A Future Arrived (30 page)

“Foot inspection,” one of them explained to Colin. “Very important to nip any problems in the bud. We've been on marches before. Went all the way to London last year with three thousand from Leeds and not so much as an inflamed bunion among the lot of them.”

The press was waiting in Haddlesfield as well, a small group of bored men who had covered protest marches many times. The only novelty in this one was that it was heading for Manchester and not London. Snaring the Board of Trade chiefs in the provinces was a new wrinkle. Lord Runcy and his colleagues might just be foolish enough to try to avoid confrontation by canceling their meeting with the Mayor of Manchester and going back to their inner sanctum in Whitehall.
That
would make a delicious headline …
Lord Runcy flees wrath of idle factory hands
. It was worth sticking around to see what developed.

The reporters found Dulcie quickly enough. “Well, well,” one of them said. “Might have known you'd be here.”

“Hello, Sam. Thought Beaverbrook sacked you years ago.”

“He's kind to dumb animals.”

Another reporter, a florid-faced, overweight man from
Foto-Mail
named Archer, eyed Dulcie as something of a curiosity. “You're Will Greville's wife?”

She smiled as sweetly as possible. “As if you didn't know. You did a piece on me three years ago.”

“Not me. I just joined. Nasty bit, was it?”

“Not exactly kind.”

“Sorry. Perhaps we can do better for you this time. I'm rather fond of your husband. Won a hundred quid on one of his nags at Goodwood.”

“Some nag,” she said dryly.

“A wee slip of a red filly. A fair description of you, Mrs. Greville, come to think of it.” He spotted Colin leaning against the car, watching. “Hello, what have we here? A Wild West show come to Haddlesfield?”

Colin ambled over, hands thrust in the back pockets of his jeans. “The name's Ross, Colin Mackendric Ross. I'm just tagging along with my aunt.”

The reporter gave Dulcie a glance. “Your side of the family or the Grevilles'?”

“Does it matter?” she said.

“Not to me, but my readers might be interested.” He eyed Colin's boots. “Fancy bit of leather that. What is it?”

“Lizard.”

“Ruddy big one. Hate to meet him in the dark. You're American I take it. Where from?”

“La Jolla … near San Diego. California.”

“I know San Diego … Coronado Hotel. I was there once when the Prince of Wales was on a world tour. Nice place to be from. Tell you what, Colin. I'd be interested in your views of all this … from the American perspective. Might be interesting, don't you think? Mind if my lad Garth takes a few pictures first?”

“No.”

He motioned to a young man with a Speed Graphic. “Get the road in the background, Garth.” He turned back to Dulcie as the photographer began shooting. “We just came up from London. They're starting to dig slit trenches in Hyde Park and set up antiaircraft guns. Chamberlain's flying off tomorrow to see Hitler in Berchtesgaden. We're on the brink, lass. You people should be praying, not marching.”

Dulcie only smiled. “If the armament factories had been opened two years ago, Hitler would be flying to London to see Chamberlain.”

“Well, that's one way of looking at it. It's what makes horse racing … a nice, healthy difference of opinion.”

Archer did his interview with Colin, low key and pleasant, and then walked down the street and into the White Hart Inn where he had taken a room for the night before driving up to Manchester. He had five hours to deadline and phoned his editor in London to tell him that the motorcycle messenger was on his way with Garth's plates. “Not much of a march” he said, “but the timing is interesting with the P.M. going off to meet Hitler. We can get some play out of it … the country crying for peace while the trade unions march for rearmament and war, that kind of slant. And have the morgue call me. I want whatever they have on Lord Stanmore's daughter … Alexandra Greville. Married James Ross of Ross-Patterson Aircraft over in the States. A bell rings on that union from a long time back … when I was with the
Express
. Might give me a wrinkle. God knows I could use a bit of spice.”

T
HE WEATHER STAYED
glorious through Thursday and Friday and the demonstration took on all the aspects of a holiday stroll through the countryside. It gathered in numbers as they went along, unemployed men from Liverpool and the ring of factory towns around Manchester coming down to join them. At least a dozen men had brought accordions and there were scores of mouth organs. There were tunes as they marched, and singing—“Tipperary” and all the old soldier songs that half of the men had once sung along the dusty roads of Flanders. Dulcie slept at night on an air mattress in the back of the Ford, but Colin and the two medical students joined other young men and some of the mill girls and slept in haystacks or barns after sitting up half the night around a campfire, shooting the breeze and sharing bottles of beer.

“You seem to be having fun,” Dulcie said as Colin cheerfully prepared breakfast on the Primus stove.

“Best time I've had since coming to England. One egg or two?”

A thousand or more voices sent the song rollicking through the streets of Manchester on the morning of the last day. The long column, marching no more than three abreast by order of the police, serpentined its way to the town hall in a light rain to await the arrival of Lord Runcy, due at noon for the ceremonial luncheon with the Lord Mayor. All of the London papers were at the newsstands and copies were soon being circulated among the crowd. As each newspaper reflected the political thinking of its owner, the headlines ran a gamut of views. The prime minister's dramatic departure for Germany dominated the front pages of all the papers, but the march to Manchester received its modest share of coverage—little of it sympathetic except from Jacob Golden's
Daily Post
and one or two other liberal dailies.

“They could have said more about us,” Colin muttered.

“Not with Chamberlain in the lion's den,” Dulcie said.

Foto-Mail
was widely passed about. A lurid tabloid, its circulation was second only to the
Daily Post
. Its headline reflected its point of view of the crisis.

TRADE UNIONS MARCH FOR GUNS NOT BUTTER

There was a photo of the marchers streaming into Huddlesfield on the afternoon of that first day. The editor had artfully chosen a shot of the minuscule Communist Party group holding up a hammer-and-sickle flag. That set the tone for the article which Colin merely glanced at. What held his attention was his picture on the opposite page. It was a good one, worth sending to his mother. He was pictured standing by the Ford, smiling at the camera, one foot resting on the bumper so as to show off his lizard-skin boots. There were men walking along a road in the background, but there was something odd about it. They were different men on a road other than the one in Haddlesfield. These men weren't jaunty. They were shabby, cold-pinched, bitter-faced wraiths. Men starving on a strike, perhaps, in some bleak coal town in Wales. The heading gave him a twinge in the gut.

EARL'S YANKEE GRANDSON NOBLESSE OBLIGING

He read Dalbert T. Archer's caption in growing fury.

“You son-of-a-bitch.” He crumpled the paper in an angry fist.

Dulcie, reading it beside him, touched him gently. “Don't pay the slightest bit of attention, Colin. It's only a rag and not worth getting upset about.”

“That bastard pulled a fast one on me, Dulcie. He
lied
.”

“No, dear. He jumbled the facts and wrote things that are unfair and uncalled for. That, my boy, is one facet of British journalism that takes getting used to. I've been tarred with the brush once or twice and I simply gritted my teeth and ignored it.”

“I'd like to shove this paper up his … nose!”

“Revealing that you're upset would be more grist for their mill. And they go just so far, you see. They know the libel laws to the last dot and comma.”

Nothing libelous, he was thinking as he walked away to try and cool his anger. Jamie
had
been a chauffeur and his mother
had
married him. The fact that his stepfather had been a chauffeur before the war and a noted aeronautical engineer when he had married his mother had not been mentioned, but didn't have to be. They had printed no lie, just a snide smearing of the truth.

Flashbulbs popped along the edges of the crowd. Colin could see several press photographers standing on the town hall steps, taking pictures of the demonstrators and an approaching cavalcade of gleaming black Daimlers. He recognized one of the photographers as the man who had taken his picture in Haddlesfield. And then he spotted Dalbert T. Archer among a group of reporters waiting behind the police line at the curb for the arrival of the motorcade bearing Lord Runcy and the Board of Trade ministers. Still clutching the tightly folded and twisted newspaper, he shoved his way through the throng.

The reporter seemed amused by his lanky, angry presence.

“All in the spirit of fun, lad. That's what
Foto-Mail
is all about. We mustn't take ourselves too seriously.”

Colin shoved the newspaper at him. “Do you know what you can do with this bilge?”

The reporter flinched. “I know what you can ruddy well do with it, Yank. You can ruddy well stop poking me in the chest with it. Now hop it, I've got work to do.”

“
Work?
Is that what you call it? More like shoveling
shit
if you ask me!”

One of the policemen turned and gave him a stony look. “Now, now, lad. Mind your tongue.”

“Not easy to do, is it?” Archer sneered. “All you ruddy Americans have big mouths.”

He neither hit the man nor pushed him. What he did was toss the newspaper at him, and Dalbert T. Archer, startled by the move, jerked his body backward, slipped on the wet pavement, and went down hard on his bottom. The policeman saw only a member of the press on the ground and the tall young man—obviously one of the marchers—standing over him in what he would later describe to a magistrate as “… a threatening manner.” The policeman was a large, experienced man and he put an armlock on the perpetrator and hustled him quickly from the scene.

I
T TOOK
D
ULCIE
three hours to find out what had happened to him, and another hour to locate a solicitor that she knew. It was late in the afternoon when Colin was brought before a magistrate and informed that D. T. Archer, journalist, of Foto House, Fleet Street, London, had pressed charges against him for assault. He was released without bail to the custody of his family.

The solicitor was wryly amused. “I saw your Mr. Archer. There wasn't a mark on him.”

“Because I didn't hit him,” Colin said bitterly. “Never laid a hand on him.”

Dulcie slipped her arm around his waist as they walked from the building. “I believe you, darling. You mustn't get upset by this. I'm sure he'll drop the charges after they get a bit of fun out of it. We'll give Jacob Golden a ring. He'll know what to do. Who owns
Foto-Mail,
Dan?”

“Part of Lord Rotherlow's chain now, I believe,” the solicitor replied.

“Jacob must know the man. All publishers belong to the same clubs. He'll set things right in no time.”

“Sure,” Colin muttered.

He felt angry and humiliated. It was raining harder now and lights were going on in Deansgate and John Dalton Street, watery blobs in the gathering dusk. A gray city, cold and bleak. He thought fiercely of La Jolla … the bougainvillaea spreading crimson across the whitewashed walls of the house. The palm fronds rustling in the wind and the surf booming against the cliffs of that beautiful coast. Homesickness crushed him like a blow to the heart.