At last, they could hear the sound of voices from within the building, as the audience began to move out. The policemen tensed – or was it Evelyn’s imagination? The women certainly did. It seemed unlikely that the dignitaries would leave by the main entrance where the Suffragettes were protesting so prominently, so women had been sent to stand unobtrusively at the stage door, and tradesman’s entrance.
‘What if they don’t come out?’ Evelyn asked.
A Suffragette sniffed. ‘Well!’ she said. ‘We’ll stay here all night, is all. Those policemen will get bored of it before we do.’
She lifted up her voice and began to sing, the song Teddy had sung at the rally, ‘Rise up, women, for the fight is hard and long …’
This time Evelyn joined in.
The doors to the hall opened, and the crowds began streaming out. Some glanced at the Suffragettes, but most walked past without looking, rather hurriedly, as though afraid they would be propositioned. Evelyn raised her voice, to avoid having to think about the fluttering sensation in her chest. She wondered what had happened to the Suffragettes inside the hall. Had they been arrested? Ejected? Held in some back room in the Civic Hall?
‘Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory—’
‘Here we go!’
It was one of the women who’d been sent to watch the other entrances. She’d been running, face flushed and hat askew.
‘They’re coming out by the tradesman’s entrance! Hurry!’
The women began to run. Evelyn ran with them, cursing her skirts that tangled against her legs as she went. Behind her, she could hear the policemen blowing on their whistles. She didn’t dare look back. It was happening. It was really happening now.
‘Do you support votes for women?’ Mrs Leighton was yelling, ahead of her. ‘Do you support a woman’s right to vote?’
There were more policemen. Where had they come from? There was a policeman behind her, holding a nightstick. The memory of the action at Buckingham Palace flashed into her mind, and she stumbled. The policeman grabbed her arm. She struggled, twisting herself, trying to remember the term of ju-jitsu they’d done at school. The policeman pulled her arm upwards and she yelped in pain. Behind her, somewhere, Miss Miraz cried, ‘Oh, I say! Steady on!’
Her voice brought Evelyn courage. She kicked the policeman squarely in the shins and he swore. She remembered suddenly what one was supposed to do about holds, twisted out of the policeman’s grip, and bolted towards the other women, and the two honourable Members of Parliament, who were, after all, who she was supposedly there for in the first place. But then there were arms around her, and her hands were being yanked behind her back, and there was cold metal around her wrists. It was over. All that worry, and the whole thing had lasted perhaps four minutes in total. And, she realised, as they dragged her towards the Black Maria, she hadn’t even managed to shout ‘Votes for Women!’
As they clapped the handcuffs shut, she remembered with a sudden start of horror that she’d forgotten to tell her parents what she was going to do. ‘Going to see the Suffragettes’, she’d told Kezia, but that now seemed woefully inadequate; they’d be bound to worry when she didn’t show up to dinner. She should have left them a note – or posted them a letter – or something. They would think she’d been kidnapped or – or run down by a motor omnibus – or anything.
No. Teddy would know what had happened. Surely they would ask Teddy when she didn’t come home. And surely, surely he’d remember what today was.
‘Come on, now,’ said the policeman, not unkindly, and she stepped up into the van, looking over her shoulder for a last glimpse of freedom.
And there he was.
He was standing outside the Woolworths on the other side of the road, rubbing his hands down the side of his grey flannel trousers. He wore an odd, closed expression, something that wasn’t quite shame, or fury, or dread, but a mixture of the three. She couldn’t tell if he was angry with her or with himself, and suddenly it seemed immensely important that she should know.
‘Teddy!’ she called. ‘Teddy!’
But they shut the doors behind her.
Roly-poly Pudding
NELL WAS, BY nature, very honourable. The Swancotts were a respectable family. If Nell had been the boy she some times thought she ought to have been, she would have treated May right. There would have been nothing that could have brought her dishonour. A kiss in the park, yes, perhaps, but nothing else.
With a girl and a girl, though … Nell didn’t know what the rules were. Were there rules? It wasn’t as though they could wait until they were married, after all. So did that mean they should do … nothing? Ever?
Her thoughts kept returning to something May had said to her once, that their love was somehow holy, untouchable. Was that true? What she felt about May, what she thought about May … her cheeks burned. It wasn’t holy. But, at the same time, perhaps it was. May was a perfect thing, a true thing.
Nell sometimes thought she was the one, true, honest thing in her whole life.
• • •
She went round to May’s house for supper again, despite her misgivings; the desire to be alone with May was stronger than the awkwardness of the nice house with the piano and the parlour and the slavey. She sat politely and ate vegetable curry and jam roly-poly pudding and said, ‘Yes, Mrs Thornton,’ to May’s mother, ever so nice. But all the time she was looking at May and thinking, Oh, to be alone with you! Oh, to have a door to shut against the world!
After supper, Mrs Barber disappeared into the kitchen with the washing-up, and Mrs Thornton disappeared into the parlour to deliver a piano lesson to a little red-faced boy in a sailor suit. And May smiled at Nell and said, ‘Come upstairs, won’t you, and look at the new book Mama gave me.’
But when they were upstairs, and the door was shut, she took Nell’s hand and said, ‘What’s the matter? No, don’t tell me. Come here and kiss it better.’
May’s mouth tasted of Mrs Barber’s roly-poly pudding. She kissed Nell, and Nell responded with a force which took May aback. There were weeks and weeks of longing in that kiss, years perhaps, years of frustration at keeping so much of herself hidden from the world. Months of claustrophobia and anxiety came out, all of a sudden, there where their lips met, and May, after her first jolt of surprise, was dizzy with it. She kissed Nell back, leaning closer over her body, tongue against tongue, heart against heart. Her heart was pounding. The blood was rushing in her veins.
Nell’s hands fumbled at the buckle of the belt of May’s gymslip, her hands slipping in their urgency. She yanked at the belt, and it came undone; May laughed and pulled the gymslip over her head, revealing the blouse and the petticoats, with the black lisle stockings, and presumably the suspenders below. Nell gasped and paused for a minute, laying her hand against May’s chest.
‘What?’ said May, but Nell shook her head, and reached for the buttons, pressing her mouth against May’s as she did so. May was finding it hard to breathe. Is this what love was supposed to feel like? Nell’s cheeks were flushed. Her fingers were working at the buttons on the blouse, her mouth still kissing May’s. May realised belatedly that she should perhaps be doing something similar, and she unbuttoned Nell’s jacket, and then the rough shirt underneath. She could see the neat pattern of Nell’s mother’s stitches in the shirt fabric. Presumably it had once belonged to Nell’s brother. The intimacy of it was dizzying. The buttons were made of bone, smooth and round and creamy-white under May’s fingers. I love you to the bone. I love you to the core.
Below the blouse, May wore a liberty bodice, and below the liberty bodice and the petticoats, she wore long, all-in-one combinations.
Nell grunted. ‘Ain’t there any of you at all under all that?’ she said, and May felt a bubble of laughter rising up inside her.
‘Stow it, you goose,’ she said, and stopped her mouth with a kiss. Nobody had told her that doing this would make her feel so full of joy. Her knowledge of sex, beyond the basic facts, was limited to Shakespe
are, and several rather grown-up novels belonging to her mother, in which sex was a matter of great worry and difficulty. Nobody had told her it would make her want to laugh and laugh with delight.
‘What you laughing for?’ said Nell.
‘I don’t know,’ said May. ‘Because I’m happy?’
Nell’s hand had found May’s breast. Her other hand was fumbling underneath her petticoats. She stopped now, and looked at May.
‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Are you …? Because I can stop if you ain’t.’
May reached out a hand and stroked the side of Nell’s cheek. She could see the confusion mingling with the pleasure on her face. How happy I am, she thought. How lucky we are each to have found the other.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sure.’
Afterwards, they lay together in May’s bed, breathless, May curled in the circle of Nell’s arm, the rough, heady scent of cloth and sweat around her. She rested her head on Nell’s shoulder, finding, as so many lovers had found before her, how perfectly the two of them fit.
It felt strange and exciting to be so close. The intimacy of it. She could feel Nell’s heart beating through her shirt. The smell of carbolic soap in her hair. She could reach out and touch the skin on her hands and face. There was something beautiful about the hardness of the callouses on her fingers. And how thrilling to rest like this, Nell’s arms around hers, as though they had a perfect right to be together, as though nothing could ever separate them. I love you, May whispered in her head, saving the words, not wanting to say them yet, wanting to enjoy their possession like a secret, like Rumpelstiltskin’s name in the fairy tale, the power by which the miller’s daughter won her child. I love you. I love you. I love you.
A Room in White Porcelain
GETTING ARRESTED, EVELYN decided, was quite simply the most sordid thing that had ever happened to her.
She had been taken, along with the other Suffragettes, to a local police station, where she had been searched, and her money and her school scarf taken away from her – to prevent her hanging herself, it was explained. Evelyn felt the urge to giggle; it seemed so queer to be in a police station in her school uniform, and queerer yet for such an innocent object as her school scarf to be considered a possible self-murder weapon. When the policemen filled out the charge sheet she told them she was eighteen, which was not strictly true, but was what she had told Mrs Leighton, and she didn’t want to be revealed as a liar in court.
The cell she was taken to was small and bare. It was horribly, disgustingly filthy, so filthy that Evelyn felt the hairs on her arms rising in revulsion at it. There was a persistent low-level stench of urine, and vomit, and something worse. There were black beetles scurrying in the corners of the room; one ran across Evelyn’s arm and made her shriek.
The cell was tiled with white porcelain bricks, and contained a plank bed, a W.C., a hot-water pipe, a horsehair pillow and two blankets. There were flies buzzing over the W.C. There was a gaslight behind a thick glass guard which was kept burning all night, and a tiny window set too high in the wall to see through. The window, Evelyn was pleased to see, really was barred. There was a spyhole in the door, and a sort of letterbox arrangement through which her food was posted. The food was the same for luncheon and dinner: bread and nasty, rather slimy margarine, served with an even nastier cup of tea. Evelyn ate and drank it anyway. She’d be hungry enough once the hunger strike began.
At first the Suffragettes knocked on the walls and called to each other – cheering things like: ‘Bon courage!’
And: ‘No surrender!’
But there is a limit to how much you can shout through a prison wall, and after a while, the drunk in the cell next to Evelyn yelled at them to, ‘Stow it, you daft cows!’
They carried on for a bit, just to show him they didn’t care what he thought, but his presence was something of a quash on their spirits, especially when he began ranting and swearing at them. Then he was loudly and violently sick on the other side of Evelyn’s wall, which made Evelyn want to throw up herself, it was so disgusting. Captured rebels in adventure novels never had to share their captivity with people like that.
Mostly, however, the lock-up was simply boring. Evelyn was so bored, she was reduced to reading her schoolbooks – a Euclid, a Virgil, and a copy of The Tempest edited for schoolgirls. Evelyn liked Virgil usually, but he was poor company in a white porcelain room which smelt of vomit and urine. If Aeneas had ever ended up somewhere quite so beastly, some goddess would be bound to come along and rescue him. The Tempest was simply idiotic. There was only one woman in the whole thing, and she was a frightful drip. How could people possibly take Shakespeare seriously when he wrote rot like that? And Euclid was not to be endured. Nobody could expect a girl to care about angles and lines in a prison cell. She wondered what her parents were thinking. Would they come to her hearing? Would they ever speak to her again? They were bound to punish her when they found out. Perhaps they’d lock her in her bedroom for ever. Perhaps they’d pack her off to the country to live with her grandparents. This whole thing had been a stupid idea. She wished Teddy were here. He’d say ‘I told you so’, but she wouldn’t care.
It would be worth it just to see him again.
The next day, she was woken early, issued with yet more bread and greyish margarine, which she was too nervous to eat, and allowed to wash in a basin of cold water. She, the drunk (now sober, and looking very sorry for himself), and the other Suffragettes were bundled out into the yard. Evelyn thought she had never been more grateful to see other human beings in her life. She hadn’t realised quite how awful being completely and utterly on your own was. It was like you weren’t fully human somehow. She had never thought she liked other people, much. But she could have kissed the other Suffragettes.
‘All right?’ Mrs Leighton said, glancing at her, and she nodded gratefully. All right. So far.
She, the drunk, and the Suffragettes were loaded into two Black Marias. Inside, the vans were divided into little stalls, just large enough to sit down in. Other prisoners had scrawled things on the walls: Bob Elliott, begging, one week. Jimmy Barnett, drunk and incapable, three shillings. Evelyn looked for Suffragettes’ names, but could find none. Her heart was beginning to hammer inside her, and her arms were tingling with nerves. A little voice was singing in her head: court, prison, hunger strike. Court, prison, hunger strike.
She felt sick.
At the magistrates’ court, they were again unloaded into the yard, and abandoned. This yard was already busy; as the morning went on it slowly filled with a mixture of policemen, petty criminals, a few men who were presumably lawyers, and the twelve Suffragettes. And there they waited.
And waited.
It was a warm July day, so Evelyn wasn’t cold, and the Suffragettes were all together. The other women linked arms and sang suffrage songs. Evelyn joined in at first, but soon stopped. She didn’t feel like singing. She was dirty and uncomfortable, her dress itched, her hair was hot and grimy, and she didn’t feel at all triumphant; she just wanted this to be over. Once again she was aware of the ambivalence she always felt around the Suffragettes – the uneasiness of her alliance, and the wariness she always felt about her place in their union. She liked the belonging, but it made her restless. It made her want to argue, to escape.
The prisoners were called in one by one as their cases were heard. It didn’t seem to take very long. There was a balcony over the yard along which they were led out afterwards. They held up fingers to their friends below to show how long they’d been given. One week. Two weeks. Three. Four. Evelyn supposed that she ought to be nervous, but she wasn’t, much. The time for nerves had passed. Mostly she was restless, and bored.
Miss Wilkinson was talking to a thin, nervous-looking woman who had been arrested for begging.
‘But I never done it,’ she was saying to Miss Wilkinson. ‘A lady asked me to help her with her bags, out of her cab, see? And when I done it, she give me thruppence. And then, when she were
gone, the policemen come and said I were begging. But I never were. I told them to find the lady, and she’d tell them, but she were gone by then, and I don’t suppose they ever found her neither.’
‘But they won’t put you in prison, will they?’ said Evelyn. ‘Just for taking thruppence from a lady?’
‘Won’t they, miss?’ said the woman gloomily. ‘One month, my sister got, for begging – and she weren’t begging neither, she were selling lavender – her young man being out of work, and the children hungry. If your children were crying for food, miss, you’d go begging, I don’t wonder. I can’t go to prison for a month, miss – I got five children at home. Whatever’ll they do without me?’
The Suffragettes nodded sympathetically, and agreed that it was a shame.
‘When women have the vote, we’ll pass laws that’ll make sure your children are looked after,’ Miss Miraz told her. Evelyn wondered if it was true. The Suffragettes promised so much. Would any of it really ever happen?
At last, the twelve women were called into the magistrates’ court and told to wait. The courtroom was full of people. It was dizzying, like the school hall on play night. Evelyn stared into the crowd, trying to find familiar faces. There must be Suffragettes there, surely? Had any of the Hampstead Suffragettes come? Had – heaven forfend – her parents? They wouldn’t, surely? How would they know where to come?
Mrs Leighton nudged her and pointed upwards. There was half a bench of women in suffrage colours, all waving. At the end of the row – and Evelyn felt her heart give an enormous bound – was Teddy. He wasn’t waving. He was leaning forward, his hands gripping the back of the bench in front of him, staring and staring and staring at her. His face was set, and very pale, and his eyes burned.