The White Dove

‘Come and get it,’ he shouted and a forest of empty glasses was thrust at him. He looked across at Tony. ‘Wield a corkscrew, Tony, will you?’

‘Jake, this is my friend Amy Lovell.’

Jake put down the bottle. ‘Pour it yourselves,’ he called out, and held out a hand to Amy. ‘Any friend of Tony’s is welcome here,’ he said simply, and took her hand in his large, warm one. Amy could almost believe that she felt the crackle as he touched her, he was so charged with energy. Jake’s arm enveloped her shoulders and he turned her to where the girl with the scarlet stockings and the earrings was frying sausages over a corner gas ring.

‘This is Kay Cooper.’ Jake kissed Kay enthusiastically on the mouth. ‘And Angel Mack.’ That was the turban girl. ‘This is Tony’s friend, Amy Lovell.’

Kay waved her sausage fork, and Angel said, ‘Hmm. Tony’s friend, eh? What did you think of the meeting?’

Amy glanced from one to the other. ‘Just that. It made me think.’

Suddenly, both the girls were smiling at her.

‘Have a sausage.’

‘And a glass of wine. Guaranteed to turn your tongue jet black.’

‘Thank you. I will.’ Armed with food and drink, Tony took Amy away into the throng. He introduced her to everyone in sight.

‘Wait!’ she protested. ‘I’ll never remember who everyone is.’

‘You wanted to meet different people,’ he reminded her. ‘What do you think so far? Changed your social perceptions, has it?’

He was teasing her again, but Amy looked straight back at him.

‘Do you know, I think it has, a little.’

She was enjoying the smoky, crowded rooms and the lively babble of talk more than the grandest society party she had ever been to. She thought that she had never met such opinionated people in her life. Or no, that wasn’t quite true. Peter Jaspert was opinionated too, but his opinions stood at the opposite pole from those expressed here. She had never found Peter Jaspert particularly congenial, yet she felt perfectly at home here tonight.

Was this, then, where her sympathies lay? For some reason the idea excited her. By listening very carefully to the talk, and by putting it together with what she already knew from newspaper reports, Amy understood that the hunger marchers were miners from the Rhondda, out of work now, who were marching on London to deliver a petition at Downing Street. Sixty per cent of men were out of work in the valleys.

Amy stared at Kay, whose black curls shook with her passionate recital.

‘This Depression can only get worse. We’re cushioned from it here, you and me and all the rest of us, by our education and because we live in prosperous London. But out there, in the mines and the rest of industry, people are suffering every day.’

Amy thought, who could be more cushioned than me? Bethan came from the valleys, but she had never so much as mentioned these terrible things. How much more don’t I know about? How much more have I never thought about, or bothered to enquire about?

‘Hello again.’ It was Angel Mack, with a jug of wine. ‘More of this stuff? Or there’s beer, if you’d rather. No cocktails or champagne, I’m afraid.’

Was it really so transparently obvious where she came from, then? Amy wondered.

‘Wine, thank you,’ Amy said firmly.

‘I’ve never been to a party like this before,’ she added. ‘Where everyone seems to have so much to say to everyone else.’

Angel laughed. ‘Oh yes, there’s always plenty of talk. That’s half the trouble with armchair comrades like us. Too busy talking about what’ll happen when the revolution comes to actually do anything about making it happen.’

‘Can it happen without you?’

‘Most definitely,’ Angel said. ‘And what about you? Are you on our side?’

Amy thought suddenly of Chance and the cedar tree shading the cool grass, and of the hunger marchers sleeping in village halls on their endless walk to London. And then of Peter Jaspert and his fluent talk of trade tariffs.

‘I’m not on the other side,’ Amy said at last. ‘Although I’ve only just discovered that.’ At once, she felt that she was a traitor to everything she knew. Quickly, to cover up her own uncertainty, she asked, ‘Does Tony Hardy come here a lot?’

Angel glanced curiously at her. ‘Tony comes and goes. Got his own fish to fry, as they say. As far as all this goes, he’s less committed than some but his heart’s in the right place. Does that tell you what you want to know?’

Amy wasn’t sure what she wanted to know.

‘What about Jake Silverman?’

‘Yes, everyone always wants to know about Jake. He’s probably much more like you than you would think. His father and the rest of his family are in the garment trade, rather prosperously so. Jake turned his back on all that when he was eighteen. I think he’d describe himself as a full-time political activist now. He supports himself by working in the Left Bookshop downstairs, and writing the odd article for the quarterlies. He lives here with Kay.’

‘Kay’s his wife?’

‘No,’ Angel said coolly, ‘not his wife. Kay doesn’t believe in marriage.’

Amy began to laugh, so that Angel stared at her even harder. She was thinking of Johnny Guild and his friends, and Peter and Isabel in St Margaret’s, Westminster.

‘I don’t think I do, either,’ Amy said.

‘I imagine not, if you’re going about with Tony Hardy. Here he comes now, looking for you.’

In the next room, someone was piling records on to the ancient gramophone. The music was very loud and very crackly, and there was hardly room to move, let alone to dance. Tony bowed gravely and held out his arms.

At once Amy lost track of the evening’s progress. She had the impression that the party was in full and noisy swing, and that a telephone had been ringing insistently somewhere. She was startled when Jake crossed the room and turned the music off.

‘Sorry, everyone.’ Jake grinned at them. ‘Complaints department. Either the row stops or the police arrive.’

Tony found Amy’s coat for her, and the hat that had been rolled up and stuffed in one of the pockets.

‘Good night,’ Jake boomed from the top of the stairs. ‘See you next time, Tony. And you, Amy Lovell, whoever you are.’

Amy smiled to herself. She wanted to come again. She definitely wanted to come again, and not just because of Tony Hardy.

Out in the darkness she began to walk briskly the way they had come, back towards the bus stop. Then she realized that Tony was still standing at the kerb, and that he was laughing at her.

‘D’you imagine that we’re going to catch a bus at one in the morning? This way. We’ll have to look for a cab towards Oxford Street.’

‘You’ll have to pay,’ Amy reminded him. ‘I put my taxi money in the hunger hat.’

‘I think I can manage. You may do it next time.’

They found a cab, and Tony handed her into it. In the familiar stuffy interior Amy leaned back in her seat. The wine she had drunk and the relaxed atmosphere between them made her ask, without thinking very hard, ‘Angel Mack said something odd. I told her I didn’t think I believed in marriage, and she said something like “I’m not surprised, if you’re going about with Tony Hardy.” What did she mean?’

Amy thought she saw Tony’s head jerk round, silhouetted against the street lights rolling past outside. But then he was so still that she thought she had imagined it.

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said smoothly. ‘Possibly pique because I’ve never made a play for her myself. Practically everyone else has. But I shouldn’t pay too much attention to what Angel says. She works very hard at being modern and hardboiled, and a good deal of it is just for effect.’