The Apple (12 page)

The silence that followed this exchange was very unpleasant, but Aunt Primrose had a special knack for breaking such silences with just the right remark.

‘I don’t care for bananas,’ she said, with a naughty twinkle in her eye. ‘Peeling them is always more pleasurable than consuming them.’

Mr Brown folded his arms across his chest. His wife glanced somewhat forlornly towards the hallway, where her overcoat hung on a wrought-iron stand.

‘You ladies can be as cynical as you like,’ said Mr Brown. ‘I can’t compete with your witty talk. But I understand human nature, and the plain fact is that as soon as a man attains the basic comforts, he no longer fancies marching in a mob of sweaty ruffians, waving banners in the street.’

‘Oh, come now: which of us is being cynical?’

‘Realistic.’

‘Realistic for whom?’

‘The human race.’

‘Oh? And who decides who’s in that?’

My mother was so wound up she might have prolonged the dispute deep into the night, but suddenly my father spoke.

‘Well, Mr Brown,’ he said calmly, ‘I’m a man, and I’ve attained the basic comforts, but next Sunday I shall be marching in the street, holding up my end of a banner.’

I don’t recall what was said after that, if anything. I don’t recall by what magical means the Browns were whisked out of our house, never to return. I only recall the fierce affection with which Mama embraced Papa. Her clutching hands went white against his back. Their cheeks were squashed together. I thought he would surely collapse from lack of breath. But they stood together like that for what seemed like half an hour. Then Aunt Primrose yawned, said ‘Well done, Gilbert,’ and curled up to sleep on the sofa.

I know your curiosity is aroused now. I know you want to know about the march. Perhaps you’ve read about it in history books. And here I am – ‘living history’, as they say – and I suppose you’re mindful that I’m ninety-two years old, and I may not have much longer to tell my story. But forgive me: I want to spend a little longer on my parents, and Aunt Primrose, and the way things were for us during that strange season when we settled in England.

Nowadays, I suppose they’d call it culture shock. I missed everything about where I had come from. I missed breathing the air. I missed the tree-lined, leaf-strewn roads of Mount Macedon, which we would travel along when returning to Melbourne from Aunt Primrose’s brother’s house. I missed the balmy afternoons picnicking in the Botanic Gardens. I missed the smell of eucalyptus. Apples and pears tasted all wrong, and the London drinking-water had scum on it, which Mama assured me was not dirt, but lime. The magnificent clear Victorian skies – that is, Victoria the place, not Victoria the English queen – had been foolishly swapped for the damp, smutty atmosphere of a polluted metropolis. There was nowhere to play in Bloomsbury and (here was another bombshell) I must cease talking to strangers. Imagine that! In Australia, if I played too long in the uncultivated outskirts of our neighbourhood, and the sun set on me, a stranger was liable to escort me home. In London, a stranger was liable (if I believed my mother’s warnings) to pull me into a dark alley, strip me naked, and sell my clothes in Petticoat Lane. Another anxiety to be added to the list of this country’s demerits!

I complained about these things to my mother one afternoon, intimating that we may have made a mistake, and that it might be a good idea to climb aboard a boat at our soonest convenience and sail for home.

My mother motioned for me to climb into her lap instead. She cradled me against her bosom, which was big and soft, even though she was not a big woman. She stroked me so tenderly I could sense she was about to cause me pain.

‘Life can’t always be as we wish,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘Things happen.’

‘Us coming here didn’t happen. We didded it.
You
didded it.’

‘Did, darling. We
did
it.’

She stroked my hair, smoothing it over my ears. I shrugged irritably, pretending to be ticklish.

‘Is our house in Australia still there?’

‘Of course it’s still there, angel. Houses don’t just fall down.’

‘Well, why can’t we go back there?’

‘Because … because we left.’ She could tell from the way I squirmed that I found this answer highly unsatisfactory. It was a Mad Hatter answer, a March Hare answer. Mama couldn’t expect to read me the
Alice
books a hundred times and get away with such nonsense.

‘A house only manages to be a home for a while,’ she said at last. ‘Being a home isn’t easy. Houses get tired.’

I punched her breast, as hard as I could, in frustration. The violence of it shocked us both. She hugged me tighter to her.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Listen. I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told anyone except Poss and your father. You must promise never to tell a soul.’

I didn’t promise. I suppose she took my silence as a promise. And now I’m breaking that silence, by telling you, because I can’t see that it matters anymore. Everyone in this story passed away long ago, and soon I’ll be history too. But then, we’re all history, aren’t we? History is all of us, end to end, until … well, the end. Which is exactly the sort of half-sensical platitude I suspected my mother of trying to pacify me with when I punched her.

‘The truth is,’ she said, ‘that it isn’t true what I told you, that I was born in a tiny village in the countryside. I was born in London. In a house only a few miles from here. I lived there until I was seven. Then I was … I was removed. My governess took me away. I thought we would come back. But we didn’t come back.’

‘Why didn’t your Mama and Papa stop her?’

‘My Mama wasn’t alive by then. And my Papa … I don’t know. I don’t know. Home wasn’t home anymore. Please try to understand. Home isn’t a house. Home is a feeling of being safe somewhere, and I didn’t feel safe with my father. So my governess and I went out into the world, looking …’ She left a long pause, not breathing, as though the rest of the sentence was already on her tongue, poised to roll off. Then she laid her cheek against the top of my head and sighed. ‘Looking.’

‘She was against the law, wasn’t she, your governess?’ I said.

Mama chuckled softly. ‘I’m sure she was.’

‘The police should have arrested her.’

‘That thought did occur to me, eventually. When I was about fourteen. Poor Miss Sugar … I gave her such lectures about morality! There she’d be, serving me my breakfast, and there I’d be, with my nose in my uncle’s battered old Bible, sulking.’

Somehow, with my body, I must have let my mother know that I was comprehending none of this. At once, she put aside her grown-up musings, and found a morsel I could digest, a bon-bon for a little boy.

‘Police have better things to do, angel,’ she said, ‘than to arrest defenceless women. They have robbers and murderers to catch.’

That satisfied me for a while. It was only days later, when my mother and Aunt Primrose were discussing the imminent release of one of their suffragette friends from Holloway Prison, that I remembered that policemen could, and did, arrest defenceless females. Evidently there were not enough robbers and murderers to keep them busy.

Only with hindsight does it seem surprising that my mother never got arrested herself. She, like the semi-mythical Miss Sugar, was against the law in various ways. For instance, she would scandalise me terribly sometimes, when we went out together, by stealing books from bookshops. Her technique, while not exactly brazen, lacked the stealthy finesse of a talented shoplifter. She would simply stuff the book inside her coat – using me as cover, it now occurs to me – and saunter out of the shop. Then she would walk straight to the nearest drain-hole and slip the book through, helping it on its way with her toe if it got stuck. The books were always about women and ‘the female question’. Mama relished the sound they made when they hit the sewer-water below.

My mother also regularly volunteered to go out on the streets to sell
Votes For Women
, a penny newspaper, and she walked defiantly on the footpath with it, which meant she could be charged with ‘obstruction’. Looking back on it, you’d think that a woman selling a newspaper in traffic would cause a damn sight more obstruction than if she did it on the footpath, but there you are: that was how the Powers That Be decided it. It was all cat-and-mouse stuff, of course. But my mother refused to be a mouse. ‘I will not walk in the gutter,’ she said, when counselled by her more law-fearing friends to do so. ‘I will not.’ And she never did – except, of course, when disposing of books with titles like
The Natural Destiny
of the Female
.

I hope I’m not giving the impression that my mother got her way in everything, nor that people in Authority always turned a blind eye to her transgressions. She had her share of mishaps. But whenever she was thwarted, she would look at her tormentor – policeman, petty official, shopkeeper, whatever – as if he were a pitiable madman, whose mission was to prevent people doing something unobjectionably innocent like drinking tea or trimming their toenails. Aunt Primrose, by contrast, was more easily grieved, despite her cool exterior. The droll self-assurance she displayed in public was apt to break down in private, and I would often run into the house, flushed with childish enthusiasm for something-or-other, only to find Aunt Primrose curled up in an armchair, furiously sucking on a cigarette, tears trickling down her cheeks. Or, if the Government had just behaved with exceptional malice or cowardice, I would hear her yelling ‘How could they! How could they!’ and so on. ‘Don’t let them get to you, Poss,’ my Mama would say, laying her arm over her friend’s shoulder. ‘Never let them get to you.’

Only twice did I see Mama reduced to tears by frustration. The first time was over what seemed to me a trifle. Newly returned to England, exploring Regent Street with me, she went into a department store and asked if they stocked a particular brand of perfume. The shopwalker told her that they did not. My mother insisted: it’s a very renowned manufacturer, she said. I have never heard of it, madam, said the shopwalker. That’s impossible, said my mother: what about the soaps and bathwater? The shopwalker apologised and said he had never heard of this particular brand; perhaps it was something exclusively available in Australia? (He could tell from her accent that she had spent some years in the colonies.) At this point my mother’s lip started to tremble, and when the shopwalker, in an attempt to pacify her, offered to sell her a bottle of Pears’ lavender water, she uttered a strange choking sound, and fled out of the store. I had never seen her behave so childishly in Australia; it was one of the first incidents I took as proof that we should never have crossed the ocean.

But that decision, as I was only too painfully aware, was not mine to make or unmake. In telling me about her abduction by Miss Sugar, my mother had reminded me that children are subject to the will of grown-ups, and cannot choose where they live or where they go. How clever she was to have that little heart-to-heart with me! Was it deliberate, I wonder? She made me believe that my outburst of grief had pushed her to reveal her most secret memories, memories too intimate to be shared with anyone but me, Papa and Aunt Primrose. How special I felt! – even as she was telling me that my wishes counted for nothing. How vulnerable she seemed, as she recalled her childish bewilderment at the way her life had been turned upside down. It was enough to make me forget that she’d shown no mercy in overturning my own.

However. There’s no point blaming her now, is there? We emigrated, and that was how it was. The colonies went their own sweet way, and we went ours, and I have become, for good or ill, an Englishman. Last of the old-fashioned gentlemen, as the nurses here call me! And of course I learned, in the fullness of time, that my mother was right. Life defies our intentions to be rational; it misleads and teases us until we are driven to do foolish things. I know. Oh God, I know.

But you don’t want to hear about my life. You want to hear about the march. I’m getting to that, I really am. I give you my solemn promise I won’t die before finishing the story. I do understand how maddening it is to get only so far, and not know what happened next. I wouldn’t do that to you!

The first thing to be said is that, as a boy of seven, I had only the haziest notions of what all this was about. My parents had been discussing the march and its importance for months, but mostly amongst themselves, and so they felt free to use words like ‘franchise’, ‘empowerment’, ‘Asquith’, ‘progressive’ and ‘suffrage’, whereas I preferred words like ‘play’, ‘eat’, ‘toffee-apple’ and ‘kiss’. ‘Suffrage’ was something I thought people experienced when they got sick or when a horse kicked them.

As for marching, I had been under the impression that it was something only soldiers did. Yet Mama and Aunt Primrose were counting down the days to the 21st of June, when they would do their duty. I wondered how they would manage the strides, in their long skirts, and whether Mama might trip on the cobbles. (She was shorter than Aunt Primrose, and her boots had quite a heel on them.)

My father was an integral part of the preparations for this momentous event. He had helped the ladies paint a banner – the only collaborative artistic endeavour he’d ever undertaken, I believe – which resulted in Mama getting green paint all over her hair. The banner turned out very handsome, though. VOTES FOR WOMEN, it said, in green, white and purple, the colours of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Green for hope, white for purity and purple for dignity. On either side of the inscription, my father had painted a statuesque woman in a long, flowing dress, with a helmet on her head and a trumpet in her hand. It strikes me now that these two Amazons may well have been the only female figures, apart from the ladies in his portrait commissions, to gain entry into my father’s oeuvre with their clothes on.

There were in fact two marches that June, within a week of each other. The first was organised by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and, as far as I’m aware, my family didn’t go. I’ve since learned, from history books, that the NUWSS favoured polite, constitutional, law-abiding means of change. That doesn’t sound like my parents’ style, I must admit. The June 21st march was organised by the Women’s Social and Political Union, a far more militant group. They were the ones who published the penny newspaper my mother sold in the street. They were the ones who had the champion colours (the other team had red and white, which my father dismissed as a crude combination). They were the ones who interrupted gentlemen’s political meetings, got arrested, got thrown into prison. Sensational! In our household, Emmeline, Christabel, Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst were heroines on a par with Hercules. Not that Hercules was a woman, but you know what I mean.