Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  “That’s right!” said a woman behind Ethel.

  “Recently I spoke to a woman in Bermondsey whose husband was killed at Ypres—she has to support his four children, yet she is paid a woman’s wage.”

  “Shame!” said several women.

  “If it’s worth the employer’s while to pay a man a shilling apiece to make gudgeon pins, it’s worth his while to pay a woman at the same rate.”

  The men shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

  Maud raked the audience with a steely gaze. “When I hear socialist men argue against equal pay, I say to them: Are you permitting greedy employers to treat women as cheap labor?”

  Ethel thought it took a lot of courage and independence for a woman of Maud’s background to have such views. She also envied Maud. She was jealous of her beautiful clothes and her fluent speaking style. On top of all that, Maud was married to the man she loved.

  After the talk, Maud was questioned aggressively by the Labour Party men. The branch treasurer, a red-faced Scot called Jock Reid, said: “How can you keep on moaning about votes for women when our boys are dying in France?” There were loud sounds of agreement.

  “I’m glad you asked me that, because it’s a question that bothers many men and women too,” Maud said. Ethel admired the conciliatory tone of the answer, which contrasted nicely with the hostility of the questioner. “Should normal political activity go on during the war? Should you be attending a Labour Party meeting? Should trade unions continue to fight against exploitation of workers? Has the Conservative Party closed down for the duration? Have injustice and oppression been temporarily suspended? I say no, comrade. We must not permit the enemies of progress to take advantage of the war. It must not become an excuse for traditionalists to hold us back. As Mr. Lloyd George says, it’s business as usual.”

  After the meeting, tea was made—by the women, of course—and Maud sat next to Ethel, taking off her gloves to hold a cup and saucer of thick blue earthenware pottery in her soft hands. Ethel felt it would be unkind to tell Maud the truth about her brother, so she gave her the latest version of her fictional saga, that “Teddy Williams” had been killed fighting in France. “I tell people we were married,” she said, touching the cheap ring she wore. “Not that anyone cares these days. When boys are going off to war, girls want to please them, married or not.” She lowered her voice. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Walter.”

  Maud smiled. “The most amazing thing happened. You read in the newspapers about the Christmas truce?”

  “Yes, of course—British and Germans exchanging presents and playing football in no-man’s-land. It’s a shame they didn’t continue the truce, and refuse to fight on.”

  “Absolutely. But Fitz met Walter!”

  “Well, now, there’s marvelous.”

  “Of course, Fitz doesn’t know we’re married, so Walter had to be careful what he said. But he sent a message to say he was thinking of me on Christmas Day.”

  Ethel squeezed Maud’s hand. “So he’s all right!”

  “He’s been in the fighting in East Prussia, and now he’s on the front line in France, but he hasn’t been wounded.”

  “Thank heaven. But I don’t suppose you’ll hear from him again. Such luck doesn’t repeat itself.”

  “No. My only hope is that for some reason he’ll be sent to a neutral country, such as Sweden or the United States, where he can post a letter to me. Otherwise I’ll have to wait until the war is over.”

  “And what about the earl?”

  “Fitz is fine. He spent the first few weeks of the war living it up in Paris.”

  While I was looking for a job in a sweatshop, Ethel thought resentfully.

  Maud went on: “Princess Bea had a baby boy.”

  “Fitz must be happy to have an heir.”

  “We’re all pleased,” Maud said, and Ethel remembered that she was an aristocrat as well as a rebel.

  The meeting broke up. A cab was waiting for Maud, and they said good-bye. Bernie Leckwith got on the bus with Ethel. “She was better than I expected,” he said. “Upper-class, of course, but quite sound. And friendly, especially to you. I suppose you get to know the family quite well when you’re in service.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Ethel thought.

  Ethel lived on a quiet street of small terraced houses, old but well-built, mostly occupied by better-off workers, craftsmen and supervisors, and their families. Bernie walked her to her front door. He probably wanted to kiss her good night. She toyed with the idea of letting him, just because she was grateful there was one man in the world who still found her attractive. But common sense prevailed: she did not want to give him false hope. “Good night, comrade!” she said cheerfully, and she went inside.

  There was no sound or light upstairs: Mildred and her children were already asleep. Ethel undressed and got into bed. She was weary, but her mind was active, and she could not fall asleep. After a while she got up and made tea.

  She decided to write to her brother. She opened her writing pad and began.

  My very dear young sister Libby,

  In their childhood code, every third word counted, and familiar names were scrambled, so this meant simply Dear Billy.

  She recalled that her method had been to write out the message she wanted to send, then fill in the spaces. She now wrote:Sitting alone feeling proper miserable.

  Then she turned it into code.

  Where I’m sitting, if you’re alone you’re not feeling yourself either proper happy or miserable.

  As a child she had loved this game, inventing an imaginary message to hide the real one. She and Billy had devised helpful tricks: crossed-out words counted, whereas underlined words did not.

  She decided to write out the whole of her message, then go back and turn it into code.

  The streets of London are not paved with gold, at least not in Aldgate.

  She thought about writing a cheerful letter, making light of her troubles. Then she thought: to hell with that, I can tell my brother the truth.

  I used to believe I was special, don’t ask why. She thinks she’s too good for Aberowen, they used to say, and they were right.

  She had to blink back tears when she thought of those days: the crisp uniform, the hearty meals in the spotless servants’ hall, and most of all the slim, beautiful body that had once been hers.

  Now look at me. I work twelve hours a day in Mannie Litov’s sweatshop. I have a headache every evening and a permanent pain in my back. I’m having a baby no one wants. No one wants me, either, except a boring librarian with glasses.

  She sucked the end of her pencil for a long, thoughtful moment, then she wrote:I might as well be dead.

  { II }

  On the second Sunday of each month an Orthodox priest came from Cardiff on the train up the valley to Aberowen, carrying a suitcase full of carefully wrapped icons and candlesticks, to celebrate Divine Liturgy for the Russians.

  Lev Peshkov hated priests, but he always attended the service—you had to, to get the free dinner afterward. The service took place in the reading room of the public library. It was a Carnegie library, built with a donation from the American philanthropist, according to a plaque in the lobby. Lev could read, but he did not really understand people who thought of it as a pleasure. The newspapers here were fixed to hefty wooden holders, so that they could not be stolen, and there were signs that read “Silence.” How much fun could you have in such a place?

  Lev disliked most things about Aberowen.

  Horses were the same everywhere, but he hated working underground: it was always half-dark, and the thick coal dust made him cough. Aboveground it rained all the time. He had never seen so much rain. It did not come in thunderstorms, or sudden cloudbursts, to be followed by the relief of clear skies and dry weather. Rather, it was a soft drizzle that drifted down all day, sometimes all week, creeping up the legs of his trousers and down the back of his shirt.

  The strike had petered out in Augu
st, after the outbreak of war, and the miners had drifted back to work. Most had been rehired and given back their old houses. The exceptions were those the management branded troublemakers, most of whom had gone off to join the Welsh Rifles. The evicted widows had found places to live. The strikebreakers were no longer ostracized: the locals had come around to the view that the foreigners, too, had been manipulated by the capitalist system.

  But it was not for this that Lev had escaped from St. Petersburg. Britain was better than Russia, of course: trade unions were allowed, the police were not completely out of control, even Jews were free. All the same, he was not going to settle for a life of backbreaking work in a mining town on the edge of nowhere. This was not what he and Grigori had dreamed of. This was not America.

  Even if he had been tempted to stay there, he owed it to Grigori to go on. He knew he had treated his brother badly, but he had sworn to send him the money for his own ticket. Lev had broken a lot of promises in his short life, but he intended to keep this one.

  He had most of the price of a ticket from Cardiff to New York. The money was hidden under a flagstone in the kitchen of his house in Wellington Row, along with his gun and his brother’s passport. He had not saved this out of his weekly wage, of course: that was barely enough to keep him in beer and tobacco. His savings came from the weekly card game.

  Spirya was no longer his collaborator. The young man had left Aberowen after a few days and returned to Cardiff to seek easier work. But it was never difficult to find a greedy man, and Lev had befriended a colliery deputy called Rhys Price. Lev made sure Rhys won steadily, and afterward they shared the proceeds. It was important not to overdo things: other people had to win sometimes. If the miners worked out what was going on, not only would it be the end of the card school, but they would probably kill Lev. So the money accumulated slowly, and Lev could not afford to turn down a free meal.

  The priest was always met at the station by the earl’s car. He was driven to Tŷ Gwyn, where he was given sherry and cake. If Princess Bea was in residence, she accompanied him to the library and entered the room a few seconds before him, which saved her having to wait too long with the common people.

  Today it was a few minutes after eleven by the large clock on the reading room wall when she entered, wearing a white fur coat and hat against the February cold. Lev repressed a shudder: he could not look at her without feeling again the sheer terror of a six-year-old seeing his father hanged.

  The priest followed in a cream-colored robe with a gold sash. Today, for the first time, he was accompanied by another man in the garb of a novice priest—and Lev was shocked and horrified to recognize his former partner in crime Spirya.

  Lev’s mind was in turmoil as the two clergymen prepared the five loaves and watered the red wine for the service. Had Spirya found God and changed his ways? Or was the clerical outfit just another cover for stealing and cheating?

  The older priest sang the blessing. A few of the more devout men had formed a choir—a development their Welsh neighbors approved of heartily—and now they sang the first amen. Lev crossed himself when the others did, but his mind was anxiously on Spirya. It would be just like a priest to blurt out the truth and ruin everything: no more card games, no ticket to America, no money for Grigori.

  Lev recalled the last day on the Angel Gabriel, when he had brutally threatened to throw Spirya overboard for merely talking about double-crossing him. Spirya might well remember that now. Lev wished he had not humiliated the man.

  Lev studied Spirya throughout the service, trying to read his face. When he went up to the front to receive communion he tried to catch his old friend’s eye, but he saw no sign even of recognition: Spirya was totally caught up in the rite, or pretending to be.

  Afterward the two clergy left in the car with the princess, and the thirty or so Russian Christians followed on foot. Lev wondered if Spirya would speak to him at Tŷ Gwyn, and fretted about what he might say. Would he pretend their scam had never happened? Would he spill the beans and bring the wrath of the miners down on Lev’s head? Would he demand a price for his silence?

  Lev was tempted to leave town immediately. There were trains to Cardiff every hour or two. If he had had more money he might have cut and run. But he did not have enough for the ticket, so he trudged up the hill out of town to the earl’s palace for the midday dinner.

  They were fed in the staff quarters below stairs. The food was hearty: mutton stew with as much bread as you could eat, and ale to wash it down. The princess’s middle-aged Russian maid, Nina, joined them and acted as interpreter. She had a soft spot for Lev, and made sure he got extra ale.

  The priest ate with the princess but Spirya came to the servants’ hall and sat next to Lev. Lev turned on his most welcoming smile. “Well, old friend, this is a surprise!” he said in Russian. “Congratulations!”

  Spirya refused to be charmed. “Are you still playing cards, my son?” he replied.

  Lev kept the smile but lowered his voice. “I’ll shut up about that if you will. Is that fair?”

  “We’ll talk after dinner.”

  Lev was frustrated. Which way was Spirya going to jump—righteousness or blackmail?

  When the meal was over, Spirya went out through the back door, and Lev followed. Without speaking, Spirya led him to a white rotunda like a miniature Greek temple. From its raised platform they could see anyone approaching. It was raining, and the water dripped down the marble pillars. Lev shook the rain off his cap and put it back on his head.

  Spirya said: “Do you recall my asking you, on the ship, what you would do if I refused to give you your half of the money?”

  Lev had pushed Spirya half over the rail and threatened to break his neck and throw his body in the sea. “No, I don’t remember,” he lied.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Spirya said. “I simply wished to forgive you.”

  Righteousness, then, Lev thought with relief.

  “What we did was sinful,” Spirya said. “I have confessed and received absolution.”

  “I won’t ask your priest to play cards with me, then.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  Lev wanted to grab Spirya by the throat, as he had on the ship, but Spirya no longer looked as if he could be bullied. The robe had given him balls, ironically.

  Spirya went on: “I ought to reveal your crime to those you robbed.”

  “They won’t thank you. They may take revenge on you as well as me.”

  “My priestly garments will protect me.”

  Lev shook his head. “Most of the people you and I robbed were poor Jews. They probably remember priests looking on with a smile while the Cossacks beat them up. They might kick you to death all the more eagerly in your robe.”

  The shadow of anger passed over Spirya’s young face, but he forced a benign smile. “I’m more concerned about you, my son. I would not like to provoke violence against you.”

  Lev knew when he was being threatened. “What are you going to do?”

  “The question is what you’re going to do.”

  “Will you keep your mouth shut if I stop?”

  “If you confess, make a sincere contrition, and cease your sin, God will forgive you—and then it will not be for me to punish you.”

  And you’ll get away with it too, Lev thought. “All right, I’ll do it,” he said. As soon as he had spoken, he realized he had given in too quickly.

  Spirya’s next words confirmed that he was not so easily fooled. “I will check,” he said. “And if I find you have broken your promise to me and to God, I will reveal your crime to your victims.”

  “And they will kill me. Good work, Father.”

  “As far as I can see, it’s the best way out of a moral dilemma. And my priest agrees. So take it or leave it.”

  “I have no choice.”

  “God bless you, my son,” said Spirya.

  Lev walked away.

  He left the grounds of Tŷ Gwyn and headed through the rain back into Aber
owen, fuming. How like a priest, he thought resentfully, to take away a man’s chance of bettering himself. Spirya was comfortable now, food and clothing and accommodation all provided, forever, by the church and the hungry worshippers who gave money they could not afford. For the rest of his life, Spirya would have nothing to do but sing the services and fiddle with the altar boys.

  What was Lev to do? If he gave up the card games, it would take him forever to save enough for his passage. He would be doomed to spend years tending pit ponies half a mile underground. And he would never redeem himself by sending Grigori the price of a ticket to America.

  He had never chosen the safe path.

  He made his way to the Two Crowns pub. In Sabbath-observing Wales pubs were not allowed to open on Sundays, but the rules were lightly regarded in Aberowen. There was only one policeman in the town and, like most people, he took Sundays off. The Two Crowns closed its front door, for the sake of appearances, but regulars went in through the kitchen, and business was done as usual.

  At the bar were the Ponti brothers, Joey and Johnny. They were drinking whisky, unusually. The miners drank beer. Whisky was a rich man’s potion, and a bottle probably lasted the Two Crowns from one Christmas to the next.

  Lev ordered a pot of beer and addressed the elder brother. “Aye, aye, Joey.”

  “Aye, aye, Grigori.” Lev was still using his brother’s name, which was on the passport.

  “Feeling flush today, Joey, is it?”

  “Aye. Me and the kid went to Cardiff yesterday for the boxing.”

  The brothers looked like boxers themselves, Lev thought: two broad-shouldered, bull-necked men with big hands. “Good, was it?” he said.

  “Darkie Jenkins versus Roman Tony. We bet on Tony, being Italian like us. Odds of thirteen to one, and he knocked Jenkins out in three rounds.”

  Lev sometimes struggled with formal English, but he knew the meaning of “thirteen to one.” He said: “You should come and play cards. You are . . . ” He hesitated, then remembered the phrase. “You are making a lucky streak.”