The Intrigues of Jennie Lee Read online

  Reuther volunteered, “I recommend the eggs easy over with a fried English muffin.”

  Jennie didn’t know what ‘easy over’ was but she wanted very much to know what an English muffin was. She looked to the man behind the counter.

  “Just as he said, please.” Then she turned back to Reuther and smiled.

  After a moment he spoke. “Coming back this way?” Then he covered her hand.

  Jennie withdrew it, shaking her head. “Don’t think so, not this trip.”

  “When will I see you then?”

  “No idea, Walter.”

  “But, Jennie...” His face showed genuine perplexity. “I thought...last night. Well, when you invite a fella...” Reuther’s words petered out.

  Jennie decided to complete his thought. “When you invite a fellow up to your room and you’re a woman, it must be serious... is that what you meant?” Reuther nodded vigorously. “Not this woman, Walter. It was grand, it was fun, but that’s all it was, last night.”

  By now the short-order cook had finished his work and served up two identical plates. A companionable silence fell between them as Jennie and Walter ate. When she finished Jennie looked round and seeing that they were unobserved, leaned over and kissed him. Then she rose from the counter and picked up her bag.

  “I’m off. Best of luck to you Walter, if you go to Russia.”

  Reuther reached out for her sleeve. “If I come through England, can I look you up?”

  “I’d like that.” It would have been pedantic to say she might be in Scotland, not England.

  * * *

  Three days later, Jennie took the late sleeper from Chicago back east. It didn’t stop in Detroit. Undressing, stretching out in a berth, trying to get a night’s sleep on a train—these were all new to Jennie. She could never afford the sleepers from Edinburgh to London. But her speaker fees and the prices in America brought this and other luxuries within reach, with money left over to send her parents back home.

  She came back from the toilet in her dressing gown, what the Americans called a robe. She pulled the curtain, settled herself in the space wide enough for two and determined to let the sway of the train over the rail gaps lull her to sleep.

  It didn’t come. Perhaps it was the novelty of the Pullman car, or the strong cup of coffee her hosts had insisted upon at the end of a convivial dinner in Hyde Park. The supper was a rare occasion at which whites and Negroes shared a table on terms of equality. Jennie had seen enough of America to be surprised by it, but had also learned enough of the country’s mores not to mention how exceptional the experience was. When one of the company learned she was booked on the sleeper east, he insisted on taking Jennie all the way up to the Union Station in downtown Chicago. He would put her in the hands of a personal friend, a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. This was the union representing the largely black employees of the Pullman Company that owned all the sleeper coaches in the country.

  As trains slid in and out of the station, their noise obliterated all conversation beyond a pace or two’s distance. Jennie’s companion managed to hail his friend from three cars away and they approached one another, smiling and waving. The handsome black man in the immaculate white coat and kepi of the Pullman porter put out his hand for the small case in Jennie’s hand. Instead she grasped the hand warmly, shaking it vigorously. Caught off guard by this patent violation of public norms, the man searched Jennie’s eyes, seeking the meaning of the gesture. Jennie’s strong Scot’s accent was enough to make him understand. She wasn’t an American and either didn’t know or wouldn’t accept the rules.

  She said, “Mr. Simmons, I’ve heard a good deal about you and your work on the way here.”

  He turned to his friend. “You’ve schooled this lady well, Fred. She didn’t call me ‘George.’”

  Both laughed at a joke Jennie didn’t understand. They now shook hands as Simmons took Jennie’s larger case from his friend’s hand.

  “No time to socialise, we’re running late on account of the weather.” He turned to Jennie. “Follow me please, Miss.”

  Even as they spoke the train had lurched once and begun slowly to move. They mounted the car’s steps quickly.

  Now, an hour later, Jennie was still awake, claustrophobic between a thick shade window covering and the shrouded passageway. She struggled into her dressing gown, found her cigarettes and matches, and then carefully rose from her lower berth, ducking her head as she emerged into the narrow corridor between the curtains drawn on both sides of the coach. There at the end of the car, standing at the only uncurtained window, was the porter, Mr Simmons.

  As she approached, Jennie put a cigarette to her mouth and proffered the packet to Simmons. Withdrawing a lighter he brought the flame to her cigarette, shook his head to decline her offer and spoke.

  “Please excuse me,” he said as he stepped past her to walk down the defile between the sleeping berths.

  Jennie touched the sleeve of his upper arm.

  “Must you go back to work? I didn’t mean to disturb you...I only wanted to join you as you looked to be at your leisure.”

  Simmons sighed. “Ma’am.”

  Jennie had been addressed this way before, despite her youthful appearance, and always by older men, almost always black.

  “I can’t stand here talking to a white lady. Not if I want to keep my job.”

  “Why ever not?” She held his arm lightly but she could feel it was against his will.

  “First man comes out of his berth for a...to use the toilet, he’ll make a scene, he’ll threaten me, then report me to the white conductor. No black man can be seen talking, smoking, socialising in the middle of the night with a white lady on a Pullman. No, ma’am.”

  He slowly pulled his arm from her hand and walked away down the corridor, leaving Jennie to contemplate the empty blackness edged by snowbanks between an occasional station lamp.

  She drew on her cigarette. I can’t even talk to a black man in public? What sort of an upheaval do they fear, the white people in this country? Perhaps what really worries everyone, right down to the poorest white man, is the threat of a Negro insurrection.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The thought came back to Jennie weeks later as she rode the Canadian National Railway sleeper from Toronto to Halifax, where she was to embark for Liverpool. In Montreal, she’d had to change for the sleeper to the Atlantic coast. There she noticed that the porters were white, and then she saw one carrying a case as the black man who owned it followed him onto the sleeper car. An event that couldn’t have taken place in the USA.

  Canada had already struck Jennie as thoroughly different from the United States, different, trying—with indifferent success—to be British. In the large towns and cities of Ontario, Jennie realised she had lost the anonymity she’d found in America. Few Americans she had met knew that Jennie was an MP. And among those who did, no one seemed to care. In Canada, matters were quite otherwise. Everywhere she was Jennie Lee, Member of Parliament for North Lanark, Scotland. It was almost as though she was on a royal tour dispensing Imperial recognition to needy colonials. Everywhere she lectured, provincial newspaper reporters asked questions. Conservative politicians were eager to dine with a member of the mother of parliament, even a Labour party MP. They asked her to tell them about Winston Churchill or Ramsay MacDonald as if they were film stars. People made speeches at her, and never left her alone long enough to meet anyone—male or female—who might take to her for whom she was instead of what she was.

  Jennie was a celebrity in Canada, and she found she did not like it. Reaching Halifax she was glad to embark for home.

  * * *

  Taking stock, Jennie found, was an unavoidable pastime for a lone tourist-class traveller on a late winter transatlantic crossing of the Cunard Lancastria. A single stateroom, a table for two that no one ever asked to join, weather too awful even for a turn along the exterior boat deck, junior officers too busy to socialise in the second-class lounge,
not even a bridge game to join. Most of the passengers had embarked at New York two days earlier. The “respectable” ones had already forged alliances for the duration of the voyage. And everyone seemed to be “respectable.” Sitting alone in the saloon bar the first evening out from Halifax, Jennie found herself scanning the room for shipboard Lotharios. Not a one leering back at her. Perhaps they don’t travel second class?

  The Lancastria plied a leisurely progress through the pea soup of the Grand Banks. The predictable wail of its foghorn made a continuous night’s sleep impossible for the first three days. This was inconvenient. Sleeping long and soundly was the best method Jennie could think of to make time pass rapidly. In the late morning, when she could remain in her bunk no longer, she would breakfast and take her notebook to the ship’s library, always devoid of other passengers. She decided she would force herself to try to put as much of her seven weeks in North America down on paper as she could recall. Nothing came. Jennie spent the first two mornings and afternoons too often staring out of portholes into a uniform grey field, seeking a horizon line where there was none. Writing something both new and interesting for the readers of The New Leader seemed hopeless. On the second afternoon, she began casting her eye across the meagre shelves, searching vainly for a book she could convince herself she just had to read. There were none.

  In her desperation, Jennie pulled on a drawer handle. It revealed a bin containing roughly three months’ worth of the weekly Economist, each still folded and banded by a paper wrapper. This was a valid excuse for not writing. She needed to catch up on the political news. Jennie unwrapped each one, ordered them in a pile from oldest to newest. The most recent one was dated Friday, 10 March 1931. She decided she would ration them, read two each day cover to cover, beginning with the issue the week she’d left for America.

  This resolution immediately fell to a combination of temptation and a sudden realisation that events of the greatest importance to her had transpired while she had been hiding from them in North America. None of the political events The Economist reported had made it to a single American newspaper she’d been able to see. It had been as though the rest of the world did not exist in the USA.

  Almost immediately after Jennie had left for her lecture tour, Winston Churchill had resigned from the Conservative shadow cabinet, over India of all things. Alone in the room, Jennie had to laugh out loud even as she felt ashamed by her reaction to Churchill’s outrageous word-picture of the Indian independence leader:

  It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, an Inner Temple lawyer, now become a seditious fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

  The Economist must have taken great pleasure in reproducing this contemptible example of Winston Churchill’s literary flair.

  Much more important, by late January, there were six million unemployed in Germany, almost as many as in the USA, a country twice as populous. British unemployment was climbing beyond two and half million.

  Then came the real bombshells for Jennie, news that made her realise she’d been away much too long, that matters were moving fast, too fast. The second number in the stack told her that Nye Bevan and more than a dozen other young Labour MPs had repudiated their own prime minister and climbed on the Mosley bandwagon. The words The Economist quoted the radical MP, John Strachey:

  We were tired of voting for measures which we did not believe could cope with the present situation, or against motions that seemed to us equally irrelevant; of listening to speeches half of which appeared to us meaningless, and the other half frankly dishonest; of sitting quietly in the “best Club in the World,” watching from its comfortable armchairs the accelerating decline of the British industrial and commercial system and the rapid drift to disaster of the movement with which we are identified.

  All sixteen of these members of parliament had agreed that parliamentary government had to be replaced. What the crisis required was an executive “invested with power to carry through the emergency policy.”

  Jennie began to read avidly, turning pages in search of something, anything, that might put her further in the picture. Nothing more in this number. She shed the magazine from her lap and reached for the next wrapper, stripped it away from the folded newsprint, and began scanning the leaders and the columns of text, hungry for the next act in the drama. Had Mosley done anything dramatic, rash? Might he let it be known, by a whisper to hacks eager for a scoop, that he had support in the palace, among the royal family, from the Duke of York? No, he couldn’t! She sought to convince herself. It would be terrible for the Duke of York. It would be more than catastrophic for you! Surely word would have come across the Atlantic if there had been anything. She literally exhaled when finally she found the next episode in the Mosley chronicle in the Economist.

  He’d not gone to the palace at all. Instead, Tom Mosley had gone to the Labour Party’s steadfast opponent—the greatest of Britain’s industrial capitalists—and he’d gone for money, enough to pay for a national campaign, at least for a while. The article, from the end of January, was titled “Mosley motors in a Morris”:

  Sir Oswald Mosley has been given a cheque for 50,000 pounds by the owner of Britain’s largest auto works, Sir William Morris, to fund his radical political movement.

  Jennie continued to burrow into the stack before her. There, in an issue from the end of February, was the next twist in the story: Mosley had extracted a half dozen MPs from the sixteen Labour members to form something The Economist called “The New Party.” Could that be Mosley’s name for it? Jennie searched for ‘Bevan’ among the list of MPs who’d resigned, one after the other, to join Mosley’s party. She made herself scan the list twice to be sure it was not there. It was just to be sure, but she was not surprised. However much Nye Bevan might agree with Mosley about politics, he would never abandon his miners and their party.

  The last straw in this wind came in the final Economist number in the pile before her, from the middle of March. Mosley had not resigned from Labour. He had been expelled from the party for “gross disloyalty” before he’d had a chance to resign from it.

  Jennie put down the last Economist. It was now early April. A month gone by. What had happened in the time between starting his “New Party” and Mosley’s expulsion from Labour, she wondered? Then, her mind walked back through these political events. What would you have done, Jennie? She knew some of the answers to this question. You would have signed on to the manifesto, for certain, just as Nye did. But you would have gone further, wouldn’t you? You’d have bound yourself to Mosley’s New Party group, wouldn’t you! And if Frank had pleaded for caution, you would have argued with him fiercely and then joined anyway! Just to show Frank you weren’t his creature? Would you have followed Mosley, if he had asked? Or even if he’d looked at you...that way. Now, in the coolness of the hour, and the draughty chill of the swaying ship’s library, Jennie wondered whether she’d been saved by her travels, at least for the moment, from her own impetuousness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It must have been fifteen minutes after the Lancastria had docked, Jennie heard the knock on her cabin door.

  “Come in,” she said without looking up.

  She was seated at the tiny desk crammed between the bunk and the opposite wall, sorting through papers, deciding what notes to keep and what to dispose of.

  Still without turning, she said, “You can take the large case, but leave the small one on the bed.”

  “Very good, Miss.” The response came from an unfamiliar voice, unexpected among the North Country accent every steward on the ship seemed to use. And then she realised it was Frank Wise who had come through her stateroom door. She rose and closed the few feet between them. She noticed as he turned the bolt on the door behind him.

  “What are you doing here
, Frank?” Before he could answer the question, she added, “I’m so glad to see you,” and drew him down to the bunk, pushing the small case still upon it down to the floor.

  Jennie began struggling against the buttons on Frank’s waistcoat as he pulled the bow carefully knotted at the blouse beneath her traveling suit. The delight of slowly disrobing one another was a ritual that repeated recollection over three months separation had carved deeper into her memory. But now, it was dispensed with by unvoiced agreement. In their mutual ardour, it was surprising nothing was torn as the clothing separating them was parted.

  All too soon, they were leaning companionably against pillows put up against the cold bulkhead, smoking. Now the steward’s knock came with the words, “Baggage to go ashore, Ma’am?”

  “Come back in five minutes,” Jennie replied.

  Frank rose and they both began to dress. He was silent. It was not like him, Jennie thought. She had to speak first and she didn’t know where to start. She went back to her very first question. “You never said, Frank, what are you doing here?”

  “Simply couldn’t wait to see you. Had to be with you the first moment one could, I suppose.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She was palpably, deeply, powerfully content. She could feel it in the sudden release of the watch-spring tension that had been driving her since she had left for the North American tour. The languid feeling couldn’t last long, but she knew it was real.

  “However did you know it was this ship, this day?”

  “Rung up your lecture tour agent. They had your schedule.”

  “Anyone else know I’m back?” She said it casually, as she folded away the last few things into her small valise. Too casually?

  “Like whom?” He was quizzical.

  She was thinking of Mosley and the Duchess of York but she replied, “Nye Bevan, Charlie Trevelyan, Ellen Wilkinson?”