With a sardonic expression Bella watched her tall, dark friend sweep out into the road. Hannah was and always had been the toughest woman she’d ever met. There was no sentiment about her at all. Even when she’d had the child, she’d never mentioned who the father was – though as soon as she saw ten-year-old Lark, Bella knew at once that her father had been Gunther. There was his smooth blond hair, his aquamarine eyes. Crafty old Gunther, he’d had them both! She laughed without rancour at the idea and then, still dimpling at the memory, bustled into the bar where her husband was pulling pints for a group of draymen.
A big, upright man with a waxed moustache, Bill had taken over the bar after serving in the army and he still had his stiff military bearing. He was fifteen years older than Bella and as indulgent towards her as a love-stricken youth. She could do anything with old Bill.
When he saw her smiling he smiled proudly back at her and asked, ‘What’s the joke, Bella? You’re grinning away like a cat that’s caught a canary.’
She patted him fondly on the bottom and said, ‘Just old memories, Billy. Have you seen the kid anywhere?’
One of the draymen answered. ‘Hannah’s kid? I saw her sitting under the tree in the churchyard, that poor kid looks as if she’s fading away.’
‘We’ll have to do something to cheer her up,’ decided Bella, ‘I’ll have to get to work on her.’
* * *
Lark had grown in the past few months, shot up like a sickly sapling, and her energy seemed to have left her entirely. When the rain started she came out of her hiding place among the old gravestones and walked slowly down the lane, stepping carefully so as to avoid the puddles of dirty water that filled the gaps in the cobblestones. From the corner of her eye she could see that she was being watched by a group of tousle-haired women and ragged children who clustered in the door of one of the houses. The fall of rain was heavy so her cotton dress clung to her back and the weight of her soaked hair bowed her head. Her attitude as she walked along summed up the overpowering misery that filled her heart.
For the first ten years of her life she had never travelled more than five or six miles from her home. She knew everyone in the district where she had grown up and everyone knew her. There was a wonderful security in that unquestioned identity… she was Aylie Kennedy’s granddaughter and everyone knew and respected her grandmother.
Until she came to London she had no idea of what it felt like to be among strangers, and hostile strangers at that. When she said ‘Good morning’ as she had been taught to do, to the women or children in Bella’s lane, they stared blankly at her and then laughed for they could not understand what she said, her Scottish accent was so alien to them. They called her Scotty, and little boys ran jeering after her when she ventured into the street. She was terrified of them but her terror made her stiff and disapproving, so they thought that she felt herself to be superior to them, and their dislike increased.
‘Oh here she comes, the little lady!’ The woman who called out as she passed had a high-pitched whining voice that rendered the word ‘lady’ as ‘lydy’. Lark lifted her head and stared at the woman, wondering for a few seconds what the strange word meant. As she looked at the woman, with her hair loose and tumbling from its pins, her clothes filthy and ragged and equally filthy children clinging to her skirt, she saw naked hatred in her eyes.
Why does she dislike me so much? she wondered with a chill in her heart. She did not realize that her persecutor was drunk. Earlier that day Bella’s husband had thrown her out of the Queen’s Head bar for fighting and swearing.
‘There goes our fine litle lady, back to old Bella’s. Where’s your ma, then? Off walking the streets in Piccadilly is she?’ The harridan came close up to Lark and screamed in her face.
Another of the women laughed, for they all disliked Hannah with her airs and graces. Tied in by their own poverty, their children and their hopelessness, they resented the way she came and went, sometimes affluent and sometimes penniless. It was a constant subject of debate among them what she did to earn her money. Hannah for her part never noticed their animosity because as far as she was concerned they were a different species to herself. She did not associate her political theories with people like that and if she was battling for the betterment of mankind, it was not for that sort of mankind.
The woman who had called after Lark addressed her again. ‘What’s your name, dearie?’
The girl stopped, surprised at this question which she took to be a gesture of friendship. She thought she had misjudged the woman after all, so she smiled politely and said, ‘It’s Lark.’
The woman and the children hooted, they screeched and threw themselves around in glee. ‘She’s called Lark! That’s some name. Who gave you that name, your fancy mother? Lark, what a name! You might as well be called turkey or peahen… what a name!’
A sea of jeering little children surged round Lark’s legs, jumping about like frenzied imps urged on by their mothers. In the middle of them the girl stood bedraggled and stricken, terrified by the dislike she felt flowing towards her. Tears rose in her eyes and she was staring around like a cornered animal, looking for some way of escape, when Bella, alerted by the din, came bursting out of the stained-glass door of the snug bar.
She was red faced with rage as she rushed up and threw a chubby arm round Lark’s shoulders, saying soothingly, ‘Come on, gal, you’re safe with me. Don’t let them rile you.’ And then, turning to the jeering women, she yelled in an ear-splitting voice, ‘You cows, don’t you know better than to turn on a kid? You drunken bitches, none of you’d better show your dirty faces in my pub again or I’ll get my old man to kick your arses out the door!’
Bella was childless but it had never bothered her much. Bill did not yearn for a family, in fact she suspected that somewhere in his past he had left a wife and children behind him and did not want to repeat the experience. As a couple they were comfortable and cosy together. Babies would only have disrupted their routine. She cuddled up to him in bed at night, and during the day helped him out in the bar, her deep gurgling, sensual laugh enchanting both him and the customers.
She felt safe to flirt when Bill was there to protect her and he liked to see the other men staring at her with frank admiration, comparing her with the raddled, gin-soaked women who crowded into the pub to drink themselves to oblivion. The Queen’s Head was in an insalubrious part of the city, the haunt of pimps and prostitutes, pickpockets and burglars. The people who made up its clientele lived by their wits, teetering always on the brink of disaster, but they were sustained by an optimism and ebullience that Bella and Bill enjoyed and admired. Any snooping policemen who came around asking awkward questions about their regulars were sent away unsatisfied. ‘We’re not coppers’ narks,’ Bill and Bella agreed together. What they knew about the lives and affairs of their customers, they kept to themselves.
They also kept tight lips about what they knew of Hannah and her friends. When she swept off to Madrid or Vienna, they asked no questions and told no tales. When she sat in their parlour talking about her foreign friends, the Germans, the Russians or the Frenchwoman who looked like a wrinkled nut and who’d spent years in prison as a dangerous revolutionary before fleeing to London, they took it all with large pinches of salt. Bella’s common sense helped her to see the flaws in Hannah’s fiercely expounded theories and a little light of amusement sometimes danced in her brown eyes as she listened to her friend…
‘What is it that you and your friends want really?’ Bella asked Hannah one night after they had been disputing Anarchist beliefs over a few bottles of beer. ‘You don’t want rid of the old Queen?’
Hannah laughed in scorn. ‘The Queen! That old widow of Windsor! She’s nothing but a symbol of oppression. Of course we want rid of her. She’s just lucky. There’s been seven attempts to kill her already but she’s always got away! We’ve killed rulers in other countries, you know. All rulers are oppressors.’
Hannah sank her voice to a conspiratori
al tone, implying she knew more about political assassination that she cared to admit. Bella dimpled. It amused her to listen to Hannah on this tack.
‘But if there were no rulers, no policemen or anything like that, how’d you keep people in order?’ she asked.
Hannah’s face took on its visionary expression. ‘People don’t need keeping in order. They should be allowed to do as they like. Then you’d see that people are basically good. Our aim is to overthrow ail governments and allow people to get back to a state of innocence.’
Bella made a rude scoffing noise with her ripe red lips. ‘That I’d like to see. If there wasn’t any law this lot around here would be cutting each other’s throat for sixpence, I can tell you that. You’d not get up the street in your fine cloak without somebody having it off you.’
‘You’re like all the rest,’ mourned Hannah. ‘All you worry about is property. Don’t you realize that all property is theft?’
Bella and Bill were proud of their pub and particularly of the new piano they’d bought for their parlour. They did not want to hear that their piano was theft.
Bill was proud to go out with Bella in her big feathered hats and boa and she was proud of him, especially when he wore his fine gold watch with the chain made up of what looked like gold nuggets. To be told that their pride in their cherished property was wrong made Bella bridle.
‘You do talk a lot of rubbish, you really do. If it wasn’t for your friends looking after you, you’d have died of starvation years ago. I don’t see you turning down money when some of your pals hand it out.’
Hannah knew Bella too well to take offence. ‘It’s only right that we help each other,’ she explained. ‘We’re all fighting for the same end and so we depend on each other.’
Bella stood up and shook a cloth over the round mahogany table. Bill would be needing his late-night supper soon. ‘It seems to me that some of us do more depending than others,’ she said sourly. Sometimes she found it difficult to be tolerant about Hannah’s idiotic ideas and all the more so recently when she saw how indifferent her friend was to the child who was at that very moment sleeping on a tear-soaked pillow upstairs.
* * *
They were sitting in a dark little room near Eastcheap, some sort of committee room where Hannah and her friends met occasionally. Hannah had taken Lark along, but the presence of her daughter was soon forgotten as she plunged into political argument and discussion. She seemed to be asking for money for some planned expedition, but the child was not very clear where her mother intended to go or whether she was to be taken along as well. As she looked at her mother, for a fleeting second a glimmer of scorn showed in her eyes. Hannah had been a rare visitor in Lark’s young life and all her ideas and attitudes had been formed by Aylie. Her real mother’s infrequent appearances had been occasions for indulgence and excitement, too short for the child to really study the stranger or to question what she said or did. Now, in London, when she was more exposed to Hannah, she listened to conversations which she barely understood but she could tell from the cadences of her mother’s voice, by the way she gestured with her head and arms and by the way she looked at the person she spoke to that she was nearly always acting a part. Her mother was not the heroine from a distant country that Lark had once imagined, she was a fake and a poseur.
‘But you must go to Scotland and see the bondagers at work,’ Hannah was saying to a gangly young woman with earnest eyes and red chilblained hands. ‘I’ll tell you where to go. The lives they lead are incredible – they work like animals and they live in squalor.’
Lark cast down her eyes so that neither of the women could see her scorn. She remembered with great clarity the bondagers she saw every day working in the fields round her cottage home. Those proud women with their brightly polished boots and immaculate aprons would be horrified to hear Hannah’s description of them. And their immaculately clean houses, though poor and crowded, put the houses of this neighbourhood to shame.
‘I’ve never heard of bondagers before… would they let me draw them?’ asked the woman who was listening to Hannah with deep interest.
‘Of course. I can vouch for that. My mother was a political activist, you know – so was my father. That’s why he was sent to Australia. I’d be glad to help you put the case of those women in front of anyone who would take an interest. Sylvia, you must do it. They can’t help themselves. They need someone like you to help them.’
It all sounded very good, thought Lark, but when you knew the facts the attitudes of people like Hannah and her friend Sylvia were patronizing in the extreme. The bondagers who were her grandmother’s friends did not need that sort of treatment from them or anyone else. She was suddenly angry on their behalf and wanted to shout at her mother, ‘What do you know about it? You only worked on the land for a couple of weeks. Aylie told me about that. You’ve no idea of what it’s like to be a bondager.’
It was dark by the time the meeting broke up and Hannah seemed pleased with the outcome. Taking Lark’s hand, she said to Sylvia, ‘I’ll have to take her back to Bella’s. Look, she’s exhausted. Come on, darling, don’t dawdle.’
When they were out on the street she said to the girl, ‘Do you have to look so glum all the time? Weren’t you interested? That was Sylvia Pankhurst I was talking to. She’s very famous, a Suffragette like her mother. I don’t approve of them really, but they can be useful, you know.’
Heavy-eyed and yawning, Lark glanced up at her fierce-looking mother. ‘What’s she going to do in Scotland?’
Hannah explained, ‘She’s planning to do a book of drawings showing the lives of working women. It makes me laugh really. None of them know what work is! I told her about the bondagers, though. They’ll make good subjects for her book, so picturesque.’
So picturesque! thought Lark, and tears pricked her eyes. She would far rather be working in the fields than trailing through the gaslit streets of noisy East London with her mother. They dodged a line of racing hansom cabs at the foot of Fleet Street in order to cross the road and Hannah stared longingly into the window of a brightly lit public house.
‘Come on, hurry up,’ she said sharply. ‘I’ll have to get you back to Bella’s.’
* * *
Bella’s face was stiff with disapproval as she listened to Hannah.
‘But you can’t send her off to Canada on her own just like that. She’s only a child. If she was going to her uncle, she should have gone when he said he’d take her. He might have changed his mind by now.’
Hannah threw out her hands. ‘But what can I do? I’ve got my work. Louise wants me to go to Seville for the political congress. It’s a great opportunity for me, I’ll meet all the most important people in the movement. She’s going to give me the money but she won’t pay for me to take a child with me…’
Bella scoffed. ‘Louise! That wrinkled old witch. If you don’t watch out you’ll end up the same as she did – in jail. I don’t know how you can bear hanging around her and her smelly female friend. They’re not natural, those women, they make me sick.’
Hannah drew up her shoulders and said, ‘Don’t be so narrow-minded, Bella, you don’t understand. Those women are revolutionaries in every way, sexually as well as politically. They’ve suffered for the cause. Louise was in a penal colony for years but she never lost her convictions; she’s one of the most influential women in the European movement. I’m very lucky to be taken up by her.’
‘She fancies you and she knows she’s got a parrot in you, that’s why,’ said Bella rudely, pushing past Hannah on her way into the bar. ‘But I’m not bothered about Louise Jumeau. It’s that kid that bothers me. You should never have brought her down here if you weren’t prepared to look after her properly. She’ll end up on the streets because she’s a pretty little thing. Some white slaver’ll get her, that’s what’s going to happen to little Larkie.’
Hannah looked cunning. ‘It might, that’s true. So what can I do, Bella? Will I send her back to Scotland?’
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‘What would she do there? Who’d take her in?’
‘The Hepburns would take her, I’m sure they would. They’re my mother’s friends and they’re well-off farmers…’
‘I thought you didn’t approve of people like that.’ Bella had heard Hannah’s political opinions expounded often enough.
‘I don’t, but they’re my mother’s friends, you know. They’d take her because of that.’
‘You’ve no conscience, Hannah. You never had much, but the older you get the worse you get. I know what you’re driving at. I’m not stupid. Bill and I’ll take the kid. We haven’t any of our own and we’re making a bit of money now. But we’ll only take her if you promise to leave her alone and not to start filling her head with rubbish every time you land up back here on your uppers and wanting a free meal.’
Bella had never spoken so frankly to Hannah before and the taller woman was visibly taken back. For a moment it seemed as if she would reply in anger but then she remembered what she wanted from her friend so she looked meek and said, ‘I promise. I don’t think she’s politically aware anyway. She’s really rather dull, I’m afraid.’
Indulged and loved by Bill and Bella, Lark grew plump and some of her old gaiety returned to her. Her golden hair shone brightly again and Bella bought clusters of pretty ribbons to wind into the thick tresses with careful, loving hands. Encouraged by her, Lark learned to cook and to help serve behind the busy bar, though if there was ever any trouble, any fighting or swearing, Bill hustled her off into their private parlour till the row died down. Like fierce guard dogs, they protected her from the cruelties and crudities of the life that surged and eddied in the streets outside the public-house door.
Neither of them were worried that her education had virtually ceased when she left the Borders. She could read and she could write, which made her almost a scholar in their eyes because, though both of them could sign their names, their reading skills were rudimentary. One of Bill’s great pleasures was to listen to Lark reading out excerpts from his favourite newspapers. He was particularly fond of accounts of race meetings and prize fights, so in time the girl became a specialist on those subjects, and amassed a knowledge which she was encouraged to trot out for the benefit of bar customers and caused them a good deal of entertainment.
Lark Returning Page 32
