Park Lane Page 6

  Bea glances over her shoulder. There’s nobody to see her. The box around the notice and the letters themselves seem to thicken and darken before her eyes. Keep away from it, she tells herself. You’ll only find yourself caught up in something and everyone will think all that business with John has gone straight to your head. At least, that is no doubt how Mother would present it, as the only explanation why her daughter could have joined ‘a bunch of half-crazed lunatics’.

  It was hardly an invitation to a riot, though. ‘Address a public open-air meeting …’ It is, on the face of it, no different to the summons to Mother’s meetings and it’s not as though Bea would be taking a bat with her.

  The alternative is another dinner in another hotel, another show, and the familiar recipe of whiskies and the gramophone after, all of which suddenly sound dull.

  The person she wants to talk to, perhaps even reveal her plans to – for he is always on her side – is Edward. But he will not emerge until noon. Mother is, in the circumstances, perhaps not the best conversational foil. That leaves Clemmie, who was back in the house last night. Tom has stayed down in the country and, in a surprising gesture of sentimentality, Clemmie declared she didn’t want to hear her voice echo around her and Tom’s London home and she would prefer to stay at Park Lane, in her old room.

  Clemmie must be awake, should jolly well be awake and ready for talking, if, Bea pauses, if she is speaking to Bea yet. She could go around to Edie’s but Edie won’t be up for hours. She has recently joined the ranks of those who don’t see the morning sun. Bea starts to push back her chair and it is now Bellows who gently moves it out of her way as she pulls herself up and her skirts down, and strides out of the room taking the newspaper with her.

  Clemmie is sitting at her old dressing table, silver-topped glass jars opened, cream thick on her face, wrestling a hairbrush through her waves. Bea flops down across her sister’s bed. Clemmie’s room is lighter and brighter than Bea’s and decorated in a rather gloriously feminine lilac and white. Bea is more than a teeny bit envious of this, especially since, if Clemmie keeps returning to claim it, Bea will never be able to move in, which is jolly unfair because Clemmie rather owes her the room now she is married. After all, it was Bea who orchestrated the ‘inexplicable’ flood in one of the bathrooms above so that Clem’s room would be redecorated for the first time in half a century. Short of a house fire, Bea’s room will remain looking as if Queen Victoria still had decades to reign.

  Bea speaks to the back of her sister’s head. ‘I’m sorry about Sunday.’

  ‘It’s all right, but don’t blame me if you’re still living here at fifty.’

  ‘It won’t be here, Clem.’

  ‘Then where would it be?’

  ‘Oh, New York.’

  ‘Do you still miss it, Bea, America? Even after living there only a year?’

  ‘It was rather exciting leaving so suddenly, on some whim of Mother’s.’

  Clemmie hesitates. ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘On some whim of Mother’s.’

  ‘Once we were there, it felt as though we could do what we liked, rather than being locked in by all these silly rules. We just ran wild on the banks of that river. Life’s different there, Clem. There’s more, more’ – Bea searches for the word – ‘possibility.’

  ‘You talk about it as if it is some sort of Promised Land.’

  Bea pauses.

  ‘In a way, Clem, I think it is.’

  Clemmie turns around to face her. ‘Why don’t you go over? You could have a glorious dance.’

  ‘On the Hudson? Only our neighbours would make it that far. It’s in the sticks, Clem. That was the heaven of it.’

  ‘Not bad neighbours, Bea. But I meant in Manhattan, silly.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Bea, ‘in Manhattan.’

  John is there, she is thinking. Maybe she could so dazzle him with a dance in her mother’s family house on Madison Avenue that he would come running back to her. She imagines herself dressed up, flowers all over the hall, her standing at the foot of the wide wooden staircase, John approaching her with a pleading expression on his face.

  However, that is exactly why she cannot go. You can’t chase a man across the Atlantic. In fact Bea can’t go there until he is back. Damn you, John Vinnicks, why couldn’t you have gone to Africa instead of heiress-hunting … and as this last thought comes into her head, Bea feels slightly sick.

  Clemmie’s voice is back in Bea’s ears. ‘Now, Bea-Bea, help me choose what to wear tonight.’

  Beside her on the bed are two dresses: one black and white satin, with a jacket designed to tie around the waist. The other, a pale grey net tunic embroidered with a vast beaded butterfly that must be nearly a foot across.

  ‘You’ll take off with those wings. Are you dancing?’

  ‘Just dinner.’ Clemmie twists to look at Bea. ‘It is being given for me. And Tom. He’s coming up this afternoon.’ She quickly turns back to her dressing table, her eyes away from Bea as she clips out, ‘Sorry, don’t mean to brag.’

  Brag, thinks Bea, brag? She rolls on her back and studies the pale lace canopy strung over Clemmie’s bed. Brag about the dinner, or the husband? She envies neither. She can think of little she would like less to do this evening. Was that what her life was to be, dinners, shows and gramophones, and then, then what? A ruddy-faced sportsman with a decaying house in the country?

  ‘Wear either.’

  ‘But I’ve hardly been in town since Freddy was born. Rural hibernation really, and one is so examined when one reappears. Is she still attractive, did she hook above her weight, et cetera? Whether it was just for the money.’

  Bea sits up and swivels around.

  ‘Clemmie, you don’t think that?’

  ‘Not on the dresses …’

  ‘Clemmie, please. Do you think that Tom married you for your money?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. He’s mad about me.’ Clemmie pauses. ‘But, you know, it could happen to any of us.’

  ‘There’s not much money. Not for us girls.’

  ‘That’s not what people think, unless they dig around.’

  ‘Because of the railways?’

  ‘And because of Mother’s mother being American. Countless pots of gold, people reckon. I mean look at …’ Bea feels as though a vice is tightening around her stomach, and decides that she will not spend this evening with the people who must have been examining her.

  Celeste responds to Bea’s note, her maid addressing the envelope, as ever, to disguise it from Mother. She says that she will come by in a taxi, and be waiting in it just to the right of the front door at half past seven. Bea has told Mother she’s going with Edie to a musical recital at the Bechstein Hall, which leaves her with a niggling uncertainty as to whether Mother’s and Edie’s paths might cross elsewhere that evening. Mother at least does not come downstairs to notice that Bea is heading out for the evening in a public taxi.

  Avoiding Joseph’s eye as she leaves alone, Bea walks straight out of the door and climbs blindly into the taxi waiting outside, which, to her relief, does contain Celeste, who is immaculately dressed for battle. She is wearing a high-collared coat buttoned up to her chin and is carrying a walking stick. Bea thinks at first, how odd, she doesn’t need it, and shortly afterwards starts to wonder what she does need it for. Bea looks down at her own clothes. On the offchance that she saw Mother on her way out, Bea has dressed for a musical recital. However, at least her overcoat is heavy, though whether it will protect her silk petticoat during whatever evening lies ahead, is in the lap of the gods. She feels a shiver of fear, and enjoys the sensation.

  Campden Hill Square is dark. It is not well lit, and between the houses on either side a railed garden falls down the hill to the thoroughfare of Holland Park Avenue. The trees in front of the houses meld into those growing over the fence of the garden’s iron rails, forming a leafless canopy.

  Bea feels the crowd before she is in its infectious mass of hot breath and expectation. Hundreds of
people are jam-packed up the narrow slope of a road on the east side of the square and rise up the hill in a dark swarm. Bea’s heart quickens as it engulfs her and she and Celeste are swept down Holland Park Avenue by a tide of new arrivals. The two of them are bobbing about excitedly in the centre, which is moving quickly enough to keep them there. Bea is pushed in the back and tries to look around, but is knocked forward again as she does so. She is surprised by this roughness and lets out a small gasp. Buck up, old girl, she tells herself, these are the suffragettes.

  The crowd carries them on and past the eastern side of the square, where the mass is densest. Celeste makes an effort at pushing her way back to the edge but the steady movement forward keeps her locked in line. ‘Dammit and blast it,’ says Celeste. ‘Just go with it, Beatrice, we’ll go up the far side of the square with this lot and then make it down from the top. Aim for the third tree from the bottom.’

  Bea is not as certain as Celeste. She can’t see who’s at the top of the square, but she doubts it’s empty. Or that they have much choice as to where they are going. The crowd turns up the far side of the square towards the grand terrace at the top, carrying them along with its burble of clipped ‘Hold on theres’ and thick miaows of ‘Oi, that’s my foot yer on’. Bea shuts her eyes for an instant. It will hardly make any difference to the direction in which she is travelling.

  God, the smell. Bea has never smelt perspiration like this. Some of it smells as though it has settled indelibly not just on the skin, but on the medley of both stiff and worn serges, tweeds, fine wools, the odd mackintosh that Bea is being knocked against. Or rather squeezed against, for the stream feels as if it is tightening around her, and sticks are digging into her sides.

  Bea is now frightened by this. If the crowd goes on tightening how will she breathe, how will any of them breathe, how will any of them get away from here? But all that they can do, any of the hundreds of people jammed around her and Celeste, is move wherever they are taken. The crowd surges forward in stops and starts, each jolt throwing Bea against her neighbours. She may have escaped Park Lane this evening, but she is again in a place where she cannot make an independent decision as to where she is going. At least she decided to come here. Yet is it inevitable that, however many decisions you make, at some point you find yourself again being swept along by events? Thank God she’s not here alone; if she could, she’d stitch her coat to Celeste’s, which is drifting in and out of reach. On they are pushed, right along the terrace to the corner, and back down the hill, where the weight of the crowd descending behind her becomes worryingly heavy. Then they stop. She and Celeste have reached a wall of bodies so densely packed that they cannot be pushed any further.

  Below them spread the darkened curves and corners of ladies’ hats and gentlemen’s bowlers, nearly all pointing in the direction of a single lit window on the first floor of a house near the bottom. Celeste starts to pick her way down towards it, moving into gaps ahead of her invisible to Bea. Instead Bea moves sideways down the hill, ‘sorry’ by ‘sorry’, and sharp-elbowed hiss by hiss. She stumbles, they’re bloody well sticking their feet out, maybe Mother is right that they are lunatics. Bea is losing Celeste and fluttering a little, the light is jolly poor and the crowd is heaving and pushing and she’s struggling to keep upright. Celeste, unhampered by manners, is moving far faster. Bea tries to track what she thinks is her aunt’s hat through the jostling ahead but the wall of bodies tightens. That’s it, no further, she’s done rather well, though Celeste’s ‘third tree’ is still twenty yards out of reach. For the first time in her life, Bea is alone at night and in a crowd of strangers, her heart is racing and she feels breathless with the excited fear of riding towards a high hedge with a complete lack of control. She tries to push again, caring less about whom she knocks on her way – the lesser evil to being seen, or even being, on her own – but the shoulders in front respond by rising more firmly against her. This at last fires some push into Bea herself. Well, damn them, she’s jolly well going to get through.

  ‘Not a chance,’ says an overly cut-glass female voice behind her. ‘You won’t get any closer. But you can see the house from here. Well, some of it. Don’t I know you? I’m sure I do.’ Bea stiffens. Good God, who is it, one of Mother’s friends? But one of Mother’s friends would not be here, and it is a voice that means well. Right now that is worth the risk of being discovered. Bea can always say she is engaged in some kind of espionage, just here to find out what the other side is up to. The woman behind this voice might be able to help her. Besides, there’s a limit to how long you can stand practically in somebody’s arms and ignore them.

  So Bea turns, or rather twists her head until she feels she has the neck of a giraffe. The woman is using her umbrella to steady herself as she stands on tiptoe – she is wearing make-up, and a little too much of it. What a relief; not a chance that Bea knows a woman like that.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘First time?’

  ‘No,’ lies Bea. She doesn’t want this stranger to latch on to her in sympathy.

  ‘A thousand here, I should say,’ the woman continues, nodding back up the hill. ‘Hours ago, some of us came. It’s so pleasing to have a good position, isn’t it?’

  Bea does not feel as though she has a good position. She has failed to reach the tree, and she has lost Celeste, which makes her position, if anything, precarious. She has a sudden dread that this is going to be one of those evenings when the police come rushing out. That would be more that Bea bargained for, she’s heard about what can happen then; now nervous, she starts to count the number of walking sticks she has seen. But surely, surely, nothing bad can happen to her on her first time.

  ‘Are the police here?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t be sure. I haven’t seen any uniforms. Maybe they’ve popped into the bushes. What a lark!’ The woman lowers her voice and leans over to whisper into Bea’s ear. ‘But of course as long as she’s in the house they can’t lay a finger on her.’

  The crowd has become suffocating. Bea has survived more than her fair share of crushes in houses too small for the numbers invited. This, however, is both more threatening and, well, dammit, more thrilling, even though – or perhaps because – there is no sign of Celeste. The night air is setting in and people are moving from foot to foot as the sway of the crowd pushes them to and fro, shaking the wet-dog smell of damp wool into Bea’s nostrils. She has another go at moving towards the tree but the shoulders in front of her tighten further and a voice growls back, ‘Should have come ealier if you wanted to be up front.’

  Closer to the house, a group of women are starting to chant: ‘Em-mel-ine, Em-mel-ine.’ In front of Bea is a small figure dressed in pale grey, an expensive pale grey. This is not the place to dress up, thinks Bea, and she’s tiny, can’t be more than a girl who should be in bed by now. Christ, she’s getting old to have thoughts like these. Bea, Celeste is right, you really do need to do something with your life. The figure turns to glance behind her and Bea sees, to her astonishment, a flash of pearl earrings, a face that has seen seven decades and a grey gloved hand gripping the handle of an umbrella. What, Bea asks herself, makes all these women come?

  On the dot of eight thirty, a silhouette appears at the lit window and the crowd roars. A small dark figure climbs between the open panes and on to a delicate wrought-iron balcony. It can be barely wide enough for her feet, thinks Bea. The woman stands up, a feathered hat black against the light, like a potentate’s, and extends her hands. The crowd rustles into silence and in the minutes that follow Bea forgets she has lost Celeste, forgets she is alone, and forgets she is surrounded by strangers.

  ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ She hears the sounds coming from her own lips.

  ‘God bless you, Mrs Pankhurst.’ A man’s voice. Well, there are enough of them here, though half of them probably plain-clothes policemen. That is how, Celeste has warned her, some of the police come.

  Then Mrs Pankhurst speaks. A thousand people stare
at the silhouette moving above them, their heads tilted back, chins up. Mrs Pankhurst raises her arms until her hands are level with her shoulders, palms facing her congregation. She will, she says, come down to join them, but first she must tell them what needs to be done. Her voice is clear. It carries over the dark swell of bodies as it declares that, by fighting, women can ‘show to the manhood of this world the kind of stuff we are made of’.

  ‘If,’ Mrs Pankhurst continues, ‘our violence is wrong then the violence of Christ is wrong.’ Then she lists a stream of violent New Testament references. Bea feels herself listening with a single, collective ear that is the crowd drawing in every word of this Christ-like figure who is feeding them, the one thousand, with encouragement alone. ‘Nothing,’ she says, ‘can put down this movement. They may kill us, but they cannot crush this movement.’

  Celeste has told Bea that in prison Mrs Pankhurst hunger-strikes so that she has to be released until she is well enough to be re-arrested, then she moves constantly, her whereabouts secret. It is only when she is out of the country that she can spend more than one night in a single place. Now she is ‘manifesting herself’, thinks Bea, to her disciples. As Mrs Pankhurst speaks of hope and right, and struggle that must shy from no act, whatever the price it takes, exhilaration emanates out through the crowd, passing from touching shoulder to touching shoulder. When it reaches Bea, she finds her lips tingling.

  ‘When your forefathers fought for their liberty, they took lives …’ And then a heckle, another man’s voice, pushed loud. ‘But you are only a woman.’ This is immediately followed by half a dozen other voices telling him to be quiet. Bea feels her shoulders tighten, he has made a direct shot, this voice, and the comment grates under her skin. ‘Only a woman.’ Bea thought of Tom’s friends at Gowden. How was she ‘only’ compared to people like that? What did ‘only’ a woman ‘only’ do? After all, she goes to lectures, she is here, too, out in a crowd, alone, surrounded by strangers, listening. But ‘do’? Listening could not be stretched to doing. If she were not to exist, thinks Bea, what acts would be undone? She has lived for twenty, almost twenty-one, years without making a mark. Her embarrassment curdles into anger against the heckler, against his little pack of chums, against every single person who thinks a woman is an ‘only’.