The Hourglass Factory (6 page)

To Frankie’s relief Gracie came back with a bottle of Old Tom and a couple of crystal sherry glasses. With a weary heart she knocked back a couple of swallows. Twinkle had Gracie pour the
gin straight into her mouth. The sight reminded Frankie of the Holloway feeding tube. She suddenly sat up straighter.

‘Twinkle, do you know a trapeze girl?’

Twinkle’s eyes had gone glossy with the hit of alcohol. ‘I know a dozen. Gracie, I think it’s time to get out, turn around, Puss.’

‘But do you know one called Ebony Diamond?’

‘Name rings a bell,’ she grunted. ‘No, not that way, I’ll never get my feet through that hole. Are you simple?’ Frankie realised she could still see Twinkle in the
mirror, heaving herself into a pink satinette robe with Gracie fuddling over the ties.

‘She’s a suffragette.’

‘Well they’ve all got bats in the belfry if you ask me. Who wants a vote anyway? Next they’ll be expecting us to sit in that dull parliament, stinking of men. Now,’ she
wriggled her arms down into the sleeves. Gracie gave a yelp. ‘That’s what you get for having fists like ham hocks.’

Frankie closed her eyes for slightly longer than a blink. ‘She’s a gypsy. You’d know her if you saw her.’

When Frankie opened her eyes she saw Twinkle had turned to face her. Her gaze was cold. ‘Why do you want to know, Puss?’ She batted a hand at Gracie. ‘No, leave my hair, just
fetch the cold cream will you?’

‘It’s Mr Stark; he wants me to do a portrait of her.’

‘Really?’ There was a sour note in Twinkle’s tone. ‘How strange.’

‘Well she’s on at the Coliseum tomorrow. And –’ she broke off, seeing the hard bright smile on Twinkle’s face and felt herself treading on thin ice. ‘Do you
mind if I . . . ?’ She reached for the Old Tom bottle.

Twinkle smiled, deliberately wide. ‘Not at all, Puss. Pour me one too, there’s a dear.’

Twinkle sat at her dressing table and began rubbing grease into her face. Gracie had scarpered. Frankie passed across a glass, then knocked back her own and poured another. It was hot, herbal,
pleasant. She felt it swimming up to her brain. ‘She’s interesting. She wears these black corsets.’

Twinkle turned on her stool and stared again at Frankie. ‘Really, these Sapphic obsessions of yours are so dull.’ Her eyes, though sunk amid folds of skin, had a ball-bearing of
steel to their core.

‘Right,’ Frankie slunk back in her seat. ‘Dinner party topics?’

‘Well, now you mention it, I do think I know her. Quite the Gibson girl, as I recall.’ She sucked in her cheekbones and put her hands round her waist. ‘Out of fashion now, of
course. It’s all thick waists and skinny hips these days. But she must have had a fun time in Holloway. Hunger striking would be positively up her strada.’ Suddenly Twinkle spun round,
her face lit up like the moon. ‘That’s it, Puss. That’s the dinner party topic. Starvation fashion. I love it, it’s brilliant, you’re a genius, Puss.’ She threw
her hands in the air and for a second Frankie was worried she was about to be assaulted by a squashing embrace. But Twinkle only made for the bed instead and flung herself backwards, groaning as
her back hit the furs. A noxious cloud of violet eau de toilette flew up from her.

‘Hold on a minute.’

‘No, it’s perfect, write it down. Will hunger striking ever catch on as a fashion trend? It’s perfect. It’s so wonderfully now. It’s delicioso. It’s deevie,
Puss. Get the suffragette waif look without setting foot in Holloway.’

‘Twinkle, you know how much trouble I’d be in. It’s taken long enough to get them off my back after the cartoon. It’s my name goes on the column too. You know
that.’

‘Mr Stark will love it.’

‘Twinkle, please.’

‘Well what? Have you got any better ideas? Next you’re going to be suggesting we write about Lloyd George’s budget or national pensions. How about the death of the House of
Lords or the rise of trade unionism?’ She reached for her gin glass. ‘Come on, they’re all bats. What do you care?’

‘But Ebony . . .’ she tailed off.

‘Yes?’

‘She’ll kill me.’

‘Since when was Frankie George frightened of a suffragette? Do you remember that day we dressed up my cockatoo to look like Christabel Pankhurst?’

‘It’s different, that didn’t offend anyone.’

‘Well why do you care?’

Frankie fiddled with her pencil.

‘Come on, spit it out, or you shan’t have any more gin.’

Frankie sighed. ‘Ebony Diamond. She had this huge argument today with the man who makes her costumes. Right in front of me, got proper violent. I’m not sure what about, but
she’s big in the suffragettes and I just, I don’t know. If I can get her trust I might be onto something. You know how desperate I am to get into reporting. Proper . . .’ She
suddenly stopped herself.

‘Proper reporting,’ Twinkle said dryly.

‘I don’t mean like that. I mean—’

‘Puss, you want to watch that mouth of yours. It’s going to get you in trouble one of these days.’ Her hand roamed the covers until she found the head of a dead mink to fondle.
‘You know you’re not really a woman of independent means yet and let me tell you it takes a lot of hard work and quite a bit of doing things you don’t like very much to get there.
Greasing men’s beards. Massaging gouty knees.’ She smiled an eerie, indulgent smile. ‘Do you think I bought all this by only working jobs I felt like?’

‘I was only hoping . . .’

‘You think that because you don’t dress like the rest of us you are above all this froth and nonsense.’

‘Don’t think that at all,’ Frankie muttered.

‘The roaring girls were trussed up like that three hundred years before you. You sound as snotty-nosed as those self-righteous suffragettes you’re so eager to stick up
for.’

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Frankie sipped the dregs of her gin glass. She didn’t dare pour another.

‘Purple then?’ she said after a few moments.

Twinkle was still in a sulk. Her gnarled pink hand fingered the rim of her glass.

‘Twinkle, you know I only brought it up because I thought you’d know a thing or two about her. You know all the society girls.’

Twinkle smiled weakly at the flattery. Newspapergirls, Frankie thought, were nursemaids as much as anything else. ‘And,’ she continued, ‘I thought if anyone would know what men
in toppers were doing going into a corset shop after hours it would be you as well.’ She tossed it out like fish bait. Twinkle suddenly looked sharply at her. Frankie couldn’t be
certain but she thought she saw a frown momentarily crease her forehead. Encouraged, she went on. ‘Oh, crazy it was. I thought I was seeing things. You must know Smythe’s, Bond Street.
I’ll bet you’ve got a couple of his in that wardrobe.’

Twinkle’s eyes had fogged over again with the gin. At length she said slowly, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t go digging around either that girl or any goings-on at Smythe’s.
You might find yourself learning things you rather wish you had left alone.’

Frankie sat up. ‘So you do know the shop I mean?’

‘Olivier Smythe’s? Any woman worth her flesh knows that shop.’

‘So why is it so special?’ She inched forward. ‘What do you know about it?’

Twinkle was silent for a moment, then looked at her coldly. ‘Nothing I would dream of sharing with you.’

Frankie felt her organs beginning to boil.

Twinkle went on, ‘You know I really do feel better after that Turkish bath. I think there’s still enough fuel in the spirit lamp for you to have one too. You don’t mind going
after me, no of course you don’t. Perhaps we’ll write about it after all.’

The wind beat Inspector Primrose’s face as the constable drove, dodging horses and carts and electric trams and white-gloved policemen directing traffic along the Mall.
The Westminster sergeant, Price, tried absurdly hard to keep up a shrieked conversation from the back seat. They approached Old Bond Street from Piccadilly where two vans were parked blocking the
turn off. The constable reared the car up onto the pavement; a group of onlookers dashed for cover as it grunted to a halt next to the Royal Arcade. Primrose clung to the dashboard, slamming into
the side of the door. On the opposite side of the road, the Fenwick’s side, a line of gaping shattered windows ran as far as the eye could see. The hundreds of police seemed equal to the
number of women, voices and catcalls pierced now and then by a single scream.

‘It’s like dominoes the way they do it,’ Price was saying to the other officers. ‘I’ve
seen them. They line themselves up. One goes first, then the next.’ They climbed out of the car, walking apace. Price demonstrated in the air the movement of a hammer on glass. ‘That
way they only get fined one window each.’

The doors of the Black Marias across the street were open and Primrose saw that already there was a cuffed woman in each cubicle, shouting through the wires.

‘I pay taxes, I pay your wages, you criminals!’

‘This is the work of that devil Asquith, let him draw our blood, you’ll never make us stop.’

‘Finger your wife with those hands, do you, sergeant? She’s an unlucky lady.’

In the cubicle nearest the door a woman was weeping. Another reached a hand though the wire towards her. ‘Hold on in there, lovie, don’t worry, they might smell like dogs but their
bark’s worse than their bite.’

Primrose shuddered, watching Price wade into the scene as if it were nothing more than unruly traffic. In the distance towards Oxford Street a breakaway group had pulled out hatchets and rocks
in stockings and were attacking a police car. Other suffragettes were trying to hold them back, calling for just the windows of shops to be smashed, while a group of women with Freedom League
posters were demonstrating, calling for an end to the vandalism. It was all a gigantic mess, Primrose thought, and in the middle of it, green coppers fresh from Peel House were grabbing the arms of
women older and more respectable than their own mothers. All of a sudden Price was behind him again, snapping his fingers. ‘Inspector, Inspector. Look.’

Primrose turned back to where the sergeant was pointing. At first he only saw a woman in a suffragette sash blowing a kiss to her friends as she was led off, cuffed. It was a scene being
repeated the length of the street, ladies in furs calmly being arrested. But beyond the woman a crowd was growing. Bodies were moving in a scrum towards one of the shattered shop windows.

‘Something’s not right there. Why aren’t they on it?’ Price gestured to a couple of constables up the road, whispering and turning a blind eye to the fight. A chant was
creeping steadily from the core of the group, but with all the knotted bodies tangling for the centre it was hard to tell what they were shouting. Primrose pushed forward, Price behind him.
Feathering the group’s edges, small tussles were breaking out, men on men. They were working men, not police, by the look of their neckerchiefs and flat caps, their brown jackets and shirts
open at the neck. Primrose wondered who had alerted them to the smash. Two were at loggerheads, clutching one another by the shoulders, rutting like stags. ‘Call them off,’ the smaller,
stockier one was shouting while the other man grunted and sweated and wrenched him to the street.

‘Here, watch it!’ a tea girl in a pinny cried, as Primrose dug into the clutch of bodies, parting the crowd like a bread roll.

‘Scotland Yard,’ he snapped back.

Her eyes flamed. ‘Well get in there and call off your dogs!’

He heaved his way into the mess leaving Price hovering at the edges. There were some shopkeepers nearby, still in their aprons and overalls. Fists were being thrown towards the centre, people
were shouting. The light was so dim it was hard to see where bodies ended and shadows began.

‘Mercy! Mercy!’ one woman cried. A suffragette in a sash tried to fling in her hammer. Primrose caught her arm just as it flew at him. A flat-capped man turned and snarled in his
face, ‘Get out of here. On police orders.’

‘I am the police.’

The punches were still beating inwards. Something was desperately not right at the centre of the commotion and the crowd outside it was growing larger. As bodies knocked against each other,
people lost their balance and dragged others to the ground by their knees. Primrose flung a boy out of the way and he landed in the stomach of the tea girl, sending her backwards. She screamed. All
of a sudden with the sweat and the bodies bashing against each other he was finding it hard to breathe. Then he saw the legs.

Two white-stockinged pins lay like birch saplings across the pavement. One had lost its boot and been stabbed in the foot with a shard of glass. A little streak of blood ran down the white silk.
Primrose rammed the final few men out of the way, until he saw the rest of the figure lying in a heap.

In front of him two men were pinning her to the ground. From the shape of her body she looked barely older than a teenager, though he couldn’t see her face, obscured as it was by mounds of
shredded petticoats lifted high over her head. She was clinging desperately to a suffragette sash as if it would protect her, screaming blind, her arms held fast above her head. The two men bent
about her were tickling her stomach, pinching her thighs, laughing hysterically. Suddenly a jolt in his back threw Primrose toppling into the girl, sending the two men sideways off their haunches
onto the pavement.

‘Watch it,’ one snarled, turning.

Primrose froze. He knew the voice. But it couldn’t possibly be. He squinted in the dim light, until he was able to focus on the two faces. The crowd suddenly simmered to a hush, interested
now in the men in the centre squaring up to one another.

‘Make up your mind,’ a woman cried scornfully, ‘Either kill us or protect us, don’t pretend you can do both.’

In front of Primrose, smiling sheepishly, as if they had been caught with their fingers in the jam jar, were Wilson and Barnes. Barnes’s lips curled underneath his thick moustache, not a
bit embarrassed, while Wilson looked at his scuffed shoes. ‘Advice we got was to be a bit rough with them, Inspector, make an example.’

Primrose stayed immobile for a second. Then his reason found him and he rushed to cover the girl’s bleeding legs, pulling her skirts back into place.