‘Oh dear, I am sorry.’ Gwen couldn’t think what else to say. She suddenly felt great sympathy for Ariadne. She looked so pathetic, poor thing. And fancy imagining that that slimy worm Harold Purvis could truly have feelings for her!
Ariadne was looking at her with bitter reproach. ‘You didn’t have to take him. You don’t feel for him the way I do. I’ve got no one else and you’ll have lots of young men interested in you. It’s not fair, it really isn’t.’
Gwen stared at her, appalled. ‘But it’s nothing to do with me, Ariadne! I didn’t ask him to leave! I’m not the least interested in Harold Purvis, I can assure you.’
‘But I’ve seen the way he looks at you, dear. And why wouldn’t he – you’re such a sweet young thing. But it’s torture for me! I’ve never seen him look at me like that . . . But sometimes I thought he cared for me. I really thought he did!’ Tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘I’m so lost and alone. I’ll have to have another houseful of strangers!’
‘I’m ever so sorry, Ariadne.’ Gwen was full of pity for the scrawny, overdressed woman beside her. ‘But all I can say is that Harold means nothing to me at all. He really and truly doesn’t.’
Ariadne looked up desperately at her. ‘Do you have to go and leave me as well?’
‘I’ve promised.’ She reached over and touched Ariadne’s bony hand with its long, painted nails. ‘I’m helping a friend – she’s having a baby. But it’s not far away. I’ll come back and see you.’
‘Will you?’ Ariadne suddenly clasped Gwen’s hand, managing a watery smile. ‘Oh you are a sweet girl! None of my lodgers has ever said that before!’
Twenty-Five
‘If I wasn’t having Lance’s baby,’ Millie said a week before her wedding, ‘I think I would have got over him fairly quickly, really.’ Sighing, she looked into the distance and added, ‘Well – I’ll have to see it through. I’ve only got myself to blame.’
The ceremony was held in their local parish in Edgbaston. Millie’s mother, Mrs Dawson, greeted Gwen with a tense smile as she went into the church. She was a kind woman who had stood by her daughter, despite her embarrassment over Millie’s condition, though she had drawn the line at ‘any fuss’ over the actual wedding.
‘She just wants to rush it through,’ Millie said. ‘I feel as if I’m being
smuggled
into marriage.’
The vicar had kindly suggested that as there were to be fewer than a dozen people present, they hold the ceremony in the Lady Chapel, where Gwen sat two rows behind Millie’s mother and sister. She had worn her favourite summer dress, a pretty frock covered in sprigs of sweetpeas, in mauve, pink and white. She sat looking at the back of Lance’s head as he waited on the other side of the aisle, and pictured Millie arriving outside. She wondered how she was feeling. In a moment there came a small flurry at the back of the church and there was the bride.
Millie had no father or brothers, so she was escorted along the aisle on the arm of a family friend, a middle-aged man with a black moustache, who was smiling broadly. Gwen warmed to him for trying to add some joy to an occasion which everyone else seemed to regard as one of gloomy necessity. Millie looked very pretty in a cream dress with a softly gathered skirt which hung just below the knee and disguised any hint of pregnancy, and she was carrying a small bouquet of yellow roses and white carnations. She was well made up, and smiled when everyone turned to look at her, catching Gwen’s eye as she passed. Gwen felt a pang, watching her. She could see the strain Millie was under, despite the brave expression. She was delivered to Lance, who was now standing and watching her solemnly. He was a tall, gangling man, an academic sort who, Gwen observed to herself, could not even manage to look smart on his wedding day. He had a long face, with a sagging expression, and his clothes, though not actually crumpled, looked somehow limp. Did he want this wedding any more than Millie?
The thought that Millie was now stuck with the droopy, if kindly, Lance for life seemed dismal. And, Gwen thought, as the two of them both quietly pronounced their vows, in less than three months it was going to be her turn. She would have to make the same vows and become Mrs Edwin Shackleton. That was the reality. Edwin was her fiancé and he was kind and reliable. And where, in fact, was Daniel this week? Once again he had gone off without warning. She tried to pretend she wasn’t hurt and angry, but the feelings welled up all the same. When he came back, of course, he would be all over her, but sometimes she felt she was being picked up and put down. No: whatever she felt for Daniel Fernandez, she should be facing the fact that he could have no part in her future.
Within days, however, he was back and she went to her first party meeting with him in a murkily lit room in the centre of town.
‘What’s it going to be about tonight?’ she asked on the way.
‘Oh, it’s not a speaker or anything like that tonight. More of a business meeting. But it’ll give you an idea – it’s the centre of all the activity, where we get things done.’
The party offices were over a left-wing bookshop. The room was thick with cigarette smoke, though there were fewer than a dozen people round the table, and on first impressions Gwen thought them disappointing. The great majority were men, though she saw three women, all of them dressed in the most workaday clothes and two looked particularly dowdy. The third had a head of thick, black curly hair which could have looked very pretty but was scraped severely back into a bun, and she had thick eyebrows and strong, intense features. A certain intensity marked the atmosphere in the room. Gwen immediately felt as if her pretty frock and hair ribbon and the smile that she directed at them marked her out as trivial and she shrank back inside herself, wondering what she was doing there.
Daniel’s manner was confident, though she felt suddenly as if he was very distant from her.
‘This is Gwen Purdy,’ he told them. ‘She’ll likely join the party. She’s here to listen in, see how we do things.’
There were nods and looks of approval in her direction and she immediately felt proud to be with Daniel. The man closest to her stood up, holding a cap in his hand and offered her a chair.
‘Welcome, comrade,’ he said solemnly.
Gwen sat, feeling the intense, unsmiling gaze of the black-haired woman on her from across the table. On the wall to the woman’s left she saw a banner on which a muscular man was waving a huge red flag.
Once the meeting began, Gwen struggled to concentrate. There was a good deal of talk about the practical details of printing leaflets and recruiting members.
One of the younger men spoke despondently. ‘It’s such an uphill struggle. Everyone seems to live with their head stuck in the sand. They can’t see that it’s getting closer. The fascist tide is sweeping over Europe and all they can think about is the next pint, the next pay packet . . .’
‘That’s for those who get any pay,’ an older man retorted scathingly. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have a clutch of screaming kiddies with empty bellies, that’s your trouble. No wonder the masses can’t think for themselves when they’re drugged with hunger and want. After the revolution, no one will go hungry. They will be awake!’
A debate ensued about tactics. One minute they were talking about a United Front and a Popular Front and about Italy and the National Government’s appeasement of Mussolini. Then the discussion moved on, bitter in tone, to the Labour Party and the ILP and during this Gwen began to feel sleepy and wished there was a clock in the room. The trouble was that the problems of fascism and what was happening in Europe all seemed too big and far away for her or anyone like her to be able to do anything about them, and other things like which parties would let the CP be affiliated with them seemed tedious and nothing to do with reality. With a sinking heart she realized she really wasn’t made to be involved with politics. All she really wanted was for the meeting to end so that she and Daniel could be alone. She sat pressing the soft cotton of her skirt into sharp creases and trying to stifle her yawns. It was only when Daniel spoke beside her that she jerked to attention again.
‘Comrades, once again we’re getting ourselves bogged down in discussions which send us round and round like rats in a trap. That’s what they want, our oppressors. They feed on our divisions, on our lack of clarity.’
He spoke quietly, but with such conviction and authority that immediately Gwen saw everyone was listening.
‘We must keep in mind our strategy. We know that for many years now – I’ve seen it over and over again in the Welsh valleys – we’ve been divided, we’re broken into splinters and fought a little battle here, a strike there. That suits them. They can defeat us when we are divided and we divide so easily with our preoccupation with the details, with our squabbles over purity and ideology! We must be practical, comrades! The threat of fascism is real and it is growing, and it is a capitalist threat. Unless we keep our eyes on our strategy of unity, we shall be defeated.’
There was a pause and Gwen glanced at him, to see him looking challengingly round the room. He was sitting bolt upright, hands on his thighs, arms straight, tensed, his eyes alight. It was as if he spoke as the conscience of the meeting and she loved him so much in that moment, which, if she tried to see it through his eyes, transformed a tired-looking collection of working people into the visionary agents of revolution. They waited for him to finish.
‘But if we are united in right, if we are disciplined and work as a united force of justice for the oppressed, nothing will be able to stop us!’
‘Comrade Fernandez is right.’ The dark-haired woman said fervently. She had a powerful, well-spoken voice. ‘When we bicker and get diverted into arguments we are behaving like amateurs, like a group of small-minded bourgeois shopkeepers! We are betraying the true spirit of the revolution!’
As she spoke she was looking across at Daniel. Gwen saw him nod in approval. She felt herself wither inside again. What on earth was she doing here? She knew nothing about any of this. She wasn’t really part of Daniel’s world. He needed someone who shared the same passion and could debate with him, walk side by side with him into the revolution that they so believed in! She felt close to tears as the meeting ended.
As soon as they stood up a number of people came to greet her and she had to compose herself to talk and smile. They seemed so glad that she was there and she knew it was because they wanted to recruit her to the party, but it still felt like an honour to be welcomed and treated in this way. The dark-haired woman had come to them straight away. She wore a long, straight dress in dark blue corduroy, a crimson scarf at the neck and flat brown shoes. The overall effect was at once severe and bohemian and she looked striking.
‘So – Gwen, isn’t it? Are you going to join the party?’
Though she felt flustered, Gwen looked back coolly at her. She wasn’t going to bark because this woman commanded it!
‘I’ll consider it,’ she said. ‘This is my first meeting, after all.’
‘I’m Esther Lane.’ She held out her hand and shook Gwen’s with masculine vigour. ‘I’m from the BCPL but I’ve joined the party as well.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Gwen said, which provoked an ironic smile on Esther’s face which Gwen took to mean that she had just said something bourgeois or in some other way considered not quite the thing in Communist circles. She had no idea what the BCPL was but she wasn’t going to let Esther know that.
After that, the woman spoke only to Daniel. Watching her, Gwen tried to place her age, and guessed that she must be in her late twenties, perhaps older than Daniel. Whatever the case, she knew she was not imagining the woman’s attraction to him. She was talking about a leaflet they were about to produce and seemed determined to delay him, actually holding onto his arm as they talked. In fact a number of people were keen to talk to him afterwards, and in the end Gwen went and sat down by the table again to wait, trying to put aside a desolate feeling of being ignored. She told herself not to be so childish. This was Daniel’s work, after all.
At last his comrades seemed prepared to leave him alone and he came over to her, his smile cheering her immediately.
‘Sorry to make you wait like that,’ he said. ‘There’s always so much to be done . . .’ He reached for her. ‘Come on now, lovely.’
Gwen felt Esther Lane’s eyes on her as she and Daniel left the room and she couldn’t help feeling triumphant. Esther might be very clever when it came to politics, but it was her Daniel chose to be with.
‘Well, what did you think?’ he asked eagerly as they set out along the street.
She was happy now, able to be full of enthusiasm.
‘It was ever so interesting. But I’ve got so much to learn!’
‘Oh, you’ll learn, my girl.’ He flung his arm round her shoulder and she revelled in his closeness. ‘It’s not difficult – not the basic principles, least. What Marx and Lenin and Engels – all of them – were teaching us was justice and common sense. What we have to do is put it into practice – bring it about!’
As they walked home, Gwen asked him what the BCPL was. Daniel told her that the Birmingham Council for Peace and Liberty were a group who were against fascism. Then he set off to explain at length about the discussion the meeting had had about the Labour Party, that it had not wanted Communists in its ranks after the CP was formed in 1920.
‘What we’re asking for is a Popular Front of all the groups opposed to fascism, but to do that we have to unite all the socialist parties. The Labour Party still won’t have us.’ His voice was bitter. ‘They’re not worthy of the name socialist! They’ve no vision – they’ve betrayed the working man right down the line!’
He talked on and on and she started to feel glum. Was he going to talk like this all the way home? She was interested, it was true, but she didn’t want to hear about politics, politics all the time. Couldn’t he give a little bit of time just to her? Suddenly, though, he broke off.
‘Here’s a good patch!’ Taking a piece of chalk from his pocket, he began to write on a smooth piece of wall next to them. He wrote the time and place of their next meeting and stood back to look. ‘There – another brick in the wall!’