‘That parkin’s all gone,’ Lilly said to Eve. ‘And you’ve no milk.’
She walked off, her dishevelled posse trailing behind her. Ellen flung her spear over the hedge and onto the common. She had a good arm and a good eye; in a skirmish or a siege she would have been an asset.
‘Are you going to say ’ello, then?’ Eve said.
Ellen crossed the garden and gave her mother a stiff-armed hug, but Eve caught her and held on, kissing the top of her head, then, with one arm still around the child’s shoulders, she tried to pick out the dried leaves from her tousled brown hair. Ellen submitted to the attention, but only briefly. She pulled away and bared her teeth dramatically, to show Eve a new gap in the top row.
‘Another one gone?’
Ellen nodded. ‘Feels nasty,’ she said, poking her tongue into the space. ‘What’s for tea?’
‘Eggs and bacon, I expect. But run on to t’Co-op for me first, fetch some milk.’
‘Can I get some sherbet?’ She held out her hand for money. Just seven years old, but she’d been driving a bargain since she learned how to talk.
‘No. Oh, go on then. And find Angus on your way back; bring ’im ’ome with you.’
The child turned and ran. Ellen Williams never walked unless there was absolutely no avoiding it. She went through life at full tilt.
‘Be careful,’ Eve said, thinking of glass bottles and milk, but she spoke to an empty garden.
T
he letter on the hall table hadn’t been from Eve, though Norah had been right about the Barnsley postmark.
‘Alderman Simpson,’ Anna said to Amos, handing him the folded writing paper. ‘He wonders whether I might stand for Ardington town council.’
They were sitting on the Victoria Embankment, a short stroll from Westminster Bridge. The bench was one that they had used so often they considered it their own. Amos had been sitting there when Anna arrived, and had already sent away three other perfectly entitled citizens, begging their pardon but making it plain that the bench could not be shared. It amused Anna that her husband always managed to get away with this: it was the element of surprise, Amos told her. No one expected to be moved on from a public bench, and therefore they always obliged.
From the wicker basket on her lap from which she had produced the letter, Anna now brought out a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. This, too, she handed to her husband.
‘Bread and dripping?’ he asked, and she laughed.
‘Bad luck. Cheese and tomato.’
He placed the package on his knee and opened the letter, scanning its contents and smirking at Greville Simpson’s copperplate handwriting. ‘You’d never know ’e were dragged up in a Grangely slum,’ he said.
Anna, who liked the alderman, tutted. ‘Nothing wrong with an elegant hand,’ she said. ‘And we can all improve our lot.’
This was true, and Amos conceded the point with a nod of his head. But Alderman Simpson’s cursive was the least of his affectations, in Amos’s view. There was a rumour that since being elected to the council, he had spent a few bob on elocution lessons and, certainly, when he addressed committee meetings in the town hall his aitches were these days very much in evidence, though not always in the right place.
Halderman
Simpson, Enoch Wadsworth called him, pillar
hof
the community. Enoch was Amos’s agent, friend, adviser and confidant: Enoch was the reason Amos was an MP. And if he couldn’t laugh at Greville Simpson with Anna, whose Russian ear, Amos was convinced, prevented her from hearing the comedy in the alderman’s voice, he knew he would be able to laugh with Enoch later.
‘Will you stand, then?’ he asked Anna now, because that, after all, was the purpose of the letter and the reason she had shown him. ‘They could use you on that education committee.’
‘Of course not.’ She took the letter back, suddenly irritated. How did he imagine she had time to run for the council? As it was, she barely had time to play the MP’s wife in Amos’s Yorkshire constituency.
‘What?’ Amos said.
She looked at him. ‘How do you think I can be councillor, when so much of my life is in London? I’d have to be always in Ardington.’
‘Well, would that be so terrible? There’s plenty to be done up there.’
She laughed, astonished. ‘But I have commissions until the end of summer, and new enquiries almost every day.’
He was looking straight ahead, at the grey-brown Thames. It moved sluggishly, as if it were made of something thicker than water, as if it were weary of its journey. ‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘In that case I suppose it’s out of t’question.’
Anna heard his words, but was certain his true meaning lay beneath their surface. For a while, she considered his profile; he was a handsome man, but there was a stubborn set to his expression that did him no favours. And she knew exactly what was on his mind.
‘You think I should run for Ardington Council, don’t you?’
He turned to look at her again. ‘I think you’d be a cracking councillor. I think with you on t’Labour benches, they’d ’ave a much better chance of getting summat done.’
‘And Anna Sykes Interiors? We just close door and say, sorry, all finished?’
He looked away again. ‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘that there are more worthwhile ways for you to spend your days than painting murals for pampered aristocrats.’
It wasn’t, by any means, the first time Amos had said this, but it was the first time in a while. Anna’s spirits plummeted. It was such a familiar refrain; He can never mention aristocrats without calling them pampered, she thought now.
‘I love what I do,’ she said. She kept her voice quiet and steady, because they were just a stone’s throw from the House of Commons and who knew who might overhear if she truly gave vent to her feelings?
‘I don’t,’ he said, as if she didn’t already know this. ‘I don’t love what you do.’
This was what happened, from time to time. The catalyst would arrive by stealth and suddenly everything would be spoiled. And now, Anna thought, I should point out how my income supports his unpaid position as Labour MP for Ardington. She didn’t, though.
‘I’m your wife and Maya’s mother, and those things will always be so,’ she said instead. ‘But also, I’m an artist.’
‘Artist to the privileged few. Artist to them as ’as a bare ballroom wall they want painting, or a billiard room that wants cheering up.’
‘You make me sound so trivial.’
‘You’re not. The people you work for are.’
‘But if it makes me happy?’
His face was set: grim and unrelenting. On his lap, the waxed-paper parcel lay untouched. Too cross to eat a sandwich, she thought: how like Maya he could be. She knew from experience that, short of pledging right now to shun every illustrious name in her order book, there was nothing she could do to unravel this tangle of resentment. Time, and a little distance, would free them, as it had done before.
‘I’m going to Slade,’ she said, standing. ‘I need to see Clara and William; ask them to come with me on Friday to Marcia de Lisle’s place in Sussex.’
He didn’t answer, and she hadn’t really expected him to. But she was damned if she would pander to his prejudices. Anna was all for equality: not least her own, with him.
He was sorry, when she walked away, that he hadn’t said goodbye. He felt mean-minded and petulant and then, when he stood, the forgotten, wrapped sandwich fell to the ground and he felt even worse. By the time he reached the Socialist Club he was mired in a profound gloom, made all the deeper by the knowledge that it was of his own making. Enoch, early as usual, had already stood him a drink; he and the pint waited at a carefully selected corner table, from where the members’ bar was in full view and the red plush curtains at an adjacent window would help muffle their voices; he was nothing if not cautious.
‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘You’ve a right face on.’
Amos sat down.
‘Nowt new,’ he said. ‘Bit of a barney with Anna.’
Enoch grimaced and pushed his round, wire-framed spectacles back up his nose. ‘Not this again? For God’s sake man, will you let ’er be?’
Amos, struck dumb by his friend’s vehemence, stared at him.
‘She’s making a living, and a good one at that,’ Enoch said, more calmly. ‘Let ’er get on wi’ it. You can’t use sheer force o’ will on a woman like Anna.’
Amos raised an eyebrow and Enoch immediately took his meaning; could hardly miss it. Unmarried, scholarly, dedicated to the party, Enoch was meant to confine his expertise to politics. What did he know about the fairer sex? Bugger all, said Amos’s expression.
‘Aye,’ Enoch said. ‘Well, ’appen I’m no authority on women in general. But any fool can see Anna’s ’er own woman. You knew that three years ago, when you wed.’
She was a grand lass too, he thought: bonny and clever, and younger than Amos by nearly twenty years. He should think himself lucky. If he, Enoch, had been given a chance – even half of one – with a woman like Anna, he wouldn’t have spent any time grousing about her. He stared into his pint for a moment, thinking about loneliness, and the lot of the political agitator. He was younger than Amos by a couple of years, but he looked older. His lungs were bad after twenty years in the pits, and the frequent struggles for breath gave him a strained, stooped appearance and a sickly pallor. He no longer thought of romance, though he’d once exchanged letters with a fellow Fabian from Lytham; for a time, he had imagined himself attached. But then she had written with news of an engagement, which, she said, ‘made further correspondence impossible’ and he had turned back to his books and pamphlets with something resembling relief. The episode, while it had lasted, had made him feel vulnerable: waiting for her next letter, worrying that he’d replied too promptly to her last. These anxieties had distracted him from his true path, he had told himself; a solitary life suited him best, and was necessary to his particular brand of political commitment. That was fifteen years ago and, for the most part, he believed it. He knew, though, that if fate had delivered him an Anna Rabinovich, he would have felt himself blessed.
He looked up at Amos, who was looking down. ‘Anyroad,’ Enoch said, returning to the theme, ‘she’s not doing any o’ them lords and ladies a favour, is she? They’re all paying through t’nose, from what I’ve ’eard.’
‘It’s talked about, then,’ Amos said, as if Enoch had just delivered a terminal diagnosis.
Enoch made a gesture of irritation. ‘Not so you’d notice. Believe it or not, t’Labour Party ’as more to worry about than where your money comes from.’
This was blindingly obvious. From within and without, the party was under attack. Victor Grayson, a young firebrand MP from the Colne Valley, seemed hell-bent on bringing down the old guard with public denunciations of their class treachery and lily-livered policies. Meanwhile, the new Liberals were stealing all Labour’s best lines; last year they’d announced an old-age pension provision and this year Lloyd George had gone for the jugular of the landed aristocracy in his People’s Budget, proposing taxes on the rich that even Robin Hood might think a bit steep. It was hard for Labour to hang on to its identity when the Liberals were redistributing wealth and taking on the House of Lords, so Amos knew well enough that the source of his wife’s wealth was the last of his party’s problems, but still.
‘Anyroad,’ Enoch said, ‘Ramsay MacDonald makes no secret that it’s ’is wife’s money they live off.’
Amos gave a grim laugh. ‘Margaret MacDonald does more Good Works than your average saint. She ’as no time to rub shoulders wi’ aristocracy. There’s trade schools to set up, and t’Women’s Labour League to run. If she paid for MacDonald to bathe in champagne, nob’dy would call her to account.’
Enoch made a discreet shushing motion: a brush of his finger against his lips. Walls had ears, and there was Amos, detracting in public from the irreproachable wife of Ramsay MacDonald; like sitting in a chapel and heckling the minister, it just wasn’t done. He lowered his voice to not much more than a whisper.
‘Do you want to know your problem?’
‘No.’
‘Your problem is, you let a bit of personal strife cloud your professional ’orizons.’
‘Nice one; put it in a pamphlet,’ Amos said, but he knew it, really, and he didn’t need lessons in psychology from Enoch. He was out of sorts with Anna, and therefore out of sorts with the world – Enoch Wadsworth and Margaret MacDonald included. His opposition to Anna’s chosen career, his resentment of her clientele, had the power to make blue skies grey. It wasn’t a permanently debilitating condition; rather, like heartburn or gout, it would flare up at some outside provocation, which, today, had been the letter from the alderman. If she would just consider how it looked to the wider world when the wife of a Labour MP counted earls and countesses, dukes and duchesses among her friends. Clients, Anna would say. Clients and acquaintances, not friends. And yet every Christmas, cards, in red velvet lavishly embossed with gold foil, dropped onto their doormat, bearing festive good wishes from one or another titled family. Maya would cut them up for collages: Amos would rather they went on the fire.
‘When Keir ’ardie ’ad ’is appendix out,’ Enoch said now, ‘King Edward sent ’im a letter of sympathy.’
‘And what’s that got to do wi’ t’price of fish?’
‘I’m just saying,’ said Enoch. He drained his pale ale, wiped his mouth with his cuff and exhaled with pleasure at the simple satisfaction of a good pint. ‘And, as far as I know, it was accepted with good grace.’ He gave Amos one of his pointed, piercing looks. ‘So think on.’
E
verything in the Whittam Hotel had been shipped from England; even the pink roses, which blushed, palely English, in the guest drawing room. To encourage British entrepreneurs in this colonial outpost, the government at home had lifted all duty on imported goods, which had saved Silas a small fortune, as the rigorously upheld aesthetic in his Jamaican hotel was that of a large country house in the South Downs, perhaps, or the Cotswolds.
It was a veritable haven of Chippendale and Chesterfields, of chintz, silk and damask. Paintings played a key role in the deception: a Gainsborough,
Conversation in a Park
, which hung in the entrance hall, was of course a reproduction of the original, but it hit precisely the note of nostalgic elegance for which Silas strived. In the dining room a trio of Constables evoked rural English summers. On the walls of the wide first-floor landing pale-faced English heiresses gazed soulfully from verdant gardens and sumptuous boudoirs, and in the billiard room gun dogs held dead birds in their soft mouths while men in Norfolk jackets aimed their rifles at the sky. No English traveller could arrive at the hotel and feel displaced. True, the ceiling fans and mosquito nets were quite out of step with the theme, but they could not be done without, and in any case, they were so comprehensively eclipsed by rose bowls, ottomans and Wedgwood vases that their incongruity was minimal.