Red Joan (2 page)

Joan sits back. She will not touch the file. ‘I haven't done anything wrong.'

‘Mrs. Stanley,' Ms. Hart continues, ‘I would advise you to cooperate. We have enough evidence to convict. It will only be possible for the Home Secretary to show clemency towards you if there is some sort of confession or an admission of guilt. Information.' She pauses. ‘Otherwise you will make it impossible for us to be lenient.'

Joan says nothing. Her arms are folded.

Ms. Hart looks down at the shiny floor of the interviewing room, adjusting the position of her briefcase with the immaculate point of her shoe. ‘You're being accused of twenty-seven breaches of the Official Secrets Act, which is effectively treason. I'm sure you're aware that this is not a light charge. If you force us to take it to trial, it will carry a maximum sentence of fourteen years.'

Silence. Joan counts the years in her head, each one causing a painful tightening across her chest. She does not move.

Ms. Hart glances at the shadow of Mr. Adams behind the screen. ‘It will be of benefit to you if anything you wish to say in your defence has been recorded before your name is released to the House of Commons on Friday.' She pauses. ‘I should tell you now that you'll be expected to make a statement in response.'

Friday. The day of William's funeral. She would not have gone anyway. She steels herself so that when she speaks her voice is quiet and firm. ‘I still don't know what you're talking about.'

Ms. Hart slips a photograph out of the side pocket of her briefcase and places it on the table between them. Joan glances at it and then looks away again. She recognises it, of course. It is the photograph from the obituary.

Ms. Hart places her palms flat on the table and leans forward. ‘You knew Sir William Mitchell at Cambridge, I believe. You were undergraduates there at around the same time.'

Joan looks blankly at Ms. Hart, neither confirming nor denying.

‘We're just trying to build up a picture at this initial stage,' Ms. Hart continues. ‘Place everything in context.'

‘A picture of what?'

‘As I'm sure you're aware, Sir William died rather suddenly last week. There was an investigation and several questions remain unanswered as a result.'

Joan frowns, wondering how exactly she might be linked to William. ‘I don't know how you think I can help you. I didn't know him all that well.'

Ms. Hart raises an eyebrow. ‘The case against Sir William is incidental to the case against you, Mrs. Stanley. It's your choice. Either we sit in silence until you cooperate, or we can just get on with it.' She waits. ‘Let's start with university.'

Joan does not move. Her eyes flick to the screen and then to the locked door behind Ms. Hart. It will not end here—she will not let it—but she can see that a degree of cooperation might be worthwhile, and could even buy her a little time to decide how much they know. They must have some evidence for William to have done what he did.

‘I did go,' she says at last. ‘In 1937.'

Ms. Hart nods. ‘And what did you read for your degree?'

Joan's vision is suddenly concentrated on Ms. Hart's hands, and it takes her a few seconds to realise what is unusual about them. They are suntanned. Suntanned in January, and the thought prompts an unexpected thud of homesickness for Australia. For the first time since her return to England, Joan wishes she had not come back. She should have known it was not safe. She shouldn't have allowed Nick to persuade her.

‘Certificate,' she says at last.

‘Sorry?'

‘Women got certificates, not degrees. Back then.' Another pause. ‘I read Natural Sciences.'

‘But you specialised in Physics, I believe.'

‘Did I?'

‘Yes.'

Joan glances at Ms. Hart and then looks away again.

‘Right.' A pause. ‘And why did you want to go? It can't have been a very normal thing to do back then.'

Joan exhales slowly, aware that everything she says must be absolutely consistent. No, it wasn't normal, but the only other options seemed to be getting married, teaching or learning to type and she didn't want to do any of those. She closes her eyes and forces her mind back to the year she first left home, wanting to be absolutely certain of the memory before she speaks, and as she does, she finds that she can still remember the feeling of that year with absolute clarity; the breathless sensation brought on by the knowledge that if she didn't go somewhere and do something then her lungs might actually burst out of her chest. It feels odd to remember it now: such a long-forgotten feeling. She had never felt a sensation quite like it before and she has never felt it since, but, now that she thinks about it, she remembers observing that same static energy fizzing out of her own son when he turned eighteen. Not old but no longer young either. An impressionable age, her mother called it.

 

In the autumn of 1937, Joan leaves home to attend Newnham College, Cambridge. She is eighteen years old and impatient to leave. There is no particular reason for this impatience other than an underlying sense of life happening elsewhere, far removed from the ivy-covered lodge of the girls' public school near St. Albans where she has lived all her life. The school is a hearty establishment with special emphasis placed on organised games, which (according to the school's prospectus) will encourage the girls to develop a love of justice, alongside the ability to make prompt decisions and to recognise defeat with good cheer, and Joan is obliged to spend several hours every week charging around the school field dressed in a pinafore and wielding a wooden stick in pursuit of these lofty ideals.

As the headmaster's daughters, Joan and her younger sister are not ordinary pupils—they do not have beds in the dormitory or parts in the school play or tuck boxes arriving through the post—and while her parents insist that this set-up is a privilege, to Joan it seems to be no more than a form of constant surveillance and, in her opinion, is bound to give them both asthma. She knows she should be more grateful, being reminded often enough of how lucky she is that her generation has not been sent off to the trenches, and that she is not obliged to run away from home in order to become a nurse in the Great War as her mother did when she was sixteen but, at the same time, she also feels there is something enticing about that youthful display of self-sufficiency, which only serves to make her feel more restless.

There is a whole world out there that is barely recognisable from the safe, padded vantage point of St. Albans. She knows this because she has seen it in her father's limp, in the newsreels at the cinema showing the Welsh collieries and deserted shipyards of the North; in newspapers and books and films; in the pictures of small children in doorways with grubby knees and no shoes. She glimpsed it when the Great Hunger March passed through St. Albans a few years previously, a straggling procession of men and women so dirty that their skin seemed to have turned a deep, charcoal grey. Joan remembers how one of the marchers stopped outside the lodge as he left town in the morning, leaning against the garden fence and bent double in a fit of coughing.

‘What's the matter with him?' Joan had asked her father. ‘Shouldn't we call the doctor?'

Her father shook his head. ‘That's coal dust,' he said. ‘Nothing you can do about silicosis. Cuts into the lungs and kills the tissue. And he's walking to London with all the rest of them because he wants his job back.'

‘Why doesn't he just get a different one?'

Her father had not answered this question immediately. He watched as the man drank the glass of water that Lally had taken out to him, and then struggled to catch up with the rest of the marchers. He turned away from her and limped out of the room, muttering, ‘Why indeed?'

He answered this question the following day, interrupting the chaplain just before the recitation of the school prayer in a way that only a headmaster can. He waved a newspaper aloft as he declared to the school that it was a criminal sort of government that refused to acknowledge the reality of life in what they called the ‘Special Areas' of Britain. It was either a failure of imagination or wilful blindness, but either way it was a betrayal. He instructed each child and teacher in the school to close their eyes and picture life in the ship-building towns where no ships were being built, to think of the boarded-up shops, the Means Test man declaring that a family's only rug must be sold before any relief could be granted. Imagine the destitution. And then imagine it in winter.

He quoted Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the coalition who was supposed to save the country from economic despair. ‘Has anyone,' Ramsay MacDonald was reported to have asked in the House of Commons in response to the marchers' request for an audience, ‘who comes to London, either on foot or in first-class carriages, the constitutional right to demand to see me, to take up my time, whether I like it or not?'

The question was rhetorical and its impact was lost on many of the younger schoolgirls, but Joan's father let the words hang in the scuffling silence before folding the newspaper in disgust. ‘Our prime minister may not know it, but we have a duty,' he said, frowning at a noise coming from a group of girls in the Upper Fifth, ‘to make this poor and hungry world a better place for everyone in it. To be responsible.'

Another pause, longer than the first, so that when her father spoke again his voice boomed into the beamed ceiling of the school hall.

‘From each'—she remembers his exact words—‘according to his ability.'

 

To Joan's disappointment, her abilities seem to be limited to hockey and schoolwork. At first, she was unsure how either of these could be put to practical use in the way her father envisaged, but she suspected that one might be of more use than the other. Her science teacher, Miss Abbott, was the first to suggest she might try for university, and it was on her instigation that Joan applied to read Natural Sciences for the honours certificate at Cambridge; the flat, weather-beaten town where Miss Abbot had once spent her happiest years before the Great War marched in and snatched away the life she had planned.

Joan is excited about going, although it is less the qualification that interests her than the prospect of going somewhere, anywhere. And it is also the prospect of learning things that she would never have the chance of knowing if she didn't go, of attending lectures in the mornings, reading books all afternoon, and spending evenings at the cinema watching Mary Brian and Norma Shearer being whisked away on horseback by Gary Cooper, then copying their hairdos later in case the same thing should ever happen to her.

Of course, she knows that in Cambridge she is unlikely to come across Gary Cooper. There will only be real men, men whose teeth do not glint in the moonlight and who ride bicycles instead of horses but still, endless, bountiful men. Boys, some of them, but even they will be a welcome break from the rippling sea of girls at school. Joan did not mention this to her father or Miss Abbott during the coaching sessions for the interview (‘And why do you wish to pursue your academic study at the University of Cambridge?') but now it simmers under the surface of her enthusiasm. She knows that it is a privilege to be going and she is constantly reminded of this fact by both her father and the college scholarship fund but, frankly, she would have gone anywhere.

Joan's father is delighted to see her go. He tells her that it will be a wonderful thing to be educated in the religion of reason. These are his words, not hers, although she knows what he means. They understand each other, Joan and her father, sharing a quiet sort of complicity that is not chatty enough for her mother or Lally. Other people tell Joan how much her younger sister resembles her, that they could be twins if not for the five-year age difference, and while Lally flushes with pleasure at this, Joan considers it to be eye-rollingly stupid, although she has to hide this sentiment from Lally. Her sister's temperament is sweet and wide-eyed, and whereas Joan cannot remember there ever having been a time when she was happy to go shopping for dress material with her mother or make daisy chains in the garden, Lally seems happy to do it. It is only her father who does not see this resemblance and grunts his disagreement when anyone else alludes to it. He is complicit in Joan's plans to escape, and Joan loves him for this more than for anything else.

In contrast, Joan's mother is decidedly ungrateful about the whole enterprise. It is clear that she would like to march into that school and have a strong word with Miss Abbott for condemning Joan to eternal spinsterhood by educating her beyond all prospects of future happiness. It is made clear that she does not intend to let the same thing happen to Lally, oh-ho no. Her second daughter will be kept well away from Miss Abbott.

When Joan suggests that going to university is no worse than running away to become a nurse, her mother shakes her head and insists that the two things are quite different. ‘They were unprecedented times, Joanie. You can't imagine it. You can't imagine the sound they made, all those boys being delivered at the hospital door, crying out for their mothers as we unloaded them from carts and wagons and ambulances until they filled the corridors. Such a terrible, terrible time.'

Joan has heard this speech before and knows better than to say what she really thinks, which is that yes, it does sound terrible, but all times are unprecedented. Surely her times are unprecedented, too. But she also knows that her mother will not actually be able to stop her, and so while some of the other girls from her class will be enrolling in secretarial college in the autumn and others will be getting married and moving into their own homes, Joan is the only one who is going to university.

 

Before she goes, there is the University Trousseau to arrange; it is a compromise, a tactical diversion, to allow her mother this slant on events. A list of items Joan will need is drawn up between them, and Joan is dispatched to the local department store to obtain great swathes of material so that she can be suitably upholstered before leaving. There must be some sort of tweed ensemble, a navy suit, a knitted outfit for lectures, a pair of chic trousers (chic is her mother's word, indefinable for both of them), three blouses, two belts, two bags (one pretty, one practical), a mackintosh, a simple woollen dress and one smart dance dress. Her mother insists that she should also have a fur coat and she will not be budged on this. It is a huge extravagance, there is no question of buying one: one must be found.