Ravenscliffe (64 page)

He looked back down at the papers. Antley Hall, Warwickshire. Canbrook Court, Wiltshire. Pemberton House, Belgravia. Wetherton Manor, Derbyshire. He looked up again.

‘We’ve a general election to fight,’ he said. His expression was dark.

‘I know. And when it’s over, I shall either be wife of an MP or not, but I shall be free, either way, to work if I wish.’

‘You’ve said no, though? You can’t work for all these damned toffs,’ he said. ‘It’s not fitting for t’wife of a Labour politician.’

She left unsaid the obvious, that he might yet lose.

‘I didn’t say no, I said thank you, and I said I’d think it over. And if I decide to do it, I’d like your blessing, but I don’t need it. In any case, where will our money come from, when – if – you’re elected?’

This was a good question. There was no weekly wage for an MP. Keir Hardie and the small handful of other Labour men in the House of Commons took donations from well-wishers and unions, and small salaries from the ILP, but Amos was by no means sure how deep that pot was, or how full.

‘We’d manage,’ he said though, stubborn and infuriating. ‘Anyroad, that’s of no account. I just don’t want you mixing with their ilk. I thought Netherwood ’all would be t’last of it.’

He didn’t raise his voice in the least and his conversational tone – maintained for Maya’s benefit – belied the challenge in his eyes. Beside him, the kettle started to whistle, but he ignored it.

‘Where’s the disgrace in it?’ she said.

‘Can’t you see ’ow it’ll look to my detractors? Don’t be naïve, Anna.’

She was trying hard to stay calm, but he was making it very difficult.

She swallowed hard. ‘I’ll fight every waking moment to get you elected – to give you what you want,’ she said. ‘And then we’ll talk about this – about what I might want.’ They looked at each other, both of them miserable now.

‘Amos?’

This was Maya, down from her chair and tugging at his trousers. He bent down and picked her up.

‘Now then, sunbeam. What is it?’

‘Kettle’s whistling.’

‘So it is.’

He put her down and pulled it off the hob.

‘Thank goodness for you,’ he said to her. ‘Wherever would we be without you?’

Anna said, ‘I thought of something today. Invite voters to come to you here, in the house, with issues that are important to them. You can listen, I can give them tea and cake, they go home thinking what a good Member of Parliament Amos Sykes would be.’ She smiled at him, and it was as if the cross words had never been spoken. This was like her: to dispel ill feeling before it took root. She was a wonderful woman, he thought.

‘You’re a wonderful woman,’ he said.

She stood up, crossed the kitchen, and kissed him.

‘Best of luck,’ she said, and kissed him again.

‘T
he cat’s among the pigeons now, good and proper.’

Daniel waved the day’s edition of the
Daily Telegraph
as he walked into the kitchen. Eve was sitting in the armchair, her feet up on a wooden stool. She looked pale, he thought. He sat on the broad arm of the chair and opened up the newspaper.

‘Listen to this. You’ll never believe it.’ He cleared his throat. Eve waited, watching him. Then he began to read.

‘Suffragists caused pandemonium at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall yesterday, when Winston Churchill, the Liberal candidate for North-West Manchester, addressed the packed assembly. Mr Churchill, who recently left the Conservative Party to join the Liberals, is known to sympathise with the suffragist movement, and yet his views did not protect him from constant interruption as he tried to deliver his address. In some exasperation, Mr Churchill invited one particularly vehement heckler onto his platform to put her views “in a civilised manner”. Lady Henrietta Hoyland’ – Daniel paused here for effect, and indeed Eve was suitably astonished, eyes wide, hands at her open mouth – ‘Lady Henrietta Hoyland, the eldest daughter of the late Edward Hoyland, Sixth Earl
of Netherwood, proceeded to berate Mr Churchill and the party he now represents. When she left the platform, Mr Churchill announced that nothing would induce him to vote for women’s enfranchisement after the disruption she and her cohorts had engineered. Later, Mr Churchill admitted he still had some sympathy with the cause, but that he “would not be henpecked”. After the event, Lady Henrietta spoke to journalists outside the Free Trade Hall. She condemned the Liberal Party for “professing to champion political freedom while consistently blocking any progress for the Women’s Franchise”. She went on to say: “If the Liberal Party will not promise to give votes to women before the election, they will certainly not do it afterwards.” Lady Henrietta is rapidly becoming known as one of the leading and most vocal members of the Women’s Social and Political Union.’

Daniel put down the paper and laughed. ‘Can you credit it?’ he said.

Eve said. ‘Manchester. Whatever is she doing in Manchester?’

‘Up and down there all the time, they say. The servants’ hall was in a proper lather about it this afternoon. You’d think she’d brought disgrace on Parkinson personally. He’s walking about the place like he’s following a coffin.’

‘Poor thing. What about t’family?’

‘Cheerful enough, from what little I’ve seen. The new guard take modern life pretty much in their stride. Not sure about her mother, though.’

He thought of the dowager countess and her old preoccupations: pagodas, peaches, palm houses. She had never given a thought to the wider world, the world outside the perimeter walls of Netherwood Hall or Fulton House. Now her daughter was harassing MPs and government ministers, dragging the family name into the newspapers, bringing
politics and polemic to the drawing room. It was, as Amos would say, a rum do.

Daniel put the paper down and ran a hand through Eve’s hair. ‘How’re you feeling, love?’

‘Weary,’ she said. ‘I went to ’ave a look at Ginger in Barnsley, and ended up behind t’counter for a couple of hours. She was run off ’er feet.’

‘Then take on another girl. Don’t be running yourself ragged.’

Eve yawned. ‘I’ve asked Sarah if she wants to go. It’s easier to find somebody new in Netherwood than to start looking for staff in Barnsley.’

‘And does Sarah want to go?’

‘She’s got to ask Nellie first. She won’t do owt that might worry ’er mam. Nellie likes Sarah to be where she can see ’er.’

For a little while they sat on in silence. The kitchen was always the warmest part of the house and today Eve had stoked up the range and lit a fire against the January cold. It had been a mild winter so far: too mild, really. There was spring blossom on the trees and the wrong flowers unfurling their tender petals in the garden. But suddenly nature had had a change of mind and when Daniel had left the house at half-past five this morning, the common had been white with hoar frost: cobwebs, blades of grass, the tangle of hawthorn and blackthorn branches in the hedgerow, were all transformed into works of intricate art. He had almost turned back to wake Eliza so that she could see the glory. He had crunched on, though, through the carpet of frost, leaving perfect footprints in his wake, the first of the day, as if he was the only man walking through this white world.

‘Are the bairns with Lilly?’

Eve shook her head. ‘They’re at Anna’s. Went straight to Ardington when school finished.’

‘Ellen too?’

‘It would’ve taken a stronger woman than me to try and
stop ’er. She went with Seth and Eliza. We should go ourselves before too long. I told Anna we’d be there for t’count.’

‘Are you sure you’re up to it? It could be a long night.’

He placed a gentle, proprietorial hand on her swollen belly. Four months to go, and then they would see who was in there.

‘I’ll be fine. I was on my feet from morning till night when I fell for t’other three. Look at me now, feet up by t’fire like Lady Muck.’

He smiled. ‘Right-o, your ladyship. I’ll just shrug off these work clothes and then we’ll be off.’

He kissed her on the head, then left the room and went upstairs. She closed her eyes. On the fire, a log shifted and the movement made it fizz with new life. In the small of her back, where it had started to ache, she had pushed one of Anna’s cushions, a patchwork of velvet in as many blues as she had been able to find in the remnants bin at Butterwick’s. Anna was all over the house, still. She was in the colours on the walls, the rugs on the floors, the fabrics on the chairs and at the windows and even in the particular arrangement of the furniture. It was a comfort, thought Eve, but she still missed her every day she didn’t see her. Anna – slightly cavalier about meal times and bed times, always more interested in what someone had to say than whether their shirt was clean or their hair was brushed – had countered Eve’s domestic excesses: shown her that she could delay the cleaning or the washing and the world would not come crashing down around her. Once, when bright rays of sunshine broke through a pewter sky and a perfect rainbow had arched over the common, Eve had said she couldn’t come to look because she was busy. Anna had marched through the house, manhandled the broom out of Eve’s hands, and pushed her bodily up the hallway and out into the front garden. ‘See?’ she had said, pointing upwards, and
the rainbow had been spectacular, every colour bold and clear against the next. ‘In seconds, it will be gone. The kitchen floor, however, will still be there.’

The Labour campaign in Ardington had been as good as it could be, and if Amos didn’t take the seat it wouldn’t be for lack of trying. He and Enoch had been given leave by the YMA to put their union duties on hold for the duration, though the old Liberal traditionalists who formed the hierarchy there made it perfectly clear that their money was on Webster Thorne. Anna’s idea of inviting the electorate into their home had been a masterstroke. Amos had sat behind a desk in the front parlour listening to their concerns, noting them down; Anna had plied them with currant buns. True, some people came more than once with patently trumped-up excuses, and other people came, blatant and unapologetic, only for the buns. Eve had had to lend them Alice Buckle to keep up with the demand. Alice had stationed herself in Anna’s kitchen and baked with ferocious intensity, like a revolutionary in a makeshift bomb factory, stockpiling grenades for an oncoming battle. Towards the end of the campaign Keir Hardie had come, graciously stopping off at Ardington on his twelve-hundred-mile tour of the country to personally endorse the Labour candidate and air his own manifesto at a packed meeting in Ardington church hall. He was a bit too radical for round here, Enoch thought, but on the other hand, he was a national figure, a Labour legend, the pit boy who won a seat in Parliament and rode to the House of Commons on a wagonette while a lone trumpeter played the ‘Marseillaise’.

‘Very best of luck, Mr Sykes,’ he had said, shaking Amos’s hand at the end of the evening. He was at the tail end of his national tour and heading back that same night to his own
Merthyr constituency. ‘I shall see you in the House of Commons before this month is out.’

‘Wish I ’ad ’is confidence,’ Amos had muttered to Enoch, after the great man had gone. ‘And ’is constituency, for that matter.’

‘It was ’ard graft won Merthyr Tydfil in 1900, just as ’ard graft will win you this one,’ Enoch had said. He was proud of his man, and proud of himself for spotting his potential. True, Webster Thorne had upped his game, reinventing himself since the by-election as a Liberal reformer with a newfound passion for social housing and old-age pensions. He’d lost that pot belly, too, Enoch had noticed, and by all accounts had turned teetotal in his quest for serious-mindedness. A mistake, Enoch and Amos agreed: you couldn’t trust a man who stood at the bar with a glass of bitter lemon in his hand.

Anyway, it was all over now. The votes were cast and the ballot boxes were in the hands of the council officers, whose job it was to count the crosses. It was a three-man race in Ardington, though an unwinnable one for the Conservatives. This was the case at the best of times, but in this contest, thrown into disarray by Balfour’s resignation, the party had hastily selected a candidate who knew neither the constituency nor the county and had made his way to Ardingly by mistake. By the time he had got himself from Sussex to Yorkshire, no one could take him seriously. This, although it had been the cause of much hilarity at the hapless man’s expense, was a worry to the Sykes team: there were few natural Tory voters in Ardington, but those there were might very well turn Liberal for want of a serious candidate of their own. What they wouldn’t do, as Amos never tired of telling Enoch, was vote Labour.

At the back of the polling station – the church hall on any other day – Eve had arranged two wooden chairs so that she could sit down with her feet up and not be in anyone’s
way. Anna sat next to her, though she was up and down constantly, always in demand. Anyway, conversation was effortful, such was the throng, Liberal and Labour supporters trying to outdo each other in robust stoicism as the evening dragged on towards night. Maya was fast asleep on Eve’s lap, facing forwards, her little body curled like a cat over the bump. Ellen and Eliza, frenzied by fatigue, made circuits of the room, galloping like giddy thoroughbreds, neither of them able to remember why they’d started, neither of them willing to stop. Seth stood with the men, listening to their talk, affecting their expressions of preoccupied gravity. A miasma of smoke, added to constantly by their pipes and cigarettes, hung above their heads.