There had been something about Rose Pankhurst’s bright button eyes that had put him off, put him off very deeply. Louise had been in his arms, he had felt her easy sudden response. Miriam had been packing upstairs, it was a stolen embrace, like any one that they had snatched over the years of deception. Sweetest of all because of the quick clandestine desire of it. He had pushed Louise’s questing hand from the flies of his trousers because he wanted to enjoy desire, not to be racked by it. But he continued to caress her, enjoying the speeding of her breath and the flush in her face. The picture of Louise aching with unassuagable desire was one of the most attractive sights of their love affair. He adored teasing her into arousal and then watching her struggling to hide it. So with one hand firmly restraining her from touching him, he had allowed his other hand to wander down her cheek, over her breast and down to the soft warmth of her crutch. And then he had seen Rose’s bright critical beam and he had felt his erection vanish and his desire wilt.
She had looked at him as if he were some kind of ordinary cheating husband. She had looked at him with disdain as if he were some horrid travelling salesman who had enticed his secretary into the back seat of his company car. She had looked at him as if he were not a caring, sensual free-thinking new man. She had looked straight through him, as if he were one of an old tedious type and not worthy of her attention, not a new man at all.
Rage would have been better, Toby thought sulkily. Outrage, shock, even exposure would have left him with the moral high ground of being able to expose Rose as a prying old fool who had seen a fraternal hug and leaped to smutty and incorrect conclusions. Miriam would have believed him, Louise would have backed him up. Rose would have looked foolish and he would have been generous, forgiving, and kind.
Instead Rose’s sharp black eyes had scanned him, had seen his hand straying to the welcoming heat of Louise’s crutch while his other hand restrained her from touching the swelling in his trousers. Sitting in his study, before the box of cuttings, Toby felt himself grow warm and knew he was actually blushing at the memory. It was the pushing of Louise’s hand away which had unmanned him before Rose. It was such a shy rejection, like an old-fashioned girl in the darkness of a cinema. It was the gesture of a tease. Rose had caught Toby out – not in adultery, which he could have brazened through – but in coyness. Rose had seen Toby protect his own feelings and risk Louise’s discomfort. Rose had seen Toby behave selfishly, egoistically, nastily. Toby could not rid himself of that picture. Rose’s view of Toby had entered into his image of himself like a rush of cold water. It turned him off like a tap.
He pulled the box towards him. He had employed a second-year undergraduate to sort the pieces of newsprint into distinct piles. She had bound them with elastic bands and labelled them in her careful schoolgirl script. Toby read the labels. ‘Recipes – puddings. Recipes – savouries. Cartoons and sketches. Book reviews. Suffragette attacks. Housekeeping hints. Court cases. Countryside news. Public meetings. Travel notes.’
He had not told Alison the student of his particular interest. His innate discretion warned him to tell her nothing. He said merely that the papers had come into his possession and he wanted them collated as research material. He had hinted that this tedious exercise of reading and sorting was the very bones and basis of research which would undoubtedly help her in her degree, and would prepare her for postgraduate work. Alison, who would willingly have sorted a dozen boxes just for the privilege of sitting on the floor of his room, even when he was not there, had knelt before Toby’s cardboard box and respectfully sorted his clippings into these asinine categories.
Toby flipped through the recipes at random. They were, had he but known it, Sylvia Pankhurst’s own recipes from her Price Cost Restaurant which operated in the Old Ford Road, Bow, during the First World War, serving food at cost price to working people. Louise, or even Miriam, could have told him of some of Sylvia Pankhurst’s social concerns. But Toby wanted to share this project with no-one. Accordingly he dropped into the wastepaper basket at the side of his desk all of the Price Cost Restaurant’s published menus.
The housekeeping hints so categorised by Alison were in fact advice for working women trying to survive on soldiers’ pay, written by Sylvia as part of her general attack on the poor conditions facing women during the war years. The travel notes were Sylvia’s diary of her travels in America, and in revolutionary Russia (including her meeting with Lenin). Toby glanced at the first couple of pages and tossed them into the bin without troubling himself to read further. The illustrations so carefully smoothed out and collected by Alison were from the Dreadnought newspaper which Sylvia published herself in an attempt to give working people the true news of the war.
The cartoons and sketches were Sylvia’s own attempts at William Morris-style drawings, invaluable to historians of the pre-Raphaelite movement – and of course to modern wallpaper companies. Toby merely glanced at them and tossed them in the bin. He had no interest in art, and he did not look carefully enough to see the little SP initials in the corner of each precious fragment. The section of countryside notes – which included some rare original poetry by Sylvia Pankhurst, and her book reviews of revolutionary and Marxist books from 1917–21 – went the same way. Toby was not generally interested in any book reviews except those which he wrote himself, or those which condemned the work of his colleagues and competitors.
When the wastepaper basket was filled with irreplaceable invaluable material, Toby felt that he had gone a long way to clearing aside the dross. Before him he had only the public meetings’ cuttings, accounts of court cases and those clearly labelled suffragette cuttings. He started to read.
Toby had two principal disadvantages working against him as he embarked on this course of study. Firstly he knew nothing about the suffragette movement other than the most commonplace facts. He vaguely remembered the Cat and Mouse Act, and the force-feeding of suffragettes in prison from his A level history. He remembered the Pankhursts, mainly Emily, the mother, and two daughters, Sylvia and Christabel: Sylvia who worked in the East End of London and became radical (he did not know about her putting Lenin straight on how to run a revolution in the heady days of Moscow in 1920) and Christabel who ran the campaign from exile in Paris. He had never even heard of Adela Pankhurst, the third sister, who emigrated to Australia.
His other disadvantage was no less grave. He was trained as a sociologist, not an historian, and artefacts from the past held no interest for him. Toby’s usual research took place on clean bright computer screens with pretty coloured graphs, or with newly published papers in freshly printed journals. He resented having to read from yellowing newsprint, and he disliked the dusty feeling of the clippings. They smelled rather strongly of dog’s wee and they strained his eyes. However, he staunchly read every word and made careful notes of all the rhetorical uninteresting speeches and the hints of organisational in-fighting. When he had read every one, noted it, and its date and publication where available, he left a note for Miriam telling her he would be home later, and drove out to Louise’s cottage to see Rose.
It was strange driving up to the door of the little house knowing it would be empty since Louise would still be at the Tuesday Fresh Start meeting. Toby had his own key and could have let himself in, but Rose’s guilt-inducing glare still made him uncomfortable. Besides, he was working, not visiting. He left the box of diminished clippings in the back of the car and strolled down the garden path to the blue van.
The dog was not at his post at the doorstep. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. Rose was not at home. Toby was so surprised that he did not know what to do. He waited for a little while by the gate, he walked down to the bottom of the orchard and looked out, in case she was walking on the common and he could stroll down the path to meet her. He considered driving back down to the village in case she was walking home along the lane. But she was nowhere to be seen. He decided to overcome his sense of diffidence about entering Louise’s house and wrote on one of his
nice new index cards: ‘I have come to see you. I am in the kitchen’, and tucked it under a stone on the van steps. Then he went back to the house, let himself in, and made himself a mug of coffee with Louise’s best filter coffee in her smart glass jug.
It was strange being in the house alone. There had been times when he and Louise had planned to meet and he had arrived early, and used his key to let himself in. But that was different from being in the house without Louise’s specific invitation, even without her knowledge. Toby strolled around the kitchen, touching things. He went into her study and looked at the books on her desk – Lawrence, he saw, and Kate Millett. He smiled with relief. Nothing very new and exciting would come out of the Lawrence essay then, he thought; and felt affection for Louise, who could always be relied on to tread loyally these well-worn paths, and would never rival his superior intellectual ability.
She had a notepad by the telephone and she had written on it:
ring Sarah,
see Edgeley,
ring Miriam.
Underneath she had written:
Toby, oh Toby, oh Toby.
Toby smiled broadly. It was quite something to enter into an intelligent woman’s heart and mind. He felt better than he had felt for days. This view of himself – a man to inspire a highly intelligent woman to doodle like a schoolgirl – restored him to himself. He was once again attractive to himself, a potent lover, a rogue.
He wandered through into the sitting room. He liked the tidiness of the place. There was a special rack for newspapers, whereas in his house the daily papers were jumbled on tables and behind sofas, until they had an enforced clear-up because someone was coming to dinner. Louise’s frivolous high-heeled slippers were neatly side by side at the foot of the stairs. Toby smiled benignly at them. Some day this house, this woman, these slippers could be his. They were his for the taking even now.
He savoured that thought and digested it with sips of good coffee. At home they drank instant coffee and made filter coffee only after special dinners or at weekends. Louise’s spinster state had prompted her to look after herself, to do herself proud. Toby was not to know that the very things he most liked about her house – the tidiness, the order, the coherent style, the treats – were all symptoms of loneliness and solitude. He mistook them for style, whereas they were nothing more than the absence of a companion, an excess of solitary time, and one of many unavailing defences against solitude.
He thought he might wait until Louise came home. She and Miriam were unlikely to delay long after the end of the meeting. He might wait for her to return and then take her to bed. He might even take her out for a meal at the Olde House at Home afterwards. Thoughtfully, Toby calculated the likely cost of a meal at the pub, and then nodded. He would have to pay cash since Miriam dealt with their bank statements and credit-card bills and would notice a cheque or the name of the pub on the credit-card statement; but he had enough cash in his pocket for a meal and a bottle of wine. He smiled, he felt expansive and generous: planning a treat for Louise, promising himself a romp in her big white bed. His desire for her, which had been so cold and quiet for two days, rose up as he inspected her property, enjoyed her prosperity, and basked in her secret adoration of him.
(Toby, oh Toby, oh Toby.)
Suddenly there was a face at the sitting-room window like a wrinkled brown mask, as silent and as threatening as a shrunken head: Rose Pankhurst. She and Toby stared at each other in mutual dislike until Toby started out of his trance and threw open the front door to her.
‘Thank you for coming to find me,’ he said warmly. ‘I just came up on the off chance that I might see you. Louise is at a meeting, but I knew she wouldn’t mind if I dropped in.’
‘Yes,’ Rose said. She stepped out of a pair of wooden clogs and walked into the room. She was carrying a small tattered bag like a gas-mask case. She sniffed the air like a hound after truffles. ‘Smells good.’
‘Coffee?’ Toby asked hospitably. ‘I just made some! I’m sure Louise wouldn’t mind us crashing into her kitchen. Won’t you come through?’
He led the way to the kitchen. Rose walked slowly after him and sat at the pine table.
‘She’s done it very pretty,’ Rose observed, looking around her.
‘Have you not been inside the house before?’ It did not strike Toby even now that perhaps he should not have invited Rose into Louise’s house without her permission.
‘Mmm,’ Rose said non-committally, who had known ever since her arrival where the spare key was hidden, and had seen everything she wanted to see in the house, except the contents of the computer which continued to puzzle her.
Toby put a mug of coffee and Louise’s tin of biscuits before her.
‘I’ve had a chance to look at your newspaper cuttings,’ he said. ‘They were pretty jumbled up with all sorts of other things but I got them sorted. And I’ve read them. A fascinating record of an exciting period.’
Rose took a biscuit and ate it with concentration. Then she took another.
‘Now I’ve got the background, so to speak, I wonder if I could look at your more personal stuff?’ Toby asked. ‘You’ve got me hooked,’ he went on with a winning smile. ‘What exciting days those must have been!’
Rose nodded and ate a third biscuit.
‘So tell me,’ Toby said. ‘What is your earliest, earliest memory?’
Rose smiled. ‘Why, here,’ she said. Her face relaxed as if the warmth of that long-ago summer were gilding it even now. ‘We lived here. My Mum and Dad and half a dozen of us. I was born here. D’you know, sometimes in dreams I see a sandstone wall and a rose, a yellowy pink rose, nodding against it. I think that’s the wall here. Where she’s got her study. The rose is gone, but you can still see the hooks for some plant which climbed up, right up to the bedroom. I can remember a tapping in the summer evenings, when I was supposed to sleep, and a yellowy pink rose nodding in at the window.’
Toby nodded. ‘You wouldn’t mind if I taped this, would you?’ he asked. ‘You just go right on remembering.’ Inwardly he congratulated himself at the skill with which he was handling her. Start her with the boring childhood bits, get her confidence, and then move on to the profitable, interesting material. Stealthily he took his little tape recorder from his pocket, pushed it across the table until it was right under Rose’s wispy chin and pressed the ‘Record’ button. From where he was sitting he could see the spool going round and round and the red ‘Record’ light glowed. Rose took another biscuit and crunched into it. Small noisy crumbs showered down on the little grille of the microphone. Toby tried not to flinch.
‘But when did your family get to London?’ he asked.
Rose grew suddenly wary. ‘Oh, there were troubles,’ she said. ‘But we ended up in the East End. Then both my mother and father were arrested for campaigning for the ILP. Sylvia Pankhurst had opened the school at Old Ford Road and I went there. She took a liking to me, and she took me in to live with her. I went with her on all the demonstrations, to all the meetings, on all the campaigns. I can still remember her speeches – I could tell you them now!’
‘Yes, yes,’ Toby said. After an afternoon of reading speeches he felt that he had heard quite enough. ‘And you helped her with the attacks, didn’t you?’
Rose nodded. ‘Her, and the others. Empty or derelict buildings, they’d send me in the back, through a little window or up a drainpipe. I’d run through the building in the dark and open the front door to them. Then they’d come in and set a fire. Go out, shutting the door behind them. The police couldn’t work it out!’ She nodded triumphantly and took another biscuit.
‘She had no children of her own?’
‘Not then, no. She had a child by her lover, but that was later. In the early days it was just me and her, and the others of course: Nora and Zelie and Charlotte.’
Toby was twitching on his seat with excitement. ‘Tell me about them. This is what I want to know! This is the interesting stuff! Which one was the cross dresser?’
Rose looked faintly surprised. ‘A dresser? None of them were in service,’ she said. ‘Charlotte had five children of her own, Zelie was an American lady, Nora was an English lady – she was the one with the money.’
‘But which one wore men’s clothes?’
‘Nora wore a collar and tie and sometimes a divided skirt and sometimes big baggy flannel trousers. They were something a bit new then. Fashionable in a way.’
Toby shoved the little cassette recorder more urgently under Rose’s chin so as not to miss a single word. Rose crunched into a Hobnob and a shower of crumbs pattered on to the microphone like hailstones on a tin roof.
‘She was manly,’ Toby prompted.
‘Bit of an eccentric,’ Rose concurred. ‘Nice enough girl. Very wealthy of course, it was her who financed the People’s Restaurant, and the toy factory, and the garment factory. Sylvia wouldn’t pay sweatshop wages, so they could never make a profit. They might call it a co-operative and they might make good things but they could never make a profit. Nora propped it all up with her money. And when Sylvia went Marxist – why, she went Marxist too!’ Rose chuckled, blowing crumbs like a little sandstorm across the table. ‘In her lovely suits and her linen shirts!’
‘She was Sylvia’s friend?’
‘Friend? She was her shadow!’
‘They were close.’
‘There was no-one closer to Sylvia, especially after the American went home.’
Toby wriggled in his chair with excitement. ‘Did they live together?’
Rose nodded. She ate another biscuit. ‘Inseparable,’ she said in a fine spray of crumbs.
‘Were they lovers?’
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