Various Flavors of Coffee (49 page)

“Are you serious?”

“Arthur is—very serious.You cannot imagine how seriously— well, never mind.” She sighed.“I am not certain whether he means

to punish me with pregnancy, or whether he genuinely believes it will cure me of the Cause.”

“But you will let him?”

“I have no choice.As he reminded me, I made certain vows.” “It was when you made them that you had no choice.After all,

one cannot call in one’s lawyer to rewrite the wedding vows clause by clause.”

“No. Perhaps it would be better if one could, though I suspect we would still get into just as many muddles. In any case, it is not quite as simple as you put it.”

“Why not?” I said, and then saw what she was getting at.“You

want
a child?”

“A family. Yes. Why do you look surprised? It is what most women want. And Arthur, as my husband, is the only person who can furnish me with that. For this, at least, I need his cooperation.”

“But you cannot be a mother and a militant.”

Two red spots had appeared on her cheeks. I should have recognized the signs; I knew her so well.

“Why not, exactly?” she demanded.

“Well—take yesterday. When those stewards manhandled you.

Imagine if you had been pregnant.”

“Perhaps if I were pregnant they would have seen the brutish-ness of their actions.”

“But what if they had not?”

Her eyes flashed.“If men cannot be trusted, they have no right to be throwing us out of meetings in the first place.”

“In principle you are quite right, Emily—but what use will your principles be when you are lying in a hospital?”

“Are you saying that my duty to my children is more important than my beliefs?”

“Well—yes. I suppose I am.”

“When did my husband walk into the room?” she cried. “And when will you get into your thick selfish skull, Robert, that

principles are not something to be put on and taken off again like—like one of your stupid jackets.”

“Actually,” I said,“I possess very few jackets these days, a consequence of the low wages for which I labor. My employer is—”

“In any case, it is all your fault,” she snapped. “Mine?” I said, astonished.

“It was the insult you hurled at Arthur which prompted all this in the first place.”

“Ah.”

“Ah indeed.Though a slightly more abject
Ah
would be appreciated, given the price I am having to pay for it.”

“Emily, I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry! What use is being sorry?”

She could be maddening when she was cross. “I should not have said what I did. I wanted to rile him—it was seeing you be-ing roughly treated, I suppose, and by him of all people.”

She sighed. In a different tone, she said,“And I have to give you up.You and the Cause. He insists on it.”

“I see. Well, this
is
serious—even more serious, I should say.” I spoke lightly, but my heart lurched.“What are you going to do?”

“I cannot give up the Cause,” she said briskly, not meeting my eye. “I could give you up, I suppose, but since you and the Cause are now a job lot, and since I have already decided to defy him over the political side, I suppose you are here to stay.”

“Does that mean—” “No, Robert. It does not.”

“How do you know what I was going to ask?”

“Because it is what you always ask.And the answer is always no.”

There was another
consequence of that moment in the hall. I was working in the café one morning when a rather scruffy individual appeared carrying a notebook.

“Robert Wallis?” he inquired. “Yes?”

“Henry Harris,
Daily Telegraph.
Can you spare five minutes?”

We talked about the Cause, and as usual he was curious about how a man had got involved. Then he said, “I gather you were mixed up in the Wigmore Hall disturbance.”

“I was there, yes.”

He glanced at his notebook. “Is it true that you asked Arthur Brewer about his marriage?”

“Yes.”

“And was it really his own wife who had just been thrown out?” “It was indeed,” I said. He wrote it down in his notebook.“Will

you print that?”

“Probably not,” he admitted. “Him being an MP. But I’ve got friends on other papers where they take a less respectful line.These things have a way of getting around.”

[
seventy-six
]

he newspaper man was right. Not in the news pages, but
in the social diaries, the parliamentary sketches, the cartoons, there gradually appeared a nameless figure of fun: the MP who opposed suffrage but whose wife was a militant.
Punch,
previously so quick to mock the suffragettes, was equally happy to tease the establishment.There was one amusing cartoon of a couple at breakfast:

hon. member:
Will you pass the salt, my dear?

hon. member’s wife:
Will you pass a Suffrage Bill?

Well, I suppose it seemed amusing at the time.

For Emily, of course, it was no laughing matter. I remembered what she had said to me, years before, about marriage being a kind of legalized rape. The best that can be said of what she now endured is that I cannot believe Arthur enjoyed it any more than she did. I am sure he thought he was doing his duty, not humiliating her for his own pleasure.

She would not talk to me about it. Once or twice I tried to ask, tactfully, if there were any signs of pregnancy—but to do so was to risk having one’s head bitten off. “You are like some horrible old peasant woman, always on about the bed linen,” was one of the more printable replies.

[
seventy-seven
]

inker made more money out of the movements in the
coffee price after the revelations about the
Nastor
than Castle had generated in six months.The mood in Narrow Street was one of quiet triumph—but also shock: I think we had surprised ourselves by how effortless this new way of generating a fortune was. It required no warehouses, no machinery, no porters or menials to grade and husk and roast, just a few signatures on some time-contracts. It was profit without expense; profit that almost seemed to transform itself from a thought in Pinker’s head to actual cash in the bank without the intermediary of any agency except

his will.

He was generous toward his staff: they were all given bonuses according to their length of service. Those like Jenks who had worked for him for many years were now wealthy men.

To me, too, he was far kinder than he needed to be. Called into his office, I found him sitting in front of some ledgers.

“Ah, Robert. I am just going through the books, clearing up some anomalies.” He smiled.“What a pleasure that is, to be able to cancel one’s old mistakes with a stroke of a pen.”

I nodded, though I was not entirely sure what he meant.

“I am going to write off the Ethiopian enterprise,” he explained.“It is time to put all that behind us—to look to the future again. A clean balance sheet—a blank slate, waiting to be filled with new endeavors.” He pushed the ledgers to one side.“You owe me nothing, Robert.Your debts are all annulled.”

“Thank you,” I said.“But—”

“From now on, you will be paid the same salary as Jenks or any of my other senior men. And like them, you will be given a bonus every year dependent on how well we fare.”

“That is very generous. But—”

He held up his hand.“You are about to say, but you are an artist. I know. And that, Robert, is precisely why I value you so much, and why I wish to persuade you to stay. Some of the others . . .” He pursed his lips. “Some of them do not see the big picture. Or rather, they see it, but they fail to appreciate its beauty. Jenks, Latham, Barlow . . . I sometimes wonder if they really have the imagination to take a company like this forward. You and I, Robert—we understand that it is not enough to have a product. One must have a
vision.
”

“You are referring to your political ambitions? Temperance, so-cial reform and so on?”

He made an impatient gesture, as if brushing away flies. “In part. But those are small fry, Robert—too small. Art is neither moral nor immoral: it exists for its own sake.That is what you believe, is it not? Well, then—so too in commerce. Business for business’s sake! Why not? Why should an enterprise not simply
exist
, with no other purpose than to be remarkable; to stand for ever, to be admired, and thus to change the way men think, or work, or live. . . . You will see it, Robert, in time. You will see how great this company of ours can be.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. “Indeed,” I said politely.

“Let me be clear, Robert. I am offering you a position as one of my right-hand men. It is customary to say either yes or no.”

I hesitated—but really there was no decision to be made. I still needed a job, and no one else was going to offer me one. I had no illusions about Pinker’s splendid visions: I had no illusions about anything very much. The man was a Napoleon, but he was a damned capable one, and he paid handsomely.

“I accept with pleasure,” I said.

“Good. Then that is settled. And Robert—you will be able to move out of Castle Street soon, hmm? You can afford better accommodation on the salary I am paying you. And my daughter, I hear, will soon have other things on her mind besides coffee.”

If Pinker thought
he was forcing me to choose between him and his daughter, he was mistaken.Although I had no intention of moving out of Castle Street until I had to, I barely saw Emily now. All her energies were directed toward her political work.

As the suffragettes’ struggle became more intense, so their organization became more autocratic. Previously there had been a constitution and elected officers, with decisions taken after a show of hands. Now the constitution was torn up. “The leaders must lead: the rank and file must carry out their orders,” wrote Mrs. Pankhurst, their chairman—or, as she now styled herself, “Commander-in-Chief of the Suffragette Army.” “There is no compulsion to come into our ranks, but those who come must come as soldiers, ready to march in battle array.”

“But isn’t this the exact opposite of what you believe in?” I said to Emily on one of the rare occasions when we managed to have a cup of coffee together. “How can you have an organization fighting for democracy which bans democracy from its own workings?”

“It is the result that counts, not the methods. And as she says, I joined of my own free will.”

It seemed to me that the movement’s objectives were becoming more important than its principles, but what did I know? Never having had much in the way of either, I was hardly in a position to pass judgment.

Emily was ordered to shout slogans at a certain minister; she did so. She was ordered to deliver handbills in a certain district; she did so. She was ordered to speak outside a factory in the East End; she did so, even though she was pelted with rotten eggs for her trouble. One tactic of those who opposed them was to release mice or rats onto the stage when a suffragette was speaking, in the hope of provoking a girlish scream and thus rousing the audience to laughter. I was present at the Exeter Hall when they tried that with Emily. Without breaking her stride she reached down and picked up the mouse that was running round: holding it up so that the audience could see, she said, “I was a mouse, too, once. Now it is Asquith who is the mouse. And look!” She pointed to a large gray rat that was scurrying across the stage.“There is Mr. Churchill!” It

got her a cheer.

But then, a few minutes later, I saw her stagger. At first I put it down to the heat—we were packed in tight; all meetings were packed in those heady times. Turning to the organizer, she said, “May I have a glass of water?” She had gone very pale. Water was fetched, but as she took the glass she staggered again, spilling some over her dress. I could hear the organizer saying to her in a concerned voice,“Are you all right?You look done in,” and her answer, “I am a little faint.” No sooner had she said it than she collapsed.

She was helped off the stage. I hurried round to the side door, and found her sitting on a chair, being fanned. “It’s just the heat,” she said, shooting me a warning glance.“It is very stuffy in there.”

I did not dispute it, but we both knew that she was pregnant.

• • •

“Will you stop?”

She shook her head.“I cannot.”

“If you go on like this you will damage yourself.”

“What nonsense, Robert. Women have been giving birth for millions of years, and they have had to do much more arduous things during their pregnancies than making a few speeches. It is just the first phase, that is all—they say the sickness usually passes in a few weeks.”

“Have you told Arthur?”

“Not yet. He and Dr. Mayhews will almost certainly try to hos-pitalize me. So for the moment I intend to keep mum, as it were.”

“I am not at all happy about this.”

“I cannot stop now, Robert. We are at a critical stage—one more push and I do believe the government will crumble.”

Personally, I thought the opposite—one more push and the suffrage movement would burn itself out. But I did not say so.

My reticence was partly selfish: I knew that when her pregnancy became public knowledge, she would be forced to withdraw from politics, despite her protests. And once that happened, everything else would change. Castle Street would close. Once she became a mother, she would inevitably have to become a wife as well—the wife her husband wanted her to be.

I took
my newfound wealth down to Sotheby’s, where I bought a number of fine drawings by a Renaissance master, including one of an Italian girl’s head which reminded me of Fikre. I spread my rooms at Castle Street with Turkish rugs, crowned my table with exquisite silver candelabra, and frequented the more expensive departments of Liberty’s once again. It seemed, finally, that my life had settled its course. I was a coffee merchant, a hired man, work-

ing for the greatest concern in London. Art and pleasure were to be my consolations.