Half of the Human Race Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Anthony Quinn

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part One: A Little Learning

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Two: The Shadowy Coast

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Three: The Coming of Age

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ALSO BY ANTHONY QUINN

  The Rescue Man

  for Rachel, MLC

  We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

  Ophelia, Hamlet, 4.4

  It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

  Though my own red roses there may blow;

  It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

  Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.

  For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,

  And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

  And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

  As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,

  To and fro:–

  O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

  ‘At Lord’s’, Francis Thompson

  PROLOGUE

  So it had come to this, she thought, as the last light of the afternoon shrank away. She had first heard the distant collection of footsteps and muffled voices descending from the gallery above, and now, like a shambling beast, it was stopping at each door on her own ward; the metal shiver of keys on a chain, the clank of the lock, a brief scuffle; shouts. Then the slam of the door followed by a long silence, which was the most unnerving sound of all. She checked the makeshift blockade of table and chair and bed she had raised against the door. How long would it hold? Her heart was beating hard, and a plume of nausea writhed in her stomach. She had not eaten for four days.

  With no company to relieve her solitude – without even a book to read – she had taken to distracting herself with thoughts of other crises she had outfaced. The most trying had come at the age of nine when she had succumbed to acute rheumatic fever; she remembered how it made her joints ache and disfigured her skin with rashes, but at the time it was the snailing tedium of the weeks in hospital that had most excruciated her. It was some days after being brought home that she caught her father unawares, sobbing in a way she had not seen before. (Only her mother ever cried like that.) Disturbed, she had backed away, and gone in search of her sister to ask, ‘What is the matter with Pa?’ Her sister, with no gift for tactfulness, had replied, ‘He was crying because of you. You were going to die.’ Though she was winded by this revelation, she did not bring the matter up with her father until years later, by which time he was able to admit that certain doctors had despaired of her condition. ‘But I never thought so,’ he added proudly, as if his own gambling instincts were a sounder judge of mortality than the reasonings of medical science.

  It puzzled her sometimes that such a momentous experience had not left a greater impression on her. But it is a sadness of childhood, and perhaps a mercy, too, that so much of it does go by without notice. The weeks and years silt up elsewhere, and only afterwards do we sift the residue for meaning. More vivid to her, now as then, was an incident two years prior to her illness, on a day that had already been set aside for memorialising. It was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, June of 1897, and in the evening her family and various cousins had gone to the West End for the fireworks display in Green Park. The crowds were more overwhelming than anyone had anticipated, and somehow in the jostling dark she and her brother, Fred, had become detached from the family party. She knew her parents would be frantic, but an hour and more of wandering brought no sight of them. As the sky above them fizzed and crumped with showers of light, she realised that they were lost, but decided that Fred, two years her junior at five, must not be allowed to know. So she explained to him in a grown-up voice she found from somewhere that an adventure lay ahead: tonight they were going to find their own way back home. Holding his hand tight, she began tramping along the main road by which they had arrived, eventually spotting the omnibus she hoped would take them in the right direction. She almost hauled him up the narrow winding steps. They sat on the knifeboard seat behind the driver, whose frequent ‘woahs’ and clucks to his horse delighted Fred even more than the novelty of being ‘on top’, with the masses of pedestrians streaming below. Either through negligence or a spirit of holiday goodwill, the conductor didn’t trouble them for a fare, and when he called out ‘Any for the Angel?’ she hurried them both downstairs and onto Upper Street. By the time they arrived home their mother was at the gate, watching the street; their father had already gone to the police station.

  The story of Jubilee Night became a family favourite, and her precocious navigation of the journey from Green Park to Islington established her, in her father’s eyes at least, as a clever and capable girl. She loved to hear him boast of her thus, and, peering down the shadowy hallway of her future, she conceived a hope that she might make something of herself. Once outside the protective cordon of his regard, however, the difficulty of such an ambition became apparent. Even among men who were her father’s friends she met a solid wall of indifference. Society did not want women to be clever and capable; it wanted them to be pliant, pretty, incurious, domestic, accommodating and, generally, silent. They were designed for no purpose other than filling and feathering the nest considerately provided for them, and to seek beyond that pinched horizon was to risk disapproval. One day she overheard a lady friend asking her mother why on earth she had let her daughter apply to medical college. ‘Don’t you want her ever to get married?’

  It puzzled at her at first, this assumption of subservience, for it seemed to be founded on nothing more than the tendency of women’s voices to be hushed and small, and men’s voices to be hard and loud. As she grew into her teens, she wondered if some mysterious unspoken principle lay behind the imbalance. Was there an intrinsic flaw in womankind that determined they should exist as a separate class, ignored and unrepresented? The idea was laughable, and yet almost everyone seemed to abide by it. She could recall the moment – she was lying on her bed in moody contemplation one evening, before the dinner gong went – when she realised how it had come to be that men should have the upper hand, give the orders, make the laws, arrange the world. And the reason was simple – because they said so. She wasn’t sure if she was more appalled at the banality of this formulation or the iniquity that had inspired it. But the shock of it made her half rise from the bed. No wonder they sounded so loud and confident. They were the important ones, just because they said so.

  The voices were outside her cell. She heard someone recite her name and number. The small partition in the door was drawn back, and she saw a face at the spyhole. More muttering, and then a key turned in the lock. But the door held fast, with her chair wedged beneath the handle. This was fortified by the planks of her bed set lengthwise between the door and the window. She felt quite proud of this construction. It was difficult to tell how many of them were heaving and cursing beyond the threshold. First an arm poked through, blindly scrabbling for purchase in the gloom. When a head appeared, she picked up the chamber pot ready to throw, d
istantly aware of her own panicked shouts and her heart hammering furiously to be let out of its cage. The tortured wood began to screech and splinter. Not long now.

  PART ONE

  A Little Learning

  1

  THEY HAD STOPPED on the sward where it flattened towards the edge of the promontory, with the shadow of the castle behind them and a panorama of the coast in front. Picnic blankets had been laid down, and a hamper was being unpacked by the younger and more enthusiastic Beaumont cousins. Down below they could see striped bathing huts ranked along the shore, and dozens, tens of dozens, of holidaymakers staking their place in the crush, paddling in the surf or reclining on the shingle. The sea swayed and glistened, hurriedly folding itself into thin white undulations as it lapped the shoreline. The noonday sun, growing fierce, had prompted matrons to take cover beneath the black blooms of their parasols. Further in the distance the pier was aflutter with Union Jack pennants, a harbinger of the Coronation less than two weeks away.

  One of the picnicking family stood slightly apart, her gaze absorbed by a spectacle way down to the right. Opinion divided as to whether Connie Callaway was a beauty. Somewhat gawky, and taller than she would have liked, she carried herself with a certain hesitancy, as if reluctant to be noticed. From her father she had inherited a strong jawline that looked at a certain angle almost masculine; yet this severity was counterpointed by an expressive mouth, delicately fluted nose, and eyes of liquid brown that glittered when she laughed, bewitching even those – not a few – who considered her ‘odd-looking’. Those eyes were focused upon a cricket match, and even at this distance she could hear the tiny click as ball touched bat. The ground, once a water meadow, was unusual in being situated right in the centre of town, and thus vulnerable to a council notoriously eager to sell it off. The sight of chalky figures shimmering at the wicket had an instantly soothing effect upon Connie’s nerves. She detested picnics: essentially, one took a pile of sandwiches for a walk, settled oneself on a scratchy tartan rug, then waited for the wasps to show up. But in spite of a naturally forthright temperament she had taught herself, in the course of her twenty-one years, the virtue of graciousness: she would not impose an irritable mood on her companions.

  There followed a burst of activity on the pitch. A batsman had slashed a ball through the covers, beating the ring of fielders and panicking a party of seagulls that had settled near the boundary rope; the birds scattered and exploded in an upward flurry. A drowsy ripple of applause rose with them, and Connie instinctively clapped too. Her cousin Louis had sidled up next to her and was also scrutinising the game, one hand in his pocket, the other shielding his eyes against the sun. He was two years older, a short, dapper man whose expression always seemed to be savouring some private amusement.

  ‘There’s a sight to gladden the heart,’ he said, gazing past Connie, who murmured her agreement. ‘I wonder if Maitland’s there today …’

  ‘Who’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, pal of mine from Oxford – a Blue. I know he’s been playing for M—shire.’

  ‘Shall we go and see?’

  Louis gave her a sidelong look. ‘We could put the idea to this lot.’ He nodded over his shoulder at their kinfolk, who were now busily distributing sandwiches and beakers of home-made lemonade among themselves. Connie pursed her mouth as she silently gauged ‘this lot’. The custom on family holidays was to do things together, and the preponderance of females among them militated against the likelihood of an afternoon’s cricket. Her older sister, Olivia, would have none of it, she knew, even if Lionel, her fiancé, was willing. Their mother might just be persuaded; she had developed a neutral tolerance of the game from her late husband’s enthusiasm. As for Louis’s mother, Jemima, and his three sisters – her devoted affection for them did not incline her to confidence in their docility. Her mother was calling them over. As she settled herself on the rug, she said, to nobody in particular, ‘There’s cricket in town today. I thought we might wander down there.’

  Mrs Callaway, who would formerly have looked to her husband for an answer to this, merely tilted her head in a way that offered no clue to her desires.

  ‘Cricket is a bore,’ said Alice flatly. At sixteen she was the oldest of the Beaumont girls.

  ‘I disagree,’ said Connie, keeping her tone bright. ‘It is slow, and complicated. But not a bore.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lionel, with a meditative sniff, ‘if we can get a seat in the members’ stand … We don’t want to be with the plebs.’

  Connie wondered, not for the first time, how prepared she was to have Lionel for a brother-in-law. He was at Barings, and even today wore a waistcoat, stiff collar and bow tie, as if fearful of dispensing with his banker’s uniform. His concession to the holiday spirit was the temporary retirement of his dark worsted suit for a pair of grey flannels, with deck shoes instead of brogues. The matter of the cricket was put aside while they involved themselves in the picnic. The sun, hoisted high, seemed to have tweaked up its glare another notch. Connie felt a bead of perspiration trickle down the small of her back, and wished they had found a more shaded spot for their lunch. The glass of lemonade was sweating in her hand. Looking to distract herself, she turned to her aunt and said, ‘That’s a lovely hat, Mima. Is it new?’

  Jemima, younger and more at ease than Connie’s mother, though widowed like her, smiled from under the hat’s wide brim at her niece.

  ‘It is. I actually meant to keep it for the big day, but I couldn’t resist putting it on when I saw the weather this morning.’

  Connie nodded, and sensed an opportunity for mischief. ‘By the “big day” I assume you mean the procession in London next Saturday.’

  Jemima blinked her soft grey eyes uncomprehendingly. ‘Ahm … next Saturday?’

  ‘Yes! The procession of all the suffrage societies to the Albert Hall. They say there’s going to be quite the most enormous turnout.’

  ‘She’s being provocative, Mima,’ Olivia cut in humourlessly. ‘She knows you meant the Coronation.’ Connie’s elder by four years, Olivia had her sister’s high forehead, a forbidding stare and a tongue that was quick to judgement. Connie was perhaps unique among the family in not being frightened of her.

  ‘What’s “suffrage”?’ asked Flora, Jemima’s youngest.

  ‘It means the right to vote in an election,’ replied Connie crisply. ‘The procession will be a way of asking the government to give that right to women.’

  Flora frowned as she digested this information. ‘But – do women want to vote?’

  ‘Good question,’ said Olivia. ‘Most women don’t want to – just a crowd of harpies who are making trouble because they think they’re the same as men.’

  ‘And if you want to know what a harpy is, Flora,’ said Connie, placing her hand with mock primness on her breast, ‘behold.’

  ‘But really, Constance, what do you hope to achieve?’ her sister pursued. ‘By insisting on the vote you inflict a burden on women – one that most will thoroughly resent.’

  Connie laughed, and shook her head. At moments like this it seemed remarkable to her that she and Olivia were blood relatives. ‘In time they’ll find it not such a burden after all. Don’t you think so, Ma?’

  Mrs Callaway sighed in such a way as to suggest she had heard this argument before. ‘I have no view on the matter at all, as you know – but I’d rather you didn’t turn our luncheon into a debating society.’ She was directing a vaguely beseeching look at both of her daughters.

  Lionel, ignoring this last plea, adopted a tone of resonant authority. ‘I read in The Times recently that they canvassed women in seventy-odd districts and less than fifteen per cent replied that they were in favour of the vote. Thirty-eight per cent,’ he said, with a pause that infuriated Connie, ‘declared that they were opposed to female suffrage. Which tells you enough.’

  Jecca, Louis’s fourteen-year-old middle sister, was assiduously calculating a sum with her fingers. ‘So – fifteen, thirty-eight … w
hat about the other, um, forty-seven per cent?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Connie, with an exaggerated shrug, ‘they’re probably just harpies.’

  By the time they had finished the sandwiches and the remainder of Jemima’s walnut cake, the treacly heat was making them quite uncomfortable. Flora and Jecca were positively fractious. Connie thought that this might be the moment to refloat the idea of the cricket, and looked over at Louis, who read the entreaty in her eyes. He stood up and briskly cleared his throat.

  ‘Right then, this is what we’ll do. Clear up here, then stroll down to the cricket. If my pal’s at the ground we’ll be able to get seats in the pavilion – some welcome shade for the ladies. Girls,’ he added, turning to his sisters, ‘if you really don’t like it you can go to the beach instead.’

  They began gathering up the detritus of lunch. Connie, inwardly, was astonished. Her lobbying for the cricket had met with blank indifference. Yet Louis had carried it off without a peep from any of them. He hadn’t even couched it as a suggestion – he had said, ‘This is what we’ll do,’ and they had simply complied with it. Without needing to enquire too deeply she knew why, and it was not because Louis had bullied or wheedled. He had no need to. He was a man, he had spoken, and that was enough.

  Louis’s surmise that his friend might be playing had proven correct, and soon he was ushering the family through the members’ gate and into a row of seats. The high scent of baking grass and sun-blistered wood permeated the air. The pavilion, built in the mid-1880s, was ambitiously modelled on the one at Lord’s in its mixture of mauve brick, wrought-iron balconies and large plate-glass windows. It had been funded for the Priory by a local businessman who hoped to raise the town’s profile as a cricketing venue. M—shire, the county cricket club, had shared a home with Sussex in nearby Brighton, though the addition of this huge pavilion and the enduring charm of the ground itself had persuaded the county to transfer its patronage to the Priory. The town, overshadowed for so long by its more glamorous neighbour down the coast, had rejoiced.