A Summer in the Twenties Read online

  ‘Let’s hear about your bad reasons.’

  ‘I suppose that’s the best place to start. You remember I was a blackleg during the General Strike, and fought a chap called Donovan in Drewton Cutting? On the same trip, while we were waiting to turn round, my guard became suspicious about some men who were loading boxes onto one of our trucks. He asked me to come and look at them. That’s how I first saw Mr. Barnes—he wanted to talk to me about the fight, but another chap, the man you call Walter Dyke I think, stopped him. My guard opened one of the boxes when they’d gone and found a lot of Bolshevik pamphlets. Now, I happen to have a friend who’s very interested in Bolshevik activities, and when I showed him the pamphlet . . .’

  ‘Mr. Bertram Panhard, that would be?’ she asked.

  He stared at her.

  ‘I heard about Mr. Panhard before ever we met,’ she said. ‘Putting a spy down into dockland to look for Uncle Ned. We’d spread it among the men not to talk to him. When you stood up from laying Harry Struther out and I got a chance to look at you the first time, I cottoned on you were Mr. Panhard’s friend—fact, I nearly said so, straight out. Then it came to me you must also be the fellow Uncle Ned had been rabbiting on about, who’d fought Tinker Donovan, so I said that instead, to cover things up. Course, I knew Uncle Ned was longing to talk to you, but still . . . oh, it was sheer impudence me taking you to the meeting at all.’

  Her expression was strange. Superficially she was enjoying the drama, the sheer outrageous tease of revelation, but underneath there was a note of sadness, almost of despair.

  ‘What’s the point of me telling you all this, then?’ he said.

  She smiled, deliberately relaxed.

  ‘Because I only know the outside. You’ve mostly only shown me the outside so far, Tom. I’ve had to guess at everything else. Why, that first evening, when we were walking to Marfleet Strand and I realised how much I liked the look of you, I began to try and tell myself that couldn’t be all there was. I’ve seen a lot of you since then, Tom. I’ve got to know what else there is to it before . . .’

  ‘Before you spit in my face?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Does Mr. Barnes know all this?’

  ‘Course not. D’you think he wouldn’t have shown it? That first evening, what with your boxing and then what you did for the men in the police station, he persuaded himself we’d been wrong about you. Only when he found you’d been staying at Brantingham . . . I told you, you’ve broken his heart. I’m just waiting for you to break mine.’

  He was silent for while, staring at his knees and biting gently at his lower lip while he considered. She poured herself more tea. The cup shivered almost violently on the saucer as she picked them up.

  ‘I’ll start a bit further back then,’ he said. ‘The most important thing in my life is that I want to marry Judy Tarrant.’

  He had not intended to look at her but her sudden release of breath startled his head round. She nodded encouragingly.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘A couple of months ago it was the only thing in my life. I thought there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to bring it off. I suppose it’s still more important than anything else, but now there seems to be a lot else which I can’t actually sacrifice for that, without sacrificing part of it too. Even then I haven’t been at all consistent. Everything that happens seems to change my viewpoint. Last week, for instance, when I saw the men stoning the fire engines and your uncle taking it for granted . . .’

  ‘He’s against that sort of thing, but . . .’

  ‘Of course. He is a totally honourable and decent man, and I admire him as much as anyone I’ve ever met in my life . . . look, that’s the heart of it. Something to do with a blindness of the imagination. Everybody sees their own side, but they won’t make the imaginative effort to see anything else. A fireman died, didn’t he, in the fire last week when one of the timber-sheds collapsed? You wouldn’t find a man in all that crowd who’d admit to wanting him to die, but all the same they cheered like a football crowd when the roof fell in. They won’t make the connection! Nobody will!’

  ‘You’ve got to the wrong end of the story, Tom. Go back to you and Miss Julyan.’

  ‘In a moment. You said you wanted to know something about the inside. I suppose I’ve been trying to tell you you’ll have to use your imagination as well as your intellect.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  It was strange how often during the past few weeks he had recounted the same events, and how different their elements had appeared each time. In the Collection Room at Sillerby there was a portable Remington which he and Father used to print labels for the specimens. It had no key for the figure 1; you were supposed to use the lower-case l. Father had not realised this, so had begun by using the capital I, which, even in the middle of a run of figures, remained intransigently a letter. It was different with the 1. When you wrote ‘Nymphalis polychloros, Helton Copse, July 11 1925’ you pressed the L key eight times. Five times it produced a letter and three times a figure and the difference was absolute. It would need a gross effort of irrationality to read them wrong. So it seemed now with the events Tom described. The event was the same, but its meaning had become wholly different. The only fact he left out was that he had got as far as selecting Ernie Doyle as a traitor; the lad was still potentially innocent; it would be unfair to announce his potential guilt. Kate listened in silence. He seldom looked away from his own shoes as he was speaking, but when once or twice he glanced her way her face seemed to express an almost academic interest, without either irony or feeling.

  ‘You must be thirsty after all that,’ she said. ‘Shall I pour you some more tea? ‘

  ‘Yes, please .’

  ‘You people do know how to look after yourselves. This kettle here, it looks just a frilly bit of expensive nonsense, but it makes a lovely pot of tea, and what’s more keeps it going.’

  ‘Are you going to spit in my face now?’

  ‘No. It’s my turn. I’m going to say my bit, and then we’ll see what we shall see, if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Better had be, Tom.’

  She drew a deep breath but did not speak. He looked enquiringly at her but she turned her head away.

  ‘I’ll start like you did,’ she said at last. ‘Something I hadn’t meant to tell you, any more than you did me. Almost the same place, really, I suppose. Put your cup down so you don’t spill on the carpet. You realise I love you, Tom.’

  He felt the air on the back of his neck stand stiff like the hackle of a dog. His throat convulsed but made no noise.

  ‘Some of it’s the other way round, though,’ she went on calmly. ‘You said all that mattered to you used to be wanting Miss Julyan, but now it isn’t that simple. All that mattered to me used to be working for the Party, but now it’s not that simple for me either. If I had to choose between you and the Party I don’t know what I’d do—so perhaps I’m lucky it looks as if I’m not going to be given the choice. . . . I want to tell you a bit about me. I’ll start a long way back, when I was just leaving High School and you must have been a kid in knickerbockers still. I was the teachers’ pride and joy those days. Plain as a boot and clever as a monkey. Of course they liked the plainness almost as much as they liked the cleverness . . .’

  ‘Nobody with eyes in his head could ever have thought you plain.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt or I shall start saying things I don’t intend. Yes, now, there I was, plain and clever and angry, just ready to leave school with all my scholarships and prizes, put up in front of them all on Speech Day to tell the world how grateful I was for my schooling . . . I see someone’s told you about this, Tom.’

  ‘Mrs. Barnes.’

  `‘I didn’t know that was one of her party pieces . . . Still, I’m glad it came from her—she’s a way of putting things, hasn’t she? Funny she should bring it out—she was that ashamed at the time, I was al
most sorry I’d done it. But I wasn’t ashamed, and I’m still not, apart from what happened to silly Mr. Claythorpe . . . Yes, but for that, it was really something for a kid my age to bring off in front of them all.

  ‘Next three years was London. Nothing I saw or learnt or heard changed my mind about how I thought of things. I started changing other folk’s minds for them. I met people who thought the same way as I did. I got in with them, joined organisations, worked for the Party harder than I did at my books, got too busy with it to come home, even during vacations—why, I went to Russia. Aunt Tess tell you that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was something. I’m going to put it in a book one day. But in the end the Party sent me back here, and I was glad. It wasn’t because I belong here that I was glad—it was because I thought I could do more for the Party, by belonging. And that’s true. The Party’s had its ups and downs and a lot of them have come close to despairing, but the Hull Dock Nucleus has kept going through it all. We haven’t a lot of members, but we’ve a lot of influence, one or two men on almost every committee that matters . . . Oh, I’ve worked hard. I was a teacher for a bit, but nobody’ll employ me now unless I sign an undertaking to give up my work for the Party. I live on bits and bobs, and a little from the Party . . . But that’s not what I want to tell you about. I came back here thinking, the way you do that age, that I knew everything. I’d been to Moscow, hadn’t I? I was in for a surprise because, going back to that Speech Day I’d almost forgotten, I found I’d started something I didn’t know. It was a joint do, you see, between the Girls’ High and the Boys’ High, and sitting among the boys there’d been a young fellow, my own age to a month, but not like me at all that anyone could have guessed. Not specially clever at his books, very quiet and polite in his shy way, but underneath bitter as alum. His father paid for his schooling of course, could have afforded to send him away to a proper public school like you went to, only . . . His father had come up from the docks, you see, started a little business, got an army contract in the Zulu War, made a pile of money all of a sudden, then married late and right out of his class, a solicitor’s daughter. She was getting on too, so they had just that one boy and no more, and he became their battle-ground. Just because the mother was set on turning him into a gentleman the father wouldn’t have it. The boy must earn his own living and have an education to fit him for it. She fought and fought, and long after the battle was over she went on fighting, dinning it into the boy’s head that he should have been to a gentleman’s school and become a gentleman, and one day walk round his own fields with his gun under his arm and his spaniel at his heels, instead of which, however much money he made, the people like that would always know he wasn’t one of them. Think about him, Tom, sitting there among the other boys that day, all eaten up with hate of his father and his father’s kind and knowing all the same that there was nothing else for him to do but become one of them. All round him is speech day going on, with the prizewinning boys and girls going up to the dais like kids going to their first communion, to show us all that they worship the same things as are worshipped by his father and his father’s kind. Then, last of all, there’s this wild girl, hair like a sweep’s brush, face like a cow-girl, stands up and slings back her head and blasphemes aloud against his father and his father’s kind and all their sacred objects. He sat there quivering as if an electric current was running through him, bringing him alive like the monster in Frankenstein. He told me that when he looked me out after I’d come back from London and Russia. Nearly four years he’d waited, but he said it wasn’t time wasted. His father had died and he could have given up work completely if he’d wanted to, but now he didn’t any longer. He knew I’d come one day, and he’d spent the time perfecting his disguise. He had too. I’d never seen anyone look more like one of the enemy—shiny white collar, shiny black boots, shiny black hair, shiny black bottom to his trousers sitting at his desk all day being a little soldier in the great big army of oppression. And he wouldn’t even tell me his name. It took six months for me even to begin to think he might be serious, but once I’d gone that far, my! He was a natural revolutionary. He didn’t need anyone to tell him—he knew. When I was in Russia they talked a bit about fellows like him. Lenin invented a word for them. Moles. They burrow unseen and bring the system down from the inside. He’d worked that out for himself, and he’s stuck to it. Even now there’s only me and one other in the Nucleus know his real name . . . But the Party think no end of him. First off, I was using him to help with my work. Then we were working in harness. Now they’ve put him over me, and I do as he says. I don’t mind. He’s a genius. He was born to do what he’s doing, and it’s what I believe in, so why should I mind?’

  She paused, as though searching for the answer to her own question. Tom was aware that she must be talking about the man they called Ricardo, but the discovery did not interest him, nor did the number of odd details she had told him which if sorted through and arranged might lead him to the truth. For the moment his whole attention was engaged in sympathy for Kate, the more so as he could see that she was doing her best not to ask for it, to keep her tone quiet and dispassionate and her features under control. All the same there was an element of wonder that she could not help expressing, as though like Tom himself she knew the facts of her own history but had not before ordered them into the pattern she was now gazing at.

  ‘I’ve been his mistress these three years,’ she said.

  She glanced at him with a sharp little smile, inquisitive to see how he took the news, determined in spite of everything to enjoy the moment. In fact the emotional charge that had underlain her story had made him aware that she was telling him more than the origins of Ricardo’s enmity to society; such shock as there was came only from the candour of the statement.

  ‘Did you love him?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s what matters, isn’t it?’

  ‘It must be one of the things that matters.’

  ‘Oh, Tom! If the world was ending and fire and brimstone pouring from the skies, you’d be trying to hold them off from us with both your hands but you’d still be making distinctions about the rights and wrongs of it! Don’t laugh. It’s one of the reasons I love you. It’s the reason I . . . Oh, you silly woman! Stop it! . . . There, that’s better. No, Tom, I can see now I never loved him, and I don’t think he’s capable of loving anybody, not even himself, not even the Party. He’s in love with destruction. He wanted me—he wants me—not because he particularly needs a woman—born different he could have been a monk in a cell. No, I opened the gates for him and showed him his road. Having me around to see and touch and talk to he keeps that moment fresh in his mind. It sanctifies his work, if you see what I mean. And for me . . . Oh, Tom, if you knew how lonely and despairing the work can be! All mankind is walled against you except for your own small cell, and even them . . . It’s a funny thing about the English. They actually hate ideas. In Russia we talked on and on about the ideas behind what we were going to do. Here, if you move one inch beyond the practicalities they look at you as if you were speaking a foreign language. Pretending to yourself you love someone is a substitute for a lot of other things you miss . . . And in any case, Tom, I’m that kind of woman. If I’d been the cow-girl I look like you’d have found me rolling in the haycock once in a while, I shouldn’t be surprised. Not that I’m a loose woman. You mustn’t think that, and besides the Party doesn’t like it . . . Oh, tell me what I’ve been trying to say to you, Tom. Give me a hint you understand.’

  ‘I understand, I think. For years you’ve been slogging away in blinkers, hauling your load, seeing only the road in front of you. Now something’s crossed your path—it happens to be me, but perhaps if I hadn’t come along it would have been something else—and you’ve stopped and looked round and seen there’s more in the world than the road and the load.’

  ‘What do you think about me, Tom?’

  ‘Do I love you, do you mean?’

  ‘Bit much to ho
pe for.’

  ‘Oh, no, you’re wrong. I think if . . . if I hadn’t already become so involved with Judy you’d have knocked me clean off my feet, but . . . Look, when you were talking about this chap and whether he loved you, I thought you were underestimating yourself. None of us can really guess the effect we have on other people. I can’t believe any intelligent man wouldn’t feel something. There’s so much to you . . . if you can imagine, on a walking tour, coming over a pass and round a bend of the track and there it is, miles of intricate distance, taking your breath away, so your first thought is you wouldn’t mind spending the rest of your life exploring it . . .’

  ‘Only you never do.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your life’s already spoken for.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Miss Julyan. Oh, Tom, why . . .’

  ‘Wait. There’s something I want to try and explain. Everything connects with everything else, even something as secret and personal as who you chose to fall in love with. Did you understand what I felt when those miners outside Leeds chucked coal at us and smashed up most of the carriage windows? It was as though I was being made to become their enemy, an enemy of half the people in England. I have to prove, if only to myself, that I’m not an enemy. Nothing I say can prove it. It’s got to be something I do. The action doesn’t have to have any purpose—it can be entirely symbolic, like the refusal of the early Christians to pour a little scented water on a pagan altar. It wouldn’t have made any difference to the world if they’d dribbled the water on the stone, but it made all the difference to them. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because it’s connected with something I want to talk to you about later. But about you and me—it would be terribly easy for me to tell myself that the way to prove I was not an enemy was to let you represent them, and so loving you would be all I needed.’