Park Lane Page 19

  Joseph’s going over has been his chance to get there, the Continent. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, is the talk, when else will one of them have that? The way he writes you’d’ve thought it was an exciting lark; it makes Grace wonder about what’s in the papers. Not the reports and the maps, Mr Bellows takes charge of those, reading what’s happened and telling them all at tea as if it were his own idea. James and Joseph used to jostle for them once he was done, just to put their word in. Though now they’re not here, their being over there is taking it away from Mr Bellows even more. No, it was the other things, like the one Bellows read out to them. An Officer’s Diary. All mud and noise it was. ‘I don’t want to upset you young women,’ he said, ‘but I feel it’s my role to make sure we all appreciate the bravery of our men.’ Mr Summers, well, he says nothing, does he? ‘I’m sure it’s the last war,’ says Mrs Wainwright when he’s gone, ‘with the Boers, he fought in that, and not everyone likes to remember.’ Then it’s her turn to fall silent.

  Several families of Belgian refugees, they’ve been told, on the nursery floor. One family per room, and how many of them is that? They’ll have the day nursery for sitting and what else are they to do, apart from sit, those that don’t get jobs, and whose jobs will those be, Grace wonders? Mussyur Fouray, you’d’ve thought he’d be happy, what with them being Belgians. But he’s not Belgian, is he, says Susan; them French don’t want to be taken for Belgians. So he’s murmuring away about how many he’s to cook for, and what they’ll eat and not eat. It’s ‘la gair’ come to the house, he puffs; he might as well be in France.

  Mrs Wainwright’s putting a brave face on it, telling them all not to worry, they’ll turn the library into a dining room, Gunters will bring in the tables, and they can hire another chef. Another chef! Well, you can imagine Mussyur Fouray at that. Like a chicken he is, strutting around the kitchen with that breast of a stomach pushed out and asking what’s not good enough about my cooking? Or something like that, as it is in French. Mrs Wainwright, however, understands and says that it will be an assistant chef. Assistant, yes, he said. Many. Chef, no. And so Mrs Wainwright’s looking. You’d’ve thought it’d be hard to find more help during a war, what with the men away. But, what with them being away and not needing looking after and so many houses shuttered up, there’s more wanting to work than before and Mrs Wainwright says she’s been ‘deluged’, all from one small notice, and maybe there’s a chef among the refugees. Not that it’s wise, she’s said, to mention this to Mussyur Fouray. And she didn’t say all this at dinner, but in the Pugs’ Parlour, when she’d called all of the housemaids in.

  ‘What about the cleaning?’ Susan asked. ‘Who’s to clean up after however many dozens there’ll be? We’ll need our own army.’

  ‘Well, it’s service, isn’t it,’ says Grace.

  ‘They’ll clean up after themselves,’ said Mrs Wainwright.

  ‘Will they be any good at it, is the question,’ continued Susan. ‘We’ll have mice back up there before we’ve said How d’you do. And the fires and the coal, what about that?’

  Cheek! thought Grace. It’s funny how just with Joseph and James gone, things aren’t quite as they should be, in more ways than you’d expect. It’s the war, must be. Who’s who and when to speak and not, they seem to matter less.

  ‘And the laundry.’ Susan wouldn’t let it rest. ‘What about that?’

  ‘Lady Masters will have it sent out.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all fine for them then. And the smalls, too, I don’t doubt.’

  ‘Susan!’ Grace had never heard Mrs Wainwright so sharp. ‘We are all finding things difficult. Be thankful that you are as safe as houses over here.’

  ‘What about them Zeppelins?’

  ‘Mr Bellows says they’ll never make it this far,’ said Grace.

  It’s the eating arrangements that trouble Grace. Not that the worry’s ever gone away, just quiet, waking her only now and then. When it does, she turns to the side in bed, looking for Mary’s shape, checking that Grace hasn’t woken her by shouting out. But Mary’s not there any more, is she, and Grace misses the way that Mary made her laugh. When it was just the two of them, Mary’d said what the others daren’t, even if it were a trifle shocking.

  But that was it with Mary, her breaking the rules. And that’s how she left. Always went one step beyond what she should have, just as she went one word more. Grace has had a letter from her, though more of a note, for writing’s not Mary’s strong point. The baby’s a fighter, little girl she is, called Grace. Mary asked if Grace didn’t mind and Grace’d thought on it, being quite proud of the fact. Not to worry that the child’s a bastard, giving her a name would at least be giving her something in life. So little Grace is weaned now, and quite happy being left with Mary’s ma. She is a guardian angel she is, Mary’s ma. There was Mary, at her wits’ end as to how she’d say it, half expecting to be turned out to the workhouse. Instead, she’d made the journey across London and been welcomed home, her ma saying it was lovely to have her back, whatever the reason that had brought her, and not to worry about her wage, they would do nicely. Mary’s mother just invented a husband for the neighbours, run over by a coal cart, and half a dozen sacks on him, too. Mary even took a new name, Perkins she is now, and they’d put it on the birth certificate, a father, too. As good a name as any, she wrote. Now Baby Grace is weaned, Mary writes, so Mary’s looking for work. Does Grace think she can talk to Mrs Wainwright for her?

  Well, Mrs Wainwright kept it under her hat all right when Mary went. Not that Mary said, but Mrs Wainwright’s no fool, didn’t say a word and swallowed that Mary had to go home for her ma was sick. Mary was pale with the guilt, for if you say something like that, doesn’t it make it happen? Grace thought of her own ma, and her stomach turned. Then it turned again as she already hadn’t seen them for three months back then. Now it’s a year and three. She has the photograph though to keep them in, and you can’t tell the grey in Ma’s hair. Grace won’t see it, either, when she next sees Ma. She’ll shut it out for she’s not to get older, Ma. Still, the girls must have changed, what with Peggy going on from eleven and all that can happen from then. And Jenny and Baby Alice, nine now she is, stretching tall. Grace wants that, her sisters growing good and strong. No need to rush into adulthood, just making their ways steadily towards it. Though you’d’ve thought that the longer it was since she’d seen them, the worse it would feel, it doesn’t. The longer your family’s been getting on fine without you, the surer you are that they will stay that way.

  So her stomach turns less now, when she thinks of them.

  Grace isn’t sure that Mrs Wainwright would take Mary back. It’d need just one of the others to know, and demand she’s turned out. Besides, Sarah’s taken her place, leaving only the kitchen, a comedown for Mary even if Mrs Wainwright could put her in above the others, and that’s without asking how she can cook. Mary’d talk her way into it, even if she didn’t know one end of a carrot from another. Grace stifles a laugh at the picture of it in her mind, only for an instant as her thoughts race back to the refugees eating and the library. What if they take the books out now that it’s going to be a dining room? Surely they’ll count them. Then they’ll know, won’t they, that one’s missing?

  18

  IT IS WHEN BEA CLIMBS OFF THE MOTORCYCLE THAT her breeches start to itch. They’re too jolly hot for this spring sunshine and the wool, no longer pressed flat onto leather and steel by her thighs, moves as she walks, its fibres sprung back to their scouring-cloth texture. A small price for the thrill of the ride, even if all she is doing is carting envelopes between an abundance of organisational HQs. She has considered shedding her WEC uniform and its obligatorily ‘modest’ sack of an overcoat down to her knees and having something run up instead, but there has been such a debate about what should be worn and who can afford it that it would just create a stink.

  She’s sure she heard a rattle as she came into the mews, it may just be the cobbles, but she needs to
check. Shoddiness, however slight, is not tolerated in the Women’s Emergency Corps. The engine is still hot to touch, even through her gauntlets, and she has to take them off, can’t fiddle with a thing in these. She flinches as her fingers brush past the metal. Yes, that’s it. Bea can’t see her fingers now, but she’s found a loose bolt. Need a wrench for this. She pulls her hands out quickly, burning them as she does so, and when she walks into the coach-house she has the side of her palm in her mouth.

  Summers is sitting there, watching her. It’s almost all he does now, sit alone in his cave that the coach-house has become. When the horses left, the grooms went with them. When he tried to sign up he was turned down. Too old. I wasn’t too old for the Boers, he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen.

  He has other things to say to Bea. These range from astonishment that she’s doing ‘a man’s work’, to ‘Let me do that for you.’ He never used to speak to her like that, but there aren’t many drivers left to choose from. Bea wonders whether it’s that she’s wearing breeches and wishes he would be quiet. What would it prove, if they all relied on men to deal with the machines? She might as well join the knitting brigades.

  Summers finds Bea a wrench. She returns to the motorcycle and fixes it, burning her hand in the same place as she does. Then she wheels it inside and throws a canvas tarpaulin over it.

  If she’s quick she may reach tea before it is taken away. No time to change, but as she passes the gentlemen’s lavatory on the ground floor she dashes in to scrub what oil she can from her hands, and fix the pins on her hair. God, what a mess. She almost wishes she hadn’t looked. Really, she should simply leave her cap on.

  Edward is standing in front of the fireplace, his khaki neatly pressed and oil-free, although, Bea suspects, just as itchy as hers. His hands are behind his back and he is rocking forward on to the balls of his feet, the flames darting all over the place behind him, giving his steady rhythm a chaotic air.

  ‘You look,’ says Bea, ‘too spanking new.’

  ‘I am spanking new. Thank you for coming to my Last Tea on time.’

  ‘I had a sack full of superfluous messages to deliver. Don’t you know that there’s a war on?’

  ‘They’re not superfluous, dear sis. We couldn’t do it without you.’

  ‘That is precisely the type of remark that makes me feel second rung.’

  ‘Oh, come off it. Anyhow, you could have put a frock on, old gal. How’s a brother supposed to go, not knowing whether his sister is really a chap?’

  And then he is quiet.

  He stops rocking and stands, feet still but head slowly moving from left to right. He is taking the room in, absorbing the image of every detail, Bea reckons, so he has it with him. The fire flares. Bea wonders whether his hidden hands are loose, or whether his fingers are knotted into each other, clenched tight.

  It’s damned unfair. As little as Edward wants to, he’ll have a chance to fight. Whereas Bea, just because she has breasts, is left behind on the grounds that she isn’t up to it. She’s chucked grenades, hasn’t she? Started fires? Where’s the difference between that and sending a shell across the lines? She’s a mind to tell them.

  She misses it, misses every single raid she drove for, each one racking up both her chances of being caught and her excitement. It was the surprise of the explosion that did it for her, and the way that in even a simple fire the flames would suddenly crackle up several feet, making them all jump. They’d wait as long as they dared to see the glass, cracks flashed to the corners of the panes, holding still for an instant, then showering down.

  But what now? Mrs Pankhurst raised Bea to the clouds, and then let her, let all of them, drop. The campaign has been abandoned for the duration of the war. Instead it is all Let’s do War Work, giving in to the condescending novelty of the idea that women are doing men’s jobs. Still, that’s what Bea’s doing it, isn’t it.

  Mother’s voice is in her ear. ‘Don’t you think, Beatrice, that this afternoon, your brother could be allowed to be right? I hope you’re changing for this evening.’

  ‘Is Edward?’

  ‘Of course not, he’ll be in uniform.’

  ‘In that case …’

  ‘Proud as I am of you, it is my last At Home until the war is over.’

  ‘Last?’

  ‘There won’t really be any point, will there?’

  No point? Bea feels as though she has had the breath knocked out of her. She pulls herself up, appetite and thirst gone.

  ‘Some of us’ – she’s trying not to bark it out but she’s hardly going to be cooing over this – ‘some of us, Mother, will still be living here.’ Then she turns and as good as marches out on to the gallery, knowing even as she does that she shouldn’t have stormed out on Edward’s last afternoon. She’s almost at the top of the stairs before she stops to look at her watch. It is a quarter past five and, dash it, Tuesday, almost time for Mr Campbell. Edward going over must have made her forget. She’ll go as she is; anyhow it makes her feel Beatrice, war motorcyclist, and not Miss Masters of Park Lane, twenty-two and unmarried.

  She’ll take a cab to Pimlico and wait in their tea room; yes, their tea room she calls it now. Mr Campbell will be there by six, to avoid his landlady’s ‘gruel’, and which, on Tuesdays and Fridays, he escapes by coming to meet Bea.

  The red and white tablecloths in the tea room have yellowed further. She has had a great many teas here over the past year, teas that consist of a cup of the stuff for her, an evening meal for him, and a great deal of what Bea likes to think of as debate, much of it on the necessity of the war; Bea saying he is plain wrong, if not treacherous. But each Tuesday, once his tea is eaten and hers is drunk, he puts a small bundle of sheets of paper on the table. ‘I really,’ he says, ‘need your help with this. Please, Miss Masters, in the interests of Free Speech, I know you care about that.’ He bends his head a little then looks back up, straight at her, his dark eyes holding hers until she finds herself nodding. Then it’s two evenings, or parts thereof, hidden away in her room and hammering it out with fingers still vibrating from the motorcycle. On Friday she hands the typed-up article back, ready for the Daily Herald, which prints it every week.

  This evening there are only a couple of tables free, and their conversation will be drowned by the chatter of others. This is no bad thing, for Mrs White has ears on every bony joint. As Bea sits, the waitress swivels around and bustles over, a tray of half-eaten food hovering in front of her chest.

  ‘Waiting for your sweetheart, miss?’

  Bea forces herself to smile, albeit flatly, in return.

  ‘I hope you don’t have to wait too long.’

  No empathy there, thinks Bea. She just wants to turn over customers as quickly as possible.

  ‘You smell of grease,’ says Mr Campbell as he sits down.

  Bea remembers that she has not bathed. ‘It’s the latest fad.’

  ‘As ever, a woman of fashion.’

  Bea feels her nose wrinkle. Is that how he sees her? Even like this?

  ‘Of course, that’s all we women ever are.’ It comes out as a retort. Christ, what’s up with her today?

  ‘Cut yourself on that.’

  Bea ignores this and asks him when his next meeting is.

  Mr Campbell is silent. He rolls his lips in, and looks to the side.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll come.’

  He flinches. Taps his fingers on the table. He always does this when she asks to come along.

  ‘In your two-pound Women’s Emergency Corps uniform?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you’d say you had come there with me? I think that might look a little odd, Miss Masters.’

  Bea ignores this, too. He’s right, that’s why she ignores it, but she’ll go on asking, and he’ll go on saying no. It has become part of their Tuesday and Friday evening banter.

  ‘You would be surprised,’ she says, ‘at how I could help.’ He doesn’t know which Miss Masters she is, does he? Nor
the deep pockets she could find him. Surely he’d ask for money if he did. The strikers are crying out for money in the shipyards. But all she’s given him are Celeste’s address to contact her and a vague reference to her father being ‘something in the City’.

  ‘I’m not sure how you’d find Clydeside,’ is his reply. ‘Or a soup kitchen.’

  ‘You’d be amazed at how fast I can ladle.’

  Mr Campbell leans over and puts his hand on hers. Bea keeps her hand still. To move it would be rude, she tells herself, that’s the only reason she’s leaving it there. This is a purely practical working relationship: he writes, she types; there is nothing more to it than that. She doesn’t even agree with half of what he writes, for God’s sake. But Mr Campbell keeps his hand over hers and Bea can’t push the idea out of her head any longer. Does he think that? Don’t be an idiot, Bea, he can’t possibly be thinking of kissing you, even if everyone seems to be kissing since the war began. Soldiers on their way out are being treated to kisses, and Bea herself has given more than one such treat, out of both generosity and curiosity. She has even been bold enough to offer them outright. The first time, she surprised herself, but her offer was so warmly received that the next offer slipped out of her mouth with barely a thought. There’s only been one who held her tighter and closer than she might have liked and when she tried to pull away he pulled her tighter still. She bit his lip and he let go, cursing, wiping away the blood with the back of his hand. ‘Vixen,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  But Mr Campbell isn’t on his way over, is he? He does not approve of the war, he is a pacifist; he says it is against his religion, in his words, to raise a gun. What if they make you, Mr Campbell, what then, she wants to ask him? They’ll shoot you if you try to leave. They’re not going to make us all fight, he says, it’s fool’s talk, and saying that they’ll send married men over.