by Lissa Evans
‘The Empire Youth League.’
‘How marvellous!’
‘Marvellissimo would perhaps be more accurate,’ said Mattie. ‘Given its political tenor. Goose-stepping a speciality.’
‘Oh, really, Mattie,’ said Jacko. ‘Now you’re being ridiculous. The League places just as much importance on healthy activities and initiative as your own little club. But we do it with an eye to the future rather than the past.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Aileen, plaintively. ‘Is this politics?’
‘One cannot dismiss the past,’ said Mattie to Jacko.
‘Neither can one live in it, as so many old comrades still seem to. The young should gaze ahead to a brighter future.’
‘Illuminated by what, precisely? The Brassoed gleam of their uniform belt-buckles? Zeal without knowledge is fire without light.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with a little smartness,’ said Jacko. ‘One doesn’t want one’s protégés to look like children romping at a party.’
‘As opposed to blank-faced recruits, unquestioningly enforcing the leader’s wishes. My girls have vim and wit.’
‘And also feathers in their hair, so I’ve heard.’
‘Just as long as the feathers don’t mean that they’re also feather-brained …’ said Jacko’s husband, delivering this hammer blow with the expression of someone handing over a pearl.
‘Far from it,’ said Mattie, crisply. ‘In fact, I have no doubt that, in whatever topic or skill you’d care to name, they could knock your bunch for six.’
‘Goodness, that’s quite a claim.’
‘Have you stopped talking politics yet?’ asked Aileen. ‘Because I never really cared for that side of things. What I loved was being so busy, every day filled to bursting and every face a friend. Dear old friends.’ She missed her step and kicked up a spray of gravel; Mattie steadied her.
In the distance, now, they could see the hearse moving slowly towards them, the two women with flags pacing ahead of it, and behind, a column of women, innumerable and silent. A cluster of undertakers’ men marked the site of the grave.
‘I want to join all the others,’ said Aileen. ‘I haven’t seen The Flea yet. Or Dorothy. Or Alice. Shall we cut round to them? Are you coming, Jacko?’
‘I think we’ll pay our respects from here.’ Jacko took her husband’s arm. ‘I’ve no real wish to dwell on the old days and, in any case, when I was introduced to The Flea after Mattie’s lecture, I rather got the impression that she didn’t take to me, and it wasn’t solely to do with her political views. Dog in a manger, one might say.’
Mattie stared at her. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘She struck me as’ – she took her time choosing her words – ‘unnaturally proprietorial. Possibly a little jealous.’
‘Jealous?’
Jacko’s expression was bland.
‘Come on, Mattie,’ said Aileen, pulling on her arm, and Mattie let herself be steered away, past vaults and memorials, round the raw mounds of recent burials, and towards the great and sombre parade that stretched from the hearse all the way back to the southern gates and beyond.
‘We’ll never find them!’ said Aileen, in despair, but The Flea had been on the look-out, and raised her rolled umbrella and discreetly shook it until they saw her.
‘I was wondering where you’d got to,’ she said, sotto voce, squeezing Aileen’s hand in greeting and turning to Mattie. ‘Is everything quite all right?’ Her expression sharpened as she scanned Mattie’s face. ‘Is something wrong? Has something happened?’
‘No, no,’ said Mattie, turning away as if to look for someone, unable to trust her own expression, which seemed to have come to some concrete conclusion ahead of her nebulous thoughts. ‘Nothing at all.’
Ida closed one eye and pressed the other to the microscope. Once you realized that those blurred spokes at the edge were your own eyelashes, you could concentrate on the circle at the centre, on the purple rectangles that shifted into sharpness as you turned the wheel: row after row of narrow, blunted bricks that might have come from an earthworm, or an elephant, or even from Mr Heap, the biology teacher, who had a lisp that they all tried not to laugh at, which was difficult when he was doing a whole lesson on ‘thellth’. Behind her, she could hear the heavy breathing of Alan Demetrios, who worked in a cement yard when he wasn’t at the continuation school, and whose nose was perpetually blocked from the dust. His eyes were bunged up, too, yellow matter clogging the inner corners. He wanted to be a bank clerk.
‘And what about you, Ida?’ Mr Heap had asked her, after she’d got nineteen and a half out of twenty in a quiz on digestion (she’d misspelled ‘hydrochloric’). She hadn’t dared to admit that recently a tiny little impossible thought had begun to roll around inside her head, like a drop of mercury – the idea that she might one day, somehow, become a doctor. Instead, she’d said, ‘Biology teacher,’ and he’d looked enormously pleased.
‘For your homework, read chapter four on the circulatory system and draw a diagram of the cardiac valves.’
‘Have a heart, sir,’ called out Alan, and everyone laughed. At Ida’s old school he’d have got the cane for that, but Mr Heap just smiled, and went round collecting up the slides.
Someone called her name as she left the classroom and she turned to see a heavy-set girl with a great frizz of blonde hair. ‘Are you Ida?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m Olive. Someone in my class said you was in that girls’ group on the Heath.’
‘Oh.’ Ida felt the same slight inward droop that might have come from a reminder of a dentist’s appointment. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Only I’m in the Empire League. You know, we’re having that competition with you on Saturday.’
‘You’re in the League?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I thought they were all nobs.’
Olive laughed. ‘Who said that?’
‘There’s a girl in the Amazons whose brother’s in it, and she’s a nob.’
‘No, me and half the girls from my flats are in it. And two of my cousins are drummers, and so’s my boyfriend, Leonard, and he’s a window cleaner with his own ladder.’ She paused a moment, as if expecting Ida to clap. ‘Some of the older boys are posh,’ she added. ‘You know, like officers.’
‘But don’t you have to march and salute and all that?’
‘So?’
‘Well, isn’t it all about militarism and following blindly and not thinking for yourself?’
‘Who said that?’
‘Miss Simpkin.’
‘Is she the one with the loud voice? My cousin can take her off to a tee. He says, when she runs, all the streetlamps in Hampstead start to shake. No, it’s about, you know, pride in being English and being healthy and better wages for English workers and getting rid of the foreign troublemakers and looking smart and all that. People are always clapping us and taking photographs. Mrs Cellini said she wanted us girls to look like film stars and we got specially measured for our uniforms and all we had to pay was five shillings and my belt on its own cost six. You’ll see it on Saturday. I’ve just put a poster up – Miss Harris said I could.’
She gestured towards the noticeboard, where the back page of the Ham & High had been pinned, with a circle of red crayon highlighting one of the advertisements.
The Empire Youth League
and
The Amazons
Invite spectators, young and old, to
A Display of Youth Skills
And Competitive Games
at
The bandstand field (East of Parliament Hill)
Hampstead Heath
Saturday July 14th, at 2 p.m.
Refreshments will be served!
‘I’m in the formation marching team,’ said Olive. ‘What about you? Your lot don’t do marching, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Nor drumming.’
‘No.’
‘So wha
t are you going to do for your display?’
‘It’s a secret.’
Olive looked baffled, as well she might.
‘The gauntlet has been thrown down,’ Miss Simpkin had announced at an Amazons meeting a fortnight before. ‘I have received a letter from the organizers of the League, who wish to pit our two clubs against each other. Do you feel that we could trounce the opposition?’
‘At what, Miss Simpkin?’
‘Let us weigh up the options.’
There’d been a discussion. The public nature of the competition made slingshots and javelins inadvisable (‘I think, on the whole, we should avoid the accidental impalement of prospective members’), and the fact that there’d been no rain for a month and the grass on the Heath was like straw meant that a demonstration of firelighting was out of the question.
‘Ju-jitsu?’ suggested Avril.
‘No, it’s not decent,’ said Elsie. ‘You can’t help showing your drawers when you do the kicks.’
Winnie raised a hand. ‘Famous statues? And people have to guess what they are? Or three-legged races?’
‘Debating?’ said Freda. ‘Bagsy me.’
Hildegard caught Ida’s eye over the heads of the smaller Amazons and grimaced slightly. ‘Do we absolutely have to do this, Miss Simpkin?’
‘Do what, Hildegard?’
‘This challenge. Why can’t we just say we’d rather not? What if we end up losing, or what if people laugh at us?’
‘I’m quite certain you won’t lose,’ said Mattie, ‘and, frankly, one should treat derision like a light shower of rain. Brush it off and carry on.’
‘We could vote,’ said Inez, who was sitting on a fallen branch, a yard or two from the rest of them. ‘We usually do. On everything.’
Miss Simpkin paused, her features working, as if crosswinds were blowing beneath the skin. ‘That, of course, is true,’ she said, ‘though I think it would be a shame if we passed up this opportunity to show that independence of mind and strength born of friendship is more than a match for the dead hand of authority. But yes, we’ll put it to the vote. All those in favour of—’
‘Don’t we need an argument against?’ asked Inez. ‘Because all we’ve heard is you giving one for.’
There was a stillness in the group; a quiet sharpening of interest. You could talk to Mattie in a way that you wouldn’t ever dare talk to most adults – you could argue and contradict and joke and even cheek, if you did it in the right spirit, but they all knew that, week by week, Inez had been edging towards something more: a sliding insolence, an inch or two further each time, a deliberate prodding at the boundaries. And on each occasion, Mattie seemed to retreat, in the same way that when you touched a snail’s horns they humbly withdrew.
‘Very well,’ said Mattie, a little stiffly. ‘Who would like to oppose the motion?’
Ida’s hand seemed to go up of its own accord; she started to lower it again, but everyone was looking at her now.
‘Ida?’
Ida hesitated, and this time Mattie didn’t say, Spit it out, or Dare to be a Daniel, as she’d done once before on the Heath, but only waited, her expression slightly vexed, so that the argument that had been fluttering in Ida’s head – that the best bit about the Amazons was the fact that when you were there, you could say things and do things and try things that you would never do anywhere else, precisely because no one from outside would be watching or judging you – that argument turned to dust, like a clapped moth, and she shrugged awkwardly.
‘I just don’t fancy it,’ she muttered, and flushed at the stupidity of her own reply.
‘So shall we vote?’ asked Mattie. ‘All those in favour?’ There was a thicket of raised arms. ‘And against? Very well, carried in favour. Now, let’s continue our discussion …’
But afterwards, while Ida was sullenly tearing up a newspaper for Fox and Hounds, Mattie came and spoke to her in the old way, using phrases like ‘splendid all-rounder’ and ‘inspiring the small girls’, and when she said, ‘You won’t let the Amazons down, will you, Ida?’, Ida agreed that she wouldn’t. And here she was now, looking at the newspaper pinned to the board, knowing that, come Saturday, she’d be running around with a red face and her slip showing under a dress she’d had since she was fourteen, in front of someone with a six-shilling belt.
‘The commander says, if we win, he’ll pay for a bang-up supper and we’ll all go on the rowing boats,’ said Olive. ‘I’ll see you then.’
She linked arms with another girl, who’d been waiting for her, and headed for the exit; Ida waited until the door had closed and then took down the sheet of newspaper.
It was dreadfully hot. The Flea had been squeezing lemons since eight in the morning, and by ten was wearing gauntlets of crushed pips. She rinsed her arms under the tap and stepped outside, her head swimming. It was entirely windless, swifts tracing parabolas against a dappled sky; not even the aspen leaves were moving – the garden might have been painted – so that when The Flea saw a patch of air above the Lumbs’ wall beginning to shiver and fold she thought for a moment that she must be going to faint. As she stared, more fascinated than frightened, the patch lengthened and became an inverted triangle, trembling and iridescent, and then an insect flew straight into her forehead and she realized that she was looking at a stream of flying ants, boiling out of a crack in the top of the wall, and suddenly the whole garden was full of insects and she retreated into the passage and shut the door.
‘Oh, hello!’ called a girl’s voice from the kitchen. ‘The front door was open.’
It was Inez, already seated, her hands folded on her lap as if waiting for a recital to start. ‘Am I early?’ she asked.
‘No, rather late, as a matter of fact. The other girls are already taking the tables and crockery across to the Heath. They’ll be back quite soon.’
‘Oh. And where’s Miss Simpkin?’
‘Setting the treasure-hunt clues, I believe.’
The Flea took a cloth and began to wipe the table-top, and Inez sat and watched her. It was the first time that The Flea had ever been alone with the girl, though she had seen her with the other Amazons, participating, though only in the way that you might say a stick participates when borne along by a stream.
‘Would you like to help me to make the lemonade?’
‘What would I have to do?’
‘You can strain the juice, to make sure there’s no pips left in it. And after that, you can add the sugar and water. Or would you rather cut up the ginger cake into squares?’
‘They’re both quite sticky things, aren’t they? I don’t much like being sticky.’
‘In that case, could you line these biscuit tins with greaseproof paper? The scissors are in the top drawer.’
Limply, the girl complied. There was nothing to her, thought The Flea – she had all the beauty of youth, but none of the essence: its eagerness, its restlessness, even its anger. There was a slyness about her, but no rage, no burning core.
Inez was cutting the oblongs of paper both slowly and carelessly; trapeziums rather than rectangles.
‘So, are you looking forward to the afternoon?’
‘Not really. It’s too hot to run around.’
‘But you’ve still come, which is commendable. In fact, you come every single week, don’t you?’
The Flea was not a good actress; she could hear the curiosity in her own voice.
Inez gave her a slanting look. ‘Lots of girls come every week.’
‘Yes, because they enjoy it. But you don’t appear to.’
‘No,’ agreed Inez. ‘I don’t.’
For a moment, the only noise was the snip of the scissors, but the straightforwardness of the exchange seemed to have changed something, to have thinned the air between them.
‘Do you come to the Amazons to find out more about your mother?’ asked The Flea.
‘I did.’
‘She was a brave and spirited young woman.’
‘Oh, not you, too,�
� said Inez pettishly, tossing the scissors on to the table, so that they spun across the oilcloth. ‘Spirited, spirited, spirited. I’m so sick of the word; it’s all Miss Simpkin ever says, which is why I got so browned off with coming here. It makes me think of an oil-lamp, not a person. And anyway, when people say it, what they really mean is Why aren’t you like her, Inez? What’s wrong with you?’ She asked the questions in a voice that viciously approximated Mattie’s, looking up at The Flea as if challenging her to contradict, but although there was spite in her face, there was also a glimpse of something else: an awful roaring misery, like that of a toddler standing in a crib, waiting for the nursery door to open.
‘Your mother was about your height,’ said The Flea. ‘And she turned heads.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that she was strikingly pretty. And I remember that she had a very direct gaze. And she bounced when she walked.’
‘Bounced?’
‘Yes, almost as if she were walking on tiptoe. And her hair was the same colour as yours.’
‘Was it?’ Inez put a hand to her plait, looped with a velvet bow. ‘It’s only dark brown, after all.’
‘Mahogany, I’d say.’
‘What else?’
‘She had a very nice smile.’
‘I don’t have any photographs of her smiling.’
‘It was the sort of smile that made you want to smile back.’
‘I don’t have a smile like that.’
‘Perhaps you do. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.’
Inez dropped her gaze and slid the scissors back towards herself, opening and closing them as they lay flat on the table-top.
‘So, is there another reason why you keep coming to the Amazons?’
‘Father says I have to.’
‘Really?’ The Flea mentally readjusted her view of Inez’s father, whom she had never met but had assumed to be vehemently anti-Amazon. ‘Why is that?’
‘Because he says I give up on things all the time and I need to apply myself. If I go every week for six months, he’ll take me to tea at Harrods. He says I need to learn the habit of persistence.’
‘Well …’ said The Flea. ‘I would say he’s right. Few worthwhile achievements happen overnight.’
