Awakening (15 page)

‘Won't you come home with me tomorrow, Papa?' Charlie asks gently.

‘I cannot.'

‘But why, Papa?'

The father seems to grope for words. He looks round vacantly; leans forwards to study his own shoes. Charlie lays his hand on his back, to remind him he's still here. The fire susurrates in the grate. Finally Mr Kyffin manages, ‘I bear the stigma.'

‘Papa, Mama didn't mean to turn you out. She has been … greatly tested. She has needed rest and I have suggested to her that she should go for a water cure.'

‘I know I'm a burden.' Childish tears trickle down Mr Kyffin's face. ‘And Prynne has stabbed me in the back. But this is irrelevant. I say no, Charlie.'

‘Well, in that case, Papa, at least come and enjoy a pipe with us in the smoking room?'

The sufferer's face lights up. ‘What a good idea.'

But this, Beatrice fears, is what triggered the aberration in the first place. Burning tobacco is transformed in the lungs of weak men to poison. The golden fibres that smell so fragrant in the leather pouch besmirch and rot the soul. Thus the men of their sect – Mr Spurgeon not excepted – abuse themselves. If Mr Kyffin could bring himself to renounce tobacco, he might yet be cured. At an All Night of Prayer last year in Alderbury, thirteen pipes, several tobacco pouches and two snuff boxes were handed in by penitents, amid scenes of sobbing and quaking. Beatrice, though unimpressed by such wild performances, was struck by the practical results.

Her husband-to-be startles her by rising with the men to leave for the smoking room. And his look tells her, ‘Do not be hasty to judge our Saviour's children.'

Later she hears music and laughter. Mr Elias is playing his fiddle, an Irish melody. Listening at the door, Beatrice peeps through the gap at the men in their retreat. Short Meerschaums and long clay pipes protrude from bearded mouths. There's an air of relaxation rarely witnessed in mixed company. Joss is telling tales of his boyhood. Charlie reminds his father of a seaside holiday in Brighton. Later she hears Christian talking about America: the tide of liberation that's carrying the abolitionist north by storm into revival after revival. In America, he says, there's less talk amongst advanced people of sin and guilt; more talk of holiness and love. All men may be saved. This is the doctrine of Mr Beecher, whom he reverences, notwithstanding the aspersions cast on the great man as a loose liver and idol of the masses.

Beatrice gazes through the fog at her radical husband-to-be, who, though he has lit a pipe, does not appear to be smoking it. He cradles the bowl in one hand on his knee, occasionally raising it towards his lips, which it never touches. In a year's time perhaps Beatrice will have been brought to assent to these shocking doctrines of allowable tobacco and universal salvation: it will all seem a matter of course. She will have passed from the hands of her Calvinist father into those of her Arminian husband.

Mr Kyffin sits and smiles at everything and everyone. Perhaps he has glimpsed a new light and is once more travelling from star to star.

Mrs Bunce, bearing gossip, is announced. In the unlit drawing room, amid a parliament of black umbrellas opened to dry, she informs Beatrice that Anna Pentecost was seen by her husband's uncle departing from Salisbury Station in the company of a certain reprehensible young minister of Fighelbourn.

Chapter 9

The passengers, having vomited their way across the Bristol Channel from Ilfracombe, await their connection at Swansea Station with three hours to spare. On the paddle steamer
Velindra
, an expansive Welsh doctor travelling home from his annual Devon holiday assured them that copper fumes had a beneficial effect on the lungs; Swansea metal workers and their families were happily in receipt of ‘the beneficent kind of arsenic'. Oddly enough, he observed, cattle die of the fumes and a bed of rhubarb will turn brown as dried tobacco but men are seldom adversely affected.

When she sees and smells the thick yellow masses of cloud belched from the shafts of the smelting furnaces, Anna knows it's a lie. Or rather, it's a lie the doctor believes. Hills of slag tower around the town; the ground is barren and black. What Anna will remember of Swansea is the foetid stink and the warrior queen.

Fumes flood the station; everyone coughs, swathing mouth and nose with cloth. Metal clangs on metal; a pig waddles across the platform and the Sala party huddles on a bench while a female voice shrieks in the station forecourt. Anna, approaching Will's homeland in expectation of poetry, has been reading the Salas' copy of the translated
Mabinogion
, thinking: I was right, it's very simple, Will cannot be known in England. He's a foreigner there as surely as any Russian.
She must be sure to explain this to Beatrice.

Close to retching in the fog, Anna closes her eyes. They open upon the grandest woman Anna has ever seen. The warrior queen stands poised at the platform edge, balancing a pitcher on the crown of her flat hat. Six foot tall or more, she peers up the line, her woollen shawl, doubled and thrown back over one shoulder, falling behind in graceful folds. A companion, scarcely less majestic, stands smiling as she looks back at the row developing in the station.

‘Who are they?' Anna asks a local passenger.

‘Cocklewomen. Picturesque, are they not? They dig for cockles in the bay and sell them at the market. Oh – watch out – here we go!'

A porter scuttles onto the platform, pursued by a cocklewoman. She picks him up bodily and slams the puny fellow down on to the track below, where he sprawls on his face groaning. Wiping her palms on her skirts, the cocklewoman straightens her shawl and looks round. You don't have to understand Welsh to know she's asking whether anyone else would care for a taste of the same?

Miriam, notebook on knee, hungrily observant, is scribbling pencilled notes. She's recording the episode in her journal perhaps. Anna is also conscious of hoarding the scene for her diary. Anna recalls Mr Munby and his notebook – how he flicked the pages over, revealing sketches of working women in trousers, coal-black from head to foot. There was a strange, quivering eagerness in his manner: something of relish in the way he described the dignity of brawny female arms and massive hands – his own being milky-white. What was in those other photographs he showed to Joss?

It's a relief to pick up your skirts and board the train, quitting the squalor of this industrial sink where thousands have to live, if you can call it living – those typhoid-stricken, pauperised multitudes of the coal and iron valleys. It's the world Mr Clifford brought before Anna's imagination, but to breathe its air is another thing. You cower and want to run.

The train speeds beside silver stretches of water, past Llanelli Vale, Ferryside and the ruined castle of Llanstephan. At Tenby there's a carriage ride – twelve on top and half a dozen inside, through lanes rich with foxglove and honeysuckle. At every village the population turns out to watch them pass, the women in their dark blue petticoats and tall black hats. Anna gasps at her first view of the harbour, cliffs and pristine yellow sands. White bathing machines are lined up on the shore. And she's back at Lulworth with Lore in a darkly glittering ecstasy that's only not forbidden because nobody imagines its existence. Cemented into the walls of the party's lodgings are great whelk shells, bleached white by sun and rain.

By the time they arrive, the cocklewomen episode has turned into an anecdote. Mirrie's friends are intrigued. This is what happens, they say, when you go too far with working women. Push down on the dough as you will, the yeast will rise. We shall grow a head taller in the next generation – and do not spit upon a woman then; she will toss you down on the line. Once the cocklewomen are literate, we shall have revolution.

‘I hope not though,' Mirrie protests. Her long, lugubrious face is earnest. ‘Joking aside. I don't want us to grow fangs and claws. Let's hope education and reform will do the job.'

‘My brother's friend,' Anna chips in, ‘said he'd once seen an apple-woman sitting on a stool beside her cart, reading the
Life of Garibaldi
.'

Anna has never before shared the company of educated, radical ladies. Questioning everything is their norm. She should feel at home. She doesn't, except for the chance to be with Mirrie. Barbara Bodichon, with her red-gold hair and her resolute intelligence, is an artist who burns for women's higher education, votes, professional status. Matilda – ‘Max' – Hays, a sculptress, smokes and affects a man's coat; lets it be known that she rides a horse astride. Max has translated the scandalous French novelist George Sand into English.

But where am I in all this? Anna wonders. Dowdy and provincial, she lacks education, style and background. Style here is expressed not in the following of fashion but in the cut of your clothes and an air of confidence. These are wealthy, cultured, eloquent people whose bohemianism rides on the back of privilege. Their accents mark out Anna's Wiltshire burr – the soft chalk of her Rs. And yet they acknowledge her as an equal, enquiring about her home and sister.

It's feels like a disloyalty to speak of Beatrice in this company. Imagine Beatrice visiting, steeling herself to hand out pious tracts – understanding little, fearing everything. She'd find so many books to burn; the conflagration would be visible from Ilfracombe.

‘My dear sister is in London at present, visiting Regent's Park College – the Baptist college. She's there in part to meet our family friend, Christian Ritter.'

‘I know that name. Ritter – wasn't he the author of
Die Pflichten des Christentums
, The Duties of Christianity?'

‘That was Christian's father, Barbara. And his cousin was married to my father. She died in childbirth.'

‘But how
fascinating
and how sad. Walther Ritter was, if I remember, a Christian Socialist, is that how one would describe him? – do I have the right man? We have several of his works at home.'

Anna tells them a little about life at Sarum House and describes the visit of Mr Clifford, assuming that this name will speak to their political idealism, as it does. But the more Anna invokes John Clifford and his collectivist social gospel, the more she's aware of falsifying her picture of Sarum House, skewing it into a haven of liberalism. How poorly their library and her mind are stocked. Devotional literature and dusty theology. But it won't always be like this, Anna promises herself. I'll accumulate books and stop hiding them. I'll face her out. Joss will help me. I'll carve out a territory.

Wearing wideawake hats and old jackets with sundry pockets, their skirts cut or pinned several inches above the ankle, the women talk their way down to the sea. The endless high-powered discussion is exhausting. It never pauses. I'm a provincial, Anna thinks. And yet she treasures the experience. There are zoological riches in the perforated caverns of St Catherine's Island, a limestone rock, the nearside of which is high and dry at low tide. While Anna carries a landing-net and a chisel, Mirrie has a leather case slung across her shoulder, freighted with hammer, oysterknife and paperknife, in quest of specimens for Baines to photograph. The others carry foot-pans, pie-dishes, soup bowls and vases as if preparing to set up house. Two other parties of ladies are making their way across the sands, similarly equipped.

Dropping behind, Anna and Mirrie saunter arm in arm, glad of a quiet interlude. There's something Mirrie wants to say, Anna can feel it.

A man with a hammer and chisel and a lad with a muslin net are zoologising amongst the rock pools.

‘The great naturalist, Mr Gosse,' Miriam says. ‘I venerate him – despite the unreason of
Omphalos.
Shall I introduce you? And his utterly angelic little boy.'

Edmund is a beloved fellow-labourer, so his father remarks with a tender smile, fondling his son's nut-brown head, in the vineyard of Truth.

‘What have you discovered today, Edmund?' Mirrie asks the serious child. She crouches down to speak to him, easy and tender with the child in a way Anna could never have imagined.

‘Well, miss, earlier we found red-noses in the cave. Poor little things. They live in holes in the rock and stick their red noses out like knobs – when we come along they shoot off back into their burrows. And we go after them.'

‘And no man knows,' adds the father, ‘how this jelly-soft creature digs out holes in hard limestone. Does he secrete acid? Does he rub-a-dub-dub with his tiny foot? Edmund and I are on Mr Red-Nose's trail, depend upon it. And now we're collecting
Sagitta
, a very tricky little chap. Although he resembles a fish, he's a mollusc in disguise.'

Mr Gosse ruefully hopes that the current appetite for sea-science will not altogether strip these fashionable watering places of marine life. ‘So many crinolined collectors,' he says, shaking his head. ‘Such an influx of tradesmen selling specimens. Naturally I do not mean yourself. Mr Sala is a respected student of science. But already the caverns here are not what they were. I should hate to see Tenby and its caves robbed of Actiniae. It's like a plague of locusts. But,
mea maxima culpa
,
have I not called the masses here, with my writings and aquarium?'