No Angel (Spoils of Time 01) (13 page)

‘Giles doesn’t call me Lady Celia does he?’

Barty didn’t really understand what being part of the family was, but she knew she was different from Giles and the twins. Nobody treated them the same: certainly not Nanny. Or Lettie, who helped Nanny. Or Cook. Or Truman, who drove the car. They all – except for Nanny – called the twins Miss Adele and Miss Venetia and Giles was called Master Giles. They called her Barty. And not always nicely either. ‘Barty take this up to the twins, Barty, don’t sit there, that’s Master Giles’s place, Barty, don’t shout at Miss Adele like that, Barty, how dare you take Miss Venetia’s bricks.’

She really didn’t think any of them liked her. They certainly didn’t like her being there. Sometimes Lettie, for instance, would make a great show of giving her a cuddle if Aunt Celia was in the nursery and then the minute she’d gone, she would push her away, tell her to go and tidy up the toys or fetch the towels from the laundry room in the cellar so she could bath the twins. Barty didn’t exactly mind, it seemed quite all right, really; everyone at home had to help, but she couldn’t understand why Giles never had to do anything like that. And she didn’t like the way she’d find Nanny and Lettie talking in low voices, but when she came into the room they’d stop suddenly; in fact Nanny would often scold her for trying to listen to things she had no business to hear.

Much worse than any of that was missing her mother and missing her father and missing her brothers and sisters; and worst of all was her brothers and sisters not being so pleased to see her any more. Billy was kind, and let her play with him, but the others were – well, they were rude. Told her she wasn’t one of them any more, when she wanted to be one of them again more than anything. Sometimes as she was leaving she would look at the room, with all of them jammed round the table, eating bread and dripping, talking, shouting, laughing, and pushing each other, and she would think of the nursery, right at the top of the great big house, where there was just the twins, who were so horrid, and Giles who didn’t talk to anyone much, and Nanny and Lettie, telling her to eat up her supper quickly, or to stop talking with her mouth full, and where after tea each day the twins went to bed and Giles went to his own room to do his homework, and she just had to sit quietly so she didn’t disturb the twins, not play with the toys, even, until it was her bedtime, and she couldn’t bear it.

She did have her own room; it was very small, of course, not nearly as big as Giles’s, but it was nice, and she really liked it. She could do what she liked in it: look at books, or do some drawing, or just think quietly to herself without worrying about doing the wrong thing. It was very easy to do the wrong thing: to interrupt the twins if they were saying something – although they could interrupt her and everyone listened – or ask Giles to look at a book with her, or say she felt sick. For some reason, they didn’t like her to be ill. It made them cross.

‘I’ve got enough to do, looking after the other children, without this as well,’ Lettie had complained one night, when she had been coughing so much she had woken her up. And then when they discovered she was hot and had to stay in bed, she heard Nanny, saying to Lettie, ‘It just isn’t fair. Why should we have to wait on her? She’s not one of their children, not properly. Just come off the street really.’

That made Barty cry. But the worst thing of all was being told all the time, over and over again, how grateful she should be and how lucky she was. Everyone said that: not just her mother, who was bound to, of course, but Nanny and Lettie and Truman and every now and again, even Aunt Celia.

‘You’re a very lucky little girl, Barty,’ she said one night, quite sternly, when she had found her crying on the stairs and Barty had told her she wanted her mother, ‘you should be grateful instead of miserable. How do you think your mother would feel if she knew?’

Barty felt quite sure that if her mother did know, she’d take her back in spite of her dad being out of work; but she had been told so often she mustn’t worry her, that she would have found it almost impossible now to get the words out. She just had to be brave and good, and one day she would be allowed to go home again. One day.

‘I’m always surprised you don’t get more mixed up with them,’ said Jago. He was sitting in LM’s drawing room, reading Saturday’s
Daily Herald
; it carried on its front page a photograph of Mrs Pankhurst and some of her ladies, pressing a petition on some politician who was attempting rather unsuccessfully to ignore them. ‘I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again. There you are, perfect example, a successful working woman, college-educated, and you don’t throw your weight behind them. You ought to.’

‘You have indeed said it before, and as I’ve said before, I don’t have time,’ said LM slightly stiffly.

‘That’s no excuse. Suppose Mrs Pankhurst said that. Where’d you all be then?’

‘We’re still nowhere much yet, anyway.’

‘Meg! I’m surprised at you. You might not have got the vote yet, but everyone’s certainly thinking about it. Look at that demonstration last June, forty thousand women. All demanding the vote.’

‘Yes, and I was one of them.’

‘I know, I know. But that was about the beginning and the end of it, far as you were concerned. I think you should do more for them, I really do.’

‘I’m never quite sure why,’ she said, ‘why you care so much.’

‘It’s what politics is all about,’ he said simply, ‘to me. The underprivileged getting help. Getting their rights, getting what they need. Women are underprivileged, you must see that. Regarded as second class citizens. Paid shockingly. Kept down by men by a kind of divine right. It’s not right.’

‘I know it’s not right,’ said LM, ‘but I don’t feel I can do anything about it, Jago. Not personally. The very fact I
am
a working woman means I don’t have time to chain myself to railings and smash windows, all that sort of thing. I’m proving myself and my sex in other ways.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘doesn’t speak much for your sense of sisterhood, that’s all I can say. I think I’m going to join them anyway. Go to some meetings and that. Not the suffragettes probably, the suffragists. More peaceful, not so aggressive. Probably because a lot of men belong.’ He grinned.

‘Of course you must do that,’ said LM, ‘if that’s what you want.’

‘It is. And I will. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while now. Anyway, what about your work? Couldn’t you publish some books about it? That would be something you really could do to help. Half the problem is hardly anyone agrees with women getting the vote. Men say women are incapable of making a political decision, that they’d stop marrying and having children, all that rubbish. You could change all that. Well some of it, anyway.’

‘We run a publishing house, not a newspaper,’ said LM briskly. ‘It’s not our job to publish propaganda. Now are we going for this walk, or not, before it gets dark?’

‘I think we’re not,’ he said.

‘Why not? Because I’m not a good suffragette?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘because I can think of a better thing to do. On this very nasty cold afternoon. Even better than chaining yourself to a railing.’

She looked at him; he had thrown the paper down, was sitting back in his chair, a lazy grin softening his rather fierce features. LM’s senses lurched; she smiled back at him and stood up.

‘Come on then,’ she said, ‘let’s not waste any more time.’

But later, lying happily sated in his arms, his words came drifting back into her head. Perhaps there was something she could do for the suffragettes through Lyttons. Perhaps with Celia’s help . . .

‘I think it’s a wonderful idea,’ said Celia, ‘really wonderful. Of course we can’t publish propaganda as such. Although we could possibly do a biography of Mrs P. Or the Gore Booth sisters, they’re really interesting. Rich, aristocratic, clever and yet they believe in it all, work terribly hard. People would be fascinated by them, I’m sure. But I actually think the way to push the female cause is through fiction. Too much popular literature supports the notion of the little women at home, taking care of their menfolk. And when I think of women like Sylvia, of what they have to endure and go on enduring for the rest of their lives and their daughters after them – well . . .’

‘What does your Mrs Pember Reeves think about women’s suffrage?’ asked LM.

Celia’s face closed in on itself. ‘I – don’t quite know,’ she said quickly. ‘We never really talked about it.’

Celia and the Fabian movement had parted, extremely stormily, after the removal of Barty from her family. Mrs Pember Reeves had told her that, quite apart from making a serious mistake from the point of view of the movement and its aims (thereby forcing them to request Lady Celia’s immediate resignation) she had done something wrong and extremely cruel.

‘You have turned that child into a social experiment, Lady Celia. She will suffer for it all her life.’

Those words haunted Celia; two years later, when she was tired or dispirited, the memory of them could still reduce her to tears. She crushed them hastily now.

‘What we should do I think,’ she said slowly, ‘is find a really splendid woman novelist to write a book for us, with the suffragette movement at its heart. That would do a lot of good I’m sure. I’ll think about it really hard. Mind you, I haven’t got much time at the moment. We sail for America in two weeks. Oh LM, I’m so excited. On the
Titanic
! Her maiden voyage. How many people will be able to boast of that in years to come?’

Lyttons were riding high early that year. The publishing business was generally booming, the actual number of books published had increased from six thousand in 1900 to over twelve thousand in 1912. People wanted to read and the leisured classes had been joined in that by the working man – and woman – better educated now and eager to extend their personal horizons. Lyttons had somehow caught precisely the mood of the age: its new fiction was intelligent and challenging, not merely entertaining. Celia’s Biographica list fed the hunger for knowledge, and a new series of books that Oliver had proposed on popular scientific subjects, such as astronomy, meteorology and botany, were flying out of the bookshops.

‘We love your books, Mr Lytton,’ the proprietor of Hatchards, Piccadilly told him over lunch at the famous publishers’ table in the Garrick Club one day. ‘They have such a style of their own. However different the subject matter and indeed the design of the dust jackets, they all have – how can I express it – they all have such an air of quality. I never hesitate to recommend anything from the house of Lytton to anyone. I trust them. Let us raise our glasses to Lyttons and to quality.’

Such accolades had given Oliver the confidence to expand the company, increase print runs, hire extra staff. And to look at the American market – where already several of his English competitors were publishing. The forthcoming trip would be much more than just an opportunity to visit his brother’s home and meet the latest small Lytton. His working relationship with Celia had also settled into something more comfortable, less threatening than it had been in the early years; Oliver’s own self-assurance, his many personal successes, the fact he was now regarded in the literary world as one of the lions of publishing, had meant that he could see her not only as part of his winning team, but as important, essential, even, to it. He found himself able to consider her suggestions, to welcome her talent for innovation, to praise her, to criticise her, all with an easy disregard for the fact that she was his wife. Which in turn had its effect on their personal relationship, made it stronger, more robust, more pliable even. He still sometimes wished she was at home, running the household, caring for the children, but he could see that if he achieved that ambition, he would fail in another, equally precious: the growth of both the financial and literary success of Lyttons.

Celia had also become one of London’s literary hostesses: an invitation to a dinner party at the Lyttons was something to be angled for, talked about, treasured. There in the dining-room at the back of the house, overlooking the exqusitely designed, carefully wild garden, the great and the good would gather: writers, publishers, artists, actors, the occasional politician, anyone, indeed, with something interesting and original to say. The Longman cousins, Robert Guy and William L were favourite guests; so was John Murray, Sir Frederick Macmillan, William Collins IV and his younger brother Godfrey, and – perhaps Oliver’s greatest friend in the industry, Joseph Malaby Dent. They would be joined by the most famous literary names of their day, Macaulay, Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Hugh Walpole, Kipling, Harold Nicolson, and bringing grace and glamour to the occasion, the Sackville Wests, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Lady Diana Manners, the dazzling Grenfell brothers, Julian and Billy, and on one particuarly glorious occasion, the greatest dancers of their day, Nijinsky and Karsavina.

It was said that if Celia Lytton had ever wished to write a gossip column for her friend Lord Northcliffe (another frequent guest) she would not have had to stir from her own dining-room. She presided over these occasions with charm and skill; her placements were challenging and interesting, one publisher’s bestselling author seated next to another, an old establishment figure opposite a revolutionary preaching trades union rights, state pensions or, of course, equal rights for women.

Celia, her beauty illuminated by candlelight, dressed always in black, would sit at one end of the table, arguing, challenging, charming, and at times outraging; Oliver, all grace and old-style courtesy, sat at the other. It was an unbreakable rule of the Lytton dining-room that the ladies never left the gentlemen to their port and doubtful stories, but stayed to share in them, and so there was never the sharp division of male and female conversation. The talk would travel endlessly, unbroken, from gossip and chatter to literary argument to political debate and back again; the parties continuing well into the not-so-small hours, sometimes until three or four in the morning. One August, indeed, Celia had thrown a birthday party for herself that had only ended with a champagne breakfast as dawn broke. For anyone with social or literary pretensions, an invitation to the Lyttons was a delight: the lack of one was little better than a disaster.