Things a Bright Girl Can Do

  ‘Get out,’ she said.

  ‘Now, look here—’

  ‘I mean it. Get out right now and never come back.’

  ‘Too right, I will!’ Nell stood up, a year’s worth of fury coursing through her veins. ‘You haven’t got a bloody clue, have you?’ she said. She spat on the floor. ‘I should have left months ago!’ And she was gone.

  For Ever

  IT TOOK HER a long time to walk off her fury. At first she was too angry to think. Her mind was buzzing with all the things she should have said to May, all the things she should have said to her idiot mother, a grown woman who thought helping German prisoners was more important than helping children on her own bleeding doorstep! For Christ’s sake! But slowly, as she walked, her anger began to fade.

  At first she was walking blindly, through the familiar streets of the East End. Then she realised that her feet were taking her towards Coney Lane, and she veered away. She couldn’t bear to go home. She couldn’t face the closeness of those rooms, no peace, no hiding place, nowhere that one could just be quiet and alone. And her mother would be sure to ask after May, and she didn’t think she could cope.

  I can’t, she thought. I can’t.

  She turned instead the way she had come, towards Victoria Park. It suited her mood to be walking. She couldn’t go home. She couldn’t go to May’s. There was nowhere she could go. Now that her anger was gone, all she felt was exhaustion and a terrible weight of despair.

  She had known this would happen. She felt, walking through the evening twilight, that she had always known it would happen. How could it not? What, after all, did she have that would keep someone like May bound to her? She had read none of the books May had. She could never follow any of her wild leaps of logic (although sometimes she wondered secretly if that was her fault or May’s). May cared about helping Germans and pacifists. Nell cared about making life better for ordinary women like her mum, and helping soldiers like her dad, who would die without weapons. They both wanted peace and they both wanted the vote. But they came at it from such different angles, was it any wonder they never seemed to understand each other? What sort of life could they ever have made for themselves? Where would they have lived? What would they have done?

  Nell was fairly sure that May had not thought very much about what sort of future – if any – the two of them might have had together. Nell herself had never mentioned it, it seemed too fantastical and faraway. But she had thought about it, sometimes.

  In that dream, they shared a room, perhaps two, nothing fancy. But those rooms were their own. Their own space. Nell was obsessed with the idea of her own space, a room that belonged to no one but her. The fact that she allowed May to share this dream was a greater honour than May would ever realise.

  They had worked, the two of them. At what, Nell wasn’t clear, although in her more fanciful moments they had managed to work for the causes they believed in, the way Miss Pankhurst did. This, of course, was all after the war …

  After the war … They would be campaigners, socialists, feminists. All of the things that the most wonderful women Nell knew were. They would move in May’s world, a world, if May was to be believed (and Nell still wasn’t sure that she was), where their … abnormality … would be accepted and forgiven.

  Nell did not, quite, believe in this vision. But she loved it. She loved it the way the exile longs for home. She felt as though she’d been caged in all her life, and May had set her free. And now …

  Now all of that had gone.

  She felt a sob rise up inside her, and she clenched her jaw against it. She couldn’t cry. She wouldn’t. But she felt very tired. She felt as though she had been fighting her whole life for something she could never have, something it was not possible to have, because it did not exist. The Suffragettes might one day get the vote, but she … how could she have what she wanted, when she didn’t know herself what that was? To live in a world where she was accepted and loved for who and what she was. Was it possible? May had allowed her to imagine that perhaps it was. But how could it be? She and May still lived in the world, didn’t they? You couldn’t ask the whole world to remake itself just to please you.

  She had reached the bridge over Limehouse Cut, the long, narrow canal which ran through Bow. She stopped walking. She thought that she had never felt so tired and hopeless in all of her life. The whole world was going to Hell, and her own small part of it was crumbling. And how dark it was! She had never been to Victoria Park in the dark – what would it look like? And then she realised that of course, the park would be closed. The gates would be locked. It felt like the final straw. She wanted to sink down in the road and never get up. She wanted to sleep for ever.

  She looked down at the dark water of the canal. A woman had been found floating there last year. A suicide. Nell couldn’t swim, and the water looked icy. She didn’t think it would take very long to drown.

  Looking down, she felt a wave of relief at the thought. She could simply give up. And, after all, why not?

  It wasn’t that she wanted to die. It was simply that she was so tired of living. And for what, exactly? What exactly was she fighting for? The war had taken even that away, Nell’s glorious battle for freedom. What did women’s freedom matter now? What did anything matter?

  She put her hands on the wall of the bridge, and watched them resting there, the skin pinched and white. She lifted her knee up onto the parapet.

  ‘All right, lad?’

  The question made her start. A man – perhaps one of the bargees from the canal – was peering up at her, looking concerned. She slithered down, awkward and embarrassed.

  ‘Yeh – yeh. I’m just—’

  He didn’t look convinced.

  ‘Whatever it is, it’ll look better in the morning, I swear.’

  Oh, Lord! Her face was hot with shame. Her only thought was to get away as quickly as possible, before he started asking questions and expecting her to explain. And what if he called the police? Suicide was a crime, wasn’t it? Self murder? They could put her in prison. And then whatever would Mum say?

  ‘Yeh,’ she said. ‘Only I weren’t – I were just – I got to get home.’

  And she stumbled away, and down the road. Back towards Coney Lane, and tomorrow.

  Choice

  MAY TOLD HERSELF that she didn’t mind about Nell at all. At all. What had she and Nell had in common, really, besides a sort of quirk in their make-up? Hardly anything. Nell had left school at fourteen and worked in a factory! And she didn’t believe in any of the things May believed in. She didn’t even believe in God! Her father was a soldier!

  May was now more isolated than ever at school. The girls had begun to tire of attacking her, which was something. Perhaps they were a little sorry for how they’d treated her, or perhaps they’d simply got bored. Either way, nobody made any attempt to make it up, and May was too proud to try. She ignored them, and they ignored her. It had been a relief at first, but now it was almost worse than their campaign of attrition. It was as though she’d disappeared. It was a strange, rather disorientating feeling. And it was lonely.

  May missed Nell most when she was loneliest – Nell might not have agreed with, or even understood, what May was doing, but she would have understood what was happening to her now. Her mother understood, but her mother was so busy nowadays. The rare evenings she was home were taken up with the piano lessons she still had to squeeze around her busy schedule. May was mostly left with Mrs Barber, who was brisk but sympathetic.

  ‘They’re a pack of silly cats, that’s what they are,’ she said, reassuringly. ‘You come here and help me make some toffee, and don’t you worry about them no more.’

  Toffee-making was something they’d done together when May was a little girl. She was too old to be comforted by toffee, but it comforted her nonetheless. She could not help but think of Nell, though. Nell would have loved making toffee, and her brothers and sisters would have loved eating it.

  ‘Whatever happened t
o that nice little friend of yours in the breeches?’ Mrs Barber said. ‘Don’t you think you ought to make it up, whatever it was you quarrelled over?’

  ‘Nell,’ said May grandly, ‘is dead to me. Please do not mention her name again.’

  But she didn’t mean it, exactly. The longer she went without seeing Nell, the more she missed her. She’d thought perhaps Nell would come round and apologise for what she’d said, but she hadn’t. And nothing, nothing would induce May to apologise to her. Apologising would mean giving in, and she couldn’t do that. If she gave in, everything would crumble, and she’d have nothing left. She’d be just as bad as those suffragists who’d given up all their campaigning when the war began.

  Not all of the suffragists had given up campaigning, but so many had. Now it all seemed to be arguments about war work, and peace work, and should female munitions workers be paid the same as the male munitions workers, and nobody seemed interested in the vote any more. May cared about all of this, of course. And she was depressed that so much of Mama’s campaigning work seemed to exclude her. May had been on several anti-war marches, and to several local public meetings. But most of Mama’s work seemed to be committees, and public meetings in provincial towns. Nobody, she thought, with a blind sense of fury, understood what it was like to give your life to something you’d thought was the most important thing in all the world, and then to have it suddenly pulled away from underneath you.

  It didn’t help that she wasn’t at all sure whether the most important thing in all the world had been the suffragists, or Mama, or Nell.

  She went to Quaker Meeting, and the problem buzzed around her head, worrying away in the quiet. Even here she couldn’t be at peace. In other churches you just had to listen to the pastor, but here you had to listen to God, which was much worse. What God said was between you and Him. And He might not say the same thing to everyone. That was why some of the young Quaker men had enlisted, and some hadn’t, and the Meeting had respected that. It was the young man’s decision. Whether he went or stayed was between him and God.

  This morning, May was wondering if maybe Nell’s decision was between her and God as well.

  Except that the Quakers had thought about it, at least. Had prayed about it. Had Nell thought about it at all?

  A woman in front of May stood up to speak about the German submarine attacks in the English Channel. She asked the Quakers to pray for the merchant seamen, swept into a war not of their choosing. Another stood and asked the Quakers to pray for the German conscripts on the submarines, also part of a war not of their choosing. An old man stood up and ministered about choice – what did it mean? How true was it to say those men didn’t have a choice? Doesn’t everyone always have a choice? Those seamen could desert, or object, or resign, after all. Or were there some things that you simply didn’t have a choice about? Some decisions that you couldn’t make any other way, without ceasing to be yourself?

  It was horribly pertinent. Ministry in Meeting was like that sometimes. That old man might have been speaking to her. I ain’t got no choice. That’s what Nell had said. May didn’t think it was true. She didn’t think a Suffragette like Sylvia Pankhurst would have taken that job, no matter how ill her little brother was. Would May have done it, if it were Mama who were sick? Would Mama have, if it were May?

  There were Quakers who wouldn’t, she knew. The American Quaker John Woolman had left his wife and daughter to come to England and ask English Quakers not to support the slave trade. He’d died in England and never seen them again. May had always rather admired him. Now, she wondered. What would she have thought, if Mama had let May die rather than sign up to make shells?

  She didn’t know. But the grief of Nell’s betrayal – it felt like a betrayal, like a punch to the stomach – was staggering. She felt, obscurely, as though this were a battle between people like Mama and herself, and people like Barbara and the girls at school. And although she’d always known that Nell didn’t feel as strongly about this as she did, she’d trusted that Nell would understand the impulse behind it, even if she didn’t share it. That she would respect the choices May and her mother had made.

  It wasn’t the factory! she told an invisible Nell, silently, in her head. I could have forgiven the factory! It was the way you didn’t seem to understand why it was important! You didn’t seem to care!

  May had always cared, all her life. She didn’t understand why it was so important to Nell to dress the way she did – although she loved it – but she understood that it was important, and she thought she would die to defend her right to do so. She had assumed that Nell felt the same way about Mama and herself.

  But you didn’t, she said silently. She was supposed to be listening to God, but the only person she wanted to talk to was Nell. You didn’t care at all.

  There was a part of her which knew she was being unfair, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

  June

  1916

  Dover Beach

  The sea is calm tonight.

  The tide is full, the moon lies fair

  Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

  Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

  Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

  Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

  Only, from the long line of spray

  Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

  Listen! you hear the grating roar

  Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

  At their return, up the high strand,

  Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

  The eternal note of sadness in.

  Sophocles long ago

  Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

  Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

  Of human misery; we

  Find also in the sound a thought,

  Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

  The Sea of Faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating, to the breath

  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Matthew Arnold

  Offensive Behaviour

  IT WAS ODD, Evelyn often thought. In wartime, any number of disasters could happen, and here in England it would be days before you found out, weeks even, sometimes.

  Here you all would be, going about your business, and your world would already have ended without you even knowing it.

  Evelyn was home from Oxford and back in her parents’ house for the long summer vac. Each time she’d come back, the house had felt different. This time, Miss Perring had left: she’d gone to work as a clerk in the Ministry of Munitions.

  ‘You should have seen her,’ Kezia told Evelyn gleefully. ‘She came downstairs and told Mother she felt she owed it to her country to support the war effort, now Hetty and I were old enough to look after ourselves. Can you imagine? Good old Perring! Hetty and I were sure she was going to go and tend war-wounded or something, but she’s picked about the dullest job she possibly could, of course. Mother was rather dashed, but Hetty and I are glad she’s gone. It’s ever so much nicer being in charge of ourselves.’

  Iris had left last year to work in a munitions factory, meaning that most of the househo
ld work now fell on Cook and Mother and the younger girls and, in the holidays, Evelyn herself. Hetty was thirteen now, and Kezia fourteen, and Miss Perring was right that in theory they didn’t need much looking after. But, said Mother, it was astonishing how much time one seemed to spend chivvying them to get to school on time, or dressed for dinner, or to finish their prep.

  Then too, there was even less food than there had been at Easter. This vac, Mother’s conversation seemed to be full of shortages, and queues, and the price of butter. By the time she had been home two days, Evelyn was ready to scream. But then almost immediately, she had something else to worry about, something so huge it made all Mother’s anxiety about food seem small and meaningless.

  You always knew when there was going to be a big offensive. The men weren’t supposed to tell you about it, but they all did. They sent you letters that said things like, ‘we’re moving closer to the Front’ or ‘we’ve all been issued with new equipment’. Sometimes they sent you goodbyes, or told you they loved you. Sometimes they even sent coded messages – Kit had agreed, very solemnly, that if he ever mentioned Treasure Island, it would mean that an offensive was about to begin – something that had terrified Evelyn’s mother and father the year before, when, forgetting this, he’d sent them a letter cheerfully telling them he’d been billeted with a real-life Captain Flint. And it wasn’t just you who got letters like this. Everyone did. Everyone with a son, or a brother, or a sweetheart ‘over there’.

  As June faded, it seemed to Evelyn that everyone was talking about the big offensive that was going to happen. Mrs Waiting, whose daughter was a VAD in a hospital in Reading, said over the bridge table that the hospital had been told to expect a hundred and fifty casualties in the next week. She delivered this news as though it was an exciting piece of gossip. Evelyn felt sick. Her eyes rose, involuntarily, to meet her mother’s, and saw what she was sure was her own expression reflected in hers.

  Before an offensive, the artillery battery against the enemy grew worse. For days, they could feel the pounding of the guns from France, making the earth quiver beneath their feet. When they were at their worst, the walls of the London house vibrated with the violence of them. They seeped into Evelyn’s dreams. The constant presence of fear was like a weight, pressing down on your chest. Or like a finger pulling on your nerves, tighter and tighter, like a child twisting a piece of elastic until either it cut off your circulation entirely, or it snapped. But the guns got on everyone’s nerves. Kezia spilled marmalade all down the front of her school blouse, and Mother shouted at her for being careless, and Kezia, astonishingly, burst into tears right there at the breakfast table.