That Forgetful Shore (37 page)

“Then I will have to turn my attention to the other May holiday, to the plight of the workers. It's going to be called, you know – this week.”

“The general strike?”

“Of course. The unions are meeting today.” Everyone is talking about a general strike. Most people still find it hard to believe that the other unions will come out in support of the miners, who are already locked out for their insistence on “not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day.” Leo doesn't sound at all stagnant when talking about the possibility of a strike; he lights another cigarette then turns back to finish the washing-up, still talking, making animated gestures with the dishrag. “How can the workers of this country stand it, Kit? Even your staid, respectable British – how can they bear it when the owners cut wages and increase hours at a single stroke? Less pay for more work? How can anyone go on believing that slow and steady, step by step, they'll win over the owners? It's revolution or nothing!” “It might be nothing. The unions might not come out.”

“Oh, they will. They will.” He lays down the dishrag and stubs out his cigarette, barely smoked, on the edge of the sink. “I have to go to Party headquarters today, of course. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. The revolution must have priority.” It's a Saturday; Friday nights and Saturdays are generally the only time they can find to be together, but the Party must come first.

Leo lacks the single-minded devotion to the Party Kit has noticed in some of his friends she's met – young Jewish intellectuals like himself, though most, unlike Leo, are English-born. These men allow the Party to control their jobs, their marriages, every element of their lives. By having a secret affair with a bourgeois schoolmistress, Leo is being, in his way, as defiant as Kit is. He's a true believer in the Red cause, but he's too much of an individual to march to the Party's beat in every parade.

The fact is, Kit thinks as she walks away from Leo's flat, she enjoys having a lover. She remembers Maggie Campbell at Dalhousie all those years ago, saying she wanted to be a round-heeled woman. “Perhaps you had the right idea after all,” Kit thinks, and imagines writing that to Maggie, now Mrs. Hamilton, well-known author of improving storybooks for young girls. She still writes to Maggie regularly, but hasn't written about Leo to her, or to anyone. It's safer to have no confidantes.

The next day she hears nothing from Leo, which is not surprising. It's Sunday, her day to make an appearance in church, another symbol of conformity which Leo mocks without mercy. But the ancient liturgy soothes her, a different kind of peace than the kind she finds sitting at Leo's rickety table smelling his earthy cigarettes. Here, revolution seems impossible, unthinkable, though upon reflection she realizes the gorgeous English words of the service would not even exist without the considerable revolution of the Reformation, which involved quite a bit of bloodshed. The Church now seems solid and reliable, but perhaps the Communist Party will seem just as staid in four hundred years, simply a part of the background of society. Only it needs better writers, if that's to be the case. A Communist Cranmer, someone with the soul of a poet who can enshrine belief in words so lovely they are lodged forever, even in the hearts of those who no longer believe.

There's more here, Kit thinks as she goes forward to receive Communion, than she'll let on to Leo, more than simply keeping her job by an outward show of piety. She does feel something here, a connection, though she's sure it's not to God. She thinks of God as Triffie knew Him – insistent, persistent, creeping into every crack and corner of life, always teaming up with the latest snake-oil huckster in hopes of getting His foot in the door. If Kit ever believed in that God, she stopped a long time ago.

Leo calls himself an atheist – but a Jewish atheist; he insists that distinction not only makes sense but matters. Kit would never go that far; if anything, she's a Deist. An Anglican Deist. Perhaps that's what Leo means by his Jewish atheism: the ideas and even more, the words you worshipped as a child shape the person you become.

She wrangles ideas like this with Leo, who calls her a bloody hypocrite. She misses the opposite side of the argument, and amuses herself as she returns to her pew by inviting Triffie and Leo to an imaginary dinner party with God as the main topic of discussion. What would Trif make of Leo? One more thing Kit will never know.

The talk among respectable churchgoers after the service is all about the threat of the strike. Kit has become so accustomed to Leo's Communist rhetoric that she sometimes forgets how terrifying the threat of revolution is to the average English person. She's used to thinking of Communism as an idea, not a bogeyman – and perhaps, knowing as she does what a real Communist thinks, she's soothed by the realization that such ideas will never take serious hold among the staid British populace.

The strike, however, goes ahead. Kit and the rest of Manchester wake on Tuesday morning to trams and trains that don't run and headlines that scream that the police have New Emergency Powers and that Everyone May Be Arrested! She walks to work instead of taking the tram, and passes a group of strikers picketing the tram stop, but otherwise sees little sign of unrest.

As the days pass, tension builds. The government brings in replacement workers to run the essential services. Out of a sense of loyalty to Leo and the cause, Kit continues to walk to work once the tram drivers have been replaced by strikebreakers. There are talks of the police and army making sweeping arrests, and Kit begins to feel uneasy about hearing nothing from Leo. It's not unusual for a week to go by without any contact, but this is not any ordinary week. When news comes, late in the week, of hundreds of Communists being rounded up for arrest, Kit is worried enough to send a messenger with a note to Leo's flat. There is no reply.

Then, suddenly, it is over. The Labour Party and the trade unions back down, ordering the strikers back to work – all but the miners, who remain out alone, with no support from their comrades. The government has broken the general strike, the great movement that was supposed to begin a revolution, in a mere nine days.

Three days after the strike ends, there's a note from Leo with nothing on it but a place and time to meet – a rundown café in his neighbourhood.

He tells Kit that he was arrested and questioned, but released without being charged just as the strike ended. He sits with his head in his hands, his coffee untouched, smoking one cigarette after another, ranting about the cowardice of the British, the weakness of those who mouth the slogans of brotherhood but collapse at the first sign of opposition. There is little Kit can say, except that she knew all along it would be this way. While part of her shares Leo's disappointment, mostly she is as relieved as every middle-class English person. It's terrible, of course, what the owners are doing to the miners, but does she really want revolution? Does anyone – even Leo, for all his talk?

“What am I doing in this country, Kit?” Leo grinds out another cigarette. “My mother was born here – so what? I am not English. I fool myself to think I could ever be part of bringing the revolution here. I need to be in my own place, among my own people. I need to be somewhere where revolution is a real possibility. I should go to Russia, or home to Poland. Or even to Germany – now
there
is a country ready for revolution!”

“You know if you go to any of those places, you'll never be allowed back into England.”

“But do I want to come back to England? For what?” He takes her hands across the table. “For you, of course, for love – but in the end, what is love in the face of revolution?”

“Still – you can't go home. Do you even have a home, anymore? Nothing is safe in Europe.” She knows that Communists are being arrested all over Europe – in Russia, they are being arrested by other Communists, for being on the wrong side of Party battles. “I'm afraid of what will happen to you if you go home.”

“Everyone goes home, Katerina. Sooner or later. Neither of us is going to lay down our lives to follow each other – so what are we doing here?”

Kit has no answer for this; she goes to his flat and they make love, not tenderly but with angry, tense passion, and then she lets herself out and goes home in the dark, taking a tram that runs as smoothly as England, carrying her back to her own quiet and respectable street.

In the months that follow, nothing changes. The miners remain out on strike, the dream of a workers' revolution receding ever farther into the distance. In November, when they finally go back to longer hours and lower pay, Leo is more despondent than ever, angry about the future both of Communism and of Leopold Lanski in England. He and Kit carry on as before, meeting and making love once every few weeks, but his moods turn darker and he talks more often of going back to Poland, or somewhere else in Europe. Kit tries to dissuade him, yet what does she have to offer if he stays? He does not suggest marriage, and she does not know what she could say if he did.

In the chilly grey winter of 1927, more than a year and a half after the strike, she begins to question her own future in Manchester. She gets a letter from her Oxford friend Edith Stone, now a headmistress in London, who writes:

Our English mistress has had the grave misfortune to fall in love and is now engaged to be married in the summer, which means that we shall be hiring again. Are you really as tired of administrating as you say you are? It's bread and butter to me but I do understand it's not to everyone's taste, and some are born teachers. If you would ever consider leaving the North, and the status of Head, I would be ever so pleased to offer you a position here. With your experience as headmistress in an English school I think I could convince my governors that your colonial accent is not the liability it once was.

Kit lays the letter aside, wondering if she will discuss it with Leo. London draws her, as it always has: she has done good work in the North, but she longs to be closer to the centre of things, and she would like to lay aside the reins of leadership in favour of more teaching, especially in a good school.

Another letter in the day's mail bears a Newfoundland stamp: unusual these days, as she has few correspondents left at home. Ben's mother writes at Christmas and on her birthday; Alice Templeman Penney sends the occasional breezy missive. So does Kit's friend Maud Smith, still teaching at Spencer, who is the author of this particular letter.

She writes about the school and about life in St. John's generally:

I suppose it all seems very far away to you now, living in England, but Times are Hard here ever since the War, and to tell the truth I think you are better off out of it. I sometimes think of leaving myself, joining my sister in the Boston States, but I can't suppress a twinge of envy at you for having gotten to England and stayed there.

Halfway through the chatty, breezy epistle a paragraph catches Kit's eye:

We have a girl here this year from your hometown – I wouldn't be likely to forget the name “Missing Point” having once heard it! Katherine Russell – very bright girl, but of course her father is a fisherman and although she's clever it doesn't seem likely the family will have the money for her to finish this year, much less next year. No doubt she'll soon be out teaching in some outport school without even her Associate Certificate. We keep hearing that the Government will tighten the regulations for teachers so that no-one will be able to teach without a proper education, and with the founding of a University College I imagine the day will come when teachers will be required to have Degrees – quite a change from the old days! But it will be unfortunate for clever girls like young Katie Russell, who will never have the money to aim so high. Though it will be good to have them all better educated, I think we will lose some good natural teachers that way, people who simply had a gift for it regardless of how little education they had.

Miss Smith rambles on about the problems of education in the colony, the new university college, and Spencer itself, with brief digressions into her personal life and the lives of several common acquaintances. It's a good long letter, nearly five pages, but only that one paragraph lingers when Kit lays the letter aside.

Katherine Russell – little Katie Grace. Imagine her being old enough to be at Spencer! But she must be fourteen by now, finished school on the Point. It seems she's got Trif's brains, and that Jacob John has managed to do all right by her. For all everyone says the fishery is not good these past few years, they must have scraped up enough to send Katie off to school. What a shame if, as Miss Smith says, she won't be able to finish the year.

As she folds the letter and puts it away Kit thinks of Leo's words: “Everyone goes home, Katerina. Sooner or later.”

Not I
, she thinks.
I'm going to London
. She is surprised to realize that without talking to anyone or mulling it over, her decision is already made.