Work keeps her busy, and it has its compensations. Her personal life, on the other hand, is virtually non-existent in Manchester. Her acquaintances are all connected with school, the mistresses on her staff and trustees of the Board, parents of students, all of whom must be kept at a cordial distance for various reasons. She attends church because not to do so would be unthinkable, but is not drawn to the life of the parish in any way; everyone understands that the school consumes all her hours and nobody expects much of her. Apart from reading, the only thing she does for her own pleasure is attend an occasional lecture or debate, telling herself she has an obligation to broaden her mind.
It’s easy to see how one’s mind, one’s world, can become narrow and limited. Kit enters through the front door of the house where she rents the upstairs flat. She has books and time and space of her own, which she once thought was the definition of happiness. And she is not unhappy; it’s only that these rooms, which she occupies alone, sometimes seem at once too large and too small. The empty chairs and half-empty bed yawn at her while the walls threaten to close in and trap her.
“Quite enough melodrama, Mrs. Porter,” she says to herself now, flicking through the day’s mail as she lays her umbrella, misted with the afternoon’s drizzle, near the radiator to dry. Pinned above her desk is a notice for the lecture she plans to attend this evening: something about Marxism, which intrigues her. She likes to learn about things well outside her area of expertise and has attended lectures on Theosophy, gardening and the archaeological discoveries in the pyramids of Egypt. Everyone she knows through school thinks the Bolshevik threat is a greater danger to the world even than the war was, but Kit also knows there are labouring men and women in the factories whose lot in life would be far worse than it is if not for the unions. She knows, too, that there are those in the city who think a Marxist revolution is exactly what England needs.
Her tea is a boiled egg and a sandwich of thinly sliced cucumber, eaten while reading Barchester Towers: she is working her way through Trollope. After tea she makes a note in her journal about the upcoming lecture: she tries to make her journal more a record of her life and activities than simply the outpouring of emotion it was at first. She has also kept up the habit of sketching in the margins, the kind of caricatures she used to draw in her letters to Trif. She notices, flipping through the pages, that her Oxford journal was full of sketches of her friends and fellow scholars as well as the tutors and dons, while the Manchester pages contain only a few sketches of students and co-workers, and many still lifes: the view from her window; a pile of crockery on her table.
Seven o’clock draws near. Kit lays aside introspection and changes from her severe office clothes to a slightly less severe skirt and blouse. For evening wear she allows herself a hemline an inch or two higher, though still considerably less daring than many of the skirts she sees on young women at tonight’s lecture. One has, after all, an image to maintain in the community.
The visiting lecturer is a Cambridge man who has recently returned from a visit to Russia – or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as he calls it. He explains the basics of Marxism and describes what he saw of the rule of the recently deceased Lenin and his successor, Stalin. Though he admits it is a harsh regime, he urges cautious tolerance of the Soviet Union. England, he says, should not cut all ties with Moscow as it is far too soon to tell how the great Socialist experiment will work out.
“But surely he’s not advocating that sort of upheaval here,” a man says afterwards. Kit is one of a group of people standing about in the hall afterwards. She goes to lectures because she is hungry for the kind of conversations she became accustomed to at Oxford, lively debates about books and ideas that were heady at the time and have now, in memory, been burnished to a higher gloss.
“Of course not.” Julia Maynard, wife of a Church of England vicar whose daughter attends Kit’s school, waves a dismissive hand. “It’s all very well to talk Bolshevism over coffee, but do you think there’s one person in this room who would mount the barricades and cry out for the blood of the upper classes?” She waves again, vaguely, indicating the assortment of middle-class people all chattering about the lecture. “Everyone here would have far more to lose than to gain from a revolution. We might be intrigued by socialist ideals on paper, but in reality? We’d run to the manor house and ask the squire to let us hide behind the battlements.”
“But the people who would fight on the barricades are not the people in this room,” another man said. “It’s the factory workers and miners. The miners are already calling for a general strike, and where might that lead? That’s what happened in Russia – a few intellectuals stirred up thousands of workers to action.”
“And is that what we are – the intellectuals?” trills Mrs. Maynard, putting a gloved hand to her throat in mock horror at the idea of being either a revolutionary or an intellectual.
“Mrs. Porter certainly is,” says the first man, who is a professor at the university. “Like a true intellectual, she remains silent listening to our babble. No doubt she forms her own opinions.”
Kit smiles, trying to look enigmatic. “I think the workers in the factories have far more to gain by working through the system as it now exists, than by overturning it.” Her comment draws a chorus of approving nods and harrumphs from her hearers. In her position, it’s very important that any views she does express be mild and uncontroversial. Not that she actually is a Communist, but if she were, she’d certainly make every effort to keep it hidden.
Mrs. Maynard’s green eyes flash wickedly at Kit. “Ahh, that’s a very safe answer, Mrs. Porter. We’d hardly like to think you’re teaching Marxism to our daughters, now would we?”
“I can assure you I’m not, ma’am, though the subject is covered in the history course – from a purely objective point of view, naturally.” Kit smiles; she’s not entirely sure what to think of Mrs. Maynard, who’s been in the parish for less than a year and so is even more of a newcomer than Kit is. The two women are close in age and Kit admires Julia Maynard’s keen mind and acerbic wit. She also admires Julia’s occasional lapses of judgement, even more damning to a vicar’s wife than to a headmistress. Kit imagines if there is one woman in Manchester she might actually be friends with it is probably Julia Maynard, though her being the vicar’s wife and the mother of a singularly recalcitrant pupil does complicate matters.
She knows most of the people in the circle, though she can’t remember the names of two of them – both related to governors on her School Board. Only one person is a complete stranger: a rangy, rumpled-looking man in a knit pullover and heavy wool pants who stands next to Mrs. Maynard. He hasn’t said a word so far and his casual style of dress makes him look a little out of place in this rather stuffy gathering.
Just as she’s thinking that, Julia Maynard leans forward, tugging the man by his sweater-clad arm. “Mr. Lanski, is there anyone here you don’t know? I’m being terribly rude – I ought to have introduced you round – you haven’t met Mrs. Porter, have you? Mrs. Porter, headmistress of St. Margaret’s school – Leopold Lanski.”
He leans forward to shake her hand. His grip is firm as she says, “Pleased to meet you, Mr … Lanski.” His accent as he says, “The pleasure is mine, indeed,” confirms her suspicion that he is not an Englishman.
“So, what did you think of tonight’s lecture?” she asks the newcomer.
He rolls his eyes. “It is very easy for those who are warm and well-fed to talk about socialism in the abstract. It sounds a bit different when the words come from men who are hungry and desperate.”
“Like the factory workers and miners, you mean? Or the Russian workers?”
He smiles apologetically. His English is excellent, but his accent lends something exotic to his voice. “No doubt there is real poverty here in the North of England, Mrs. Porter. But what I saw in my home country before the war was far worse. It is true, people do reach a point where revolution seems like the only option.”
“But of course, you have already said you believe in working within the system,” he goes on. “Even if the system is rooted in injustice?”
Kit pauses a moment, collects her thoughts. “I have seen a great deal of good coming from collective action,” she says. “Not just in factory cities like Manchester, but back home, among fishermen in rural areas,” she adds, thinking of Coaker and the Fishermen’s Protective Union.
“Ah yes. I was going to ask you where you had come from.” I vass goink to ask. “I have not much of an ear for English accents, but I think yours is … what do they say? Of the colonies?”
She moves a step closer without knowing she’s doing it. There’s something electric in the man’s presence. It reminds her of the long-ago morning when she came to the schoolhouse in Elliston and saw Ben standing outside. Of course, that’s not the only time. She’s felt the same magnetic presence, the same attraction from other men over the years, though she’s moved in so many all-female circles that there haven’t been many opportunities to be overpowered by the nearness of an attractive man. When there have been such opportunities, there’s often been a complication, such as the man being someone else’s husband. Which this man might very well be, for all Kit knows about him.
“Mrs. Porter, dear, we’re about to get a cab – do you want to share a ride?” Julia Maynard lays a gloved hand on Kit’s arm. Kit hesitates, and Leo Lanski says, “I had hoped to ask for the honour of seeing Mrs. Porter to her home, if that is not too bold.”
“No, of course, thank you very much,” Kit says to Leo, and smiles at Mrs. Maynard, who raises her eyebrows almost to her hairline and makes a tiny O of her mouth. Was Kit thinking just a few moments ago that this woman might be a friend?
Leo escorts her, not home, but to a nearby café. They aren’t long into their conversation before he asks, “And is there, I should inquire, a Mr. Porter?”
He must know there isn’t; wherever he’s from, he’s been in England long enough to know that a married woman would not be headmistress of a girls’ school. “Mr. Porter died in 1918,” Kit says, looking down at her coffee cup.
“Ah. I am sorry.” He pauses, then adds, “I mean I am sorry in more ways than one – I presume your husband died in the war, and I served in the German army. So when I meet an English war widow such as yourself – and I have met many – I feel I owe you an apology.”
“You don’t,” Kit said. “As it happens my husband died after returning from active service. But even had he been killed in action – I would hardly hold an ordinary German soldier responsible for his death.”
“Even had I been on the other end of the gun that killed him?”
“I would try not to,” Kit says. “One would have an emotional reaction, of course – it’s unavoidable – but logically, one can’t blame soldiers for war. They fight for king and country, and follow the orders of their commanding officers.” She thinks of the charge of the Light Brigade, of the charge at Beaumont-Hamel.
“That is surely true in my case,” Leo says. “My father was Polish, and I grew up in what we called Poland, though it was not on the map at that time. I was conscripted into the German army and forced to fight against fellow Poles who were conscripted by the Russians. I never fought on the Western Front.”
“Yet you apologized.”
“I apologized for being part of the war. I claim the universal defense. We only follow orders – we fight for king and country,” Leo says. “So the working men of one country slaughter their natural comrades, the working men of another country, in the name of wealthy kings who cares nothing for their lives. How long will this go on? Do you think we have learned anything from our war to end all wars?”
“You talk like a pacifist,” Kit says, and he nods. “But if you’re really a Marxist,” she goes on, “don’t you agree with Lenin – that revolution can’t come without spilling blood?”
“It is true, you have caught me out.” He laughs, then puts aside his cup and lays his large, bony hands on the table, palms down, fingers spread, so that she can’t help but stare at them. There’s nothing extraordinary about his hands but the gesture is strangely erotic; she can’t look at those hands without imagining them on her skin, circling her waist, running down her thighs. She looks back up and meets his brown eyes, looking steadily at her from his long narrow face under a tumble of wavy brown hair. “But if bloodshed must come, should it not be in the cause of building a better world, rather than shoring up the old one?”
Kit pulls her thoughts back, startled to realize they are still talking of war, pacifism and communism. She suspects that his thoughts, like hers, are straying from the political to the personal.
But what kind of personal connection could there be between people such as this man and herself? She’s managed to tease out during the conversation that he is a Polish Jew whose mother was born in England. After the turmoil of the war his widowed mother wanted to return to her own country. Leo accompanied her, read history at Cambridge and is now a lecturer at the university here in Manchester. He is also a member of the Communist Party, writes for Communist papers and dreams of sparking revolution in England. He is a man she might meet at a lecture, might even have a conversation with in a café – once only. A Jewish Communist rabble-rouser is certainly not someone Mrs. Porter of St. Margaret’s could be seen with on a regular basis.
“This old order that you speak so lightly of sweeping away,” she says, again pulling her thoughts into some kind of order, “I’m not so ready to dismiss it as you are. I think there is as much good as bad in it, and more good than I see in the Soviet Union.”
“Ah, but the old order changes. It must – it is changing already.”
“Exactly! Changing already, by gradual means. By the ballot box, not by revolution. England has already had a Labour government. Change is being built on the foundations we have already laid.”
“Your faith is touching, and most of your countrymen share it,” says Leo. “Even the poorest Englishman, the one who votes Labour government and puts his faith in the trade union – he clings to the hope of rising to a better position under capitalism, even as the capitalists do all they can to break the unions and grind the workers beneath their heels.”
He really is a fascinating, frustrating man, and though she has to keep dragging her thoughts back from his lips and hands to his damnably incorrect ideas, Kit realizes that part of the attraction of the man is that her mind is as engaged and excited as her body is. She’s about to reply with a spirited defense of capitalism when he leans forward.
“And now, where shall we go after we finish this coffee?” he says. “I have offered to walk you home, but I suspect you do not welcome gentlemen callers at such an hour – even if I were a gentleman, which of course I am not. My own lodgings are much humbler, but very private – and perhaps you will not need to worry about finding a way home until morning, hmm?” He lifts one of her hands in his and brings it, not to his lips, which would be oddly pretentious, but to graze, briefly, his stubbled cheek. The gesture excites Kit so much she can hardly breathe. Really, it has been far too long since she has touched a man.
“Mr. Lanski, I’m sorry, but I think you have mistaken what kind of woman I am.” She pulls back her hand.
He smiles, a slow, lazy smile that seems worlds removed from talk of revolution and bloodshed.
“Have I? You are a headmistress of a girls’ school,
an upright member of society and of the Church of England, a model of propriety. If either one of us has mistaken what kind of woman you are, Mrs. Porter, I don’t think it is I.”
Triffie
TRIF HAS NEVER been hunting, but she’s heard men talk about it. Jacob John goes into the woods every fall with a few other fellows and they often bring home a caribou between them; jars of bottled caribou meat line Trif’s pantry shelves, a treat in the cold months of winter. She imagines the hours the men must spend in patient waiting, squatting in the bushes, watching for a sign of their prey.
For two months now she has given that same attention to Joe Bishop, watching him in church, watching him walk down the road. She smiles and says hello to him as she always does, but defers the question of extra lessons for Katie Grace by coming to school herself to pick up the younger children, telling the girl to hurry home to do her chores. She sees Katie’s face drop when Trif urges her home to make bread or beat the rugs and hears the echo of Aunt Rachel’s voice in her own. She will not do that to her own daughter – rob her of life’s chances, or the birthright of a sharp brain – but neither will she send her child unarmed into the lion’s den. Sometimes you need more than prayers, more than good intentions.
She makes her move in the middle of October, as the evenings start drawing in and the chill in the air shifts from a nip to a bite. She makes an excuse to visit the man at home, because the schoolroom is no place for what she has to say.
She has spent these weeks turning things over in her mind, re-reading Effie’s letter, remembering what Amelia said, what Millicent refused to say, what Kit said so long ago. Even Betty’s words, mumbled and shamed. She has spoken to other women, none as blunt as Amelia or Effie or Kit, but she’s heard enough.
She’s turned over her own memories, too, replaying them, asking herself the obvious question, till she almost doesn’t trust her own mind. Amelia Snow didn’t believe her – didn’t believe Trif could have remained innocent so long. She tries to call up memories of the schoolroom, of Mr. Bishop’s hand on her shoulder, his voice next to her ear. Was there ever anything – did his fingers stray to the neckline of her dress? Did he lay a hand on her thigh while he helped her unravel the mysteries of Geometry?
That Forgetful Shore Page 26