A sharp scuffle at the door made him look up. With a nasty scrape the wood shuffled back against the parquet and the grinning faces of Inspector Barnes and Sergeant Wilson dangled in.
‘Fred-boy!’ Barnes chirped. ‘Look lively! Quick one in the Hat and Feathers?’
Both men’s cheeks and noses were ruddy and already bore the cheer of drink. Primrose looked at his wall clock. It was well after working hours; there was no reason he shouldn’t. On the other hand Clara would be waiting at home and it was the third night this week he had been late for his tea.
‘Come on Freddie, cheer up, they put away over a hundred at Bow Street today.’ Wilson looked pleased as a fox.
‘One by one, the suffragettes are gone,’ Barnes wheezed leaning further into the room. ‘Holloway’s chock-full. Word is they’ll be sending them to the Tower next.’
‘Really? Not a bad idea,’ said Wilson.
‘It’s a joke,’ Barnes sneered over his shoulder at the Sergeant. ‘Come on, Fredboy, what do you say? Hat and Feathers? Drink up an appetite. My wife makes chops on a Wednesday.’ He rubbed his hands together.
Primrose sighed then looked back out of the window at the costermonger’s girl. Her eager little spirit was making him glum. ‘Not today, I’m afraid. Have to wade through this lot at home.’
‘It’ll be here in the morning.’ Barnes waited, his luxurious moustache twitching in anticipation. After a second, he slapped his hands down against his hips, defeated. ‘Your choice.’
Primrose nodded graciously.
The detective bustled backwards into the corridor, pushing Wilson along with him, and let the door fall shut. Primrose ran his gaze around the room. It fell on the closed copy of Vincent’s Police Code which he kept lying in the corner like a sneaky eye. ‘You must when on duty allow nothing but duty to occupy your thoughts.’
That was all very well, but the suffragettes had changed everything at New Scotland Yard. Now it was the criminals who wore the reproachful looks as they were arrested, cried ‘shame’ at the officers when standing in the dock. The lines of right and wrong were blurred and morals seemed bent all over the place. And what was the role of the police if not a moral one?
He packed a few case files into his briefcase to look over at home. A woman charged with pouring acid on golf courses, another two arson cases, both park bandstands, and a handful of suffragettes who had breached the terms of their prison release.
As he stood up to leave, his eyes briefly came to rest on the board on the right hand wall of the office, where the smiling portraits of the Pankhurst women were pinned; soft focus family shots Special Branch had somehow obtained. They looked like music-hall stars; Mrs Pankhurst and her wise eyes; a tall elegant woman in muted silks – that was Sylvia Pankhurst; and the bright, sharp gaze of Christabel, alongside a copy of her arrest warrant, issued by the Yard when she disappeared six months ago.
Out in the main office he handed a pile of typing to the night secretary, filed some reports in the tray for the Chief Inspector and went back to lock up his office. He was just about to slide his key in when a slow collection of voices creeping through the corridor made him pause. Junior detectives began hauling their coats from the backs of chairs and carefully taking revolvers from locked desk drawers. A uniformed man strode towards him and stopped sharp. Primrose recognised him as Sergeant Price from Westminster division, based down the road, and wondered briefly what he was doing at Scotland Yard. He didn’t have to wonder long.
‘Sir, window smash going on right now,’ the Sergeant barked. ‘Length of Bond Street. Chief Constable wants as many men as possible.’ He slowed down and said carefully, ‘To avoid the kind of happening of . . .’
‘Black Friday,’ Primrose sighed heavily. He clicked back open the lock of his door, dumped his briefcase inside and locked it again. It was beyond his hopes that they would leave him alone tonight, just leave him to get on with his paperwork and his supper.
‘Chief wants us to get our skates on, so if you don’t mind I’ll jump in the Daimler with you.’
‘No, I don’t mind,’ Primrose said quietly. He kept his eye on the crowd of officers gathering along the hallway, looking out for Wilson or Barnes. He wondered if they had made it out of the building yet and were on their merry way to the Hat and Feathers.
‘Were you there on Black Friday?’ Sergeant Price asked as they strode towards the stairs.
Primrose paused before nodding, half-relieved that there was still someone in the Metropolitan Police who didn’t know about his heroics with Mrs Billinghurst and her bath chair.
‘Super said it was grim. I heard two died.’
‘Something like that.’ He wished the young sergeant would shut up.
‘Still, if that’s the game Winston Churchill wants to play. It was Churchill who ordered the beatings, wasn’t it?’
Primrose looked at his curious face. ‘Where did you hear that?’ He tried to keep his voice flat but there was an edge to it.
‘I thought it was common knowledge. Since Churchill wouldn’t allow an enquiry they never got to the bottom of it. Men like that don’t just rally themselves by accident . . .’ His voice faded as Primrose stopped walking. He took the sergeant by the elbow and dropped his voice.
‘A word of warning, a friendly one. You ought to watch your words with senior officers. You might not find the next one you say such things to so lenient.’
They became caught in a throng of policemen piling down onto the street and Primrose felt his breath suck in. Moments like this convinced him he was still more comfortable in a scrum of animals than people, heaving around the Lancashire heifers on his uncle’s dairy farm rather than rubbing shoulders with fellow men.
Out in the yard a uniformed constable was already climbing behind the wheel of the Daimler. Officers were piling into the Black Maria arrest vans; more inside were checking the locks on the wire cubicles. Primrose slid into the front seat while Price and another two plain clothes officers jumped in the back. The clod of hooves and the roar of engines folded into one as each vehicle set off in turn for Bond Street.
Five
Twinkle, Frankie’s writing partner whose name was printed significantly larger than hers on their shared column, lived just off the Edgware Road. The rich strawberry red of her building meant that the turn off was always easy to find. Street lamps snaked clouds of electric light up against the walls, gleaming off the lacquer. As Frankie walked, she let her fingers strum the glossy black railings lining the gardens. She was still puzzling over the sight of the carriages outside Smythe’s. Perhaps there was another exit to Lancashire Court. Perhaps they weren’t going into the shop at all. There were plenty of clubs down that way; it could have been nothing but a dull meeting of politicos.
Twinkle’s block lay halfway down the row of Oxford and Cambridge mansions. A whiskered porter let Frankie into the hydraulic lift and she rose with a jerk. In the safety of the metal cage she sniffed herself. She had the whiff of public house on her, tobacco and beer. Twinkle would probably try to attack her with the eau de toilette. She wrinkled her nose. So long as it wasn’t violets.
The lift cranked to a halt on the top floor, glowing in dainty yellow light. There was no one about. Frankie had never seen anyone coming or going in her visits to Twinkle. The whole place had an eerie quiet to it, nothing like her own lodgings on Percy Circus where there was always a noisy communist meeting going on upstairs, or an Italian family shouting at each other in the street. She straightened her shirt and knocked on the door.
In her day Twinkle had apparently been quite something to talk about; the last of the great Courtesans, so it was said. Books were dedicated to her, paintings made of her in the classical style, and hung in Mayfair drawing rooms under the guise of art. Legend had it that a poet once threw himself into the Thames over her, though he had then thought better of it and swum ashore, only to die of cholera weeks later. She had been an icon of fashion, seen at Ascot, at the Savoy, riding along Rotten Row
with an entourage of copycats. The papers never called her by her real name, which Frankie didn’t know, and not even by her nickname, which she had earned, so she claimed, for being ‘the little star of our times’. She had always just been ‘fair anonyma’ or ‘the muse’. Rumours flew round society circles like flies in a dirty cake shop about who her clients were or had been. Names that read like a roll call of the House of Lords were bandied about as blackmail currency.
Boredom had settled on her like dust in recent years. Itchy to dip her toes back into the limelight she had been on at Mr Stark about a column. The trouble was, he said, she was a little ‘balmy on the crumpet’ these days; she would need a helping hand to make sure her ideas were fit for the public to consume. So four months ago, on the 30th of June, the Ladies’ Page Friday column ‘Conversations from the Boudoir’ was born and suddenly Frankie found that every Saturday on her doorstep, a little cheque for one pound and one shilling would appear. She couldn’t say that she had ever had pride over the work. But it was bread, it was a pot-boiler, as Audrey Woodford would say, and pot-boilers were never to be sniffed at.
She waited minutes before the parlourmaid answered the door, a pale-cheeked girl with ginger freckles. Frankie didn’t recognise her. Twinkle went through parlourmaids like most women went through handkerchiefs.
‘Sorry to keep you, Ma’am,’ she dipped at Frankie.
‘It’s all right. I’m late anyway.’ Won’t last a week, thought Frankie as she stepped inside. There was a strong sweet-savoury smell in the air, wafts of stew on the boil coming from the kitchen, gravy, beef and onions. Her stomach rumbled. The stout had made her hungry and she hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
‘She’s in the boudoir.’ The maid led the way down the hall with fragile steps, towards a pair of lavishly etched glass doors. From beyond, a muffled voice trilled, ‘Is that you, Puss?’
Frankie winced at the nickname. The maid paused to pick up a tray of tea from a Japanese sideboard and pushed open the doors with her hips.
At first Frankie wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at. Twinkle’s body seemed concealed inside a box, the kind magicians used when they wanted to cut women in half. Except this one was upright and only her head poked out of the top, her plentiful grey hair whipped into a turban like cream on a trifle. She must have been sitting down or crouching because the box was wide and squat and was making streams of perspiration tumble down her face. Above her, leaning precariously, a contraption had been rigged; a tilting hat-stand held in place by a pulley roped to the legs of the enormous bedframe. Attached to it, two ribbons had been looped through the upper corners of a newspaper, holding the pages apart. Twinkle’s face was half-covered by a thick rubber band circumnavigating her head, strapping a pair of horn opera glasses in place to magnify the paper’s text. She turned slowly towards Frankie until she had her in the sights, looking for all the world like a terrifying mechanical owl.
‘What the devil . . . ?’
The maid whispered, ‘It’s a gem–wood cabinet. Turkish bath.’
Twinkle’s head snapped round. ‘Page. Quickly girl, I’ll lose the train of thought. Hello, Puss.’ The maid scurried over to the cabinet and ran the next page along the ribbon.
‘You’re not going to make me get in that.’
‘And why not? You could do with one.’ Twinkle looked at the maid. ‘No, dear, not tea, I said gin. We want gin, don’t we, Puss? But first you’re going to eat. I can’t of course, I’m fasting.’
‘You can drink gin on a fast?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Nothing.’ Frankie sniffed the meaty air again. ‘What are you making?’
Twinkle twitched and made little grunts as the parlourmaid struggled to unstrap the goggles. ‘That’s better. Give me a kiss, Puss.’ Reluctantly Frankie walked over and kissed Twinkle’s red cheek. Her skin felt like hot wet paper. ‘Gracie’s made oysters, haven’t you?’
The maid blushed.
‘Doesn’t smell like oysters.’
‘The prairie kind.’
Frankie stifled a retch. ‘Aw, I’d love to but I’m stuffed. Had cockles and chips on the way over,’ she lied. She should have known; last week Twinkle had surreptitiously fed her goat pizzle disguised in a heavy paprika sauce. Dr Freud and his followers, Frankie fancied, would have a field day with Twinkle. There was a purple velveteen chair perched between the window and the bed and she sat down at a safe distance. Gracie was still standing awkwardly by the door.
‘What are you waiting for? Gin, girl, I said. ‘Now, where was I? Ah yes, you’ll never guess what that piss-pot Mr Fox-Pitt from the Pall Mall Gazette has said now. Where is it, I can’t see without those damned glasses? Listen to this.’
Frankie took her notebook from her pocket and licked the tip of a pencil.
‘“You cannot call a fashionable French or English woman well dressed, but you might describe her as expensively upholstered. Dressmakers,” he thunders, “appear to have lost sight of the fact that the primary object of clothing is to keep the body warm . . .” Well, I might say to him that a woodland is exceedingly plain without its flowers. Flowers also serve that other essential purpose.’
‘Decorating cakes?’
‘Pollination.’ She looked accusingly at Frankie. ‘Of course, if you can make the plain look work. But . . . I can’t help thinking that if women were encouraged to dress like you the birth rate would slow.’
Frankie bit her tongue and looked around the room. Across the bed lay a tangle of furs with heads, paws and tails flopping in every direction. ‘Are you going to get out of there? You look as cooked as a Christmas goose.’
‘What do you think about Mr Fox-Pitt? I think we should get our revenge. I have the idea to recommend that men wear purple.’
‘Purple? Why purple?’
‘I would like to see women arriving at the theatre, and being shocked to find a man sitting next to them who clashes with their dress. And purple clashes with quite a lot of things. Like your suit, Puss.’ She glanced at Frankie’s trousers against the chair, and continued to ramble. ‘Purple has a sort of ecclesiastical feel to it, and that would make things feel very naughty at jollifications, don’t you think?’
To Frankie’s relief Gracie came back with a bottle of Old Tom and a couple of crystal sherry glasses. With a weary heart she knocked back a couple of swallows. Twinkle had Gracie pour the gin straight into her mouth. The sight reminded Frankie of the Holloway feeding tube. She suddenly sat up straighter.
‘Twinkle, do you know a trapeze girl?’
Twinkle’s eyes had gone glossy with the hit of alcohol. ‘I know a dozen. Gracie, I think it’s time to get out, turn around, Puss.’
‘But do you know one called Ebony Diamond?’
‘Name rings a bell,’ she grunted. ‘No, not that way, I’ll never get my feet through that hole. Are you simple?’ Frankie realised she could still see Twinkle in the mirror, heaving herself into a pink satinette robe with Gracie fuddling over the ties.
‘She’s a suffragette.’
‘Well they’ve all got bats in the belfry if you ask me. Who wants a vote anyway? Next they’ll be expecting us to sit in that dull parliament, stinking of men. Now,’ she wriggled her arms down into the sleeves. Gracie gave a yelp. ‘That’s what you get for having fists like ham hocks.’
Frankie closed her eyes for slightly longer than a blink. ‘She’s a gypsy. You’d know her if you saw her.’
When Frankie opened her eyes she saw Twinkle had turned to face her. Her gaze was cold. ‘Why do you want to know, Puss?’ She batted a hand at Gracie. ‘No, leave my hair, just fetch the cold cream will you?’
‘It’s Mr Stark; he wants me to do a portrait of her.’
‘Really?’ There was a sour note in Twinkle’s tone. ‘How strange.’
‘Well she’s on at the Coliseum tomorrow. And –’ she broke off, seeing the hard bright smile on Twinkle’s face and felt herself treading on thin ice. ‘Do you mind if I . . . ?’ She reached
for the Old Tom bottle.
Twinkle smiled, deliberately wide. ‘Not at all, Puss. Pour me one too, there’s a dear.’
Twinkle sat at her dressing table and began rubbing grease into her face. Gracie had scarpered. Frankie passed across a glass, then knocked back her own and poured another. It was hot, herbal, pleasant. She felt it swimming up to her brain. ‘She’s interesting. She wears these black corsets.’
Twinkle turned on her stool and stared again at Frankie. ‘Really, these Sapphic obsessions of yours are so dull.’ Her eyes, though sunk amid folds of skin, had a ball-bearing of steel to their core.
‘Right,’ Frankie slunk back in her seat. ‘Dinner party topics?’
‘Well, now you mention it, I do think I know her. Quite the Gibson girl, as I recall.’ She sucked in her cheekbones and put her hands round her waist. ‘Out of fashion now, of course. It’s all thick waists and skinny hips these days. But she must have had a fun time in Holloway. Hunger striking would be positively up her strada.’ Suddenly Twinkle spun round, her face lit up like the moon. ‘That’s it, Puss. That’s the dinner party topic. Starvation fashion. I love it, it’s brilliant, you’re a genius, Puss.’ She threw her hands in the air and for a second Frankie was worried she was about to be assaulted by a squashing embrace. But Twinkle only made for the bed instead and flung herself backwards, groaning as her back hit the furs. A noxious cloud of violet eau de toilette flew up from her.
‘Hold on a minute.’
‘No, it’s perfect, write it down. Will hunger striking ever catch on as a fashion trend? It’s perfect. It’s so wonderfully now. It’s delicioso. It’s deevie, Puss. Get the suffragette waif look without setting foot in Holloway.’
‘Twinkle, you know how much trouble I’d be in. It’s taken long enough to get them off my back after the cartoon. It’s my name goes on the column too. You know that.’
The Hourglass Factory Page 4
