Free Park Lane by Frances Osborne Page B

tighten, he has made a direct shot, this voice, and the comment grates under her skin. ‘Only a woman.’ Bea thought of Tom’s friends at Gowden. How was she ‘only’ compared to people like that? What did ‘only’ a woman ‘only’ do? After all, she goes to lectures, she is here, too, out in a crowd, alone, surrounded by strangers, listening. But ‘do’? Listening could not be stretched todoing. If she were not to exist, thinks Bea, what acts would be undone? She has lived for twenty, almost twenty-one, years without making a mark. Her embarrassment curdles into anger against the heckler, against his little pack of chums, against every single person who thinks a woman is an ‘only’.
    Mrs Pankhurst does not fear that she has done nothing. She turns the comment back.
    ‘That is what we are fighting, my friends. We women are fighting not as women, but as human beings, for human rights.’ She defies the police to arrest her again, and taunts them for cowardice in not keeping her in jail. Cowardice for force-feeding her, head pulled back, strapping her down. They stick a tube through her mouth or nose, and push it right down to her stomach. All the women scream, Celeste has told Bea, in detail, and over lunch, which somewhat stalled Bea’s appetite. The warders pour in a liquid. ‘All futile, really,’ said Celeste. ‘They only vomit it back up with the blood from their gums.’ Last time Emmeline had had enough and when the warders came in, she held a clay jug above her head and threatened to hit them, and they’d released her before she had died from starvation. ‘A martyr ain’t good for politics. They’re just going to take her back when she’s well enough. Ruddy Parliament and their Cat and Mouse Act.’
    And now, thinks Bea, the police, the Cat, want their Mouse back and here she is, standing right above their noses, mocking them, and untouchable, even if she is ‘only a woman’. Ha, thinks Bea.
    Mrs Pankhurst is exhorting her listeners to lay down their own lives, for what, she asks, ‘is life? At best it is very short. Would it not be well, when we leave this life, as leave it we must, to leave it having struck a blow for what is truer life; having struck a blow for the freedom of our sex; having struck a blow against subjection; having struck a blow against the vicious conditions into which the majority of our sex is born; having struck a blow against the disease and degradation of the masses of our country? Can you,’ asks Mrs Pankhurst, ‘keep your self-respect any longer?’ And Bea, standingthere, wonders at her own life, its lunches and dinners and dances. Mrs Pankhurst, Bea realises, makes her tremble.
    Mother calls herself a suffragist, and Mrs Pankhurst ‘a proponent of lunacy’. Mother believes that every step Mrs Pankhurst takes makes women appear less suitable to be given the vote. She is far from alone. There are middle-class men who don’t believe women should vote, working-class men who fear that women may be given the vote instead of them, and women like Mother who are quite convinced that only their approach can succeed. She expects Bea and Clemmie to fall in line with her point of view, and upon the very first meeting of the National Union branch down near Beauhurst – which she co-founded – dragooned the pair of them to come along. Clemmie begged Mother not to put her name on the list.
    ‘This is ridiculous, Mother, it is simply embarrassing for us all, don’t you see that?’
    ‘That’s not a wise comment, Clementine, from a young lady who is supposed to be about to come out into society. You need my help to find a husband.’
    ‘Aunt Celeste escaped without a husband,’ Bea interrupted.
    ‘She was asked to leave. It became inappropriate to have her with us any longer. Anyhow, there’s little joy in being the spinster sister in the attic. Or anywhere.’
    ‘Surely,’ returned Clemmie, ‘I’m hardly going to find a husband if I appear to be some ranting