After the War Is Over: A Novel

by Jennifer Robson

  “Do you want anything to drink?” John asked. “I’m sure they could fetch you a cup of tea.”

  “No, thank you. I think I might just read through my speech one last time.”

  “It’s still a version of your column?”

  “Yes. Since that’s the point of my coming here, to try and ensure that women’s concerns aren’t swept aside, I thought I should cleave to that subject.”

  “Perfect. I’ll leave you to it.”

  She read through it once, then a second time, and soon felt a little steadier. As soon as she had folded her speech back into her handbag, Miss Rathbone approached and asked if she might introduce Charlotte to the evening’s other speakers, all of them senior members of the Trades Union Council. She shook their hands and thanked them for inviting her and promptly forgot every last one of their names.

  Moments later an usher, or perhaps it was the theater manager, led all of them out of the parlor—the green room, he called it—and along a dark hall, and then quite unexpectedly onto the stage itself. They were seated on a row of chairs, right under the hideously hot and blinding lights, and within seconds Charlotte felt perspiration gathering at her temples and nape. If only she’d allowed Norma to powder her face before they’d left.

  It had been agreed that John would introduce her, so he went to the lectern at the front of the stage, and then, finding it not to his liking, stood to one side and waited for the audience to fall silent. He was perfectly at ease, entirely in his element, and it struck her, then, that he ought to run for Parliament. A Britain run by men like John Ellis would be a fine place indeed.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is John Ellis, and I am the editor in chief of the Liverpool Herald.” He paused for the round of applause this provoked, waiting patiently until the hall was silent again.

  “Thank you very much. I have come here tonight to introduce a young woman whose name, I believe, will be recognizable to those among you who are regular readers of the Herald.

  “Nearly a year ago, I received a letter from Miss Charlotte Brown. She spoke of the suffering she was witnessing among the people who came to her office in search of help, and she asked me to give voice to their troubles. She wished for them to be heard. I was so impressed by her letter that, on the spot, I offered her a weekly column in my newspaper. To my great relief she agreed, and in the ten months since she has never once disappointed me.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my very great honor, and my distinct pleasure, to introduce Miss Charlotte Brown to the members of the Liverpool Trades Union Council.”

  While John had been speaking, Charlotte had removed her gloves and extracted her speech from her handbag. Leaving the bag on her chair, she walked across the stage, shook John’s hand, and stood behind the lectern. It was several inches too tall for her; she could barely see across it. So she did as John had done: she moved to the side and looked out across the theater. It was packed full—nearly a thousand people, Norma had said. She swallowed once, twice, and waited for her nerves to settle and the pounding heartbeat in her ears to fade.

  People were looking at her expectantly, though, and the theater was perfectly silent. She would have to begin.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Mr. Ellis, for your most gracious introduction. I will add only that it is my honor to be associated with your newspaper, and that I am deeply grateful to you for having given me a platform for my thoughts and concerns.

  “As some of you may know, I work as a constituency assistant to Miss Eleanor Rathbone, and though the scope of my work is varied, I daily encounter people who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times and need help of one sort or another.” She drew a deep breath; it really was going well so far.

  “As a result of my work, it has become clear—”

  “What’s a toff like you to know about our problems? Who are you to speak for us?” came a voice from the crowd.

  An outburst of jeers and catcalls followed from other members of the audience, which blessedly seemed directed at the man who had interrupted her. He was not cowed. Instead he glared at her, his arms crossed, his expression angrily defiant.

  At length the theater fell silent again, those who had been standing took their seats, and Charlotte knew she had to answer. What, indeed, gave her the right to speak out? Simply to assume she possessed such a right would be to cast in her lot with those very people who stood on the backs of the poor and ignored their existence.

  Yet to admit the truth of it, to answer honestly, would be to broadcast a secret to which only her parents and a few family friends in Wells were privy. None of her own friends knew, not even Lilly, for she had decided long ago never to speak of it. It was so long ago she couldn’t remember why, exactly, she had decided to shut it away. Most likely she had been worried that her parents might be embarrassed.

  If they were here tonight, though, what would they tell her to do? Would they tell her to hem and haw and conjure up some mealymouthed explanation that justified her presence on the stage? Or would they tell her to do what she knew was right?

  “I believe I owe the gentleman in the audience an answer. Who am I? How can I possibly claim to understand such suffering? My answer is simple: I understand because I have lived it myself. I, too, have suffered, and I do know what it is like.

  “Yes, I attended the University of Oxford. And, yes, when I speak I sound as if I were born with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth. But the truth is quite different. The truth is that I spent the first four years of my life in the dockside slums of Bristol.”

  The theater was now so silent that she scarcely had to raise her voice. “I was abandoned in Wells Cathedral when I was four years old. I was dirty and starving and I only knew my first name. It was Bridget, by the way.

  “The people who found me, Laurence and Davina Brown, later became my adoptive parents. They had always wanted a child of their own, and to them, I suppose, the wretched four-year-old they found, asleep on a pew in the choir, must have seemed like a gift from God. It took some time for the authorities to find where I’d come from, and all that while I stayed with them, with my new parents, and in the fullness of time they adopted me.

  “My mother had vanished, but the story unearthed by the authorities was a tragic one. Her neighbors told of how she had taken to drink after my father had died. She was Irish, Catholic, friendless and alone in a foreign country, and no one would employ her. No one would give her any help. So she had taken me from Bristol, where we had been living, to Wells Cathedral, for reasons we will never know. She left me with the clothes I was wearing and a ragged blanket. There was no note, likely because she didn’t know how to read or write. And then she disappeared. I will never know what became of her.

  “I had a very happy childhood. My adoptive parents were loving and kind and everything that good parents ought to be. They cherished me, and my ambitions, and paid for my education.

  “Today I live an easy life—I freely admit it. I am paid well for the work I do, I live in a lovely home, I am never hungry, and I rarely have to go without anything I want.

  “But I still remember, nearly thirty years after the fact, what it was like to be cold and hungry and alone. I recall how my mother would disappear for hours at a time, and how there was never anything to eat. I recall how cold my feet were, always so cold, because I didn’t have any shoes. I remember what it was like to be utterly helpless.

  “It is my belief—and in this I am certain you agree with me—that no child should live like that, nor any woman or man. So that is why I do the work I do, and that is why I presume to speak on behalf of those who have nothing.”

  She had . . . she could think of nothing else to say. So she took a step back, and then another, and waited for someone to fracture the deadening silence that had fallen over the hall. She would almost welcome jeers from the crowd, if only someone would—

  The man who had challenged her stood up. He began to clap, and wit
hin seconds everyone else was on their feet, their applause and shouts of “hear, hear” so deafening that she couldn’t hear anything else.

  She felt a hand on her arm, and turned her head to see that it was John, leading her back to her seat so she might fetch her handbag, and then off the stage, into the welcome dark and peace of the wings.

  “Save your speech for another night,” he told her, bending close so he might speak in her ear. “You’ve won them over, Charlotte. The next time they’ll be putty in your hands.”

  She nodded, knowing he was right, and in any case quite certain that she was done with public speaking forever and ever. She looked out at the audience one last time, hoping to fix the moment in her memory. It was far easier to see, standing here, than it had been onstage with all the lights shining in her face. In the gallery, in the top row, she found her friends, standing and applauding madly for her. And then she spied a flash of fair hair at the very back of the theater.

  Could it be? She shaded her eyes with her hand, squinting against the glare that made it so difficult to see through her spectacles. The man was so far away, yet she recognized the way he stood, the way he carried himself, even the way he was smiling so broadly.

  “John—there’s someone I know in the audience,” she protested, but instead he took her arm and led her to the green room.

  “Sorry about that—I couldn’t hear a thing back there. Why don’t you sit down for a moment? May I fetch you a glass of sherry?”

  Miss Rathbone, who had been right behind them, shook her hand and then, for the first time in all their acquaintance, she embraced Charlotte. “You were magnificent. Simply magnificent.”

  “Wasn’t she? Here you are, Charlotte. Down that and you’ll feel better in no time. Would you like a sherry, Eleanor?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Have you ever heard such a reaction? I think it quite unprecedented.”

  Charlotte wanted very much to join in their conversation, but her thoughts were still in the theater, still focused on the man she had seen at the very back, all but invisible, standing in the shadows.

  “As I was leaving the stage,” she interrupted, “I spotted an old friend in the crowd. I should so like to see if he is still there.”

  “They’ve started up the speeches again,” John answered, “so I’d say you’re best to stay here. But if you wait for a while he’ll probably come to you.”

  It did make sense, so she accepted her glass of sherry and, sipping at it, waited for an usher to come and tell her that a man was waiting at the theater door and would like to see her. An usher did come, but it was only to admit Rosie, Norma, and Meg, who were perfectly happy to accept their own glasses of sherry and wait with her in the green room until all the evening’s speeches were done.

  But Edward never did come in search of her, and after a while she began to wonder if she had simply imagined his being there. He had been very far away, after all. It might have been another tall, slim, very fair man with a cane.

  She let her friends escort her home, after a final round of handshakes and congratulations from John and Miss Rathbone and the men from the Trades Union Council. They chattered around her as they hurried through the cold night, abuzz with the excitement of Charlotte’s speech, but she could find nothing to say. Instead she thought of her mother and father, and how she would have to write them in the morning and let them know what she had done. They would support her, of course, but she wished, now, that she’d asked their permission before sharing her—their—story with so many strangers.

  She worried as she walked, and not just about her parents. Would her admission change the way others felt about her? The women at work, for instance, or her friends from university? What would Lilly and Robbie think? What about Edward?

  It was a good thing there was no chance of her marrying him, for this latest revelation would surely put his mother in her grave. Robbie’s origins, though humble, were as nothing compared to Charlotte’s ancestry: Irish, Catholic, and quite possibly illegitimate.

  Although the others wished to stay up and celebrate her triumph some more, she pleaded a headache and put herself to bed right away. It was late, after all, and they all had to work in the morning.

  She fell asleep easily enough, thanks to the sherry, but was roused by the clock at St. Luke’s as it chimed three in the morning. Wide awake, her mind turned and turned, obsessively mining the events of the evening like clockworks that had been wound too tight. It was silly to worry about her speech—it was done and over and she wouldn’t undo it even if she could.

  It hadn’t been Edward at the back; surely it had not been him. And yet . . . if it were him, if he had taken the time and trouble to come and hear her speak, should she not attempt to discover the truth of it? Learn why he had come, and why he had left?

  She would stop by the post office on her way to work in the morning and telephone Lilly. That was the best solution. She would call on the pretext of wishing her a Happy Easter, and she would ask after Edward. If he were in London, that would put paid to her imaginings. And if he were elsewhere? If he had been in Liverpool?

  She had no notion, not the slightest idea, of what she would do.

  Chapter 30

  Charlotte was at the post office when it opened at eight o’clock the next morning. For such a conversation, she couldn’t possibly use the telephone at the office, nor did she expect Miss Rathbone to perpetually fund her expensive long-distance conversations on matters entirely unrelated to work.

  No sooner had the clerk opened the door than she was rushing past him to the telephone alcoves, all mercifully free. She went to the nearest, picked up the receiver, gave the operator Lilly’s number at home, and hung up. It shouldn’t take long for the connection to be made, not at this time of day.

  Only a minute or so later, the telephone rang and she picked up the receiver.

  “I’ve made the connection, madam.”

  “Thank you very much.” She waited, unaccountably nervous, for someone to answer at the other end.

  “Fraser residence.”

  “Hello, Robbie. It’s Charlotte. I wonder if I might speak to Lilly.”

  “Of course. Is everything all right?” Presumably they didn’t often receive long-distance calls first thing in the morning.

  “Yes . . . at least I think so. It’s nothing to worry about, I promise.”

  “She’s still upstairs but I’ll fetch her.”

  Several minutes later Lilly came on the line. “Hello? Charlotte?” She sounded as if Robbie had woken her up.

  “Hello, Lilly. I’m so sorry for getting you out of bed.”

  She could hear her friend stifling a yawn. “No, it was time I was up. I stayed up far too late last night. Reading at first, to pass the time until Robbie came home from the hospital, and then up another hour while he told me about his day.”

  “He didn’t sound tired at all.”

  “He never does, the wretch. But tell me—what is the matter? Did something happen at your speech? I do hope everyone was pleasant to you.”

  “Oh, they were. Perfectly pleasant. I couldn’t have hoped for a warmer reception. The thing is . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I may have seen Edward there. I mean, I can’t be sure. It was quite dark at the back of the hall, and the lights were shining in my face, but I’m fairly sure it was Edward. Do you know . . . I mean, do you think it could have been him?”

  Lilly didn’t answer, and after the silence had stretched on for many seconds, Charlotte began to worry the line had been dropped.

  “Lilly? Are you still there?”

  “Yes—I’m sorry. It’s only that I wasn’t sure what to say. He did know about your speech. He came to dinner on Sunday night, and while he was here he asked after you. So of course I told him that you’d been invited to speak at the congress. But I hadn’t realized he would go.”

  “Ah,” Charlotte said. She had been so certain her friend would say Edward had
been in London the entire time.

  “Didn’t he come to say hello afterward?” Lilly asked.

  “No, and that’s the curious thing. I mean, why come all that way and then just leave? Do you know if he might have left London on Thursday?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t. I haven’t spoken to him since Sunday. As far as I know he’s been here all the while. Perhaps it might be best if you spoke to him yourself.”

  That was the last thing she wanted, but it wouldn’t do to admit it to Lilly. “Very well. Do you have his telephone number at home?”

  “It’s Kensington 1227. But I wouldn’t call now. At this hour he’s likely to be at the clinic.”

  “What clinic? He isn’t ill, is he?”

  “No, silly. The clinic he founded in Whitechapel. The Free Clinic for Disabled Servicemen.”

  “But I . . . I had no idea. When did this happen?”

  Another pause, and although Charlotte couldn’t be certain, it sounded as if Lilly might be smiling.

  “I think you must speak to him directly about it. There isn’t a telephone at the clinic, not yet, so you’ll have to wait until this evening to ring him at home.”

  “You won’t tell me any more?”

  “No. I think it’s past time you and he spoke directly to one another. Long past time. The clinic,” Lilly added, “is at the corner of Fieldgate and Parfett Streets, just off the Whitechapel Road. I’m going to ring off now. Good luck, my dear.”

  And then, with a tinny click, Lilly was gone. Charlotte went to the counter, emptied her purse of every last shilling to pay for the call, and continued on to work, her thoughts more awhirl than ever. It simply made no sense. No sense at all.

  She spent the workday that followed in a daze, jumping out of her skin every time the telephones rang in the reception area or Miss Rathbone’s office, though the calls were never for her. She spent hours toting up figures for a study on wages and expenditures, only to discover, after copying everything out in ink, that she had made a number of idiotic errors in her basic arithmetic and would have to start again.