Half of the Human Race Page 13

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘what became of your friend – that day?’

  Connie glanced warily up the table at Mrs Maitland, who was busy talking to Tam and the lawyer. She said, sotto voce, ‘She’ll be out next week. Two months, hard labour.’

  Eleanor, hearing this, leaned in excitedly. ‘You mean, she’s been – in prison?’ It was unfortunate that this last word emerged on a rising note of scandalised interest, and could not fail to be heard at the other end of the table. Mrs Maitland, with the reflex of an eagle spotting a rabbit in open country, swooped down on this sudden titbit. ‘Who’s been in prison?’ she asked sharply.

  Will instantly stepped in. ‘A lady Miss Callaway knows – she was involved in an affray some weeks ago in the West End.’

  ‘So, this lady – she was wrongly arrested?’ asked Eleanor.

  How nice to be so innocent as that, thought Connie, who hesitated, then said, ‘No. Not wrongly. She broke a shop window on the Strand – with a hammer.’

  Mrs Maitland, a nerve twitching in her cheek, looked down the table at her. ‘Are we to suppose this miscreant is … a suffragette?’ She said the word as if she were holding it, distastefully, with a pair of tweezers.

  ‘I suppose she is.’

  ‘And how do you know this … person?’

  Connie felt her heart begin to thud. ‘She’s – Lily – is a friend of mine,’ she said, then quietly corrected herself. ‘Actually, my best friend.’ In the short silence that followed she sensed her revelation exerting an almost physical pressure on the atmosphere. Tam was nodding philosophically over the rim of his wine glass, while Fotheringham, with professional impassivity, stared straight ahead. Still hoping to limit the damage, Will blundered in again.

  ‘But Miss Callaway actually tried to stop her – and got a bloody nose for her trouble. She wanted nothing to do with it.’ Connie obscurely resented this defence, even though she saw it was a shield against his mother’s Medusa glare.

  Mrs Maitland was very far from being mollified. ‘These women … they simply bring disgrace on us all. Two months seems hardly adequate punishment –’

  ‘It’s the maximum sentence,’ Connie broke in, ‘for the cost of the damages.’

  ‘Miss Callaway is right,’ said Fotheringham neutrally. ‘Under the Malicious Damages Act if the window broken cost less than five shillings, two months is all she could be given.’

  ‘And it’s only a broken window!’ added Eleanor. ‘It’s not as though anyone was hurt – apart from Miss Callaway.’ Connie could have hugged her for that.

  Mrs Maitland’s gaze narrowed. ‘That’s foolery, Eleanor. It may be “only a broken window” to you – to a shopkeeper it’s his livelihood. What if everyone decided that their grievances required them to break windows and burn down buildings? What price democracy then? I’m sorry, but any sane state will allow that lunatics ought to be restrained.’

  The tone of her voice did not invite disagreement. For the next few moments all that could be heard was the soft clink of cutlery on plate. Eleanor took a deep breath, and for a second Will was seized by a dread that she was going to pursue the argument.

  ‘More fish pie, anyone?’ she said, looking around the table.

  By the time pudding was finished the social temperature of the room had been restored to a level of civility, if not of jollity. Mrs Maitland seemed to have laid aside her aura of queenly displeasure for the time being, and was once again holding forth to Tam and Mr Fotheringham, both of them still content to play murmuring courtiers around the throne. Will, used to her sudden cold fronts and lightning flashes of temper, felt that it might have gone much worse, though he sensed beneath Connie’s well-mannered constraint a brooding sense of hurt. And pluck, too! My God, he’d almost fallen off his chair when she’d spoken to his mother so candidly … He was coming round to the idea that the two of them would best be kept apart in future.

  Connie’s own thoughts were tending in the same direction. A natural sense of tact, and her nascent regard for Will, inclined her to maintain a blameless front, but she realised that her confessed association with Lily had put her, for the moment, beyond the pale. It was strange, though, for she had never encountered anyone she could not in some small way charm. To judge from Mrs Maitland’s refusal to catch her eye, there was a first time for everything. The table had been cleared and they had drifted back onto the terrace when Tam suggested a walk. The prospect of escaping Mrs Maitland’s presence appealed so strongly to Connie that her response (‘Oh yes, let’s!’) betrayed perhaps more feeling than she had intended. Mr Fotheringham, settled into post-prandial torpor, declined such exercise, which effectively meant that his hostess would stay put, too.

  The afternoon was offering hints of the summer to come, a certain sultriness in the air and a sun that kept playing hide-and-seek with the clouds. They started through the meadow, the four of them naturally splitting into pairs, with Connie and Eleanor setting the pace ahead of Will and Tam. Eleanor, in her final year at Roedean, had the same athletic ranginess as her brother, though with something more pensive in her demeanour. It seemed that she had recently been presented at Court, and described the fuss of the ceremony with a shrugging disregard.

  ‘The courtiers chivvy and shoo you about as if you were a beagle. But once I’d made my double curtsy the worst was over. Now I just have to attend a lot of dances and hope some chap takes a shine to me.’

  ‘You don’t wish for a career, then?’

  ‘I’ve not really thought about it. I suppose I’d like to play tennis, but I don’t think Mother would stand for that. It was bad enough when Will decided he was going to play cricket.’ As if reminded of him now, they stopped and settled on the grassy verge of a river to wait for the men. Eleanor said, in her straightforward way, ‘Do you work, Miss Callaway?’

  ‘Yes. In a bookshop near my home. But it’s – not what I’d like to do.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve recently gone back to my medical books. I studied medicine for a year after leaving school –’

  ‘So you wanted to be a nurse?’

  ‘No. A surgeon.’

  Eleanor gave a little giggle, which she stifled on seeing that Connie was quite serious. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of a lady surgeon before.’

  Connie pursed her lips wryly. ‘If it were left to men you never would.’

  Further discussion of this topic was curtailed by the arrival of Will and Tam, who were in the middle of a heated discussion. ‘I haven’t a clue why,’ Will was saying in a defensive tone.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Eleanor, looking from one to the other. Will shook his head, saying nothing; Tam, holding his gaze, said, ‘Your brother has been a damned fool –’

  ‘Ladies, Tam,’ muttered Will. Tam sighed, and apologised to Connie and Eleanor for his language.

  ‘I’m just trying to get to the bottom of why Bluey hasn’t been made captain.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Connie with a look of dismay. ‘How could they not?’

  Will shrugged. ‘Not for me to say. I fear I misconstrued the committee’s intentions. The subject didn’t come up –’

  ‘I’d dearly like to know what you said to them,’ Tam cut in. ‘That job was yours for the taking. You know they’ve given it to Middlehurst?’

  ‘I’d heard. Decent chap.’

  ‘But no captain.’

  Connie, sensing the burden of disappointment on both men, said, ‘Well, it might be a blessing in disguise. Your only responsibility now will be to score runs.’

  ‘Quite so,’ replied Will, grateful for this defusing remark. ‘I’ll bear that in mind at the Priory tomorrow morning.’

  ‘You’ll be there to watch us, Miss Callaway?’ asked Tam.

  ‘Of course,’ said Connie, standing up to smooth down her dress. She looked out upon the river while Eleanor and Will discussed what direction their walk should take. They would follow this path, it seemed, and skirt the borde
r of the neighbouring farm. Just then a trio of swans hove into view, serene and inscrutable in their movement through the water, their heads so still and sculpted they might have been made of porcelain.

  ‘Wouldn’t think they were dangerous, would you?’ said Tam, who was following her gaze. Connie looked round to catch his half-rueful, half-amused expression. The question didn’t seem to demand an answer, so she smiled, and watched the birds glide on until they disappeared from view – three, two, one – at the willow-clogged bend in the river.

  The next day at the Priory would become, in the long perspective of Connie’s memory, one of near-Elysian bliss. The morning started fine, with a lemony sun peeking through the vast cathedral skies; M—shire’s new captain, on winning the toss, had elected to bat. When the pavilion bell rang for the first time that season she craned forward on the bench to watch Tam and his fellow opener stride out to the crease. Will, who had reserved the seat for her in the members’ stand, had considerately supplied a picnic blanket to ward off the late-spring chill, and sat with her until the first wicket went down. She had hardly dared hope to see the two of them batting at once, but the loss of another wicket did indeed bring Maitland and Tamburlain together. Their opponents, Yorkshire, were rusty from lack of match practice, and their quick men bowled fatally short all day. What stuck most enduringly in her mind’s eye was the sight of the ball nearly disappearing – a black dot against the sky – before it dropped into the midst of the murmurous crowd, or else over the wall for a six. Tam started off the more briskly, thrashing anything loose on either side of the wicket and racing to the seventies by lunch. In the afternoon Will picked up the pace and overtook his senior partner; by tea they both had hundreds and were still going strong. Connie, thrilled as she was by this display of explosive hitting, could not help wondering if the two batsmen were, at times, stealthily competing with each other; whenever one of them had rattled off a few boundaries, the other would follow suit with a flurry of his own. She would have dismissed the observation as fanciful if she hadn’t read the match report in the next day’s paper making the very same point.

  Will’s own favourite moment was driving the final ball of the day straight down the ground and not breaking stride until he was clattering up the pavilion’s wooden steps, and saw Connie applauding them from her seat. He stopped, doffed his cap and grinned. He and Tam had put on an unbroken stand of 310. That was one in the eye for the committee! In years to come he would look back on this day – as perfect a day’s cricket as he had ever had – with a yearning that squeezed on his heart. It was not that he wouldn’t play so well again. But it was never to be with Tam as his partner at the other end.

  7

  CONNIE HEARD THE meter click on as she continued to gaze out of the cab’s window. Slanting needles of rain had just begun spattering across it. Her driver had parked opposite the unfriendly castellated front of Holloway Prison, the blank repetition of its institutional brick a kind of complement to what one imagined were the cheerless routines within. She had received a message from the Vaughan family’s lawyer asking her to meet Lily at ten o’clock in the morning at the gates, and felt a flutter of nerves at the prospect of seeing her for the first time in over two months. Connie had written several letters to her in the meantime, and received nothing in reply, a silence due, she hoped, to the constraints of His Majesty’s Prisons rather than to her friend’s unwillingness to correspond. The authorities forbade prison visits to anyone but family. It was a weekday in the middle of May, and she had been obliged to take time off from the bookshop: ‘a sudden illness in the family’ was the excuse she had made to her two assistants.

  At a quarter past, the door within the gatehouse heaved open, and a woman carrying a suitcase stepped out. Connie strained to make out her features: she was about Lily’s height, but something in the colouring and tautness of her skin caused her a brief confusion. Could it be …? She got out of the cab and took a few faltering steps across the road. The woman had put down her case, and was staring vacantly into the middle distance, as if trying to remember how she had come to be standing on this bit of pavement. She didn’t seem to be aware of anything at all until Connie was almost in front of her, at which point her eyes swam into focus.

  ‘Lil? It’s me,’ she said, trying to keep her voice gentle and steady – more difficult than it should have been, for she sensed her face betraying alarmed surprise at Lily’s appearance. Her skin was the shade of uncooked dough, dramatically heightening the effect of the faded purple-yellow bruising around her left eye. Her lips were cracked and flaking, and when Connie leaned in to kiss her she smelt something faintly metallic and yeasty on Lily’s breath.

  ‘Connie,’ was all she said, in a voice quiet enough to suggest a fear of being overheard. Connie intuited an estrangement even in the way she spoke her name. She picked up Lily’s suitcase.

  ‘I’ve got a cab waiting. Let’s get you home.’

  Lily nodded in spiritless assent, and allowed herself to be led across the road. They stepped into the car, and Connie called the address to the driver. As they sat together, Connie took Lily’s hand in her own. She felt something strangely valetudinarian in her friend’s demeanour; their separation was beginning to seem more like two years than two months.

  ‘Did you get my letters?’ Connie asked her.

  Lily nodded, and searched her coat pocket for a moment. She brought out a little bundle of letters, tied with string, which Connie recognised as her own. None of them had been opened. ‘They handed them to me this morning – the whole lot.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t get to read a single one?’

  Lily shook her head, seemingly indifferent to the outrage expressed on her behalf, and stared out of the window. Connie felt ill at ease. While she feared what prison might have done to Lily, she had still anticipated a wild relief on their being reunited, and perhaps a brave joke from the released prisoner to prove that she was unbroken. The wraithlike creature sitting next to her, however, was very far from reassuring. She had never thought to see her look so frail – so depleted.

  ‘What happened to your eye?’

  Lily looked puzzled for a moment, then lightly palpated the bruised skin with her fingers, as if it would help her to remember. ‘One of the wardresses was holding me down, and I became … agitated. I think it was her elbow.’

  It was not just the dark allusion to duress but the neutral tone in which she spoke that shocked Connie. Tears would have been preferable to this hollow-voiced calm.

  ‘So you were on a hunger strike?’

  Lily nodded, distantly. ‘I think most of us were.’

  Connie gave her hand a sympathetic squeeze as an image of tubes inserted into nostrils flashed unbidden across her consciousness. She had read reports of forcible feeding, and the detail contained in them had made her recoil: it seemed almost inconceivable that her own best friend had been subjected to it.

  ‘Are you – all right?’ said Connie, sensing the feebleness of the question.

  Lily turned from the window to look at her. ‘No. But I will be.’ The ghost of a smile passed over her face. ‘I’ve got to go to the dentist,’ she added, fingering the inside of her mouth. ‘They broke a tooth when they were – forcing my mouth open.’

  ‘Oh, Lil …’ She didn’t know what to say after that. The cab had turned off Roman Road. The Vaughan house, on Ellington Street, looked stolidly unsuspecting of the return of its convicted resident. Connie tapped on the driver’s window, and the cab pulled to a halt.

  Lily hung her head, and said, ‘You know that my parents wouldn’t visit me the whole time I was there?’

  ‘I suppose they thought it would upset you –’

  ‘They were ashamed,’ she said baldly.

  ‘I wish they’d have let me visit you.’

  Lily nodded thoughtfully, and they got out of the cab. The car’s engine must have been overheard, because the front door opened and her mother was coming down the path towards them. Mrs Vaug
han’s was a bustling stride, suggestive of a comic matron in a Savoy Opera, but now she faltered on seeing her daughter – much as Connie had – and her plump chin began to tremble uncontrollably. But she had none of Connie’s tact.

  ‘Oh my good God – what have they done to you?’ she cried.

  ‘Hullo, Mum,’ said Lily by way of reply, and was then swaddled up in her mother’s embrace. Connie stood still, caught uncertainly between the roles of friend and witness to a familial scene that excluded her. Mrs Vaughan was clucking about her daughter with tearful endearments, stroking her hair and making the kind of fuss that Connie knew Lily would instinctively resist. But when she touched her friend’s arm to signal her leave-taking, the face Lily turned to her was a surprise: her eyes no longer bore the dry, careworn tolerance she had shown in the cab, but a glistening sorrow that was just about to spill over the rims. Her mother’s helpless abandon had proven too much. Connie silently raised her hand in goodbye, and bent her steps in the direction of Camden.