This evening there are only a couple of tables free, and their
conversation will be drowned by the chatter of others. This is no bad thing, for Mrs White has ears on every bony joint. As Bea sits, the waitress swivels around and bustles over, a tray of half-eaten food hovering in front of her chest.
‘Waiting for your sweetheart, miss?’
Bea forces herself to smile, albeit flatly, in return.
‘I hope you don’t have to wait too long.’
No empathy there, thinks Bea. She just wants to turn over customers as quickly as possible.
‘You smell of grease,’ says Mr Campbell as he sits down.
Bea remembers that she has not bathed. ‘It’s the latest fad.’
‘As ever, a woman of fashion.’
Bea feels her nose wrinkle. Is that how he sees her? Even like this?
‘Of course, that’s all we women ever are.’ It comes out as a retort. Christ, what’s up with her today?
‘Cut yourself on that.’
Bea ignores this and asks him when his next meeting is.
Mr Campbell is silent. He rolls his lips in, and looks to the side.
‘Tomorrow.’
‘I’ll come.’
He flinches. Taps his fingers on the table. He always does this when she asks to come along.
‘In your two-pound Women’s Emergency Corps uniform?’
‘And?’
‘And you’d say you had come there with me? I think that might look a little odd, Miss Masters.’
Bea ignores this, too. He’s right, that’s why she ignores it, but she’ll go on asking, and he’ll go on saying no. It has become part of their Tuesday and Friday evening banter.
‘You would be surprised,’ she says, ‘at how I could help.’ He doesn’t know which Miss Masters she is, does he? Nor the deep pockets she could find him. Surely he’d ask for money if he did. The
strikers are crying out for money in the shipyards. But all she’s given him are Celeste’s address to contact her and a vague reference to her father being ‘something in the City’.
‘I’m not sure how you’d find Clydeside,’ is his reply. ‘Or a soup kitchen.’
‘You’d be amazed at how fast I can ladle.’
Mr Campbell leans over and puts his hand on hers. Bea keeps her hand still. To move it would be rude, she tells herself, that’s the only reason she’s leaving it there. This is a purely practical working relationship: he writes, she types; there is nothing more to it than that. She doesn’t even agree with half of what he writes, for God’s sake. But Mr Campbell keeps his hand over hers and Bea can’t push the idea out of her head any longer. Does he think that? Don’t be an idiot, Bea, he can’t possibly be thinking of kissing you, even if everyone seems to be kissing since the war began. Soldiers on their way out are being treated to kisses, and Bea herself has given more than one such treat, out of both generosity and curiosity. She has even been bold enough to offer them outright. The first time, she surprised herself, but her offer was so warmly received that the next offer slipped out of her mouth with barely a thought. There’s only been one who held her tighter and closer than she might have liked and when she tried to pull away he pulled her tighter still. She bit his lip and he let go, cursing, wiping away the blood with the back of his hand. ‘Vixen,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
But Mr Campbell isn’t on his way over, is he? He does not approve of the war, he is a pacifist; he says it is against his religion, in his words, to raise a gun. What if they make you, Mr Campbell, what then, she wants to ask him? They’ll shoot you if you try to leave. They’re not going to make us all fight, he says, it’s fool’s talk, and saying that they’ll send married men over.
Then the thought comes to her. Good God, is he married? Bea imagines a wife and children, two or three of them. More? Could he have spent a year without mentioning them? It is Bea’s turn to
flinch, even though why on earth, Beatrice Masters, should you care?
Mr Campbell takes his hand away.
‘Good ladling hand,’ he says. ‘But no.’
Weeks on, Mr Campbell’s ‘No’ is still irritating Bea as she drives over to Celeste’s, all the more so because he, somewhat of a sudden, signed up and vanished to France, and she can no longer retort. She couldn’t accuse him of a complete about-turn for he’s not raising a gun, just ferrying the wounded about. Though, thinks Bea, isn’t doing so somehow supporting the war, too? It’s certainly a darn sight better than what Bea is up to with the WEC and all its Good Show, Old Chaps – and that’s the closest she’s found to Lauderdale Mansions since Mrs Pankhurst did her bunk.
The word now is that the Front’s coming to London any day. Not that it will be the real thing. Then she wonders about Edward. Surely he’s managing to find a bit of excitement, and that it’s good for him. While she quietly hopes to God that he’s not as scared as he was when he left.
Back here half the city is walking around with their faces tilted to the clouds, scouring the sky for Zeppelins. Makes talking a walk along the pavement perilous. Bea imagines Curzon Street engulfed in flames with a sort of fascination. It’s still there, isn’t it, that yearning for the rush of excitement? Revving the motorcycle’s engine did it for her for a while, but it’s not the same. Is it a wholly wicked thought to want the Zeppelins to come? Well, if she had a chance to get out there good and proper, she wouldn’t have to be willing bombs to rain here. That’s no excuse, she tells herself, for there’s no getting around it, it is a terrible wish to have.
Why, this afternoon she had gone around to Edie’s. There Edie was, sitting under her curving stone staircase in a billowing white dress and fanning her baby while fretting about sending him out of town to escape the bombs. ‘I can hardly bear to let him go, Bea, yet it’s so terribly selfish of me to think about what I feel when I should
only be thinking of what’s best for him.’ Edie looked miserable, and Bea felt guilty enough over her desire for the war to come to London to be relieved when the conversation drifted into the pain of having to invite dull people to dinner. She even, in the course of it, agreed to come along. Which was certainly a mistake.
The rest of the day, a rare day off, had been intended for errands and dressmaker’s. Apart from sweltering the two hundred yards to Edie’s house, the heat–blistering and rather unexpected for May – defeated all; especially the visit to the dressmaker’s, for she could hardly have muslin fitted with rivulets running down her back. Instead she had retreated to the cool of the museum at the rear of the house. It was tomb-stale. No sunlight or air, it seems, had entered for some time – one of the shrinkages in household duties since the footmen left. They were encouraged to go, Bea is sure, by Mother’s offer to continue paying them their full wages in addition to army pay. Poor boys. At least they’ve missed the refugees, though for Bea, collecting car-loads of Belgian refugees from Charing Cross in the Rolls and delivering them to boarding houses and private homes had been a lark. Mother, however, became utterly carried away with it all and Bea had to exercise some restraint over her. Even when they were already up to three families, with four or five children apiece, Mother was still asking around for more and Bea told her they simply had enough. It wasn’t Mother who was going to live with them. She had declared that now Edward was in France she would be spending most of her time down at Beauhurst, building up the dairy herd to feed the nation. She has, she announces to almost every visitor, already been milking the cows herself. Poor beasts, thinks Bea, will they ever recover?
Just as Bea pulls up outside Celeste’s house, the sky above her cracks. Good God, that’s it, a Zeppelin! She feels a surge of excitement and leaps out of the car to see a streak of light cut across the clouds. Then nothing. No Germans yet, simply the chance of rain. Sleep, too, if the temperature drops enough afterwards. The air is
hellishly muggy and she is so damp that she might as well have walked over. She’s a mind to beg an iced bath as soon as she’s in.
She finds Celeste in her drawing room, standing by the fire, smoking, and floating in a cloud of lilac chiffon that looks as if it might combust with a single dropped ash. ‘Champagne?’ she asks Bea, waving her cigarette at the ice-bucket and a remaining glass beside it. ‘South Pole temperature. Only thing to cool a fellow down. Help yourself. How’s the cycle?’
‘Oh, fine, fine. Running well. At least it was yesterday. I haven’t been out on it today. Luckily, or its tyres might have melted. How are you?’ Bea walks over to the bottle of champagne and pours herself a glass.
‘Excellent. I’m up to nine refugees. And it’s a wonder what they can do. Everything from haute cuisine to the accounts, though most of them are after jobs in the munitions’, the men too, for which they are highly overqualified. I rather fear that they will desert me for the East End, poor buggers.’
Bea walks over to the window and half looks out at the slow-moving street melting below. She speaks with her back to Celeste.
‘I think Mother is in competition with you.’
‘That is not news, Beatrice.’
‘Refugees.’ Outside is now darkening as a black cloud arrives overhead. The walkers below are looking up, and quickening their pace.
‘That’s noble of her. How many does she have? What are you looking at out there?’
‘Oh sorry, waiting for the rain. I rather enjoy it when the clouds burst; it always feels such a relief.’ Bea turns back to face Celeste, and walks over to the cigarette box sitting on a side table. ‘Anyhow, soon to be twenty-two refugees – if you count the small ones. Do you have a light?’ Celeste nods, and throws Bea a large silver lighter, which Bea catches, then lights a cigarette with it.
‘Good God, even in that house you can scarcely have room to breathe.’
It is Bea who can’t breathe as she chokes on the cigarette she has taken. God, it’s one of Celeste’s Turkish ones. Quite disgusting. She stubs it out, and collapses back on to the sofa behind her. ‘And Mother has fled the situation. I’m not quite sure who’s in charge. Mrs Wainwright, I suppose.’
‘And what is Mrs Wainwright doing?’
‘What are we supposed to do?’
‘Many of them are extremely well educated. I should try having a conversation with them and find out what they want. I should think that French was probably the only thing that all those highly strung mam’selles taught you.’ Celeste is pointing at Bea with her cigarette.
‘Our refugees speak Flemish.’
‘That’s no excuse,’ says Celeste. ‘You can always improvise a sign language. Or you could teach them English. Better still, learn Flemish from them and get yourself out to Flanders. After all, a skirt didn’t stop Boadicea. Have some more champagne.’
Bea nods, pulls herself up and refills her glass. She remains standing and takes a large swig, which, on top of what she has already drunk, goes straight to her head, and she gestures with her glass as she speaks.
‘It’s not as though we’re allowed to pick up a gun, Celeste. It’s all “We couldn’t do it without you” sort of work. I find it particularly condescending. And I’m not exactly cut out to be a nursing VAD who sits at a patient’s bedside for hours on end.’
‘Pretty weak excuse, old girl, and you know there’s a good deal more to it than that. Besides, look at the FANYs, they’re careering around on horseback, straight in the line of fire. And they’re all scared, Beatrice. You don’t imagine everyone over there is thinking that they quite fancy a good look at some wounds for a bit of entertainment. Where’s your mettle, girl? Rather sounds like you’re being a bit of a funk.’
Bea bristles at this. Her a funk? Has Celeste forgotten what Bea did before the war? How many raids she went on? Hardly a funk.
She crosses her arms, slightly spilling her champagne as she does so, but she ignores it.
‘I don’t think you can call me that, Celeste. Look what I did, and I would do it again. Near gasping to. Oh blast Mrs Pankhurst for giving it all up for the war. It makes me livid. God, I really miss it. Don’t you?’ Bea suddenly needs to know she is not alone in feeling this.
‘We all miss it, but times have moved on.’
‘Not for the vote.’
‘There’s a war on, Beatrice …’
‘Oh, don’t give me that …’
‘We have to do what we can. If we help win this war, we may have a chance of voting against the next one. Besides, suffrage raids will pale in comparison to what you will see out there. Even if you don’t lift a gun.’
With that, the sky thunders again, this time right over their heads. Bea walks over to the window and peers outside.
‘I am sorry to disappoint you, but it is not the Zeppelins. You can’t say you’re as good as at the Front yet. You will need to go over for that. It will be the greatest thing you can do for the cause.’
Celeste’s words are almost drowned out by the rattling of water on the window panes. The wood itself is shaking and the glass looks as if it might crack.
‘It’s the Flood,’ shouts Bea. ‘Come to wash away the war.’
‘And it’ll be taking the cowards with it,’ mouths Celeste in return.
1916
19
GRACE IS IN THE SERVANTS’ HALL WITH HER BEST
summer frock on. The boot boy is trying not to look at her but Susan and Sarah, they’re peeping all right, just pretending not to. They’ve all been waiting to see Joseph come for her this evening before he takes the train back. He called round more than a week ago and Grace wasn’t in. Wasn’t in, out just for an hour or so on an errand for Miss Beatrice. Fancy the luck of that. He couldn’t wait, his note said, he knew he’d said it would be today in his letter but he had to go straight up to see his ma on the next train. Didn’t know how long he’d be caught there, what there’d be to do. Harvest, he said, needs bringing in. He is sorry for letting her down.
Cheeky, thinks Grace. Let her down? He isn’t the only thing she has to worry about. But that’s not true, is it, Grace Campbell? Joseph and his big warm blondness are what’s given her hope in the past year. It’s strange, being so free to choose her own life now. She can go where she likes – but there’s a nothingness to that, as though wherever she puts her feet, the ground beneath might slide away.