‘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.
Along the endless road, and in the villages and towns where they had stopped, there had been surprising support. During the day the farmworkers in the fields and most of the drivers of the cars and lorries that rumbled past them, splashing them with filthy water from the potholes in the roads, had stared and then, when they understood, there had been encouragement and coins dropped into the bags marked ‘March for Work. March for Food.’
At nights, when they stopped dead tired in the town halls and even, once, in a huge barn still stacked with hay bales, people had brought food. Sometimes it had been local union representatives, bringing cash donations and messages of support as well as thick sandwiches and urns of strong, sweet tea. But sometimes it was different people, prosperous, middle-class and not workers, as the miners described them. These people looked shocked and sympathetic, and murmured ‘We must all do what we can to help,’ and they brought exotic pies with rich, crumbly pastry and, on one memorable night, a huge baked ham. He had been eating much better than Mari and Dickon would be doing back in Nantlas, Nick thought painfully.
He finished his soup and the last of the bread, and then reached into his rucksack. He had given most of the chocolate to a boy with a terrible cough who had been struggling to keep up almost ever since they had left Wales, but there was one square left. He had been keeping it to have as a celebration when they reached London, and he unwrapped it now and ate it slowly, thinking about Mari.
It was right that he had come, even though he had had to leave her, Nick was sure of that. The march was running under its own momentum now, already a success. Out of the seven hundred men who had left Newport eleven days ago, only a handful had dropped out, in spite of the official labour movement predictions that the miners would never make it. Even those men had had to be ordered to stop marching because their torn feet or exhaustion were holding up progress. Their dogged determination to reach London was a testament in itself, because the marchers had deliberately been chosen, by Nick and the other organizers, from the poorest and weakest of all the thousands of unemployed men across the coalfield who had wanted to march. Any man still receiving the meagre unemployed benefit or the Poor Law relief had been excluded, because no one could guarantee that he would be able to claim the money again on his return. None of the march organizers wanted to claim the responsibility for another destitute family.
Only those who had nothing were chosen, just because they had nothing to forfeit. Nick put aside the thought that he stood to lose his own benefit. That was something he would have to reckon with if and when it happened. It would have been impossible to act as a spur to the other men and not to march himself.
And the march was a success. People were with them, no one could deny that. The food, and the money in the fighting fund proved it. Best of all was the support that had come not only from workers, often in defiance of their own right-wing unions, but from the secure, middle-class people who