James remained for a moment with the inspector while Paul followed the constable across the littered paving stones to the Members’ entrance and climbed into a four-wheeler. As they edged through the door he saw Grace open her eyes, then close them again, rather too swiftly. He thought, ‘Damn it, I don’t believe she’s hurt at all! She’s just using us to make the most of the situation!’ and instead of telling the cabby to drive to the nearest casualty ward he gave him the name of their hotel, saying, ‘All right, Officer, I realise you couldn’t help it and I’m a witness to that!’ The man saluted and looked very relieved, wiping the sweat and grime from his forehead as James rejoined them.
‘Well,’ he said, as they moved slowly across to Whitehall, ‘I’ve given him something to think about but I did it with my tongue in my cheek! The poor devils are in a hopeless position. It’s the politicians not the police who should be censured for this kind of thing! Is she hurt, do you think?’
Grace herself answered the question by opening her eyes and subjecting all three of them to an ironic scrutiny. There was, Paul reflected, an element of glee in her expression but as soon as she saw Claire she wriggled out of Paul’s grasp, tossed back her hair and said, carelessly, ‘Well, that’s one up for us anyway! I’ll wager that inspector has a sleepless night or two! Thank you, James, it was clever of you, and you too, Paul!’ and to their amazement she plunged her hands into a sachet fastened to her waistband, extracted a handful of hairpins and began to tidy her hair.
James said, with a note of mild reproof, ‘I guessed you were spoofing all the time, you little devil! But he didn’t, did you, Paul?’
‘No, I’m damned if I did!’ Paul growled, feeling very foolish and avoiding Claire’s glance. ‘She looked to me as if she was heading straight for martyrdom! The next time I’ll do what I intended to do then—keep well clear of a mess like that!’ and then he remembered the woman who had been punched in the back and the elderly man with the banner banged over the head with his staff and suddenly he felt neither foolish nor irritated, but almost proud of the way she had used them to save herself from arrest and another spell in gaol and also to hit back at her persecutors. He noticed too that she was much thinner than the last time he had seen her, with her pleasing roundness gone and a strained, white face that reminded him of an under-nourished adolescent. Her clothes, well-cut and once smart, were now wildly disordered. The shoulder of the blouse had been ripped across, exposing the strap of her petticoat and her skirt was stained with patches of manure and road dust. He said, with awe in his voice, ‘Is it worth all that? Isn’t there some other way?’ and James replied, quietly, ‘They’ve tried all the other ways, Paul,’ and a look of understanding passed between Grace and James so that Paul felt shut out of their confidence.
Claire said, as the cab stopped at the hotel, ‘You’d best come in and tidy up, Grace. Then we can all have tea,’ and when Grace hesitated she added, laughing, ‘You really do need a wash and brush up! They’ll probably arrest you if you go home in that condition,’ whereupon they all got out and whilst Paul was paying off the cab the two women went through the foyer, causing the commissionaire to open his eyes wide as they passed him on their way to the stairs.
The men remained below, James ordering two stiff whiskies, while Paul went into the cloakroom to make what repairs he could on his burst collar. When he returned James said with a grin, ‘Leave ’em to it, Paul, they understand one another well enough!’ and Paul thought that perhaps he was right for during the cab ride he had been aware of a curious intimacy between the women. He said, ‘Very well, but afterwards, I’m going straight home, James! Every time I come here something damned unpleasant happens and from now on I’m avoiding this blasted city as if the Great Plague was still raging!’ and James told him he was probably well advised to do just that but from now on he hoped Paul would support universal suffrage with more enthusiasm.
‘Yes, I’ll do that, James,’ Paul said, slowly, ‘but out of disgust, rather than conviction! I never thought to see Englishmen behave like that towards demonstrators. On the Continent, perhaps, but not here and not against women, however misguided! As a matter of fact I’m half-persuaded that people like Grace enjoy it in a way. Is that prejudice on my part, would you say?’
‘No, not entirely,’ James said, sipping his drink, ‘but even if they do I don’t see why they should apologise for it. There’s self-satisfaction in fighting that hard for something you believe in deeply and sincerely and they’ll win, quite soon, I believe.’
‘It can’t be soon enough for me,’ Paul grumbled, ‘for right now I feel like a bath and not simply to wash the dirt from my body!’
While Grace was in the dressing-room Claire sat in the bedroom sewing up the rent in her blouse and when this was done she set about beating the dust from the heavy folds of the skirt and sponging away the great yellow stain. She worked methodically, her mind contemplating the unlikely situation, that seemed to her as improbable as a story in a chain-library novel but it did not embarrass her, for instinct told her that Grace had long since renounced any claim on Paul. When she came out drying her hair with a bath robe, she studied her dispassionately, noting her boyish figure, and the prominence of her collar-bone as she slipped on her blouse and stood before the long mirror tidying her hair. There was hardly a trace, Claire thought, of the trim, self-assured young woman who had entertained her to tea at Shallowford in the first year of her marriage. All her curves had disappeared and with them her indifferent, half-vacant air that had seemed at that time close to boredom. Now the lines of the face were taut, the cheek-bones prominent and every movement she made whilst brushing and underpinning her hair was crisp and decisive, as though physical energy was something to be carefully husbanded. Only yesterday, Claire recalled, she had thought of this woman as sensual but she changed her mind now and wondered if dedication to a political cause, to the extent that this woman had dedicated herself, demanded the discipline of a nun entering an order. She thought, ‘There must be enormous strength of will there for I know myself well enough to realise that I couldn’t exchange life with Paul, or the security of the Valley, for an abstract idea. I might have done once but not now, not having enjoyed a man’s vigour and protection, not having borne him children as she bore him a child. She has resilience too, she isn’t in the least put out by this turn of events and seems almost to take it for granted,’ and she began to comprehend some of the sources of the failure of the marriage, reasoning that, beside Grace, Paul was an adolescent, with an adolescent’s dependence upon flattery. She said, as she handed Grace her skirt, ‘Would you think it impertinent of me if I asked you if you were happier now, Grace?’ and Grace stopped in the act of stepping into her skirt, smiled and said, with utmost candour, ‘Certainly not, providing you’ll be equally frank with me!’
‘I’ve always been grateful to you,’ Claire said slowly, ‘and I don’t mind admitting that. There was a time when I was very jealous but that’s done with, I’m not jealous now, any more than you are of me! I’m happy and I think Paul is; in fact, I know he is. Yet I know too that he wonders about you sometimes and that he’ll be very upset by what happened today.’
Grace hitched her skirt and tucked in her blouse so that Claire thought she put on clothes more like a soldier hurrying to parade than a young woman dressing in the presence of another. She had a trick of conducting an intimate conversation like this on a flat, impersonal level, as though Claire was a recruit to the Cause and she was instructing her in tactics.
‘I’m quite sure Paul is happy, Claire, far happier than I could have made him, and believe me, I’m grateful to you too! You were the means of soothing my conscience about him. All the same, I still think you should have fought for him in the first place.’
‘But it wouldn’t have worked that way,’ Claire retorted, although it secretly pleased her to have proof of the fact that she knew Paul so much better than this strange, eclectic creature, �
��and you haven’t answered my question! I’ve got a reason for asking it.’
‘I don’t want to know reasons,’ Grace told her, ‘I made a bad mistake and so did he but I made mine deliberately, so it wasn’t fair that he should help pay for it! Am I happier? I don’t know, I had never much expectation of happiness so it’s difficult to judge. I’m doing what I want to do, I’ve found a purpose to justify myself so I suppose that’s something. The only way I did that when I was a wife was over there,’ and she inclined her head towards the bed. Claire said nothing, so she went on, as though answering her own questions, ‘That’s half a marriage but Paul isn’t a man satisfied with half, is he? I soon found that out and that’s what decided me to stop pretending. I imagine it’s very different with you for you always belonged in his precious Valley. It’s still the whole of his life, I imagine?’
‘Yes,’ Claire told her, it was, that and the children.
‘You have children? Yes, of course you have, Uncle Franz told me—two girls, wasn’t it?’
‘Two boys, and now a girl.’
‘You haven’t wasted much time!’
‘The first two arrived together—twins— the girl last December.’
Grace looked then as if she was trying to make up her mind to say something important but was not sure how it would be received and for a moment Claire suspected that she was going to flaunt her ‘liberation’ by inquiring into the sex relationship of man and wife. Then, suddenly, Claire understood the reason for her hesitation; she was thinking, no doubt, of her own child Simon and said quickly, ‘You were wondering about your boy?’ but Grace shook her head vigorously and replied, ‘No, that wasn’t it! It just occurred to me that a woman like yourself must regard a person like me as a masochist.’
Claire had. never heard the word ‘masochist’ and frankly admitted as much whereupon Grace laughed and said, ‘By God, Claire! I was right about you! You were the only person in the world for Paul and I admire your honesty! Not one woman in a hundred would have admitted that in your situation!’ and when Claire’s expression showed she was unable to follow her reasoning, she went on, ‘It’s just a fashionable word meaning someone who derives pleasure from pain. Some of our people fall over themselves to use all the new words, you know, and I suppose some of them really are masochists. Well, at least my affiliation is not that much of a fad! I’m the person I am simply because I watched my mother driven to suicide by the cruelty of a man and I suppose this is my way of hitting back but perhaps Paul never told you about that?’
‘No,’ Claire said, ‘he never did.’
‘Well, if you’re interested ask old John Rudd when you get home but I shall have to go now, I’m probably the only one who survived the raid and Headquarters will want a report,’ and she picked up a yellow straw hat of Claire’s from the window seat and said, ‘Could I borrow this until tomorrow? I lost mine in the scrimmage.’
‘You can have it, a donation to the Cause,’ Claire said, ‘but before you go I would like you to know that both Paul and I campaigned for Women’s Suffrage at the last two elections in the West.’
‘I do know it,’ Grace said, ‘for that comes within my terms of reference. However, this isn’t the kind of war won on platforms, as you probably noticed outside Parliament this afternoon.’
Claire said, ‘If you’d been arrested and taken to gaol would you have gone on another hunger strike and been forcibly fed?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Grace replied carelessly, ‘they’re so frightened of the prospect of one of us dying in gaol that they’ve introduced a new method now. They watch us starve for a few days, turn us loose, then arrest us again as soon as we’re strong enough to totter along between two fat policemen!’
‘It’s outrageous,’ Claire burst out, ‘how many times have you been in Holloway?’
‘I’ve lost count,’ Grace said, ‘but I can tell you how many times I’ve had the steel gag and been fed through the nostrils. That’s something you do remember.’
Suddenly Claire felt sick and miserable. The thin, erect figure standing by the window was a rebuke, not only to her but to all of them and contemplation of her, and all that had happened to her over the last few years, made a mockery of the brilliant procession they had watched the previous day. She said, falteringly, ‘How … how long will it go on, Grace?’ and Grace, shrugging, said perhaps another two or three years, depending upon all kinds of factors, the staying power of the Militants, the supply of funds, the state of public opinion and the obstinacy of male legislators of both parties. Then, as though bored with the subject, she crammed on the hat and said, ‘We’ll go down now. Paul will be tormenting himself guessing what we’re talking about up here!’ and she moved for the door but Claire caught her arm and said, ‘Wait, there is one thing more! We haven’t told Simon about you. It isn’t easy to explain divorce to a seven-year-old. We shall, of course, but sometimes I wonder … well, wouldn’t you like to see him? You could, at any time you wished.’
Grace gave her another of her long, thoughtful stares before saying, ‘No, I don’t think that would be very wise of me, would it? He’s happy and fit, I imagine?’
‘Yes, he is,’ Claire told her, ‘he gets on well with the twins but Ikey, the boy Paul more or less adopted, is his great favourite.’
‘Ah yes, Ikey,’ Grace said, as it struck her that Claire must be quite unaware of Ikey’s role as the link between them. ‘How is Ikey shaping? I always had great hopes of that boy.’
‘He’s doing very well,’ Claire told her, ‘he’s in his first year at Woolwich. He was going to be an Engineer but he’s changed to the Gunners. Having his own children hasn’t made any difference to how Paul feels about him.’
‘No,’ Grace said, slowly, ‘it wouldn’t, not with people like you and Paul, but …’ and she stopped, biting her lips so that Claire said, ‘Well?’
‘In a place like the Valley,’ she said, with less than her former assurance, ‘Simon won’t be in ignorance about me long. If I was in your place I should get Ikey to explain to him and not lose any time about it. It wouldn’t help if he heard it from one of the farm hands. Will you do that for me, Claire?’
‘Certainly, if Paul agrees,’ said Claire, although privately she thought the assignment eccentric.
‘Paul will agree to anything you suggest,’ Grace said and suddenly, inexplicably, she bent forward and kissed Claire on the cheek, after which she pulled open the door and marched out into the corridor. ‘No wonder Paul could make very little of her,’ Claire thought, as she watched the yellow straw hat bob down the staircase, ‘for who on earth could? Certainly not me!’ and she hurried to catch her up before Grace found the table where Paul and James sat smoking, each looking as sombre and ill-at-ease as an expectant father.
Chapter Nineteen
I
There was no persuading him to remain in London another night and catch the 11 a.m. train from Waterloo, that all Valley travellers used, for it was the only main line train that stopped at Sorrel Halt. He fled the city like a fugitive, telling her that this was not the first time but would be the last. At first she was depressed that their holiday, which had begun so well, should have ended so abruptly and on such a dismal note but as the lights of the tenement houses fell away, and the train ran on into dark, open country she began to share his relief at going and was soon lulled to sleep by the clack of the wheels. When she opened her eyes again it was light and she could smell parched summer woods, a few miles short of the Devon border.
He had not asked her about her conversation with Grace and she had not told him, thinking that it would keep for when he felt less jaded but he remained moody and silent over breakfast at The Mitre, in Paxtonbury. It was not until they had hired a horse and trap at the livery stables, and were breasting the incline on the first stage of the fifteen-mile journey to the Valley that he began to perk up a little, for she saw him lift his head and sniff the
air like a pointer, as though he was searching the rendezvous of the west wind and the whiff of Channel spindrift. He said, as though she had been privy to his thoughts all the way home, ‘That glitter and all those blaring bands! Pomp measured out by the chain mile and what is the point of it if the vast majority are just lookers-on? Can you answer me that now?’
She said mildly that she supposed the spectacle itself was there to be enjoyed by taxpayers, and this, in essence, was the object the authorities had in mind but he growled, ‘Yes, I daresay! Bread and circuses, to keep the mob yammering for more red on the map! But they’ll bellow for local blood if given the chance, as you saw outside the House yesterday! Damn it, if we put on a show down here to mark a national occasion every man, woman and child in the Valley would be personally involved in it! But not in London, for London isn’t England any more! Monarchs used to make progresses to places like the Valley. Now they use London as a reflecting mirror and a bloody flyblown one at that!’
He seldom swore in her presence but she said nothing, knowing his mood would blow itself out in a few growls and gusts and that every turn of the trap’s wheels would improve his humour and she was right. After a rumble or two he subsided, his features relaxed, and he began to look about him as they tackled the last lap of the interminable hill to the saddleback where the real moor began. A hundred yards or so below the crest he pulled on to the heather and let the reins drop between his knees. It was then about 8 a.m., and the morning river mist had long since been sucked up by the sun so that the open stretches of Sorrel winked at the sky and the salt taste of the wind was unmistakable. She saw him grin and stretch himself, and in his sudden enthusiasm he thumped her knee so vigorously that she shouted, ‘Hi! That’ll leave a bruise, you great bully!’ but she smiled because she was so relieved the magic had worked again.
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 73
