Crooked Pieces (17 page)

I am the happiest person who ever lived. Today at three o’clock exactly came a knock on the door. Mrs Garrud was on her way to open it but I jumped right past her down four stairs together and begged her not to trouble herself.

There stood Fred. For a moment I could not think why he looked different, but then I realised he had real clothes on, not a uniform. He looked twice as handsome. I had on my best blouse that has tiny flowers across the bodice and round the cuffs and a new blue skirt and jacket that I went out and bought yesterday for thirteen shillings and fourpence in Oxford Street. More than a week’s wages! I should not have
done it but I will have no chocolate for a month and that will make up the money. I wore my hair down with a blue velvet ribbon although you could not see it under my hat.

Fred smiled when he saw me and offered me his arm. I was all right about that for I have held Frank’s arm sometimes and also Pa’s when he is acting the clown. We walked down to the corner of Argyle Place and Fred said, ‘What do you think? Too cold for the park?’

In fact, it was rather cold and my new jacket not as warm as I would have liked. I said, whatever he thought best. ‘Well then, I think we should aim for a gallery. Portraits or landscapes?’ I said, whichever he thought best, at which point Fred stopped walking, turned me round to face him and said, ‘I’d like best for you to stop trying to please me and say what you think, Maggie.’

‘But I was never in a gallery. How can I know what I would like?’

‘True. Well, let it be portraits then, for they take less time to look at.’

This seemed sensible to me. I told him how Miss Sylvia had painted my portrait.

‘May I see it?’

‘I haven’t got it. She has it in her studio.’

‘Is she a good painter?’

‘Wonderful. She made me look…well, like me, I suppose.’

‘Then I should certainly like to see it. I shall buy it from her and put it in a locket round my neck. Why are you laughing?’

‘Because it is the size of a paving slab.’

Next thing he is dragging along the street like a hunchback, pretending he has a paving stone round his neck. People
turned to stare and nudged each other but he did not care at all. I said, ‘You will be in rare trouble if your sergeant sees you now. He will not want a madman in his force.’

Fred stood upright again. ‘He has a tribe of them already. One more won’t make a difference.’

‘One person
can
make a difference,’ I said, without thinking, for it is a slogan on the bottom of our pamphlets.

Fred looked all serious. ‘I suppose you must believe that or you couldn’t do what you do,’ he said.

The gallery was not a bit as I had expected, not that I had known what to expect. I had thought, I suppose, that it would resemble Miss Sylvia’s studio – all mess and paintbrushes and oils with their lids left off. Instead it was high and light with huge wide walls painted white, and along them picture after picture, all of people and sometimes with some bug-eyed little dog sitting, smug as a chaplain, on its mistress’s lap.

Some I liked greatly. One of an old man with a skinny child by him. He reminded me a sliver of my grandad, for he had kind crinkly eyes and wispy hair and brown spots under it like the map of the Holy Land that Mrs Beckett had up on the wall of the Sunday School. There were a mass of gentry and dotted round them, their whey-faced children. Pale waxy copies, eyes dull inside their pointy heads, all ruffs and jewels and velvet. Like flowers that never saw the sun.

Fred asked me what I thought.

‘It is all very clever.’

‘You don’t like them?’

‘They are not…like Miss Sylvia’s.’

‘But they are here, and hers are not. So maybe it is she who should change her style?’

I could not let that by. ‘These are here because a man has painted them. There can be no other reason.’

Fred looked quite taken aback. ‘I had not thought you would be so against our sex.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not. Truly. I have three brothers of my own. How could I be against them?’

‘But that is your family. Do you really think all other men are hopeless?’

‘No… No I do not. You mistake me. I am just angry that one man can paint the same face six times over and be here, with great white walls, and fame and everything, and someone like Miss Sylvia who can paint you so you would think it was a mirror, is forced to work long hours in a tiny room with no proper light and sleep in that same room, and
still
cannot get her paintings in a gallery.’

Fred was quiet for a long deep moment. ‘Would you like to have an ice, now?’ he asked.

‘If that is all right with you,’ I replied.

He took me to a splendid tearoom in Regent’s Park from where we could see the zoo animals and the people strolling along, laughing and chatting together and poking sticks through the bars to tease the poor creatures. The monkeys jabbered and grabbed at them and if they succeeded, snapped them in half and chewed at them. Other animals ran away. Only the elephant took no notice.

The waitress brought us the menu which was a foot long at least and covered in wavy writing saying what the different cakes were, and more ices than I had thought were in the world. We had chocolate sponge and then strawberry ice to follow. Fred asked what I would like to drink. There were sodas, and
ginger ale and all sorts but I said, ‘Tea, please,’ because, after all, it was a tearoom and I thought it might be rude not to drink some.

He told me about his sister, Clara. How she has a beautiful singing voice but may not use it for her father says music is a vanity.

‘Surely not church music?’

‘Yes, anything. Plain, everything must be plain and simple. That way sin cannot get a foothold, he says. Why are you smiling?’

‘I was just thinking he should meet the chaplain at Aylesbury who found sin in every breath we took and every blade of grass we trod upon, and there’s not much plainer than a prison.’

‘Well, that’s the sort of righteousness that drove the Quakers away in the first place. They grew tired of being preached at by hypocrites who only got their office by preferment and cared about as much for Christ’s teachings as the people who killed him.’ He looked quite agitated. ‘Would you like another ice?’

I blushed for I had eaten mine very fast. ‘No, thank you. It was so lovely I was afraid that it would melt.’

Fred smiled. ‘That’s no reason not to have another.’

This time we had vanilla. I was so stuffed I could hardly stand when it was time to go.

‘Would you like to walk a little?’ he asked. Though it was cool, the breeze had died, so I said, yes, I thought I should. He gave me his arm again and I thought how someone looking from the tearoom might think that we were sweethearts. This made me feel most funny.

We strolled across the grass. There was the great grey elephant standing stock-still in its cage, its mighty ears spread open like sails to catch the wind. It had not moved.

I said, ‘It’s as though it’s listening.’

‘And watching.’

‘Yes. Waiting for something.’

‘Like a bun coming over the bars?’

I laughed. ‘Maybe. Or something a bit more exciting.’

‘Two buns. It’ll have a long wait.’

‘Elephants don’t mind waiting. They live so long it doesn’t matter.’

‘Lucky old them,’ said Fred. ‘I hate waiting. I like things to happen when I want them to.’

‘So do I. I do hope we get the vote soon. There are so many laws I should like passed.’

‘What laws?’

‘Oh, hundreds. Free hospitals, free schools, free buns for elephants…’

‘How about votes for elephants?’

I laughed. ‘Why not? They’ve got bigger brains than men have.’

‘Yes, and they’d be a lot harder to arrest.’

He asked me what it had been like in prison. I told him how frightened I had been at first but that after a while it just got boring.

‘I read that some of the women were made very ill by it.’

‘Yes, but they were ladies, you see. Not used to such conditions. For me it was not much worse than home except the warders, who are harder than bailiffs, some of them.’

‘Still, I do not like to think of you in a cell, Maggie.’

‘No more do I, but if it is for the Cause, I have no choice.’

‘You do have a choice,’ he said most firmly. ‘You can choose not to be involved in what can only bring you to trouble.’

‘“Stay home and mind my hearth”, you mean?’ (This is what Miss Sylvia says to stir the women to action).

‘Is that so wrong?’

‘It is if you haven’t got one, like half the women of England.’

‘I see you have been well schooled by your employers.’

This riled me. ‘My employers are also my friends. They are not all rich fine ladies, you know. Mrs Drummond has a whole family to look after, and Miss Annie was a mill girl herself. They are fighting for justice, that is all. For people like me and your sister.’

Fred lowered his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong to speak as I did. Of course you must fight for what you believe in. It’s just – it just seems to me that you have taken on too much. The Government will not give in and a few hundred women marching will not change a single thing.’

‘If a single person can make a difference, how much more can a few hundreds?’

He frowned. ‘Is that what Miss Sylvia says as well? Or is it Miss Christabel, or Mrs Pankhurst?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s what I say.’

We walked a while in silence and I wondered if I should leave go his arm now we had quarrelled so badly, but when I went to wriggle my hand away he took hold of it with his and looked straight down into my eyes. ‘Am I to be forgiven?’

I said I thought it was I who was in disgrace.

‘Why? For standing up for your beliefs? That is what I admire about you most.’

I felt quite tingly. ‘Yes, but you do not agree with them.’

‘Not all of them, but that doesn’t make me right and you wrong.’

I looked up at him amazed. For a man who had bought me two ices
and
a cake, to let himself be so countered! ‘Perhaps we are both right?’

Fred laughed. ‘Perhaps. Or both wrong. Either way I must take you home or it will be midnight and the ladies will come looking for you and beat me with their umbrellas.’

‘They will have no need of that for I am trained in self-defence.’

‘Really?’ He looked mightily surprised.

‘Mrs Garrud, where I lodge, teaches it. It is from Japan where everyone is yellow,’ I explained.

He stopped dead and, seizing both my hands, asked most earnestly, ‘And will all this fighting turn you yellow, too, Maggie?’

For a moment I thought he was serious, then I saw that his beautiful green-brown eyes were dancing.

‘Strawberry ices can prevent it, I have heard,’ I told him.

Fred gave my hands a real strong squeeze. ‘Then it shall be my duty to supply them. Shall you last till next Sunday, do you think?’

I am the happiest person alive.

There has been violence in the north. One of our speakers was knocked unconscious by a marble thrown by a lout (paid for by the Liberals, Miss Annie said). She is all right now, but
every day there are mobs of stupid useless youths hurling rotten eggs and fruit at our women. The police do nothing to prevent it. Miss Christabel said it was all to the good for the local people think such behaviour wicked, and have turned out all the more to give support. I can understand her reasoning, but I still should not like to be knocked senseless by a marble, or a rotten egg, for that matter.

Mrs Pethick Lawrence has worked miracles in the office. We now have a separate department, The Women’s Press, for selling pamphlets, badges, postcards and photographs of the leaders, as well as books explaining the Cause. Miss Knight has come to take charge of it and on Thursdays I am her assistant. If we are not busy she talks to me about government things, and lets me read the books so that I really begin to understand how much we are seeking to achieve. The more I learn the more I wonder if it can ever be done, for there are women who have been campaigning for nigh on
fifty
years and still see so little progress. Is this to be my whole life’s work?

Just when I was feeling truly crushed by it all, into the office burst Miss Christabel, sparkling as a shooting star. ‘Look at this! Look at this! Look at this!’ Great big photograph of Miss Annie being carried shoulder high through a crowd of cheering miners.
SUFFRAGETTES SWEEP ALL BEFORE THEM
ran the headline. ‘What do you think of that, Maggie? Where shall we display it, do you think? On the wall? On the window? How about Big Ben?’

In five minutes I was back up again. I said so to Miss Sylvia. She nodded. ‘My sister is a very remarkable creature. My mother, too.’ Probably I was wrong but I fancied she looked a bit sad as
she spoke. She has had to leave her painting course. The Cause takes too much of her time and she told me if she could not attend to it properly, she would as soon not do it at all.

Though she works all day and into the night, I think she misses it greatly, for I remember how with a brush in her hand, she looked as if she was in another world, full of calm and peace. And there is certainly none of that in Clement’s Inn!

She asked if I was glad to have left being in service. I said, yes, mightily, though I still miss Cook and Mr and Mrs Roe, for they are the finest people in the world. She agreed. ‘But nothing is wasted, Maggie, for if you were to marry…’ here I was attacked of a coughing fit, ‘…there is no harm in being able to cook.’

I said my ma was a very good cook and could make a feast of a pig’s cheek and a potato. This is not entirely true, for she tends to forget about it once it is stewing and often the dinner boils over. Miss Sylvia asked if I had been home lately. I said, no, I had been much occupied with sending out the circulars. She looked quite anxious.

‘Maggie, you must not give over your free days to your work. I will speak to Mrs PL. You shall go home next Sunday, for sure.’ I felt quite sick.

‘If it please, miss, I should like not to go home next Sunday, if it can be arranged.’

Miss Sylvia looked a lot surprised. ‘Why not, Maggie?’