Half of the Human Race Page 3

  Revill, holding forth his palms in a gesture of innocence, glanced at Connie. ‘Miss – my sincere apologies.’

  Connie heard no sincerity in them, but wanted the scene over with, so she nodded briefly then looked away. Will dismissed Revill with a jerk of his head, then conducted his guests into a billiard room on the other side of the corridor. He introduced Louis to a small cluster of his Priory colleagues before inviting Connie to sit with him at a table in the corner.

  ‘That was a timely intervention,’ she said, looking over her glass at him.

  ‘Your cousin is quite the bantam, isn’t he?’ said Will, who proceeded to talk of his friendship with Louis at Oxford; as he did so, Connie took the chance to study him more closely. Will’s face in repose was brooding, though there seemed little of moodiness about him. He had an abstracted gaze at times, and she couldn’t help noticing his long eyelashes, almost like a girl’s. She thought there might be something rather spoilt about the set of his mouth. He was asking her whether she liked the south coast.

  ‘Very much. This is our first time down here – we used to go to the Continent.’

  ‘Oh, whereabouts?’

  ‘Mostly to the Riviera, sometimes to Lake Como. But then my father died and we – well, we couldn’t any longer because –’ She stopped, and coloured at having blundered towards an intimacy. Will, sensing her embarrassment, filled the space. ‘I lost my father when I was twelve. A heart attack.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Connie, with a sympathetic lowering of her gaze.

  ‘We were pretty close,’ he continued, with a rueful smile. ‘He taught me a lot about cricket.’

  ‘So did mine!’ said Connie, her eyes bright with enthusiasm. ‘Pa used to take me and my brother to watch the MCC.’

  Will merely nodded, and Connie realised then what she ought to have said. ‘I’m sure that your father would be … very proud of you.’

  ‘Hmm. Not if he’d seen that shot I played today.’

  Connie smiled. ‘Well, that was unfortunate. But …’ She sensed an interesting topic ahead, and wanted to see if he would take the bait. Will was alert to the significant pause she had left.

  ‘“But” what?’

  Connie didn’t require a further prompt. ‘I was going to say – but you don’t quite help yourself as a batsman. You seemed too keen to compete with Mr Tamburlain’s quick scoring, when it would have been more sensible to support him. And the ball you got out to was exactly a consequence of that eagerness – you went too early into the stroke and were caught on the crease. But that may be to do with technique …’ She was talking earnestly, hurriedly, in the hope that Will might sooner appreciate her understanding. But his gaze had dropped as she spoke, and she wondered why. Now he looked at her again, and said, distantly, ‘My – technique?’

  Not sensing any danger, she continued. ‘Yes. It seems to me – I hope you don’t mind my saying – you hardly move your feet at all. You’re rooted to the crease, and seem unsure whether to go forward or back …’

  Will was listening, though hardly able to believe his ears. It was a shock to him, for he came of a class and generation of men who were disposed to regard a lady’s opinion as merely decorative. He might have found her impertinence amusing were it not also for her apparent conviction that she was doing him a favour. The temerity of the girl! Connie’s stream of talk had begun to dry as she perceived a certain tension in his silence. Will shook his head for a moment, as if he were surfacing from a daze, and spoke with cold deliberation.

  ‘Actually, I do – that is, I do mind your saying. May I ask, Miss Callaway – have you ever played cricket yourself?’

  Connie, startled by his unfriendly tone, shook her head.

  ‘I thought not,’ said Will. ‘So you’ve no experience of facing a cricket ball that’s coming at you like a rocket from twenty-two yards. You’ve no experience of making quick decisions, or of compiling an innings, or indeed of anything that pertains to the discipline of batsmanship. And yet –’ he allowed himself an abrupt chuckle ‘– you presume to tell me about the niceties of “technique”?’

  Connie was quiet for a moment, and fixed a measuring look on him. It was not resentment she felt so much as disappointment. His charm had proven as brittle as a teatime wafer; beneath it was only petulance and condescension.

  ‘I’m sorry that you take offence at something I meant quite innocently. It’s true that I’ve never played cricket – I have never had the opportunity – but surely that does not disqualify me from having an opinion. I dare say you have never made an armchair, but you’d not hesitate to say whether the one you’re sitting upon is comfortable or not. No, I haven’t learned “the discipline of batsmanship”, as you call it, but I have watched enough cricket in my life to know whether a player has acquired a sufficiency. And you, Mr Maitland, have not.’

  Will could not tell if it was anger or incredulity that had hold of his tongue. He looked at her as one might at a lunatic or a child who had just stumbled upon the gift of eloquence. He even experienced a small shiver of alarm. Hitherto he had enjoyed the company of women without ever feeling an obligation to take them quite seriously. He excepted his mother from this. He took her very seriously indeed. Connie, meanwhile, was pulling on her gloves. She saw the expression of stunned bemusement clenching Will’s face.

  ‘I’m sure you would rather be talking to your friends,’ she said, standing up and feeling glad of her height, for once. She would keep a civil tongue. Will, surprised at her suddenness, also rose to his feet. Despite his annoyance, he was not blind to his obligations as a gentleman.

  ‘Miss Callaway,’ he said, swallowing hard, ‘I am at a loss as to – I fear we have misunderstood one another – your forwardness –’

  ‘Don’t concern yourself, Mr Maitland,’ she replied calmly. ‘I think the misunderstanding was mine. I believed you to be … other than you are. And now I’ll bid you good evening.’

  She stepped past him before he had time to remonstrate with her further. She would leave a message at reception to let Louis know that she had gone. On her way through the vestibule she had to pass through a thick knot of revellers, one or two of whom stared at her with candid interest. The tallest of them, who had been talking, now broke off to clear a path for her as she advanced. Tamburlain. He looked much older close to, his skin darkly blotched and his huge black moustache flecked with grey. As she caught his eye he bowed, gravely, and said, ‘Miss.’ She nodded her thanks and walked out into the night.

  As the sea bucked and heaved beneath the esplanade, Connie leaned on her elbows against the railing and stared into the dark. An imperceptibly fine spume had dampened the night air, and when she licked her upper lip it tasted of salt. She felt a light-headed exhilaration. Among her family she was known to be combative – in spite of their closeness, she and her father had had the most tremendous rows – but it was not her inclination to be so with near-strangers. She thought back to the look of surprise that seized Will’s countenance, and felt triumphant. It occurred to her now that he had never been addressed so frankly by a woman before. Well, he should accustom himself to it. A batsqueak of conscience told her that she might have exercised a little more tact. But this was swiftly drowned out by the flood of indignant scorn on recalling his sullen self-importance. ‘The discipline of batsmanship’ – what pomposity! She knew she was right, and that he had made a fool of himself. It was a pity, really. She had rather liked his face.

  2

  ON THE MORNING of the following Saturday Connie was in her father’s study, drawing her finger along a neatly serried shelf of Wisden Almanacks. The collection abruptly ended with the edition of 1908, the year that Donald Callaway had departed this life. Those numerals inscribed on its spine had rendered the volume a kind of memorial in her eyes. The year was a turning point for her, for all of the family, marking the age when he was alive – and everything after, when he was not. It was a divide as absolute to her as BC and AD. When she plucked a Wisden fr
om the shelf and opened its brittle pages her nose took in the scent of dust and time, with the faintest melancholy traces of her father’s pipe smoke. A jovial, gregarious man, he was well known among his City peers for daring speculations that would nearly always yield dividends, and he had kept his wife and children – two daughters and a younger son – in the comfortable security of a large house in Islington. His fabled luck in the markets had not, alas, insured him against cardiac failure. One autumn morning a colleague had found him slumped over the desk in his Cheapside office. Connie had happened to be looking out of the morning-room window at Thornhill Crescent when the policeman opened the front gate and walked up the path, his heavy step the harbinger of ill tidings.

  As the shock of his death reverberated through the family, another followed swiftly in its wake. Without precisely understanding his occupation, Connie knew that a broker undertook certain risks as a matter of course, and she only had to read a newspaper to appreciate how suddenly financial ruin could engulf an apparently safe institution. Yet when the family’s solicitor, Mr Napier, had presented himself at the house some weeks after the funeral to read the will, no one was at all prepared for the news that their late paterfamilias had been, to all intents and purposes, bankrupt. In the months leading up to his death, Donald Callaway had borrowed heavily on a diamond-mining venture in South Africa, only to see it collapse without warning, leaving himself and other leading brokers in the City recklessly overcommitted. Mr Napier’s quiet, measured tones as he related this was in notable contrast to the exclamations of dismay from Connie’s mother and sister, who at one point resorted to the disbeliever’s rhetorical fallback, namely that ‘there must be some mistake’. There was no mistake. Once certain creditors had been satisfied, the will would leave nothing to the family but the house they lived in. Unable to bear the broken expression on her mother’s face, Connie looked at Fred, her brother, who grimaced and said, in an undertone, ‘Crikey.’ He was due to go up to Cambridge the following year, and, in the stunned minutes that followed the solicitor’s disabling revelation, Connie knew that Fred would now be calculating the greatly increased odds against his being able to do so.

  In the forlorn discussions that ensued over the next few days the widow and her children took stock – ironic phrase – and made some hard decisions about the future. Julia Callaway had brought to her marriage a modest fortune of her own, which was mostly intact at the time of her husband’s death. This would allow her to maintain the running of the household, though at a reduced level; the cook would be retained, along with a maid. The other servants would have to be dismissed. All extravagances – the carriage and pair, visits to the theatre, the accounts at Jones Brothers and at Nicoll’s on Regent Street – would be henceforth curtailed. Holidays on the Continent were now unthinkable. As to their individual futures, there was enough money, just, to see Fred through his final year at Uppingham and thence to Cambridge, but Olivia and Constance would be obliged to seek gainful employment in order to make ends meet. Olivia, who had no ambition other than to marry well, greeted this new imposition with a look of candid horror. Connie, more independent-minded than her sister, had been about to start her second year at the London School of Medicine for Women.

  If Connie had felt more encouraged she might have enquired into the possible connections between her father’s business failure and his sudden death. Was the heart attack consequent on the shock of his undoing, or was he predisposed to the condition? When she broached the subject with her mother, however, she had met with a pursed rebuff that seemed to warn against further enquiry, and Olivia’s response was even more brusque. In spite of this, Connie had an intuition that her mother and her sister had talked privately between themselves on that same subject. She might have felt hurt at this perceived exclusion but instead she tried to bury her curiosity, if not her sense of grief, in the conscientious pursuit of her first job. She secured this, ironically, through an enthusiasm of her late father’s. A passionate reader, Donald Callaway had for years patronised a small but well-regarded bookshop in Camden Town, and in so doing had become friendly with the owner, Mr Hignett, a man of his own age, outlook and clubbable habits. Connie, who had inherited her father’s bookishness, was herself on good terms with him, both through his attendance at the Callaway dinner table and at the shop, where she was often dispatched to collect her father’s latest parcel of books.

  Having noticed Mr Hignett at the funeral, she decided to write to him at the shop, and was rewarded with a letter in which he initially expressed puzzlement at her interest but went on to indicate that, if she were quite serious, he would gladly find her a position. A month later Connie started there as an assistant. The work was of an unchallenging nature; she found the cataloguing and stacking quite dull, but she enjoyed corresponding with out-of-town customers and minding the shop during the quieter hours when she could have a little reading time to herself at the counter. She got on well with the two young women who worked there, and Hignett’s manager, zealous only in his talent for delegation, left them to run the place more or less by themselves. She would set off from home each morning just before eight to open the shop, and at just after six in the evening be ready to lock up. Others might have been downcast by this sudden change in routine and perhaps even humiliated by the obligation to work in ‘trade.’ Connie, fighting the impulse to self-pity, mourned the abrupt cessation of her medical studies, but she knew it was only through her father’s liberal-minded view of the world that she had been allowed to pursue higher education in the first place.

  She was skimming a Wisden profile of A. E. Tamburlain –

  debut for Sussex, 1889; featured as one of the Five Cricketers of the Year in 1893; 16 Test appearances for England; annus mirabilis in 1899, when he hit four centuries in successive matches and scored the quickest hundred (44 minutes) in county history; moved to M—shire, 1906

  – when the door of the study creaked open and Olivia entered. Connie, seated on the top of her father’s old library steps, looked down and bade her good morning.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Olivia asked. In reply Connie held up the little volume; her sister regarded it with indifference, and then began to wander about the room, pausing now and then. It was a sign that meant she had something to say. ‘Aren’t you working this morning?’

  Connie shook her head. ‘I’ve taken the day off. You surely haven’t forgotten?’

  Olivia looked blank, and then, remembering, clicked her tongue in exasperation. ‘You’re not really going, are you?’

  ‘Of course I’m going! We gather at the Embankment for half past four, and the procession starts an hour later. Just think – all those women marching together –’

  ‘Yes. Just think,’ said Olivia sarcastically. ‘It’s really rather common, marching.’

  ‘Common’ was Olivia’s most damning epithet, and covered a multitude of apparently innocent activities. Funny stories were common, so too was holding hands, kissing on the lips, whistling in the street and riding a bicycle – all of which Connie happened to enjoy. Anything from Germany and France was common, unless it was wine and, possibly, opera. Organ-grinders, flower sellers, paperboys were unutterably common. Connie suspected that bookshop assistants would be similarly tarred, though Olivia had refrained from saying so.

  ‘I might also call in to see Mr Brigstock on my way.’

  ‘Oh … him.’ Her sister seemed less certain in her response to this. ‘Are you sure he’s quite – a gentleman?’

  Connie laughed. ‘I do hope so. He’s asked me to sit for him.’

  ‘What?!’ Olivia looked horrified. ‘Of all the – you’ve surely refused?’

  Connie shrugged, enjoying her sister’s outrage. ‘I haven’t given him an answer yet. Though I suppose it’s rather an honour.’

  Olivia merely scowled at this and resumed pacing the room. On another day she would have expatiated on the character of Mr Brigstock, whose reputation as a painter did not, in her view, excuse the dis
tasteful sight of his dirty fingernails. But Connie could tell that she had something else on her mind. She had turned back to her Wisden when she heard Olivia halt again, and sigh.

  ‘Lionel,’ she began, ‘has suggested to me that I – stop working. He wants me to help prepare the house.’ Connie heard this without surprise. Olivia had not adapted to their reduced circumstances with anything like the good grace of her sister. She had been teaching, unhappily, at a junior school in Holloway for nearly two years. The pupils she liked well enough – her cast of mind was naturally pedagogic – but her staff colleagues she regarded as petty-minded, cliquish and, no doubt, common. Nor would she have been slow in communicating her disdain: she did not suffer many kinds of people gladly.

  After considering this news for some moments, Connie said, ‘And what is your own inclination?’

  ‘Well, of course I’d prefer not to work.’

  ‘There is no “of course” about it. You studied for a year to qualify. It has furnished you with an income. Does that not count for something?’

  Olivia shrugged, and Connie realised at that moment the decision had already been made. It was merely her approval that was being sought. Olivia would marry Lionel the following summer; she would then bear his children and run his home. Even if Connie could accept the surrender of one’s life to a man, she could not quite face the idea of that man being Lionel. She sometimes wondered if her aversion to him was simply physical: perhaps once she had grown accustomed to his mean slot of a mouth, his carefully oiled hair and his nasal voice all would be well. But even in that unlikely event, she could not deceive herself as to his oafish manners, his deafness to pomposity and – so common to his sex – the immovable sense of his own importance. And yet Olivia could abide all of this just because he was rich and would keep her in a grand style. There was only one question arising in the matter that intrigued Connie, and thus far she had managed to resist asking it. Now would be the moment. She closed the Wisden, and looked straight ahead as she spoke.