She reached to the pendant light switch on the pillow beside her and put on the light overhead. Brock’s book was on top of the bedside cabinet, and with a wince she reached over for it. It was called Eleanor Marx: a Socialist Heroine’s Tragedy. She turned towards the end and found the passage she was looking for, which described the circumstances of Eleanor’s death.
For some years beforehand, Eleanor had been living with Edward Aveling, a socialist activist with an interest in education and the theatre. Although not legally married, Eleanor considered their union a true marriage of free love. Aveling, however, was not a popular figure among her friends, who saw that he took advantage of Eleanor’s generosity, spending extravagantly on his theatrical friends the legacy from Engels which was her only capital, while she immersed herself in the hard work of Marxian scholarship, socialist politics and the development of the trade-union movement. On the morning of Thursday 31 March 1898 Eleanor received an anonymous letter revealing that Aveling had secretly married an actress some months before, changing his surname to that of the woman, but continuing to live with Eleanor in order to relieve her of the last of her savings.
Eleanor’s reaction was remarkable. She called Aveling and told him calmly that she proposed to commit suicide, and invited him to accompany her into death. While Aveling prevaricated, Eleanor sent her maid round to the chemist with a note requesting chloroform and prussic acid so that they could put down their dog. The maid duly returned with two ounces of chloroform and enough prussic acid to kill several people, together with the book which the chemist kept for purchasers of poisons to sign. Eleanor took the book into the room where Aveling was, and a little later brought it back, signed ‘E. M. Aveling’, for her maid to return to the chemist. Seeing that Eleanor was determined to go through with it, Aveling announced that he was ‘going up to town’, and promptly left.
Eleanor then went upstairs and wrote several letters and prepared certain packages, among them, presumably, one containing Marx’s manuscript on which she wrote her message to Rebecca Demuth. She gave all these with instructions to her maid, had a bath, dressed herself in white, and retired to bed. By eleven o’clock that morning she was dead.
Kathy let the book drop on to the bedcovers, as she tried to imagine Aveling’s reaction to Eleanor’s calm demand that he join her in suicide. If her death was noble, it was also impossibly implacable and remote. Suddenly Caroline Winter’s reaction to her husband’s infidelity, to go out and order a new kitchen, or that of her own lover’s wife, whose price had been a week in a luxury hotel in Grenada, seemed comfortingly practical and sane.
What happened to Aveling? She read a little further and discovered that Eleanor’s tragedy had had one final twist, when Aveling himself had died no more than a month after her, from a cancer which had been growing all the while in his side. She winced, conscious again of the throbbing pain in her own side.
Eleanor was dressed in white.
And something else. Kathy went back to the beginning of the account and read again until she found it. Eleanor Marx died on 31 March. So also did Eleanor Harper.
Something crawled up Kathy’s spine, the adrenalin beginning to feed into her system. Her heart thumped. The thought, blindingly obvious now, flashed into her head. If Meredith was expecting to meet with Bob Jones and Judith Naismith at 3, why did she take a sleeping pill at 2 that would knock her out for the whole afternoon?
She lay for a while, thinking, then rang for the nurse and asked for a telephone.
The woman on switch at New Scotland Yard was no help at all. There was no reply on Brock’s line, nor on two others she tried. Paging him produced no results. Similarly with Gurney.
‘I’ve already tried Chief Inspector Brock’s home number but there’s no reply. It’s really very important I speak to one of them immediately! I don’t have Sergeant Gurney’s home number. Could you let me have it, please?’
‘I’m sorry. We can’t give that sort of information over the phone. They both must have left for the night.’
Kathy’s brain was racing. She reached for the buzzer and got hold of the nurse again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped, the exertion of small movements draining her absurdly.
‘Don’t worry, dear. What can I do for you?’
‘My clothes. Are they around somewhere? There’s a telephone number I need in one of the pockets.’
The nurse nodded. A few minutes later she returned with a carrier bag. She grinned. ‘Anything else?’
‘No. that’s great. Thanks a lot.’
Kathy found her trousers at the bottom of the bag, rolled up in a ball, and fished out the screwed-up note which Bren had given her with the address and telephone number of Suzanne Chambers. She hesitated, then dialled the number.
‘Yes?’ A woman’s voice.
‘Er, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m trying to contact Detective Chief Inspector Brock on a very important police matter. Is he there by any chance?’
‘Who is this?’
Kathy felt a trickle of sweat run down her back.
‘I’m a colleague of his. I really am most sorry to disturb you, but this is a matter of life and death.’
‘He’s not here. Did he give you this number?’
‘Thanks. Sorry again.’ Kathy put down the receiver. ‘Shit!’ She bit her lip with embarrassment.
She didn’t know what to do, although she knew she had to hurry. She lay helpless, drumming the fingers of her left hand on the white bed linen.
At last she clenched her teeth and reached across her body with her comparatively good left hand and pulled the bedclothes back. With a grunt of effort she eased herself up into a sitting position, then swung round so that her feet could fall off the side of the bed. She saw her bandaged left knee under the hem of the white cotton gown they had given her. Her side was aching more insistently now as she began to shift into position to stand on her wobbly legs. She waited until her head was clear, then tried to stand. A wave of nausea flooded through her, and she put her weight on the side cabinet, ready to reach for the stainless-steel bowl. The feeling passed and she sat again on the side of the bed. Very slowly she bent her trunk forward and pulled the plastic carrier bag towards her, emptying it on to the bed. Inside were the clothes and shoes she was wearing yesterday. Her coat wasn’t there.
It took a painful, exhausting age to work her aching body out of the gown and into her underwear and trousers. Then she slipped her polo-neck sweater over her head. She had to stretch the right arm out of shape to get it around the plaster cast, and ease it carefully down over the pad of dressing around her right side. The laces on her shoes were the biggest problem. When she stretched forward to do them up, she gave a stifled yell as an agonizing pain shot through her side. She closed her eyes, gasping, then tried again, controlling the pain just long enough to tie the laces clumsily.
She scribbled a short note for the nurse. The pain seemed to help her to focus. She got to her feet, swayed towards the door, then stumbled down the corridor, blindly following a knot of visitors on their way out. She sensed that people were staring at her. She didn’t understand why until she passed a nurses’ station with a mirrored panel facing into the corridor, as if for visitors to fix up their smiles before facing the patients. Who is the weird woman who looks as if she’s been hit by a bus? She examined the mirror more closely. Tufts of fair hair sprouted through a swathe of bandages. The visible part of her face was mottled black and blue.
She found herself in a lift. Someone spoke to her and she mumbled a reply. Then she came to a bright foyer area, passed through swing doors and out into the cold night air. A couple got out of a taxi in front of her. She stumbled past them and collapsed into the back seat, her side on fire.
The man’s eyes in the driving mirror looked concerned.
‘What you say?’
‘Jerusalem Lane.’
‘Where’s that, then? I dunno it.’
‘Marquis Street,’ she said urgently. ‘Cor
ner with Carlisle Street. East Bloomsbury.’
When they reached the end of Jerusalem Lane, the man had to open Kathy’s door and help her out. She screwed up her eyes with pain as she straightened her back to stand on the pavement.
‘There’s some money in the right pocket of my trousers,’ she gasped. ‘Can’t get it. My arm.’ She swung the cast helplessly.
He looked doubtful as he came round behind her right side and reached towards her pocket. Suddenly he pulled away his hand and held it up under the light that illuminated the gates to the building site.
‘Jesus! You’re bleedin’! Oh gawd!’ His mind leapt to the risk of AIDS. ‘You need an ambulance, not a bleedin’ taxi!’ He thought of the blood on his seats.
‘Please,’ she said struggling to reach into her right pocket with her left hand.
‘Forget it.’ He was already back in his cab and pulling away.
31
‘Kathy?’ Peg’s voice, mechanically distorted, sounded in surprise from her intercom. ‘Come in, dear.’ The door clicked and Kathy limped slowly up the two flights towards the diminutive figure waiting for her at the top.
‘Oh my, dear! Is that really you? What a state you are in!’ Peg clucked around Kathy who shuffled into the lounge room and sank into an armchair, gasping for breath.
‘Should I get you a doctor, dear? You look terribly white! And those bruises!’
‘No. I want to talk to you, Peg.’
‘Of course, dear. What about?’
‘About Eleanor, and Meredith. It’s time you told me the truth.’
‘Oh… I see. Are you up to it, though, dear? You really don’t look well. You’re trembling.’
‘A glass of water would be wonderful.’
‘Of course.’
Peg went off to the kitchenette and busied herself for what seemed a long time. Kathy was grateful to be able to remain still and soak up the heat from the gas fire blazing in front of her.
Peg at last returned with a glass, not of water but of a steaming brown liquid the colour of weak tea.
‘This is what you need, my dear. Our father was a Scotsman, and this was his infallible cure for any ailment, especially in the winter. A hot toddy. You get this inside you and it’ll warm the cockles of your heart.’
She stirred and then removed the teaspoon. She offered the glass to Kathy, who held the potion to her nose, inhaling the fumes of hot whisky. She sipped and almost choked on the burning spirit. She could taste the sweetness of the sugar swirling in the bottom of the glass. Gradually her throat accustomed itself to the whisky as it filled her with reassuring warmth.
‘Was it the books, Peg? Is that why Eleanor did it?’
‘Did what, dear?’ Peg asked cautiously.
‘Killed Meredith.’
All of a sudden Peg seemed filled with confusion. She ducked her head, put her knuckles to her mouth, looked this way and that, as if seeking advice from the sisters who were no longer there to give it.
‘Oh,’ she whimpered. Then she gave a long sigh, plucked a dainty handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan and pressed it to each eye. ‘How did you find out?’
‘Just tell me,’ Kathy said.
‘The books…’ Peg began slowly, shaking her head. ‘They were only the final straw. Eleanor was so very upset when she discovered that they were gone. But there had been other precious things which Meredith had been taking. At first Eleanor didn’t realize. There was a letter in a frame which she kept in an old suitcase under her bed. One day she noticed that it was gone. Then later, one of her books from the bookcase was missing, and more papers from the suitcase. She was quite beside herself. She even thought she must be going senile and mislaying things, although of course she had the clearest mind of any of us. It wasn’t until she saw the book in Meredith’s flat that she realized that Meredith must have been taking them. When she confronted her, Meredith was quite unabashed.
‘How is your toddy, dear? Do you feel any better?’
‘It’s just fine, Peg. Go on.’ She had nearly finished the drink, and the warmth inside and outside her body was easing her discomfort. Even the stabbing pains in her side had diminished to a steady throb.
‘One can’t really blame Meredith. She just didn’t realize what she was doing. She had become so very worried about money in recent months, and we were very little help to her in that respect. I’m afraid that neither of us was in a wellpaid job, and we didn’t have the superannuation schemes people have now. Over the past ten years our funds had run down almost to nothing. Meredith saw the problem most clearly, and she was under so much pressure, from Terry, and then from the people wanting to buy the house. And then there were the leaks in the roof, and the wiring. I think she must have felt she was having to hold the world together entirely on her own. So when Eleanor accused her of stealing her things, she was quite brazen. She said that she had been forced to do something, and Eleanor should feel pleased to help. In any case, she said, the old things had come from our mother, and really belonged to us all. You see, she just had no idea of the value which Eleanor attached to those things. She had never been interested in the history of our family, and the things which had come down to us.’
‘But to murder her… her own sister.’
‘I know, dear. It was quite terrible. Terrible.’ A single tear ran down Peg’s cheeks, leaving a tiny trail of reflected firelight. ‘But Eleanor said Meredith simply couldn’t be trusted. When she realized that the things were worth a lot of money, she insisted that they must be sold. She said she would get lawyers to take them from Eleanor. She was the eldest sister, and said they were rightfully hers. So like her to say that, just as she did when we were little girls.’
‘I don’t understand, though, why Eleanor wouldn’t be happy to sell them to Judith Naismith’s university.’ Kathy was feeling much more comfortable. The tension in her body had been replaced by a warm glow. The alcohol had gone to her head a little, and her tongue slurred over the last words of her sentence.
‘Oh dear me, no,’ Peg clucked her tongue. ‘Dr Naismith is an academic. She sees the papers as simply some kind of valuable historical relic, like the Dead Sea Scrolls or something.’
‘Well, they are, aren’t they?’
‘Oh no!’ Peg’s voice dropped to a whisper. Her eyes shone with the same inner light that Kathy had seen before. ‘Do you know what is written on the monument on our great-grandfather’s grave? Beneath his famous words “Workers of all lands, unite” is a second quotation from his writings. It says, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” ’
Kathy stared blankly at her, uncomprehending.
‘Eleanor said that the papers belonged to the future, not to the past. Not even to the present, when the works of Karl Marx are so universally misunderstood and misrepresented. You see, our great-grandfather maintained that the revolution could only be achieved in the most advanced societies, not in the backward peasant countries where so-called Marxist revolutions have occurred in the past seventy years. That is logical, you see, because he understood that it was only by passing through the complete cycle of capitalist development that a society would experience its inner contradictions to the full, and thus be capable of transforming itself and achieving the final goal of true socialism.’
Peg was reciting the phrases in a cosy, familiar manner, as another elderly lady might discuss the strategies of contract bridge, or growing roses.
‘Now if you understand this, then you can see that the whole history of socialist revolutions in this century, in Russia and in even less developed countries, has been a dreadful mistake, a misguided attempt to take a short cut from feudalism to socialism. Our great-grandfather foresaw that such an attempt would be doomed, and he wrote his final book to describe the true path. His book is a map of the future, but it cannot be used to take a short cut to that future, as were his other books. That is why it cannot be published until the time is ready. And ju
st imagine how people would sneer at it now, when all the world believes that the failure of those false experiments of the past seventy years has proved that Marxism is a path only to poverty, oppression and despair. We must wait, twenty years or thirty, until the memory of these mistakes has faded, and a new generation is ready to understand the true path to the final goal.’
Kathy found it difficult to reconcile this grand vision of human history with the reality of the elderly lady huddled in front of her gas fire, explaining why one of her sisters had pulled a plastic bag over the head of another. The mismatch was too silly to be taken seriously. She felt her weary brain lose focus, and her stricken body withdraw into itself.
‘Am I explaining it to you, dear?’
‘Not really,’ she mumbled in reply. She really was desperately tired, and could hardly remember any more why it had seemed so urgent to leave her hospital bed for this nonsense. She couldn’t imagine how she was ever going to get out of this armchair again.
‘Oh dear. Well, that was how it seemed to Eleanor, anyway. She was so bright, so dedicated. The papers weren’t just something given to us by our mother. They were a sacred trust which our family had inherited.’
Kathy tried to rouse herself. ‘Why did Eleanor wait so long before killing herself?’
‘She was drawn to the anniversary of Tussy’s noble suicide, of course, and then she wanted the new buildings to be at the stage where we could put her safely away, where she wouldn’t be disturbed, at least for a couple of decades.’
‘So that wasn’t Danny Finn’s idea?’
‘No, dear man. He thought it was. I helped him to think of it.’
‘And the Endziel is down there with Eleanor?’
Peg gave a coy smile, ‘Perhaps, my dear, perhaps.’
‘Why the hammer?’
‘Eleanor thought we should distract you. To give us more time. We saw it at Terry’s house one day when we were invited to admire the new work being done to their kitchen. Eleanor thought of it. We knew it would make things worse for Terry for a while, but it served him right. Stupid boy. It was a hateful thing to do to poor Eleanor. But she was already gone, and sometimes one must do hateful things.’
The Marx Sisters bak-1 Page 29
