Flint and Roses (19 page)

Results, she felt, would be less than perfect, since election, in many cases had been sought for prestige rather than a desire to be of service, and it seemed unfair to her that from a population of over seventy thousand only some five thousand persons had a property qualification high enough to enable them to vote at all. But the town council would do more, surely, than the old Lighting and Watching Commissioners had ever done—would have to do more, since the councillors had made such a fuss about getting the Charter in the first place—and she could think of no one better, she assured me, than Mayor Agbrigg to lead them.

‘We have always seen him as a quiet man,' she wrote, ‘the least regarded of all that family, where it was always Jonas's brilliance and Aunt Hannah's determination we were taught to admire. A gloomy man, with just cause to be gloomy, perhaps, since I am now sufficiently in his confidence to have been informed of the hardships and sorrows of his past. But a sound man, who has not taken office for his own glory, nor because his wife wishes her share of it, but because he intends to be useful. I like him.'

And, in the manner of Caroline, she forgot, or did not think it worth a mention, that Freddy Hobhouse had proposed to her and offered to wait indefinitely for a reply.

‘Dear Hannah,' my mother had murmured that same morning, sentimental with Chianti and sunshine, ‘what a great day for her—we shall have our concert hall now, with your father's name upon it, you may be very sure. I must write to her at once, and have something delivered—something quite splendid as a token of our congratulations—for she will need our help now, poor Hannah. I doubt if she can extract much more from Joel, and she will spend every penny her husband possesses to make sure his term of office is remembered, and to pave the way for Jonas to come after him. Goodness—if she knew what this lilac taffeta has just cost me.

And it surprised us both, I think, for a moment or two, that Ira Agbrigg's first act as mayor was not the drumming-up of subscriptions for that famous concert hall, but an attempt to purchase with public money the privately owned and disastrously mismanaged Cullingford Waterworks Company, so that Simon Street—the putrid district where Prudence, it seemed, in the company of her seriousminded friends, had actually set foot—would no longer be forced to rely on a single stand-pipe, turned on half an hour a day, or the erratic services of a water-cart.

‘Good heavens!' my mother said, wrinkling her nose. ‘I do not think Hannah will take very kindly to a waterworks as a memorial. Could it be that Mr. Agbrigg is not really so tame as we supposed? Ah well, we will go to Switzerland next, Faith—next week, in fact—for they have an abundance of water there. And you may tell dear Prudence that I cannot, approve of her visits to Simon Street, nor in the least understand what she can find to do there. In fact I am quite shocked, and not altogether comfortable about yesterday's news that I am to be a grandmamma. No, I realize you were not aware of it, for Celia wrote to me in great secret, considering it improper for young ladies like yourself and Prudence to be informed. However, she describes herself as being in an “interesting condition”, which I assume to mean “with child”. And that, my dear, is bound to take us home again—in six months or so—since both Celia and our Lady Mayoress will expect me to be in attendance at the great event. Ah well. Monsieur Fauret is going to Martinique in any case. Switzerland, then, and Paris to follow. And I think we had best start saying to ourselves, over and over, how pleasant it will be to see Cullingford again.'

We were away just over a year, journeying north again through a raw November, a pall of thick yellow fog obscuring the platform at Leeds, where we changed trains for Cullingford, so that my mother murmured, again and again. ‘Heavens, how dark it is! One forgets, every time, how dark—how very meagre.' And, since she had come home merely to await the birth of her grandchild, and to review her finances with Uncle Joel, it was as well she could not know that events in Europe would soon prevent her from setting off again.

We were standing all unawares on the threshold of a revolutionary year, when the people of France would rise up once again and replace their ageing king, Louis Philippe, with a new republic, releasing a spark of disobedience which would consume with stunning rapidity the autocratic governments of Italy, Germany, Bavaria, Hungary; a vast earthquake of revolt against poverty and oppression, against the yoke of the Habsburg Empire, the yoke of the landlord and the proprietor, against the old tyranny of the aristocrat and the new tyranny of the industrialist. It was a year which sent hundreds of that desperate class we called the ‘labouring poor'to sacrifice themselves in the street-fighting in Milan, in Berlin, in Vienna when the Habsburgs marched in to take it back again; to tear up the paving stones of my mother's beloved Paris, and be slaughtered at their barricades, searching, one supposed, for the liberty and equality which all previous revolutions had promised and then managed somehow to deny. It was a year when our own revolutionaries, the Chartists, would attempt to march on Westminster, bearing a petition of five million signatures, and as many men as they could muster, demanding a vote for every adult male in Britain, and that old revolutionary dream, a secret ballot, to shield him from the persuasion of landlord and millmaster.

Yet we knew nothing of that, standing chilled and travel weary in the swirling fog of a Leeds November—luckily, perhaps, since my mother, who had grown quieter, sadder with every Northern mile, may well have turned tail and rushed back at once, while the ports were still open, and risked herself at the barricades.

‘How dark!' she said again, as Cullingford loomed into sight. ‘Midnight at four in the afternoon. Have I really spent my life here?'

And even I—for whom this was a true homecoming, the rest already little more than a summer dream—was briefly saddened by the rain-soaked, wind-raked hills, the chimney-stacks belching their malodorous welcome on the sky-line; by the soot-blackened mass of Cullingford itself as we stepped out of the station, a town not planned for beauty, not planned at all, but thrown down anyhow to suit the convenience of millmasters, a factory here, a nettle-bed of workers'cottages there, even the parish church—which no longer seemed so noble to my travelled eyes—obscured now by the hastily constructed demands of industry.

‘The people—' my mother moaned. ‘How sad they are!' And so they seemed, bowed heads shawl-wrapped and cowering against the cold, perpetually hurrying, since nothing in these cobbled, narrow streets offered an inducement to linger; closed carriages looming mud-spattered out of the fog, a sudden cough, muffled by thick air and distance, and then another, a grey drizzle, a factory hooter somewhere mournfully marking time.

‘I had forgotten how they cough,' my mother said, shivering. ‘I suppose it is the smoke, and those insanitary dwellinghouses your sister speaks of'And pressing her handkerchief to her face, she walked quickly across the station yard to where our coachman was waiting.

‘Well then, Thompson. We're home again.'

‘Aye, ma'am,' he replied. ‘Dratted train was late.' And we set off for Blenheim Lane.

Prudence was in the hallway to greet us, crisp and near in a gown that had all her usual quiet elegance, her hair a shade or two darker than I remembered, parted in the middle, drawn smoothly over her ears into a low chignon that gave her narrow face a becoming air of maturity. And although I loved her and had longed to see her again, there was a moment almost of shyness when I knew we had not really missed each other.

For the past year, apart from the ineffectual fluttering of Miss Mayfield, she had been her own mistress, had made her own arrangements, her own acquaintances, expressed her own opinions regardless of effect or consequences, come and gone to suit no one but herself, certainly not her whimsical, capricious mother. But now we must both be ‘young ladies at home', and as the house I still thought of as my father's reached out to claim me—so dim and cool, so very still—I could not tell how long it would be before we found each other again.

‘My word, you are very smart,' she said, coming to assist with the unpacking of my boxes. But my tales of Monsieur Albertini, the couturier, of Roman gardens and flirtations under Parisian chestnut trees did not interest her, whilst her references to Mayor Agbrigg's plans for drainage and sewage were an astonishment to me.

‘And what has become of Aunt Hannah's concert hall, then?'

‘Oh, she will have it. I suppose. But Mayor Agbrigg will not be remembered for that. He has sense enough to know that if Aunt Hannah is allowed to busy herself about the concert hall she will not interfere with his own projects. And his projects are admirable, Faith—truly. He will have a great fight on his hands to buy the Waterworks, for the owners do not at all wish to relinquish it. But he will succeed. It is useless, you know, to preach about “cleanliness being next to godliness” to people who are without sufficient water for drinking and cooking, let alone washing. If you live in a street where the stand-pipe is only turned on once a day and you have but one bucket capable of holding water—and you have a family of eight or ten children in your two-roomed cottage—you do not use that water for scrubbing your floors. You boil your potatoes in it, no matter how discoloured it may be, or what nameless particles of filth you find floating in it, and then you drink the potato water. Presumably you make tea with any drops that are left, and then wait—all eight or ten of you thoroughly unwashed—until tomorrow, when the tap is turned on again. It is water they need, Faith, not a sermon—and not a concert hall either. And I am convinced Mayor Agbrigg can provide it.'

‘Goodness, such fervour! I do hope so. And what of Celia and our dear brother Jonas?'

She made a slight movement of her shoulders, a half-shrug of impatience and a little pity. ‘I rarely see them. He works. She polishes her silver teapot. I have been too occupied to spend much time with her.'

‘Occupied with what, Prudence?',

‘Well. I have made an acquaintance or two, you know. I have not been dull. In fact I have been quite daring, for I have even had some correspondence with Mr. Crispin Aycliffe, our brother.'

‘Prudence, you have not? My word, how very interesting!' And, much impressed, since this was a name we had been forbidden to mention, I sat down on my bed, the contents of my boxes scattered everywhere, the distance between us melting a way.

‘Yes—I discovered that an acquaintance of mine is acquainted with him too—a most odd coincidence—and so I obtained his address and wrote him a line or two about father's death and the arrangements which had been made, since I suppose no one else had troubled to inform him.'

‘You mean you offered him a share of your porcelain?'

‘Well,' she said, flushing slightly. ‘So I did. And I would have made sure he got it, too, whatever the Barforths and the Agbriggs may have had to say—since it is simply sitting there behind those glass cases doing nothing. And he may have been in need. However, he replied most courteously, thanking me but declining, and I have exchanged half a dozen letters with him since then. He has been living abroad but is now in London, married, respectable I suppose, except that he is a Chartist.'

‘Oh surely, Prue,' I said, fascinated, quite pleasantly horrified, ‘he cannot be that? Chartists are revolutionaries and criminals, are they not?'

‘Are they? They are demanding one man one vote, which may seem criminal to those who have the vote already. Hardly to those who do not.'

‘Well, I have never thought much about it. But who is this new acquaintance, then? Is he a Chartist too?'

‘Possibly it is a Dr. Ashburn, who comes originally from Cheshire, although he has travelled a great deal and has not been long in Cullingford. He gave a most memorable series of lectures last winter, to which Mayor Agbrigg escorted me, mainly, on social issues—starvation and alcoholism and infant mortality, that sort of thing, of which he has ample experience, since he has a great many patients in Simon Street.'

‘Good heavens! I thought no one in Simon Street could afford a doctor.'

‘They cannot—or very few—and so it is fortunate for Giles that he has private means.'

‘Oh yes—Giles, is it? I see.'

‘I think you do not.'

‘Do I not? Well then, Prue, what is he like, this Giles? Is he seventy-two, and bald, and fat as a bacon-pig?'

She smiled, a trifle unwillingly to begin with, but then with a decided glint of amusement in her eyes. ‘No. I think he may be thirty, or not much above it, and he is lean rather than fat. And yes, Faith—since you are clearly wondering—I do see him fairly often. But then, I see Freddy Hobhouse even more, and like him better than I used to, since he has stopped trying so hard to marry me. And I see a number of other gentlemen quite regularly besides—none of whom are seventy-two and bald—including Blaize Barforth, which may surprise you.' And, in my relief that she had not been seeing Nicholas, I said, without meaning to be unkind, ‘So it does. I cannot imagine what Blaize may find to amuse him in public health—and sewage.'

But my composed, apparently very contented sister, was not in the least offended.

‘Oh, he does not care a scrap about such things. I believe it merely amuses him to observe a young lady who does—since we are quite a rarity. And, when he chooses, Blaize can be very useful. He will work wonders when it suits him—as he did about the new equipment Giles wanted for the infirmary—although he tends to disappear the moment something else comes along to distract him. Well, one must accept him as he is, and get the best out of him when one can. He and Giles Ashburn are great friends—which may surprise you too.'

We went the next morning to Albert Place, where Celia, much altered by her condition, greeted us as if we had never been away, or at least as if she had not really noticed it. And as she drew my mother aside for a whispered consultation about the forthcoming event, of which Prudence and myself were supposed to be unaware, I saw that she, too, had but little interest in our travels.