Doubled over again Celia gasped, ‘God, you’re a hard bitch, Violet.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for all this,’ Violet pointed out. ‘I came back here after a quiet evening with my gentleman friend and what do I find? You here, looking ready to die.’

  ‘He had to do it,’ Celia said. ‘It could have ruined his engagement.’

  ‘Pity he’s not here now, then, isn’t it?’ remarked Violet, standing up. ‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to find somebody.’

  ‘Think of something else, Violet,’ Celia said. ‘Help me. You could help me to the hospital in a cab—’

  ‘What? And get arrested for procuring abortions?’ said Violet angrily. ‘Oh no.’

  Celia’s head dropped again as a spasm of pain struck her and when she raised it again she saw Violet, in stockinged feet, going out.

  Within moments Mrs Henderson, a bulky woman in black silk, was back with Violet. To emphasise her innocence of such matters Violet had told the housekeeper a confusing story, with enough detail to lead her to the truth. ‘She says she’s been to a doctor. A gentleman friend took her in his carriage. Now she’s in pain, and ever so frightened,’ Violet had reported, which was enough to get the housekeeper, who had been writing to her niece on a desk in her cosy room, up from her chair in an instant.

  ‘Silly girl. Silly girl,’ said Mrs Henderson, kneeling beside Celia. She looked up at Violet, standing in confusion at the end of the bed. ‘Violet! Run straight out and find a cab!’

  ‘All right, Mrs Henderson,’ said Violet meekly. ‘I’ll just have to get my boots on.’

  ‘Hurry up, then,’ said the housekeeper. As Violet laced her boots she saw the woman pull Celia to her feet. ‘Get some monthly towels, Violet, and bring them here.’ Violet reluctantly pulled three of the cotton-wool sanitary towels she used for her monthly periods from a drawer and brought them over. ‘Now, run for it,’ ordered Mrs Henderson as she handed them over.

  Ten minutes later Celia Hardwick and Mrs Henderson had gone and the maid was stripping the sheets and blankets from Celia’s bed. She came back for the mattress.

  ‘That bad, eh?’ said Violet, on her bed with The Heart’s Awakening again.

  The maid, who had failed to stop Violet’s early morning ablutions and was having to get up earlier to get her hot-water jugs filled in time, made no reply. She thought it was typically hard-hearted for Violet to be lying on a bed reading a book when another young lady had been taken to hospital in a cab, however wicked and misguided that young woman had been.

  Nevertheless, Violet went peacefully to sleep after finishing her book, having told the girls who came in what had happened. But at three she was woken by a nightmare, suddenly aware of the risk she was running herself. She saw Celia’s chalky face, the dark circles under her eyes, her fear, and all the blood. She knew what happened to girls who slept with men they weren’t married to; her mother had told her often enough. But Violet’s mother, with her lined face, thickened body, untidy skirts and old boots, her hands roughened by hot water, scrubbing and ashes, was an all too vivid picture of what happened to women who slept with men to whom they were married. Violet had scarcely heeded the warnings. Now she saw the danger she was in from Tom Rawlinson’s erect member and agonised, pleading looks. It was all very well, she thought, messing about on the railway embankment as kids, when one thing had led to another, on hot summer nights. She’d been fourteen, then, and Tom seventeen. She’d been lucky so far, but luck didn’t last for ever. Look at Celia, who might die, and, if she didn’t, wasn’t going to be allowed to set foot in Hammonds again. Celia’s fate would lead her to hanging round stations looking for men. Probably in the end she’d die of a nasty disease. If she, Violet, got pregnant, she’d have that to look forward to too, or a speedy marriage to Tom, which she didn’t want. Deeply frightened, alone in the dark, Violet didn’t entirely lose her nerve. That was a habit she’d abandoned at eight years old, seeing her sister Norah blubbering under her father’s blows because she’d panicked and not had the presence of mind to blame next door’s cat for the breaking of a teapot. At that point Violet decided never to lose her head. Now she decided that never again would Tom Rawlinson make love to her, however much he pleaded.

  Celia Hardwick was never seen again. Mrs Henderson refused to give any information about her but it was because Celia had gone for good that Violet got her permanent position on the gentlemen’s glove counter in Mr Gummidge’s department, and it was only four days later when Frederick Levine looked in again.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘I wanted to thank you for bringing me my gloves in time. They told me you came yourself. But unfortunately I’ve spoiled one pair and left another in a cab – I’ve come to pester you again.’

  ‘You’d better take a dozen, the giddy life you’re leading,’ said Violet, knowing a young woman could be pert to a gentleman who was young enough, or old enough, as long as Mr Gummidge was out of hearing.

  ‘Make it a dozen then,’ he said. ‘But only if you’ll have supper with me tonight. Otherwise I’ll have one pair today, another tomorrow and another the day after, just to see you again. You’d better accept my invitation or I’ll be haunting your counter like a ghost.’

  Violet smiled at him, showing her pretty, even teeth. She had lost her temper with Tom the night before, fallen into one of those uncontrollable rages which hit her like a storm when they occurred. She’d learned to use the threat of these tempers to good effect, when her mother wanted her to stay home from school, for example, or when asked to do household tasks while making herself a dress, but the truth was that the real thing, surging over her, terrified her as much as it frightened the victims and witnesses. They came less often than in childhood, when she had screamed, torn her own clothes, attacked bystanders, once stabbing her brother Frank deeply in the arm with a pair of scissors before being dragged off by her mother and Norah. Violet in a rage, they said at home, seemed possessed by the devil. The real reason was probably that ordinarily Violet maintained an iron control over her own behaviour, while living in a world which never gave her what she wanted. Sometimes it was all too much for her; sometimes she exploded.

  That night in Camberwell, Tom had tried to put his arms round her. She’d burst out, ‘You said we were going to the pictures. Now you want to start messing about with me as usual. You’ll give me a baby yet, you bastard.’

  ‘Violet, Violet,’ he said, startled. ‘I love you so much. I want you so—’

  And Violet had screamed, ‘Don’t you dare come near me again,’ glaring at him. ‘I’ll kill you if you do. I hate you.’

  And even now, as she spoke quietly to Frederick Levine, she had only the fear, but no real recollection of what she’d done in Tom’s room the night before. She’d stamped and raged about. She remembered breaking the photograph of Tom’s dead mother which stood on the mantelpiece in a silver frame. At one point the landlady had come up and banged on the door, and Tom had opened it and spoken to her. She recalled Tom holding her at arm’s length, while she kicked out at him, and his sudden grimace as she hit him, followed by his incredulous expression as, suddenly, he seemed to realise exactly what was going on. She’d smashed a vase and told him nothing made her feel sicker than that horrible thing in his trousers, she’d rather handle dog’s mess, she’d told him in a scream, he’d never make a success on the halls, unless he joined a troupe of performing monkeys. She remembered him sitting on the bed with his head in his hands, saying, ‘Go away, Violet. Go away. I can’t stand you being in the room any more.’ She’d left the mess and Tom’s sobs and jumped straight on a tram. She was shaking violently, but had only the faintest of qualms about what she’d just done. Sometimes such a feeling of darkness and oppression came over her that she knew if she didn’t release them she would die.

  She woke next morning feeling fresh and light, as if the world had started anew, but uncertain about herself, who had done all these things. Now here was a gentleman inviting her to supper, not one of your mashers, not the sort who usually hung round actresses, or milliners, or girls who worked in shops. He was quite diffident, really, thought Violet. The son you could handle. She smiled at him and said, ‘If you insist, sir.’

  ‘I’ll collect you at … When does the store close tonight?’

  ‘At seven,’ Violet said primly.

  ‘I’ll pick you up then,’ he said.

  ‘I shall have to be back by ten,’ she said.

  ‘Oh – do you live here, then?’ he asked.

  ‘During the week,’ she said. ‘I spend the weekends with my family.’

  He nodded, put on his black homburg and walked, tall, straight and tidy, to the door of the shop. He had tact, she thought, didn’t hang round the counter chaffing and laughing and making Mr Gummidge suspicious. The only question in her mind was why he had invited her at all. He wasn’t a womaniser, so why was a gentleman like him handing out invitations to a girl like her?

  Meanwhile Frederick Levine, in the back of the car taking him to the Levine-Schreft bank, was slightly agitated. As Violet had seen, he wasn’t a man who went out with girls who worked in shops, made presents to dancers, picked girls up at fairs. Now twenty-three, he had little experience of women. His brother Laurence had taken him to Mrs Leslie’s brothel in Half Moon Street on the evening before his sixteenth birthday, though he was dragging about the house after a pretty maid at the time, a girl whom he imbued with all the virtues his sentimental nature led him to invent, or perhaps, detect, for he never got to know her well since his mother discharged her not long after. At Half Moon Street he was taken by a good-natured woman, heavily powdered and scented, unlike all the other women he knew, who entertained him in a gilt and plush bedroom, on a big brass-knobbed bedstead. He was half-frightened by her ample, very white bosom and hips. His immature body had performed, but although Laurence would have laughed if he had told him, he blamed his brother for taking him to Mrs Leslie’s and making sure his first sexual experience had been a challenge, loveless and almost masturbatory.

  He returned to Mrs Leslie’s from time to time. He’d made regular, half-termly visits when at Oxford and now rationed his trips there to one a month, after he had been at his club. It was, he knew, damaging to a man’s health to suffer too many erections without relief and he had been told as a boy that masturbation was harmful and weakening. He was sure about the first part, less sure of the second, but saw his visits to places like Half Moon Street as necessary, as well as pleasant, where you entered what looked like a respectable hall, were ushered into what looked like a conventional drawing-room, where young ladies, fully dressed in the latest styles, sat on well-upholstered furniture – sometimes one played Chopin, or some drawing-room piece on the piano – and finally found yourself upstairs with a naked woman. The sexual act was intended to mean no more to you than ordering tea from a waitress in a tea-shop.

  After some years of this, at Mrs Leslie’s and one or two establishments of the same kind, he began to associate the women he met there with friendship, of a kind, and sexual release, and the unmarried girls he met at dances with chaste, tepid companionship. They had, after all, been brought up in sheltered surroundings. They revealed few views, if they had any, showed their characters, if they had any, hardly at all. Certainly, they showed no signs of knowing anything about the relations between men and women. If they did, they concealed it successfully. In their mothers, often, Frederick Levine sensed a kind of ease and acceptance of life, some of the sharp perceptions he had found among the prostitutes in the brothels. They attracted him more than the daughters, Frederick knew, but could not face making approaches to them, even when he suspected the approaches might not be unwelcome, and could feel nothing for the girls he danced with at balls, with their white dresses and the flowers in their hair. He supposed other men found ways of courting these girls, who seemed to him to be more like grown-up children, whom he took in to supper or who poured his tea on sunny lawns – his brother had married one after all – but it seemed to him that there was no way of finding out who they actually were, so carefully had their upbringing taught them to conceal themselves.

  As the car drew closer and closer to the bank, he wondered what on earth he was going to do with that small, pretty girl from behind a shop counter this evening. What would they talk about? What was the point? He wasn’t planning to seduce an honest working girl – he didn’t even want to. He decided he’d have to go through with the evening somehow, then let her down lightly at the end. Send her some flowers, then, goodbye, he thought. The chauffeur opened the door, he got out, pondering how far the bank should be investing in the new Russian railway line. The loan would produce four and a half per cent. There were industrial disturbances in Russia but then, so there were in Britain. The loan was guaranteed by the Tsar – perhaps that was good enough. On the whole, he thought, a good idea to invest heavily. He’d get an opinion from his Uncle Leopold.

  Not long after Frederick Levine had sat down in his office and asked his secretary to ask his chief assistant, Henry Sturgess, to come in, Violet was in the bathroom upstairs at Hammonds, feeling for the five guineas in half sovereigns she had taped under the back slat at the top of the cupboard, behind a roll of purple oilcloth which no one liked to throw away, but for which no use could be found. Then she got off the chair, with the money in her hand, and raced back to her counter, telling Mr Gummidge she had been to the stock-room. At dinner-time she spent two guineas, a whole month’s wages, on a pair of black kid shoes, with small heels and a bar across the foot, shoes far too fragile for a young woman who spent her time walking in muddy streets and getting on and off buses and trams. She bought a lawn petticoat with lace at top and bottom for half a guinea, spent five shillings and sixpence on lace-fringed drawers, another five and six on a matching camisole and got, for five shillings, two pairs of black silk stockings. This left her with less than a pound. She bought a pair of leather gloves, in black, and taped the remaining half guinea back under the shelf. For the money she had spent she could have bought herself a good dress, or a costume, but Violet knew that a real lady dresses properly from the skin outwards and was in any case concentrating on enhancing the effect of her pretty little hands and feet. While Frederick Levine had dismissed Violet from his thoughts as soon as he got to his office, Violet spent the day dreaming of her own body, in its expensive underwear, her legs in silk and her hands in their dainty little gloves.

  The hands of the clock on the wall opposite her counter slowed down after dinner, crawled after four, and from five onwards seemed stationary for long periods. Violet thought she would die if the afternoon went on any longer. At a quarter to seven she hid six pairs of stitched leather gloves at the back of a drawer used for exchanged or damaged gloves and told Mr Gummidge she had better go to the stock-room for more. As there were few customers about he agreed. The assistants were forbidden to go into their dormitory during business hours unless they were ill, so Violet had hidden all her new things in a large cupboard containing shelves of huge, old-fashioned corsets, huge, pink shapes of canvas, elastic and whalebone, designed to control and enlarge ample bosoms and bottoms of an earlier generation. There, in the dim light coming through a transom above the cupboard door she quickly stripped naked and slipped into her new underclothes and put her outer clothes on again. She put her camisole, drawers and cotton petticoat in a bag on the shelf and stuffed her own narrow corset on a shelf with the others, resolving never to wear it again. During the last ten minutes of her dinner-break, after she had finished shopping, she had tidily sewn four stocking suspenders from four pieces of elastic, attached to a broad belt of elastic round her waist. It felt lighter, more comfortable, and she felt freer. She put on the new, soft shoes and, sucking a scented purple cachou to sweeten her breath, she strolled back to her counter, the replacement gloves in her hands, looking much as she had done when she left, although, in her new shoes, she felt like dancing.

  Kate Higgins, April 1st, 1991

  Andy picked me up outside the flat on Thursday. He’d said over the phone that he wouldn’t come up. ‘I don’t want to have to chat to your flatmate,’ he said. ‘The trip was a real bastard.’ I knew he didn’t like Di, who was exactly the sort of woman he objected to. She ran a small print shop with some other women. He said this was bread and circuses on the rates designed to keep the community happy and employed, defusing discontent which ought to be expressed openly. It was true that though the place ran at a profit a lot of their work came from people wanting posters for gigs they were holding in council-sponsored halls and from various local organisations. He actually told her his views of her work during a supper party which I organised so that we could all be friendly, but where Andy made it obvious he was not happy with the food and company. Di told him that if he wanted discontent openly expressed perhaps he’d like to lead the movement from the front, and try some rubber bullets and CS gas on for size. Andy was so startled by her rudeness and also by being accused, implicitly, of being too cowardly to face the police, that he scarcely replied. Wherever he went everyone knew he was brave. It was never mentioned, but the three days and nights pinned down by Iraqi fire in a cave with the Kurdish partisans, the siege of Lesotho, the river-run across the Rio Grande with illegal immigrants, guards and searchlights on the other bank, had not been forgotten. You didn’t accuse Andy Littlebrown of leading from the rear, and Di had.

  It wasn’t just Di’s job to which Andy objected, but the fact that she spent much of her free time helping people fight landlords or trying to get funding to set up créches, or stop the closure of the local casualty ward or compiling statistics about the suicide rate in tower blocks. Andy supported all these things but he couldn’t stand Di’s style, which consisted of going on doggedly and unglamorously, expecting no fame or money for her efforts, and certainly not getting any. Nor could he bear her assumption, never expressed, that people with surplus income must automatically be doing something morally wrong. Putting them together was like throwing a dog and a cat into a small room.

 

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