Fall of Giants

As it happened, both Ethel and Bernie were home from work that day. Bernie was ill in bed with influenza, and so was Lloyd’s child minder, so Ethel was looking after her husband and her son.

She felt very low. They had had a tremendous row about which of them was to be the parliamentary candidate. It was not merely the worst quarrel of their married life, it was the only one. And they had barely spoken to one another since.

Ethel knew she was justified, but she felt guilty all the same. She might well make a better M.P. than Bernie, and anyway the choice should be made by their comrades, not by themselves. Bernie had been planning this for years, but that did not mean the job was his by right. Although Ethel had not thought of it before, she was now eager to run. Women had won the vote, but there was more to be done. First, the age limit must be lowered so that it was the same as for men. Then women’s pay and working conditions needed improvement. In most industries, women were paid less than men even when doing exactly the same work. Why should they not get the same?

But she was fond of Bernie, and when she saw the hurt on his face she wanted to give in immediately. “I expected to be undermined by my enemies,” he had said to her one evening. “The Conservatives, the halfway-house Liberals, the capitalist imperialists, the bourgeoisie. I even expected opposition from one or two jealous individuals in the party. But there was one person I felt sure I could rely on. And she is the one who has sabotaged me.” Ethel felt a pain in her chest when she thought about it.

She took him a cup of tea at eleven o’clock. Their bedroom was comfortable, if shabby, with cheap cotton curtains, a writing table, and a photograph of Keir Hardie on the wall. Bernie put down his novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which all the socialists were reading. He said coldly: “What are you going to do tonight?” The Labour Party meeting was that evening. “Have you made a decision?”

She had. She could have told him two days ago, but she had not been able to bring herself to utter the words. Now that he had asked the question, she would answer it.

“It should be the best candidate,” she said defiantly.

He looked wounded. “I don’t know how you can do this to me and still say you love me.”

She felt it was unfair of him to use such an argument. Why did it not apply in reverse? But that was not the point. “We shouldn’t think of ourselves, we should think of the party.”

“What about our marriage?”

“I’m not giving way to you just because I’m your wife.”

“You’ve betrayed me.”

“But I am giving way to you,” she said.

“What?”

“I said, I am giving way to you.”

Relief spread across his face.

She went on: “But it’s not because I’m your wife. And it’s not because you’re the better candidate.”

He looked mystified. “What, then?”

Ethel sighed. “I’m pregnant.”

“Oh, my word!”

“Yes. Just at the moment when a woman can become a member of Parliament, I’ve fallen for a baby.”

Bernie smiled. “Well, then, everything’s turned out for the best!”

“I knew you’d think that,” Ethel said. At that moment she resented Bernie and the unborn baby and everything else about her life. Then she became aware that a church bell was ringing. She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was five past eleven. Why were they ringing at this time on a Monday morning? Then she heard another. She frowned and went to the window. She could see nothing unusual in the street, but more bells began. To the west, in the sky over central London, she saw a red flare, the kind they called a maroon.

She turned back to Bernie. “It sounds as if every church in London is ringing its bells.”

“Something’s happened,” he said. “I bet it’s the end of the war. They must be ringing for peace!”

“Well,” said Ethel sourly, “it’s not for my bloody pregnancy.”

{V}

Fitz’s hopes for the overthrow of Lenin and his bandits were centered on the All-Russia Provisional Government, based in Omsk. It was not just Fitz, but powerful men in most of the world’s major governments, who looked to this town for the start of the counterrevolution.

The five-man directory was housed in a railway train on the outskirts of the city. A series of armored railcars guarded by elite troops contained, Fitz knew, the remains of the imperial treasury, many millions of rubles’ worth of gold. The tsar was dead, killed by the Bolsheviks, but his money was here to give power and authority to the loyalist opposition.

Fitz felt he had a profound personal investment in the directory. The group of influential men he had assembled at Tŷ Gwyn back in April formed a discreet network within British politics, and they had managed to foster Britain’s clandestine but weighty encouragement of the Russian resistance. That in turn had brought support from other nations, or at least discouraged them from helping Lenin’s regime, he felt sure. But foreigners could not do everything: it was the Russians themselves who had to rise up.