All My Sins Remembered (51 page)

The man with the black moustache and the bright, penetrating eyes was the one to do it. Alice was suddenly certain of that. He was brave enough, and he had the determination. It was the raw potential of his power that she had scented last night, through the smoke and the lilies and the women’s perfume.

The New Party had failed, but Mosley’s bearing seemed to indicate that that did not matter. Alice felt within herself that it did not matter either. There was a way forward, she was sure of that, and she knew that Tom Mosley could find it. The country would be swept.

If I could be part of that, she thought. She held the idea within herself, protecting the flare of it as if she cupped her hands around a flame.

Grace was lying back against the cushions. One silk-stockinged foot drew apparently idle circles, but she was watching Alice intently.

‘He asked you to join his party, didn’t he?’ Alice demanded.

‘Yes. I thought hard about it. I admire him personally, like all sorts of other people from Bob Boothby to Aneurin Bevan. I also think that his economic ideas are very sound. But in the end I decided I could be more useful by staying where I am, within our own party.’

You were afraid to risk your own seat
, Alice silently translated.
Oh, if I had been in your place, I would have gone
.

‘In the end he only recruited five Labour MPs and one Conservative. I think subsequent events, catastrophic election results and the pitched battles and the violence that seem to follow him wherever he goes, have proved me right.’

‘What will he do now?’ Alice asked.

‘I should still like to see him doing something splendid. Heading some force for change that would be clear-cut and strong and incontrovertible.’

‘Like Hitler in Germany?’

‘Perhaps,’ Grace mused. ‘But I don’t think that anything as modern and coherent as Hitler’s movement will ever be possible in this poor, damp, vacillating country of ours.’

‘I would like to go and hear Mosley speak. I would like to offer to help him. I could do that, couldn’t I?’

Grace swung her feet down on to the floor. Her glass was empty now. ‘Yes, you could do that. Only what will Nathaniel say if he discovers you marching in uniform with the fascist youth bands?’

‘I don’t wear a uniform and I shan’t march.’ Alice frowned and her solemn face went red. ‘Anyway, Nathaniel isn’t a Bolshevist, you know.’

‘Of course he isn’t. But I don’t believe he is a great admirer of Hitler or Mussolini either.’

‘I know that. But I must find out what I believe in myself, mustn’t I? Pappy would defend my right to do that, he would defend anyone’s.’

‘Yes, he would. And so would I,’ Grace said softly.

Alice went to hear Mosley speak.

The first time was in Trafalgar Square, and she walked there from Vincent Street through the mild London sunshine. There was only a small crowd; Sir Oswald Mosley stood on the plinth at the foot of Nelson’s Column and a little corps of eight young men wearing black shirts and grey flannels surrounded him. Alice was able to come close to him, and he seemed to speak directly to her. She found that she could not take her eyes off his face.

‘We must be the movement of youth,’ he told the crowd. He had an orator’s voice, rising and falling as rhythmically as music. ‘We must gladly accept discipline, and the effort, and the sacrifice, because only by accepting these can great purposes be achieved. By these alone can the modern state be built.’

His words seemed to enter Alice’s blood.

After the rally was over she walked home again alone, wishing that she could have followed Mosley and his young men. The streets she passed along seemed to glimmer with a light as hard and bright as diamonds, and all the soot-stained buildings were cleaner and sharper and seemed to stand higher against the colourless sky.

It came to her suddenly that she did have something to be proud of in being British, and that she was ready to defend it against apathy and degeneracy and the creeping tide of Bolshevism. She lifted her head and swung her arms as she walked.

Grace was, as usual, not at home, but Alice met Cressida on the landing outside her bedroom.

‘How was the great rally?’ Cressida asked.

In the flush of her excitement Alice said warmly, ‘It was marvellous, utterly marvellous. You should have come, I wish you had heard what he had to say.’

Cressida blinked. Her pale, short eyelashes gave her a myopic appearance, although she saw perfectly well. ‘You wish
I
had been there?
I
wouldn’t go anywhere near muck like that. I am a socialist.’

Cressida had recently adopted a left-wing stance. Grace was amusedly tolerant of her political posturing – when she took any notice of it at all – but Alice found it deeply irritating. Alice was too serious and too literal-minded to be amused by the notion of a twelve-year-old socialist.

‘You only claim to be one because you want to oppose Grace.’ Opposing Grace was the most incomprehensible aim, to Alice.

‘Not just Mummy. Grandfather and good old Uncle Hugo with their feudal notions and military-minded Uncle Thomas as well, actually.’

‘What do you know about anything?’

‘As much as you, dear Alice. I can read, can’t I? And listen and make up my own mind.’

‘You’re just a stupid little girl.’

‘I’m not stupid, stupid.’ Cressida lashed out with a clenched fist. With all her weight behind it the blow connected with Alice’s arm, and Alice gasped with pain. She was ready to hit back, but then with an effort she regained control of herself. She was always conscious of her own dignity, and she didn’t want Grace, or even Nanny or Mabel, to hear that she had been fighting with Cressida like an infant in the schoolroom. She turned and walked away, still quivering with anger.

Cressida watched her go. Her fists were still clenched, and her stolid face was mottled with hatred.

Alice learnt to be circumspect about her new-found zeal. There were more meetings and rallies to be attended as the British Union of Fascists slowly emerged under Mosley’s leadership, and Alice slipped away to join the swelling, uneasy crowds whenever she was able. Her work for Grace didn’t fill all her time, and she was often able to absent herself from Vincent Street. But she did not talk much about what she saw and heard. She kept the fire of her devotion well shielded, away from the crass misjudgements of those who would not understand it.

There began to be scuffles and then full-blown fights at some of the meetings, between Mosley’s supporters and bands of hostile anti-fascists. Alice watched the battles indignantly, but she was proud when hecklers and communists were thrown out by the Blackshirts.

At one meeting there were persistent interruptions from a trio of men up in the gallery of the hall. Mosley raised his arm and pointed his finger. Alice shivered, as if he pointed at her instead.

His accusation rang out. ‘There you see three warriors of class war, all from Jerusalem.’

It was the first time Alice had heard him single out the Jews as a target. He said afterwards, to qualify his words, ‘Fascist hostility to Jews is directed against those who finance communists, and those who are pursuing an anti-British policy.’

Alice believed what he said. Of course, anyone who gave money to support communism or worked against the national good should be a target, whatever his faith or nationality. If any Jews did such things, then they must be prevented from doing so.

After that meeting there was a march. Mosley and seventy of his young men marched along Fleet Street and down Whitehall to their headquarters. The men wore their black shirts, and they strode along without coats or hats, singing and calling out the Union’s rallying cries. There were no women with them, but Alice slipped along in their wake, almost a part of the rabble of anti-fascists that scuffled at the tail of the march.

The singing and the sound of marching feet and the sight of Tom’s handsome head held high at the front of the column were almost unbearably stirring. There were tears in Alice’s eyes. She would have done anything for the cause at that minute.

The pain was in the reality that there was nothing she could do except run along behind the men.

Perhaps her chance would come. She watched the bareheaded young men swarming into the party headquarters in a great burst of cheering before she turned away and made her way back home.

Clio and Jake saw what was happening, but they also did not see.

Alice had discovered a vein of secrecy within herself. When she met her brother or sister it was easy to convince them that she cared about nothing but being Grace’s secretary-assistant, eagerly hanging on at the outer fringe of her cousin’s political life. The pretence that it was not important, did not even exist, made the flame of her new devotion burn brighter and sweeter inside her.

There was sly excitement in coming back from a Blackshirt rally with the Leader’s oratory like a bell in her head, to Gower Street or Islington or just to Vincent Street, and seeming to be the same Alice that she had always been.

The knowledge that she was not the same nourished her more richly than any food could have done.

She had always been the baby of the Babies, the youngest one of all the brothers and sisters and cousins, the last to arrive at the table when all the knowledge and wisdom and experience were being dished out, but now she felt herself growing big and strong. She alone knew where the future must lie. She was superior to all of them. Superior even to Grace. Alice thought that in her heart Grace understood and believed in the right way, but she was weak enough to let political expediency dilute her intentions.

As it happened, Alice underestimated what Clio and Jake did know. Separately, they were aware of their sister’s growing fanaticism, but for different reasons they were unwilling to admit it to each other, or even to themselves.

To Jake, Alice was still partly a little girl. He cherished the memory of her as an innocently demanding toddler in the last summer before the war. Alice had slept on a rug with her curls damp against her flushed face whilst he was importuning his cousin Grace in the angle of a hawthorn hedge. Alice belonged in those pre-war days, when the world had seemed to Jake to be a sunny and equable place. That was before the trenches and the stretchers, and the rare quiet times between bombardments when he had sat reading Donne by the light of a paraffin lamp.

He ruined me and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

The words came back to Jake with peculiar resonance now. The world had not regained its sunniness for long, and darkness and death had become over-familiar presences in his medical practice. There was a particular bitterness in the possibility that Alice might be affected by this darker world, and so he chose to convince himself that she was not.

Jake was repelled by the anti-Semitism of the Blackshirt movement. There was a bad evening at Islington, when Alice was sitting down to a family supper with him and Ruth and the children, Rachel and Lucas. Out of nowhere, out of nothing more than the small currency of exchanged news and domestic opinions, had come a disparagement of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in Germany.

Alice had laid down her knife and fork. She lifted her head and Jake saw that her eyes were wide, and very bright, the pupils like black glass.

She began to parrot the old propaganda. There were good Jews, like Nathaniel. Like Levi and Dora Hirsh and Ruth’s mother and father. And there were bad Jews, corrupt financiers who embezzled and stole and who undermined the economy and gave money to the communists. The bad Jews must be punished. They must repay what they had stolen.
Stolen from us
, Alice said.

Ruth had gasped. For once, she was at a loss for words.

Looking from his Jewish wife to the round, smooth faces of his Jewish children, Jake had felt sick. He had felt as if the ground shivered along some fault under the floorboards, under the folds of the cloth that covered his dining table, and that at any moment a fault might crack open and they would be pitched in different directions, some of them landing on one side of the chasm and some on the other, and some of them vanishing into the blackness itself.

And yet … Alice was his sister, and he loved her as he loved all of his family. He felt that they were all bound together by threads that spun out of the Woodstock Road and held them tight for ever. It was because he loved his mother and father that he couldn’t tell them that their beloved Alice had joined the Women’s Movement of the British Union of Fascists. It hurt him that he did not know for certain that she had, that she left him to guess and to imagine the worst. And it cut him that she could come to his house, and say such things in front of Ruth and the children. Yet he loved her as much as he loved the children. More, perhaps, than he loved their sharp and combative mother these days. Jake was not sure how the gulf had opened between Ruth and himself, or how long ago, but now that it was there he had no idea how to bridge it again. They went through all the rituals of living a domestic life together, but the sharp pleasure that they had once known in being together had now entirely faded. They existed side by side, and curbed their irritation with one another as best they could.

He found some inadequate words. ‘That is enough of that talk at my table, Alice.’

Ruth had glanced at him, a hard look that seemed to say, Is that all?

And Jake had looked away from her to his sister, who coolly met his eye. Then she had smiled. Her top lip lifted, showing her white teeth and her gums, making her look like some healthy and utterly unquestioning farm animal.

The excuse that Jake chose to make to himself for his sister’s sudden and frightening allegiance was male, and doctorly. He knew that Mosley was a handsome and charismatic man, and that the youths who marched behind him were mostly well setup, and shown off to their best advantage by the buttoned-up black shirts and fascist insignia of their uniforms. He decided that Alice was in the grip of a sexual fixation, intensified by the charged atmosphere of rallies and marches. Her ill-informed fascist enthusiasms would soon pass, he told himself, once she was safely married.