something and that you must be going insane. Then there’s the residue of guilt for God knows what becomes of them without a reference. Really, I don’t mind a rocky countenance if you can find things where you set them down last.’
It isn’t, thinks Bea, Mother who has to have her scalp jabbed by the Woman with Iron Fingers. Mind you, with Suthers as a benchmark, Mother would be unlikely to notice.
Susan is fast. Bea will give her that, and Bea is still ahead of the others when she comes down to breakfast. She noses her way along the sideboard of poached eggs, kidneys and half a dozen other offerings. She takes nothing. At the end the newspapers lie folded like fallen dominoes. She takes one and makes for a chair, not seeing Joseph until he slides it in behind her.
‘Miss Beatrice?’
‘Oh, coffee, please. And maybe toast.’
He nods, and vanishes.
The usual silversmith’s window of sugar shakers and coffee pots squat on the white tablecloth in front of her. She pushes both them and the empty place settings next to her out to the side and spreads the newspaper flat.
The announcement is easy to find:
Mrs Pankhurst, who has returned to England in order to resume her work for the vote, has taken up residence at Campden Hill Square, where she will address a public open-air meeting tonight, at 8.30.
Bea glances over her shoulder. There’s nobody to see her. The box around the notice and the letters themselves seem to thicken and darken before her eyes. Keep away from it, she tells herself. You’ll only find yourself caught up in something and everyone will think all that business with John has gone straight to your head. At least, that is no doubt how Mother would present it, as the only explanation why her daughter could have joined ‘a bunch of half-crazed lunatics’.
It was hardly an invitation to a riot, though. ‘Address a public open-air meeting …’ It is, on the face of it, no different to the summons to Mother’s meetings and it’s not as though Bea would be taking a bat with her.
The alternative is another dinner in another hotel, another show, and the familiar recipe of whiskies and the gramophone after, all of which suddenly sound dull.
The person she wants to talk to, perhaps even reveal her plans to – for he is always on her side – is Edward. But he will not emerge until noon. Mother is, in the circumstances, perhaps not the best conversational foil. That leaves Clemmie, who was back in the house last night. Tom has stayed down in the country and, in a surprising gesture of sentimentality, Clemmie declared she didn’t want to hear her voice echo around her and Tom’s London home and she would prefer to stay at Park Lane, in her old room.
Clemmie must be awake, should jolly well be awake and ready for talking, if, Bea pauses, if she is speaking to Bea yet. She could go around to Edie’s but Edie won’t be up for hours. She has recently joined the ranks of those who don’t see the morning sun. Bea starts to push back her chair and it is now Bellows who gently moves it out of her way as she pulls herself up and her skirts down, and strides out of the room taking the newspaper with her.
Clemmie is sitting at her old dressing table, silver-topped glass jars opened, cream thick on her face, wrestling a hairbrush through her waves. Bea flops down across her sister’s bed. Clemmie’s room is lighter and brighter than Bea’s and decorated in a rather gloriously feminine lilac and white. Bea is more than a teeny bit envious of this, especially since, if Clemmie keeps returning to claim it, Bea will never be able to move in, which is jolly unfair because Clemmie rather owes her the room now she is married. After all, it was Bea who orchestrated the ‘inexplicable’ flood in one of the bathrooms above so that Clem’s room would be redecorated for the first time in half a century. Short of a house fire, Bea’s room will remain looking as if Queen Victoria still had decades to
It isn’t, thinks Bea, Mother who has to have her scalp jabbed by the Woman with Iron Fingers. Mind you, with Suthers as a benchmark, Mother would be unlikely to notice.
Susan is fast. Bea will give her that, and Bea is still ahead of the others when she comes down to breakfast. She noses her way along the sideboard of poached eggs, kidneys and half a dozen other offerings. She takes nothing. At the end the newspapers lie folded like fallen dominoes. She takes one and makes for a chair, not seeing Joseph until he slides it in behind her.
‘Miss Beatrice?’
‘Oh, coffee, please. And maybe toast.’
He nods, and vanishes.
The usual silversmith’s window of sugar shakers and coffee pots squat on the white tablecloth in front of her. She pushes both them and the empty place settings next to her out to the side and spreads the newspaper flat.
The announcement is easy to find:
Mrs Pankhurst, who has returned to England in order to resume her work for the vote, has taken up residence at Campden Hill Square, where she will address a public open-air meeting tonight, at 8.30.
Bea glances over her shoulder. There’s nobody to see her. The box around the notice and the letters themselves seem to thicken and darken before her eyes. Keep away from it, she tells herself. You’ll only find yourself caught up in something and everyone will think all that business with John has gone straight to your head. At least, that is no doubt how Mother would present it, as the only explanation why her daughter could have joined ‘a bunch of half-crazed lunatics’.
It was hardly an invitation to a riot, though. ‘Address a public open-air meeting …’ It is, on the face of it, no different to the summons to Mother’s meetings and it’s not as though Bea would be taking a bat with her.
The alternative is another dinner in another hotel, another show, and the familiar recipe of whiskies and the gramophone after, all of which suddenly sound dull.
The person she wants to talk to, perhaps even reveal her plans to – for he is always on her side – is Edward. But he will not emerge until noon. Mother is, in the circumstances, perhaps not the best conversational foil. That leaves Clemmie, who was back in the house last night. Tom has stayed down in the country and, in a surprising gesture of sentimentality, Clemmie declared she didn’t want to hear her voice echo around her and Tom’s London home and she would prefer to stay at Park Lane, in her old room.
Clemmie must be awake, should jolly well be awake and ready for talking, if, Bea pauses, if she is speaking to Bea yet. She could go around to Edie’s but Edie won’t be up for hours. She has recently joined the ranks of those who don’t see the morning sun. Bea starts to push back her chair and it is now Bellows who gently moves it out of her way as she pulls herself up and her skirts down, and strides out of the room taking the newspaper with her.
Clemmie is sitting at her old dressing table, silver-topped glass jars opened, cream thick on her face, wrestling a hairbrush through her waves. Bea flops down across her sister’s bed. Clemmie’s room is lighter and brighter than Bea’s and decorated in a rather gloriously feminine lilac and white. Bea is more than a teeny bit envious of this, especially since, if Clemmie keeps returning to claim it, Bea will never be able to move in, which is jolly unfair because Clemmie rather owes her the room now she is married. After all, it was Bea who orchestrated the ‘inexplicable’ flood in one of the bathrooms above so that Clem’s room would be redecorated for the first time in half a century. Short of a house fire, Bea’s room will remain looking as if Queen Victoria still had decades to
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