Various Flavors of Coffee (25 page)

“It does,” he agrees,“although it does not oblige him to.” “Whereas if the market has its way, the workers will always be

paid the bare minimum.” “Indeed.”

“So Free Trade might actually work against the individual liberty of the worker,” she suggests, “by denying him the opportunities which his freedom should bestow. He will not be free of disease, or free of poverty, or free of moral degradation. Nor will he have any opportunity or incentive to rise above his current station.” He looks at her, delighted. “Miss Pinker—Emily—you have summed up in one eloquent nutshell the debate which is currently

preoccupying our party.”

“Really?” She is absurdly pleased by his compliment. “Gladstone, of course, thought that if you simply left everything alone
—laissez faire—
it would all work out for the best. But we are starting to discover the drawbacks of that approach. Did you know that half the men who were called up for service against the Boers had to be sent back to the factories? They were simply unfit to fight.What some of us are talking about now is something called constructive liberalism, or positive liberty—government safeguarding the freedoms and well-being of the individual.”

“Meaning what, in practical terms?”

“Nothing less than a complete change in the role of the state. We would take on, in fact, many of the responsibilities of enlightened employers. For example, why shouldn’t all workers be entitled to some form of medical care? To sick pay? To a pension, even?”

It is all she can do not to gasp.“And this will be your policy?” “It will.”

“How will it be paid for?”

“Well, not by import duties on coffee or tea, obviously—we are committed to reducing those.We are discussing a sort of national insurance scheme, into which every worker would pay according to his or her ability.” He smiles.“I should stress that there is a long way to go. Even within the party, Gladstone has left a long shadow. And”—he glances down the table—“some of those whose support we need to enlist are not yet convinced.”

“How can I help?” “Are you serious?”

“I have never been more serious about anything in my life.” It is exactly what she has always believed in: some middle way between the paternalism of enlightened Tories and the ferocity of the free market. But radical . . . exciting . . . not some dreary compromise but a completely new way forward. It is enough to make her pulse race.

“Would you be prepared, even, to do constituency work?” he says doubtfully.“In my own ward, Ealing, we are in sore need—”

“Yes! Please! Anything!”

“What’s that?” Pinker calls genially from the head of the table. “Brewer, what are you scheming with my daughter?”

Arthur keeps his eyes fixed on her as he answers. “Miss Pinker is volunteering, Samuel. I had no idea she was so interested in politics. Of course, I would ask your permission first. . . .”

Pinker smiles indulgently. “What Emily does in her spare time is up to her. If my daughter can be useful to you, Arthur, by all means rope her in.”

[
thir ty-four
]

“Rich”—indicates the gases and vapours are present in a highly pronounced intensity.

—
lingle,
The Coffee Cupper’s Handbook

*

ext afternoon, as we try to doze, there is a terrible

commotion. I wake up, groggily, to the sound of gunfire. One of the Bedouin is being held down by three others. He is pleading, the words pouring from his mouth in an unending stream. He is made to stand up, pushed to the ground again, kicked savagely, babbling protests all the while. It seems he was caught making off with some of Bey’s trade goods.

An impromptu court is convened—a circle of squatting Bedouin, a chair for Bey in the center, chairs to one side for Hector and me. Sensing that something unpleasant is about to happen, I try to decline mine, but the Bedouin are unhappy.

“You must watch, Robert,” Bey says, his voice flat. “As far as they are concerned, they have done us a great favor by bringing him to justice.”

Reluctantly, I sit. The man is brought into the circle and forced to his knees in front of Bey.There is a brief exchange: a few sentences, no more. A sword is produced. It is offered to the merchant.

Two Bedouin lift the accused man to his feet. He is stretched out, a man grasping each arm. His stream of protestations rises to a shriek. Bey walks toward him.The blade swings. One of the men holding the prisoner falls back; a moment later, the prisoner falls the other way.

The man who was holding the prisoner’s left hand is still holding it. The prisoner, meanwhile, is staring in shock at a gushing stump.The blood heaves out in ghastly, pumping gouts.

Casually, without hurry, one of the camel drivers fastens a tourniquet around the bloody wrist and helps the prisoner away. The severed hand is tossed to the ground in front of Bey, who ignores it. Dropping the sword, he strides out of the circle. The Bedouin, who have so far maintained a watchful silence, turn to each other and chatter politely, for all the world as if they are spec-tators at a private
soirée.

I see Bey
later by the luggage, looking somber. I do not mean to disturb him but he walks over.

“I suppose you think that sort of thing bad form,” he says curtly.

“I make no judgment.”

“If I had not carried out that sentence—which is the sentence according to their law—they would have killed him. But they would also have looked on me—on you, on all of us
ferengi—
as weak, impotent men. And out here, that could be dangerous.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” He scans my face as if he seeks there some other reaction, different from my words. Whatever he sees there seems to

satisfy him, because he grunts and says, “If people drinking their coffee in London only knew what it
really
cost, eh, Robert?”

Now we are
climbing into the mountains. Castles, quite ruined, perch on inaccessible rocks, their battlements patrolled by eagles and kites.We see cattle, small and lean, their heads topped with tall horns in the shape of lyres. Even the villages have changed. Instead of the humped tents of the nomads, there are settlements of wood and straw, the people round-faced, flat-nosed, like Aborigines. It is a strange mixture of the medieval and the prehistoric: if a crusad-ing knight on his charger were to turn the next corner I would scarcely be surprised.

We make camp
by a highland lake filled with pelicans and buy fish from a villager. The dazzling, glittering scales are like something beaten out of metal. Fires are lit: the fish are speared on twigs and roasted.The Bedouin murmur to each other as they eat, then one by one they go to sleep.

The ground is hard and the night cold. I get up and move closer to the fire.

A sudden flare illuminates a face opposite me. She is staring into the embers. Bright, fierce eyes reflect the flames, as does the polished skin. Beneath the headcloth, a face of elfin beauty. Any girl in London would kill for those cheekbones.

“I can think about nothing but you,” I whisper.

For a moment I think she can’t have understood.Then she says sharply in her lilting accent,“Don’t say that. It’s what
he
says.”

“Perhaps it’s true.”

She makes a scornful noise.“Did he tell you how he got me?” “Yes.”

“He likes that story. I don’t suppose it occurred to him I would rather have been bought by the other man.”

“Would you?”

She shrugs. “Before the sale we had to go and collect our things. I knew where there was a glass tile with a crack in it. I worked at it until the broken glass came away in my hand.Then I wrapped it in my clothes. When my new owner—whoever he was—tried to take what he had paid for, I planned to use it to cut first his throat, and then my own.”

Her eyes turn back to the dying flames. “Night after night I waited to die. But Bey did not come.That could only mean he was going to sell me. But he did not do that either. I was puzzled . . . and then I began to see. He wanted to own me, but he also wanted to preserve me, like a precious object which he alone may take out of its box, to gloat over and then put back.”

She turns to look at me, raising her chin. In the half-light I can see her teeth, very white, behind her open lips.

I lean toward her. A moment’s hesitation, and then my mouth touches hers. She takes my head in her hands, says breathlessly, “They can buy me and sell me. But my heart is my own.”

We kiss again, more deeply. She looks around, at the sleeping shapes. “We must be careful,” she warns. “People have died for less.” She takes our blankets and pulls them over our heads, covering us.

There, in the darkness—in the cave of the blankets, like a child’s game—there is the smell of her breath: myrrh, cinnamon, violets, musk . . . and the taste of her skin, her tongue, the sweet warmth of a kiss, the sounds she makes, her gasps.

And the words she whispers, as she nuzzles my lips:
“I have been waiting all my life for you.”

[
thir ty-five
]

“Leather”—this is the powerful, animal smell of well-tanned hides.

—
lenoir,
Le Nez du Café

*

o now Emily adds Liberal political work to her other
interests. Three afternoons a week she takes the train from Waterloo to Ealing to help in Arthur’s constituency office. Amongst the volunteers are several other suffragists. It is interesting work—more than interesting: it is thrilling; this sense of comradeship and endeavor, all these different people with their differing backgrounds and motivations joining forces in the ser-

vice of an ideal.

For all ideals are linked.That is what Emily sees now—that the world is divided into those who want to exploit it for their own ends and those who want to change it for the benefit of all. If you are on the side of change, you make common cause with other idealists. Whether your particular interest is suffrage, prison re-form, the Poor Law, or pensions, you are all on the same side, working together for power.

And Arthur—he is the leader of their little group, but he wears his leadership lightly, always remembering to thank the volunteers for their efforts on his behalf. Sometimes he takes small groups of helpers to tea at the House of Commons: when he invites Emily to join one of these groups, she is all the more pleased because she knows he is not singling her out for attention. He shows her up to the Ladies’ Gallery, from where women are allowed to watch the House at work, hidden from view behind a kind of iron grille.The debate is about the war—the Liberals are pressing the government to guarantee the jobs of those who have been sent abroad to fight. Emily is amazed by the boisterous atmosphere: the House reminds her of nothing so much as the sugar pit at the Exchange. But the aggression, the fighting, is even more ritualistic here. She sees men howling insults at each other yet, five minutes later, casually throwing their arms across each other’s shoulders as they leave the chamber.

Arthur asks a question. He makes himself heard with dogged courtesy, and seems to win a small point of order. He sits down to a grave chorus of “Hear hear”; afterwards, when she meets him in the lobby, he is flushed with triumph.“Did you see how I harried the Admiralty?” he cries.“They will not be happy about that.” She congratulates him.A group of half a dozen men hurry past. One of them pauses.“Good work, Brewer,” he says jovially, punching him on the arm.

“Thank you, sir,” Arthur says proudly. The man’s eyes—his charming, twinkling eyes—turn to Emily.

“And who is this?” he says.

“Miss Emily Pinker, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. A great reformer,” he adds for her benefit.

“And what do you think of our Parliament, Miss Pinker?”

“It is wonderful,” she answers truthfully. “There seem to be so many people here who are trying to get things done—to move forward.”

“Indeed, although there are almost as many trying to do exactly the reverse,” Sir Henry says, shaking his head comically.The other men around them laugh easily. For a moment she is suffused with the warm glow of inclusion in this clever, energetic, able comradeship.

“Miss Pinker has a special interest in female suffrage,” Brewer says.

“Ah! And as you may have noticed,” Sir Henry says, indicating the young men around him,“all of us here at present are male.We call it the mother of parliaments, but exclude those who might be mothers from its chambers. Perhaps, Miss Pinker, we will see a day when you not only have the Vote, but might even be voted for.”

“Do you really think so?”

He smiles, as if to ask how she can doubt it.Then with a nod he has gone, already deep in conversation with an aide. The retinue follows in his wake. She can feel the force of his optimism still lighting her up like a flame.

After Arthur has said goodbye to her, escorting her to the Underground station at Westminster Bridge to catch a train back to Limehouse, she feels quite bereft, as if she is being banished from the Garden of Eden by a stern but kindly angel.

[
thir ty-six
]

nother day’s travel. But the landscape around us has

changed. Now the hillsides are terraced for agriculture. From the high passes, looking down, it is as if someone has run a giant comb over the earth.

Sometimes I glimpse a stand or two of a bush with dark, waxy leaves. Hector nudges me and grunts with satisfaction. “See that? Coffee.”

Intrigued, I ride my mount alongside one of these bushes to examine it more closely.The whole plant is dotted with tiny white blossoms, the petals sweet-smelling and fragrant when I crush them between my fingers; they are dense, almost like cactus, plump with perfumed sap. The smell is of coffee, but there is also a faint aroma of honeysuckle and jasmine that rises above even the reek of my sweat-dirtied travel clothes.

Underneath each branch hang pendulous yellow cherries, fat and full of pulp. I pull one off and bite it experimentally. But the flesh is bitter, astringent as the inside of a lemon.