It was too confusing. Fear and loyalty and obligation meant she couldn’t refuse Stella, and at the same time, for reasons she was more cautious about naming, she didn’t want to spy on Bill. So far, she hadn’t formed any kind of plan. She had simply reacted to each of these irreconcilable pressures as they occurred, one at a time. The trick was not to think about more than one thing at once. As for what the Imps thought about all this, she had no idea yet.
Walking with Bill away from All Souls, she found herself taking a side. Whatever the Richardsons wanted to know, she was going to try to keep it from them. If she could, she would protect this man from the harm they intended to do him. And she supposed that was bound, sooner or later, to work out badly for someone. Herself, most likely.
They had been walking for a while, apparently without direction. She’d intended to ask Bill more about the reasons for the march, to get him to explain the situation in South Africa and his part in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, but they’d spoken only about personal things. She had discovered that the farm she’d been evacuated to when she was ten had only been a few miles from his home town of Bridgwater, though by the time she arrived there he had already left, having turned eighteen three days after conscription started.
‘I was home a few times on leave,’ he said. ‘Then, as the war carried on, I saw less and less point in the place. Once it all finished I went to university on an ex-soldier’s scholarship, and I’d barely visit home even in the holidays. I feel bad about that now – I was married, with a baby son by then, so I thought I had a life of my own. But it upset my parents terribly I’m sure.’
‘My ma and pa were glad to get rid of me for a bit, I reckon,’ she told him. ‘By the time I saw them again in forty-five, they’d nearly forgotten me, and I’d nearly forgotten them.’
‘What were they like?’
‘Horrible. My pa died in ’forty-seven. Ma’s still going. Still horrible. I don’t have anything to do with her.’
They walked on quietly for a while. Delia saw that Bill understood she didn’t want him to push her for details about her parents, just as she had known not to ask him about his experiences in the war. And she felt more intimacy in these cautious avoidances than she would have in any opening of the heart. She realised he had brought her round in a circle, and they were heading back up Portland Place towards All Souls, where the other protestors were now congregating.
Feeling an urgent need to tell him something personal and real in these last few minutes before they were swallowed up in the march, she said, ‘Reg and Janet, the people I was sent out to, they were kind to me. Not that I made it easy for them. It weren’t what I was used to, decency, so at the start I took it for weakness, and I took advantage, as I thought. There were other kids there too, three of them – some better than me, some worse, and all of us miserable when we arrived. But Reg and Janet kept being lovely, no matter how shitty any of us brats were, until they won us around. That was lucky, I know. There were plenty of evacuees got treated badly where they were sent, came back broken from it. I came back fixed. Partly fixed, anyway. I could read and I could swim, and I knew what it felt like to be happy.’
‘Are you still in touch with them?’ Bill asked.
‘I never went back. Never even wrote.’
‘Why?’
‘Soon as I got back to London, I started working for this woman who’s still my boss now.’
‘Shoplifting?’
‘Mainly. In those days we’d do other stuff too. Short cons. Factory break-ins. All sorts. Then after a few months we started to specialise, as it were.’
‘And that was why you didn’t contact Reg and Janet?’
‘I suppose I was ashamed of myself. I’d let them down, slipped back into what I’d been before. They saved me in a way, and I never even thanked them for it.’
They had reached the fringes of the crowd. A force of mostly young men and women, cheerfully serious. As Bill had predicted, at least half were wearing duffel coats. Some of the protesters carried placards bearing messages. No Arms for Apartheid; No Blood on Our Hands; Remember Sharpeville; Justice for Sisulu, for Mandela, for Mbeki, Wolpe, Motsoaledi and Mlangeni. Strange, alien names. Characters from a story she barely knew anything about.
‘So we both abandoned our Somerset parents,’ Bill said. He took her hand as the people around them began to move. For a few minutes it all felt stiff and bumbling, until a chant arose from within the march and everyone’s feet fell in time.
No-o—wea-pons-for-South-Africa!
No-o-African-blood-on-our-hands!
Now they were part of something.
Elsewhere in the same crowd, Tess and Jimmy were also marching. Tess added her voice to the rest, and after only a few repetitions, the chant had become automatic to her, part of walking. She half forgot she was doing it.
Almost everyone here was white, she thought. Which seemed wrong, somehow, though she struggled to pinpoint quite why. And she realised she probably wouldn’t have noticed, except that there were a few black people scattered among the crowd. There was one, an elderly man marching just behind Jimmy, who was on her left. To her right were a couple with one child in a pushchair, and another on his father’s shoulders. Across the whole row just ahead of them a group of veteran campaigners wearing trade union and CND badges held up a wide banner on which was painted the yin and yang insignia of the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
The mood of the marchers, which she had expected to be sombre and angry, surprised her. It was wrong of them to be so happy, she thought; although at the same time she was glad to see Jimmy’s eyes looking brighter than they’d been in weeks.
The Anti-Apartheid Movement seemed to suit him. After taking Bill Shearsby’s leaflet that night in the Gaudi Club, he had discovered the Camden branch of the society. On the same Sunday afternoon Tess had taken her trip to Fenfield, he’d gone to a meeting at the Secular Hall.
‘I knew it was bad over there, just not how bad. What you see on the news is just a tenth of it,’ he’d told her afterwards. ‘The British government are nothing more than gun runners. I’m definitely going on that march now. You have to come as well, Tess. You said you would.’
Well, she had said something about wanting to find out more about the march, even if at the time she hadn’t particularly meant it. More importantly, Jimmy was her friend, so she went along with this new enthusiasm of his. He gave her pamphlets, rough documents produced on Photostat machines and spirit duplicators, and once she’d read them, she couldn’t pretend this wasn’t important. One document he’d given her described the massacre at Sharpeville – how sixty-nine people had died that day, just for demonstrating. They’d been shot by the white police for trying to do the same thing she and Jimmy and all these others were doing now. The language of the pamphlet was simple and unemotional. Its anonymous authors had understood that all that was necessary was to list the facts. Fifty-one men killed. Eight women killed. Ten children killed. Shot with British Sten guns and British Lee-Enfields by police sitting safely in Saracen armoured cars built in Coventry.
She’d known, of course, that such things happened. Before, she had avoided looking at them. Now she couldn’t look away. One fragment in particular she could not shift from her thoughts: ‘Shot in the back as they ran for safety’. So Tess was right to raise her voice for them today, here where it was safe to protest; where the policemen surveying the march carried neither rifles nor sub-machine guns, did not sit inside armoured cars.
A few tourists had stopped to watch this Interesting Example of British Culture. Most of the other passers-by ignored the march entirely. Further up the road, a group of young men started berating the protestors.
‘Who pays for your bleeding student grants?’ one of them yelled. ‘Me, that’s who! My bleeding taxes!’
‘Cheap price to buy yourself a conscience,’ Jimmy shouted back.
‘Up yours, Duffelcoat!’ the man replied, acknowledging neither Jimmy’s debating point nor the green anorak he had put
on to distinguish himself from the other marchers, but Jimmy kept grinning anyway.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked Tess.
‘I’m fine.’
She wasn’t sure there was any point to what they were doing, but that mattered less than she had thought. Setting off for the march, she’d believed she’d be demonstrating against power, against money, against factories, armies, secret police; against the kind of self-belief that took centuries of privilege to build. Now she understood, she and power were not enemies. Enmity required both sides to be engaged in the fight.
Power did not care about their march, did not even notice it. Power allowed it, in fact. Encouraged it. What they did today would trouble the conscience of no businessman, and no politician. They would not prevent the sale of a single Lee-Enfield rifle, of a single Sten sub-machine gun, of a single Saracen armoured car. They would not prevent the manufacture of a single bullet.
And if oppression and injustice were ever to end in that part of the world, it would merely move somewhere else, continue making money there. Such things would keep going forever. Protesters would always be silenced, beaten and tortured. The innocent would always be shot in the back as they ran for safety. Understanding this, she saw why the march was not sombre but joyous. She felt it too now. She was on the right side, though all the power in the world disdained her one small voice. Because it did.
The marchers filed into Trafalgar Square, and became first a crowd, then an audience. Barbara Castle spoke, then Harold Wilson, then Duma Nokwe, the exiled secretary-general of the African National Congress. Fairly quickly, Tess found herself only half listening to the speeches, hearing the rhythms of their rhetoric, but little of the detail. Occasionally she became aware of a sentence or two, and was reassured nobody was saying anything she hadn’t already read in one of Jimmy’s pamphlets. For the most part, she played follow-my-leader. She clapped when others clapped, cheered when others cheered; she booed the names of Tory politicians, booed the names of arms manufacturers and booed the name of Charles Robberts ‘Blackie’ Swart, the South African president.
Then it was over and the crowd began to thin as the demonstrators dispersed towards Tube stations, buses and pubs. Banners were rolled up and packed away. Tess saw the woman with the pushchair break her own placard in four so she could squeeze it into a waste paper bin.
‘Over there,’ Jimmy said, pointing through what was left of the crowd at the broad steps up to the National Gallery. ‘That’s Mr Shearsby, isn’t it? I wondered if we’d see him today. And look who’s with him.’
Interesting, Tess thought. Shearsby and Delia were heading for the gallery’s entrance. ‘Shall we go over and say hello?’ she said.
‘I don’t think they want company, Tess. Looks like they’re here together – you know.’
‘Mr Shearsby invited us to this demonstration. I’m sure he’ll be pleased to see we came along.’
She barged her way through the thinning crowd. No longer bothering to object, Jimmy followed in her wake. By the time she’d almost caught up with them, Delia and Shearsby were talking in the gallery foyer. Jimmy put a hand on Tess’s upper arm and muttered, ‘Let them be, Tess.’
She stopped, realising she had no idea why she’d been so determined to force this encounter.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
But Delia had spotted them, and Shearsby, who must have noticed his companion’s reaction, turned around. There was no trace of the other night’s irascibility in his smile.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You’re my son’s friends, aren’t you? I assume Marius isn’t with you though.’
Jimmy said, ‘No, he’s not. But Tess and I did the whole thing. Marched here from Portland Square.’ His face flushed.
‘I thought Mr Nokwe was a very powerful speaker,’ Tess said, just before the ensuing silence became unbearable.
Shearsby nodded. ‘I’m always impressed by how hopeful Duma is, after everything he’s been through. Barbara was good too. Harold less so. He knows how to give a speech. I mean, I believe him, but I don’t always believe in him, if you understand me.’
Tess noticed the way he used these people’s first names, as if unintentionally or habitually, and she wondered if it was really either of those things.
‘Must be good for the cause,’ she said, ‘to have such well-known politicians speaking for it. And it looks as if Mr Wilson has a chance of being the next prime minister.’
‘If he is elected I suppose we’ll see whether he’s got the courage to place human rights before business interests.’
‘I suppose so.’ Tess was already at the limits of anything she could confidently add to a political discussion. Fortunately, Shearsby wasn’t interested in testing her.
‘Are you two here to see anything in particular?’ he asked.
‘The gallery?’ Tess said. ‘No. We just wanted to say thanks – for telling us about the march.’ She turned to Delia. ‘There was something else, actually – I wonder, is there any chance I could visit you again next week – to do some more work?’
‘Tess came out to Fenfield to do some sketches of me last week,’ Delia said.
‘Really?’ Shearsby said. ‘I’d be interested in seeing those.’
‘I’ve really only started. I do think the work might be worth looking at eventually, though. When it’s more – realised, perhaps. It’ll be my end of first year project for college, and there’s an art dealer on the exam panel, so it’s important we do something that’ll get her attention.’
Jimmy bridled unexpectedly. ‘I thought you weren’t bothered about any of that.’
His reaction annoyed her. Surely he could understand that she was only keeping the conversation going. Whether or not she really cared about the opinions of this mystery dealer didn’t matter in the slightest. She ignored him and turned back to Delia. ‘So, could I come back?’
‘If you can make it tomorrow, there’s something I think you’ll like seeing.’
‘I have classes, but I can probably get around that.’
‘Then get to my flat for ten. Don’t bring your painting stuff, though. And wear something ordinary, so you won’t stand out.’
‘Will you be – working?’ That seemed an exciting prospect as well as an unnerving one.
Delia shook her head. ‘This is something else.’
Jimmy was quiet all the way back to Camden. By the time they came out of the Tube and separated to head for their own houses, Tess had long since given up trying to engage him in conversation. Then, just before they parted, he said, ‘Are you really thinking about trying to impress that dealer?’
The question revived her irritation at him. ‘It was just something to say, Jimmy. You’d made things so uncomfortable, I thought I needed to keep talking.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, looking neither contrite nor convinced. ‘So you’re telling me Garvey didn’t change your mind the other day, when he came to Roger’s class?’
‘Oh. I’d forgotten about that. What do you mean, change my mind? He only wanted to make sure I understood I hadn’t fooled him with that hitch-hiking stuff at my interview.’
‘It’s more than that, Tess. He thinks you have something. And that dealer does too. She’s already bought one of your pictures, after all.’
Now she saw. It was envy that had made Jimmy so stupid and sullen, so unlike himself – and all because she’d sold a picture; because Garvey thought she might have something; because Bill Shearsby had been interested in her work; because she might be about to do something good for once. Maybe because, unlike Jimmy, she hadn’t wrecked things for herself by having sex with a Moncourt tutor.
‘Well, I’m looking forward to finding out what this mysterious business of Delia’s might be,’ she said, trying to change the subject. ‘Can you cover for me at college tomorrow?’
He gave a sharp, intolerant sigh. ‘You’re going back to Fenfield? I don’t think it’s sensible, Tess. You’ve no idea what that woman migh
t get you involved in.’
‘I’ll be careful. So, can you tell them I’m ill?’
Jimmy looked down at the ground and said, almost to himself, ‘I don’t know if I should. I mean, if you were hurt or something, and I’d helped—’
What remained of her patience with him broke. ‘Then tell them what you like, or don’t bother. I’m going anyway.’
‘Nous voudrions assises loin de la fenêtre, s’il vous plaît,’ Bill said to the waiter.
They were in a bistro on a side street off Shaftesbury Avenue, a tiny place with tables packed uncomfortably close to each other. If it had been busy, Delia thought, she’d have found it difficult to talk, but it was almost empty tonight. Just one other couple.
Bill had suggested they come here. It was a favourite of his. For some reason, ignoring the waiter’s excellent English, he insisted on speaking to him in French, and although Delia didn’t understand the language, it seemed to her it often took a lot of repetition and rephrasing from Bill before the waiter grasped what he was saying. Perhaps it was the Somerset accent.
‘The other night at the Gaudi,’ he said, layering butter on a chunk of thick-crusted bread. ‘I don’t remember that girl saying anything about painting your picture.’
Delia could hardly explain that Finlay had sent her back to find out more about Bill’s son’s friends. She took a mouthful of the house red. It had tasted harsh and sour at first, but the second glass seemed much smoother.
‘Tess, you mean? She came up to me at the bar after you left. Said she thought I’d make a good subject.’
Bill dipped his bread into the cassoulet. ‘I can see her point.’
Delia ignored the threshold he’d just crossed. ‘I wasn’t sure about letting her come back – what people in Fenfield might think of that. But I don’t think it’s me she’s interested in, so much as the life of crime.’
‘Le demi monde,’ he said, smiling. ‘Typical middle-class bohemian.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘Anyway, that’s what I’m taking her to see tomorrow. A crime.’
Finer Things Page 14