Park Lane

by Frances Osborne

  ‘You should write something,’ she says. ‘That way more people will hear.’

  ‘In theory,’ he says. ‘But somebody like me can write all they like and there’ll never be a soul to read it. Don’t tell me, Miss Masters, that you are going to offer to send it to your friend, the editor of The Times?’

  ‘I’ll have to see what’s in it first.’ It comes out, a reflex of a reply that reveals more than she’d like, but which silences Mr Campbell. In this silence it occurs to Bea that there are indeed many things that she can see more clearly than he can. Perhaps he recognises this, too, for he still says nothing and just looks at her as if he’s asking some all-encompassing question. The Times, she continues, is not the newspaper for all views. His might just, she believes, be more suited to the Daily Herald, where she knows the editor slightly better.

  This has certainly surprised him. The Daily Herald, the trade unionist newspaper; he clearly was not expecting that from a dressed-up girl looking for ‘entertainment’, as he called it in Campden Hill Square.

  Mr Campbell looks down at the tea-stained tablecloth, then up again.

  ‘Are you going to offer your writing skills to type it up for me? Do ladies type?’

  Type for him? Is that the sum of what Bea can contribute to changing the world – typing and envelope-stuffing? But, just as in Lauderdale Mansions, if she wants to help then this is how she has to start and so, she says to herself, this is where you, Beatrice, tell a barefaced lie.

  ‘I’m not bad.’

  Before she’s drawn breath again he’s asking her whether she has a machine. She hesitates. There’s an old one in the library down at Beauhurst, dust just about kept off the keys. But Mr Campbell is definitely on the verge of laughter now, and this offends her. Why, their conversation has come so far – is it no more than a joke for him?

  Her question as to what he finds so amusing comes out as interrogation. As well, perhaps, it should.

  ‘The idea of such a young lady working as my secretary.’ He calms down as he speaks but the mocking elation is still there. ‘It’s almost the revolution in itself,’ he continues, ‘but I could lend it to my sister. She can’t borrow the machines at work, but she’s fast. Right fast.’

  ‘Oh, is she?’ replies Bea. It occurs to her that she is unlikely to feel too friendly towards Michael’s sister. His sister gets him books, he continues. They’ll lend her those, her employers, in the office she works in. Well, one book. And he’d like to look at it again, but it’s hard to ask in the circumstances.

  I can do better than that, Bea says, and their conversation resumes. When she next raises her cup to her lips and finds the tea is cold, she realises how long she has been there.

  Where on earth is it? Bea has searched E and F, just in case, then gone back to the catalogue again. It’s there, it must be. It’s not as though Edward or Mother will have Engels on their bedside table.

  Bea surveys the yards of bookcases around her. E and F took her half an hour. That makes six more hours, at least, if she is to search the lot. Compared to S or M, E and F are rather thin.

  One more time on E. She’s up the ladder, this is where the damn thing should be. It’s in the catalogue, for Christ’s sake. She starts to pull out the books, for it might have been knocked into the gap behind. The books slide out easily, as though one of them has been taken away.

  Well, it’s not there, but there are two other books by Engels in the row. The Communist Manifesto, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Bea takes them both down.

  12

  ‘ARE YOU ILL, BEATRICE,’ BARKS MOTHER AT LUNCH ON Monday a fortnight later. ‘You are barely out of your room. Can’t have you looking only half there when, it appears, most of London will be turning up on the day after tomorrow. Still, I suppose if you stick to dancing and don’t try to have a conversation nobody will notice.’

  Mother is, as ever, presiding over the table and its offerings, her petite stature giving her chair a throne-like air. Even the tone of her voice has a regal quality to it. She studies, Edward claims, the speech of Queen Victoria, and he swears to Bea that he can therefore hear traces of a German accent. As Mother speaks Bea pulls herself upright, feeling again a twelve-year-old who has made some comment that Mother regards as naive.

  If only she knew, thinks Bea, she would be appalled. Then Bea checks herself. Mother may disapprove of violence but Bea is only typing. And among Mr Campbell’s views is a call for one of the very changes Mother is waging a campaign to bring about. Maybe, just maybe, Mother would be impressed.

  Bea knows she is forcing the hand of optimism thinking this. For as much as the improvement of workers’ rights is a recurring topic of conversation at Mother’s Beauhurst house parties, the theme there does not include the overthrow of all the privileges enjoyed by Mother and her guests.

  ‘What has happened to the friends who kept you so busy?’ continues Mother. ‘Given the rather unrecognised, I feel, quality of London air and the experience of life that it brings, to spend so much time at home and indoors is rather a waste. And you have no time to do that, particularly being still unmarried and, good Lord, having to turn twenty-one on the day of my first dance in years. However, whatever the coincidence, we are categorically not mentioning anything to do with birthdays; there is something rather inelegant about celebrating them. Anyhow, it is clear you need to get out, and I think you should come on my rounds this afternoon. A group of us are meeting at Sybilla Sandham’s. Our spies tell us that, with Emmeline here, there’s a new wave of violence coming. We must do what we can to stop it.’

  Spies? What does Mother mean, spies? Is Bea being watched in Lauderdale Mansions? Will it be passed back to Mother that her daughter is a new recruit? She feels sick, and in her mind she goes around the faces in the typing room, the envelope-stuffers, the women in the room at the back of the flat. Which one, she thinks, which one is the spy? And does this mean she can’t go back there? Her stomach turns again. Typing and stuffing envelopes, however menial, has, well, she’s enjoyed it, it has given her a sense of, can she call it, ‘purpose’? Oh, bother Celeste, surely Celeste knows about this, that Bea might be discovered by Mother. Damn selfish of her to draw Bea in so. Damn selfish for Bea, and damn selfish for Mother.

  Bea sits there, and says nothing. Not that there is a need to say anything, for Mother, as usual, is continuing to speak and, being Mother, veers off into another line of conversation without a moment’s notice.

  ‘Oh, I saw Mrs Vinnicks last night at the Beltons’. Ghastly crush it was, reeked like a gymnasium. I was fanning myself with my dance card when she appeared from the crowd wearing pale pink satin like one of this year’s debutantes and a corset she can hardly have been able to breathe in. Talk about mutton dressed as lamb. It took her a matter of seconds to tell me that she was “distraught”. It appears that John has become engaged to a girl he met on the boat – some heiress. The jewellery the girl had with her made the newspapers as soon as they arrived in New York. Mrs Vinnicks is claiming distress that John will therefore not be returning to England – peculiar little woman.’

  At least Beatrice thinks Mother ends like that. Her ears are ringing so loudly that it is hard to hear anything at all. She’s not sure what she’s more upset by, the news itself, or the fact that it’s being passed to her so casually by someone whom Bea has been so worried about upsetting herself.

  Ten minutes later, she is back at her typewriter. Her ears are still ringing but that isn’t going to keep her fingers still. She hits the keys hard, bruising her fingertips and joints. The pain is jolting her into another man’s words. Well, blast you, John Vinnicks, you would never write this. Blast you, Mother, for making me still care.

  The next morning, she’s up and out, no breakfast, no newspaper, barely a helping hand with her dress, and she’s in a taxi heading for Lauderdale Road, telling herself to hell with Mother’s spies. Every minute tomorrow will be focused around the dance. Mother will alternately incarcerate her so tha
t she is not tired, and force her into the park so that she does not look as though she has been inside all day.

  Today, however, is still Bea’s. So what, so what if she were found out? Bea imagines a deputation coming to inform Mother that her own daughter has betrayed her. Well, then she would know what it feels like to be hurt. For Mother has, hasn’t she, betrayed me, thinks Bea, scrabbling around in her mind for where exactly that betrayal was. It felt like a betrayal, to be told in such an offhand manner about John, as though it didn’t even occur to Mother that Bea might be upset. That, however, is Mother, none of that mollycoddling that other mothers give. All is set on not making too much of a song and dance about anything, simply leaving one to buck up and get on with it – as though belittling a situation makes it hurt less. But this doesn’t hurt less. No doubt Mother believes that she was just treating Bea like a grown-up and assuming Bea had pulled herself together over it all. Well, if Mother wants a grown-up daughter, then, thinks Bea, I shall grow up however I please.

  The apartment in Lauderdale Mansions is in a state of both uproar and industry. Doors are opening and closing, and women are striding along the passageway. Something is up, something that is obviously such common currency within these walls that Bea is simply assumed to know and therefore cannot possibly ask. At least everybody appears too preoccupied to wonder where she has been for the past two weeks. ‘What Emmeline would want,’ Bea overhears, ‘is for us to keep on with it.’ However, even merely keeping on with it, the smell of anger is competing with that of soap. In the typing room, where there’s a space she’s nodded towards, the keys seem to be clattering down louder than before.

  Letting herself be caught up in the heat, Bea shunts the piles of papers into position and starts to tackle the machine in front of her. Her typing has improved, albeit marginally, over the past two weeks locked in her room – though perhaps not as much as it should have, given the hours she has spent transcribing Mr Campbell’s spiky writing. Still, she goes on, she types and pauses, and types and pauses again, her fingers in the air as if listening out for whatever it is that has happened. If Bea is here long enough, the news must, surely, reach her ears. A hand touches her upon the shoulder and Bea jumps, sending her small pile of papers flying.

  It’s the woman with arched eyebrows. There’s not an ounce of reproach in her, but Bea still shivers. ‘Come with me,’ she says. Bea dips her forehead and nods, before leaning over to pick up what she dropped on the floor. ‘No, leave that,’ says the woman. ‘Come immediately. Now.’

  The room is full, the beds are packed and women are lining the walls, but the first face Bea sees as she enters is Celeste’s. Bea stalls slightly for, as nonchalant as she has convinced herself she is about Mother discovering what she is up to, she is not entirely happy with Celeste. ‘Good chap,’ says her aunt. ‘Wanted you in on this.’ Bea looks her aunt up and down. She is wearing plus fours, against which the crates and stones and machetes on the floor behind her almost pale into insignificance. Celeste notices Bea staring at her lower half. ‘Hunting gear, my dear. We’re back to battle here.’

  To battle, and here Bea is, in the inner sanctum. Maybe Celeste is not so bad after all.

  As Bea looks at the empty chair ahead of her and listens to the words ricocheting around her, she feels her heartbeat quicken and her eyes widen.

  Mrs Pankhurst, she learns, was arrested yesterday in Glasgow. She’d been bundled up to Scotland in the back of a car – of course they couldn’t take a chance of being spotted on the train. She’d spent the nights on the way up there at supporters’ houses emptied of other guests. The rally was last night. Telephone calls and wires have been flying to and fro and they’ve all, apart from Bea, read the paper this morning, and voices are coming from every corner of the room:

  ‘Nobody saw her come into the hall. They weren’t even sure she had made it.’

  ‘Half of them couldn’t see the platform anyhow. It was packed. They were practically standing on each other’s shoulders. Then when Isabel Margesson got up to introduce her, a cloaked figure stepped forward from the group at the back of the platform. She threw off her hood – and it was Emmeline! But it was then that the uniforms broke in through a side entrance. There’d been plain-clothes in the crowd, of course.’

  ‘They put up a damn good fight from the platform. The flower pots worked. Small enough to chuck quite far. Still a smack. Soaked a couple too with the speakers’ water. Then it was a riot. One of the best. Tables, chairs. The bodyguard and the police fencing with their clubs. We even had explosives prepared, though they didn’t scare them off. Bloody determined they were. The pistol, too—’

  ‘Pistol?’

  ‘Blanks.’

  ‘Cowards.’ Three or four of the women are standing up or leaning into the centre of the room from the walls they have been leaning against. Now a thickset woman is waving her arms around as though she’s doing a quickstep semaphore.

  ‘No,’ dissents a voice from a bruised woman sitting in front of Bea. ‘One police martyr and we’d be set back years.’

  ‘Wish I’d been there.’ A gangly woman leaps up to say this, cheeks shining.

  ‘We took several split heads.’

  ‘Bravo, bravo.’ Bea realises that the room is applauding. She turns to Celeste who is standing, clapping as hard as the rest of them. As if infected by the elation, Bea joins her. She is clapping the bashing of a policeman’s head. And she is enjoying it.

  Slowly, the women settle, even as the list of arrests continues. Ethel Smyth was taken on Sunday, and Sylvia Pankhurst at a Men’s League demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Half the women here must think Sylvia’s absence good riddance as her People’s Army is taking the focus away from them. But she’s still a Pankhurst and now two of them are in jail.

  ‘We have to fight back now.’ The gangly woman, perspiring a little more, is standing again, this time to a chorus of ‘hear, hear’.

  ‘Something big. They take us, we hit them. Something that stands out, won’t be forgotten.’ Bea can’t see where this voice comes from. The gathering has turned into a free-for-all, with whoever feels like it giving their penny’s worth. The chairwoman is just sitting there behind her table in front of the window, letting comments fly, and the temperature rises. Bea’s is rising with it.

  ‘Like Lloyd George’s last year.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Arson.’

  ‘We can’t do his house again.’

  ‘Whose house then?’

  ‘McKenna,’ say half a dozen voices together.

  ‘Bloody Home Secretary.’

  ‘The bugger.’

  ‘We’ve a right to petition the Throne.’

  ‘He can’t turn us down like that.’

  ‘We’re not fully fledged citizens, remember.’

  ‘Not fully fledged humans. Can’t think for ourselves.’

  ‘And so, no vote.’

  ‘Bastards.’

  At last the chairwoman stands up. ‘Ladies, are we all in agreement?’ She is speaking as though she is introducing a guest at a church fete.

  ‘That they’re bastards?’

  This is met with guffaws.

  ‘That we need to take action as soon as possible.’

  ‘Against whom?’ This is Celeste’s voice. Bea turns to find her aunt’s eyes transfixed by the chairwoman as she speaks.

  ‘McKenna,’ says the chairwoman, and the heads around Bea are nodding, a few voices murmuring aye, aye, and Bea finds herself nodding, too.

  ‘But,’ the dissenter speaks again, ‘what if somebody is hurt?’

  ‘This is a war,’ replies the chair. ‘People get hurt. Think what are they doing to those of us in jail? What will they be doing to Emmeline, tonight?’

  The thought curdles in Bea’s stomach. Twelve men and women, Mrs Pankhurst’s arms strapped into a chair: Bea can almost feel the gagging reflex of having a tube stuck down her throat.

  ‘As soon as we can, then. Tomorrow?’

&n
bsp; ‘No, too rushed. We’ll plan it today, get the kit in tomorrow. We go on Thursday. Who’s in? We need a driver. With her own car.’

  Bea can certainly drive. Faster than anyone here, she’ll bet.

  Her hand is the first to shoot up.

  13

  MARY WOKE GRACE UP AGAIN THIS MORNING WHEN rushing off to the lavatory. Green, she looks, though she won’t say a word to Mrs W. She’s begged Grace not to. Not with the dance and all, she says.

  And it is the dance tonight. Mrs Wainwright is taking no prisoners in the morning’s cleaning. As Grace stands to attention, all floral frock and mop, Mrs Wainwright’s finger only leaves the surface she is walking alongside in order to examine it for dust. Grace thinks Mrs Wainwright barely needs to look, she can just feel the soft grains slow her down. They near spring-cleaned these rooms yesterday, and the day before and for as many days before that as Grace cares to think. But the furniture’s been moved now. The men from Rumpelmayer’s came in yesterday and pushed the chairs and sofas in the library and yellow drawing room to where they thought best. Of course there was dust underneath. They can’t move every piece every day, and it gathers so fast, even in the rooms barely used. This morning Lady Masters is redirecting the furniture to where she thinks fit, and Mrs Wainwright has them at the spaces it occupied last night. Even Susan, though it’s not strictly her job. We all have one job today, Mrs Wainwright tells them. Susan murmurs that she’ll be blowed if Rumpelmayer’s men don’t move it all again when they put up the supper tables. And don’t, she whispers, do anything more than tiptoe into the ballroom. The polisher’s been frogging it up and down there for two days and it’s an ice-pond so the dancers’ feet can slide. But if one of us goes down, it’s more work for the rest.