by Nina Allan
Another time, I stand in a shop doorway opposite and watch the women arrive for their meeting. I’m amazed to find that I recognise some of them, from the letters I’ve read, from the blurred photographs in the Women’s Studies archive in the British Library. One of them, a young poet named Kathleen Thwaite, is accompanied to the door of the meeting house by her husband, Austin Gears. I know that Kathleen is to die in 1937, on a protest march against Franco’s fascists in Madrid. It makes my heart ache to see her, and the urge to do something, to warn her in some way, is all but overwhelming. I turn quickly away, hoping to catch a glimpse of Helen Bostall instead. On this occasion at least she appears to be absent.
* * *
Has my being here, even to stand motionless in the street, altered things somehow, and for the worse? I push the thought away. It is coincidence, that’s all. She will be here next week, and if not then, the week after. It need not matter. The next time, I file inside the hall with the other women. No one talks to me or takes particular notice but many smile. I feel accepted as one of them. More than that, I can imagine myself as one of them. It is almost as if I have experienced this life, this version of my life anyway, this Dora Newland who attended suffragist rallies in Hyde Park, who conducted furious arguments with her uncle about being allowed to travel down through Italy with another woman friend. Casting Henry – dear Henry, who indulged our every whim when we were children – in the role of authoritarian guardian makes me smile.
We sit on hard wooden chairs in the draughty space – three small attic rooms that have been converted into one larger one – and listen to a Mrs Marjorie Hennessey tell us about her experience of studying politics at the Sorbonne. She is an impressive woman, commanding and authoritative, and I cannot help wondering what happened to her, how come she failed.
So many women, I think. It is depressing to consider how many of us have been discouraged, disparaged, forced to reconsider, turned aside from our dreams.
I want to rush up to Marjorie Hennessey and tell her not to give up, not to drop by the wayside, not to fall silent.
“She’s wonderful, isn’t she?” It is the interval and we are queuing up for tea. The woman who speaks to me seems shy and rather young, and I have the feeling this is her first time here also. Her cheeks are flushed pink.
“Admirable,” I say, and for a second I experience a sensation close to vertigo. I am here, and I am speaking to someone, I think. I hug my bag as if seeking support from it. Inside the bag are the keys to my flat, my purse, my Kindle ereader, my mobile phone, all those other insignificant trifles that don’t exist yet. I come from the future, I think, in what Martin always calls the MGM voice. I want to laugh out loud. I glance over at the chalk board, where Marjorie Hennessey has been drawing diagrams illustrating the economic implications of women withdrawing their labour from the home.
I wonder how my new friend in the tea queue would react if I were to tell her that almost a century later we’re still fighting the same battles. Again, I want to laugh. Not that it’s funny.
“We need more like her,” I say instead, because that also is still true. Now more than ever, we need more anger, more knowledge. “Shall we sit down?”
We take our tea and sit at one of the wooden trestles at the side of the hall. The woman tells me her name is Barbara Winton and she’s a socialist.
“They say there’s going to be another war,” she says. “We have to join with our sisters in Europe – we must prevent war, at all costs.”
She is learning German, and corresponding with the daughter of a friend of her father’s, who lives in Frankfurt. “Her name is Gisela. She’s a sculptor. Don’t you think that’s marvellous? She’s asked me to go out and visit her and Daddy says I can. It feels – I’m not sure how to explain – as if a whole new life is beginning.”
“I hope you’re right,” I say. I tell her that I’m studying Law, that I am hoping to practise at the bar. I see confusion on her face – my age, probably – which is swiftly succeeded by a kind of wonder, mixed with mischievous delight. Women have been allowed access to the legal profession for less than a decade, after all.
“Well done, you,” she says. “I think that’s marvellous.”
Her excitement is contagious. It is only as we are about to resume our seats for the second half of the programme that I finally catch sight of Helen Bostall. She is near the back of the room, talking to a woman with an upright posture and hawkish nose whom I recognise at once as Daphne Evans.
I gaze at them, dumbstruck. I feel like a spy. As I move towards my seat I see Helen turn, just for a moment, and look directly at me.
Instead of the blank, flat gaze of a woman casually scanning the crowd, what I see in her eyes – indisputably – is recognition: you’re here. I feel cold right through. My hands begin to shake. I’m going to drop my cup, I think, then realise it’s all right, I no longer have it. Barbara Winton has taken it from me and returned it to the tea bench at the back.
* * *
That was when I lost my nerve. Instead of sitting down again I pushed through the crowd to the door and then rushed down the stairs, almost tripping over my paisley skirt in the process. Once outside I felt better. There was the usual rowdy hubbub coming from The Charlady, the same stink of greasy Irish stew and overloaded dustbins. I made my way to an access lane between two rows of terraces and took out the watch. I engaged the lever without looking at it – not looking had become a kind of superstition with me – and stood there in the dark, counting primes and feeling that odd, trembling dream state take hold until I became aware of the sound of traffic – motor traffic, I mean, buses and police sirens – on Camden High Street.
I was back. I breathed in through my mouth, tasting exhaust fumes and the tarry scent of someone’s spent cigarette. I stood still for some moments, letting the world come back into focus around me and feeling the relief I felt each time: that I had conducted an extremely risky experiment – heating flash powder in a petri dish, say – and managed to get away without blowing my hands off.
I never experimented with going forward, not even by one day. I had a terror of it, a paralysing phobia. It was a deal I made, I think – with God, the devil, myself, Owen Andrews? Bring me safely home, and I’ll keep our bargain. Well, I guess it worked.
The next time I went back, I was prepared. So, it seems, was Helen. She was waiting for me this time, at the bottom of the stairs outside the meeting house. She told me later that she’d waited there at the start of every meeting since she’d first seen me, knowing I would be returning but not knowing when.
“Dora,” she said quietly. “You’re here at last.” She caught my hands in both of hers. Her fingers were cold. It was December, and she was smiling in a way that suggested she was greeting an old friend, someone she knew well but hadn’t seen in a while. Pleasure, and sadness, as if she knew our time together would be short.
“I don’t understand,” I said, and sighed. Who was I to talk? “How did you – how do you know me?”
“Knowing everything you know – do you need to ask?” she said. “The order in which things happen doesn’t matter, surely? Just that they happen. I’m so pleased to see you.”
She leaned forward to embrace me, and I found myself almost believing – there was such joy in seeing her, such emotion – that this was indeed a reunion and not, as I knew it to be, our first meeting.
“Come,” she said. “We can go back to the flat. Edwin’s away – in Manchester. That’s what he says, anyway.”
“You don’t think he really is?”
She shrugged. “Edwin tells me what it pleases him to tell me. Sometimes it’s the truth and sometimes it isn’t. I had to give up caring which a long time ago.”
We came to Milliver Road. I’d been to the house of course – what I mean is I’d stood outside it many times. I knew 112 as a spruce, bay-fronted terrace with replacement windows. The house in Helen’s time seemed smaller, meaner, the exterior paintwork chipped and blisterin
g. A flight of steps led steeply down to a basement forecourt.
“We’ve had problems with damp,” Helen said. “The woman who lives upstairs says there are rats, too, but I’ve never seen them.”
“Mrs Wilbur?”
She gave me a puzzled look. “Mrs Wilbur? Mrs Herschel lives on the ground floor. There’s no Mrs Wilbur.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. So my researches had proved correct – Irene Wilbur hadn’t moved in yet. There was still time.
“Let’s go in and get warm,” Helen said. “I’ll light the stove.”
* * *
“We were happy here once, Edwin and I,” Helen said. The stove was well alight. Soft lamplight threw shadows on the whitewashed walls of the cosy front sitting room. Framed prints, showing images from a Greek bestiary. An orange-and-green Aubusson rug. Books, books everywhere, overflowing the alcove shelving and piled on the floor. A stack of handwritten pages lay fanned across a low wooden table. It was a good room. A room I felt at home in.
I also knew I’d been there before.
“Have you eaten?” Helen asked.
I laughed. “It’s been a hundred years at least,” I said.
“I can warm up some soup. I made it yesterday.”
“That would be lovely.” I wasn’t hungry – quite the opposite – but I was curious to see how food might taste here. In fact, it tasted like potato soup, thick and nutritious and well seasoned. We ate, dipping bread into our bowls, and I asked Helen what she was working on.
“I’ve been helping to edit a collection of essays by women on the subject of war,” she said. “I want to include writing by German women as well – letters, memoir, whatever I can get hold of. The publisher was against this at first but I managed to persuade them how important it is, essential, even. You don’t think it’s too soon?”
I shook my head.
“I’m glad. We have to use every weapon we have.”
“Weapon?”
“To make people understand what war really is. The madness of it.” She fell silent, head bent. “Dora, I know I shouldn’t really ask you this, but do we succeed? Do we succeed at all?”
I know I shouldn’t answer, and I don’t, not then, but the following week, when I know that Helen will be at her meeting, I return to Milliver Road for one final visit. I have an envelope with me, addressed to Helen. I post it through the front door of the house, hear it fall on to the scuffed brown linoleum of the communal hallway. Inside is a second-hand copy of John Hersey’s memoir, Hiroshima in the original Pelican edition, its pages faded and brittle but clearly readable, the most concise response to her question that I can think of. What good will it do? None at all. But Helen asked me a question and she deserves an answer.
* * *
“That doesn’t matter now,” I said in 1927. “What I mean is – it matters, but there are more urgent things to think about. Urgent for you, anyway.”
“You’re frightening me.”
“In a month’s time, Edwin is going to be murdered. If you stay here you are going to be blamed for it. There will be a trial and—”
“You’re telling me I’m going to be hanged. For a crime I had nothing to do with.”
I stared at her, horrified.
“I thought it was a dream,” she said, more quietly. “That man. He sat on the edge of my bed and told me about it. He was crying. He seemed quite mad. When I told him to go away he did. I wish I’d been kinder.”
Arthur Rawlin. So he had used the watch to try and save her, after all.
“None of that is going to happen,” I said quickly. “But you must leave London, and Edwin. You need to pack your things and get as far away from here as you can.”
She nodded slowly. “I’ve been planning to go, anyway. To leave Edwin, I mean. Whatever we had – it’s over. I could say he’s changed but really I think it’s me. I see him differently now.” She paused. “I see everything differently.”
“Can you think of any reason why anyone would want to kill Edwin?”
She was silent for a long time, lacing and unlacing her fingers. Finally she sighed. “I really don’t involve myself with Edwin’s business any more, but I do know there are people in the Four Brothers he’s fallen out with. Badly. Edwin believes, I don’t know, that we should do something to signal the start of the revolution. Something dramatic, something violent even. He says he has people standing by – bomb makers.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how much of this is true, and how much is just talk. The more he drinks the more he talks, Edwin. That’s something I’ve noticed. Not that half the brethren would see much wrong if Edwin really is planning to blow people up. I think mainly it’s about power within the group – who has it and who doesn’t. There are some who see Edwin as a threat, who think he’s getting above himself. I’m sure they’d be more than happy if he were out of the way. Can you believe that?”
“I can more than believe that.”
“They don’t like him because he’s clever, because he doesn’t give two hoots about their old hierarchies. Because he’s from Manchester, even.” She turned to look at me. “I keep asking myself if it’s partly my fault that things have gone this far. If I could have talked to him more, maybe? But I’ve come to understand that Edwin never cared about what I thought, not even at the beginning. He wanted an audience, that’s all. Now that I no longer listen, he cares even less.”
I was tempted to tell her about Ray and me, but decided that would be unfair. Ray’s no bomb maker, just another man with an ego who needs it stroking. Now that I no longer have to live with him, I can even enjoy his company from time to time. “Where will you go?” I said instead.
“I have a friend, Elsa Ehrling, in Berlin. She says I can stay with her as long as I need. I can teach English. And there are other things I can do to make myself useful. Elsa says workers for peace need to make their voices heard in Germany, now more than ever.”
You’d be right there, I thought, but did not say. I’d interfered enough already. Besides, she would be safe in Berlin, at least for a time.
“I would wait until the new year – but not much longer,” I said. “And tell no one what you are planning – not even Daphne. You can write to her from Berlin. She will understand.”
“I know she will. And, Dora – thank you.”
We talked of other things then: the book she dreamed of writing on poetry and war, my love of numbers and the loneliness I’d always felt in having to abandon them.
“But you never did abandon them – your being here is proof of it. You can see that, surely?”
She was right in a way, I suppose. But I’m no Sophie Germain.
The stove gave out its warmth, and we sat beside it. I understood that this was the moment of change, that if I had indeed met with Helen before, I would not do so again. That I had done what I had come to do, and that this was goodbye.
I felt time tremble in the balance, then come to a standstill. There are moments when time lies in stasis, and this was one of them. But time always moves on in the end.
“I’m pregnant, by the way,” Helen said as I was leaving. “Edwin doesn’t know, don’t worry.”
My heart leapt up at her words. I think I knew this was your story, even then.
* * *
Edwin Dillon lived. With Helen gone and their plans in ruins, Leonard Bell must have decided that murdering him was too much of a risk. Or perhaps he waited, hoping for a better opportunity and never finding it. A year later, the Four Brothers disbanded. Leonard Bell went to Germany, where he became part of the communist movement dedicated to getting rid of Adolf Hitler. He was arrested and deported back to London in 1934. Edwin Dillon headed a splinter group, also calling itself the Four Brothers, and believed to be one of the main instigators of the notorious plot to assassinate Oswald Mosley in 1936. He served four years for his involvement, and although it is not known whether it was prison that made him lose his appetite for radical politics, he cut loose from all his Four Brothers c
ontacts and after the war returned to working as a freelance journalist. You can find feature articles by Edwin Dillon in the archives of The Times, The Guardian and The Glasgow Herald, among other places. He died in 1971.
He was briefly involved with the Irish writer Eimear Mowbray, with whom he had one son. Douglas Mowbray also worked as a journalist, and was known to be a fervent supporter of the IRA. Douglas died aged thirty-one, when he killed himself and his young daughter Gemma by driving off a bridge on the outskirts of Belfast. His son Padraic, who was also in the car at the time, survived. I have been unable to trace his whereabouts. There is every possibility that he is still alive.
* * *
Real history is a mass of conflicting stories. According to the official records, Helen Mildred Bostall was tried and found guilty of the murder of Edwin Patrick Dillon and sentenced to death. The execution was carried out on August 14th, 1928. History seems content with this judgement, though there are many, including myself, who would argue that capital punishment is never justified.
There are also anomalies, if you care to look for them. The Library of the Sorbonne records the publication, in 1941, of a pamphlet by Ellen Tuglas with the title On War: the imaginary reminiscences of hell’s survivor. The work was originally written in English, although a French translation was provided by Ivan Tuglas, a Russian exile resident in Paris since the 1920s and Ellen’s common-law husband until his death in 1952.