The Intrigues of Jennie Lee Read online

  Charlie Trevelyan stepped forward, extending his hand. “So glad you were able to come Mosley. I think you know every one, except perhaps Miss Lee, the—”

  “The new member for North Lanark,” Mosley finished the sentence with a smile. Apparently he even knew her precise constituency. However did he learn I’d be here tonight? Jennie wondered.

  “How nice to meet you, Miss Lee. Splendid maiden speech!” He smiled warmly, indeed magnetically, and took her hand.

  Lady Trevelyan was watching Mosley as one might observe a predatory falcon.

  “You don’t know each other already?” They both shook their heads. Lady Mary observed, “I’d have thought your politics would have thrown you together before now.”

  “How so?” Jennie invited her to explain.

  “You’re both Independent Labour Party, aren’t you?”

  “Is that right?” Jeannie looked towards Mosley with surprise and pleasure.

  “Well, there’s no other way I could get into the Labour Party.” Unlike the Conservatives and Liberals, Labour was a confederation of disparate groups. “I don’t qualify for union membership. I’m certainly no Fabian and I won’t join a co-op. So the Independent Labour Party was my only way in.”

  Charlie Trevelyan now sought to bring the tall captain, Macmillan, into the conversation. “How about you, Macmillan? You don’t seem any more attached to the Tory party than Mosley was before he quit.”

  Macmillan was about to reply when he was interrupted by his wife.

  “Politics. What a bore.” She downed her second martini and lurched slightly to the drinks tray.

  To break the embarrassed silence, she turned to the others and asked, “Have you seen the new Arnold Bennett play, at the Theatre Royale? That Charles Laughton is a scream.”

  Jennie smiled. “Charles Laughton? He‘s got a flat in the place where I live.”

  “I say, Miss Lee, make a play for him, do! You’ve the looks for it.” Lady Dorothy’s directness didn’t seem to shock anyone. But Jennie felt the need to change the subject.

  “Actually, the building’s had a more distinguished occupant than the Laughton’s. Karl Marx lived there when he first came to Britain.”

  “Is that why you lodge there, politics?” Annoyance tinged Lady Dorothy’s voice.

  The butler announced dinner and the company put down their drinks. In pairs they moved out of the brightly lit salon to a darkened room, in the middle of which a table had been laid. Over a brilliant white tablecloth, cluttered with beautifully polished silver, each of the eight places glittered. Going in, Jennie found herself briefly on the arm of Tom Mosley. They looked at the place cards and took their seats.

  The party made a start at the dining table etiquette of alternating small talk to one’s right and left as the courses succeeded one another. Months later, Jennie would reflect on how beautifully each of them managed to tip toe through the mine fields of what they must have known about each other. The dinner was her introduction to the complexities of cosmopolitan life in the capital. Each party round the table bore an almost open secret, one Jennie knew or would soon learn without asking. Lady Dorothy Cavendish had been carrying on an affair with another MP. Her lover was her husband’s best friend, and Captain Macmillan, who looked ashen that night, would contemplate suicide within months. Keynes was a homosexual married en blanc to the beautiful ballerina sitting across from him, with her own chequered taste for men. At one end of the table, Charlie Trevelyan was Jennie’s sometime lover. At the other end was his complaisant wife. As for Mosley, Jennie was about to become one of his almost open secrets.

  By the savoury course, Mosley decided that Lady Dorothy’s injunction against politics had lasted long enough.

  Looking across to Keynes, Mosley observed, “Look here, you’re the only man at the table not an MP.” Keynes looked up, daubing his mouth. Mosley continued. “Ever think of standing? You’ve certainly got strong opinions.”

  Keynes thought for a moment. The others fell silent, really interested in his answer. How much of the truth could he tell? That he’d be laughed out of his circle, the Bloomsbury group, if he stood?

  He replied coolly, “No discipline, Mosley. Won’t take the whips.”

  “Sorry, Keynes, not good enough. Party discipline’s never stopped me.“

  “Stopped you? It provokes you, Tom!” Lady Trevelyan laughed. “You’re as bad as Churchill. Crossing the floor to Labour after you were elected as a Conservative!”

  “I’ll have to cross back again to equal Winston’s record for ratting and re-ratting.” He used the word Churchill had employed to describe his two escapes from sinking political ships, in 1904 and 1924.

  Lady Mary teased. “Would you do it, Tom?”

  Mosley put down his napkin and thought for a moment. “If I had to, to get anything done. There are a million unemployed men in this country and no one’s interested in finding them work.” Mosley glanced towards Jennie, gauging the effect of his words. She smiled, nodding her concurrence. She was about to speak when Mosley went on. “Winston understands there’s no point being in politics without at least a chance at power. In fact, power is the only thing that makes the whole filthy business interesting.”

  “Filthy?” Macmillan asked.

  “Squalid!” There was disdain in Mosley’s tone. “I’ve met too many men at Westminster who are there just for what they can get out of it. And the jobbers you’ve to deal with...Belisha, Mond, Shinwell...” He fell silent for a moment while the others contemplated his list. There was one from each party on it—Liberal, Conservative, Labour, but all Jews. No one round the table took exception. Was this acquiescence, embarrassment or cowardice Jennie wondered? Casual anti-Semitism was fashionable. Probably it meant nothing. Meanwhile Macmillan and Keynes frowned at each other, but good manners kept them from remonstrance.

  At this point, Dorothy Cavendish lost patience. “I suppose one just can’t escape politics at this table. Do you think the ladies can retire now, Lady Mary?” She looked towards Lady Trevelyan and rose to pre-empt a demur.

  “Quite right,” Lady Mary concurred. “Let’s leave the gentlemen to their port and politics.”

  Jennie remained seated. “I’ll stay on if I may.”

  She addressed herself to Lady Mary. It was something she’d done before at the few formal dinner parties.

  Lady Mary nodded. “Suit yourself.” Then she led the two other women from the dining room.

  * * *

  There was a complicated little dance as the men moved to vacated seats on either side of their host. Macmillan, who’d been seated in the middle of the table, took a seat at Charlie Trevelyan’s immediate left. Before Keynes could take one of the empty places closer to the others Mosley rose, offered his to Keynes and came round the table to sit next to Jennie. She noticed. When they had settled, the butler brought a tray of drinks, a box of cigars and a silver cigarette case to the table. Trevelyan and Keynes both reached into the box and a cigar nipper was handed round. Mosley took up the cigarette box and offered one to Jennie, who took it.

  Freed from any further conversational constraint, Trevelyan turned to party politics. “Well, comes the flapper election.” It was to be the first election with full woman’s suffrage. “Will the ladies change things, Jennie?”

  She laughed at the fact obvious to all. “I shall at least be allowed to vote for myself.” Then she thought for a minute. “I don’t think it will change things much. For 40 years Tories wouldn’t grant woman the vote because the suffragettes were all real socialists. ILP, my lot. But most women are conservative.”

  “There’s a pity.” It was Macmillan, the only member of the Conservative party in the room.

  “You’re right, Miss Lee.” Keynes spoke through a funnel of blue grey smoke as he tried to get his cigar started. “If they vote Labour, it’ll be because they reckon old Ramsay MacDonald’ll be as niggardly with their money as the proprietor of a coal mine.”

  Everyone laughed at t
he image, but each for a different reason. Jennie remembered that the Labour leader had helped break the general strike in ’26 and destroyed the coal miners union.

  The table fell to discussing the details of industrial policy—Keynes giving a little lecture on economics, Macmillan suddenly enthusiastic in agreement, Charlie Trevelyan shaking his head at Keynes’ political naiveté.

  But Jennie was no longer listening closely. She was instead preoccupied by the feeling of Mosley’s hand on her thigh, warming it through the thin gown. She should have removed it instantly. Why are you letting him do this? The reply came back in her thoughts. It’s only a bit of fun. How far up her leg would she allow it to go? The feelings were becoming increasingly pleasurable as the hand moved slowly up her thigh. Jennie had to decide where to draw the line. Not here. Not yet.

  Suddenly the conversation shifted. Trevelyan was asking Mosley a question. “Mosley, I hear your good Lady Cynthia has been adopted as the Labour candidate for Stoke-on-Trent. Is that right?”

  “Yes, Cimmie is standing.”

  “Is that quite fair? Husband and wife both on the Labour benches.”

  “Front benches too, if I can contrive it,” Mosley replied in a smug tone.

  Jennie decided it was time to end the little under-the-table game. It wasn’t the casual mention of an absent wife. She already knew enough about political marriages not to be terribly surprised. But she’d be embarrassed if Keynes or Charlie noticed. They’d be too discreet to let on in any way if they were to. Perhaps they’d already noticed.

  It was certainly too late to remonstrate with Mosley, even by a glance of anger. His hand had been caressing the flesh beneath her gown for too long now. She should have removed his hand immediately if his advance had really been unwelcome.

  You’re playing with fire, and not yet burned, girl. Stop now! The thought made her stand up quickly, so quickly if the other men had been looking, they would have seen Mosley’s hand drop from her lap. She stubbed out her cigarette.

  “Thank you, Sir Charles. I’ll join the ladies after all.”

  * * *

  Jennie decided to walk home along the Embankment, to lean against the wind coming up the Thames, to think her way back to Soho. She knew well enough she’d have to decide how she felt about this man she’d allowed to grope her.

  There were knots of homeless men camped beneath the stone barrier that broke the weather coming off the river. These wretched souls wouldn’t trouble Jennie, she knew. They might as well have been her North Lanark constituents—hungry, wet, cold, all their anger stewed down into hopeless resignation: no threat to the lone young woman passing along their cardboard shelters. Often before she would stop, talk a while, leave a half crown. For once Jennie hardly noticed them. It was Tom Mosley on her mind.

  She had been steadily antagonised by his talk: the naked attraction to power, the casual anti-Semitism, the evident political opportunism. And yet he was handsome, very handsome, more striking, more attractive up close, in evening clothes, exuding a faint musk, than he’d been twenty feet away from her in the Smoking Room of the House. She’d enjoyed her effect on him as much as she’d savoured the titillation of his fingers. It had been heightened by the brazen risk they both ran, sitting there in that formal dining room, men in dinner jackets on each side of them, leaning back, puffing at cheroots and Havanas. Once or twice Keynes had looked downwards, beneath the table-top. Had he actually noticed?

  Even in the chill coming off the Thames she was able to relive the sheer pleasure of the touch upon her thigh.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d used someone and allowed herself to be used. She’d slept with Charlie Trevelyan, there across the table, more than once. It had been almost companionable however, warmth in chill hotel rooms on wintry nights in gloomy midland mill towns. She had no use for double standards. Jennie was prepared to treat men on a level, but she had to get as good as she gave—boys at the ‘varsity, comrades from the picket line. But she had liked them. This would be different. Mosley struck her as brazen. And she’d never taken a lover she wasn’t quite certain she could cope with.

  Jennie literally shuddered and wrapped the coat tighter against a fresh gust. Lost in her thoughts, she’d gone too far along the Embankment. Jennie turned back to Northumberland Avenue, up through Trafalgar Square on her way to Soho.

  Chapter Five

  The next day, writs were issued for a general election to be held six weeks hence, at the end of May. With a safe seat in North Lanark, Jennie was drafted into speaking across Scotland and Northern England for every Labour Party candidate who had a chance and needed the young people’s votes.

  Wherever she went, doorstep to doorstep with a local candidate, the scene repeated itself: The withered, threadbare woman at her doorstep, pushing hungry children back from the door—dirty, shoeless, unclothed children she would not let Jennie meet. Behind her an older child dressed in faded calico hopsacking carried her youngest, older and younger both sucking hard on thumbs. Once Jennie had asked for the man of the house and was told he’d been out of work so long he was ashamed to come to the door. She didn’t make the same request again.

  Speaking a half dozen times a day, to groups that ranged from doorsteps and street corners to halls packed with hundreds, Jennie made the same speech over and over. It was full of radical promises that three months in Westminster had convinced her the old men of the Labour Party’s leadership didn’t really want to keep, even if they did win.

  But they did win.

  Jennie woke up in Glasgow on the morning of the 31st of May, 1929 to discover that her party had beaten the Tories: 287 Labour members of parliament against 260 Conservatives, with the balance of power—fifty-nine seats—held by Lloyd George’s Liberal party.

  Her party’s victory wouldn’t mean much to her, Jennie thought. She’d just be another backbench MP, occasionally indulging her outrage braying into a political vacuum, with no influence whatever over events. But that was not how things turned out.

  * * *

  Almost immediately, parliament was recalled. Back at her London flat for the first time in six weeks, Jennie found a third buff envelope, heavy with gold embossing. It carried a very kind, but now rather firm invitation from the Duchess of York. Evidently, her previous notes had not been merely polite correspondence with an old chum. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons really wanted to see Jennie.

  * * *

  They’d never have met but for the Great War, then in its second full summer. And of course there was the fire that broke out, one late summer day in 1916. Someone, almost certainly a servant, had been careless, smoking under the sombre hennin towers circling the timbered roof of the massive central keep of the forbidding Glamis Castle north of Dundee.

  The Earl of Strathmore had offered to take in wounded men at the castle, almost immediately after they had begun streaming back from the Black Watch; his son Fergus’ regiment in 1914. Fergus was to die in the trenches the next year. Of course, the Earl’s hospitality was only extended to “other ranks”—private soldiers and non-commissioned officers—on the understanding these men would not be so disfigured by their injuries to cause disquiet to the Earl’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons.

  The fire broke out under the roof of Glamis castle sometime in the afternoon of the 16th of September 1916. Her mother, the countess, gone for the day, Elizabeth was playing chatelaine. There were about a dozen soldiers in the house. A few had visitors. One of these was a twelve-year-old girl, Jennie Lee, up from Cowdenbeath fifty miles to the south.

  It was only the powerful pump of the Dundee brigade’s machine that saved the castle, spreading a wet coat across the entire roof, while its men fought the fire’s source in the servants’ quarters beneath it.

  Just when everyone was breathing a sigh of relief that the castle had been saved, the real catastrophe began. With a loud report, water began spilling in cascades out between the roof and the exterior walls. The water tank under the roof had bur
st and was now adding to what the fire truck had pumped out and was still sluicing down from the roof.

  Standing in the park surveying the damage high above, the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth immediately understood what had happened.

  “It’s the water tank. It’s flooding the castle!”

  She rushed back into the house followed by a dozen of those nearest her. The tank’s contents were spilling down the stairs from storey to storey, with the strength of a salmon run in flood. Above the stair the broad ceilings were straining with the weight, and walls were beginning to stain as the water seeped everywhere. Standing at the landing between the ground and first floors, Elizabeth took command.

  “Brooms, mops, hurry! Anything that will move the water off the floors.”

  Among the staff and the soldiers frantically channelling the flow with whatever came to hand, Elizabeth noticed a young girl. As she worked, her head was turning from side to side surveying the paintings on the wall. Then she addressed Elizabeth.

  “Should na’ something be done to save ‘em—the pictures and rugs, the furniture we can move? What if the ceilings collapse from the water?”

  She was right. Elizabeth called the footmen and some of the soldiers together. The young girl joined in as they began rescuing furniture, pictures, rugs, anything that was threatened by the flood of cold water and could be moved. For the next three hours, a dozen maids, soldiers, guests swept, sloshed, brushed water down the stairs, until someone managed to turn off the source of the water that filled the roof tank.

  By ten that night, they’d done what they could. Wet, exhausted, but slightly exhilarated by the madcap adventure she’d been through, Elizabeth found herself sitting on steps outside the carriage entrance of the vast brownstone of Glamis Castle. Next to her was the young girl who’d been through the entire afternoon and evening, never flagging, always there in the thick of things, smart, effective, not just doing things, but thinking what needed doing, and how things could be done better. Elizabeth looked at her and the girl looked back, smiling.