The Children's Book (93 page)

Nevertheless, he undertook to lecture for the newly formed National Committee for the Break-Up of the Poor Law. This body, Beatrice Webb’s brainchild, had its offices between the Fabian Society’s premises and the London School of Economics, all just off the Strand. Their members overlapped considerably—they were all working to the same end. They hoped to be more realistic than the socialists. Beatrice Webb said that the vision of a socialist could stand as a long-term aim, but in the meantime something must be done with “the millions of destitute persons which constitute an infamous and wholly unnecessary accompaniment to an Individualist State.”

Individualist politics was difficult. There were meetings, conferences, summer schools, study groups and leaflets. There were sixteen thousand members, and branches everywhere. There were eleven paid employees and four hundred lecturers on call. The lecturers included, as well as Charles/Karl, Rupert Brooke, who travelled in a picturesque caravan from the New Forest to Corfe and back. He and his friend spoke engagingly on village greens and street corners. Beatrice Webb meant to bring about “a rapid but almost unconscious change in the
substance
of society.” Rupert Brooke was euphoric about human beings and human nature.

In 1910 also the Fabians held a summer camp. The camps were on the North Welsh coast—two weeks for the campaign workers who included a mix of Fabian Nursery, lower-class professionals, elderly ladies, teachers and politicians. These were followed by a conference of Fabians from universities. The University Fabians were high-spirited and the Cambridge contingent were camp. Rupert reported, to Lytton Strachey, late-night titillations and rampages. Beatrice Webb complained that they held “boisterous, larky entertainments” and were “inclined to go away rather more critical and supercilious than when they came … They won’t come unless they know who they are going to meet, sums up Rupert Brooke… they don’t want to learn, they don’t think they have anything to learn… the egotism of the young university man is colossal.”

Julian and Griselda did not go to this camp. Charles/Karl went to the camp for the campaign workers. The women wore gym tunics. The men wore flannels or breeches and stout socks. There were sensible shoes, and gymnastic exercises, and swimming. Charles/Karl had managed to persuade Elsie Warren to leave Ann with Marian Oakeshott and come to the camp. Elsie was reading and thinking with a speed and intensity much fiercer than Rupert Brooke’s little dives into Elizabethan poetry. As though her life depended on it, said Charles/Karl. It does, said Elsie. She read Matthew Arnold and George Eliot,
A Modern Utopia
and
News from Nowhere
, Morris’s poems and Edward Carpenter. She wrote down what she liked and disliked about her reading in an exercise book she did not show to Charles/Karl.

There was supposed to be no sex at Fabian camps. There was companionship, and purpose, and a clean mind in a clean body. Elsie asked questions, and questioned the answers she got. When she arrived, her
accent was defiantly midlands. In fact she could, if she chose, neutralise it to a flat, nondescript intonation. Charles/Karl watched her engage battle and make friendships with a teacherly pleasure. There was also sex. Charles/Karl knew, he thought, that Elsie “liked” him. They had private jokes. They were at ease with each other. Too much, Charles/ Karl thought. Much depended on the weather. On one of the sunnier days they took a walk together, and sat down on a hummock nibbled by sheep. I should like to kiss you, said Charles/Karl.

“And then what?” said Elsie, moving neither closer nor further, lying at his side and examining the earth.

“Well, and then we might find out.”

“Find out what?” said Elsie steadfastly.

“Hurting you, in any way, is the worst thing I can think of.”

“And losing my independence is my worst.”

“You can give me an independent kiss.”

“Can I? I don’t think so. One thing leads to another.”

“You can’t say,” said Charles/Karl, daring greatly, “that you haven’t been led before. You know about it. I don’t.”

Elsie frowned. “You haven’t met a real snake in human form, I don’t think. A bird-charming snake with cold eyes and a
will.”

“I have a will. But I don’t want to hurt you—”

“There’s a lot of things you don’t want to do, as well as that. Another thing I don’t want, is not to be friends with you. It means a lot to me.”

Charles reached for her hand. She let him. He moved his face towards hers, and she closed her eyes. And then snapped her lips shut and turned away.

At the end of the camp, Charles/Karl and Elsie set off a day early, missing a talk by Herbert Methley on “Art and Freedom, Social and Personal.” Elsie said she didn’t want to hear him, and Charles concurred. “We can change trains,” he said, “and look at the countryside.” He waited. “All right,” said Elsie.

They ended up at a pretty pub in Oxfordshire, with a garden sloping down to a stream, and roses, and pinks, and forget-me-nots. Charles said: “Elsie, you are Mrs. Wellwood.”

“No I’m not, and won’t be. But you can say so, this once. Just this once. I’ve thought it out, and I owe you.”

“Owe,”
said Charles. “Damn you. I want you to be happy.”

“I’m not ever going to be happy. I’ve got out of my place, and not into any other. But here we can play-act, if you want, I said we could.”

In the bedroom to which they were shown, he thought of kissing her, and thought he would not kiss her, and opened the window on to the lawn so that they could hear the river running. Midges flew in. He closed the window. Elsie, her back rigid, brushed her hair out, and put it up again, her back to Charles/Karl. But she saw him in the mirror, and saw his look of anxiety, and gave him a rueful grin as she stabbed in the last hairpin. He smiled back at the glassy Elsie.

They went down to supper, one behind the other on the shallow steps with their worn carpet. The dining-room had pretty wallpaper and flowery curtains. Elsie sat up straight as a ruler, and clenched her hands in her lap. She chose mushroom soup, and roast leg of lamb with green peas, and plum tart. So did Charles/Karl. He said

“That fellow, Methley, is an ass.”

“He doesn’t write about the real world, that’s for sure.” She looked at her plate. “He takes people in, though.” She said “Mrs. Methley, she was very good to me, along with Mrs. Oakeshott and Miss Dace. Women who might have been prim and nasty. They saved me, really.”

Charles/Karl said “All sorts of things are changing.” He wanted to say something personal and reassuring about her past disaster, but did not know what. He saw she knew that. The soup came, and bread, on little plates painted with flying storks and rising storks and feathery reeds. Charles/Karl asked if there was wine, and was brought a short wine-list and ordered a bottle of white Burgundy. Elsie said

“Minton. The storks. My mum—my mother—used to paint the storks. We got one or two seconds. They weren’t her favourite. Japanese-style, she said they were, and the storks were for long life. For babies, she said, in England, and she had too many of those.” She paused. “She died of white lead. She were an artist, was an artist, if she could have had the opportunity. Philip got it from her. She died o’ white lead and too many children. We had a daft song.”

“Yes?” said Charles/Karl.

“Seven in a bed and one of ’em dead” said Elsie on a sort of rush. “Philip and me made it up. There was nowhere to—to put me brother
when he died, so he had to stay there, wi’ all of us coughing and like to go as well.”

She said “I’m sorry.”

“What for? I want you to talk to me. Tell me things.”

“They’re not nice things for this good meal on these pretty plates. It brought it back. You’ve been good to me, like Mrs. Methley and Mrs. Oakeshott. I’m grateful.”

“You are saying that,” said Charles/Karl, “to emphasise—to act—the class difference between you and me. Which we ought to forget.”

“There’s real cream in the soup. Just the right amount. That’s an art, too. We can’t forget the difference.”

His mind was full of a picture of seven—dirty—people, crammed coughing into one bed, and one of them dead. He saw Elsie, wielding her soup-spoon, neatly. It was a strong face, indrawn with self-control, alert with curiosity. It was alien, partly because of the class difference, because of what she had lived, and what he had not lived. He said

“I love you, when you look cross like that, and set your shoulders.”

The firm face quivered. “Don’t make me cry. It would be embarrassing. I should embarrass you.”

There was a silence. The lamb came and was eaten, whilst they talked of the summer school lectures and Elsie said Mr. Shaw could imitate anyone’s accent and then iron it out. She talked about Shakespeare. She talked about Rosalind and Viola, dressed as men, having to take charge of things, full of hope. She asked Charles/Karl “How did he know?” and said there was no other man who wrote so well about women, so you believed he knew them from inside, so to speak.

“And then, there’s Lady Macbeth, who suddenly says she has given suck to a baby. That’s the only mention. She don’t—doesn’t—seem like a woman who has a baby and she only mentions it to say she’d tear it away from its feeding. It’s terrifying. He meant it to be.”

They analysed Cordelia, and Goneril and Regan, and enjoyed their talk. The plum tart had a delicious custard. Cream, again, said Elsie, good rich cream. Thickened with eggs and cream, not just cornflour.

There was no one in the world whose company gave him such pleasure. But he could not say, he was at ease with her. He could not say, he felt “right” or “at home” with her. He didn’t. And then he thought, that was part of it, that drew him to her.

They went up to the bedroom. Charles/Karl said it was a pity about the midges. Elsie began to take off her clothes, in a practical sort of way, finding coat-hangers, aligning shoes under the bed, as though she was alone in the room. She hung her skirt, and blouse, and went, in her petticoat, to clean her teeth, still looking practical. He loved her muscles, as she bent to untie shoes or stretched to hang her skirt. She brushed her teeth fiercely. She said “Don’t just
stand.”

So he too began to undress, shoes, woollen socks, breeches, jacket. His feet were long and white. They looked unused. He brushed his own teeth. He brushed his hair, for no good reason, and Elsie laughed. So he walked over to her and began to undo her bodice, with slightly tremulous fingers. She put her fingers over his and helped him. All their fingers were electric. She stepped out of her petticoat, and out of her bodice and stood there in her drawers.

“What the butler saw,” said Elsie Warren.

Her breasts were carved, like a goddess, he thought, and her nipples were brown, chestnut brown.

She turned, and bent, and lifted the cover, and slid into the bed. The cover was white cotton embroidered with white rosebuds and roses.

Charles/Karl took off both his rational vest and his Jaeger underpants. He thought, this sort of thing happens in most lives and always differently. He felt a little drunk, but was not.

He got into the bed, beside her, and did not know what to do, partly because he did not know what she wanted. Beside him, she slid out of her drawers and moved close to him. She stroked him, and he grabbed at her, and she wriggled and laughed, and took hold of him, and guided him—like
this
, just like
this
, said Elsie Warren. And she took his hand, and guided it down, between the curls and twists of their underhair, and then he, or it, or they knew what to do, and found a rhythm, and he said, on a caught breath, “Oh, are you happy now?” and she said “Yes. More now. Oh yes.”

Breakfast was happy and sad. There were already things between them that they were not saying, not discussing, deliberately not thinking. He did not think about seeing that fine face over breakfast for the rest of his life, nor did he think of sleeping nightly with his hand on those carved breasts or between the lean, strong legs. He did say, they could find a
place for another night, and she did say “I mustn’t stay away from Ann, Ann needs me.”

•  •  •

Walking across the gravel path to the cab, after paying the bill, he thought confusedly that he could now never marry, because he could not imagine wanting another woman. He had made decisions that had made… muddle … for everyone.

In 1911 King George V was crowned in Westminster Abbey on June 22nd in the middle of the longest hottest summer the country had known. The King took a measure of 98° Fahrenheit on his greenhouse thermometer. Neo-Pagans slid naked into cool pools in Grantchester, under hanging boughs, and hid giggling in the undergrowth, watching punts pass, full of tourists and dons. The royal yacht
Hohenzollern
carried the Kaiser and his family to the Coronation. Queen Mary wore a hat with cream roses and delicate feathers. In July the Kaiser sent the new German gunboat,
Panther
, to Agadir and was accused by the French and the English of interfering in French colonial affairs.

The Webbs, the driving force of the Fabian Society, had absented themselves from heat, gaiety and tension together, and had parted for Canada on a tour that was to take them a year. Work at the National Committee diminished in intensity. This was partly because the poor, the workers and their dependants, were stirring with discontent, dissatisfaction, determination and even rage, all over the country. There had been miners’ strikes and railwaymen’s strikes, strikes of woollen and worsted workers in Yorkshire and of cotton spinners in Lancashire, strikes by the Card and Blowing Room Operatives’ Association. In that hot summer there was a wave of action beginning with seamen’s and firemen’s strikes in Poole and Hull two days before the Coronation. Then the dock workers joined the seamen and firemen. Agreements were reached, threats of military action were made, new demands arose amongst the workers. In August, there was a strike of the Transport Workers, who were joined by the lightermen, the stevedores, the carters, the tugboatmen, the crane porters, the coal bunkerers and the sailing bargemen. The Port of London came to a stop. Vegetables rotted and butter went rancid in casks. Frozen meat from Argentina, New Zealand and the USA went foul, green and noisome as the refrigeration ships gave up work, powerless. Starvation threatened. At this point the women of Bermondsey, led by Mary Macarthur, suddenly left their work and ran into the streets, shouting and singing. It was spontaneous: they did not have one overwhelming grievance; they had discovered that their lives were intolerable and the world they lived in unacceptable and unjust.