Half of the Human Race Page 9

  If I ‘ad a rope and pulley,

  I could feel the breeze more fully.

  If it wasn’t for the ’ouses in between.

  Unwillingly, her eyes began to moisten as the desperate jauntiness of the tune took hold. She had sat stony-faced through love duets at Covent Garden, through requiems at the Bechstein Hall, but now here she was, reduced to tears by a tuppenny-ha’penny canting song. Brigstock had glanced in her direction, and his expression changed in an instant to alarm.

  ‘My dear girl …’ she heard him say.

  Connie shook her head, unable to speak. She would be all right in a minute, she felt sure, so long as he didn’t touch her. But then, right on cue, he took her hand in his, and patted it gently. At that, her shoulders began to quiver, and the tears began to spot her lap. She couldn’t help herself, and at Brigstock’s whispered entreaty she took his handkerchief and let him steer her outside past the waiters and stragglers. The bar downstairs was still in a roar as they emerged into the night.

  ‘At least allow me to pour you a brandy in my rooms,’ said the painter, his hand resting solicitously on her elbow as they walked towards Mornington Crescent.

  ‘I’m quite well, thank you, Mr Brigstock. I’m only sorry that I interrupted your evening.’

  ‘Constance, please.’ It was the first time he had addressed her thus, and it created a little frisson in the air between them. It seemed that more than mere familiarity was being risked. ‘May I presume to ask what has distressed you? Is it something I’ve said?’

  She shook her head, though she heard in his tone an assumption that it was something to do with him. Could it be that he had mistaken her tears as evidence of romantic distraction? Her impulse was to correct him immediately, but she feared that attempting to explain something that touched so tenderly upon her father’s memory would set her off again. She bit it back, and kept silent. Camden High Street was still lively at this hour, and they had to navigate a pavement crowded with men and women pouring out of its public houses. Outside one, a penny-whistle player tootled merrily, while a ruffian associate holding forth a cap importuned the passers-by. Connie, feeling more in command of herself, stopped and turned to Brigstock.

  ‘I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind. A tram will be along soon.’

  Brigstock returned a look of concern. ‘I’ll flag down a cab for you.’

  ‘No, don’t.’ She was thinking of the needless expense, but regretted her brusque reply. ‘But if you’d be kind enough to wait with me …’

  He made a gesture of impatience. ‘For heaven’s sake! You don’t imagine I would just leave you here – at the mercy of the drinking classes?’

  Connie half smiled at that, and felt relieved as she spotted a tram in the distance. She had the impression that there was a matter unspoken between them, but now was not the time to broach it. As the tramcar shuddered to a halt, Brigstock took up her hand for the second time that evening, and pressed it to his lips. He fixed her with an earnest, enquiring look.

  ‘Would you – at a more convenient time – explain …?’

  Connie nodded. ‘Yes. I will,’ she said, and boarding the tram she found a seat. Through the window she watched his figure recede into the distance, his arm raised in farewell. Her hand still trembled as she held a match to her Sullivan. Yes, explain. She would have to tell him that, much as he might wish it otherwise, her tears had nothing to do with him; that she acknowledged the depth of his feeling for her but, alas, could not reciprocate it.

  These thoughts preoccupied her as she stepped off the tram and walked back to Thornhill Crescent. They persisted after she had doused her bedside lamp and rested her head on the pillow. She sensed an urgency about disabusing Brigstock, who might even now be planning his declaration scene. It would be a mercy to nip his hopes in the bud. Her dreams were troubled by confused reverberations from the music hall – somehow, she had ended up onstage apologising for the hopeless acrobats, while the audience almost as one bayed abuse at her – and she woke in a state of bewildered relief.

  With the resolve of last night still uppermost in her mind, Connie hid herself away in the bookshop’s office all morning, rehearsing her lines to him until she had them by heart. As midday came around she left the shop on the pretext of going to luncheon, and bent her steps towards the painter’s rooms in Mornington Crescent. She had made up her face carefully, and the expensive loden coat she had borrowed from her mother provoked a tiny appraising double take from the landlady. Pursuing her heartbeat up the stairs she pictured Brigstock’s surprise on seeing her, so soon after their last meeting. At her knock she heard footsteps ambling along the corridor, and the door swung open.

  ‘Miss Callaway,’ he said pleasantly, not surprised in the way she had anticipated. ‘Please, come in.’

  Without catching his eye, she entered, and he led her into a small parlour overlooking the back of Mornington Crescent station. As she stood gazing out, a train rumbling down below made the window vibrate in its frame. He asked her to sit down, but she refused, aware that the tentative intimacy of the night before had subtly changed. Daylight seemed to have put a different complexion on the matter.

  ‘Are you recovered from …?’ He had a slightly puzzled air.

  ‘Thank you, yes. Mr Brigstock, I wanted to say –’

  At that moment, a door off the corridor was heard to creak open, followed by the light slapping patter of bare feet on floorboards. Connie, frozen to the spot, looked at Brigstock, whose expression hadn’t altered. Presently a young dark-haired woman, sleep-dazed and wrapped in a thin dressing gown, peered into the room. Her gaze unconcernedly took in Connie.

  ‘Uh, ’scuse me,’ she muttered, and dozily withdrew.

  Brigstock didn’t appear to have noticed the interruption. His eyes held the same enquiring gleam, and must have taken in the furious blush now suffusing Connie’s face. She turned again to the window in a belated effort to hide it.

  ‘You were going to tell me something,’ he said coaxingly.

  She paused, trying to collect herself, wondering at her naivety – the pity she had felt for him and his old man’s infatuation. Little did she know! Summoning her will, she faced him. ‘I wished only –’ she began, a catch in her voice. ‘I wished only to apologise for my selfish behaviour, and to thank you for – your understanding. Good day to you.’

  She didn’t wait to hear his reply, brushing past him and hurrying down the stairs. She felt the awkwardness of her exit keenly, but her only object was to be out of that house. The roar and bustle of the street barely impinged on her as she quickened her step, mortified each time she replayed the scene in her head – his quizzical look, the peacock flash of the girl’s dressing gown – but grateful nevertheless that her mission of ‘mercy’ had been so abruptly torpedoed.

  5

  ‘I WISH I had hands like yours,’ said Connie, holding Lily’s hands across the table and examining them as if she were a fairground palmist. ‘They’re so neat and womanly. Look at mine,’ she continued, wrinkling her nose. ‘The size of them … they look more like feet!’

  Lily giggled, quickly checking them herself to see if the comparison was just. They were having tea at the Corner House in Coventry Street. Connie had taken to staring at hands a good deal of late. It had started when a friend of her brother Fred’s, a medical student, had come to dinner just before Christmas and she had idly recounted to him her girlish ambitions of becoming a surgeon. The young man, with no more than a glance, remarked that it was a pity she hadn’t pursued them, for her hands (if she didn’t mind him saying) looked strong and bony, ‘like a man’s’. The initial effect of this observation was to make her grateful that she so often wore gloves. Then she began to wonder if there wasn’t something in it – if her future really did lie, as it were, in her hands. In the new year she had dug out some of her old medical textbooks, and spent most of her free evenings studying at the new public library at the corner of Thornhill Square and Lofting Road.

&nbs
p; It was now the 1st of March, a day off, and she had spent the afternoon wandering around the West End in search of a new lawn coat. As a rule she preferred to shop for clothes on her own: the opinions of friends, however well meaning, were apt to confuse her dependable instincts. And Lily, in any case, seemed in too difficult a mood to be of much help. Connie caught her checking her watch again, but when she had mentioned this half an hour before Lily became rather snappish. She was well versed in her friend’s moods, but today’s seemed quite different, an indecipherable compound of reticence and skittishness. Might there be a man in the background? Just then a waitress was passing their table.

  ‘Shall we have another pot, Lil?’

  Lily shook her head emphatically. ‘No, I must be getting along.’

  ‘Oh.’ Connie put just enough enquiry into the syllable to invite an explanation.

  ‘I have to meet someone – in the Strand,’ she said, then called to the waitress for the bill.

  Her curiosity piqued, Connie said airily, ‘I’m going that way, too. D’you mind the company?’

  ‘Fine,’ replied Lily, with a terseness that suggested it was anything but. Well, thought Connie, this did sound like a man, and if Lily was going to be mysterious about it then she would feel no compunction in tagging along. Outside, a pale late-afternoon sunlight glistened on the rain-rinsed pavements. They skirted the stuttering traffic that was coming from Piccadilly and walked on through Leicester Square; a newsvendor was barking out the headlines of the Standard’s late edition. Connie sensed an urgency in Lily’s gait, and felt suddenly aggrieved that she had not been taken into her confidence.

  ‘You know, you can tell me, Lil,’ she said with a sidelong look.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘If there’s a new sweetheart in the offing.’

  Lily clicked her tongue and sighed irritably. ‘It’s really nothing like that.’

  ‘Then why so secretive? And why has it put you in such a mood?’

  Lily stopped and glared at Connie, who flinched. What had she done to merit that look? They were standing on St Martin’s Lane, with shoppers streaming by on either side of them. Lily was now looking about the street, apparently in search of something.

  ‘All right, then – you asked,’ she muttered, and almost dragged Connie by the arm across the road. She led her into a narrow passageway of blackened bricks and reeking drainpipes, stepping inside the murky embrasure of a tradesman’s doorway that screened them completely from the street.

  ‘What on earth –?’

  ‘Shh,’ hissed Lily, who had now unclasped her handbag. From it she produced something wrapped in a canary-coloured duster. With a furtive check against passers-by, Lily unrolled the cloth, and there, incongruous but unarguable, lay a hammer. Its varnished handle and metal head gleamed brand new. For a few stunned moments Connie simply gazed at it. Only when her eyes caught the expression of dread and defiance on Lily’s face did she finally understand.

  ‘Oh, Lil …’

  Lily swallowed hard, and seemed about to speak. Instead, she rolled up the hammer in the cloth and replaced it in her handbag. Then, with another glance at her watch, she stepped out of the shadowed doorway and back into the street. Connie, left staring at nothing, hurried after her.

  ‘Lily, wait.’

  ‘I haven’t got time,’ she said without breaking stride. ‘I’m supposed to be there at quarter to six.’

  ‘I’m just – Who’s put you up to this? Was it Marianne?’

  ‘Not directly. She introduced me to one of her … lieutenants.’

  ‘At a meeting? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘You were busy. With your books, remember?’ There was an accusing note in her voice that made Connie shrink. She had been preoccupied, it was true, but it seemed inconceivable that the militants should have got their claws into Lily without her even noticing. When Marianne had asked them that night in November if they could be counted upon, they had both been doubtful. The prospect of prison seemed too grotesque to bear thinking about. But something – someone – had changed Lily’s mind, and any minute now she was going to take an irreversible step. Ahead of them, the Strand was a honking fury of motor cabs and buses. She clutched at Lily’s arm.

  ‘Please, think about this. You don’t have to do it.’

  Lily paused, reluctantly. Her face was deathly pale, but it was her voice, the quiet decision in it, that frightened Connie. ‘No, you’re wrong. I do have to do it.’ She held her gaze a moment longer, then, with a little skip, darted across the road. She was briefly lost amid the traffic, reappearing at the corner of Villiers Street, where she stood surveying the crowds, left and right. An agony of suspense finally drove Connie to cross the road herself, and as she walked towards her friend she wondered, in a flash of desperation, if she might snatch Lily’s bag out of her hand and make off with it.

  On seeing her approach, Lily half turned away, as if from a troublesome acquaintance one hopes to avoid. ‘I can’t let you do this,’ Connie said.

  ‘For God’s sake, keep your voice down,’ Lily replied in a sharp undertone. ‘There are policemen everywhere.’

  ‘Lil, I implore you –’

  But Lily was looking beyond Connie’s shoulder. ‘That’s her,’ she said, and as she moved away she began to open her handbag. Connie saw a woman twenty yards up the street nodding at Lily’s approach, and then caught a glint of metal in her gloved hand. Lily had stopped in front of a silversmith’s, its huge plate-glass windows holding a mirror to the Strand’s ceaseless toing and froing. From the direction of St Martin-in-the-Fields bells rang out, announcing the hour. Connie sensed her own reflection gravitating across the shopfront when, as in a dream where perverse and unlikely events occur within a familiar setting, she watched Lily swing the hammer against the glass. It sounded a thin metallic clunk and bounced off, leaving the pane intact. Office workers on their way home looked round in curiosity. She swung again, harder, and this time the glass broke with an affronted squeal. A neat hole opened up, with spiderweb cracks vectoring in every direction; her third and fourth blows sent the whole thing crashing in. From along the street came answering sounds of shattered glass. A man, his lips twisted in rage, came hurrying out of the shop door and bellowed, ‘Oi, you bloody hellcat!’

  Lily, ignoring him, had moved on to the next window, and was about to deal it the same treatment when the man, a good foot taller than the assailant, dragged her back by the hair. She cried out in pain. Connie, who had been immobilised with horror up to this point, instinctively moved to her friend’s defence.

  ‘Stop that,’ she shouted, and clutched hold of the man’s tailcoat. She heard the material rip in her hands as he jerked away. Turning, he hissed, ‘Fucking cow!’

  The violent shove he gave Connie sent her flying head first towards the window, the one Lily had been about to break. She heard an onlooker’s startled ‘Oh!’ as her face smacked against the glass. The shock of impact dazed her – it had caught her flush on the nose – and she staggered against a lamp post in an effort to stay upright. She straightened her hat.

  ‘Are you all right, miss?’ she heard someone ask, and then mixed in with the echoes of tinkling glass came the quick high shrills of a whistle. Lily, grappling still with the silversmith’s man, called out, ‘Connie! It’s the police – run for it!’

  It took Connie a few seconds to realise that she was now in danger – was it aiding and abetting? – and, her nose still smarting, she looked round to see two, no, three policemen dodging through the crowds towards them. Mechanically she turned and broke into a hustling kind of run, her boots crunching over glass where the other woman was still bashing out her own splintery chaos from the shop windows. She appeared to be enjoying herself. Panic lent lightness to Connie’s feet as she brushed past sandwich-board men and startled shoppers, who scattered out of the way of this careering madwoman. She slowed for a moment as her nose began to drip – she touched it and found blood on her glove – then turned to s
ee one of the policemen wrestle the hammer-wielding woman to the ground. His colleague was looking up the street, and having spotted her was now in pursuit. How absurd, she thought, to be chased up the Strand by a bobby! It sounded like something from a music-hall song. But her wildly beating heart urged her to run as fast as she could: which, given her hobble skirt, was not fast enough. Another glance behind told her the policeman was gaining.

  A motor cab some yards ahead was turning into a side street, and without thinking she followed it. Ahead of her she saw the glittering facade of the Savoy, its forecourt thronged with porters, cabmen and bejewelled guests. Slowing to a more decorous trot, she removed a glove and held it to her nose. She had just nodded at the liveried doorman when, behind her, she heard a shout. ‘Stop that woman!’

  Without turning, Connie darted through the revolving doors and into the hotel foyer. Where now? Strangers idled about, heedless of her plight. She trotted across the chequered floor and almost collided with a bellboy.

  ‘The ladies’ cloakroom?’ she said, her mouth still muffled by the glove.

  ‘That way, miss. Just follow the signs.’

  She ducked into a corridor, not seeing any signs. Around the next corner, a group of men in evening dress were ambling towards her. She turned her face away from them, fearful of their scrutiny. The dazzle of the white walls and the electric lights oppressed her senses. Further down the corridor another man in tails was hurrying to catch up with the others. She didn’t look at him, either – but he looked at her, and stopped very suddenly.

  ‘Miss Callaway?’

  She glanced up, and took a few seconds to recognise – the cricketer.

  ‘Mr … Maitland –’ His face was frowning in alarm.

  ‘Good heavens. You’re bleeding –’

  ‘Yes, the Ladies?’ she interrupted.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, with a little bow. He escorted her along the corridor, and stopped at a door marked WC. Connie pushed it open and was about to enter when she turned back to Will.