Half of the Human Race Page 5

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘Even for a worthy cause?’

  ‘As the poet wrote, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”’

  ‘That’s a rather lyrical way of evading responsibility.’

  ‘Touché,’ said Brigstock, laughing. He rose to help her into her coat. ‘Before you go, perhaps you’d care to look at this.’ He unclipped the sheet of paper on which he had been sketching and handed it to Connie. He had caught her well, she thought: the relaxed posture on the couch, head propped against hand, and seated alongside her, the lazily curled feline. Beneath it he had written, in a tiny cursive, ‘Constance and Maud. 17 June 1911’, and initialled it DAB.

  ‘What does DAB actually stand for?’ she said.

  ‘Denton Adolphus. Heaven knows what my parents were thinking of. But “Dab” is rather appropriate, for my line of work. It was a nickname at school.’

  She moved towards the door.

  ‘Thank you for sitting for me,’ he said. She smiled by way of reply, and offered her hand. He clasped it warmly, and they bid one another goodbye.

  As soon as Connie stepped off the tram she saw Lily waiting at their designated spot on Northumberland Avenue. The marchers were by now milling around in vast numbers, and it took Connie a minute to push a way through them to reach her.

  ‘There you are!’ cried Lily, relief in her voice. She puffed out her cheeks as she leaned in to kiss her. ‘I thought we’d missed each other.’

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Lil. The tram took such ages – I ought to have gone on the Tube.’

  ‘Not likely! You’d melt on a day like this.’ Lily was wearing a huge straw bonnet with daisies festooned around the brim. The two friends were of an age – they had both just turned twenty-one – though Lily’s round, innocent-looking face and small stature belied her years. She worked as secretary to the headmistress of a Camden girls’ school and was regularly mistaken, to her chagrin, for one of the pupils. She was now adjusting her bonnet in the reflection of a shop window.

  ‘You don’t think it’s too much?’ she said, pointing at her headgear.

  Connie shook her head. ‘You look lovely – like the Queen of the May.’

  The crowds of women marchers had suddenly thickened around them, and the air seemed to crackle with excitement. Everywhere the eye looked was a medley of white, purple and green, on banners, flags and sashes. Mounted policemen were patrolling the edges of the swelling scene. From behind they heard the rousing boom of a bass drum, and in the hush which followed a speaker had mounted a temporary platform at the top of the street. She now delivered a short address through a megaphone.

  ‘Women – the multitudes I see gathered here today give proof, if any were needed, that the cause of suffrage goes from strength to strength. Let me remind you of what our chosen colours signify: white for purity, green for hope, purple for loyalty. This is a Coronation procession, and out of respect and loyalty to our new King we have laid down our weapons and called a truce to the war. Yes, a war! – for that is what we have been waging. If woman is to be kept no longer in subjection, but a human being with her own powers and responsibilities, she must become a soldier. Today we demonstrate our commitment to the cause by marching. On another day, we may be obliged to fight, to suffer violence and imprisonment. But we will do so because we know that right is on our side, and this government shall everywhere hear our voice – Votes for Women!’

  The crowds cheered wildly and echoed her cry, though when Connie had looked about her during this address she had noted that the mood was far from unanimous. At the mention of ‘war’ she had seen some women shaking their heads. She suspected that most of the marchers assembled today had not involved themselves in militancy – the riotous demonstrations, the altercations with police, the unruly behaviour in the courts – and she had not herself known anyone who had. She remembered the first time she had read newspaper reports of ‘suffragettes’ being forcibly fed in prison, and felt cold horror. It sounded like a fiendish torture from a Gothic novel. She could not even contemplate the idea without feeling sick.

  The bands had started up, and the massing lines of marchers were on the move. Around Trafalgar Square and the roads leading off it, wheel traffic was now suspended; no vehicle could have made it through the huge current of women walking seven or eight abreast, banners raised high. Some had come in historical costume, a living pageant of famous women down the ages – Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, Grace Darling, Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Brontë. There were representatives from mills, match factories, clothworkers’ guilds. So many hundreds of different unions, from all corners of the kingdom! Connie glanced at the banner just behind, blazoned in large white letters – GOD BEFRIEND US, AS OUR CAUSE IS JUST. As they turned into Pall Mall the stolid, complacent facades of the gentlemen’s clubs stared down. A procession of this kind might march past every week, she thought, and meet only indifference. Through the raised window of one majestic soot-blackened edifice she glimpsed shadows moving about. Here they all were, pouring through the heart of male clubland, and yet none of its denizens seemed in the least disturbed by their intrusion. If, as that lady alleged, they were engaged in a war, then this afternoon’s skirmish would have to be considered a disappointment. The enemy had not even bothered to stir from its trenches.

  As if sensing her despondency, a little knot of marchers ahead of them had started up a rallying song.

  Shout, shout, up with your song!

  Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking.

  March, march, swing you along,

  Wide blows our banner and hope is waking.

  After a few more lines of this, Lily looked round and cupped her hand over Connie’s ear in order to make herself heard.

  ‘What an awful song!’

  She smiled her agreement, and gave Lily’s arm a squeeze.

  Song with its story, dreams with their glory,

  Lo! they call, and glad is their word!

  It sounded so earnest and jolly – and yet so galumphing. Connie imagined Brigstock hearing the lyric and curling his lip in sardonic disdain. No wonder he took such a pitying view of women … She would prove her mettle one day and show him that a woman need not be a meek drudge or a domestic pet. But for the moment she would have to put up with the fatuous words of this marching song.

  They had just turned the corner into St James’s Street when they heard a strident wolf whistle. A party of five or six swells, in tails and toppers, had been sauntering along the pavement and come to a halt. One of them, with a monocle fixed over his eye, had spotted Lily and called to his pals in a tone of braying insolence, ‘I say, shouldn’t that child be at home tucked up in bed?’

  Lily flushed angrily, and made to reply, but Connie steered her away. ‘Ignore them, Lil. They’re buffoons, and drunk, by the sound of it.’

  The monocled man was now alongside them, and addressed Connie directly. ‘Ah, miss, you there – don’t you wish you were a man?’

  ‘No,’ Connie fired back. ‘Don’t you?’ The man’s companions guffawed at this, and one of them clapped him heartily on the back, dislodging his monocle.

  ‘Ouch! A hit, Reggie, a palpable hit.’ As the cracks and sniggering continued, another of them was heard to say, incredulously, ‘Votes for women? Good Lord – whatever next?’ Connie had started to walk away, but now turned back. She looked the man in the eye, keeping her voice perfectly even.

  ‘Whatever next? After the vote, I dare say women shall take the jobs, too. We have the will. We only need to find the way. And the likes of you – gentlemen – will be left wondering whatever happened to the good old days.’

  The men were briefly stunned into silence; if she had ranted they would have laughed, but she had spoken with calm command. She took in their glazed eyes and blotched, well-fed faces, but she had already turned on her heel and taken Lily’s arm by the time their satirical cries of ‘Oooh’ and ‘Hark at her’ were piercing the air. The two friends were halfway up the s
treet when they heard the cry of ‘Bloody toms!’

  Lily looked at Connie, and the surprise mirrored on each other’s face sent them into convulsions of laughter. Not even another chorus of ‘The March of the Women’ could quash their high spirits as they walked on.

  3

  WILL HAD MISTIMED his journey across town, and now the hansom he had taken outside his flat in Devonshire Place was hopelessly adrift of his destination. It was Thursday morning, the day of the Coronation, and he had failed to take into account how many streets would be closed or blocked off to wheel traffic in anticipation of the royal event. He had arranged to meet his mother and sister off the train at Charing Cross and thence conduct them to the party in time to watch the King and Queen’s procession from Westminster Abbey. It was not a duty of unmitigated delight to him – he would rather have been at Lord’s watching the MCC play Cambridge University – but he knew how excited they were, and he wouldn’t dare let them down. His cab had been obliged to take a circuitous journey to the station and was now snailing through the backstreets at the south end of Bloomsbury.

  Had passers-by spotted him on the street earlier, attired in matutinal grey with a silk tie (purple, in honour of the day) fastened by an emerald pin, they would have assumed him to be a fellow at ease in the world, probably well off and blessed with a certain physical charm. His clean-shaven face was unusual among his peers, though he would have worn a beard if the bristles had not sprouted so patchily on his chin. That proved to his advantage, for shaving lent his features an open friendliness they would not otherwise have enjoyed. From his sporty, wide-stepping gait one might have expected him to talk in boisterous tones, but his voice was soft and pleasant, and he used it sparingly, almost shyly. It had already failed to attract the attention of the cabbie, seated above with the clatter of wheels and hooves harsh in his ear; Will realised, too late, he ought to have waited for a motor cab.

  After weeks of blazing sunshine the day had begun disobligingly muggy and overcast. A cortège of smudged grey clouds was just now passing overhead. Since leaving the south coast for London by train the night before, Will had been brooding on his current abysmal form with the bat. He had not scored a fifty all season, and, as he secretly admitted to himself, he had not seemed likely to. Loss of form was painful for any batsman, but for Will it chafed the more so after such an auspicious start to his M—shire career. He had announced himself there two years ago with a century on his debut; the rest of the summer yielded three more, and an aggregate just short of 1,400 runs – a club record for a player in his first season. His second season had shown the first one to be no fluke: he registered three hundreds in May alone, hit a double century in July (the first at the Priory for seven years) and ended second to Tamburlain as the club’s top scorer. Yet it was the manner in which he compiled his runs that had caught the eye. His buccaneering style had thrilled the crowds, and he had begun to score almost as quickly as Tam, from whom he had copied a favourite ploy of swivelling on his front foot and swatting across the line at balls down the legside; it had kept fielders at midwicket busy all summer. Newspaper reports were soon comparing the two men, one citing Will as the young pretender to Tam’s crown, for which he was ragged in the club’s changing room. Yet he was secretly gratified. To be mentioned in the same breath as Tam was an accolade in itself.

  The early weeks of the 1911 season, however, had brought him crashing down to earth. He had collected a pair in his first game – ominous beginning – and for the rest of May he failed to make a score higher than thirty. His timing of the ball, immaculate the previous summer, had gone to pieces, and his vulnerability to swing-bowling had been horribly exposed. It was baffling as well as disturbing: he hadn’t consciously changed anything about his batting, and yet where once reigned fluency and grace there was now only a desperate struggle for survival at the crease. His bat might as well have had holes in it for all the good it was doing him at present. At first he blamed his luck; then, when his poor run continued into June, he realised his problems might have a deeper root. It was a blow to his self-esteem, but he had eventually made up his mind to seek out wise counsel, and his spirits lifted at the prospect of a likely supplier being present this afternoon.

  The cab had at last pulled up at Charing Cross, where the bank holiday crowds were streaming forth from the concourse, flags in hand. A riot of Union Jack bunting had foamed over the Strand; it coursed between railings, along parapets, across windows. Having paid his cabman he waded against the flow of the oncoming masses until he spotted his mother and Eleanor in matching straw hats and cream-coloured dresses. They were standing next to an alarming assortment of bags and cases. Good Lord, thought Will, how many days are they planning to stay? Arranging his features into an expression of mild penitence, he hurried over.

  ‘Hullo, Mother,’ he called brightly. ‘Sorry I’m late. My cab’s just been halfway around town trying to get here.’

  ‘Hullo, darling,’ said Mrs Maitland, fiddling with her gloves and proffering her cheek to be kissed. She looked up at the lowering, mouse-grey sky, which was now beginning to grumble. ‘Proper summer weather,’ she remarked archly. ‘Three fine days and a thunderstorm.’

  ‘You seem to have a lot of luggage,’ said Will, looking about them.

  ‘A porter helped us,’ she replied, missing the point.

  ‘Packed train. I had some old woman almost sitting on my knee,’ said Eleanor, a pert seventeen-year-old whose fair skin almost shone against the ambient gloom. As she offered her cheek to be kissed, Will took in competing scents of perfume and perspiration. The air around them felt as thick as pudding.

  ‘What on earth is in the crate?’

  ‘Champagne, of course. It won’t do to arrive empty-handed.’

  ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to. We can’t carry this lot all the way to St James’s Street.’

  ‘Surely we can take a cab?’

  He shook his head. ‘The roads are all closed off. It’s on foot from here.’

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Maitland protested at this inconvenience. There was a steely gleam in her eye which Will knew of old. ‘I suppose we’d better get started then.’

  ‘I’ll go and store these at left luggage,’ he said.

  Once he had done so, he began to lead his mother and sister through the heaving press of bodies in Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall. At junctions, pickets of police milled about in anticipation. As they passed through the jostling crowds, Will occasionally glanced at the faces of strangers and discerned the same expression in them. What was it, exactly? A vague, deferential, somewhat bovine curiosity. So many thousands of people tramping the streets, so much discomfort and fuss and waiting endured merely for the chance to pay homage to someone who was, after all, a mortal like themselves. One had to wonder at the point of it. He recalled a similar summer’s day in 1897 when the family had assembled in his father’s office, high up in a building on Cheapside, to watch the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee procession through London. Will was nine at the time, and he and his young cousins had been solemnly advised to remember this day so that they could tell their children about it in years to come. All Will could now bring to mind was the sight of a little black bundle holding a parasol as protection against the blazing sunshine. ‘That’s Queen Victoria!’ his mother had said, pointing excitedly from the window, but he felt disappointed that such a famous personage could look so dumpy and insignificant. Someone else had pointed out to him the two horsemen in white uniform flanking the royal carriage: on one side her son, the Prince of Wales, and on the other her grandson, the Kaiser. Later that day Will had been sick from an excess of ice cream. He supposed that, were he ever to have children, they would be less than enthralled by his reminiscences.

  ‘William!’ It was his mother, and judging by her peeved tone he had not been paying attention.

  ‘Sorry?’ he said.

  ‘I said, how much further is it?’ They were struggling between the stands and the multitudinous humanity thronging the we
st end of Pall Mall, where pavement space had been squeezed into a narrow two-way channel. Above the street every available peephole seemed to have five or six spectators, on roofs, windowsills, ledges. Nimble youngsters were hanging like monkeys off the lamp posts.

  ‘Just round the next corner,’ he reassured them. Nearby he heard a blackguard bawling out some popular song, and soon other voices were joining in. From behind Will felt someone barge violently against him, though no apology was offered. He glanced at his watch. They would have had an hour’s play at Lord’s by now. He would like to have been there. In fact, he would like to have been anywhere other than among these revelling hordes. A stray line of Latin poetry, one of few to fasten on his unpoetic consciousness, came to him:

  Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.

  ‘I hate and shun the common rabble.’ he muttered to himself. If only he could.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said his mother.

  ‘Nothing. Here we are.’ They had turned into St James’s Street, where a few doors along from a bootmaker’s stood a tall mansion block; Will rang the bell and they were admitted by a doorman. An electric lift took them to one of the upper floors, and then they were entering a grand drawing room, with wide bow windows and a balcony overlooking the street. Fresh-cut flowers festooned every surface. A party of mostly young men were already heaping plates with food – Westphalia ham, ruby-red slices of beef, rolled ox tongue, chicken livers – from a buffet table. In the far corner someone was playing a waltz at the piano. Their host, a young man of rakish demeanour, boomingly addressed them.

  ‘William, greetings! Mrs Maitland, I presume,’ he said, bowing deeply, ‘… and the delightful young Miss Maitland. Welcome, all!’ Reggie’s conviviality began at such an inflated pitch that there seemed a danger he might float away on a cloud of gaseous goodwill. Mrs Maitland, used to deference, inclined her head regally. Eleanor merely giggled.