And yet his dissatisfaction went deeper than he would admit. His courtship of Ada Brink, now into its sixth month, had been perfectly agreeable, its steady rather than scintillating progress apparently suiting the different temperaments of both of them. Lately, however, Will had felt renewed vibrations of enthusiasm for their match emanating from his mother, who had taken to organising dinners and lunches and outings that would bring the young couple unavoidably into one another’s company and indicated, with ominous clarity, the ultimate destination Mrs Maitland had in mind for them. While he felt strong enough to resist the pressures of maternal manipulation, it did incline him to make a serious appraisal of Ada’s suitability as the prospective companion of his life. Of her beauty he could make no complaint; as the days lengthened and the sun stayed longer, colour touched her cheeks and her blonde hair turned flaxen. She looked lovelier than ever, and he didn’t mind telling her so. She was possessed of exemplary manners, and a natural affability that drew people to her. All of this was encouraging. It was the idea of a lifetime together that gave him pause. She was young, of course, and relatively unformed, but there seemed little hope of passions and pursuits that might unite them in time to come. She had no interest at all in cricket; he had none in dances and riding, unless it were a bicycle. Neither of them liked the theatre. She had even less interest in books than he did, though she was a keen reader of ladies’ magazines and she laughed at the cartoons in Punch, which only made him wonder at the quality of his own jokes – she giggled no less delightedly at them.
But what worried him more, surprisingly, was Ada’s placid, almost bovine temper. Most of the time he thought this pliancy quite wonderful, and enjoyed the manly prerogative of deciding where they would eat, which concert they would attend, whose friends they would invite (his, usually). On occasion, however, the novelty of making all the decisions palled, and he would ask her whether there were something in particular she wanted to do. She might then offer a suggestion, but with no great enthusiasm; more often she shrugged and smiled and said, ‘You decide.’ Will knew that most men of his acquaintance would take this to be the natural order of things and rest complacent in their own dominion. He felt less certain, and the more passive and biddable Ada seemed to him the more he found himself hankering for a show of spirit, of independence, of simple curiosity. He wanted someone beautiful, but with a mind of her own. Someone like – no, he would not say her name, but … someone like her, only without the criminal tendencies. Was that too much to ask?
These troubling ruminations were still a weight on him as he guided his bicycle through the players’ entrance at the back of the Priory pavilion. Middlehurst, the M—shire captain, was recovering from injury, so Will, as one of the senior players, had agreed to supervise Monday-morning nets. As he approached the changing room he could hear a competing medley of male guffaws, and on entering found the players trading jokes whose topicality he wasn’t slow to grasp. Someone had been reciting the headline story from the Daily Mail.
‘I ’eard she was very short-sighted and mistook the creature for the Queen – she was only tryin’ to curtsy.’ More laughter.
Another voice piped up. ‘Nah, she had ten bob on Anmer to win and was telling the jockey, “Oi, get off – I can ride this nag quicker meself.”’
Revill, the cocky young opening bat, was red-faced and short of breath from cackling. He spluttered out, giddily, ‘No, no, she knew it was a good each-way bet – she just wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth!’
Will, steering his gaze around the room, saw that he was the only one there not hooting with laughter. He dropped his kitbag on the floor and walked over to Revill, who was knuckling tears of mirth from his eyes. He looked up unguardedly as Will’s shadow towered over him.
‘So you regard it an apt subject for comedy, Revill?’
‘Beg your pardon?’
‘You heard me. A woman is trampled to death by a horse, and you think it appropriate to entertain the fellows with your so-called wit?’
‘The woman was a lunatic –’
‘And that makes it permissible to mock her?’ snapped Will, his voice cold with disgust. A silence had fallen as suddenly as a slammed door. ‘You say a lunatic. I realise it might be incomprehensible to oafs like you, but sacrificing oneself for a cause takes courage – real courage. Instead of making tasteless jibes you might try considering what you would die for.’ He shook his head, and cast a baleful glance around his teammates, who looked stunned. ‘What that woman did … she was braver than the lot of you. I mean it.’ He could almost feel his lip curl as he spoke. He paused for a moment, then walked out of the room.
For the rest of the morning he batted at nets without interruption. Nobody caught his eye and, aside from the groundsman, who had no inkling of what had occurred in the changing room, nobody spoke to him. Having thrashed ball after ball in a trance of fearsome concentration – the players seemed too cowed to bowl him anything above military medium – he tucked his bat under his arm, discarded his gloves and pads, and walked off alone towards the pavilion. Revill was loitering, with the hesitant air of one who had prepared an apology, but Will didn’t look at him as he passed.
Connie had taken the Tube to Holborn, but on gaining the street outside she found herself unable to move more than a few steps at a time, such was the press of bodies heaving around Bloomsbury. Wheel traffic had been halted, and crowds of people surged along the streets. She had been in surgery all morning with Cluett, assisting as he performed an append-ectomy; she still had the smell of gas and blood in her nostrils. She had eventually been obliged to ask his leave for the afternoon off. He didn’t enquire as to where she was going, though it wouldn’t have entailed a great deal of guesswork: Miss Davison had become the nation’s cause célèbre, and today was their final opportunity to salute her. The police looked overwhelmed by the numbers which had followed her coffin from Victoria through the West End. St George’s would provide a funeral service, one of the few churches willing to accommodate the deceased. Connie had accepted the impossibility of securing a place inside, but it seemed that the size of the crowd might actually prevent her getting within two hundred yards of the church itself. They swarmed on, and every side street and byway disgorged yet more bodies to swell their number. She had not seen a public bereaved in this way since the day Queen Victoria died. She vividly remembered that day, hearing the news on the street and rushing indoors to tell her father. He had looked at her and said: ‘I’m glad it was you who told me.’
She had at last got to the turning of Hart Street. From here she could see the church, with its Hawksmoor steeple, incongruously surmounted by a statue of George I in a Roman toga. As she inched through the crush, she heard rising from within the church the strains of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, and instantly thought of Ivy Maddocks conducting the choir in Holloway. Standing on tiptoe, Connie could see the draped coffin being shouldered under the portico; it was festooned with flowers of all kinds, though their colours were only green, purple and white. The police were clearing a space so that the pall-bearers could manoeuvre the bier down the steps and onto the open carriage, which was also decorated with flowers. As this was happening Connie noticed the hush that had fallen around her. Women – men, too – stood in rapt silence, tears in their eyes; a man standing next to her had taken off his cap and was mouthing the words of the hymn. What an extraordinary thing was the British public, she thought. It hurled missiles and broke up meetings of law-abiding suffragists, spat in the face of blameless newspaper vendors and openly rejoiced in the arrest of demonstrators. But now it turned out in its thousands to mourn the passing of the most rabidly militant suffragette who had ever lived. It seemed the people loved nothing more than a renegade who flouted all reason and addressed them in the unanswerable language of self-destruction.
An hour later she had found a suitable vantage on the steps of St Pancras Station from which she could see Miss Davison’s funeral cortège approach its terminus at King’s
Cross. Her earthly remains would be borne hence to the family home in Northumberland and a private burial at her local church. Marching bands had maintained a strident serenade in her wake. As the bier finally disappeared amid the teeming crowds, Connie stood there for some moments, sensing the anticlimactic deflation of the afternoon. She had witnessed a spectacle, and had paid her tribute – but she felt no catharsis. The deceased was already being hailed as a martyr, even among those who had previously shown no interest in the suffragist cause. Yet the revelations about her own father still touched Connie too rawly for her to regard Miss Davison’s suicide as anything other than a tragedy. She was descending the steps towards Euston Road when she heard her name being called, and looked round to see Ivy Maddocks approaching, wearing a wide black armband and a face exhilarated with misery.
‘Hullo, Ivy,’ she said, offering her hand and a smile of honest sadness. She knew that Ivy had been on friendly terms with the dead woman. Her eyes were red-rimmed behind her spectacles, though a light shone in them.
‘A famous day, Constance. From now on they’ll know we shall stop at nothing. Only look at our support!’ She gestured at the crowds milling loosely around them.
‘It’s remarkable –’ Connie began, but Ivy wasn’t listening.
‘They can’t hurt her now. She’s going to a better place,’ she said, her voice choked with feeling. ‘… a better place,’ she repeated with breathy emphasis.
‘You mean – Northumberland?’ said Connie, unable to resist mischief.
‘No,’ said Ivy, as deaf to teasing as ever. ‘I mean the Lord’s kingdom. This act will be her monument.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ Connie replied uncertainly.
‘How can you doubt it, dear? Emily knew she was on a mission. “Fight on,” she said, “and God will give the victory.”’
Connie thought the quotation was from Joan of Arc, but she decided not to quibble with this determined apostle. Ivy had been present at the church, and was recalling the service in reverential detail, from the flowers on the coffin to the funerary prayers and the choice of hymns. For want of something to contribute, Connie said, ‘I thought of you, actually, when I heard “Nearer My God to Thee” – one of your favourites, wasn’t it?’
Ivy nodded in a childlike way, apparently pleased that her tenure as Holloway’s choirmistress had left its mark. They had been walking down the Gray’s Inn Road alongside straggling groups of mourners, most of them in black and adorned with laurels or purple irises.
Connie was about to turn north when Ivy, still with purpose in her step, said, ‘I have a meeting just near here – would you join us?’ Ivy belonged to a tight-knit clique of militants whose zeal for the cause was underpinned by an evangelical Christianity. Miss Davison, as their most celebrated member, was likely to be the exclusive subject of conversation.
‘It’s been rather a long day, Ivy. I should be getting home –’
‘Oh please, Constance,’ she said earnestly. ‘Can you really not spare the time? It’s only a few like-minded friends.’
Connie had met some of Ivy’s friends before, and guessed that her mind was less ‘like’ than her companion assumed, but some deep-lying gland of pity reacted to Ivy’s plaintive tone. She had lost a friend, after all, not just a comrade.
‘Well, perhaps for half an hour …’
Connie failed to guess, however, that the meeting would be held in a temperance hotel. She would have enjoyed a glass of something after foot-slogging behind the funeral cortège, but the only refreshment provided was cucumber sandwiches and tea. The upper room to which Ivy had led her disclosed a dozen or so ladies, all of them righteously flushed from the afternoon’s proceedings and eagerly gabbling over one another, as if to claim their own little share of history in the making. Connie, as the only one of them not to have been in the pews at St George’s, or indeed to be sporting a black armband, was regarded with an air of polite puzzlement. To hear them talk, one would imagine the funeral service had combined the eloquence of the Book of Psalms and the majesty of the Sermon on the Mount. One lady, still in a transport of idolatrous fervour, kept murmuring, ‘So beautiful … so beautiful.’
The one to whom the rest of the assembly deferred was a lady of imposing handsomeness, thin-faced, green-eyed, with a tightly coiled bun of russet hair. Her name was Edith Aitken, and as soon as Connie entered the room she felt this queen bee’s gaze alight upon her. At first she wondered if it was disapproval for not wearing an armband, but on being introduced she perceived herself to be an object of interest to the lady, who took her aside.
‘I see you were on the strike, Miss Callaway,’ said Edith, glancing at the Portcullis medal pinned to Connie’s jacket, a decoration awarded to every hunger-striker at Holloway. ‘A tribute to your mettle, I should say.’
‘Yes – though it nearly killed me,’ Connie replied, in a light but rueful way.
‘Well, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Sacrifice of the self is the noblest of all, do you not think?’
‘I’m not sure that I do,’ said Connie quietly, sensing the heresy on her tongue. ‘I would be sorry to see anyone following Miss Davison’s example.’
‘Oh?’ said Edith, with a not unfriendly curiosity. ‘So you object to the idea of martyrdom?’
‘In that form – yes. I cannot regard her in the same spirit of admiration as your friends here do.’
‘Then … how do you regard her?’
Connie paused, hearing the steel in Edith’s tone. ‘As a very unhappy woman who had lost the balance of her mind. Please don’t think I deny her courage – she did more than I would dare –’
‘Yes, she did,’ Edith broke in sharply.
‘– but martyrdom was the result, not the cause, of her action. As you know, she had tried to kill herself twice before, in prison. She may have been predisposed, mentally, to do so, I’m not sure. But I feel certain that Miss Davison was in grave need of medical help.’
Edith looked at her with a challenging gleam. ‘Are you suggesting she was mad?’
Connie held her gaze. ‘I believe that, to one degree or another, all suicides are mad. And I have observed the effect on their loved ones enough to know that they destroy more than their own selves.’
At this point a discussion which had begun elsewhere in the room was now being foregrounded, and Ivy, eager to invite Edith’s participation, interrupted them.
‘Edith, we’ve been putting our heads together. We must take up the sword that has fallen from Emily’s hand. Our conclusion –’ here she gestured at the half-dozen ladies assembled around her ‘– is that we intensify our campaign against the enemy.’
‘And so we shall,’ said Edith coolly. ‘With or without the approval of Mrs Pankhurst. It is a matter of taking the initiative – I propose a series of “spectaculars” that will seize public attention in the same way that our dear Emily has done. We will have this government on the run.’
There followed a debate about the most immediate way of inflicting damage. Government buildings were now too heavily guarded to be viable targets, while incendiaries at railway stations had drawn down too much popular opprobrium. It seemed that sporting events remained their best option, guaranteeing both huge publicity and ease of disguise: faced with large crowds, the police could not always be vigilant as to who were militants and who law-abiding citizens. The women’s arsenal of matches and kerosene and hammers could be concealed about the person. Connie, having listened in dutiful silence, was about to make her excuses when she heard someone talking about Festival Week on the south coast. Ivy, eyes glittering behind her spectacles, made one of her sudden bird-like turns in her direction.
‘Constance knows all about cricket.’ All eyes now focused on her. ‘I recall a little postcard of a pavilion on your cell wall. Where was it?’
Connie, put on the spot, smiled wanly. ‘It’s … a place called the Priory.’
‘Ah, we’ve all heard of that,’ said Edith. ‘And Festiva
l Week would ensure the crowds. Miss Callaway, is this a mission you would lend yourself to?’
She felt herself blushing guiltily. ‘I’m not sure how … useful I could be.’
Edith squinted at this hesitation. ‘Well, you seem to know the place. Perhaps you have information about access, about escape routes. Come, my dear, you are a soldier of this volunteer army, are you not?’
Connie had to think quickly. Lord Daventry, President of M—shire CC and his friend the MP, Greville Foulkes, were scheduled to attend. Yet the thought of damage being done to the Priory appalled her, and her immediate instinct was to refuse them flat. Sensing the fanatical mood in the room, however, she realised it would be more politic to assume the guise of support. And it might be to the Priory’s advantage if she were there to keep an eye on these potential saboteurs.
‘I have a friend down there …’ she said with a meaning look.
‘Excellent,’ said Edith, not taking her eyes off Connie. ‘We have three weeks to prepare. We will need to have a plan of the building, and then determine on which day we should make our attack.’
‘What exactly would be the nature of this – attack?’ asked Connie, holding her voice steady.
Edith’s expression was Delphic. ‘That’s to be decided. But it will be something worthy of our fallen comrade – be sure of it.’
Half of the Human Race Page 28
