The Intrigues of Jennie Lee Read online

  “It’s only a few days.” She nodded.

  The rumble coming from both directions, rising through their feet, broke into their reverie. When they looked up, the six great wheels of an A1 steam locomotive where sliding, apparently not rolling, down the platform track. It was Jennie’s Edinburgh-bound train.

  * * *

  Three hours later, Jennie was sitting, not in the small kitchen of the terrace house she’d been raised in, not facing her parents across the same wooden table at which she’d grown up. Instead she was alone with her mother—just them, no father—sipping tea in a shabby café, below the elevated trestle of the railway tracks that bisected the Cowdenbeath high street. The rain had stayed with Jennie as she rode north, heavy enough to make both shores invisible as her train trundled across the Forth Bridge. Matching her mood, the storm showed no sign of weakening as the train moved inland through Fife.

  Jennie had wired ahead and Euphemia Lee was waiting at the station. As Jennie’s train pulled in, she could be seen under the cover of the platform shelter, not quite gaunt, but serious, unsmiling, mouth a thin line, and yet the face still unwrinkled, a cigarette in her hand, and two or three fag ends stamped out at her feet. Smoking on a railway platform was not something her mother was wont to do, Jennie thought. Euphemia Lee was alone. She’d mounted the stairs to the platform and was waiting. She means to intercept me, alone. Could someone have told her why I was coming?

  Euphemia’s greeting was surprisingly warm, at least by Scottish standards. She took hold of her daughter’s arms, held her back for a good look, and then hugged her. Perhaps she was eager to see me, that’s all.

  Euphemia spoke. “You must be tired from the long journey.”

  “No, Mum, I’ve been in the north of England for some days. It was only a matter of a few hours getting here.”

  Her mother was obviously not listening. Preoccupied, she took Jennie’s case and led her down the stairs. Under the railway bridge, at the High Street she turned in the opposite direction from their home. Before Jennie could ask why she spoke.

  “Let’s get a cup of tea at the caf’, dear.” Jennie nodded, and her mother went on, “I wanted to talk to you before we see your father.”

  Jennie stopped. But he’s not my father. The thought was in her eyes as she glared at her mother. Euphemia Lee looked back into them hard, her face softened and her eyes pled for a little understanding. Jennie read them and softened.

  “Yes, let’s get a cup, I’d like that, Mum.”

  Face to face, at a small round table, in a dark alcove, neither woman seemed to know how to begin. Suddenly, sitting there, it came to Jennie, a question that tacitly assumed enough to open the subject they both had to address.

  “How did you find out I knew?”

  Her mother withdrew an envelope from her coat pocket. Jennie recognised the manila of a government envelope with official franking and no stamp. She placed it on the table and smoothed it out. The return address was now clear, No. 10 Downing Street.

  “He wrote to warn me the secret was out. Politics being what it is, I guessed you’d find out soon enough.”

  “MacDonald wrote to you. Ramsay MacDonald? You’re in touch with him?”

  The thought almost bowled Jennie out her chair. She grasped the edge of the small table with both her hands.

  Her mother answered, matter-of-factly, “Occasionally, not more than that, perhaps once a year.”

  This was beyond Jennie’s ken. “But why? Whatever for?”

  * * *

  Euphemia withdrew a packet of Woodbines, offered one to her daughter, who took one from her mother, perhaps for the first time in her life. Lighting up, the older woman drew on the cigarette, flicking a loose bit of tobacco from her lip with her tongue and spoke.

  Her voice remained unemotional, “He’s your...real...father. He cared about you. He was proud of you. But he could never talk about it to anyone...except me.”

  Jennie wanted to challenge her mother. Her real father was James Lee, the man who’d raised her, loved her, pushed her into a man’s world, made her the woman she’d become. But Jennie wasn’t going to argue about the words ‘real father.’

  “How long has MacDonald known? Since I was born?”

  Euphemia shook her head. “No. He didn’t find out till you were three. He’d come back to Cowdenbeath for a meeting, and met you for the first time.”

  “But he knew...about me?”

  “Not till then.”

  Jennie paused, working up the courage to invade the intimate life of another person, her mother’s. It wasn’t just unnatural, it was more than unpleasant. It would be repugnant, but she had to know. “How did...it...happen?” She couldn’t bring herself to go beyond the pronoun.

  “Must you know?” Her daughter could only nod. Euphemia fortified herself with another draw on the fag. “He seduced me...one night while you father was at the theatre next door.”

  She waited for a reaction. Seeing her daughter’s eyes narrow in anger she went on.

  “Of course, I could never tell your dad. He’d have killed MacDonald sure as we’re sitting here.”

  “Why did you never tell me?” Even as she asked the question Jennie realised how silly it was.

  Her mother replied nonetheless. “Tell you? Don’t be daft! Tell you when? When you were a bab’? When you were a schoolgirl? When you were in the ‘varsity, already deep into our politics, girl?”

  “Sorry, Mum. T’was a stupid question.”

  But her mother was going on. “Besides for a long time I admired him, we admired him, your dad and me both, especially in the war when he gave up everything.”

  Both mother and daughter knew that Ramsay MacDonald had resigned as party leader and actively opposed the Great War against his entire party for four years, till its end vindicated him triumphantly.

  “There wasn’t a reason in the world to tell you, even if you could have kept it from your dad.” She looked hard at her daughter. “And you must never say anything to him, do you hear?”

  Jennie reached for her mother’s hand. “I swear.” She took another cigarette from the packet on the table, lit it and smiled inwardly, while keeping her face immobile. Thanks, Mum, you’ve given me what I really need, a personal anger I never really had. You’ve dispelled any pity for the doddering old man. Her mind sought the right word for how she felt. Then it came. You’ve made me Nemesis.

  As if she were reading her daughter’s thoughts, Euphemia Lee spoke. “Jennie, once his politics changed, when he became a trimmer, a compromiser, we began to despise Ramsay MacDonald. By the time he showed how comfortable he was round the wealthy, once we began to despise his politics, you were already with us. There was never any need to make you hate him for what he did to me.”

  The women rose. Jennie left a few bob on the table. By tacit and mutual consent, the conversation was over, the matter was closed, the subject was not to be broached again. As they walked out into the rain, struggling with umbrellas against the gusts, Jennie couldn’t deny the feeling that there was something she hadn’t asked, something she still needed to know, a loose thread she had not tugged at. Whatever could it be? It will come to you, Jennie. But it will be too late to ask, won’t it?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Each day through the middle weeks of August, the news was worse. Each day, the Tory press proclaimed the rising onslaught on the pound, the inexorable closures—mills, mines, shipyards, foundries, factories. All accompanied by the same front-page leader, in one variant or another, over and over: Government Must Take Action! Almost any action would suffice, just to show the government understood it was in crisis.

  After a few days with her parents, Jennie found reasons to nurse her constituency and went off to Glasgow. North Lanark was more depressing than it had ever been. The August weather was fine. But the warm and sunny spells made the days worse for Jennie. She’d watch from the train crawling slowly out from the centre of Glasgow, as housewives came out of tenements and
terraced houses to hang sodden laundry or pluck weeds in a kitchen garden. Choosing a different stop each day, she began walking, promised herself she’d spend the week finding her way from one end of the constituency to the other, meeting voters wherever she could find them. There was little enough work and the strips of urban allotments Jennie passed were teeming with men, each preening his vegetable trellis, sometimes right up to the evening’s dusk after nine. Jennie wanted to talk, but the men were shame-faced and sullen. Each evening, she’d manage to catch the last train from Motherwell back to Queen Street Station in Glasgow.

  MacDonald had returned to London from his own Scottish constituency on the 10th of August, the day Jennie had left Cowdenbeath for Glasgow. But then, for another few days, nothing much happened in Whitehall that the papers could report. Jennie expected nothing more than the drumbeat of front-page leaders in the Tory broadsheet dailies: the persistent demand that the burden of a failing economy be shouldered by the unemployed. Finally, on the 19th, MacDonald called his cabinet together. The next day, when the London papers arrived in Glasgow, there was no hiding that the government was at an impasse. The cabinet was evenly divided on the cuts, and MacDonald grasping at some compromise that would keep his government in office and him as prime minister.

  That evening, as Jennie walked into the shabby hotel on George Square, the desk clerk turned to the pigeonholes and pulled out several pieces of paper.

  “People ‘been calling for you and sending you wires, Miss Lee.”

  He handed her two telegrams and a handful of notes. One of the telegrams was from her mother: Labour MPs seeking you. Stop. Go to London. Stop. Mum. Another was from Ellen Wilkinson in London: Need you here urgently. Stop. Take next train. The note was from her local constituency committee head: MPs trying to reach you. I’ve given them your hotel’s name. The trunk call phone messages were from Nye Bevan—typically extravagant, Jennie couldn’t help thinking—and from Frank. He wouldn’t have called from home. Either he went to a post office or he was already in London for some reason. She looked up from the bits of paper in her hand.

  “Do you know when the night train for London goes?”

  “11:33. But booking hall’s already closed.”

  “Never mind. I can get a ticket on the train. Only I won’t want a sleeper.”

  Can’t afford one, can I? She laughed out loud. It would be seven and a half hours to London Euston, sitting up, if the 2d class compartment was full. Nothing for it. Jennie shrugged.

  “Please prepare my bill.”

  She moved to the stair and began a trudge to the third floor. There had been no explanation in any of the messages. But surely it was political, not personal. Everything political is personal to you, Jennie, the voice in her head was knowing.

  It was 3:40 AM, when the bright lights on the quay during the Liverpool station-stop woke her from a deep sleep. Jennie had actually found an empty compartment and a conductor who was a Labour Party stalwart. He knew the name, even pretended to recognise her from the papers and promised to keep passengers from joining her as long as he could. Now, as she awoke and realised where she was, the trace of the dream she’d just woken from remained with her. It was unmistakably the face of her father—her real father, Ramsay MacDonald—nothing more. Then it evanesced. Was the face threatening, angry, had it leered at her? She couldn’t conjure it again. She leaned back, tilting her head against the side cushion, and tried to sleep again. Five minutes later, she gave up. She thought about her mother and Ramsay MacDonald. Jennie found herself, for the first time since her conversation with her mother, actually conjuring the image of Ramsay MacDonald, twenty-five years younger, seducing an equally younger Euphemia Lee. What must it have been like? She could somehow paint an image in her mind of the tall, thin, handsome man with a sort of ludicrously lascivious grin. It came along with a rising anger at him. But it was the woman she couldn’t put in the picture.

  Euphemia Lee was a person of great strength, rather unbending, with a mind that could not be changed. She’d been the stalwart in their small family, making the decisions, and enforcing them: firm with her daughter and firm with her husband. Single-mindedness had been her chief character trait. The notion that a man might have seduced her just didn’t fit easily with her character.

  Jennie tried again to make the seduction happen in her mind. Could Euphemia Lee have been attracted to the politics MacDonald represented? He was already a personality in Labour Party circles back then. Might she have been star-struck, seduced as much by his celebrity? No, Jennie had to admit, her mother was just too dour for that and too unsentimental about the politics she shared with MacDonald too.

  No, it couldn’t have been seduction. The notion of ‘Ramsay MacDonald—seducer’ was preposterous. If it wasn’t seduction, what was it? She made herself think things through, repugnant things. Still, things that just didn’t sit right. It was like a jigsaw with a puzzle piece forced in somewhere. Could it have been worse than seduction? Could it have been assault? The word formed in her mind. Rape? And then afterwards hidden, suppressed, denied, allowed by both parties to become mere ‘seduction’? In her rage against MacDonald, she wanted to make this the truth. But she knew the pieces of the puzzle didn’t really fit this way. He was even less capable of rape than he was of seduction.

  Then the question came to her, the one she’d failed to form and so failed to ask that afternoon in the shabby café beneath the railway bridge over the high street in Cowdenbeath. Mum, why ever did you tell MacDonald about me at all? Three years later, or ever after, for that matter? Why did you even allow yourself again to be in the same room with the man...if it had been rape or anything even remotely like it? She had to ask herself: would her mother not feel the violation every time she saw him, heard from him, in fact every time she looked upon her daughter? She paused on this problem in her train of thought. Would a man who’d raped or even seduced a woman stay in touch with her, visit her in her husband’s home, carry on a correspondence with her for years?

  The coach began, almost imperceptibly, to move along the Liverpool station platform. Once it picked up enough speed, the rhythmical sway of the carriage began to urge her back to sleep against her will. She didn’t want to give in to it. She had to think things through. She rose, reached for the packet of fags in the coat rolled on the rack above her head. Jennie remained standing. Balancing against the rhythm of the train as she lit up and let the smell of the smouldering Virginia tobacco waken her completely. Then she sat.

  It wasn’t rape. Couldn’t have been. So it had to have been seduction. Could it have been the other way round? Might your mother have been seductress, and MacDonald the seduced? This at least made a kind of sense to Jennie. She had no trouble seeing herself seducing a man. She’d done it in fact, would have seduced Mosley just for the fun of it if he’d put up the slightest resistance instead of a more than willing participation. But your mother seducing someone, anyone? And under her own roof? Just out of desire? Out of the question. The dour Presbyterian in your mum wouldn’t have allowed it to herself. Euphemia Lee had never done anything merely for fun. Could it be your mother wanted Ramsay MacDonald’s child? Jennie had been an only child, and had complained of it more than once growing up. Her friends and schoolmates all had brothers and sisters, some had too many for their family’s own good. She knew how long her parents had been married before Jennie arrived. And she knew equally well that her mother had never taken any precaution against pregnancy. ‘Family planning’ had been as much a watchword among socialist ladies in Scotland as women’s suffrage. Euphemia Lee had introduced her daughter to contraception before she went up to university in Edinburgh. But there was, to Jennie’s secret adolescent inspection, no sign of a diaphragm or other such device in her mother’s most intimate cabinets or drawers. Either she didn’t need one, or her marriage was chaste, or...Wanting a child by MacDonald, then telling him and conducting a correspondence with him for years. Surely your dad would have learned of it...unless he
knew all along? The alternatives and the possibilities were jumbling in her mind. If Dad knew, why had Mum sworn me to secrecy from him? It was becoming hard to follow one possibility without others cutting across and leading her in quite different directions. Then, quite against her will, Jennie fell asleep.

  She was still sleeping deeply when the train came to its final halt at King’s Cross London. As the conductor shook her gently awake, Jennie instantly experienced a rush of relentless anger. She couldn’t explain to herself why, but the political rage against Ramsay MacDonald she’d harboured was now strengthened and made much more personal. And it had broadened to her mother, and her father. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t frame an exact reason why she was now so angry with the world that had created her.

  * * *

  Back in her flat, Jennie went to her phone. Who to ring up first? Ellen, Nye, no, Frank of course. He answered at the first ring and before he could say anything, she spoke.

  “I’m in town, Frank.”

  “You know about the cabinet crisis meetings?”

  “Yes, it’s why I’m back. Took the night train.”

  “You must be knackered.” He paused but before Jennie could respond he spoke. “The ILP is trying to rally every Labour member we can—Trades Union Council, Fabian Society, anyone we can to get the ministers to resist the cuts.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Looks like there’s eight or nine members of the cabinet on our side. Not enough yet. I’m going to try to teach Parmoor some economics.” This was the government’s leader in the House of Lords. “Ellen thinks you could give Lees-Smith a bit of backbone. She’s going to talk to Margaret Bondfield.” This was the only woman in the cabinet. Frank smiled. “Doesn’t think you can help much there.”

  They both chortled, recalling Jennie’s slashing attack in the commons less than two months before.