Read Online Park Lane by Frances Osborne - Free Book Online Page B

waiting in it just to the right of the front door at half past seven. Bea has told Mother she’s going with Edie to a musical recital at the Bechstein Hall, which leaves her with a niggling uncertainty as to whether Mother’s and Edie’s paths might cross elsewhere that evening. Mother at least does not come downstairs to notice that Bea is heading out for the evening in a public taxi.
    Avoiding Joseph’s eye as she leaves alone, Bea walks straight out of the door and climbs blindly into the taxi waiting outside, which, to her relief, does contain Celeste, who is immaculately dressed for battle. She is wearing a high-collared coat buttoned up to her chin and is carrying a walking stick. Bea thinks at first, how odd, she doesn’t need it, and shortly afterwards starts to wonder what she does need it for. Bea looks down at her own clothes. On the offchance that she saw Mother on her way out, Bea has dressed for a musical recital. However, at least her overcoat is heavy, though whether it will protect her silk petticoat during whatever evening lies ahead, is in the lap of the gods. She feels a shiver of fear, and enjoys the sensation.
    Campden Hill Square is dark. It is not well lit, and between the houses on either side a railed garden falls down the hill to the thoroughfare of Holland Park Avenue. The trees in front of the houses meld into those growing over the fence of the garden’s iron rails, forming a leafless canopy.
    Bea feels the crowd before she is in its infectious mass of hot breath and expectation. Hundreds of people are jam-packed up the narrow slope of a road on the east side of the square and rise up the hill in a dark swarm. Bea’s heart quickens as it engulfs her and she and Celeste are swept down Holland Park Avenue by a tide of newarrivals. The two of them are bobbing about excitedly in the centre, which is moving quickly enough to keep them there. Bea is pushed in the back and tries to look around, but is knocked forward again as she does so. She is surprised by this roughness and lets out a small gasp. Buck up, old girl, she tells herself, these are the suffragettes.
    The crowd carries them on and past the eastern side of the square, where the mass is densest. Celeste makes an effort at pushing her way back to the edge but the steady movement forward keeps her locked in line. ‘Dammit and blast it,’ says Celeste. ‘Just go with it, Beatrice, we’ll go up the far side of the square with this lot and then make it down from the top. Aim for the third tree from the bottom.’
    Bea is not as certain as Celeste. She can’t see who’s at the top of the square, but she doubts it’s empty. Or that they have much choice as to where they are going. The crowd turns up the far side of the square towards the grand terrace at the top, carrying them along with its burble of clipped ‘Hold on theres’ and thick miaows of ‘Oi, that’s my foot yer on’. Bea shuts her eyes for an instant. It will hardly make any difference to the direction in which she is travelling.
    God, the smell. Bea has never smelt perspiration like this. Some of it smells as though it has settled indelibly not just on the skin, but on the medley of both stiff and worn serges, tweeds, fine wools, the odd mackintosh that Bea is being knocked against. Or rather squeezed against, for the stream feels as if it is tightening around her, and sticks are digging into her sides.
    Bea is now frightened by this. If the crowd goes on tightening how will she breathe, how will any of them breathe, how will any of them get away from here? But all that they can do, any of the hundreds of people jammed around her and Celeste, is move wherever they are taken. The crowd surges forward in stops and starts, each jolt throwing Bea against her neighbours. She may have escaped Park Lane this evening, but she is again in a place where shecannot make an independent decision as to where she is going. At least she decided to come here. Yet is it inevitable that,