Saturday City

by Webster, Jan

  ‘No, I wouldn’t!’ she cried hotly.

  ‘I didn’t think you would,’ he said ruefully. ‘Well, think of this. Think of how small and delicate a plant our Labour organization is today. A mere seedling. How can we feed it, nourish it? By getting more members in the House. How would you set about doing that, Carlie? Right. By public meetings, stirring the electorate. But you might also want to reach an accommodation with the Liberals over the seats you might contest —’

  ‘You mean a secret pact?’

  ‘If you like to call it that. And the Liberals in their turn might ask you not to rock the boat by pushing the female suffrage —’

  She gazed at him in dismay and disbelief.

  ‘I didn’t think you were that sort of politician,’ she said at last.

  He stood up then, in front of her, and she had never seen him look so angry.

  ‘There is only one sort of politician, Carlie, worth his salt The one who thinks of the common good. And while the women’s vote is important, it’s more important that the starving be fed, the sick looked after and the out-of-work found jobs.’

  He began to walk off up the corridor, but changed his mind and returned, to add: ‘There’s a time of great social upheaval coming. If we have a small but stable Labour Party in the House, we may be able to keep the balance. And I must give that aim my first priority. I expect you to understand that.’

  ‘It’s dishonest,’ she said slowly.

  He was very angry indeed now. She could see a little vein stand out on his left temple and she was frightened as well as angry.

  ‘Dishonest? When have I ever been dishonest?’

  ‘You were dishonest with my mother over Kirsten Mackenzie.’ There, it was out, the other resentment that had been simmering somewhere in her mind since last night, when for the first time she had fully realized the bond between Kirsten and her father.

  She was sorry the moment she’d said it. Dreadfully sorry. There were some pains no civilized human being should ever inflict on another, some territories no daughter, however privileged, should invade. It would never have surfaced had she not felt unbearably let down over the women’s vote.

  Her father’s face had changed. It looked pinched and withdrawn, as though he were in physical pain.

  ‘I am glad you think you have the right to judge me.’ His voice shook over the ironic words. ‘But I would have expected something kinder from you, Carlie.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she faltered.

  ‘It is no matter,’ he said coldly. ‘Now let me get back to my work.’

  *

  ‘Even if you’re not speaking to your father, can’t we go down to the Horticultural Hall at Westminster and join in the celebrations?’ Aggie demanded.

  She looked at Carlie’s stubborn, freckled face and sighed impatiently. Sometimes the Scots with their slow-burning tempers, their broody silences, their insistence on working a moral issue to the bone, really infuriated her. At least, this specimen Scot, the only one she knew, did. She tried again.

  ‘We’ve got twenty-nine Labour MPs now!’ she exulted. ‘Think of that, gel! Twenty-nine! And twenty-five Lib-Labs and it means the working-class have fifty-four representatives in Parliament now. Oh, come on! They’ll have the champagne out down there. You gotta celebrate. Even me mum is, downstairs. She’s sent out for eel pie and stout. It’s a poor heart that never rejoices.’ She punched Carlie’s arm, but gently. ‘Come on, gel. Put on your best bloomers and join the fun!’

  Carlie gave a reluctant smile, but agreed. In the omnibus going towards Westminster, she observed: ‘My father isn’t the whole Labour movement, after all. I’m glad for the workers. Glad for people like my mother, who works so hard, away from all the excitement and adulation. She got my father in again at Dounhead, as much as his efforts.’

  ‘I still think you should have swallowed your pride and gone up there to help him fight the election.’

  ‘If he’d wanted me, he could have asked.’ Carlie’s tone was stiff.

  ‘What I can’t understand,’ said Aggie, ‘is your ma never coming down to London.’

  ‘There isn’t the money. MPs get nothing from the electors, you know, and Labour MPs have to depend on what they get from the compulsory fund. My mother never asks for anything above mere subsistence. She lives her life for and through my father. That’s why —’ Carlie’s mouth worked and Aggie saw she was near to tears — ‘that’s why I hate what my father did to her through Kirsten Mackenzie.’

  ‘We’ve been through all this,’ said Aggie patiently. ‘You think people should be bloody saints. That’s because you’ve never fallen for nobody —’

  ‘I was fond of Donald —’

  ‘I mean real go-to-bed stuff,’ said Aggie roughly. ‘You’re not like that, gel. You’re a bit frigid and stand-offish, tell the truth.’

  ‘Aggie!’

  ‘Bit sure as death you are!’

  ‘Have you done more than — kiss a man, then?’

  ‘Naow, give over,’ said Aggie. ‘Last thing I want is to end up in the family way.’

  ‘There! That makes two of us!’ said Carlie, smiling and in better humour.

  The Horticultural Hall was full of Labour people in a near-ecstasy of jubilation. Carlie did not see her father at first and half-hoped he had still not returned from Dounhead. She knew she would have to speak to him and yet there were hurts and contradictions inside her she had still not resolved. She vacillated between the wish to talk to him in private and the instinct that a rapprochement might be easier in public.

  A young Non-conformist preacher who had been one of the earnest band of debaters at her father’s flat came up to her now, beaming all over his innocent, well-scrubbed face, full of rumours as to who would get which office in the new government.

  ‘John Burns is to look after the unemployed, I’m told,’ he confided. ‘And Beatrice Webb says he is pleased as a child.’

  ‘He’s the one who got fed-up with “working-class boots, working-class trains, working-class houses and working-class margarine”, ain’t he?’ demanded Aggie. ‘Good job they’ve given him the unemployed.’

  Her irony was lost on the young preacher, who went on: ‘Keir Hardie’s in at Merthyr, of course, and he’s tipped to lead Labour. Campbell-Bannerman will be the Liberal Prime Minister. So Scotland will be well represented, Miss Fleming, and justly so!’

  Carlie scarcely heard him. She left Aggie in his clutches and made her way through the crowd to where she had just spotted her father.

  ‘Well, daughter?’ he greeted her. She was still close enough to him to know how much he might have wanted the job of looking after the unemployed.

  ‘Well, Father. ’Twas a famous victory.’ She did not kiss him. ‘Will you be coming to the opening of Parliament?’

  ‘Will Mother be coming?’

  ‘You know she never comes to London.’

  ‘Then I fear I shall not be there either.’

  *

  ‘Cor! What a bunch of raggle-taggle gipsies we are!’ sighed Aggie. She surveyed the little procession of women with an air of comical disillusion. ‘We’re supposed to be the very first suffrage procession in London, ain’t we? Can’t you get your end of the banner higher, Vera? Sylvia Pankhurst herself embroidered it, you should think a lot of it.’

  Vera’s riposte was sufficiently lively to send a nervous titter through the ranks, but the uneven procession at last set off, possibly four hundred in all and nearly all East Enders. Carlie joined step with Aggie while they raised a smaller banner, this one largely the work of the Fermoyle family, even, Aggie boasted with a grin, down to the stout mark in the corner.

  Perhaps raggle-taggle wasn’t a bad description of them. Certainly by the time they reached Caxton Hall, a few hems of cheap skirts were beginning to dip and boots which had started out well-shined betrayed their age by the dust in their cracks. The police had made them furl their banners, in deference to the pomp and ceremony at Westminster, where Black Rod wa
s on his way to signal the start of the new Parliament.

  While Annie Kenney addressed them, they waited to hear if the King’s Speech had mentioned women’s suffrage. Perhaps Mrs Pankhurst knew already that it would not. When the news came, she suggested they should move to the House of Commons, where only twenty of them were allowed in at a time to beard their MPs.

  Neither Carlie nor Aggie was lucky in the ballot. They remained outside in the increasingly dispirited crowd.

  Carlie knew the outcome, anyhow. Not one single member of the brave new regime could be persuaded to take up the cause.

  *

  ‘I feel I’m getting to know him,’ said Aggie. She was standing in Central Lobby with Carlie, the banner disguised to look like a parasol over her arm and gazing up at the stained-glass, unresponsive features of St Andrew.

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ said Carlie. She shivered a little.

  ‘Any way I can help you young ladies?’ The policeman’s voice was excessively bland, his small brown eyes shrewd and suspicious.

  ‘We are waiting to hear the result of the Plural Voting Bill,’ Carlie told him, more crisply than she felt.

  ‘You know,’ put in Aggie irrepressibly, ‘the one what will allow qualified women to be registered, and put you men in your place at last.’

  ‘Been thrown out, it has,’ said the constable. ‘That I can tell you. So why wait around any longer?’

  For answer, Aggie stripped the cover from the banner and she and Carlie hoisted it between them. It bore the legend: ‘Women should vote for the laws they obey and the taxes they pay.’

  Together they walked quickly through the Lobby, the policeman behind them. While he caught Aggie and confiscated the banner, Carlie mounted a bench and with her arm raised cried: ‘Will the Liberal Government give justice to working women? Will Campbell-Bannerman give women the vote?’

  A second policeman made a hasty appearance and dragged her from her perch. She kicked his ankle and watched him grimace in pain. Twisting nimbly from his grasp, she sprinted into St Stephen’s Hall and on to the pavement outside. There she began again. A thin-faced, patrician girl in the movement’s colours provided her with a soap-box to stand on. A crowd gathered round her, by no means all of it sympathetic, and a stone struck her a glancing blow on the head. Reeling, she saw the constable she had kicked so resoundingly cleave his way through the people like an axe.

  *

  Once in the cell, the shaking stopped. Carlie looked around her. There was a plank bed, a skilly and some prison clothes the wardress had left behind, with the instruction that she was to change into them. She had no intention of doing so. On top of the clothes was a yellow cloth number. Number Eighteen. She managed a grim smile.

  She tried to remember the other instructions the woman had given her, not looking at her. You washed in that unbelievably tiny basin. In the morning, you were expected to empty your slops. Roll your bed. Clean your tins with three pieces of rag and a bath brick. Make sure they were really clean.

  You would be given a pail of water in order to scrub the stool, bed, table, shelves and floor. Well, if they expected to break her spirit with that, they were up a gum tree. She didn’t mind scrubbing. She had learned in the Rows, for Josie had always maintained a healthy contempt for housework.

  The wardress came in the morning, bearing a pint pot filled with gruel.

  ‘I don’t think I can eat that,’ said Carlie.

  The woman ignored her words. ‘You get that and six ounces of bread a day,’ she intoned. ‘You’ll eat it, all right. I’ll bring your sheets.’

  ‘Sheets?’

  ‘You’re expected to sew at least fifteen a week.’

  ‘I won’t be here that long.’

  The woman smiled at last. ‘Thirty days, wasn’t it? Four weeks. Sixty sheets.’

  It was the sewing that was the worst. At school, she had been strapped with the tawse because she had never been able to make small, even stitches, and now it was as though the nervous embarrassment of these days came back, making her clumsy and reluctant. She watered the sheets with her tears.

  The time passed slowly. She speculated on the shouts from other parts of the prison. Once she thought she heard Aggie’s voice shouting, ‘Don’t give in.’ In the beginning, anger and righteous indignation sustained her. But she couldn’t eat the gruel and after four days she began to feel weak in the legs.

  Her thoughts tended to wander away from her. She lay on the bed, thinking of the games she and Donald had played in Dounhead House, the fat grapes and cold, creamy milk they had had from Aunt Tansy.

  In a weak and silly way, she longed for Donald. It was foolish, because he would have forgotten about her by now. And she thought how she did not really like London, with its seductive air of knowing everything, its brassy restaurants and jangling cars. Only Aggie and the Fermoyles made it tolerable. Now that her father did not care about her any more. But she wouldn’t think of him. She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t.

  On the sixth day, the cell keys jangled and the door opened to reveal him. She flew into his arms and he patted her gently, telling her she would be released and so would Aggie. He had pulled strings, there was no doubt of that. But she accepted the means of escape, for there was nothing you could do for the others as long as you were locked up. And, in any case, when a by-election loomed, everyone was released as a matter of vote-catching. The Government had to accept the unpalatable truth that the Suffragettes — as the Daily Mail called them — were gaining support.

  Back at his rooms, he served her with coffee and scones, inexpertly and clumsily. All around was the evidence of his ‘bachelor’ existence — dusty surfaces, unwashed cups and unfinished sandwiches. She knew none of this mattered to him.

  ‘Well, Carlie,’ he said at last, ‘are we friends again?’

  She hung her head. ‘I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, I’ve been very unhappy.’

  He patted her shoulder. ‘You’ve suffered because I am what I am. I’ve taken a lot for granted in my life — your love and your mother’s support.’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘I never thought to hear you say it.’

  He smiled at her. ‘Well, perhaps it’s time we were more open about things. I want to talk to you about Kirsten Mackenzie.’

  Her mouth set in a line. ‘Not her. Please.’

  ‘Yes,’ he insisted. ‘Now you know all about — what happened between us, so I won’t be mealy-mouthed. Your half-brother, Wallace, is completing his education in Grenoble. When he comes back, I want you to get to know him, to be friends. We are all adults now. And I want you to go and see Kirsten.’

  ‘Why do you ask me to do this?’ she demanded.

  ‘Because she came to see me about you, while you were in Holloway. She was very concerned for you and very impressed by your courage.’

  She made a protesting sound.

  ‘She thinks you ought to be in Scotland, in Glasgow, strengthening the women’s movement there. They need the campaign skills you’ve learned.’

  ‘Go back to Glasgow?’

  ‘Yes. But first see Kirsten. It would please me very much.’

  *

  ‘So you’re Duncan’s daughter.’

  She had imagined that this would be Kirsten’s greeting and had thought of her rejoinder: ‘And Josie’s.’ Only it came out less seriously than intended and they both smiled. The resistance Carlie had felt towards Kirsten melted in her presence. She was gentle, warm, responsive.

  ‘Carlie, I don’t know what you think about me,’ Kirsten began boldly, ‘but I want you to know that, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we force this government into the realization that women must have the vote.’

  She sighed. ‘It’s been a long struggle. You know that Emily Davies, who is still with us, handed the first petition for suffrage to John Stuart Mill in 1866? We sent a memorial to Gladstone in ’84. The answer’s always been the same. No, no and no.’

  ‘They’ve go
t to crack some time,’ said Carlie grimly.

  ‘They’ll crack before we do. It’s got to be all-out war, Carlie. Intervention at every by-election. Meetings, rallies, deputations. And if these fail, attacks on property. Other symbolic acts that will draw attention to our case.’

  ‘I’m ready for anything.’

  ‘You’ll find plenty of support in Glasgow. The Sunday-night street-corner meetings are well established. We’ve got teachers and nurses behind us, but we need to rally support from every quarter.’

  A plain-faced girl brought a tray of tea and biscuits into Kirsten’s office and laid it on the desk. Kirsten poured the tea and handed Carlie a cup. There was a somewhat constrained silence as they both sipped.

  ‘How is your mother?’ It was Kirsten who spoke first.

  ‘Very well. When I say very well, I mean slowed down a bit with rheumatism. But the front room at home is still as full of strangers as ever. All wanting her time, her signature, her help.’

  ‘Funny thing was,’ said Kirsten, ‘we got on rather well, your mother and I.’ She did not look in Carlie’s direction, but out through the window to the dusty London square. She threw down the pencil she was toying with and said, more briskly, ‘People who question convention get into painful situations sometimes. We might find in the future that the convention of marriage will be outgrown. Especially when families are limited or some women choose not to have children at all.’

  Carlie said nothing. She wanted to put her mother’s case, her own case, for that matter, but it was suddenly irrelevant.

  ‘When I first met your father,’ Kirsten was saying, ‘he was like a man in pain. Not physical pain. That’s not the worst sort, in any case. He wanted to do so much, but he had lost his religion and he didn’t know how. I helped. It did not seem frivolous or evil at the time, and it doesn’t seem so now.’ She paused, then said gently, ‘I sense you’re at some sort of crossroads, too, Carlie. Am I right?’

  Carlie nodded dumbly.

  ‘Then go back to Glasgow. I think you will find work to do there.’