‘It is more important that I earn a crust at the moment.’ She tutted. ‘I can’t afford such high-minded things.’
‘You mean that you are worried about what those toffs at Haughten Hall would think if they suspected you were a window-breaker!’ I cried. ‘It is not the time to think of reputations – there is more at stake!’
‘You are right,’ she said, setting the teapot back down on the table with a crack. ‘This is about the toffs at Haughten Hall. This is about Sir Howard paying me five shillings on Friday for both our services this week. This is about me taking Sir Howard’s five shillings and paying the landlord three towards the rent. Then there is the five pence that I owe the grocer and coalman, not to mention the money you fritter away at that filthy bookstand in Partridge’s. Then once I am done paying everyone, I will have to go back to Haughten Hall and do it all again, because at the moment there is nowhere else that I can earn such money. I need what Sir Howard pays us and that is that!’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘I thought you said it was me who didn’t understand!’ she said. ‘Maybe it is you who have a lot to learn about politics.’ She held the leaflet up to my face, stabbing the angelic woman with her long fingernail. ‘Sir Howard is a Member of Parliament. He has voted against those women’s Conciliation Bills twice already, and these women cause him a lot of problems. He cannot think that we have sympathies with them or I will lose my job.’
I thought of the meeting on the common again – Mrs Elliot-Palmer with her curses and Sir Howard with his raised hand. I had thought their hostility was due to an excitable dog and a mis-sold horse, but now I imagined a feud that had lasted much longer – years of disputes and broken engagements, of cold shoulders and distrust.
‘I won’t go,’ I said. ‘How could I go to the house of someone who won’t give women the vote, someone like Sir Howard?’
My mother shook her head wearily. ‘You will come with me, Nell—’ she held the leaflet in front of me, tearing it down the middle, the halves fluttering on to my plate ‘—or we don’t eat!’
* * *
My words of protest were lost on my mother, for later that morning we returned to Haughten Hall. I had hoped to find Iris waiting in the entrance hall in her riding britches, but when Dora showed us upstairs I guessed that the meeting with Mrs Elliot-Palmer on the common had put an end to any excitement and I felt a strange kind of disappointment.
My mother was called in to Sir Howard’s study and Iris beckoned to me from another door, the expression on her face telling me that my guess was right.
I followed her through the door into the small dark room and she pirouetted slowly on the rug, her arm spinning past shelf upon shelf of leather-bound journals.
‘He says we should each find something to read,’ she said wearily, ‘but we are to take what we find back to the study because a library is no place for young girls.’
I went to a shelf but all the books were bound in the same kind of leather. There was nothing to tell them apart but a couple of meaningless words embossed in gold on each spine followed by roman numerals in such high numbers that they looked like toppled dominos.
I started to panic and turned back to see what Iris was choosing but she stood in the centre of the room, her hands on her hips, watching me.
‘Your face!’ She laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry, those are my father’s books about politics.’ She waved her hand towards a little table with several stacks of books on it. ‘These are the ones he expects us to read.’
There were books of all colours on the table with golden titles, pictures and patterns. It was as big as the selection that they had on the stand at Partridge’s, but the titles were newer and there were several first editions that I could not usually afford.
‘Oh, you take Strand magazine!’ I cried. ‘And you have the novels of Marie Corelli! I have to hide those from my mother – she says they are sentimental smut and quite ungodly!’ I twisted my voice on the last word so that I sounded like my mother. After all, ‘ungodly’ was a word that my mother used often, especially when she spoke of me.
Iris laughed. ‘We take a lot of things,’ she said. ‘My father has some kind of subscription and I don’t think he even knows what arrives. The company supplies what they think a girl of my age would want to read, but I really only look at them now and then.’
I took a book from the table. It was a novel by one of my favourite authors, although I had never heard of the title before as my mother did her best to keep me away from such things. The cover had golden sand dunes and pyramids embossed on the front, which I thought beautiful.
We left the library and carried our books back to the portrait-lined study, sitting on opposite ends of the window seat, the ruffles of Iris’s short skirt rising to her shins as she sat. I opened the beautiful cover of the book I had chosen and read the first few pages but found that I could not settle into the story. I held it up to Iris to ask if she had read it but the words stopped in my throat when I saw that she had not taken a novel from the little table but something plain-looking with a French title. Suddenly my story, which seemed to be some silly romance about Egyptian princesses, felt childish. I had always thought of myself as a reader, but now I felt that the kind of thing I read did not matter.
I watched Iris as her eyes moved over the text, a slight crease in her brow and a twist on her lips. I studied her features – her round cheeks and small childlike nose – but I still could not think what it was about her face that kept drawing my eyes back to it. I fancied that it could be the way that she wore her hair long, with only the front pinned away from her forehead, framing her face like a schoolgirl’s, or the way she raised her eyebrows slightly when she smiled, but there was more to Iris than her face. There was something not right about her – something not right about the Caldwells and my thoughts kept turning to the way she had shrunk from Sir Howard’s raised hand, the childlike way she dressed, the oil paintings that stared down at us from every wall and the family feud that had broken her engagement.
‘I have met Francis Elliot-Palmer,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said, looking up, although her voice was quite disinterested.
‘Properly,’ I added. ‘I saw him in the village and he remembered me from the common. I even saw the end of one of his photoplays.’
‘What did you think of him?’ she said, putting down her book slowly. ‘Do you think I will miss out by not marrying him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, embarrassed, for I did not want to explain that I had not actually spoken with him save for a few awkward words outside the church hall when he had called me ‘Nell’ – a name I had not told him.
She stared at me silently and I realised she wanted more from me.
‘Well, I suppose I could not really see the two of you together,’ I said quietly.
‘That is what I think too,’ she said, nodding as if to convince herself as well as me. ‘Maybe it is for the best. After all, I think the religious mania would be too much for me.’
‘I understand that,’ I said. ‘You should try living with my mother.’