Connie’s hand flew to her mouth in shock. The sudden tragic conclusion had caught her off guard.
‘Suicide among cricketers is more common than you might think,’ added Tam, who spoke with no inkling of his story’s effect upon Connie. ‘You didn’t know?’
Connie shook her head, and said nothing. Their food had arrived, and Tam poured them another glass, though the interruption had not diverted him from his sombre theme. ‘Aye, I’ve known a few who’ve … gone that way. P’raps the game attracts them. You need the strength up here –’ he tapped his temple ‘– if you’re going to survive as a player. I could always tell which ones had it – Will, for instance –’
It was the first time his name had been mentioned, and Tam broke off in the manner of one who had blundered. But Connie had already prepared herself for this moment, and with a self-conscious calm, said, ‘How is Will? Did he join you on the Isle of Wight?’
‘No,’ Tam replied distantly, ‘I think he was – elsewhere.’ He didn’t look her in the eye as he spoke.
‘He came to visit me in prison. Did he tell you?’
Tam nodded, and shifted awkwardly in his seat. She suspected he was not much disposed to talk about matters of the heart. ‘I think he was quite shocked,’ he said tactfully. ‘Seeing a friend in distress …’
‘Well, a true friend would have offered to help,’ she said, and Tam took the oblique compliment with a small tilt of his head. They had finished the cutlets and paused for a smoke – Tam had a cigar in blast – when a shadow loomed over their table. It was a fashionably dressed young man – a ‘nut’ – with a monocle gleaming in his eye and a grin as toothy as an alligator’s.
‘Hullo again!’ he cried and offered his hand to Tam, who looked nonplussed by the stranger’s greeting. If the man suspected that Tam didn’t remember him he betrayed no sign of embarrassment. ‘Pardon the interruption, just spotted you across the room. Coronation Day, two years ago? Though I’ll always recall it as the day the Great Tam was guest of honour at my flat!’
Tam’s brow slowly cleared as the memory began to surface. ‘Er, yes … is it …?’
‘Reggie – Reggie Culver,’ he supplied cheerily. ‘I think we have a mutual friend – Will Maitland. Saw him the other day, as a matter of fact, out walking with a young lady –’
‘It’s a pleasure to see you again,’ Tam cut in, glancing at Connie, who now understood his awkwardness when Will’s name had come up. So … it had not taken him long to form a new attachment. She could tell from his distracted manner that Tam wanted rid of their intruder, but Reggie plainly had no intention of letting his catch slip away; he had begun, like so many others, to yarn through his personal memories of the batsman. Connie had the disagreeable sensation of having met the man before, but she couldn’t exactly recall where. The drawling voice, that monocle …
‘… never seen such a hit!’ Reggie was reminiscing over the shot they always talked about, the one that cleared the pavilion at Lord’s. Tam took this moment to gesture in Connie’s direction, saying, ‘This young lady was there, too – saw it with her father and brother, I think …’
Connie smiled, touched that Tam should have remembered this out of all the hundreds of people who had bedevilled him with their recollections. Reggie, glancing briefly at her, offered a stiff tweak of his mouth before resuming his descant of blandishments. Connie might as well have been invisible for all the interest he had displayed – and she realised in that instant where they had met before. This was the bumptious creature who had accosted her and Lily on the suffrage march during Coronation week (‘Don’t you wish you were a man?’). Reggie plainly had no memory of her; perhaps he asked every woman he met the same question. Good Lord – to think he was a pal of Will’s! He might have jawed at their table all lunchtime but for the intervention of a waiter and his pudding trolley.
‘Oh well!’ said Reggie, as if his imminent removal were a cause of regret for all concerned. ‘Nice to run into you again. Good luck for the new season, sir!’
As he strolled off back to his own table, Tam muttered under his breath, ‘He thinks I’m still playing, the jackass …’ He seemed upset by his recent idolater.
‘He was very enthusiastic about the Lord’s hit,’ said Connie, trying to coax back his good mood.
‘Yes, him and a thousand others,’ he said gruffly. ‘They seem to assume it’s the only thing I ever did. I scored 23,000 runs in a career, made the quickest championship hundred in the game, played for England – but all they want to talk about is that shot. It makes me –’ He checked himself, as though hearing his own disproportionate irritation, and looked at Connie. ‘I’m sorry – must seem very graceless of me. I’ve just been brooding about things …’
‘You mean your retirement?’ she asked.
He let his head drop. ‘It’ll take some getting used to.’
Connie reached across the table and patted his hand. ‘I’m sure you’ll find fulfilment in other ways, Tam,’ she said gently. ‘You still have your life ahead of you.’
Tam surprised her by clasping the hand she had laid on his. She felt his gaze so searchingly upon her that, in slight alarm, she cast about for a diversion. With a brave laugh, she said, ‘So Will has found himself a young lady, it seems. I’m curious – I confess it!’ Her voice was light, but her words contained a question that Tam couldn’t ignore.
‘I’ve met her the once,’ he said, shrugging. ‘She seemed – perfectly nice. But she couldn’t hold a candle to the previous one,’ he added.
She smiled at his nervous gallantry, and murmured, ‘“’Tis not a year or two shows us a man …” Never mind. There are worse fates than being alone.’
Tam looked at her searchingly. ‘What could be worse than that?’
‘Oh … to be mistakenly joined to another person. I dread that more.’
‘D’you really?’ he said, giving her a curious look. He leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve known both states, and I’m not sure.’
Connie stared at him, astonished. ‘You were – married?’
‘Is that so surprising to you?’ he said with a hurt expression.
‘No, no – I mean … you never talked about it, so I assumed …’
‘There are some things I don’t talk about,’ he shrugged. After a pause, he said, ‘We married young – too young. I was playing cricket six days a week, trying to earn a crust. We’d hardly see one another. Dora, that’s the wife, she got upset about it, and for a while I tried to set things right. We took more holidays. But once my career was on the up it just became harder and harder. The final straw was going to Australia with the England team in ’94. I was away for ten weeks. By the time I got back, it was all over. She’d moved out, found someone else.’
Connie said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Tam.’
‘It wasn’t all bad, though – when we were together, I mean. We had some happy times … The marriage failed, but I wouldn’t call it a mistake.’ He seemed to be debating the matter with himself. Connie sensed, not for the first time that afternoon, that Tam’s odd mood might have its source in something other than professional disgruntlement. There seemed a tentativeness in his manner with her, as though he were gauging how much intimacy could exist between them. It occurred to her again how little she knew him. The more he revealed of himself – and this disclosure about his marriage was certainly a surprise – the less she felt she understood. The ‘Great Tam’ she had read about in the newspapers, the loud, gregarious sportsman who gambled and caroused late into the night, was very different from the vulnerable fellow before her now. A suspicion, unformed but troubling (the way he had clasped her hand), was prompting her to wonder if he might be rather lonely.
They talked about their future plans. Connie spoke of her excitement at the prospect of assisting Mr Cluett at St Thomas’s. Tam looked startled by her ambitions, and said so.
‘Why? Do I seem such a feeble feminine creature to you?’ she said jestingly.
He shook his
head. ‘Far from it. I only wonder at the terrible responsibility of it. To have someone’s life in your hands.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Connie. ‘But then it’s a terrible responsibility to do anything useful at all.’
There followed some argument as to who would have the honour of the bill. Connie eventually insisted over Tam’s alarmed protests. ‘You paid for my lawyer. You will not pay for my lunch as well.’
He looked quite unhappy about this, but brightened on conceiving another opportunity to meet in the summer. The Priory would stage a benefit match to salute his retirement, he explained, and, scheduled during Festival Week, huge crowds were expected to attend. ‘There’ll be a dinner for me at the pavilion, with various worthies of the town. I’d be very honoured if you agreed to attend.’
Connie bit her lip. ‘It’s very kind of you, Tam, but – there’s a certain mutual friend I would prefer to avoid …’
Tam nodded slowly, and looked so crestfallen that Connie held back from a firm answer. She knew almost for a certainty that she wouldn’t go, but asked Tam for a little time to consider the proposal. It seemed to mollify him. They emerged from the restaurant into the blustery spring day they had left behind. Connie clapped her hand on her hat to prevent it from blowing away, and offered her other hand for him to shake. As he did so, he said ‘I’m sorry about what happened with you and Will, but …’ He paused, and looked more anxious than she had ever seen him. ‘… but I hope it won’t prevent our being friends.’
‘Of course it won’t,’ she said, wondering how she could soften the eventual refusal of his invitation to the Priory. He offered her his arm, and they began walking towards Piccadilly Tube station. On a news-stand was blazoned the shrill headline:
LATEST SUFFRAGETTE ATTACK ON GOLF COURSE
Tam caught her eye, seeing that she had read it. Connie returned a sidelong look, and laughed. ‘Nothing to do with me.’ She glanced behind, nevertheless, mindful of strangers tracking her steps through the uncomprehending crowds.
14
‘DEAD?’
Will had just cracked the top of his breakfast egg, and laid down his spoon. The gesture felt like a mark of respect. Eleanor, with The Times unfolded across the table in front of her, nodded gravely. For some moments a hush fell over the room, distantly punctuated by the metronomic tunk of the grandfather clock, before she spoke again.
‘In hospital at Epsom yesterday afternoon. She never regained consciousness. “Two visitors had draped the screen around the bed with the WSPU colours … A sister of the patient and a lady friend of her mother stayed at the hospital for many hours, and on Saturday night her brother arrived at the bedside. Only members of the staff, however, were present when the end actually came”.’
Dead. It was that odd conjunction of something that was shocking yet not surprising. The lady whose final hours the newspaper described was Emily Wilding Davison. In common with many others, Will had become uneasily preoccupied by her fate. On the Wednesday of the previous week, Miss Davison had taken the train to Epsom Downs racecourse with a suffrage flag wound about her middle, concealed beneath her coat. During the Derby Stakes, as the horses rounded Tattenham Corner, she had run out onto the course and, attempting to grasp the reins of the King’s horse, had fallen beneath its hooves. She was rushed unconscious to a nearby hospital where a surgeon tried to relieve the bleeding inside her head from the fracture. For the last four days her life had hung in the balance. The Queen, who had seen the incident, was reported to have enquired about her condition.
Incredulity mingled with outrage in the newspaper reports, which Will had read in a state of sickened fascination. He couldn’t comprehend the wilfulness that had induced the woman to destroy herself. To hunger-strike was one thing; to throw yourself in front of a galloping horse quite another. He supposed, vaguely, that there must be causes worth dying for – King and Country, of course (one had to say that) – but it seemed inconceivable that female emancipation could be one of them. She must have been a madwoman; her middle name, ‘Wilding’, almost confirmed it. Yet as news of the incident became clearer, details of Miss Davison’s preparations on the fatal day appeared to undermine the assumption of suicide. It emerged that she had bought a return ticket to Epsom, indicating that this was not to be her last journey. Eyewitness reports at the course suggested she was quite in control of herself. After the first race, she had marked on her card the winner, Honeywood, and in second place King’s Scholar. The next race came and went – she marked that, too. The third race was the Derby.
For as long as Will relied only on newspaper reports, Miss Davison’s act of martyrdom remained an abstraction; unsettling, of course, but essentially elsewhere. It was upon seeing it for himself that the full horror overtook him. He had been walking down Baker Street when he noticed a queue outside a dingy little music hall. It was now the fashion for such places to show Pathé newsreels of recent public events – royal weddings, society gatherings, popular demonstrations. Will would have passed right by the hall but for his eye snagging on that day’s bill of entertainment: SUFFRAGETTE INCIDENT! His curiosity piqued, he bought a ticket and entered the frowsy darkness of the auditorium, full to the door even this early in the evening. He sidled through the crowds in the back gallery, heads silhouetted against the flickering screen as the projector whirred laboriously on. The only film Will had watched for any length of time had been the report of an MCC game at Lord’s, and that principally because he knew Tam featured in it. As it transpired, the reels were so imperfect that it rendered the images of the cricket near-meaningless – the players moving at that jerky, farcical speed – and Will had seriously wondered if this craze for cinematography could last.
He sensed a murmurous hum of anticipation: a title card announced DERBY DAY, 4 JUNE 1913. The audience seemed to close in around him. It started, the camera silently, almost primly, surveying the Epsom crowd, an unsuspecting sea of hats, then a switch of angle to the horses bunched together, pounding across the turf. They turned Tattenham Corner, a racing blur of equine sinew and muscle, until nearly all had passed the camera’s static gaze. Then Will saw a figure materialise, as in a dream, in front of the last rider but two and in the blink of an eye caught the drastic impact and the tumbling havoc that followed. In the dark around him he heard a protesting intake of breath, though the moment had come and gone so suddenly he wondered if he had really seen it at all. But here it came again, the same sequence played on a loop, and now he began to piece it together. It was horrifying to mark how the figure ducked beneath the rails and stepped, quite daintily, around the oncoming horses; then, an extraordinary thing, she dodged one as it thundered towards her, as if to say, No, you’re not the one I came for. She seemed to stand in the midst of them for an eternity, waiting for Anmer, the King’s horse, until it was almost on top of her, and then raising her hand to stop it. Will stood there shaken, appalled. The collision had sent Miss Davison somersaulting over the ground; the horse struggled to its feet, but she and the jockey lay motionless as the crowds began streaming onto the course.
He had watched it again, and again, nine or ten times, until the sequence seemed burnt onto his retina. It was that deliberate sideways step the woman made which haunted him, the calculation of it. She knew precisely what she was doing. In the days following Will had made no mention of the Derby film to anyone, though he could not help himself thinking about it, and he waited for news of the injured woman in a private agony of suspense. If she died, would others follow her lead? Or would the government finally yield to the women’s demands? He looked across the table at his sister, still absorbed in The Times. Eleanor was a rational, educated, trustworthy sort of girl … it did not seem so terrible to him that she might one day have the vote. Indeed, he suspected that she might know a great deal more about the political processes of the country than he did.
Now she raised her eyes from the paper. ‘I wonder if Constance knew her …’
‘I’ve no idea,’ he said, after a
pause, rather nettled. He regarded her continuing interest in Connie as rather tactless, though he added, casually: ‘Tam would be the man to ask about Miss Callaway. He saw her in London.’
‘Tam? Are they friends?’
‘Hardly. But for some odd reason he’s invited her to his benefit match at the Priory next month.’
When Tam had informed him of this development, Will sensed that he was being asked, implicitly, for his permission. He had heard nothing more of the matter since, and trusted that Connie would stay away – for the sake of all concerned.
‘Perhaps Tam enjoys her company,’ mused Eleanor. ‘And she does love cricket.’
At that moment their mother sailed into the room, and in unspoken agreement brother and sister dropped the subject they had lately discussed. Mrs Maitland looked at the fractured head of Will’s boiled egg and said, in peremptory fashion, ‘Something wrong with the breakfast?’
Will shook his head. ‘My appetite seems to have deserted me.’
‘Oh? I hope you’re not sickening,’ said his mother. ‘You haven’t forgotten about dinner with Ada and her parents this evening?’
Suppressing a sigh, he said, ‘Of course not. Would you excuse me? I have practice at the ground in an hour.’
With a meaning look to Eleanor, Will discarded his napkin and retreated from the table.
The sun was hidden beneath rolling banks of cloud, and the atmosphere had become muggy. Will, sweating astride his bicycle, was unsettled by the recent conversation with his sister. Bad enough to have that unfortun ate woman at Epsom on the brain; now she had become, maddeningly, entangled with the memory of Constance, whose face still rose unbidden before him in his dreams. Whenever he thought of their last interview in that wretched prison cell, with iron doors clanging in echo, he suffered a blinding spasm of shame; it literally caused him to close his eyes for a moment and bow his head. Hitherto he had salved the conscience-needling discomfort by reminding himself that they were never likely to meet again. It was shabby, but it would be endurable. And then Tam had nonplussed him with the news that he had invited her to the Priory for his testimonial match. Of all the – He could only presume that Connie would have as little inclination to see him as he did her.
Half of the Human Race Page 27