A Woman's Place (11 page)

She did force herself to think of it as over and instead sank herself into her suffragette activities. Surprising how a thing starting out as a mere passing interest had taken hold. Listening to so many brave exploits, she began to feel that until she did something brave she would never truly be a suffragette. Her only fear was that the more she became involved, the greater the risk of her parents discovering what she was up to. Then the fat would truly be in the fire.

‘One day we’re going to get arrested and sent to prison,’ she said to Connie as they came away from one of several demonstrations, this one comparatively mild, not causing enough disruption for the police to turn up. ‘We’ve been lucky so far,’ she went on darkly. ‘But if it happens then our parents
will
find out.’

Connie’s shrug looked almost complacent, as if it didn’t matter to her any more. ‘We knew it could happen when we joined,’ she murmured.

The gesture irked slightly. Eveline wished she could feel as easy in her mind as wealthy Connie. Knowing she must soon do more than just join the odd rally or attend a few meetings had made her see that this was no game. If called upon she mustn’t fail her friends and what they stood for, fought for, often suffered for. It was the prospect of her dad finding out that made a coward of her.

‘Don’t it worry you at all?’ she snapped, grammar blown to the wind.

‘So far we’ve been lucky not to have got into trouble.’ Connie’s change of tone took her by surprise. ‘But one day it’ll happen, and then …’

The sentence was left unfinished; she saw Connie was in fact far from complacent, as much in fear of her family’s reaction as Eveline of hers once her secret was out. It was inevitable. Having money didn’t buy security and peace of mind. One look at Connie’s face told her that and she felt momentarily humbled.

They had narrowly missed arrest on a previous demonstration on June the nineteenth. They’d gone with a sizeable body of the WSPU to the House of Commons to distribute leaflets quoting part of the 1689 Bill of Rights on the right of any subject to petition the king’s representative and render any attempt by the police to obstruct their passage illegal. It had all ended unsuccessfully and in confusion with a hundred and twenty-two women arrested.

At their first militant foray, she and Connie had only just avoided being caught, scurrying off as the police arrived. She’d felt a coward, a traitor. It plagued her for days after. At the next George Street meeting she was hardly able to look others in the eye even though no one blamed her. Connie said she felt exactly the same, but arrest would mean complications regarding her family. Although the cause was beginning to take precedence over fear of family reaction, they still dreaded that day even above the possibility of arrest.

After the skirmish, they had parted company, neither of them caring to join in an evening’s spate of window breaking at the Treasury and Home Offices, later to hear that thirteen more women had been arrested.

Convicted, the thirteen were taken to Holloway where they had gone on hunger strike. After six days they were released. Eveline had to admire them. Six days voluntarily starving themselves!

She who enjoyed every meal Mum put before her wondered where they found their courage, many being women of good breeding who usually ate far better than she ever did. She was aware that one day she too could expect to stand in court alongside those brave souls for a cause that mattered more to them than anything and on whose actions hung the right of women to be included with the voting masses.

‘Perhaps going on hunger strike might not be as bad as it sounds,’ she said to Connie, thinking of the artist Marion Wallace Dunlop who had stencilled the extract from the 1689 Bill of Rights on the wall of St Stephen’s Hall in the House of Commons and been given one month’s imprisonment for refusing to pay her fine. Her demand that she be placed in the First Division as a political prisoner denied, she went on hunger strike.

‘They released her after only four days,’ Eveline went on. ‘I suppose a person can put up with not eating for four days. It’s a surer way of getting out of prison before your time’s up.’

Connie was rueful. ‘If they did let you starve yourself to death it’s an even surer way of getting out before it’s up.’ Which made Eveline think.

Connie was aware she was being too melodramatic. There’d be such an outcry were a woman to be left to starve to death. But at the moment she was more worried about the repercussions should her family discover what she was doing.

Eveline had far less to lose, since her life was not bound to the rules of polite society. And Eveline had only one secret to conceal from her family. She had two, one that she was an active, militant suffragette, the second that she was keeping clandestine company with someone they would never accept, someone with hardly any money and no apparent prospects.

George was waiting anxiously at the ticket barrier as she threaded her way through crowds of summer holidaymakers and weekend trippers.

‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted. ‘I am a bit late.’

‘You’re not late,’ he said, taking her arm as they showed their tickets at the barrier. ‘I’m early.’

The cigarette smoke of a second-class carriage made her eyes sting a little; she preferred a first-class ladies-only compartment, even if not every time, because her father kept strict control of her allowance as though she were a child. As a result a second-class ticket often had to suffice. But this was how she had met George Towers, so she could thank her father for that. Sitting beside him, feeling the warmth from his shoulder as it pressed against hers in these cramped seats on a warm afternoon, she blessed that particular day she had dutifully conserved her allowance.

They talked the whole way home; there was no need to worry about others overhearing, the compartment was already buzzing with conversation, unlike the sedate silence of the first-class ladies-only. He spoke of his life, his father’s death several years ago, his ailing mother, her need to be cared for. Connie listened, whatever he said suddenly vastly important.

‘It means of course that I can’t go out just whenever I wish,’ he said. ‘I pay a neighbour to come in if I need to. I try not to make it too often and get back as soon as I can. Expensive otherwise,’ he laughed.

It didn’t sound much fun but did indicate that he probably didn’t have a girl in his life. It was rather proved to her as they got off the train.

‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’d very much like to take you for a meal next Saturday before catching the train. It means my getting home later but I’m sure my mother’s neighbour will give eye to her for an extra hour or two.’

Connie’s heart leaped with delight. Despite his regard for filial duty it was good to know he was still his own man. But next Saturday would be a problem, she and Eveline having agreed to take part in a small, peaceful demonstration after the meeting, outside a hall where an MP had arranged to speak. She could hardly back out. They would probably parade around in front for about an hour or two unless moved on, which the police seldom put themselves out to do so long as it remained orderly.

She drew in a deep, determined breath. ‘I have to be somewhere tremendously important. Could we make it later, say six thirty?’

There was her father to consider – friction remained between them. They were still not talking to each other, as if he had washed his hands of her. He spoke to Verity, wrote warmly and often to Denzil and Herbert away at their public school, but it was as though she did not exist.

Should he disapprove of anything she did he would make a point of addressing her mother, requesting his displeasure be passed on, speaking as though she were a third person. If he were there when she came into a room, he would go out without so much as glancing her way. It made life at home exceedingly uncomfortable and she was glad he was mostly at his Harley Street practice, his local surgery or at his club.

George’s face lit up. ‘Six thirty is fine,’ he said.

Connie had never been so happy. Was it possible to fall in love so quickly? On the train home she hung upon George’s every word as he spoke more fully of his life.

His father having been a senior clerk in a small bank, George had generously been taken on in a position of junior clerk. When his father had died after a sudden stroke, George had continued to work there with the promise of promotion on reaching twenty-one. He was twenty-three now, no longer a junior, his wages having increased, but on this he kept himself and his mother, paid the rent on a small, landlord-owned terraced house and paid a neighbour to keep an eye on his mother while he worked. The woman more or less cared for her full time now, as his mother had grown steadily more frail in health and weak in the head. The savings his father had left she persisted on hoarding, and though it was now accruing a tidy interest, refused to have it touched, insisting it be kept for a rainy day.

All this he told Connie with no hint of bitterness and her admiration for him mounted during their train journey home at the same rate as this wonderful sense of falling in love. She prayed George might be feeling the same towards her though there was no way to find out and all she could do was hope.

Connie had told her previously that she’d met a young man by the name of George Towers. But Eveline’s thoughts had still been lingering around the man who to her mind had fled as fast as he could having found her not to be the easy little catch he’d no doubt been expecting. Presumably he felt she was not worthy of any more attention. It was the only explanation she could give for Laurence’s months of absence. She felt angry whenever she thought about it.

‘George is such a wonderful person,’ Connie was saying today as they helped themselves to tea and jam sponge with their meeting coming to a close. ‘I only wish we did not have to meet in secret the whole time.’

‘In secret?’ she echoed. Connie had never mentioned this before.

She had already spoken of the fiasco following her rejection of her prospective fiancé called Simon, from an eminent family and whom her father had set his heart on her marrying, and the uproar when she’d turned down this Simon’s proposal. But this newest bit of information was a surprise.

‘My father would not approve of George,’ she said. ‘A bank clerk is not what my father would want for me. So we meet at Paddington Station on Saturdays and on some Sunday afternoons we go for long walks. I tell my father I am meeting a friend for afternoon tea. If he were to find out about George he would forbid me to see him ever again.’

‘He’s bound to find out sooner or later,’ Eveline said.

‘I know. And I am dreading it.’

Eveline made a sympathetic sound but her mind was racing from the reappearance of Larry at the meeting today. She wasn’t going to tell Connie, who would probably think her an idiot, but her heart had soared at the sight of him, looking bronzed and handsome from his long and probably expensive vacation.

He had his cousin with him again, no doubt chaperoning her, but as Eveline went to get her tea and cake, while Connie was occupied in conversation with some other women, he’d come over. His cousin was on his arm; he introduced her as Miss Edith Fitzhugh.

Having acknowledged the attractive, somewhat athletic young woman, Eveline had asked politely if he had only just returned to England.

Larry chuckled. ‘I’ve been home for … must be a month now.’

The news came as a jolt. She was nothing to him, a girl from the East End, not even good enough to be considered. She felt let down, but she had never been anything but proud, proud of where she lived. Her home shone clean as a new pin, nothing about it was shabby, with Dad’s shop bringing in a decent living. If it wasn’t a patch on what he was used to with his people in their large country house, their upper-class friends, their society parties, their horses, their hunts and meets, it wasn’t her fault.

She was relieved that Connie was still talking to the other women and hadn’t seen her discomfort. Then out of the blue he referred to his offer before leaving on vacation to take her to the seaside. ‘If you still want to go.’

Her immediate inclination had been to lift her chin and say with a deal of dignity that, no, she was no longer interested. Instead, she heard herself saying, ‘Do you still want to?’ Aware how foolish it must sound.

‘Of course,’ he chuckled, his cousin giving a supportive smile. ‘How about next Sunday, just you and me?’

Unable to find words, she nodded, hating herself for being so easily swayed, but her heart was already nearly popping out of her chest, it was beating so madly.

‘Right,’ he’d said. The bright blue eyes seemed to be devouring her and despite herself she felt a shiver of excitement run through her.

‘I’ll pick you up in the old motor, say outside Liverpool Street Station around nine o’clock?’ he was saying. ‘Take a spin down to Brighton, show you what the sea looks like.’ It sounded patronising but she no longer cared. ‘Bring a veil. You could lose your hat, pinned on or not. Gets breezy in an open top.’ He seemed to have forgotten his cousin standing by his side.

‘There’s a rug for your knees already in the motor and I’ll provide the grub. Otherwise just bring your ravishing self. See you next Sunday then.’

He and his cousin were gone by the time Connie turned back to her, too eager to tell her about George Towers to notice the glow Eveline was already feeling in her cheeks.

Names were again being put forward by her father. Through her mother, of course; he was still not wholly speaking to her unless it was the occasional sharp reprimand.

‘For heaven’s sake, Constance,’ her mother would say at regular intervals, ‘one might be led to think you had every intention to become an old maid. What is the matter with you, child? Don’t you want ever to get married?’

Yes, she had every intention but not to one of their choice.

In fact if they knew what her choice was they would die on the spot.

She’d been seeing George for two months now. He was as much inconvenienced as she was, having to arrange and pay extra for his neighbour to come in on a Sunday to be with his mother those two or three hours he was away.