‘Look here,’ he said, awkwardly. ‘I shouldn’t have said them things I said. It weren’t right. I’m – I’m sorry, all right?’
She looked at him wearily, with that same dead gaze.
‘It dun’t matter,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ She closed her eyes.
He said, a little panicked, ‘It does, though. I am sorry, honest I am. You believe me, don’t you?’
She stared at him for so long that he thought she wasn’t going to answer. He began to grow afraid. He hadn’t meant it. Or – if he had, he hadn’t meant to hurt her quite as hard as all that.
‘Nell …’ he said. ‘Nell, old girl. We’re mates, you and me, ain’t we?’
At last, she seemed to see him. She gave a ‘Ha!’ and took a puff on her disgusting cheap tobacco. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you want. What does it bloody matter, anyway?’
But he noted that she didn’t apologise.
Kneading
MRS BARBER WAS in a bad mood. She was making the bread for the next day, pounding it against the tabletop as she kneaded it. May sat in the kitchen and watched her. Her mother was giving an anti-war lecture in Southampton. She’d been doing a lot of this lately. May much preferred it to the committee meetings, because at least she could come along and give out handbills. But tonight was a school night, and May’s mother wouldn’t be home until gone midnight, so May was once again left with Mrs Barber.
‘Your mother,’ said Mrs Barber, ‘had better watch out. She’s going to be getting herself in trouble, one of these days.’
‘Mama?’ said May, surprised. ‘Why? Has someone said something?’
‘Has someone said something!’ Mrs Barber slammed the dough against the table. ‘That John Catlin ought to know better, he ought. As if your mother would conspire with Germans!’ John Catlin was the postman, and an old enemy of Mrs Barber’s. ‘Still,’ she went on, ‘I’ve a good mind to tell her, she shouldn’t be sending off for foreign German papers. People do talk.’
‘Do you mean Jus Suffragii?’ said May. ‘Darling Mrs Barber, that’s not German. It’s Latin. It’s the paper of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.’
‘Huh,’ said Mrs Barber. ‘Well, he is a fool, then. As if Germans would be writing in a Latin newspaper!’
Jus Suffragii was published in English and French, but May did not bother to correct her.
‘Actually,’ she said. ‘There was a letter from German suffragists in this one, sending greetings to everyone else. We sent them a greeting before Christmas too. Women don’t want to fight wars, you know, Mrs Barber, especially not suffragists. We’re all for equality and justice, not one set of people being better than everyone else.’
‘Tell that to Mrs Pankhurst,’ said Mrs Barber darkly. Mrs Pankhurst had been very vocal recently on how everyone ought to give up fighting for votes and start fighting for Britain instead.
‘Mama says,’ said May, ‘that some women in the IWSA want to organise a peace conference just for women, with representatives from all the countries in the alliance. It’s going to be in the Netherlands, she says. Won’t that be marvellous?’
‘A peace conference!’ said Mrs Barber. ‘What good will that do? Women can’t stop this war, dearie. Only the men could do that, and they won’t. Like little boys, they are. If Mr Asquith and the Kaiser were in my nursery, I’d bang their heads together until they were ready to kiss and make up.’
May giggled.
‘I bet the Kaiser wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I bet he was a horrible little boy. But, Mrs Barber, that isn’t true, you know. Mr Asquith and the Kaiser aren’t the ones fighting this war – it’s ordinary people like us. If everyone just refused to fight, they’d have to make it up. There was the most glorious article about it – Mama showed me. It said that governments oughtn’t to be allowed to decide anything like foreign policy without everyone in the country being allowed to vote on it – everyone, do you see? Women too. Women won’t ever vote to go to war, you know, Mrs Barber, it’s only men who think like that. If we could just get the vote, there wouldn’t ever be any more wars, ever.’
The old arguments came out easily enough. But even to May, they rang a little hollow. Women had been depressingly eager to send their sons and husbands off to France. Millicent Fawcett had outraged May’s mother by declaring that it was treason to even talk of peace – a declaration which was rather baffling given the nature of most of her organisation’s official statements. It was one thing for old Mrs Pankhurst to change her mind, but for Mrs Fawcett to do the same!
May’s mother had resigned her membership in a fury, along, it must be said, with a rush of other women. But even so. May loved the idea of the modern, twentieth-century woman, who would throw off the stale old traditions of Victorian England. It was deeply depressing to discover that Modern Woman was just as nationalistic and war-hungry as Victorian Woman had been.
Mrs Barber knew this as well as May, but she did not say so. Mrs Barber loved May and her mother – almost as much as she would have loved a child of her own. But she considered them both incurable innocents, and saw no reason to disabuse them of their quaint notions about basic human goodness. Quakers believed there was that of God in everyone. Mrs Barber thought there might be exceptions.
‘Well!’ she said to May. ‘That’s a lovely idea, dearie, but Mr Asquith won’t let your mother go to the Netherlands and talk to Germans, you know. Why! He’d arrest her as a spy, like as not, and send her to prison.’
‘Mama wouldn’t care,’ said May. ‘And neither would I. Just let Mr Asquith try, that’s all!’
Consolation
IT WAS A miserable day in December. Nell couldn’t bear to go home. She turned instead towards May’s house. At least it was warm in May’s house. (Although it wasn’t, actually; the living-room fire was a sputtery, resentful, hiccupy little thing, and May never had a fire in her room unless she was ill. May’s room was actually colder than home. But May was always happy to lend you jerseys. And of course they had other ways of keeping themselves warm, when it was just the two of them.)
And at least it was quiet. At least you could hear yourself think.
At least there was food.
There was less food than there used to be, though. Nobody had much food these days, even the nobs. Nell was never sure quite how much money May’s family had, and of course one couldn’t ask. There was the slavey, Mrs Barber, and the nice house, and the fancy school, and Mrs Thornton was a gentlewoman, of course. But all of May’s clothes were worn and darned and let-down, and her mama had to work, and there were the pitiful fires, and Mrs Barber’s grumbles about the price of bread, and the food all vegetables. Vegetables were what you ate when money was so tight you couldn’t even afford a Sunday roast. Even as hungry as Nell’s family were now, they still ate bread and beef dripping for tea.
So it was a mystery. Different rules evidently applied if you were gentry. Nobody actually said anything about food, but Nell was given the general impression that, while of course they were very sorry for her trouble, and of course she was always very welcome, perhaps it wouldn’t be politic to come round all the time. Not with prices what they were at the moment, and May’s mama so busy with her anti-war work, and no time to teach piano.
Not that she should stop coming. But just … well. She knew.
Nell did. She was painfully proud, and would have died rather than have Mrs Barber think she was trying to scab off May’s generosity. As a result, she turned down so many invitations that May began to wonder if she’d done something to offend her. It didn’t help that autumn was now here, and you couldn’t just sit in the park like you could in summer. And May had school, of course, and prep in the evenings. And, and, and …
But Nell couldn’t stop seeing her. May, to Nell, was like opium. Like brandy on a cold day. Like an electric shock. She made everything blaze. What did all the petty mess of manners matter when there was May there, waiting?
So she still came.
; She just saved May for days when everything was most desperate.
Today was a desperate day. This morning, she’d been offered a job as a milkman’s mate. She kept this job for a total of five minutes until a boy, coming too late, cried in bitter jealousy: ‘You can’t give it to her, mister! She’s a girl!’
‘Don’t be daft!’ said the milkman, roughly, and then, in sudden doubt, ‘You ain’t, is you?’
Nell hesitated, but before she could answer, the boy cried, ‘Yeh, she is! She’s Bill Swancott’s sister! Look at her: she’s got titties and all!’
‘You shut your face!’ cried Nell in fury, but it was too late. The damage was done.
‘What you doing dressed like that anyway?’ the milkman said. ‘It’s disgusting, that’s what it is. Like them women what goes round setting fire to things. Mad, they are. Someone ought to lock them up before they hurts someone. What’s your mother think she’s playing at, letting you go about dressed like that? I ain’t being funny, love, but no one’s going to give you a job looking like that.’
The guilt and the misery twisted up inside of her all day, until she could bear it no longer and went round to May’s, uninvited and unannounced.
Mrs Barber answered the door.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s polite to give notice before descending on a family for supper? What if we were otherwise engaged?’
Nell had never done any such thing before in her life, and this welcome rather crushed her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I does usually, honest I does, ma’am. I don’t need nothing to eat, I ain’t hungry. And I can go away if May’s busy. I don’t mean any trouble, ma’am, honour bright I don’t.’
‘All right,’ said Mrs Barber, her face softened, almost imperceptibly. ‘As it happens, Mrs Thornton’s been held up at a committee meeting, so we’ve supper going spare. And in this house, I hope we wouldn’t make a guest go hungry. But just you remember for next time, you hear me?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Nell. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ And she scurried inside.
May – hearing her voice – was coming down the stairs. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Don’t mind La Barber. She’s in an awful wax because Mama’s been out every night this week, and Mrs Barber thinks she’ll give herself TB or something. Did you ever hear anything so absurd? I say, though, what’s up?’
Nell explained. ‘It ain’t nothing, not really …’ But the further into the story she got, the more upset she found herself becoming. As she got towards the end, she was horrified to hear her voice begin to wobble and tears start in her eyes. She was going to cry! She never cried! Boys didn’t, and if boys didn’t, neither would Nell. Living in such close quarters, it was essential to learn how to keep your feelings locked away, and Nell was an expert. Yet here she was, almost crying on May’s landing, over something as stupid as this!
May said, ‘Nell! Nell, it’s all right. Come on. What a beastly man. You don’t want to listen to people like him. You never do usually, do you?’
Nell sniffed and rubbed her nose with her sleeve. This was awful! It wasn’t at all how you were supposed to behave, especially around your girl. Men might drink, when things got bad, but they never, ever cried. Nell didn’t think she’d ever seen her father cry. Not when the baby died. Not when Bernie had diphtheria. Never.
‘Naw,’ she said, turning her head away. She felt she couldn’t bear sympathy, on top of everything else. She could face any cruelty, but kindness always destroyed her.
‘Hush. Hush. Nell. Darling Nell.’ May’s hands were on her face, and she was kissing her, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, her nose. Nell was shaking. ‘Nell. Nell, my love. It doesn’t matter what they think. I love you. That’s what matters. Darling Nell, please don’t cry.’
Nell pulled herself away.
‘You what?’
‘I love you. Didn’t you know?’
Nell blinked at her. She rubbed her eyes, trying to buy herself time, to take in what she’d said. May loved her! Her! Nell! A blazing star of a girl like May, and she loved her! It wasn’t possible. It bewildered her.
‘Aren’t you pleased? I won’t say it again if you don’t want me to.’
Pleased! Pleased was too small a word for what Nell felt. It was as though her whole world had been turned topside-up. She couldn’t contain it.
‘You love me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you a loony?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Now May was laughing. ‘Why? Don’t you love me?’
But Nell couldn’t sort that one out either. It all seemed so simple for May; you had two people, and they loved each other, and that was that. But May to Nell was more than love. She was joy, and torment, and magic, and terror, and lust, and hope, and despair, and secrets, and truth, and sin. May was a lodestone in a bewildering world. She was everything. How could you take all that and call it love?
But if it wasn’t love, what was it?
‘Go on now,’ she said weakly. May took her hands in hers.
‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I belong to you, and you belong to me. You know that, don’t you? Come back when you’ve worked it all out. I love you. I promise. I’ll be right here, waiting.’
March
1915
I THOUGHT OF the armies marching now along the great main thoroughfares of Europe, everywhere bringing destruction to peaceful homes … the cries of fatherless children, the groans of injured men; a gigantic arrest of human progress … beneath all a great hunger, till famine prove the victor …
The night long, as I grieved there in my solitude, the men called up to war yelled on, in quenchless mirth.
The Home Front, Sylvia Pankhurst
Tea Parties, Euclid and Knitting
FOR EVELYN, THE first six months of the war passed in something of a daze. She felt strangely dislocated – from the rest of the world, but also from herself. All of the things that had previously ordered her days had disappeared: school, Teddy, her schoolfriends, even the Suffragettes. In the usual course of things, she would have ‘come out’. There would have been parties and dances; Evelyn’s friend Joyce had been to a dance organised for the entertainment of soldiers, and another to raise money for Belgian refugees. But for a long time, she had been too ill for parties.
Fortunately for Evelyn, as she began to grow stronger, she found that the work for her Oxford Scholarship examinations took up most of her time. To pass these, she would have to know a great deal more than what was taught in a small second-rate private girls’ school. She had weekly lessons in Latin and Greek with Miss Dempsey, as well as further sessions at a boy’s crammer in Hampstead, wrestling with Euclid and the baffling intricacies of geometry. The work was hard, but it was exactly the sort which suited Evelyn, and it was a relief to be worrying about conjunctions and irregular verbs instead of what might very shortly be happening to Teddy and Christopher. Any time spent not working was swept up by her mother, who insisted that she take part in the busy life of middle-class Hampstead, a seemingly endless round of tea parties, and dinner parties, and bridge parties, and church bazaars, and war work, which mostly seemed to mean knitting. Evelyn and her mother both attended first-aid classes run by the Red Cross, accompanied by an enthusiastic Kezia, whose one hope seemed to be that the war would last until she was old enough to go out to France as a stretcher-bearer.
Teddy and Christopher had both managed to get commissions in London regiments. Neither of them had yet gone out to France; Teddy’s regiment was in an army camp near Brighton, while Christopher’s was somewhere in Kent. Christopher minded being in England ferociously, but Teddy seemed happy enough where he was. He sent Evelyn letters full of vivid pencil sketches of soldiers, and Brighton children playing in the streets, and still lifes of souvenir shops and army barracks, and revolvers.
‘Probably best to burn these as soon as you get them,’ he wrote cheerfully. ‘Simply frightful things could happen if t
hey get into the wrong hands.’ Evelyn didn’t burn them, of course, but stuck her favourite pictures up around the mirror on her dressing-table and glared at them whenever she was feeling black-doggish. She was rather surprised by how much she missed him. How ridiculous to feel like this, like a girl in a penny romance! She told herself firmly that she was a modern woman, and had more important things than boys to worry about. But it didn’t seem to make much difference. She still missed him like anything.
The Oxford examinations were held at Easter, in a hall full of earnest-looking schoolboys, most of whom had no intention of taking up their places if the war still happened to be going on in October.
‘But, of course, it’ll probably all be over by then,’ one boy told Evelyn gloomily. ‘Just my rotten luck my birthday’s not till August.’
Evelyn could only hope he was right.
Every Man Will Do His Duty
THERE WERE FEWER boys in Coney Lane now. It seemed to Bill like everyone had joined up, everyone who was eighteen anyway, though when he said this to Mum she said, ‘Don’t be so daft! What about Clarence? And Robbie? And Dolly Ivey’s Leonard – he’s still around, ain’t he?’
‘Len Ivey is a scab and a wart,’ said Bill. ‘If he joined the army, he’d probably desert. You don’t think I’m like him, Mum, do you?’
‘Don’t you talk like that about your elders, young man …’ Mum began, and the subject had been dropped.
Bill longed for conscription, then he would have to join up, no matter what Mum said about it. If the war was still going on when he was eighteen. Which it mightn’t be.
He was beginning dimly to understand that this war was more than an adventure, or a chance to serve your country. That for the young men of his generation, this would be the defining experience, a bloody Freemasonry to which you would either belong, or would spend your whole life knowing that when this moment had come, you’d been found wanting.