The World is a Wedding (8 page)

If he moved his hand any higher up Flora's thigh, he would need to think about Stanley Baldwin again. He paused. It was a mystery to Wilfred how long these things were supposed to last—but he felt certain it should be more than a couple of seconds. He thought perhaps around two minutes. That was a long time and would demand an exceptional level of control, and political thought.

He stroked and kissed Flora's hair. He didn't know if Flora enjoyed the conjugal act. He could ask, but that would be very ungentlemanly. She appeared to like it because she smiled afterwards. He wasn't sure if ladies liked these sorts of things. Perhaps ladies didn't think about these matters as much as men—otherwise they would need to go, like men, to the Narberth Rugby Club to get things off their chest. And he had never heard a lady make mention of marital relations, so perhaps they didn't think about it at all. Although Flora Myffanwy had once said something: ‘You're on my hair,' and when Wilfred had looked he saw that his forearm was leaning on her long thick curls so that her head was being pulled to the side at an odd angle.

Wilfred shifted and arranged himself in the bed. What he hadn't understood was how much geometry there was in the conjugal act—it was not unlike trying to get a corpse in a coffin at the right angle. Things had to go in the right place in the right way, so to speak, and he was glad of his training in undertaking. It had unexpected benefits because he was experienced in attempting to get bits of other people's bodies to do what he wanted and needed them to do.

He lay still and paused in the proceedings for a moment. Wilfred had thought about his predicament a great deal while making coffins. What was the least exciting thing he could think of? Tax. But he was prone to getting hot and bothered when doing his bookkeeping and getting in a fix about the figures. Politics? The Liberal Party? But then he might think about David Lloyd George, that Titan of a Welshman—though he was born in Manchester. Now there was a man to rile the blood. Stanley Baldwin? Very nice chap, no doubt commanded respect, what with him being prime minister, of course. Couldn't argue with that. Stanley Baldwin was a good choice—an
apposite
choice—and Stanley Baldwin cut the mustard.

By the eighth Saturday night of his married life, Wilfred Price was happy to acknowledge to himself that he had performed his matrimonial duties with the requisite level of control demanded by a husband for the satisfaction of his wife. With the help of the prime minister.

T
here were so many women in the Conway Hall. Grace glanced down at the leaflet the guest at the Ritz had given her:
Mass Meeting on the Representation of the People Act
. Grace had not seen this many women together before. She didn't know if she was unnerved or reassured. There were women swarming towards each other, greeting each other, turning this way and that, and friends in small circles. A huddle of Indian women, draped in bright saris, stood talking animatedly, and another gathering of women in coats as threadbare as her own looked at a pamphlet. There was hair in Eton crops, confident voices, fox-fur stoles, and embroidered handbags hanging from delicate forearms. Grace waited in this mêlée, alone and uncertain, yet something within her wouldn't let her leave, even though she sensed that, with a spark, the excited chatter could burst into hysteria. But Grace noticed she wasn't frightened; she merely stood in the middle of this strange, foreign scene in her strange, foreign life.

She thought back to how she came to be here, in London, and the beginning of her journey several months ago. She remembered the station in Narberth: the two well-kept platforms with hanging baskets and ironwork that was regularly repainted white. When the steam train came round the corner, curling through the grassy hills, the platform was laid out like a well-considered tea-table, carefully set and waiting, a place where one might disembark and find repose. But that day she hadn't been arriving; she had been fleeing Narberth. Her train had passed through the green ancient fields of Narberth: there was Whitland, Carmarthen and then Neath, like a whisper of what was to come. Then Port Talbot: a valley of coiled pipes and thin chimneys puffing smoke that seeped into the train carriage. And dark clouds that cut out the sky. She hadn't known Wales was like that: the earnest mining and smelting by people who lived close to the soil, toiling within the earth, dwarfed by the mountains. She had only known Narberth, and it had been safer and more beautiful than she had been aware of. She was frightened—and she hadn't yet left Wales.

Grace looked around the Conway Hall and wondered if she should talk to someone. She had come to the meeting today because it was her afternoon off and, as usual, she had nowhere to go, nothing to do and no one to see, which was too much space for her mind to fill. She wished she'd brought some books with her to London—she had been reading
Silas Marner
—but had packed so hurriedly she hadn't thought to, taking only necessities—although reading kept her mind occupied, which was a necessity.

A woman approached, her Wellington boots unbuckled and flapping.

‘Come on!' She commandeered Grace by the arm, chaperoning her into the auditorium, her bobbed hair swaying. ‘You'll want to sit near the front, won't you?'

It was loud inside the auditorium, with voices and the clack of shapely heels on the parquet floor. A banner worked in purple and green above the podium read:

 

Mrs. Pankhust, Founder/Champion of Womankind

Famed for Deeds of Daring Rectitude

 

‘Take your coat off: you'll be blistering.'

‘I'd rather not.'

‘Whatever suits. Sit here. I'm Mary—Mary Richardson.' The woman whitened the large maroon birthmark on her cheek with face powder from a compact. ‘If they extend the Reform Act I'm going to stand as a parliamentary candidate for Bury St. Edmunds. Isn't it just ripping?' She snapped shut her compact and it closed with a clean click.

Grace smiled politely. All these woman, what would it lead to? The only times she had been within a group of girls—and some of these women resembled girls to her—was at school when clusters of girls formed to skip with one long skipping rope, chanting:

 

‘Bronwen and Llywellyn sitting in the tree,

K-I-S-S-I-N-G

First comes the love,

Then comes the marriage,

Then comes the baby in the baby carriage.'

 

And, as a small child, she had been taken to the Mothers' Union where she had played at the feet of matronly ladies with elaborate hair, dressed in milky-white cotton. To her child's eye, they looked like a circle of wedding cakes: sculptured, moral, firm and ornate. But this, here, was almost a rabble of femininity.

‘Mary Richardson? The Window Smasher? I simply don't believe it!' a woman exclaimed. ‘I haven't seen you since Holloway Prison.'

‘Daphne Brimble!' the woman Grace had been speaking to replied excitedly.

Grace glanced around. She had seen what large groups of people—of men—did during the war. And what had been done to them: how they returned—her brother Madoc included—with a disturbed sanity. And a destructive arrogance. She had seen the stupidity of groups and the fantasies they could concoct. Were these women aping men, being called to arms for yet more violence, triumphant and expanded on the fantasy of victory? She had read in the newspaper that Christabel Pankhurst had said the Great War was God's vengeance upon the people who held women in subjugation. But, as in the War, Grace had no passion for this fight. She didn't understand what the Suffragettes wanted. What
was
the Representation of the People Act? And what did ‘universal suffrage' mean? It sounded like universal suffering and rage.

‘Look, there's Mrs. Garrud.' The woman with the birthmark tapped Grace. ‘If you're going to join the Cause, it's simply essential to learn Suffragettes' self-defence from Mrs. Garrud. You can't imagine what brutes the police constabulary can be. Do join us for a lesson. Be at Highbury Corner at three o'clock on a Wednesday . . .' The woman suddenly leaped up. ‘Sit here. I'll be back.'

The hall was filling and Grace was squashed in her seat; the rows of chairs were cramped together and three Alexandra Nurses in uniform, who looked like sisters, were sitting to the other side of her. They were jolly, buoyed by hope and moral purpose.

‘Have you read
A Doll's House
? It's a play by Henrik Ibsen,' one piped up.

‘Christabel is pregnant,' another whispered.

‘No, she isn't,' the other replied conspiratorially. ‘She only thought she was. Wished she were. It was a phantom.'

Grace stopped listening, entering into that state of awake sleepiness she existed in since she had come to London. London—this meeting—didn't disturb her. It was the backdrop to her somnolence, like a fantastical bedroom in which she was sleeping. What I do to forget myself, she thought, and closed her eyes.

‘You came; you read the pamphlet. I'm glad I've recruited at least one girl for the Cause,' said a young woman with auburn hair, walking elegantly in front of the stage. It was Lady Lytton from the Ritz. She squeezed politely along the line of chairs towards Grace and the three sisters attempted to make space for her.

‘Yes, ma'am,' Grace replied. Did she have to play subservient, served and server, now they were no longer in the Ritz? Yes, she decided. Grace couldn't talk to Lady Lytton in the way that Lady Lytton would be free to talk to her.

‘Haven't been anywhere this cramped since I went camping in Sissinghurst with Lord Baden-Powell's Girl Guides. Eleven of us in a four-man tent.' She straightened an unusual silver ring on her finger. Grace looked down at her own hands, once fair and fine, but already reddening and becoming chapped. Before, when the nearest she had come to work was collecting honey, she had worn her brother's protective leather gloves; now there were no barriers between her skin and her work. Her hands were changing her and putting her into a lower class.

‘That's Mary “Slasher” Richardson, the lady with the birthmark standing by the pillar,' Lady Lytton said conspiratorially. ‘It was she who attacked the Rokeby
Venus
in the National Gallery, with a meat chopper just before the war. That must have taken some doing.' She took a rosette from her pocket and pinned it to her velvet lapel. ‘It is a rather lovely painting—or was.' She straightened the long green, white and purple ribbons hanging from the rosette, then took a small sketchpad from her coat pocket and began quickly sketching the outline of the stage.

‘Don't the banners on the stage look colourful?' she remarked. ‘I know what you think—that this is only for rich women. So we may occupy ourselves with more than needlepoint or watercolours.'

Grace smiled non-committally. There was a pause. They sat quietly, side by side, as the pause became more charged until suddenly the young woman said, ‘You remind me of her. My elder sister. She was quiet and fair, like you. And had blue eyes. Oh, the peculiar things grief does. I am even talking to you, speaking with you as if you were her, with the same ease,' she said, seemingly embarrassed by her sudden self-revelation. ‘Really, I shouldn't talk to anyone about it.'

‘Yes, ma'am,' said Grace.

‘I had a sister,' the lady explained. ‘She died. Sometimes women do—in the most awful circumstances. It's all very hush-hush—the circumstances, that is.'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

Lady Lytton put her hands to the row of pearls at her neck. ‘If my fiancé's mother knew, I doubt she would allow him to marry me. They're Catholic, too. It's so utterly dreadful at home these days, I escape to the Ritz to get away.' She sighed and batted her hand, as if to clear her mind of painful thoughts. ‘Are you going to become a Suffragette?' she asked Grace abruptly.

‘I don't know, ma'am.'

‘I've been coming to the meetings since my sister died,' Lady Lytton said, resuming her sketching. ‘I expect the vote is incidental, but something useful might come of it one day.'

A dignified woman in a huge hat walked determinedly onto the stage, hit a gavel on the lectern and stood square on, waiting for the room to hush. A frisson ran through the crowd. Lady Lytton began sketching with purpose. Without introduction or any to-do, the woman began to speak:

‘What lies in the future, no one can tell. The women's movement will go forward, as all other movements for human progress will go forward. No woman of today would go back if she could to the conditions her grandmother suffered. No matron would agree to put on her cap and retire from life at thirty-five.'

Grace began to listen.

 

Back in the dormitory at the Ritz, Grace took off her coat and put her feet on the dormitory bed despite still wearing her shoes. It was a small rebellion; perhaps it was because of the Suffragette meeting she'd been to earlier that afternoon, with all those independently-minded women. Grace lay back and felt the warm ache of her exhausted body.

She adjusted her corset, which was tight but fitted and did the job. She could have loosened it, but didn't—kept it on, even at night.
One mustn't let oneself go
, the shop assistant had admonished. No, one mustn't. She tore a piece from the loaf of bread she was keeping in her bedside cabinet drawer, hard now because it had lasted her five days. She was hungry, but she wanted above all things to keep her figure. The corset helped keep her flat and shapeless.

Hilda burst in: ‘The housekeeper wants to see you now. You're to wait in her office.' She tutted excitedly. ‘You must be in trouble.'