Park Lane (8 page)

Avoiding Joseph’s eye as she leaves alone, Bea walks straight out of the door and climbs blindly into the taxi waiting outside, which, to her relief, does contain Celeste, who is immaculately dressed for battle. She is wearing a high-collared coat buttoned up to her chin and is carrying a walking stick. Bea thinks at first, how odd, she doesn’t need it, and shortly afterwards starts to wonder what she does need it for. Bea looks down at her own clothes. On the offchance that she saw Mother on her way out, Bea has dressed for a musical recital. However, at least her overcoat is heavy, though whether it will protect her silk petticoat during whatever evening lies ahead, is in the lap of the gods. She feels a shiver of fear, and enjoys the sensation.

Campden Hill Square is dark. It is not well lit, and between the houses on either side a railed garden falls down the hill to the thoroughfare of Holland Park Avenue. The trees in front of the houses meld into those growing over the fence of the garden’s iron rails, forming a leafless canopy.

Bea feels the crowd before she is in its infectious mass of hot breath and expectation. Hundreds of people are jam-packed up the narrow slope of a road on the east side of the square and rise up the hill in a dark swarm. Bea’s heart quickens as it engulfs her and she and Celeste are swept down Holland Park Avenue by a tide of new
arrivals. The two of them are bobbing about excitedly in the centre, which is moving quickly enough to keep them there. Bea is pushed in the back and tries to look around, but is knocked forward again as she does so. She is surprised by this roughness and lets out a small gasp. Buck up, old girl, she tells herself, these are the suffragettes.

The crowd carries them on and past the eastern side of the square, where the mass is densest. Celeste makes an effort at pushing her way back to the edge but the steady movement forward keeps her locked in line. ‘Dammit and blast it,’ says Celeste. ‘Just go with it, Beatrice, we’ll go up the far side of the square with this lot and then make it down from the top. Aim for the third tree from the bottom.’

Bea is not as certain as Celeste. She can’t see who’s at the top of the square, but she doubts it’s empty. Or that they have much choice as to where they are going. The crowd turns up the far side of the square towards the grand terrace at the top, carrying them along with its burble of clipped ‘Hold on theres’ and thick miaows of ‘Oi, that’s my foot yer on’. Bea shuts her eyes for an instant. It will hardly make any difference to the direction in which she is travelling.

God, the smell. Bea has never smelt perspiration like this. Some of it smells as though it has settled indelibly not just on the skin, but on the medley of both stiff and worn serges, tweeds, fine wools, the odd mackintosh that Bea is being knocked against. Or rather squeezed against, for the stream feels as if it is tightening around her, and sticks are digging into her sides.

Bea is now frightened by this. If the crowd goes on tightening how will she breathe, how will any of them breathe, how will any of them get away from here? But all that they can do, any of the hundreds of people jammed around her and Celeste, is move wherever they are taken. The crowd surges forward in stops and starts, each jolt throwing Bea against her neighbours. She may have escaped Park Lane this evening, but she is again in a place where she
cannot make an independent decision as to where she is going. At least she decided to come here. Yet is it inevitable that, however many decisions you make, at some point you find yourself again being swept along by events? Thank God she’s not here alone; if she could, she’d stitch her coat to Celeste’s, which is drifting in and out of reach. On they are pushed, right along the terrace to the corner, and back down the hill, where the weight of the crowd descending behind her becomes worryingly heavy. Then they stop. She and Celeste have reached a wall of bodies so densely packed that they cannot be pushed any further.

Below them spread the darkened curves and corners of ladies’ hats and gentlemen’s bowlers, nearly all pointing in the direction of a single lit window on the first floor of a house near the bottom. Celeste starts to pick her way down towards it, moving into gaps ahead of her invisible to Bea. Instead Bea moves sideways down the hill, ‘sorry’ by ‘sorry’, and sharp-elbowed hiss by hiss. She stumbles, they’re bloody well sticking their feet out, maybe Mother is right that they are lunatics. Bea is losing Celeste and fluttering a little, the light is jolly poor and the crowd is heaving and pushing and she’s struggling to keep upright. Celeste, unhampered by manners, is moving far faster. Bea tries to track what she thinks is her aunt’s hat through the jostling ahead but the wall of bodies tightens. That’s it, no further, she’s done rather well, though Celeste’s ‘third tree’ is still twenty yards out of reach. For the first time in her life, Bea is alone at night and in a crowd of strangers, her heart is racing and she feels breathless with the excited fear of riding towards a high hedge with a complete lack of control. She tries to push again, caring less about whom she knocks on her way – the lesser evil to being seen, or even being, on her own – but the shoulders in front respond by rising more firmly against her. This at last fires some push into Bea herself. Well, damn them, she’s jolly well going to get through.

‘Not a chance,’ says an overly cut-glass female voice behind her. ‘You won’t get any closer. But you can see the house from here.
Well, some of it. Don’t I know you? I’m sure I do.’ Bea stiffens. Good God, who is it, one of Mother’s friends? But one of Mother’s friends would not be here, and it is a voice that means well. Right now that is worth the risk of being discovered. Bea can always say she is engaged in some kind of espionage, just here to find out what the other side is up to. The woman behind this voice might be able to help her. Besides, there’s a limit to how long you can stand practically in somebody’s arms and ignore them.

So Bea turns, or rather twists her head until she feels she has the neck of a giraffe. The woman is using her umbrella to steady herself as she stands on tiptoe – she is wearing make-up, and a little too much of it. What a relief; not a chance that Bea knows a woman like that.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘First time?’

‘No,’ lies Bea. She doesn’t want this stranger to latch on to her in sympathy.

‘A thousand here, I should say,’ the woman continues, nodding back up the hill. ‘Hours ago, some of us came. It’s so pleasing to have a good position, isn’t it?’

Bea does not feel as though she has a good position. She has failed to reach the tree, and she has lost Celeste, which makes her position, if anything, precarious. She has a sudden dread that this is going to be one of those evenings when the police come rushing out. That would be more that Bea bargained for, she’s heard about what can happen then; now nervous, she starts to count the number of walking sticks she has seen. But surely, surely, nothing bad can happen to her on her first time.

‘Are the police here?’ she asks.

‘Oh, I couldn’t be sure. I haven’t seen any uniforms. Maybe they’ve popped into the bushes. What a lark!’ The woman lowers her voice and leans over to whisper into Bea’s ear. ‘But of course as long as she’s in the house they can’t lay a finger on her.’

The crowd has become suffocating. Bea has survived more than
her fair share of crushes in houses too small for the numbers invited. This, however, is both more threatening and, well, dammit, more thrilling, even though – or perhaps because – there is no sign of Celeste. The night air is setting in and people are moving from foot to foot as the sway of the crowd pushes them to and fro, shaking the wet-dog smell of damp wool into Bea’s nostrils. She has another go at moving towards the tree but the shoulders in front of her tighten further and a voice growls back, ‘Should have come ealier if you wanted to be up front.’

Closer to the house, a group of women are starting to chant: ‘Em-mel-ine, Em-mel-ine.’ In front of Bea is a small figure dressed in pale grey, an expensive pale grey. This is not the place to dress up, thinks Bea, and she’s tiny, can’t be more than a girl who should be in bed by now. Christ, she’s getting old to have thoughts like these. Bea, Celeste is right, you really do need to do something with your life. The figure turns to glance behind her and Bea sees, to her astonishment, a flash of pearl earrings, a face that has seen seven decades and a grey gloved hand gripping the handle of an umbrella. What, Bea asks herself, makes all these women come?

On the dot of eight thirty, a silhouette appears at the lit window and the crowd roars. A small dark figure climbs between the open panes and on to a delicate wrought-iron balcony. It can be barely wide enough for her feet, thinks Bea. The woman stands up, a feathered hat black against the light, like a potentate’s, and extends her hands. The crowd rustles into silence and in the minutes that follow Bea forgets she has lost Celeste, forgets she is alone, and forgets she is surrounded by strangers.

‘Bravo! Bravo!’ She hears the sounds coming from her own lips.

‘God bless you, Mrs Pankhurst.’ A man’s voice. Well, there are enough of them here, though half of them probably plain-clothes policemen. That is how, Celeste has warned her, some of the police come.

Then Mrs Pankhurst speaks. A thousand people stare at the
silhouette moving above them, their heads tilted back, chins up. Mrs Pankhurst raises her arms until her hands are level with her shoulders, palms facing her congregation. She will, she says, come down to join them, but first she must tell them what needs to be done. Her voice is clear. It carries over the dark swell of bodies as it declares that, by fighting, women can ‘show to the manhood of this world the kind of stuff we are made of’.

‘If,’ Mrs Pankhurst continues, ‘our violence is wrong then the violence of Christ is wrong.’ Then she lists a stream of violent New Testament references. Bea feels herself listening with a single, collective ear that is the crowd drawing in every word of this Christ-like figure who is feeding them, the one thousand, with encouragement alone. ‘Nothing,’ she says, ‘can put down this movement. They may kill us, but they cannot crush this movement.’

Celeste has told Bea that in prison Mrs Pankhurst hunger-strikes so that she has to be released until she is well enough to be re-arrested, then she moves constantly, her whereabouts secret. It is only when she is out of the country that she can spend more than one night in a single place. Now she is ‘manifesting herself’, thinks Bea, to her disciples. As Mrs Pankhurst speaks of hope and right, and struggle that must shy from no act, whatever the price it takes, exhilaration emanates out through the crowd, passing from touching shoulder to touching shoulder. When it reaches Bea, she finds her lips tingling.

‘When your forefathers fought for their liberty, they took lives …’ And then a heckle, another man’s voice, pushed loud. ‘But you are only a woman.’ This is immediately followed by half a dozen other voices telling him to be quiet. Bea feels her shoulders tighten, he has made a direct shot, this voice, and the comment grates under her skin. ‘Only a woman.’ Bea thought of Tom’s friends at Gowden. How was she ‘only’ compared to people like that? What did ‘only’ a woman ‘only’ do? After all, she goes to lectures, she is here, too, out in a crowd, alone, surrounded by strangers, listening. But ‘do’? Listening could not be stretched to
doing. If she were not to exist, thinks Bea, what acts would be undone? She has lived for twenty, almost twenty-one, years without making a mark. Her embarrassment curdles into anger against the heckler, against his little pack of chums, against every single person who thinks a woman is an ‘only’.

Mrs Pankhurst does not fear that she has done nothing. She turns the comment back.

‘That is what we are fighting, my friends. We women are fighting not as women, but as human beings, for human rights.’ She defies the police to arrest her again, and taunts them for cowardice in not keeping her in jail. Cowardice for force-feeding her, head pulled back, strapping her down. They stick a tube through her mouth or nose, and push it right down to her stomach. All the women scream, Celeste has told Bea, in detail, and over lunch, which somewhat stalled Bea’s appetite. The warders pour in a liquid. ‘All futile, really,’ said Celeste. ‘They only vomit it back up with the blood from their gums.’ Last time Emmeline had had enough and when the warders came in, she held a clay jug above her head and threatened to hit them, and they’d released her before she had died from starvation. ‘A martyr ain’t good for politics. They’re just going to take her back when she’s well enough. Ruddy Parliament and their Cat and Mouse Act.’

And now, thinks Bea, the police, the Cat, want their Mouse back and here she is, standing right above their noses, mocking them, and untouchable, even if she is ‘only a woman’. Ha, thinks Bea.

Mrs Pankhurst is exhorting her listeners to lay down their own lives, for what, she asks, ‘is life? At best it is very short. Would it not be well, when we leave this life, as leave it we must, to leave it having struck a blow for what is truer life; having struck a blow for the freedom of our sex; having struck a blow against subjection; having struck a blow against the vicious conditions into which the majority of our sex is born; having struck a blow against the disease and degradation of the masses of our country? Can you,’ asks Mrs Pankhurst, ‘keep your self-respect any longer?’ And Bea, standing
there, wonders at her own life, its lunches and dinners and dances. Mrs Pankhurst, Bea realises, makes her tremble.

Mother calls herself a suffragist, and Mrs Pankhurst ‘a proponent of lunacy’. Mother believes that every step Mrs Pankhurst takes makes women appear less suitable to be given the vote. She is far from alone. There are middle-class men who don’t believe women should vote, working-class men who fear that women may be given the vote instead of them, and women like Mother who are quite convinced that only their approach can succeed. She expects Bea and Clemmie to fall in line with her point of view, and upon the very first meeting of the National Union branch down near Beauhurst – which she co-founded – dragooned the pair of them to come along. Clemmie begged Mother not to put her name on the list.