After the War Is Over (2 page)

C
harlotte walked north, her route taking her along the grand avenue that divided Princes
Avenue from Princes Park. Swaths of snowdrops had emerged from the winter-dead grass
of the boulevard, their blooms gleaming brightly in the gathering twilight. Once,
the first flowers of spring had seemed like heaven-sent heralds of new seasons and
new life. But that had been a lifetime ago, before the world had changed. Before she
had changed.

She hadn’t a very long commute from her lodgings to Miss Rathbone’s office at the
foot of Granby Street, scarcely half a mile, and on an evening like this it made for
a perfectly pleasant walk. Some of the other women at work had bicycles, which they
rode fearlessly through the city traffic, but Charlotte preferred to walk. Bicycles
weren’t cheap, besides, and were next to useless on rainy and cold days. All the same,
she rather wished she’d learned how to ride one when she was still young. Not that
being thirty-three made her ancient, but she was well past the age when she could
frolic about like a schoolgirl.

She crossed Upper Parliament Street and continued north. Night was nearly upon her,
the birds gone silent, the streetlights
flickering to life. Almost home, and for a change she wasn’t so late that the Misses
Macleod would be worrying about her.

Miss Rathbone had sent her to the elderly sisters when she had first arrived in Liverpool,
back in the summer of 1911. They were spinsters, she’d told Charlotte, and devoted
to each other. No longer able to manage on their own, they’d badly needed help, but
the cost of keeping a servant was beyond their modest means. So Charlotte would board
with them, keep an eye on the old ladies, and her rent would cover the wages of a
live-in maid-of-all-work.

When Charlotte had left for London in the autumn of 1914, Rosie Murdoch, a nurse at
the Red Cross Hospital in Fazakerley, had taken over her room. Nearly five years later,
Rosie was still in residence, and had been joined by two additional boarders, Norma
and Meg. With the upstairs full, Charlotte had been installed in the dining room upon
her return. It wasn’t an ideal solution, for they all had to cram around the kitchen
table for supper, and the other women’s comings and goings sometimes made it difficult
for her to sleep. Norma in particular was a night owl, not returning until the wee
hours on the three evenings a week she went out dancing, and occasionally, rather
the worse for wear, she needed to be helped up the stairs and into bed.

Altogether the house was fairly bursting at the seams, but the other boarders were
a far more lighthearted group than Charlotte’s earnest colleagues at the constituency
office, their amusing and often boisterous dinner-table conversation just the sort
of leavening she needed to elevate her spirits, or at least distract them, at the
end of a long day. The lone exception was Meg, widowed during the war, whose sadness
enveloped her like a cloud of too-strong perfume. Charlotte had tried, gently, to
befriend the widow, but so far with little success.

Quickening her pace, she reached Huskisson Street just as the clock on St. Luke’s
Church rang six o’clock. She came to number 47 and let herself in, but rather than
unlace her boots straightaway she lingered in the front hall and let the comforts
of home seep into her bones. The house smelled of beeswax polish and Lifebuoy soap,
fresh-baked bread and fried onions; standing there, she suddenly felt so tired that
she wanted nothing more than to eat her supper and crawl into bed.

Instead she unlaced her boots, took off her coat and hat and gloves, tidied everything
away in her room, and went down the back stairs to the kitchen, where everyone else
was in the middle of supper. She didn’t have to look at the table to know what was
on the menu, for it was a Wednesday, and Wednesdays meant bubble and squeak, made
from vegetables left over from Tuesday’s supper, and served with such scraps as remained
from Sunday’s roast—this week it had been mutton—to round it out.

Charlotte squeezed into her place at the table and waited for Janie, the maid-of-all-work,
to dole out her portion of supper.

“How was your day?” asked Miss Margaret.

“Quite good, thank you. How is everyone else? How is that poor lance corporal doing,
Rosie?”

“He rallied last night. Looks like the worst of the infection is behind him. Now we
only have to keep an eye on his burns, make sure none of them go septic—”

“Rosie, dear, you know how I feel about your hospital talk at the table,” Miss Mary
interjected mildly. “You’ll give us all indigestion.”

“Sorry. Will bend your ear later.” Although Charlotte had left nursing behind, likely
for good, she never minded listening to Rosie talk about work.

“How was your day, Meg?” Charlotte asked. “Was the shop busy?”

“I’m afraid not. Scarcely five customers all day. But Mr. Timmins says things will
pick up as Easter draws near.” Meg never once looked up from her supper, her answer
delivered without inflection or any discernible emotion. It had been like this at
every meal since Charlotte’s return to Liverpool, but she could hardly fault the poor
woman. Sometimes the worst wounds of all were invisible to the naked eye.

Charlotte turned to the girl sitting at her right. Not yet twenty, Norma had an abundance
of youthful energy and optimism that could be grating to the nerves, especially at
the end of a long day. But she was also a reliable source of entertainment at the
table, especially when conversation became bogged down. “How about you, Norma? How
were things at the office?”

“Well, let me tell you—it was nifty. A brick of the
dreamiest
doughboys you can imagine came in. They were sending a crate of something-or-other
home to America.”

“Whatever for?” asked Rosie, not sounding especially interested.

“They’re only allowed to take their kit bag home on the troop ships. If they have
any extra keepsakes from France—”

“Like what? A stuffed rat? A roll of barbed wire?”

“Don’t be such a wet blanket, Rosie.
Honestly
.”

“Go on,” Charlotte pressed. “The Americans came in and were shipping something home
. . . ?”

“And they said I was so nice, and such a pretty girl—such a
doll,
they kept saying—that they had something for me. And here it is!” With a flourish,
she pulled a small paper bag from beneath her chair and emptied its contents onto
the cluttered table. “Can you believe it?”

It was a banana. One perfectly ripe banana, its skin scattered
with just the right amount of freckles, its heady fragrance half forgotten yet instantly
familiar. Neither Charlotte nor anyone else in the room had seen one since the summer
of 1914.

“Where on earth did those boys find a banana?” asked Miss Margaret.

Norma had been working at a shipping office down by the docks for several years, and
often came home with startling stories or unusual gifts from customers. Only last
week she’d brought home an ancient bottle of Madeira, its stenciled label illegible
under a hardened layer of decades-old dust. They’d polished off the bottle of dizzyingly
strong fortified wine in an evening.

“I’ve learned it’s best not to ask. They’d had an entire bunch, they said, and this
was the last one. Shall we?”

They all leaned forward, crowding close as Norma peeled away the skin and set the
naked fruit on a clean dinner plate that Janie placed before her. And then, as precisely
as a surgeon, she cut it into seven equal portions.

Silence fell around the table as the women slowly ate the fruit, their faces a moving
tableau of wonder and delight. Meg was the first to speak. “It’s . . . it’s just lovely.
I’d forgotten . . .”

“Me, too,” said Rosie. “My mum loved them. Would buy a bunch from the greengrocer
whenever one of us had a birthday.”

“Thank you, Norma,” said Miss Margaret. “Such a treat for us all.”

“You’re very welcome. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll excuse myself. I’m off to the pictures
with one of the girls from work.”

“What are you seeing?” asked Charlotte. It had been an age since she’d been to the
cinema herself.

“
The Hope Chest
. It’s Dorothy Gish’s newest. Doris has seen it already. Says it’s grand.”

Soon Charlotte was the only one left at the table, and as she scraped her plate clean
of bubble and squeak it occurred to her that she’d forgotten to check the table in
the front hall for the day’s post.

“Janie, did anything come in the post for me today?”

“Oh, yes, Miss Brown. Shall I fetch it for you?”

“No need. I’m done now. Thank you for supper. You always make everything taste delicious.”

The letter was on the front hall table. As soon as she picked it up, she knew it was
the
letter, the one she’d been waiting for all week. Her heart racing, she tore open
the envelope and began to read.

           
16 March 1919

           
Dear Miss Brown,

                
Further to your inquiry of the 12th March, I am pleased to confirm that, as per the
regulations of the Representation of the People Act of 1918, and as a graduate in
good standing from Somerville College, you are indeed entitled to cast a vote in the
forthcoming by-election for Oxford University. I therefore enclose a voting paper
for you to return at your earliest convenience, together with instructions on its
proper submission.

I remain,

Your obedient servant,

Mr. C. M. R. Hopkins

Office of the Vice Chancellor

University of Oxford

S
he set off for work not much past dawn the next morning, her voting paper tucked securely
in her handbag. How odd, that a single piece of paper could instantly make her feel
more present, more engaged, as if she were somehow part of a greater whole.

Even the task she’d set herself for the morning, collating information on rents and
prices from a whopping great pile of files, seemed appealing, and by the time her
wristwatch read half past eight, before anyone other than Miss Rathbone had arrived,
Charlotte had opened, read, and made notes from each and every file.

She took the voting paper from her bag, unfolded it, and smoothed away its creases.
It was time.

She went to the door of Miss Rathbone’s office and knocked lightly.

“Do come in!”

“Miss Rathbone? Do you have a moment?”

Charlotte’s employer looked up from the papers that cluttered her desk and exhaled
a great plume of smoke from one of her ever-present Turkish cigarettes. “Of course,
my dear. Is everything all right?”

At least fifteen years Charlotte’s senior, Eleanor Rathbone had been middle-aged since
the day she was born. Some of the younger women who worked in the constituency office
were intimidated by her, for she took no pains to hide her formidable intellect, nor
did she have much patience for those who were less sure in their convictions than
she. A generation ago she would have been called a bluestocking and dismissed out
of hand for her ridiculous notions about equality between the sexes and the inherent
value of women’s work. Two decades into the twentieth century, Miss Rathbone was beginning
to make her presence and politics felt on the national stage.

Like Charlotte, she had attended Somerville College at Oxford, and after finishing
her studies, Miss Rathbone had returned to Liverpool and had joined her father in
his work chronicling the lives of the city’s working poor. She’d been elected as a
city councilor for Granby Ward in 1909; two years after that Charlotte had begun work
as one of her constituency assistants.

But Miss Rathbone’s work as a ward councilor was only one of the many hats she wore.
Elsewhere in Britain she had become known as a committed suffragist and defender of
women’s rights beyond the voting booth. If a cause was worthy in her eyes, she threw
her considerable weight behind it. Rest could wait for the hereafter, she often told
her assistants. What counted, in this life, were good deeds and hard work.

She was far from perfect, of course. She tended to bully her opponents into submission,
smothering their arguments with the weighty superiority of her own convictions. She
was high-minded to a fault, maddeningly humorless at times, and entirely lacking in
vices apart from her addiction to tobacco.

Charlotte worshiped her.

“Yes, ma’am, quite all right. I’ve come about my vote.”

“I don’t follow you,” Miss Rathbone said, stubbing out her cigarette and regarding
Charlotte with an air of heightened interest.

“I can’t remember if I told you I didn’t vote in the general election. I wanted to,
but I had to apply to the registrar at Somerville for proof of my status as a graduate,
and by the time—”

“I understand. By the time you’d jumped through all their hoops, registration had
closed.”

“I was so disappointed. But they’ve since called a by-election for Oxford University,
so I will be able to vote after all. I know it’s one of the university constituencies,
and not a proper riding—”

“A vote is a vote, my dear.”

“As soon as the writ was issued, I applied for my voting paper, and it arrived yesterday.”
Her voice faltered; until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much it had meant to
her. “I was hoping, Miss Rathbone, that you would do me the honor of acting as my
witness.”

“The honor is entirely mine,” Miss Rathbone replied, her serious face transformed
by a rare smile.

Charlotte extracted her voting paper from its envelope and filled in the empty spaces
where indicated.

                
I
,
Charlotte Jocelin Brown (Somerville College, 1907),
give my vote as indicated below:


                
Professor Gilbert Murray, standing for the Liberal Party

                
I declare that I have signed no other voting
paper and have not voted in person at this election for the university constituency
of Oxford.


                
I also declare that I have not voted at this general election for any other university
constituency.


                
Signed


                
Charlotte Jocelin Brown

                
47 Huskisson Street

                
Liverpool

                
This day of
19 March 1919

Her contribution complete, she handed the form across the desk to Miss Rathbone.

                
I declare that this voting paper (the voting paper having been previously filled in),
was signed in my presence by
Miss Charlotte Jocelin Brown
,
who is personally known to me, on this day of
19 March 1919
.

                
Signed


                
Eleanor Rathbone

                
Greenbank House

                
Mossley Hill, Liverpool

Miss Rathbone set down her pen, lit another cigarette, and sighed with contentment.
“Normally I would not presume to discuss your choice of candidate with you, but as
it is staring me in the face, I will commend you for it.”

“I fear Professor Murray has no chance at all.”

“None whatsoever,” Miss Rathbone agreed. “The university is Conservative to its foundation.
But that, my dear, is not the
point. Your name has been counted.
You
have been counted. How does it feel?”

Charlotte had to think on it a moment. She’d been so intent on having her voting paper
signed and witnessed that it hadn’t occurred to her to dwell on the moment itself,
let alone contemplate its true significance.

“Casting my vote felt familiar, oddly enough. As if it were something I’d done a hundred
times before. If I think on it, I suppose I would say it felt right. As natural as
breathing.”

“An excellent point, for what could be more natural than an intelligent, able, and
curious adult exercising her right to help determine the governance of her country?
I feel this calls for a toast, in spite of the early hour.”

Pushing back from her chair, Miss Rathbone went to a small drinks table at the far
side of her office. She poured two modest measures of walnut-brown sherry and handed
one of the tiny glasses to Charlotte.

“To you, Charlotte, on the occasion of your first opportunity to exercise your franchise
in a parliamentary election, and to those who fought so valiantly for the cause of
universal suffrage, but were never able to cast their own vote.”

They raised their glasses and then, seated again, sipped at their sherry. It was beautiful
stuff, so dry it nearly evaporated on Charlotte’s tongue, and so potent that she set
her glass down unfinished. It wouldn’t do to fall asleep at her desk.

“I’ve been meaning to congratulate you on your election as president of the National
Union,” she said.

“Thank you. I’m afraid we have a long road ahead. With the government so obsessed
with stabilizing the labor market, I worry most women in this country will soon find
themselves
out of work. It makes me wonder if we have all lost sight of what truly matters.”

“Perhaps it’s simply that people want a respite from urgency,” Charlotte ventured.
“They want to
be,
to live without anxiety, and if that means neglecting causes they once held dear
. . .”

It was clear, from the puzzled expression on Miss Rathbone’s face, that such sentiments
were not only foreign to her, but also unthinkable.

“Then we are all lost. No; we will have to find a way to wake this country up—and
do so before we stand at the brink of disaster again. That reminds me . . .”

“Yes, Miss Rathbone?”

“Only an idea or two for my article on family allowances. Back to work we go, my dear.
I need to finish off these memos I was writing for tomorrow’s meeting of the Personal
Service Society. You’ll be there to take notes, won’t you?”

“Of course I will. Thank you again, Miss Rathbone. It means a great deal to me that
you witnessed my vote.”

“You are most welcome. Now shut my door tight, and leave me to think.”

W
HEN SHE EMERGED
from Miss Rathbone’s office, a little light-headed from the few sips of sherry she’d
imbibed, her colleagues had all arrived and were fetching themselves cups of tea in
the cloakroom.

Her closest friend in the group, Mabel Petrie, was just taking off her coat. She and
Charlotte were Miss Rathbone’s assistants, while the other women, six in total, worked
as clerk typists. Like Charlotte, Mabel was the daughter of a vicar, and though she
hadn’t been to university she had received a
fine education at a ladies’ college in Newcastle, where she had grown up.

“May I show you something, Miss Petrie?”

It was a quirk of the office that she and Mabel were accorded the privilege of being
referred to by their surnames, while the clerk typists were known by their Christian
names alone. When she and Mabel went to lunch, or took a walk through Princes Park,
they used each other’s Christian name; but at work they were Miss Brown and Miss Petrie.

“Oh, do. That looks like something official,” Mabel answered.

“It’s my vote,” Charlotte said, and instantly the cloakroom fell silent.

“Your vote? How is that possible?”

“I can’t vote here, as I don’t own any property or pay rates or anything like that.
But I went to Oxford, and as a graduate of the university, I’m entitled to vote in
their constituency.”

“Doesn’t the city of Oxford have its own member of Parliament?” asked Margaret, one
of the younger clerk typists.

“It does, but for some reason the universities themselves have constituencies. Oxford
and Cambridge both have one, and there’s a new constituency for all the other English
universities.”

“Seems an odd way of doing things.”

“It is, rather. But it gives me the chance to vote, so I’m not going to complain.”

The other women all crowded round, all eager for a look at Charlotte’s voting paper.
All except Miss Margison.

Though a clerk typist, Ann Margison insisted on being called by her surname, and as
she had worked for Miss Rathbone for donkey’s years, no one thought to challenge her
on it.
She was capable enough, and was as devoted to their employer as the day was long,
but she was such a disagreeable person, all hard edges and cutting gibes. If Miss
Margison had ever had something nice to say about anyone or anything, Charlotte had
yet to hear it.

“Lucky you,” the woman said, and it was clear she was not offering her congratulations.
“Lucky to be able to buy yourself a vote so easy.”

Charlotte ignored her; what could she say that wouldn’t sound defensive or pandering?
It was true, after a fashion, for her expensive education had set her apart, and had
given her a vote when most other women were still excluded from the franchise.

“You’ll all be filling out one of these before long,” she said. “You know Miss Rathbone
won’t rest until it happens.”

When the others had gone to their desks and begun their day, Charlotte returned to
her little office and looked at her completed voting form until she was sure it was
fixed in her memory. She folded it into the envelope she had prepared earlier, affixed
a stamp, and then took it to the pillar-box around the corner. Pushing it through
its slot, rather as she imagined one might insert a ballot in a voting box, was terribly
satisfying, if a trifle anticlimactic.

There were no brass bands to herald her victory, no crown of laurel or medal to mark
her achievement. Only the sun, shining brightly in a pale spring sky, and the joyous
music of birdsong high in the trees. But for now, for today, it was more than enough.