Half of the Human Race Page 7

  ‘Pretty sure,’ said Connie, feeling less so as they blundered on through the clinging veils of white mist. ‘Let’s just keep going.’

  Her pretended certainty paid off when, a minute or so later, they came in sight of the appointed hall, a thin slice of gaslight just visible through the oaken double doors at its front. Inside, the meeting was already under way, and the lighting disclosed a much larger gathering than Connie had anticipated. Edging their way along one of the back rows they eventually found a vacant spot, somewhat distant from the stage but useful as a vantage to survey the two hundred or so congregants. From their demeanour and dress Connie speculated that they were ‘women of assured circumstances’ – she had read the phrase in The Times – and some, to judge from the diamond flashing like a bayonet on the hand of the woman next to her, rather more than assured. Perhaps it was only such women who had the time to devote to a cause; the rest either didn’t care or else were too busy trying to make a living. She shifted in her seat and focused on the woman who had just stepped up to the podium. Her name was Louisa Gray, a leading light of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and a speaker Connie had admired at the Albert Hall meeting in June.

  Miss Gray’s voice was marked by a pleasingly melodic lilt. ‘… and present circumstances seem even less hopeful. We have been grievously wronged by the intransigence of this government. In protesting their treatment, and in asking for what is rightfully ours, we have endured contempt, physical degradation, even imprisonment. Now, after two years of forbearance while they wavered on this Conciliation Bill, we gather that the prime minister’s new purpose is to reform suffrage – for men! Could anything be better calculated to add insult to injury? Yet I would urge you, all of you here present, not to be discouraged. In the long perspective this will seem but a brief setback on the road to freedom. We will endure, and we will oblige this government to listen to us. How? By continuing to make an intolerable nuisance of ourselves! We have already done so by confounding them on census night, by refusing to pay taxes, by applying to our MPs, by writing to the newspapers, by openly proclaiming our cause in public places. We will not let them rest. We will be gadflies on their rump, pricking them, provoking them, until they concede that the best way of dealing with an intolerable nuisance is to remove the cause which drives it. After the fuss we have created they will regard negotiation not merely as a duty, but as a relief. So I say to you: onwards!’

  Her words were being applauded when a commotion arose near the front. A lady had stood up, although it was plain from the noise she was making that her neighbours in the audience were reluctant to give her the floor. Miss Gray, apparently recognising the protester, signalled to them to let the woman speak. Once she had turned her face to the assembled, Connie also recognised her. It was Marianne Garnett, a woman whose energetic militancy had bounced her from Speakers’ Corner to Holloway Prison and back. Becomingly attired in purple and black – a veil had concealed her identity up to this point – Mrs Garnett spoke in tones that had less melody but greater resonance than did Miss Gray’s.

  ‘I thank Miss Gray for the opportunity to speak,’ she said, with a gracious bow, ‘and I approve entirely her determination to make an intolerable nuisance of herself. In an ideal world she would persuade the government to repent of its ignorance. But we live in a world that is as far from ideal as can be conceived. Let us be clear about what has happened. The Conciliation Bill has been – to use Lloyd George’s boastful word – torpedoed. The truce we offered them has now been exposed as a futile delay. We have kept the peace, we have refrained from outrages – we have, once again, been overlooked. This government does not intend to honour our goodwill with a concession of its own. It is my belief that they never did. Constitutional means of persuasion have failed, utterly. So what is left to us? I say that Asquith and his cronies will listen to the argument of stones breaking glass –’ At this, a chorus of boos and groans sprang up, and women on both sides of the hall rose in protest. But Mrs Garnett merely raised her voice over them. ‘We are already treated as outlaws. Why then should the government be surprised if we behave as outlaws? I am a wife and mother of two young children, yet I am ready to leave a happy home for a prison cell. Will any of you here do the same?’

  At this, the meeting degenerated into an unseemly shoving match; Mrs Garnett’s harangue had inflamed the mood, and a scuffle broke out between the handful of militants who had come to her aid and certain National Union members, whose professed aversion to violence evidently did not preclude manhandling their unruly opponents. Connie and Lily were too astonished to do anything but stare as a couple of bruisers, hired in case of a police raid, stomped into the fray, seized Mrs Garnett and frogmarched her down the side of the hall towards the exit. Cries of ‘Shame!’ echoed across the room. While a semblance of order was being fitfully restored, Connie leaned over and whispered in Lily’s ear, ‘Let’s go.’ Lily seemed surprised, but she promptly followed as her friend made a retreat from the hall.

  They came out into the fog-bound evening in time to see the woman at the centre of the fracas upbraiding the men who had ejected her. A third man in a cap, who had come to her defence, now seemed to be occupying the role of referee between the parties, as Mrs Garnett, with remarkable calmness, explained to the bruisers the immemorial British prerogative of free speech, and their own shameful part in denying it to her. After some minutes of not being able to get a word in edgeways, her two antagonists shrugged and withdrew, tossing oaths behind them. Connie took Lily’s arm and, with a faltering step, approached the indomitable lady.

  ‘Mrs Garnett?’

  The woman looked round, and Connie saw an imperious glitter in her eyes. ‘Yes?’

  ‘We’ve just been listening to you speak –’

  ‘Then I thank you,’ she cut in crisply. ‘Few others were, it seems.’

  The man in the cap was now whispering deferentially to her, and with a brisk nod he trotted off. She began smoothing down her ruffled skirts, seemingly oblivious to the two young women off to her side. Connie glanced at Lily, who had pulled a quizzical face; then she said, ‘You don’t remember us, do you?’

  Mrs Garnett’s magnificent head turned again to face them. Frowning, she said, ‘I don’t believe I do.’

  ‘We used to know you as Marianne Brooke. At St Joan’s?’

  Her eyes gave a sudden, startled blink. ‘St Joan’s …’ she said, her breath pluming in the night air. She looked searchingly from one to the other. ‘I seem to – are you … Constance?’

  Connie smiled. ‘I am – and this is Lily.’

  ‘Lily – yes!’ she said with a little sigh, the light of recognition now kindling in her dark eyes. ‘Well, fancy that! It must be all of – eight years for me, I suppose. St Joan’s. I haven’t thought of the place in ages.’

  ‘Audere est facere,’ said Lily with a giggle. Mrs Garnett gave an amused nod on hearing their old school motto.

  ‘“To dare is to do” … I can think of some who might profit from that lesson,’ she added archly, glancing back at the hall from which they had emerged. ‘I wonder what Miss Dolan would say if she could see us now.’ The name of their severely religious headmistress reduced them abruptly to silence – and Connie’s droll vocal mimickry (‘Bow your heads for the blessing, gels’) roused them to laughter. They heard the engine before they saw the twin headlamps of a motor car swim through the fog. It pulled to a halt by the kerb where they were standing.

  ‘My husband’s driver, Stansfield,’ explained Mrs Garnett, of the man behind the wheel, the same one she had lately dispatched in their presence. He was now stepping round to open the passenger door. ‘I’m sure I can take you somewhere,’ she said, by way of invitation.

  Connie thanked her, but declined the offer as unnecessary – at which Mrs Garnett snorted. ‘On a night like this? In with you.’

  A quick glance between the friends signalled an agreement not to argue. Once they were settled on the dimpled leather seats, the
driver turned to his employer.

  ‘Where to, ma’am?’

  Mrs Garnett told him an address in Mayfair, and they were off. ‘I’m having supper at my club,’ she explained. ‘That sounds rather like a man, doesn’t it? But Stanny will take you wherever you need to go.’

  As Mrs Garnett’s cedarwood scent permeated the car’s interior and the fog pressed damply against the windows, Connie enjoyed a nervous shiver of excitement: it was the first time she had been in a private car. Even the throb of the vehicle’s engine suddenly sounded glamorous. She felt madly curious about the woman bundled up next to her. In recent years Marianne Garnett’s name had become familiar in the papers; their own connection to her at school – mutely adoring at the time, as juniors will be to the head girl – had been eclipsed by her continuing celebrity as a spearhead of the militants. This was a woman who had been photographed talking to Lloyd George and Asquith, and later in conversation with two Whitehall policemen (who happened to be arresting her). She had attained the spotlight very quickly. Yet it was an unambiguous personal reference made at the end of her speech that came back to Connie now.

  ‘So – you have children, Mrs Garnett?’

  ‘It’s Marianne, please. Only the press and the politicians refer to me as “Mrs Garnett” – and often something worse. Yes, I have two girls. A three-year-old, and an infant of six months.’

  ‘Good grief,’ said Lily. ‘How do you find the time to – um …’

  ‘Well, I’ve been indisposed most of this year, but really it’s all fallen together quite nicely. I had my baby during a truce, and now I can return to the fray – like a giant refreshed!’

  At the foot of Shaftesbury Avenue a horse had slipped in the fog and brought down chaos, but Marianne’s driver simply veered up a side street and bypassed the delay. To her enquiry about their lives since St Joan’s, Lily shyly mentioned her secretarial work.

  ‘Ah, I know that school. Jane Clowes, the headmistress? I’ve met her at charitable dinners. And yourself, Constance – I now recall you being quite the bookworm.’

  Connie gave a half-smile, flattered that Marianne should remember this. ‘Well, perhaps that decided me – I work at Hignett’s bookshop, in Camden.’

  Marianne looked at her curiously. ‘And that satisfies you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ replied Connie, honestly. ‘But it’s a living.’

  The car had pulled to a halt on the forecourt of a tall red-brick mansion in South Audley Street. From the upper windows lights blazed through the fog. Marianne rubbed a little hole through the clouded window and said, ‘Here we are. It only now occurs to me – I do apologise – perhaps you’d like to join me for supper?’

  Connie and Lily looked momentarily taken aback, prompting a delighted ripple of laughter from Marianne. ‘You two! You look as though I’d asked you to take Stanny’s place at the wheel. Don’t be alarmed. It’s known as the Cavendish Club – “for ladies”. All quite respectable, I assure you.’

  ‘If you’re quite certain …’ said Connie, wondering if they were properly dressed, and what indeed ‘proper dress’ in such an establishment might entail. They stepped out of the car, and Marianne, tapping at the driver’s window, had a few quick words with Stanny. He tipped his cap and drove off.

  ‘Where does he go?’ asked Connie, staring after him.

  Marianne shrugged. ‘Oh, I think he just drives around. Shall we?’

  She led them to the club’s door, where a peremptory knock admitted them. They trailed a servant up a balustraded staircase, its oak-panelled walls hung with oils of solemnly profiled grandees. As they passed along a corridor to the dining room, two ladies, stately as galleons and wrapped up in furs, nodded at Marianne, who offered a casual salutation. Under the dazzle of the room’s electric chandeliers, their hostess cut an almost frighteningly imperial figure. Her head looked sculpted, like the carved prow of a ship, and around it her thick brown hair had been coiled in a glossy chignon; pale-skinned and dark-eyed, she had a slightly uptilted chin that seemed, like a pugilist’s, ready for combat – which was just as well, thought Connie, who was about the same height yet had not mastered that frank self-confidence, the swagger and brightness which distinguished Marianne’s bearing. She ought to have been painted by Sargent. A waiter had sidled up to their table, and was reeling off the evening’s menu.

  ‘No loin of beef, then?’ said Marianne, disappointed. ‘Very well – I’ll have the mulligatawny, then the poussin.’

  Connie and Lily, not daring to catch one another’s eye, both chose the duck breast in port-wine sauce and aspic. ‘Oh, and we’ll have the Lafite – in a jug, please,’ called Marianne to the departing waiter.

  Lily was staring around the room. ‘I’ve never seen the like,’ she said, in a wondering tone. ‘A supper room where the women are at leisure and the men wait on them, hand and foot.’

  ‘The world turned upside down,’ said Connie wryly.

  ‘One day soon it won’t look at all unusual,’ said Marianne. ‘Men can sense it coming. That’s why they’re clinging so desperately to what they’ve got.’

  ‘What you said about the Conciliation Bill – is there really no chance of it being passed?’

  Marianne shook her head. ‘None whatever. Asquith will make sure of it. He simply doesn’t like the idea of women being enfranchised – for one thing, it may create more Conservatives than Liberals. For another, I gather his wife’s taste for parliamentary gossip has got her into trouble. From this he seems to have assumed that any woman involved in politics is a liability.’

  ‘But this government has shown that it will negotiate,’ argued Connie. ‘Look at how they eventually made peace with the unions in the summer. The dockworkers, the railwaymen – they went on strike –’

  ‘Exactly! They did something that obliged the government to listen. The strikes meant that food was rotting in warehouses, that travelling was well-nigh impossible. The country was being brought to its knees. But women – we have no such economic leverage. No bargaining tool. Without that, pace Miss Gray’s optimistic forecast, I see no likelihood of a constitutional about-face.’ Marianne paused, and then continued in a more musing tone. ‘We live in a time of war, and we have to equip ourselves to fight it. Nobody else will supply us with weapons. Miss Gray and her kind insist that militancy is favoured only by a minority. But those who are ready to suffer in person and reputation for a cause they love are always in a minority. And given what we have suffered, the wonder is not that there are so few, but that there are so many.’

  Lily, pensively toying with her glass, said in a quiet voice, ‘I admire the courage … but, speaking truthfully, I couldn’t bear to go to prison.’

  Connie had been thinking precisely the same thing. Her earliest impression of incarceration was gleaned from visiting the huge suffragette bazaar at the Prince’s Skating Rink in the spring of 1909. She had inspected there a replica prison cell, designed to show the public the mean, cramped conditions that women were being forced to occupy: the thought of it terrified her. That day had also been the one occasion she had seen Mrs Pankhurst up close, seated at a bric-a-brac stall; she would call out in a profoundly bored and distant voice, ‘Pretty little vase – just a shilling.’ Connie had been too shy to talk to her.

  ‘Believe me,’ said Marianne, ‘when I first started, just the thought of going out to lecture the public filled me with dread. But I steeled myself to it, and by the time we began our campaigns I was used to rough treatment – I had been kicked, punched, pelted, spat upon … and that was before the police got hold of us! By that stage, being arrested didn’t seem such a grievous fate.’

  ‘Yes, but – prison?’

  ‘It was grim, I have to say. And if you were on the strike, well –’ Marianne broke off as a waiter arrived at their table, and she leaned back. ‘Perhaps I should save that delightful reminiscence for another time. Let’s not ruin our supper.’ Connie felt at once relieved and frustrated at the interruption. She dreaded
to know what Marianne had experienced, and yet she could not suppress a horrible curiosity goading her on, wanting to hear the worst. While they ate, Connie studied her more closely. To think of the advantages this woman had enjoyed – a wealthy, artistic family in Chelsea, education at Girton, two children, a husband who could afford a driver – and yet she had set them at naught in pursuit of a cause. The cause. Strange, too, that she in no way conformed to the ‘suffragette’ of stereotype – a winged fury, if one were to believe the Daily Mail. For all the fanaticism that swirled about her, for all the execration heaped on her, Marianne seemed absolutely sane and self-possessed. There was no ostentatious martyrdom about her, though there had been something irresistible, almost majestic, in the way she had stood up to address that meeting in the hall. Even Olivia, sullen foe of suffrage, would have been awed into silence by this woman’s cool command.

  Marianne had summoned the waiter to refill their glasses, and now raised her own to Connie and Lily. ‘A toast, I think. To the school, of course, and to friends reunited – if I may have the honour of calling you friends.’

  Connie had felt certain that the toast was going to be ‘Votes for Women’, yet Marianne had instead invoked the spirit of personal amity. The woman’s charisma was boundless, oceanic – you could drown in it, if you weren’t careful. As their plates were being cleared, she suggested they take their coffee in the adjacent room, and gestured them through. Here, with the lamps turned low, conspiratorial clusters of women were reclining on sofas and armchairs, and waiters swanned discreetly around the tables. Marianne proffered a fanned pack of cigarettes; Connie took one, and returned the favour with a light.

  ‘Ah,’ sighed Marianne, exhaling a thin column of smoke. ‘I confess – if it came to a choice between the right to vote and the right to smoke, I would prove a disgrace to our sex.’

  They were still savouring this irreverence when Connie noticed the entrance into the room of a certain lady, whom Marianne plainly recognised, for she pursed her lips in amused disfavour. ‘And talking of a disgrace …’