A Quiet Life

After a few moments the first bars of ‘The Red Flag’ began to rise up from the crowd. Laura didn’t know any of the words and couldn’t join in the singing, but as she lengthened and slowed her steps to fall in with the rhythm, she felt that the crowd was fumbling for a sense of togetherness, and that the song, marvellously, seemed to give it to them. Even when the song faded, that sweet sense of being enfolded by a common purpose remained. Looking around her, she was rather reassured by the look of the people on the march; she had been nervous that the communists would be a raggle-taggle bunch, but in fact a drab propriety seemed to characterise them. Everyone was in shades of grey and navy, so that it was only the brilliance of their flags that brightened the streams of people. The walking and the singing seemed to go on and on, and Laura began to get nervous about time passing. ‘When does this finish?’ she asked Florence, who was now holding one of the banner poles.

Florence turned to her, and told her there would be speeches in the square, but they would leave before that for the other protest. At Laura’s puzzled look, Florence explained that a few of them were going to take the march to Halifax. Laura had never heard the name before. ‘The Foreign Secretary, you know?’ Elsa said. Her voice was low and brusque. ‘We can’t just do this, the marching, Trafalgar Square, just what they want us to do.’ Laura could not see why this was not enough, the thousands of massed people as they got to the huge square lined with its grimy buildings. There were so many, she would have felt afraid of the crush, but there was a reticence about their movements, and one said ‘Sorry, comrade,’ in a gentle voice as he stepped on her foot. But as soon as their part of the march had filed into the square, Florence took Laura’s arm and led her to what was obviously a prearranged meeting spot down a side road. Here, about two dozen women holding bags and rolled banners were waiting, and after a while they all moved off, down a broad avenue bordered by the chilly expanse of another London park.

‘I have to go back soon,’ Laura said, looking at her little silver watch. ‘I told my aunt I was shopping with my cousin – we’re going to meet at teatime.’

But Florence was not listening, and the pace of the women now was quicker and more urgent than the march had been. It was Elsa who was directing the group, with the help of a map, and at one point they had to retrace their steps to find their way into a wide square. Here, the sounds of traffic were muffled, the sidewalk unrolled smoothly under their feet, the trees opened huge branches under the quiet grey sky, the houses rose white and cold behind their sharp railings, a woman in a coat with a high fur collar was getting out of a car, holding a tiny dog, two policemen were standing indifferent in front of one of the blandly graceful houses – and that was the one the group was making for.

‘Now, girls!’ shouted Elsa, and suddenly all the banners were unfurled, some women were lying down, while yet others threw a pot of red paint at the shining black door of the house, shouting ‘Halifax, murderer!’ and ‘Arms for Spain!’ as they did so. Laura felt a spurt of fear run through her body, and stepped away from the group as the policemen moved towards them. A policeman bent over one woman who was lying down on the sidewalk and started to drag her along, so that her dress rucked up below her, showing the tops of her thick stockings, while another policeman started to blow his whistle in panicked bursts. The woman on the pavement in the fur-collared coat paused for a moment, and Laura caught her eye, expecting a secret sign of sympathy. ‘War-mongers,’ she spat. ‘Stupid bitch.’

Laura started to walk away, almost into the path of a couple more policemen who were running along the pavement. As she hurried off, she could hear shouts behind her, and the noise of further struggle.

3

The memory of the march stayed sharp in Laura’s mind. She had got to the tea room on Piccadilly only a little late, after asking directions from a woman once she had got away from the square. Winifred had been keen to tell her about the lunch she had had at the Criterion with the chap from the cricket club dance, and had hardly noticed Laura’s distraction. All the way home and all the next day the voices of the singers, and the startling physical courage of the women in the square, had remained vivid. Part of her felt nervous about what she had witnessed, but the sense of urgency pulsed through her. What would change, now that the women had been so brave?

But she looked in Aunt Dee’s Times newspaper, and saw no discussion about it at all; neither the next day, nor the following one. Reading the dense and impersonal reports of political speeches in the newspaper, she gradually came to understand that Halifax’s policy of non-intervention in Spain had not shifted in the slightest. In fact, nobody but her seemed to have heard about the protest, and gradually she came to realise that it had not rippled the quiet life of the Highgate household, let alone the government.

As the days went on, it was hard to imagine what would create ripples in Highgate. There was a constant decorum to life here, which was both reassuring and claustrophobic. As Winifred said, Aunt Dee seemed to think that the best way for Winifred to behave was the way laid down during her own youth; it was a repetitive round of visits and walks and luncheons with girls who had much the same manner and appearance as Winifred herself, together with French conversation lessons and piano practice, and games of cards and reading aloud with Aunt Dee in the evenings, or the occasional concert or trip to the theatre. This round of activity quite easily accommodated Laura, and it was only her pact with Winifred, which meant that once a fortnight or so the girls said they were going shopping or to tea with a friend, while each went their separate way for two or three hours, that caused a secret rift in the tight tapestry of good behaviour.

It was a few weeks after her arrival, when Winifred was meeting up with her boyfriend again and they had told Aunt Dee that they were going to the cinema, that Laura went to see Florence at the local party headquarters in King’s Cross. She had telephoned her that morning when Dee was busy with Mrs Venn, and Florence had told her where to come and explained they would go on to a meeting that Elsa was to speak at. But when Laura got to the little basement office, she found everything in confusion. Elsa was unwell, apparently, with a horrible sore throat, and Florence was talking to one Bill Ellis, the local party leader, about what to do. ‘It’s just a women’s group,’ Bill said.

‘It’s a branch of the Co-operative Women’s Guild,’ Florence said, ‘Elsa was keen to bring them in – said that they should be receptive to the message about the struggle on two fronts.’

‘Well, could you trot along and give them her apologies? If she really can’t speak, there’s nothing to be done about it.’

‘She gave me her notes,’ Florence said, and Laura noted the hopeful confidence that had so entranced her on the boat. ‘I’ll give the talk for her, it’s fine. I did lots of talks to women’s organisations in New York.’

‘This isn’t New York …’ Bill seemed wary of giving Florence the go-ahead, but then someone called him to the telephone and before going he succumbed, only asking whether she really did have Elsa’s notes and reminding her to stick to the line on the united front against fascism.

Florence reassured him, and turned to Laura, who was delighted at the thought of seeing her friend speak in public. It was the first time that they had seen each other alone since the protest, and as they walked to the house where the meeting was to take place, Laura tried to ask her about what had happened after the march. There was another one planned for Easter, and a fundraising pageant for Spain in a few weeks’ time, Florence told her. Laura realised it was not just her ignorance that meant she had not caught the fallout of the protest. It was true that nothing had changed, but for Florence there seemed to be nothing surprising in that failure; all the planned activities would continue regardless.

The part of London they were walking through now was closely built, the houses rearing up above them and almost cutting out the sky. It was one of those evenings that Laura had realised were characteristic of the city, with a dampness in the air which was infinitely suspended, never falling as rain, studding Florence’s hair and her old coat with tiny stars. But in the house where the meeting was to take place the light was cold from bulbs that hung bare from the ceiling, and everyone’s skin looked sallow. There were only about a dozen women in the room, sitting planted on small chairs, their bags on the floor at their sides, a stillness surrounding them. As the first speaker went through various pieces of business and reminded the women in the room to pay their membership dues, Laura waited for Florence to stand up and break through the solid atmosphere.

But when Florence did stand up, she seemed physically ill at ease and her voice fell hesitantly into the room. She was not talking in her own voice, Laura realised after a while; she was reading from the notes she had in her hand, and the urgent rhythms of her own conversation were replaced by careful arguments that Laura kept following and losing. These were mainly about the logic of history and the correct understanding of the current situation in Europe, where Fascists in Germany and Spain must be defeated by a united front. The terms of the speech were all abstract, and Laura found her attention wandering. She began to watch the knitting being done by the woman beside her, fantastically quick and accurate, spooling off into a fine pattern of purple and green. When Florence stopped, Laura came back to herself and realised to her shame how much she had missed.

The woman who had spoken first now invited questions from the floor. There was a long silence, so long that Laura began to blush for Florence, but then the knitter beside her clicked the needles into her bag and asked her why she was advocating that they go off to fight fascism in Europe, with all the problems here at home. ‘Two million unemployed,’ she said, in a hoarse monotone, ‘and that doesn’t count all the ones like my old man, working short hours, not enough even to cover the rent since I was let go on account of falling orders. That leaves only my girl working, so she’s sweating day and night now, and my boy can’t get the medicine he needs for his pain – he’s never been able to work, you know. Four mouths in the flat, damp running down the walls – that’s not something another war will solve.’

Laura was horrified at the thought of the home that the woman had left to come here. She looked at her and thought, she’s probably younger than Aunt Dee and yet she was stooped, her thin hair twisted at the back into a straggling bun. She would not know how to speak to her, but Florence was already talking again and Laura was glad to hear her voice return to the urgency Laura had first heard on the boat over the Atlantic. She was holding forth about how the workers had achieved so much in the past, and how this was no time to give up; and about what women could achieve too; and the rent strikes being led by women in the East End. As she recounted this concrete heroism, Laura felt flooded with light. But then Florence looked down at her notes again and stumbled, and started again, talking about the struggle on two fronts, about how it was important to link the struggle against capitalism at home with the struggle against fascism in Europe. Again she returned to abstraction, and when the talk finished and the women were invited by the chair to the tea table, where there was sweet, strong tea and cookies, Laura felt a kind of relief.

The woman next to her spoke to her as they stood up. ‘You’re a Red, too, are you?’ she said, and Laura nodded diffidently. ‘So you’re all for war, then? It’s an easy line. But you don’t know. If you’d lived through the last one you’d know. We all said, never again.’

Laura was conscious of her own poor understanding as she began to repeat phrases from Florence’s speech.

‘That’s what they said the last time,’ the woman said before she had finished. ‘A war to end wars. A war for a better world. They came home to higher unemployment, lower pay …’

‘But that was an imperialist war – it was fought to defend the Empire …’ Florence had come over to them. ‘This will be a war against imperialism and fascism; it’s quite different.’

The woman said something about how she sounded like the Conservatives, all this eager talk of war. Laura felt shamed by the criticism, but Florence hardly paused.

‘If Churchill and Eden and Duff Cooper can see that Chamberlain is on the wrong path,’ she said, and Laura wondered at her ease with these British personalities, ‘that’s welcome, whatever their motives. Of course that doesn’t mean that they are right on anything else. In the long run we’ll resist them just as we are resisting Adolf Hitler.’

Laura warmed to her certainty; how wonderful it must be to have such sure knowledge of what was happening and what was about to happen. But she felt, to her embarrassment, the other woman’s gaze fall on Laura’s fur coat and polished nails as she stretched out her hand for a cup. The conversation faltered, and the two young women stood in silence with their tea until it was time to go.

Outside, the air seemed to have cleared a little, and there was a frosty chill. When Laura asked Florence to show her the way back to the Underground station, Florence said she was going the same way. It was just along here, she said, that she lived with Elsa. A short silence fell, and then Florence asked if Laura wanted a quick cup of hot chocolate before going home.

So this was where Florence was living her independent life! The free life that Laura should be living if only she didn’t have her family holding her back. As Laura followed Florence up the stairs, she felt a thick excitement rising in her. To be sure, the apartment seemed unprepossessing; there was a gap in one sash window that someone had tried to fill by stuffing it with newspaper, and stacks of dusty books and papers on the floor. But still, surely it was full of the hope of freedom.

It was only two rooms, Florence explained – so Florence slept in the living room, which was also Elsa’s study, as Elsa’s bedroom was so small. It was indeed very small, and when Florence opened the door to ask Elsa if she wanted anything, Laura could see Elsa in a bed which seemed to fill the room from side to side, with a large paisley eiderdown tucked over it. ‘I think the fever’s gone down,’ Elsa croaked, and then asked Florence about the meeting. Laura heard Florence telling her that it had all gone well, that the speech had been delivered as Elsa would have done it, and that she was sure some of the women would come to the pageant. Laura sat on the edge of the hard blue couch as they talked, and then, when Florence came out to make some cocoa on the gas ring, she stood up and said she had only just realised what the time was, and that actually she should go. She asked if she could borrow a pamphlet which she had found on the floor, and Florence said she could, but hardly looked at her.

‘We’re out of sugar,’ Florence called to Elsa.

‘Open the condensed milk instead,’ she heard Elsa order her from the bedroom, ‘and help me up, for goodness’ sake.’

4

‘I get the feeling your boyfriend is not treating you well,’ Winifred said to Laura the next day as the two girls walked up to Highgate High Street to do some errands. ‘And I must say – my last dinner with Colin was dull as ditchwater. The wages of sin are boredom, don’t you think?’

‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘it’s true – it’s not …’ But she tailed off.

What could she say? After the last meeting with Florence, she had gone once or twice to other gatherings of the Party in King’s Cross or Holborn. They had been full of speeches that constantly returned to abstraction, that never delved into the experiences that had brought her and, she assumed, others into the room. Even when she had sat with the other comrades over tea in the basement office, the conversations had been so far from the exquisite insights of Florence’s discussions on the Normandie that she had almost cried with frustration. Instead, they had been mainly about procedure, with a great deal of discussion about who was on the right lines, and who was being bourgeois or deviationist or showing ‘Trotskyist tendencies’ in their approach. In all of this Laura sat in unbroken silence, and Florence herself said little, while Elsa was almost the only woman who raised her voice at all.

And the more she saw of Elsa, the less Laura could warm to her. There was the obvious scorn she showed towards those who did not come up to scratch, her grey serge dresses that smelled of sweat, the glasses she kept twitching up her nose. Laura knew she was wrong to judge Elsa in what Florence would tell her was a petty, individualist way, but she could not help herself, as she sat watching Elsa, and watched Florence watching Elsa, and saw Florence take on – without, Laura thought, knowing that she was doing so – some of the little mannerisms and turns of phrase that characterised Elsa’s speech.

‘Don’t worry – you can keep him secret if you like.’ Winifred broke in on her long silence.

Laura realised she had to say something, given how generous Winifred was being in helping her to meet her imaginary boyfriend, and so she began to tell a story in which the boyfriend took on the face and opinions of Joe Segal. At one point she mentioned something that he had said about communism, and Winifred laughed and told her she had been having a similar conversation with a friend of hers the other day.

‘Cissie – can you believe, not a political bone in her body, really – had picked up some of that stuff. I told her to leave it well alone. Communism – can you imagine a more humourless, miserable way to live? I don’t just mean no shopping. But the point is, some people really are special, that’s the truth, and those are the ones who need to run the show. I don’t know why it is that so many people at the moment seem to think it’s the answer to bring everyone down to the lowest level.’

Laura was about to jump in, about to tell Winifred that communists didn’t think that nobody was special, but luckily she caught herself in time. The last thing she wanted was for Winifred to start arguing with her about communism even before she had it straight in her own head, and when she was feeling so … what was she feeling? Just then they came to the bookshop where Winifred was to find a particular novel for Aunt Dee, and Laura was able to go to the back of the shop where the poetry was kept, and under the pretence of browsing she went on with her train of thought.

Why was it that she had kept Florence and Elsa and the Party secret from Winifred all this time? Deep down, she realised this could not go on. Sometimes everything came straight. The pamphlet that Florence had lent her recently had laid things out for her in a beautiful order, showing that one did not have to accept the corruption and dishonesty and the stifling soullessness of the world as it was. While she was reading, she had said to herself, I’ll join the Party properly, and tell Winifred, and move out and throw in my lot with Elsa and Florence. That’s what I’ll do. But once she had put the pamphlet away and gone out of her bedroom, she could not even form the words in her head that she would say to Winifred. The great impetus left her whenever she thought about living in the way that Florence and Elsa lived, rushing from tedious meeting to meeting, and returning to that cheerless apartment in the evenings. Just then, Winifred called to her and she put the book that she was pretending to look at back on the shelf.

After leaving the bookshop they walked up to the top of the hill where there was a dressmaker above a flower shop. Winifred bought most of her clothes ready-made, but wanted a dress altered for a dinner party that she was going to that weekend. They stood in the dusty light of the dressmaker’s room while Miss Spark pinned up the hem of the dress.

‘And I think I want these ruffled sleeves taken off,’ Winifred said. ‘What do you think, Laura? I could have it sleeveless.’

Laura had hardly been looking, but then she suddenly saw Winifred turning to view herself in the mirror, her neck rising out of the stiff green silk like a straight narcissus breaking out of its leaves. Miss Spark was trying to convince her to put some trimming in place of the sleeves, taking out a length of white net that she thought would be right, and some small white silk roses, but Winifred looked at them and discarded them, turning around again in front of the mirror, lifting her arms. No, not a flower, Laura thought. A bird.

‘I’m sorry you can’t come to the dinner,’ Winifred said as they walked down the stairs back to the street. ‘Giles was reluctant enough to take me – not that he’s taking me, of course, his friend Alistair is. One of the Initiates.’

Laura looked rather than asked the question, and Winifred explained how Giles and his very best friends had belonged to a society at university called the Initiates. ‘All they mean, I think, is that they are initiated into adoration of one another; it’s not that they are all that special, or all that gorgeous, or that successful, but you know what men are like – they need these secret societies, these movements and cliques, to feel comfortable. Wouldn’t life be nicer if people didn’t need all of that? Clubs.’ Winifred’s voice dropped into scorn on her last word.

Just at that moment the two girls had entered the park between the high street and Aunt Dee’s house, and Laura stopped in surprise. On the way up, a morning fog had covered it, but now the air had cleared. For the first time she saw London revealed as a place of potential beauty, in this park full of its layers and layers of different greens, both deep and transparent, opening onto that now almost familiar view of a secretive city down below. She said how lovely it was, and Winifred casually agreed. As they walked on, Laura kept looking out at the city, its promise of energy, its distant song of movement, and she wished that she were able to go into it that afternoon rather than do what they were expected to do – go home and be idle in the over-upholstered living room, reading and playing cards. She knew that Florence and Elsa were preparing for a big concert for aid for Spain, and she longed to be with them. Even if in practice the preparation only meant the repetitive business of stuffing envelopes and typing out address labels, still it might hold purpose within it, and on this day full of the brimming hope of spring she longed for a sense of purpose.

As soon as they got into the house, Laura realised she was not the only one who was feeling out of step with the Highgate house. Winifred had seemed good-humoured while they were walking outside, but when her mother told her she had got her the wrong novel she slammed it down on the table and insisted that this had been the title they had discussed. Although Laura had seen Winifred irritated before, this was the first time that her voice had crackled into real anger. Perhaps, Laura thought as Winifred ran upstairs to her room, shouting about her mother’s unreasonableness, the decorum of the household had been partly a response to her presence, as if everyone had been determined to put on a good show for the new onlooker. But now she was no longer new, nobody could be bothered to keep up the façade. The bitter atmosphere continued over supper, when Aunt Dee complained about the amount that Winifred was spending on dresses and Winifred countered by telling her that it wasn’t her fault she wasn’t allowed to earn any money.

The following Saturday, the day that Winifred was going to the big dinner party, Laura came down to breakfast to find the atmosphere between mother and daughter had curdled completely. ‘I can’t believe that you’d try to stop me again …’ Winifred was saying.