uniforms. He decided that Alice was in the grip of a sexual fixation, intensified by the charged atmosphere of rallies and marches. Her ill-informed fascist enthusiasms would soon pass, he told himself, once she was safely married.
There was the risk that she might be carried off by one of the young thugs of the movement, but almost none of them was of her class or background. Jake reasoned that she was much more likely to be claimed by one of the scions of Tory families who passed through Grace’s drawing room. He thought that would answer her real inclinations. And once she was properly bedded, this dangerous phase would be over.
It was a reassuring line of thought, but the pursuit of it stirred other ideas within Jake. He sat in his surgery after the last patient had gone home. He took the brandy bottle out of the bottom drawer of his desk and poured a measure into the medicine glass kept for the purpose. He tipped the spirit into his mouth and thought about Ruth, tracing in his mind’s eye the creases that ran under her belly and the mottled veins that had begun to spread over her thighs. He could hear her remonstrative voice in his head.
Then he began to consider other possibilities. Moving slowly, heavily, he stood up and went to his coat that hung from the hatstand in the corner. He took a notebook from his pocket, and referred to it before he lifted the telephone receiver.
Clio knew, or guessed, how deeply Alice was being drawn into the net of fascism. But she did not discuss her fears with Jake and Ruth out of a kind of delicacy, a respect for the Jewish solidity of their family life and shame for Alice. She also had the idea that it was not Alice who was finally to blame, but Grace.
It was Grace who allowed, or even encouraged, Alice’s allegiance to Mosley. Grace had introduced her to him, in her own drawing room. It was Clio’s belief that Grace was drawn to the movement herself, but was too careful of her own position to admit it openly. But through Alice’s membership she could experience it vicariously, in perfect safety. Through her silly, adolescent devotion to her cousin, Alice had become a pawn in Grace’s game.
Clio had hardly seen Grace since Alice had gone to live in Vincent Street, but she felt the old, dissonant chords of mistrust and suspicion begin their deep vibrations all over again.
However, the main reason for Clio’s failing properly to stand guard over her sister was nothing to do with Grace, or even with Alice herself. As the winter of 1932 came, and Clio’s third wedding anniversary passed, she was increasingly preoccupied with the tightening spiral of her own life.
It was a cold winter, and fog-bound, murky chill descended on London and settled in the dingy Gower Street rooms. Miles was drinking heavily and seemed lately to have given up all pretence of working. They had very little money. Resentment against him flared up in Clio when he wasted what they did have, but she smothered it rather than allowing it to erupt into one of the vicious arguments that her husband seemed almost to enjoy.
Clio was weary, and the weariness oozed out of her in a series of small illnesses. There was a cold, and then a gastric infection, and then another cold that she could not shake off. She had almost never been ill in her life before, and the experience made her feel even weaker and more helpless than ever. The days spent lying in the disordered bedroom, wondering when Miles would slam out of the house or come banging back again, were the dreariest she had ever spent. Her sense of a lost, parallel life that they might have lived together if only an elusive detail or two could have been changed was heightened by his occasional kindnesses.
Sometimes he brought her a tray, with invalid food invitingly prepared and a nonsensical poem rolled in her napkin ring.
‘I’m sorry to be such a wet blanket,’ Clio said, trying not to cry as she twisted the scroll of paper in her fingers.
‘Poor old blanket,’ Miles said lightly. He bent over to kiss the top of her head and then slid away, out to the Fitzroy, or Soho, or wherever it was he spent his time.
Jake came to see her and pronounced that she was run down and anaemic, and needed a change of scene.
‘Can’t you get Miles to take you away somewhere? You’ve got no children, no real ties. You could go away for the rest of the
winter, to the south of France, or Morocco, even. There’s no reason to stay here.’
‘And there’s no money to take us anywhere else.’ She tried to smile, and Jake did not seem to see the bitterness in it. ‘I shall have to make do with Christmas in the Woodstock Road.’
That year, Miles would only consent to leave London with her for two days. Nathaniel and Eleanor did their best to make it a happy family Christmas, but it was a gloomy festival. Alice came home, filled with a glittering, unfocused brightness that seemed to strike at an awkward angle off all of them. Ruth could barely speak to her.
Ruth had only ever come to spend Christmas holidays with her husband’s parents out of a belief in family solidarity. She always disapproved of Nathaniel’s secular enjoyment of a Christian festival, and this year with the spectre of Alice’s fascism gliding between them all she had tried to refuse Eleanor’s invitation.
Eleanor had begged her. ‘The children love it so. It isn’t Christmas without children, Ruthie.’
In the end, they came. Luke and Rachel were duly spoilt with stockings and too many presents beneath the tree and too much to eat. Over-excitement turned to bad temper and then tears, and Ruth darted her sharp, hard glance at Jake to say, I told you so.
Miles ate as much as he could of Eleanor’s good food, and drank volumes of Nathaniel’s College claret and nineteenth-century port. He was charming and amusing, as he always could be when it suited him.
Clio sat coughing and snuffling on a sagging sofa in the room that overlooked the frozen garden. Staring up at The Janus Face it came to her that she hated the portrait.
‘Why do you keep that horrible thing hanging there?’ she asked Nathaniel.
Nathaniel was surprised. ‘It’s a fine painting. He’s caught the look of both of you.’ The old tease of John Leominster was long forgotten. ‘Besides, I’m fond of the man. What’s become of him?’
‘Pilgrim?’ Clio had recently met Jeannie in Charlotte Street. The artist’s model looked fifteen years older than her real age. Jeannie’s news was that Pilgrim and Isolde were in Berlin together.
