Read Online Sons and Daughters by Mary Jane Staples - Free Book Online

dressed in long-skirted mauve. His notes told him she was eighteen. She looked twenty and a bit more. Her black glossy hair, parted down the middle, hung like straight curtains on either side of her face, and between the curtains dark eyes regarded him through the lenses of horn-rimmed spectacles. She wasn’t bad-looking, she had a wide firm mouth and an unblemished skin, but against that, she also had the paleness of a student given to earnest study all day and half the night. ‘Hello,’ he said, rising to shake her hand, ‘I’m Paul Adams, secretary of our group.’
    ‘Yes, good-oh,’ she said. ‘Lulu Saunders. Miss. Pleased to meet you. Trust we’ll get along. Can’t always tell. Not at first sight. Still, here’s hoping.’ Her speech was clipped and staccato, putting Paul in mind of Mr Jingle making his mark in Dickens’s novel
Pickwick Papers
.
    ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ said the MP, and ducked out, looking so happy to escape that Paul suspected the daughter made him nervous.
    ‘Fill me in,’ she said.
    ‘For a start,’ said Paul informatively, ‘our chief work here is recruiting and propaganda.’
    ‘Know that, don’t I?’ said the earnest young lady. ‘Good at it, are you?’
    Paul blinked.
    ‘Good at it?’ he said.
    ‘No worries if you’re not,’ said Miss Saunders, ‘I’m brilliant.’
    ‘References?’ said Paul.
    ‘What?’
    ‘References to confirm your brilliance,’ said Paul.
    ‘Give over. My father’s my reference. Honest John. Not many like him in Parliament. But he’ll never make Prime Minister. Not the right kind of brain. If he had mine, he’d stand a chance.’
    ‘How’d you come by all that modesty?’ asked Paul.
    ‘Modesty?’ Miss Saunders looked sorry for him. ‘Can’t afford modesty. That’s for shrinking violets. Gave all that bunk the heave-ho when I was nine. Knew by then life was a curse for shrinking violets. Earned myself a good education. Now I’ve got my foot on the ladder.’
    ‘Tell me more,’ said Paul.
    ‘Nothing to tell. Apart from making a decision.’
    ‘What decision?’ asked Paul.
    ‘Going to be a Member of Parliament by the time I’m thirty,’ said Miss Saunders.
    ‘Is that a fact?’
    ‘A promise. Where do I sit?’
    ‘Over there.’ Paul indicated a desk opposite his own. There was a chair and a typewriter.
    ‘Crummy,’ said Miss Saunders. ‘Listen, Adams. Let’s understand each other. I do what’s required of me, but I don’t take orders.’
    ‘Listen, Saunders,’ said Paul, ‘you’ll do what’s required and you’ll take orders.’
    ‘How old are you, bossy boots?’ asked Miss Saunders.
    ‘Fifty.’
    ‘What’s your real name, then? Peter Pan?’
    ‘How would you like to be fired before you start?’ asked Paul, thinking her name suited her. She was a Lulu all right, full stop.
    ‘That’s it, make me laugh,’ she said. ‘Suppose we get down to biz? Don’t like wasting time. What’s the schedule?’
    ‘Delivery of leaflets,’ said Paul. There was a large parcel on his desk, brown wrapping paper ripped open. ‘Five hundred. They came to us from the printers Saturday morning. See that satchel?’
    Miss Saunders saw it, hanging on the door peg.
    ‘Well?’ she said.
    ‘You carry the leaflets in that,’ said Paul, ‘and you spend the day knocking on doors, talking to tenants and leaving a leaflet at every house. Whenever you get no answer, slip a leaflet through the letter box.’
    ‘Listen, Adams—’
    ‘That’s all, Saunders,’ said Paul. ‘There’s a General Election coming early next year, and these are pre-election leaflets, spelling out the dangers of the Conservatives getting back in if we take victory for granted.’
    ‘Now you’re talking,’ said Miss Saunders. ‘Don’t want that bloody lot back in. Nor that warmonger,Churchill. Upper-class drunk. Wouldn’t surprise me if the Establishment made him Lord Churchill. Probably give him his own distillery too.’
    ‘Some of