Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

  *

  As the return Atlantic crossing grew to a close, Sandia was aware that she was putting an era in her life behind her. Her marriage to John Beltry seemed like something she had dreamed, except that after marriage there was this feeling of not being quite complete, of involuntarily turning for comfort and answer to someone who was no longer there. But she had come to terms with her widowhood and now she found herself thinking of the tea-rooms. She still loved them, loved the contribution they made to the life and bustle that was Glasgow. She began to plan an extension of the original tea-rooms; perhaps a wood-panelled smoking-room for the men and a pretty, light, airy restaurant mainly for the ladies …

  All of it was put out of her head by the cablegram awaiting Finn at journey’s end. It was from Kitty and it simply said: HAVE BURNED ALL MY BRIDGES AND AM COMING HOME. Instead of helping to draw up plans for the tea-room extension, Sandia found herself knee-deep in preparations for a wedding.

  Kitty and Finn had a large church wedding with a splendid reception. Honoria and Marie-Lou made the crossing to attend, and Alisdair’s wife Tina was the matron of honour.

  All the Glasgow papers carried pictures of the wedding. Finn’s name was becoming well known, and Kitty’s family’s influence in the city was not unacknowledged. The camera caught the bride and groom facing each other with happy, if slightly wary, smiles, and the captions said they would set up home in Kelvinside.

  Sandia was not altogether sorry when it was all over. She felt Kitty and Finn needed time on their own after all the fuss. And going back to work, with all its problems, was almost soothing.

  One of the waitresses remembered, when she had been back in harness for a couple of days, that during her overseas trip a man with a Northern Ireland accent had been asking after Sandia. A big, handsome, fairish man who had said he was a Mr Dandy Peel. He left his kind regards, and hoped to call again.

  Chapter Twelve

  Carlie Fleming thought briefly about her cousin Sandia as she made her way excitedly to the House of Commons with her friend from the East End, Aggie Fermoyle. Her mother had written that morning to say that Sandia was being courted, again by Dandy Peel who, it seemed, had turned up in Glasgow some months before, following the sad death of his wife from tuberculosis.

  It was a touching situation, Carlie felt, but at the same time, she considered that romance must come low on the list of female priorities, today of all days. For after eight years, and much pressure from Mrs Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union (motto, ‘Deeds, not words’), the original Women’s Enfranchisement Bill was due to be presented once again to the House of Commons.

  Supposing it were passed! This was, of course, its first reading. It would still have to go through the perils of a second reading, and then passage through the House of Lords, but supposing today the House at last took the women’s cause to its heart, what a triumph that would be!

  She grabbed Aggie’s arm as they passed through St Stephen’s Hall on their way to meet her father in the Central Lobby. Pale-faced and tense, Aggie smiled back at her. Together they had addressed many meetings in draughty East End halls and on windy street corners; with others of the ‘Pankhurst lot’, they’d gone north before Wakes Week to vie with the quacks and the Salvation Army for the attention of the crowds; and together been splattered with rotten tomatoes, knocked off their soap-boxes by angry males and kicked in the shins by vindictive children.

  But today was a day to forget the indignities. Women of all shapes and sizes, all ages and classes, were converging on the House as she and Aggie were doing, the purple and green of their movement displayed on hat ribbons, rosettes and scarves.

  She remembered now, as they entered the crush and swell of the Central Lobby, with its huge stained-glass windows of the patron saints, its stone arches, its didactic paintings and insistent sense of history in the making, how when her father had been elected the first thing she had said to him was, ‘You must see that women get the vote.’

  She smiled a little to herself, watching him come towards her now, people plucking at his sleeves as he passed, anxious to have a word with him. He had done what he could. At the same time, she had to be honest and admit that Labour supporters as a whole could have done more. Some felt that women could wait till all working-class men had the vote and that by supporting the Pankhursts they were helping only middle-and upper-class women. She knew well enough her father had to weigh open and patent support of the female suffrage against the conservative element among those who put him in Parliament. Politics, as she was discovering, were seldom a case of black and white, but many shades in between.

  ‘I’ve secured your seats in the visitors’ gallery,’ said Duncan, kissing his daughter and shaking hands warmly with Aggie. ‘Bamford Slack has been balloted to present the bill. I think he’ll do a good job — always providing he gets the chance.’

  ‘What do you mean, gets the chance?’ demanded Carlie sharply.

  ‘There’s a lot of opposition,’ answered Duncan, looking round the Lobby, which seemed to be full of chattering, laughing, excited women. ‘I’ve never seen a turn-out of women like this, but it’s one thing to find support in the Lobby, another thing altogether to sustain it in the House.’

  Carlie looked at his face closely. Did he know something they did not? There was no possibility of further talk, for a policeman was clearing a way through the crowd for the Speaker’s Procession with the cry of ‘Hats off, strangers!’ and it was agreed that it was time she and Aggie took up their seats in the gallery.

  Since coming to London, Carlie had often sat in the gallery, especially on those occasions when her father hoped to speak. She had heard him rise to make impassioned intervention on behalf of the unemployed, to urge caution in the Balkans and to plead for improved conditions in the ‘sweated’ industries. Now she wished with all her heart that it was he, not Bamford Slack, who was submitting the women’s bill. But that perhaps was selfish and unreasonable. The important thing was that the bill, first drafted by Mrs Pankhurst’s father and advanced as far as its second reading in 1870, was once again a live issue.

  ‘What’s happening now?’ Aggie demanded in a stage whisper.

  ‘It’s the Roadway Lighting Bill first,’ said Carlie informatively. ‘Shouldn’t take long. It’s just to make sure that carts travelling along public roads at night carry a light behind as well as before.’

  ‘Do they have to have a bill about that?’ demanded Aggie. ‘Seems only common sense to me.’

  ‘Seems they do,’ Carlie whispered. ‘But sssh, or we’ll be thrown out!’

  The long-winded Parliamentary procedures had always irked Carlie and the speakers to this bill seemed even more given to circumlocution than any she’d heard before. Mentally she switched off and looked down at the floor of the House. As always, it thrilled her to see her father sitting there. He was looking as restless and fed-up as she felt. No wonder! Couldn’t they stop going on about carts and roads and lights?

  She gazed at the packed public seats. So many faces she had come to know, dedicated workers in the Women’s Social and Political Union. She felt a stab of shock as she recognized Kirsten Mackenzie, listening intently. Of course, she would be here. Carlie had seen her at all the big WSPU meetings, though she had avoided meeting her face to face. Even approaching middle-age, she was a vibrant and attractive woman and not short of admirers, so it was rumoured. Carlie’s feelings towards her were ambivalent — half anger that she had once superseded her mother in her father’s affections; half admiration that Kirsten Mackenzie could make the liberated woman look so admirable to the public eye.

  A sharp kick on the ankle made her look at Aggie, who whispered vehemently, ‘Something’s happening. What’s gone wrong?’

  Turning her full attention back to the debate, Carlie saw that yet another Tory MP was on his feet. He was telling some complicated, silly story that went on and on. And when he sat down, another rose behind him to relate a feeble joke. Real
ization dawned, as the ‘promoters’ of the Roadway Lighting Bill filibustered like mad. They were determined to ‘talk out’ the franchise bill.

  There was a great subdued roar of fury from the women when it became clear their bill had foundered. Carlie and Aggie rose, stiff-limbed, and found themselves carried into the Lobby on a furious tide.

  Some women were weeping tears of open frustration. Others were gathering in angry groups to consult. Carlie pulled Aggie aside from the crowd to wait under the stained-glass window showing St Andrew for Scotland. It seemed an appropriate place to wait for her father.

  When he appeared, Carlie burst out at him angrily: ‘What happened in there? Can they do that in a democratic country?’

  ‘Unfortunately they can,’ admitted Duncan. ‘Our late friend Parnell perfected the art of the filibuster. You have just seen it used to good effect tonight.’

  ‘Why was there no intervention?’ demanded Carlie.

  Duncan shook his head. ‘What you have seen,’ he said slowly, ‘is the expression of the view that women are unfitted by their physical nature for the exercise of political power. Most men still believe that.’

  ‘Then most men had better watch out!’ cried Aggie, unable to contain herself any longer. ‘Look! Those women over there are trying to tell us something!’

  A stout matron in a large, dipping hat broke away and approached them. ‘There’s to be a protest meeting in Broad Sanctuary, near the gates of Westminster Abbey. Come along, sisters! We’ll show them whether we mean business or not.’

  ‘Be careful,’ Duncan advised. ‘Militancy will only get you arrested.’

  ‘And where has caution got us?’ demanded the stout woman. ‘From now on, it’s going to be militancy all the way. And if we go to jail, so be it. Women should vote for the laws they obey and the taxes they pay!’

  ‘There you have it, Duncan,’ said a soft voice behind him, and they turned to see Kirsten Mackenzie, dressed in dove grey, surveying Duncan with a look of angry irony. ‘Tonight the dam broke. There’ll be no stopping us now. Tell all your friends in the House it is so.’

  ‘Kirsten!’ Duncan held out a hand to her, but with a set face she swept past him. Carlie could think of nothing to say to him either. She was choking with a sense of angry betrayal. It was turned on all men, even on her own father.

  She took Aggie’s arm and they marched with the rest to Broad Sanctuary. Kirsten Mackenzie was already there, addressing a section of the crowd. The night air was full of cries and agitation. Buttons glinting, London’s constabulary advanced on the crowd. Facing them, Carlie found herself shouting at the top of her voice, ‘Votes for women! Votes for women!’ An old flower-seller carrying home her basket of fading violets looked at her and then spat in the gutter.

  ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, my gel,’ she advised her.

  *

  Lying in bed that night in the Fermoyle home in Albert Road, Bow, Carlie felt the sensations of anger creep over her skin like the bed-bugs she hoped she had got rid of.

  When would the chance come again to put a bill before the House? And even supposing the Commons eventually accepted it, wasn’t it more than likely the House of Lords would throw it out? She knew, from her travels about the country, how hard it was to make a dent in public opinion.

  It would be easy to give in to despair, except for the certainty that tonight something had happened. As Kirsten Mackenzie had put it, tonight the dam had broken. Women’s tentative plea for recognition and dignity had been ridiculed in the House. But the tactic would prove counter-productive. From now on, men too would be ridiculed, wherever there was an election. And that would be only part of a whole new campaign to make the world listen. Women had waited long enough.

  She lay thinking of Kirsten Mackenzie and the sense of near-hostility between her and her father. Was that what a grande affaire could come to, in the end? Yet there had still been something between them, an electric awareness that had communicated itself to Carlie. She was sorry for Kirsten Mackenzie for the first time in her life. Coming to London had helped her to become more open-minded, less ready to divide human relations into good and bad.

  Unable to sleep, she lay thinking of other ways in which coming to London had changed her. One thing was sure: she had been right to come. It hadn’t been easy in the beginning, when she’d been so timid and raw, so aware of her Scottishness. She was often surprised, looking back, that she’d had the gumption to refute Donald’s pleas and entreaties. Even now, she still missed him. There was a nexus of pain and responsibility somewhere in her thoughts that was labelled in his name.

  Yet only by getting away had she been able to realize how stunted she was: by the rigid codes of behaviour at home, by the greater hypocrisies. London invested its corners with the almost overpowering gift of freedom: but it was a gift for adults only. She had been forced to grow up here and the extent of her adulthood was that she knew now how much farther she had to go.

  Even so, she had been more sheltered than most. Her father had found her secretarial work and she had started to write for the Labour organ, The Champion, finding an easy editorial style that came naturally. In the beginning, she had found most of her friends through the Independent Labour Party, earnest young men and women who came to her father’s apartments and sat till the small hours discussing how socialism could be made to work.

  She’d joined the cycling corps which bicycled into Kent and Essex at the weekends, singing ‘Jerusalem’ on the village greens and sticking slogans urging the workers of the world to unite on gates and walls and once, in a facetious moment, on a cow’s rump.

  But there had been something less than satisfying about all this theory on the part of pipe-smoking clerks and adventurous lady teachers. She had gravitated to meetings in the East End, where she had met Aggie Fermoyle. And she had left her room in her father’s flat and become a paying guest in the teeming household which made no secret that it needed her money. It was more cheerful and companionable than the Westminster apartments, for her father was often away on Parliamentary missions or sitting late at the House.

  It had been a gesture, she saw now, coming to live in the East End, a reaction to the constant talk and posturing of the new wave of ‘educated’ radicals which had started in the colleges and crested in the comfortable London suburbs.

  Perhaps unconsciously she had wanted back to the uncomplicated socialism of the Rows, arising out of need and not of theory. And certainly, here with the Fermoyles, she had found the dynamism she sought. For they lived on a level just above squalor, and then not always. And all around were the rope-makers, the stitchers of shirts, the biscuit-packers, waste-rubber cleaners and chicken-pluckers whose lowly-paid jobs barely kept body and soul together.

  Carlie had not been able to believe it when Aggie told her what her own job was: making wooden seeds for raspberry jam. But it seemed it was so. And this restless, needle-sharp, warm-hearted Cockney was glad to have it for the money it brought in. But she wasn’t prepared to leave it at that. She wanted the vote for women so that people like her mother, whom she adored, would have a say in the running of a better-organized society.

  She modelled herself on Annie Kenney, the millgirl from the North who had succeeded in softening the upper-class image of ‘the Pankhurst lot’. Except — and Carlie smiled in the dark — Aggie could be a lot funnier and more scurrilous when she addressed the East End crowds …

  ‘You awake?’ Carlie juddered to consciousness to see Aggie standing by the bedside, with a cup of tea in her extended hand. From downstairs came the squawks and shrieks of the younger Fermoyles getting ready for school. The sun poured into this bright front upper room that was the best in the house, something that never failed to tweak at Carlie’s tender conscience.

  ‘What d’you think?’ Aggie demanded, watching critically as Carlie swallowed the tea. ‘Now you’ve slept on it, what about last night, then? Are we going to let them get away with it?’

  ‘I don’t t
hink so,’ said Carlie slowly. ‘Aggie, I’m going to see my father today. He must do something. So must Keir Hardie and any others with a vestige of humanity.’

  ‘Gotta get to work,’ said Aggie tersely. ‘You do what you can, gel.’

  The day was well advanced and the streets of Bow lively with horse-traffic and shoppers before Carlie set out. In Albert Road, a pre-school Fermoyle and her friends danced to the music of an organ-grinder with a singularly ugly little monkey holding out the cup for Carlie’s penny. She had dashed off an angry article on the previous night’s happenings for The Champion. Whether the editor would publish it was another matter, for she had pulled no punches.

  The Central Lobby was quiet, reflective after the angry scenes of the night before. She sent in the customary Green Card to see if her father was available. In about half an hour he appeared, seeing off a deputation of men in cloth caps and rough clothes.

  ‘A “Right to Work” deputation,’ he told her. ‘There’s a million of them out there, Carlie, without jobs, and still the best we can offer them is soup kitchens and stone-breaking.’ He looked tired and her resolution wavered slightly, but only for a moment.

  They sat down on a leather bench in one of the stone alcoves. She came straight to the point.

  ‘Paw —’ the old, childish nomenclature slipped out — ‘you’ve got to help with the suffrage.’ She could not keep the hurt from her expression. ‘Last night it was as though we hadn’t a friend in the House. But you believe in the female suffrage. You’ve always said so. Now you must come out and say it loudly. Rally support for us. Today we feel very let down.’

  He seemed to be only half-listening to what she was saying, his gaze at some point beyond her right shoulder. But at last he looked at her, very directly, and said, ‘Would you understand me, Carlie, if I said to you now that political dynamics are sometimes more important than political argument?’