Half of the Human Race

by Anthony Quinn

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ cried Brigstock. ‘I’d been wondering at what hour in the morning you’d show up. Come in!’ She shot an amused glance at the silk paisley dressing gown that he wore over a frayed dress shirt.

  ‘Still too early for you to have dressed properly, I see.’

  He gave his mouth a twist of wry approval: they had instantly dropped into their familiar way of conversational sparring. He did not look very changed since she had last seen him, in Paris, two years ago. His slouch had become a middle-aged stoop, and the neat pointed beard was a self-conscious attempt at homme d’affaires gravitas. But he was still lean as a whippet, and still with a gleam in his eye. She followed him along a short corridor to a drawing room which he had converted into his studio; the three tall bays, each framing a view of the park, offered as much light as an artist could wish for. A heavy easel stood in one corner, holding a half-finished portrait. Against the walls leaned stacks of framed canvases, which he was sorting through in preparation for a retrospective of his work the following month. He had invited Connie to ‘advise’ him on what to select, though she suspected that it was merely a pretext to show off.

  ‘Have a look through ’em while I make some tea,’ he said over his shoulder.

  She began idly to pick out one canvas and another, and found that a vague chronological arrangement had already been imposed on the assembly. One could trace a line from his earliest landscapes, mostly of Kent and Sussex, through the Mornington Crescent paintings to the larger studies of street life from his Parisian and Venetian sojourns. Some of them she admired – sprightly still lifes, nudes in dingy bedrooms, the oddly unsettling crowds at music halls and horse sales – and some she regarded with the bemused indulgence of an old friend. Brigstock’s facility in painting was at once his strength and his weakness. He could do everything interestingly, and almost nothing brilliantly. The painter, who had absented himself for perhaps longer than he needed to, now returned with a pot of tea and china cups balanced on a tray. He set it down on a table already piled high with art books, monographs and catalogues, then absently began stirring the pot.

  ‘So …?’ he began, with a nod to the stacks. Connie was aware that she had never rhapsodised over his work, and that Brigstock had never quite encouraged her to.

  ‘There are some lovely paintings,’ she said, looking him in the eye. ‘The Mornington Crescent ones make me feel very nostalgic.’

  ‘Ah, the hungry years. Or, at least – the peckish years,’ he said with a laugh. ‘I’ve moved barely a mile from the place, but what a difference.’ He made a nonchalant gesture to encompass the grandeur of his new abode.

  ‘Gracious living,’ agreed Connie, craning her gaze up at the coving.

  ‘We all move on,’ he shrugged. ‘I couldn’t stay in a garret forever. With the prices these fetch now it would be dishonest.’

  ‘I notice you still smoke those foul French cigarettes,’ she said, taking out a packet of Sullivans and offering him one.

  ‘Old habits. I suppose a fat cigar would better suit my elevation in the world.’

  They smoked in silence for a few moments. Then she spotted something in the far corner of the room: it was the corner of a burnished gilt frame where the oatmeal-coloured dust sheet had teasingly peeled away. The dimensions were plainly enormous. She sidled over to it.

  ‘What’s this? The portrait in the attic?’

  He squinted at her through curling cigarette smoke. ‘I was wondering whether to show you this. You remember I was at the front for four weeks in the summer of ’18? Well, in my capacity as an “official war artist” I undertook certain commissions that were … out of my usual line.’ He pulled back the sheet, revealing a canvas about seven or eight feet long, a group portrait of six British generals standing about casually in a conference room. Their identical tight little moustaches and swagger sticks were counterpointed by their different heights and eyelines; they had the uncertain look of actors awaiting instructions from their director. None of the officers seemed to have noticed the captain’s tunic and cap thrown over a chair in the corner; or else they were determinedly ignoring it.

  ‘They look a sinister lot,’ said Connie thoughtfully.

  ‘Hmm. I didn’t much care for them,’ Brigstock admitted. ‘And I dare say the feeling was mutual.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ she asked, pointing to the foregrounded figure, a short, choleric-looking fellow who, alone of the six, stared unflinchingly out at the viewer.

  ‘Ah, the scarlet major … don’t recall his name. No oil painting, is he?’

  She smiled, then took another measuring look at the picture. ‘It’s – a remarkable thing,’ she said, and meant it. ‘I like the “not-thereness” of that discarded uniform in the corner.’

  Brigstock inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘It’s actually called The Uniform. I’m not sure about exhibiting it, all the same. There’s a danger it may overwhelm the rest.’

  Connie shook her head. ‘But you must show it. The fact that it’s so different from your other work – that’s significant.’

  He turned on her an expression in which pride mingled with doubt. ‘That’s a strong steer. I’ll bear it in mind.’ He covered it up again with the dust sheet, as if to stare at it for too long might turn them to stone. Connie, crushing out her cigarette in a pewter ashtray, settled herself against an enormous zebra-hide cushion. She watched him while he refreshed their teacups, and found herself pleased that he had at last returned to London. He was the sort of friend with whom she could pick up a conversation as if only two hours, rather than two years, had intervened. That ease in one other’s company sometimes bothered her. Had they missed a vital turning that might have transformed friendship into something deeper? Perhaps not. The disparity in age would always have ruled against them.

  ‘So – do you notice something different about me today?’

  Brigstock frowned at the question, then tilted his head consideringly. ‘Different … Have you, um, done something with your hair?’ She shook her head, and he scrutinised her now, his eyes narrowing on her body. ‘You don’t mean to say –’

  Connie realised where his speculation was tending and gave a little laugh. ‘No, no. It has involved a period of gestation – though a good deal longer than nine months.’ He looked baffled at that, so she continued. ‘I am, from today, qualified to vote. It’s my thirtieth birthday.’ For a moment Brigstock’s mouth hung open, an expression so rare on him as to seem almost alarming. Then he found his voice again. ‘Well, of all the – bravo to you, my dear!’ He grasped her hand, and pressed it to his lips. ‘Thirty! Hard to believe …’

  ‘You did know women could vote now, didn’t you?’ said Connie, only half joking.

  ‘Well, I read about it, of course,’ he said defensively. ‘I recall having other things on my mind at the time.’ It was a fair point. That the Representation of the People Bill had received its Royal Assent and become law one night in February 1918 was somewhat lost amid the darkness of wartime despondency. After all that had gone before, their moment of historic triumph had felt like an anticlimax. The vote had been given to them – some of them – as a reward for ‘war service’, rather like a treat given to a child for behaving unexpectedly well in difficult circumstances. Brigstock meanwhile had dashed out of the room, returning some moments later with a bottle of champagne and a pair of tin mugs. ‘Sorry, I haven’t got round to unpacking the crystal yet,’ he said, tearing the bottle’s foil neck and firing the cork across the room. Connie remembered the mugs from Mornington Crescent; as with his cigarettes, he could not quite forsake every remnant of his old bohemian days. ‘To a very happy birthday,’ he said.

  ‘To our enfranchisement,’ she replied in gentle correction. She swallowed, and felt the acid bite of the champagne in her stomach. Thirty: it was not so hard, she thought, having cushioned herself against the inevitability. What did dismay her was the negligible progress she had made in the sixteen months since the end of the war.
After the hospital in Endell Street had closed in 1919, she had set about renewing her association with Henry Cluett, the surgeon whose protégé she had been before the war. But he was about to leave the place, and London itself, to take an early retirement; her wartime work, which ought to have been the making of her, turned out to have little influence in the altered world of peacetime. With nobody willing to sponsor her renewed ambitions as a surgeon, she had joined the nursing staff of the Middlesex Hospital in Mortimer Street, where she was a sister. Enfranchisement was a landmark; professional mobility was still a pipe-dream. She would have to wait, and hope. A woman voter was something society would gradually accept, but a woman surgeon still floated in the realm of wayward ideas.

  Brigstock was looking at his pocket watch. ‘Why don’t you stay for lunch? I have some people coming round.’

  Connie shook her head. ‘I can’t, I’m afraid. My oldest friend is getting married, and I have to be at Regent Street to offer reassurance on her trousseau.’

  ‘Good Lord. I’m surprised there are any men left to marry.’

  ‘Well … my friend has found one. He’s charming, too.’ Joe, Lily’s intended, was a railway clerk with a fine tenor singing voice and a flat in Stamford Hill. She smiled, thinking of his shyly deferential manner in women’s company.

  ‘My dear, you look almost wistful. Don’t tell me you’re longing for connubial fulfilment yourself?’

  She laughed at this pompous locution. ‘No, I’m not. But is the thought of my being married so extraordinary?’

  ‘No, no … I simply can’t envisage you under the marital thumb, that’s all. You and I are of the same kidney – sufficient unto ourselves. We don’t need anyone.’

  Connie paused, and considered a reply – but kept silent. In one way she felt flattered by his estimation; but she baulked at his admiring recruitment of her into the ranks of natural solitaries. That was not the way she felt about herself, even if it seemed so to the world. She took a last mouthful of champagne and stood up.

  ‘I must go,’ she said, collecting her hat and gloves. ‘Thank you for showing me the pictures. I’ll look forward to seeing them, at –?’

  ‘Oh, the Templeman Gallery, in Albemarle Street. You must promise to come to the private view – the middle of May, I fancy.’

  He followed her as she returned along the passageway to his front door. But something rankled with her. She felt, obscurely, that her eligibility had been impugned, and she turned to him as he held open the door. ‘What you said before – that I didn’t need anyone – what did you mean?’

  ‘I said that we didn’t need anyone. It was meant as a compliment, Connie –’

  ‘It’s only that … would it surprise you to hear that someone – a man once asked me to marry him?’

  Brigstock looked at her now with a tender-eyed sadness. ‘No. That doesn’t surprise me at all. I only feel sorry for the fellow.’

  ‘Because he was deluded?’

  He gave a half-smile. ‘Because he wanted you badly enough to ask.’

  She cut back through the park and thence down Portland Place, where she passed a horse-drawn cart delivering coal at a house. She wondered if horses, so vital out in France, had been given a reprieve since the war ended. It seemed unlikely. Outside the Langham Hotel the queuing taxis were clouded in fumes of grit and petrol. At the junction of Regent Street the traffic thickened, honking, impatient to move on. There was an eagerness everywhere, it seemed, to move on. She still brooded on Brigstock’s remark, and felt annoyed with herself for reacting to it: what did he care if she had once rejected a marriage proposal? Only her nettled pride had induced her to confess it. Outwardly, her life had achieved the independence she had longed for. She was renting a tiny flat above a shoe shop in Regent’s Park Road. She enjoyed her work at the Middlesex. She had a little money saved from the bequest of a distant relative on her father’s side. Yet such relish of her autonomy ran contrary to the prevailing assumption that a woman was not complete if she remained unmarried, and today’s milestone had reminded her of lines from a comic ditty the soldiers used to sing at concert parties:

  Hug me, kiss me, call me Gertie,

  Marry me quick, I’m nearly thirty!

  She dodged across the frantic crossways at Oxford Circus and Regent Street, and pushed through the heavy double doors of Jay’s, which she had visited years before when it was a mourning-dress emporium. It had recently, and dubiously, converted to selling wedding trousseaux. She wandered along its aisles, past smugly posed mannequins veiled in silk and muslin, past counters displaying hats and gloves and fashionable fripperies, and took the stairs to the bridal department.

  ‘Connie!’ It was Lily, standing on a chair by the window and waving while an assistant edged around, pinning the hem of an ivory-coloured silk dress. As Connie stepped towards her she began to see the elaborate lace embellishments of the material and its double satin streamer ribbon. It lent its wearer the appearance of an oversized doll. Raising herself on tiptoe she kissed Lily on the cheek.

  ‘Hullo, Constance.’ The voice came from behind her, and she turned to find Lily’s mother sitting on one of the courtesy sofas, her round face stiff with disapproval. Connie now sensed the air vibrating from the aftermath of a tremendous row.

  ‘Hullo, Mrs Vaughan,’ she said, injecting a note of brightness into her voice. ‘I didn’t know you’d be here!’

  ‘I might as well have stayed at home, fr’all the notice she’s taking of me.’ The tone was primly aggrieved. Connie turned back to Lily, who raised her eyes heavenwards in an unambiguous mime of irritation. The shop assistant, her mouth full of pins, was continuing her mute circuit of the bridal hem.

  ‘What d’you think, then?’ said Lily, anxiously reading her friend’s expression.

  ‘You look beautiful, Lil, honestly,’ she replied, then glanced back towards Mrs Vaughan. ‘Is something the matter?’

  Lily sighed. ‘For some reason Mum thinks this hemline is too high on the calf –’

  ‘Calf?!’ Mrs Vaughan almost shrieked. ‘It’s almost up to your knees. Your father would have a fit if he could see what I can.’

  ‘I knew this would happen,’ said Lily, shaking her head. ‘Con, will you please explain to her? She thinks it’s “indecent” to bare anything above the ankle.’

  Connie, already feeling a distinct urge to be elsewhere, had turned a conciliating smile on Lily’s mother and was about to speak when the latter piped up again. ‘And shall I tell you another thing? That hem will make you look even shorter than you are.’ The argument from morality had cut no ice with her daughter, but the argument from aesthetic principle delivered a palpable hit. Lily blushed violently, and her voice trembled with anger as she spoke. ‘What a horrible thing to say. Sooner I get married the better – I won’t have to listen to your spitefulness any more.’ She picked up the rustling skirts of her dress, ignoring the startled assistant, and hurried off to the fitting room.

  Mrs Vaughan pursed her lips in righteous offence. ‘Well, really. I’m only trying to save her from herself …’

  Connie went and sat down next to her. ‘I think Lily’s just suffering nerves – about the day. The dress is important to her, Mrs Vaughan, and she so wants your approval. I suppose the hem is a little high, but you know, she has such shapely legs. Isn’t she entitled to show them off on her wedding day?’ Mrs Vaughan continued to grumble quietly about her daughter’s wilfulness, but Connie’s honeyed blandishments soon coaxed her into a better mood, and then managed to effect a discreet and dignified withdrawal from the battlefield of hurt feelings.

  Once she was gone, Connie tapped on the door of the fitting room. ‘Lil? You can come out now.’ When she received no reply, she gently turned the doorknob and craned her head around the jamb. Lily was sitting on the shallow velvet-covered bench, her figure multiplied by the angled mirrors on each side of the closet. Her cheeks were blotchy with tears, in poignant contrast to the elegant tucks and folds of her pristine dress. />
  ‘Oh, Lil,’ she crooned, putting a consoling arm about her. ‘You mustn’t let her upset you. The mother of the bride always pokes her nose in –’

  ‘That’s not why I’m crying,’ she said with a sort of laughing sob. ‘I was listening to the way you talked to her, so patient – it set me off. You’re just a lovely person, Con – that’s all. I only wish there were some man we could find for you to marry.’

  Connie laughed and squeezed her friend’s arm. ‘Don’t you start! I’ve just been told by someone – a man, in fact – that I’m not the marrying kind.’

  Lily clicked her tongue in reproof. ‘Well, he’s wrong about that. You’ve just chosen not to – though why, I’m not sure.’

  She sighed, and stared back at her reflection. ‘I hardly know myself. I’d always thought there were more important things to do than marry – campaigning, for a start, then having a career. I wanted to live without feeling beholden to a man. For a while I suppose I did …’

  ‘You mean – during the war?’

  She nodded. ‘Oh, I’m glad it’s over – how could I not be? – but it did make us useful. It proved to men that we weren’t just feeble domestic halfwits. I mean, didn’t we take responsibility? We worked so hard they eventually had to give us the vote.’

  ‘So we achieved something.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But I wonder … They’re not letting women keep those jobs. It’s “thanks a lot and you can all go home now”. I could work in a hospital for another twenty years and I’d be no closer to doing what I want to do. They’ll make small concessions now and then, but men still have all the cards – and they know it.’ She paused, and gave Lily’s knee an encouraging nudge. ‘But they’re not all so bad, are they?’

  ‘Joe had better be ready to give me more than “small concessions”,’ she said, giggling at the unintended hint of vulgarity. She looked round at Connie, then suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth in shocked self-rebuke. ‘Heavens! I’ve just remembered – happy birthday, Con!’ And she gave the birthday girl such a fierce embrace that Connie, after some moments, had to remind her that her bridal gown was in danger of being crushed.