It’s a Battlefield (6 page)

A man called Bennett asked: ‘What measures are being taken?'

Mr Surrogate raised his hand. ‘I was coming to that. I am not on the executive committee of the party. I am trying to speak for the ordinary member. I propose that a collection be taken on the spot in aid of Comrade Drover's widow and that a proportion of the collection recently held in London for the fighting fund be allocated to a suitable memorial.'

Bennett said: ‘He's not dead yet.'

‘We can't disguise from ourselves,' Mr Surrogate said, ‘that there's little hope. The petition sheets, of course, will be handed to everyone as he goes out.'

A man in a heavy overcoat stood up. ‘I've been asked to come 'ere,' he said, ‘by the garidge. Couldn't we pass some sort of resolution now, on the spot, askin' Parliament . . .'

The horn-rimmed intellectual rose beside Mr Surrogate. ‘Quite impossible,' he said. ‘Quite impossible. We are more than ten persons. By 13 Charles 2, Stat. 1, we should all be liable to imprisonment. It's out of the question.'

‘Sit down,' Bennett called, and Mr Surrogate and the man from the garage sat down hastily. ‘Sit down,' Bennet repeated.

The treasurer said: ‘I'm not taking my orders from you, Comrade Bennett. If the meeting –'

‘Sit down.'

Mr Surrogate crouched over his shoe-lace. He was wondering bitterly whether all movements ended in a scrimmage of individuals for leadership. He thought of the first Fabian Society, of the ladies in their Walter Crane dresses and shorn heads and cigarettes, their belief in the perfectibility of the human character, and their patronage of house painters and plumbers. He remembered the arguments at midnight going home over Chelsea Bridge in a hansom with a chosen companion.

‘Now,' Bennett's voice said above him, ‘we can get on to business.' Mr Surrogate looked up and away. He knew only too well his mind's trick of remembering causes in human terms: the Fabian Society in terms of that midnight hansom and the first tentative pure-minded discussions of Free Love and the Emancipation of Women with a girl who would not be serious even when she was in bed with him.

‘Or is there any other intellectual who wants to 'ear 'is own voice?' Bennett continued with his eyes on Mr Surrogate; but Mr Surrogate looked away in deep despair. For years now, passing through every stage of socialism, he had believed with complete sincerity that he would one day get into touch with the worker; but the plumber who had written a Fabian Essay was the man of that class he had known most intimately. He was the only one, an elderly man with steel spectacles and a background of religion and hedge schooling, who had been wholly serious, who could bandy back and forth with Mr Surrogate the abstractions he loved: Social Betterment, the Equality of Opportunity, the Means of Production.

Personalities! Mr Surrogate shuddered. They had always betrayed him. Women whom he had wished to emancipate flirted with him, and when the lovely abstractions of Communism had lured him into the party – Comradeship, Proletariat, Ideology – he found there only Bennett. He resented even Drover's intrusion as an individual to be saved and not a sacrifice to be decked for the altar. In a cause was exhilaration, exaltation, a sense of Freedom; individuals gave pain by their brutality, their malice, their lack of understanding. He could live in a world of religions, of political parties and economic creeds; he would go mad rubbing shoulders at every turn with saviours, politicians, poor people begging bread. And yet he could not be happy alone among his glamorous abstractions; he wanted a companion to help to confirm his belief that these things were real – Capitalism and Socialism, Wealth and Poverty – and not these other things, champagne and charity balls and women bearing their twelfth child in an overcrowded room.

‘Is that girl here?' Conder asked.

Jules said: ‘We'll catch her after this.'

‘There's a story here for the morning papers,' Conder said, ‘but how can I use it? My faith to the party would be broken.' He ran his hand distractedly over his bald head, talking on in a low voice, listening to what Bennett was saying, thinking of several things at once. Drover's wife, there might be a good interview, ‘not sit down under it like bloody intellectuals,' suppose there are other newspaper men here, ‘pamphlet 36', mustn't risk being thrown out of the party, if it's in the morning papers I shall be blamed, ‘three volunteers to distribute at the gates,' I shall be blamed, I shall be blamed.

‘I'm a delegate from the garidge. They want to know what's going to be done about Drover.'

‘I'm coming to Drover all in good time,' Bennett said. ‘There'll be the petition to sign. Do you expect us to attack the prison? What's the good of breaking windows? If they want to 'ang 'im, they'll 'ang 'im.'

‘There's a lot of feeling at the garidge.'

‘Then ‘old a meeting at the garidge. Get some of the intellectuals to talk till you feel all right. I've got up 'ere to face facts.'

‘Something ought to be done.'

‘This meeting's got more to attend to than Drover. Who's Drover anyway? I've never 'eard 'im do anything for the party. We've got a big job on now that can't wait for Drover.'

Somebody in the middle of the hall called out: ‘Good old Bennett,' and everybody laughed.

‘They're shouting Drover this and Drover that at me. Drover doesn't matter now. It's not one policeman we want to kill. I'm not a talker. I'm the man who does a job. We've got enough blacklegs. We've got 'em in the party, we've got 'em in this ‘all as like as not. Spies and blacklegs. Men who've never done a stroke of honest work, talkers, scribblers. We've got to weed 'em out.'

‘Really,' Conder said, stroking his head, ‘he's going too far. He's questioning our honesty.'

Kay Rimmer sat with her head on her hands and her eyes on the floor. She thought of the long streets between her and Battersea, the Jews in Charing Cross Road, the whores in Coventry Street, and the long hill of Piccadilly; at the other end, past the King's Road and the cabmen's shelters, past the slow dull river and the warehouses and the tram-lines, Milly waited, Milly with her intolerable grief, fear in the kitchen, suspense in the sitting-room, pain on every stair. ‘They're shouting Drover this and Drover that at me.' Drover who had never intruded, who had sat as quietly as a visitor in his own home, importuned now from every piece: the plant unwatered, because it had been his job, no beer in the house because he used to fetch it. I want to enjoy myself, she thought, Jim doesn't matter to me, I could hate Milly for this, and looking up she saw Mr Surrogate's smooth cheek and pale hair.

‘There's Kay,' Jules said and waved his hand. He noticed again that she had been crying. Above his head Bennett rumbled on. His rage was like a storm which, if two were together in a room, drew them together with its darkness and the closeness of the air. He allowed himself for a while to think of loving Kay; she was more of an individual with her eyes wet. His mind, which had been misty with regret, vague with aspiration, cleared momentarily, and it occurred to him that possibly all he needed was a woman. Love when one had no money was a chancy thing; one took it when it came, but that was seldom. They were always, women, wanting something in return: a visit to a dance hall, chocolates, a cinema; they thought it undignified to take the pleasure as its own reward; or else they became moony, passionately monogamous, and when he wanted to laugh and love and make a noise, they wanted to be quiet in the dark, alone with him. But Kay was not like that; she had too many friends ever to want to creep into corners; he almost believed that it would be safe to love her. Her tears did not frighten him; they meant that she would be glad of company; he got miserable himself when he was left alone, would have paid anything he had for even Conder's company, was lost, was frightened. Only a woman, only a noise, only a gramophone playing or people talking could save him then from sinking back, back into himself, meeting his harsh mother on the threshold, back past the moaning drunken cries, back past the quarrels in the next room, back to the kisses and the sweets and early bed, back to no more being. Shout, sing, be in a crowd as he was here; that was better than searching in the dark for something as hopelessly gone as the sheltered existence of the womb. ‘Jules, you have forgotten this. . . . Jules, you have forgotten that. . . . God damn you, how much longer have I got to wait?' Slowly he would emerge, apologize, explain. They thought, all the employers and the customers he had to deal with, that he was lazy, but he forgot as easily his own affairs, his handkerchief, his coat when it was stormy, and today the letter which had come for him, addressed and re-addressed with a French stamp, only this moment remembered. ‘I'll open it at lunch-time,' but at lunch-time a hurdy-gurdy was turning in the street, two children were circling with raised pinafores, an unemployed man was slapping his hands to help them with the time, and Jules could stand and laugh and gossip, feel himself for ten minutes part of the street, part of London, part of a country, not one abandoned by his mother's death to fight his way in a land which was his only by the accident of birth.

The surface of the brain was aware of Bennett talking, Mr Surrogate bending his head over his shoe, Kay trying to catch his eye; their images danced across his brain like rain on glass, leaving no impression. He was already away, seeking what he had lost, what he was never quite reconciled to losing, complete dependence, a definite object (to breathe, to grow, to be born), the impossibility of loneliness.

‘Come on,' Conder said, ‘it's over. I knew they'd do nothing about Drover. They're good for nothing but talk.'

‘Why do you come?' Jules asked.

They were pushed together for a moment in the entrance, somebody thrust petition papers into their hands, and they were again apart with a foot of pavement and a splash of lamplight between them. Something in that quick involuntary contact affected Conder; it was as when one shared a taxi with a strange woman after a party and the chance contact induced confidences between a street and a street. ‘I suppose,' he said, ‘when everything is badly wrong, even the talk of something better. . . .' He looked at Jules sideways, with shame, with a sharp hopefulness.

The street was full of people, laughing and going home. Jules longed to be with them. He said to Conder: ‘There's Kay,' and to Kay: ‘This is Conder.' Conder took off his hat and Kay's eyes rested with distress, boredom, a veiled malevolence on the bald head.

‘Can we see you home?' Conder asked.

‘But I don't want to go home yet,' Kay said. ‘It's early.' She leant against the lamp-post and pressed her cheek against the iron.

‘Come to the park then,' Jules said.

‘It'll be cold.'

‘A café.'

‘Both of you come with me,' Conder said, ‘and have a drink at the “Fitzroy”.'

‘I've had too many drinks at the “Fitzroy”. Can't you suggest something new, something exciting?'

Conder put his hand to his head. ‘I'd ask you to come and have some supper, but you see I've got to meet someone at 10.45.' She smiled with unbelief. Men couldn't even think of a new excuse.

‘We could go to a cinema for an hour,' Jules said.

‘I don't want to go to a cinema or a café or a pub, and I don't want to go home and I don't want to walk about in the park.' The men stood round her with perplexed irritated faces. They ought to understand, she thought, what home will be like with Milly waiting there, not sleeping, not taking off her clothes, hopelessly entangled with a man who is not there, who will never be there again. She wondered with a kind of vexed sensuality what it felt like to be so tied to a man. These were men, standing round her offering coffee and beer and moving pictures, and never dreaming – you could tell from the dull depressed faces – that the only thing she wanted now, this minute, this night, was the knowledge of what it felt to be so tied to a man.

Jules said: ‘It's nearly 10.45, Conder, now.'

She gazed from one to the other of them, from Conder, short, shabby, with a bald head and ink-stained fingers, and nails blunt from a typewriter, to Jules with the lost look she told herself it would be easy to love.

‘Won't anybody say something funny? I want to laugh.' She knew suddenly that Jules understood, that if Conder had not been there, he would have made love to her, but this knowledge irritated her and when Conder looked at his watch and said, ‘Yes, really. I must be off,' she exerted all her charms to keep Conder, smiling and pouting, a faint evocation of a famous film actress in a small part in an early faded film. ‘Oh, but I know you just aren't interested in me. You've not really got an appointment.'

‘Believe me, Miss Kay,' Conder said, ‘there's no one I'd rather stay and talk to, and I hope that you'll let me call around at the works and take you out to lunch one day. If it wasn't so important –'

‘What is it anyway?'

‘Ah, but ladies can't keep secrets,' Conder said, bowing impressively. His personalities flickered so quickly that he was himself confused, uncertain whether he was the revolutionary, the intimate of Scotland Yard, or, a new part this, the master spy. He took off his hat and moved quickly round the corner into Charlotte Street, head a little bent, butting against the cold sweep of the wind.

‘Kay,' Jules said.

‘Look,' she said quickly, ‘there's Mr Surrogate.' Mr Surrogate came out of the cinema alone, paler than when he entered. He had shut himself into a lavatory until he thought the place was clear, for he was unwilling to encounter Bennett. It would arouse bad feeling, he told himself, the party mustn't be split into groups; and at intervals, hearing feet prowling round the wash-basins, he had pulled the chain convincingly. His face clouded when he heard his name spoken, but it cleared again at the sight of a girl under the lamp-post. He padded deprecatingly across the pavement. It was quite like the old days of the Fabian Society. ‘Well, Comrade? What about a cup of coffee?' He looked at her more closely. ‘You are the girl who cried.'