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Nick lifted up his arms to quieten them again.
‘That’s it, lads. Shall we make a start? Don’t want to keep them waiting down the valley, do we?’
They shuffled awkwardly into a column. Half of the men had fought in the War, and remembered the discipline of marches. The rest lined up behind them, grinning in embarrassment. There was a ragged cheer of encouragement from the wives, children and old men who had gathered against the railings to watch them go.
‘Good luck, boys. You tell ‘em, up in London.’
Amidst the renewed cheers, the uncertain column began to wind away along the valley road. At the back of the line two boys were carrying a roll of canvas. They looked at the waving hands, and the erect shoulders in front of them, and then glanced at each other. At once they dropped the canvas roll and unwrapped it. Inside was a green silk banner. It was gaudy with gold threads and the scarlet of a huge dragon, its tail curling back over its head. Nantlas, Rhondda was embroidered on it in big gold letters, and the initials SWMF. They slotted the supporting poles quickly together and hoisted the banner between them. The wind tugged at the gold fringes and the silk bellied out, making a riveting splash of colour amongst the drab greys.
It was like a signal. From windows and doors up the terraces heads appeared and the cheering was carried up the hillside in thin, insistent waves. Nick glanced back from the head of the line and saw the banner glaring bravely behind him. The march, setting out in hunger and despair, was suddenly festive, like the Galas of the old days. He lengthened his stride and the marchers swung along behind him in the pride of the moment.
The singer was next to him. He looked back too, smiling, and then began to sing again.
Hello, Piccadilly, Hello, Leicester Square,
It’s a long, long road up from the valleys,
But we’ll march, right there.
Nick joined in, and the song was taken up all along the line until they were singing and marching and the waving and cheering followed them all along the road until the corner took them round the fold of the hillside and out of sight.
The road ran on in front of them, flanking the railway line with its empty, rust-red trucks shunted into deserted sidings. The slag mountains towered on either side of them, and the black scars of the workings bit into the green hillsides. No one glanced at the scenery. Strung out down the valley were more towns and villages like Nantlas. More men would join them from all these places, and they would march on to meet the miners who had come down from Rhondda Fawr, and the others from across the entire stricken coalfield. At Newport, when they were all together, they would turn on to the London road.
And they would walk and walk until they reached Downing Street. It was a long way.
Around him, Nick heard the singing dying away as one voice after another was silenced by the road stretching ahead. They were solemn now, and the sudden burst of high spirits was over. The two boys in the rear let the banner drop again and wrapped it in its protective canvas before running to catch up once more.
‘We’re on our way, then,’ Nick said quietly.
‘May it bring us something more than blistered feet,’ the singer said beside him, with an absence of expectation that was ominous to Nick.
Tony was as good as his promise. He took Amy out to dinner in Soho, to a cheerful restaurant where Italian waiters with striped aprons wriggled between the close-packed tables, and the owner came out with his magnificent moustaches to sit at the tables of the most favoured customers. Amy ate the highly flavoured food from the thick white plates with clear enjoyment, and drank quantities of Chianti from bottles wrapped in a raffia shell.
A trio of violinists in red shirts came and played insistently between the tables, and Tony and Amy winced and laughed at each other before Amy put a shilling into their held-out plate to make them go a little further away.
‘I like this place,’ she told him, and Tony smiled.
‘I like taking you out. You have the knack of enjoying uncomplicated things. Rather unusual for a girl like you, I should think. I had imagined it would be hopeless if I didn’t know where to buy orchid corsages or belong to exclusive clubs.’
‘Does that mean you’ll go on doing it?’ she asked him. ‘I’d like to go to Appleyard Street again.’
Tony looked at her. ‘I don’t know,’ he said with deliberate vagueness. He had been evasive when she had mentioned Appleyard Street before.
‘When?’ she pressed him, and he sighed.
‘Look, Amy. Appleyard Street isn’t really a suitable place for you. I took you as a once-off expedition for interest’s sake. See how the other half, and all that. If I’d thought a bit harder, I wouldn’t have done it at all.’
‘Why can’t I go there?’
‘Peers’ daughters with connections like yours don’t generally mix with Communist sympathizers. It would make a nice little item for some newsman. Think of it from your father’s point of view. Or your brother-in-law’s.’
Peter Jaspert. Isabel and he would be back in two weeks’ time. Amy had begun to admit to herself that she was hurt by the stilted quality of the letters and cards from her sister. She told herself that of course she wasn’t expecting detailed descriptions of married life, but she still felt that the closeness that had always existed between them was being denied by the pages of guidebook enthusiasm for Tuscan hillsides or Michelangelos.
The truth was that she was missing Isabel badly. If she saw more of Richard, Amy thought with a touch of sadness, perhaps she wouldn’t feel it so much. But even when Richard was home from Eton, although he was as amusing and affectionate as always when they did meet, he was increasingly busy with his own mysterious affairs and he seemed to have no time to spare for Amy. ‘Haven’t you got a dozen Guards officers to take you dancing?’ he would grin at her.
When she protested that she didn’t care for officers he would stare at her, mock-surprised.
‘Don’t you?’
She sighed now and turned her attention back to Tony and the question of Appleyard Street. ‘Yes. I see that you can’t be responsible for taking me there. Sorry. It’s odd, you know. I felt … comfortable, there.’
‘You made an impression. Angel Mack was asking about you the other day. I didn’t tell her anything, of course. Never mind, Amy.’ Seeing her face, Tony reached out and covered her hand with his own. ‘We’ll go somewhere else. Poetry and music at the Wigmore Hall next week? One of my poets is reciting his work. Very avant-garde, I promise you.’
‘Can I come with you to the hunger march?’ she persisted.
‘No. For different reasons, but definitely not. It might not be safe, for one thing. What about the Wigmore Hall?’
Amy submitted to the diversion. She could perfectly well see the hunger marchers alone, after all.
‘All right,’ she grinned at him. ‘Avant-garde verse it shall be.’
His hand rested lightly over hers. Amy liked him touching her. It was odd that she disliked what other men tried to do to her, yet she definitely wanted Tony to kiss her and he never even tried to. It wasn’t because of who she was, Amy was sure of that. They were friends, on a clear footing that had nothing to do with social position.
She looked at him now across the table. Tony leaned back in his chair and the sputtering candlelight made dark shadows under his cheekbones. Amy thought that he looked intriguing. Not handsome, but romantic, and clever, and enigmatic.
She was suddenly breathless, and she opened her mouth to breathe more easily. Tony looked back at her, as if he was waiting for her to say something.
Daringly, she tried out the words in her head. Tony, I love you. Did you know? At once she felt her cheeks redden. She turned her hand so that her fingers laced with Tony’s and pressed them.
He returned the pressure lightly and then laid her hand gently back on the cloth. She felt scattered breadcrumbs rough under her wrist.
‘Time to go,’ Tony said.
Outside the restaurant the night air was cool.
With his hand at her elbow Tony steered her to the kerb and into a cab. They sat side by side in the darkness watching the lights flick past. Amy’s face was turned away and Tony saw the disappointed hunch of her shoulders.
‘What can I do?’ he asked, wishing there was something.
‘Kiss me,’ Amy answered without hesitation.
‘Oh, Amy.’ There was a faint breath of exasperation in his voice and something worse, amusement. But he leant forward and touched her mouth with his own.
I didn’t mean like that, Amy thought miserably.
She looked away again, out into the street. At the beginning she had been interested in Tony for the doors that he promised to open. But now he attracted her in a different way that made her feel hot, and awkward, and unsure of herself. He was certainly fending her off. The realization embarrassed her, and she felt her face grow even hotter.
Tony said, ‘You aren’t very happy, are you? What is it?’
Amy shrugged. She couldn’t, in her embarrassment, recite her loneliness for Isabel and Richard and her feeling of uselessness to the world.
‘I told you at the wedding,’ she said, as lightly as she could. ‘I feel a little lost. But I should solve that for myself. Don’t you agree?’
The cab was turning in at the end of Bruton Street. Amy looked and saw the warmly lit windows of her home. Adeline had been giving a dinner party tonight, but by now they would all have moved on to the Embassy Club.
‘I hope you will find some way of being happy,’ Tony said, with odd formality.
The cab drew up. The driver sat stolidly behind his glass panel, collar up and cap pulled well down over his ears.
‘Isabel will be back in a day or so, won’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Amy answered. ‘Isabel will be back.’
‘Until next week, then. At the Wigmore Hall.’
They said their good nights, and Amy went up the steps and into the house alone.
Isabel’s new home in Ebury Street looked as clean and shiny as if it had just been unwrapped, Amy thought. The maid showed her into Isabel’s drawing room on the first floor. It was full of pretty pale chintzes and bowls of fresh flowers. There were tranquil watercolours on the blue walls, and a tidy little fire in the polished grate. Silver-framed pictures of Peter’s family and of herself and Isabel as children stood on the grand piano at one end of the room.
The door opened and there was Isabel. Amy ran to her.
‘Oh, Bel, I’ve missed you so much.’ The girls hugged each other, smiling wordlessly.
Then Amy stood back, holding her sister at arm’s length. Isabel was wearing a pale blue dress that matched her room, and her hair waved flatteringly over her ears and was caught up at the back of her head. She looked more elegant than ever, but there were faint, blue shadows under her eyes.
‘Bad journey?’ Amy asked sympathetically.
‘Oh, the night sleeper isn’t so bad. But we were glad to be home.’
‘Where’s Peter?’
‘He went to his office for a couple of hours. I think he might be back now. He’s probably dressing. Lucky the House is in recess, or he’d have dashed off there too. He was getting very restless, the last few days.’
Amy sat down on one of the sofas near the fire, and Isabel settled herself opposite.
‘Well?’ Amy asked. ‘How was it?’
‘Would you like a drink?’ Isabel reached out for the bell. The maid came in with the tray, and the sight of Isabel enjoying her hostess role made Amy feel more cheerful for a moment or two.
When they were alone again she said, ‘Tell me about it. You’ve been away for six weeks.’
‘Didn’t I, in my letters?’
‘Not really. I could have got exactly the same news from the Guide Michelin. Are you happy, Bel?’
Surprisingly, Isabel laughed and the shadows disappeared. ‘Oh, I’ve missed you too. Amy the insistent. Yes, darling, of course I’m happy.’
‘Is it what you expected?’
‘Rather early to say, after only six weeks. And not very typical wedded weeks, either. It’s more than I expected, I think.’ Isabel looked down at her wrist, turning her bracelet so that the stones caught the light. ‘And it takes a little getting used to, you know. You’ll find out for yourself, when the time comes.’
‘I expect so,’ Amy said noncommittally. She was relieved, in a sense, that Isabel wasn’t making wild claims of perfect happiness. Marriage would take some getting used to. Isabel looked tired, and she seemed a little withdrawn, but she appeared to be reacting with all her old calm, common sense. Perhaps the fears that her letters had aroused in Amy were unfounded, after all. Isabel was moving gracefully around the drawing room now, using the refilling of their glasses as a pretext for adjusting an ornament and straightening a cushion. Suddenly she looked every inch the proud new wife, and Amy smiled.
‘Not a lot has happened to me. I’ve been out two or three times with Tony Hardy.’
‘Mmm? I saw him briefly at the wedding. I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.’
‘I think he is, now. He took me to a political meeting because I was complaining that I never met anyone different. Almost everyone was a Communist.’
‘Amy, for God’s sake don’t say anything about that to Peter. He thinks they should all be clapped into prison.’
They looked at each other apprehensively and then they started to laugh, just as they had always been able to do.
Peter came in. His hair was brushed flat and sleek and he looked even healthier than he usually did, if that was possible.
‘Oh dear,’ he said genially, ‘the terrible twins. Giggling, just like always. How are you, Amy m’dear?’
‘In the pink, thank you Peter.’
There was the faintest of suppressed snorts from Isabel.
‘I really don’t understand you two, you know,’ Peter said. He poured himself a whisky in a crystal tumbler and splashed soda into it from a siphon on the tray. He crossed the room to where Isabel was sitting and stood behind her sofa, one hand resting on her shoulder. Amy saw her sister glance up at her husband. It occurred to her that there was a kind of wary anxiety in the look.
Whatever there was, Peter didn’t see it.
‘Have you had a good day, darling?’ Isabel asked him. His hand moved, lightly, to stroke her neck.
‘An excellent day.’
They faced Amy now, both smiling, and she thought how handsome they looked. Mr and Mrs Jaspert, comfortably at home.
Amy felt a frown gathering behind her eyes with the sense, still persistent, that everything was not quite right, for all the external harmony. But Isabel went on smiling and Peter’s hand tightened affectionately on her shoulder before he moved away again.
They were extolling the beauties of Tuscany, reminding one another of sights and improving on one another’s descriptions, when the maid appeared to show in the other guests. Two couples came into the room, exclaiming conventionally at its prettiness. There was another Tory MP, senior to Peter, and his ambitious wife, and a sharp-eyed City man with whom Peter went into a huddle at one end of the room while his wife talked about horses at the other.
A moment or two later Amy’s partner for the evening arrived.
She had been vaguely expecting someone in the Johnny Guild mould and the blond young man who shook her hand surprised her a little. He looked hardly older than herself, twenty or perhaps twenty-one. He had a gentle, unassuming manner and Amy could see that he was shy in Peter Jaspert’s house. But when, at length, his eyes did meet hers his blue, direct glance seemed at odds with the rest of him.
‘Amy, may I introduce Charles Carew? Charles, this is Miss Lovell, Isabel’s sister.’
They found themselves sitting together on the sofa, isolated by the conversations on either side of them. Glancing up, Amy saw Isabel talking animatedly to one of the wives about the arrangement of her drawing room. She looked proud and happy, and Amy felt her anxiety dissolving. Following her gaze Charles Carew said quietly, ‘It must be strange, finding oneself married.’
His perception startled her and she asked, absurdly, ‘So you aren’t married, Mr Carew?’
He laughed, and then tried to smother the sound. For a moment he was so like one of the ‘suitable’ boys who had been invited as dancing partners to Miss Abbott’s school that Amy looked down, half-expecting to see Charles Carew’s knobby, adolescent wrists protruding from his shirt cuffs in just the way that theirs had done. But his cuffs were long enough to hide his wrists. She saw that his hands were well scrubbed with long, square-ended fingers.
‘No,’ he said, his amusement under control. ‘I’m a doctor.’
He must be older than he looks, then, Amy thought.
‘I’m almost entirely dependent on my father. Surgery is a long training. A wife and family’s a long way in the future. If it happens at all, that is.’
They found themselves smiling at each other.
‘I think I feel the same,’ Amy confided.
When they went down to dinner, Charles took Amy’s arm politely, with old-fashioned manners.
The dining room was filled with more flowers. Isabel must have spent the whole day arranging them. The table was a polished oval reflecting the candlelight and the pink, white and gold of Isabel’s wedding china, and the faces around it looked pleased and relaxed. Isabel herself was beaming with pleasure at the success of her arrangements.
Amy felt herself relaxing too, with the laughter and talk and Peter’s elegant claret. Suddenly she was enjoying being in Isabel’s house, amongst her own generation. It was quite different from being at Bruton Street, or Chance, or one of the formal dinners before a dance. And because of his seeming youth, and his shyness, and the memories that he’d stirred in her, Charles Carew seemed more like a childhood ally than a dinner partner.
Amy looked from Isabel at one end of the table to Peter at the other. Perhaps this was what marriage was. Being in your own house, with your own friends. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising at all that Isabel looked strained after six weeks’ travelling. Being at home would make all the difference.
If I marry, will it be like this? Amy asked herself. She tried to imagine Tony Hardy at the other end of the polished table, but the picture eluded her. Chianti and sardines at Appleyard Street were the things that went with Tony. The thought of him made her smile.
‘Will you share the joke with me?’ Charles Carew asked her softly. He had been watching her, she realized.
‘I’m sorry, that was rude of me. I was just thinking of a friend of mine and trying to imagine him here.’
‘And could you?’
‘Not really.’ The idea was irresistibly funny, but Amy suppressed it because it seemed inappropriate to be talking about Tony, however obliquely, to this shy, polite boy. To deflect him, she asked, ‘Are you an old friend of Peter’s?’
‘My father was in India with his, years ago. The Jasperts came home when Peter’s grandfather died whereas we stayed, but the families have kept in touch. Otherwise my world doesn’t exactly touch on Peter’s.’
‘What is your world?’
‘Medicine,’ Charles said, as if he was surprised at her need to ask. ‘Once I’m qualified as a surgeon I’m going straight back to India. I can be useful there, you see. There’s a lot to be done.’ The mild expression had vanished.
‘I envy you,’ Amy said simply, and once again she was aware of Charles Carew’s appraising, direct gaze.
She had to turn away, then. On her other side the MP, Archer Cole, was asking her something.
It wasn’t until the end of the evening that Amy and Charles spoke directly to each other again. Charles was the first to leave, and he came across the room to say good night to her. They exchanged good wishes and then, thinking of her vacant days, on impulse Amy asked him, ‘Would you be free to come and have tea with me at Bruton Street one day?’
She was still thinking of him as a family friend, and also perhaps imagining that he would fill in, in a brotherly way, some of the emptiness that Richard’s elusiveness created.
Charles thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘I’d like to, very much, but I don’t think I can. I’m doing my theatre practice in the afternoons, you see. I have surgery lectures all morning, and at night there’s cramming to do. I don’t have any free time, really.’
‘Never mind,’ Amy said cheerfully. ‘I’m sure we’ll bump into each other again.’
They shook hands. Peter was waiting, and Charles followed him out of the room and the door closed behind them.
Amy didn’t think about him again.
Amy was the last to leave. She had stayed behind after the others had gone to have a nightcap with Peter and Isabel.
‘I did enjoy myself,’ she told them, stretching out on the sofa with a sigh of pleasure. They beamed their satisfaction back at her. Peter took Isabel’s hand and held it, and Isabel murmured, ‘I thought it went rather well, too. I must tell Cook how pleased we were.’
The fire had sunk to a red glow, warming their faces and making the silver picture frames reflect back a coppery light.
Isabel let her head rest against Peter’s shoulder. Her eyes were closed and Amy couldn’t guess what she was thinking, but her face was smooth.
It’s all right, Amy thought.
She wanted to slip away and let the maid see her out, but they jumped up when she stood up to go, and insisted on coming downstairs with her.
At the street door Peter hailed a taxi for her.
‘I hope there will be hundreds more Ebury Street evenings like this one,’ Amy said.
‘Of course there will,’ Peter answered, and Isabel echoed him. ‘Of course there will.’
As the cab pulled away Amy looked back at them. They stood side by side framed by the light that spilled out of their front door and down the steps. They lifted their hands and waved to her, in unison.
There was a wonderful, tantalizing smell filling the dusty hall.
The men came filing in, too tired to joke any longer or even to talk, and dropped their bundles against the walls without looking at them. But the smell drew them to cluster round the open door at the end of the hall.
‘This way, lads. That’s right.’ It was the catering contingent who had gone on ahead of the marchers from stop to stop, and had been waiting for them with hot food at the end of every day. Silverman and his friends on the Organizing Council had done well, Nick thought. The soup was being ladled out of big pans into a medley of cups and bowls. Nick was ravenous, but he waited until he had seen all his Nantlas contingent into the line before joining the end of it himself with the other march leaders.
It was the last night.
They had reached the outskirts of London, where new factories were springing up along the Great West Road and rows of neat, suburban houses in their square gardens stretched to the north and south of them. On every street corner here there was a little grocer’s shop or a tobacconist’s, windows and walls bright with coloured signs. The long column of dirty, exhausted men had tramped silently past the homeward-bound workers, men coming out of the shops with the evening newspaper under their arm and packets of cigarettes in their pockets, and women in bright, spring-like clothes carrying baskets of food.
There had been cheering supporters lining the route, more tonight than on any of the others because the London Workers had turned out to greet them. But in the tranquil streets behind them the ordinary people going about their business had stared in surprise. London looked prosperous, different from any of the other places they had been through. Nantlas with its empty shops, grey streets and hollow-faced men and women, might have been on another continent. Another world, even.
The soup queue in the parish hall inched slowly forward. All around, men were sitting on wooden chairs, intent on their steaming bowls. When he reached the table at last one of the catering volunteers filled Nick’s bowl for him, and gave him two generous hunks of bread. It was vegetable soup, thick and delicious. Nick carried his away to a corner as carefully as if it was a bowl of molten gold. The first spoonfuls, so hot in his mouth that they almost burned him, spread warmth all through him.