‘And if she does go – and she will – what if I can’t forgive ’er either?’ Amos said. ‘She doesn’t see both sides o’ t’coin.’
Enoch listened, and had nothing to say. He always took Anna’s part in the tussles of will that from time to time afflicted their marriage, but now he was silenced. There was no getting away from the fact that, at this remarkably volatile and critical point in the nation’s political history, it was provocative of the wife of a Labour MP to accept the hospitality of one of the richest families in Britain. One thing to charge them a small fortune to paint their walls; quite another to raise a glass with them at the glittering pinnacle of their social season.
‘Of all t’years for ’er to go,’ Amos said, ‘it ’ad to be this one. Naval bombast, and that Romanov despot to boot.’
‘’appen that’s why she wants to go,’ Enoch said. ‘Being Russian, like.’
Amos had his head in his hands, and if Enoch intended to be funny, his humour missed its mark. Amos’s name was on a list of seventy MPs making a formal complaint to the government about the tsar’s visit to Cowes. In the Foreign Office, Sir Charles Hardinge was peddling a story about improvements in Russian civil liberties to excuse the king, but everyone knew Nicholas presided over a murderous regime, and his close family ties to the British royals were an embarrassment and a disgrace. He was the spitting image of the Prince of Wales; Amos could just imagine the pair of them in Cowes, playing sailors. It made him feel sick with rage. And to know that Anna would be somewhere there, among them … he moaned out loud, a low, soft bellow of pure misery. Across the table, Enoch stared into his pint and wondered if it was time they left.
Talk about rubbing salt into the wound, thought Enoch when they left the comfortable little pub half an hour later. At Amos’s behest they were off to hear Lloyd George address a public meeting in East London; a battle cry, doubtless, to one of the most impoverished parts of the city. Speaking for himself, Enoch would have given it a miss. The message would be all over the papers the following day, and the pair of them were already as glum as a wet Monday morning without the additional pain of witnessing first hand the splendid oratory of the chancellor. But Amos had always believed that forewarned was forearmed; listen to the opposition, he said, before drumming them out of office. He attended more Liberal meetings than most Liberals, and always he watched in dour silence with his mouth set in a grim line. He was like an opium addict, thought Enoch: he knew it was bad for him, but he couldn’t give it up.
They walked in silence down Rhodeswell Road towards the incongruous crenellations of the Edinburgh Castle. It had been the biggest gin palace in Limehouse until Thomas Barnardo got his reforming hands on it and converted it into a mission church, where the strongest drink a man could buy was coffee. Spiritual succour on tap but no spirits, thought Enoch, with his pamphleteer’s habit of finding bons mots for every occasion. Another time he would have shared this with Amos, but he glanced at his friend’s stern profile and decided to keep it to himself.
From the windows of the houses around the hall, WSPU banners had been strung and women leaned out shouting abuse at any man they suspected of being a Liberal. The pavement, too, was crowded with jeering, jostling suffragettes. Amos and Enoch pushed their way into the building and found a place to stand by the back wall. The hall was packed – there must be thousands, Enoch said, and Amos nodded – and even with every window in the hall pushed wide it was stiflingly hot. The taunts of the women outside threatened to drown out the speaker, but from the moment he began Lloyd George had his audience in thrall and somehow, something of the charged atmosphere filtered through the open windows so that even the militancy out on the street began to ebb.
The chancellor started on the Navy’s new warships, insisted upon by landed noblemen who were not, he said, remotely interested in how the government paid for them. ‘Somebody has got to pay; and then these gentlemen say: Perfectly true; somebody has got to pay but we would rather that somebody were somebody else.’
There was laughter, and Amos and Enoch exchanged a look. There was something of the class warrior about Lloyd George tonight, and the massed bodies in the hall sensed it too. On he went. The building of the eight new dreadnoughts had begun, he said, so the government had passed round the hat. ‘We sent it round amongst the workmen and winders of Derbyshire and Yorkshire, the weavers of High Peak and the Scotsmen of Dumfries, who, like all their countrymen, know the value of money. They all dropped in their coppers.’ He paused here, and waited for a few beats. ‘We went round Belgravia,’ he said, ‘and there has been such a howl ever since that it has completely deafened us.’
A great roar of contempt went up, a rousing endorsement of the chancellor’s unequivocal ridicule of the country’s toffs. Here was a man with his feet planted firmly on their side of the divide: an ordinary man, speaking from the heart for ordinary men. When Enoch looked at Amos he had his eyes closed and a strange look on his face: despair, envy, admiration.
‘I went down a coal mine the other day,’ Lloyd George said now, and Amos’s eyes sprang open again.
‘We sank into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain and we did about three-quarters of a mile with rock and shale above us. The earth seemed to be straining – around us and above us – to crush us in. You could see the pit props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibres split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way, and then there is mutilation and death.’
Enoch leaned in to his friend and whispered, ‘We could leave. We’ve got ’is gist,’ but Amos didn’t reply, only stared ahead at the man who was taking the very words from his mouth.
‘And yet when the prime minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords and say to them; “Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives? Some of them are old. They have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse?” They scowl at us, and we say: “Only a ha’penny, just a copper.” They say, “You thieves!” and they turn their dogs on to us and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who at the risk of life create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand.’
The stamping and whistling was tremendous; he had the crowd in the palm of his hand: silent when he wished to speak, baying for blue blood when he paused. Amos wondered how soon the king would learn of his chancellor’s treachery. He pictured the fat monarch, just about to settle down to a slap-up dinner on the royal yacht down there in Portsmouth, on the eve of the Spithead Review. But never mind the kaiser and his quota of battleships, Amos thought: the king’s most dangerous adversary was right here in the mission hall. Amos clapped and whistled with the rest of the crowd, and there was nothing grudging about it; credit where credit was due, he thought.
H
ugh took Eve for lunch at the Mountain Spring Hotel. Soon she would be sailing back to England, and Hugh said he wanted to treat her before she did. They talked, as he drove, about her girls and how they’d been when he saw them. She wanted precise details – what they said, how they looked, what they wore – which Hugh struggled to supply. ‘I’m a man,’ he said. ‘I don’t notice the finer points.’ But he did tell her that Eliza looked prettier than ever and danced for him on the slate floor of the big kitchen, and Ellen deigned to eat lunch at the table in his honour.
‘Where else would she eat it?’ Eve said.
‘Up a tree, by all accounts. She’s turned wild in your absence.’ He started to laugh, but stopped when he saw her expression. ‘No, it’s fine. She was fine.’
‘Was she filthy?’ Eve had an image now of Ellen, caked in muck and feathers, foraging in hedgerows.
‘Clean hands, but the rest of her was a little grubby,’ Hugh said honestly. ‘Anna was there, remember – she has standards, even if they’re not quite as high as yours.’
She looked at him when he mentioned Anna, for signs of the old attachment, but he just smiled blandly, although he was perfectly aware of her curiosity. He had proposed to Anna once, trying to step in front of Amos, pip him at the post: she had turned him down and married the man who – in Hugh’s considered opinion – was far less likely to make her happy. At Ravenscliffe, over lunch, he had noted her reluctance to talk about her husband, and an absence of radiance when she did; noted, too, his absence from the gathering, which went unexplained. All of this had been very interesting to Hugh: never say never, he had thought. Picturing Anna now, he allowed himself to think it again. Sometimes life was a long game, and the patient man the victor.
Eve gazed at the sea, which glittered turquoise, and read aloud the quaint and captivating road signs: Alligator Church, Fellowship, Nonsuch and, ahead, a left turn to Frenchman’s Cove. She felt a sudden sharp regret at how little of the island she had seen. The hotel, Musgrave Market and Eden Falls – these three points, marked on a map, would accurately plot the tiny triangle of her existence here in Jamaica.
‘I’ve ’ardly seen anything,’ she said now, in a sort of plaintive wail. ‘I should’ve done more while I had t’chance.’
Hugh smiled across at her. ‘Yellow fever tends to put the kibosh on touring.’
‘I suppose so. But before I fell ill, I didn’t stray far either.’
‘Well you strayed from Netherwood to Jamaica. It’s further than a lot of people go in a lifetime.’
‘True.’ She smiled, and he allowed himself an appreciation of her beauty. The illness had left her thinner than before, and more fragile in appearance, but this enhanced her allure, Hugh thought. ‘What?’ she said, and he looked away at once.
‘I was just thinking,’ he replied, his eyes back on the road, ‘how very much you’ve done for us, and what an absolute brick you’ve been.’
‘Why thank you, kind sir.’
He inclined his head graciously and then swung the motorcar into an almost-concealed right turn, which took them on to the long, straight, spectacular driveway of the Mountain Spring. It was lined on each side with jacaranda trees, whose spreading branches formed a canopy through which the sunshine filtered in leopard spots of light. Eve stretched out an arm and trailed her hand through the lower, softer shoots, and Hugh told her that they’d missed the glory of full bloom, when the flowers gave the entire driveway a purple-blue glow.
‘You see, there’s something I should’ve seen,’ Eve said, although until he mentioned it she had thought it uncommonly charming already.
‘Another time.’
She looked across at him. ‘You know as well as I do that I shan’t be back.’
‘We-ell,’ he said, slowly. ‘As I just said, never say never.’
‘Did you say that? I didn’t ’ear you.’
‘Didn’t I?’ He laughed at his own mistake, but kept it to himself. ‘Well, anyway, it’s a firmly held belief of mine that one should never rule anything out.’
‘You can rule out me coming back, believe you me. Boats and bridges are all burned.’
The hotel suddenly revealed itself as they emerged from the tunnel of jacaranda. It was a long, three-storey building with a pitched roof, tiled red: functional rather than picturesque. It possessed no immediate charm, said Eve; it lacked personality. Hugh said that so did its owner, the president of United Exotics.
‘But what Vernon Dowe lacks in personality he makes up for in personal wealth, a fair amount of which he’s ploughed into this place. They wanted the Whittam, y’know. Silas wouldn’t sell. I thought he was mad, but now I think perhaps
I
was.’
An immaculately liveried doorman stepped forwards and Hugh slowed to a halt.
‘Good afternoon madam, and welcome to the Mountain Spring Hotel. Good afternoon sir, and welcome back.’
Very slick, thought Eve, very clever to know she was new and Hugh wasn’t. The young man flashed a toothy American grin and held open the door for Eve, who hadn’t realised it was quite time to get out of the car. She shot Hugh a quizzical look. ‘They park the motor for us,’ he said, then adopted a New York twang – softly, so as not to offend – and added, ‘All part of the Mountain Spring experience.’
The interior of the hotel was wonderfully cool, thanks, Hugh said, to Vernon Dowe’s investment in some new-fangled electromechanical apparatus that could draw in warm air and blow it out chilled. ‘Never,’ Eve said, but the evidence was all around her; at the bar, some of the women wore furs. She and Hugh were ushered to a table with two clubby leather chairs, given plump, promising menus and each offered a flute of perfectly cold champagne, on the house. ‘A token of our appreciation to loyal customers,’ the waiter said.
‘So, Mr Oliver, do you come here often?’ Eve said, affecting a passable drawl when the waiter had gone and they had toasted one another’s good health and happiness.
‘Between you and me, absolutely as often as possible,’ Hugh said, and they laughed. She could see the draw. Aside from the blissful effects of the cool-air machine, the place was a sanctuary of competent calm. A string quartet played Brahms among the potted palms and the waiters moved about the room as if they were on oiled castors; their obliging smiles accompanied every word and deed. They were all white-skinned, though: not a local among them. This seemed odd, to Eve: a startling contrast to their own enterprise on the other side of town.
‘New Yorkers and Bostonians,’ Hugh said, ‘to a man. Silas grinds his teeth in frustration whenever I persuade him to come here with me.’
‘Even now?’ She was thinking of the merry atmosphere at the Eden Falls Hotel: the busy terrace, the barbecue nights.
Hugh nodded. ‘Even now. He’d swap places in a heartbeat.’
‘’e’s ungrateful. ’e wouldn’t know a good thing if it slapped him in t’face.’
‘He’s conventional, that’s all. He’d like to be not merely a successful hotelier, but a
conventionally
successful hotelier, like Dowe.’