London - Edward Rutherfurd [557]
The huge inequalities and problems of the new industrial age had not been solved. While King Edward VII amused his subjects – the less puritan of them anyway – with his racy court and his splendid style, the uncertainty of these unresolved tensions increasingly troubled them too. Although the great socialist revolution predicted by Marx had not yet come, the Trades Unions which had grown up in the 1880s had two million members by the turn of the century, and four million expected soon. In recent elections they had fielded their own political party which was already emerging as a growing third force. At present the Labour Members of Parliament, only some of them true socialists, were ready to go along with the Liberal government whose radical wing, led by the brilliant Welshman Lloyd George, was pledged to introduce welfare provisions for the poor. “But they won’t be able to do much, and the Conservative House of Lords will vote down even that,” Bull predicted. “And what will happen then?” It was precisely this vague but growing fear of social unrest that made him deplore the demonstrations of the Suffragettes. “Trouble breeds more. You’re stirring it up,” he complained. “Have you considered your children?” he went on. “Do you think this is very kind to them? Is it a good example?”
Violet was furious. How could he use her children against her like this? “The children are proud of me!” she stormed. “They know what I’m doing is for a good and moral cause. I’m showing them how to stand up for what is right. And I’m sure they know it.”
“Are you sure?” he answered.
His brother Herbert could be rather foolish sometimes with his clowning, thought Percy Fleming. But that was Herbert. A little crowd had paused to look at him as he stood in the middle of Tower Bridge.
“Decide, Percy!” he called out. “I shall stand here even if the bridge opens up until you do!”
One of the crowd was a young woman – well, perhaps a year or two older than he was, Percy supposed – very respectable-looking. He wondered what she thought of it.
“Well?” cried Herbert, striking an attitude in the fashion of a melodrama at a music hall. “Oh, Percy, you will kill me!”
“I shall if you go on like that,” said Percy – quite wittily, he thought. He glanced at the respectable girl to see if she thought so too.
Percy Fleming was a lucky man. In the fourth generation, the descendants of Jeremy Fleming, the Bank of England clerk, totalled thirty in number. Like any other family, some had prospered and some had not. Many had left London. Percy and Herbert’s father had kept a tobacconist’s shop in Soho, just east of Regent Street, which was a jolly area nowadays. When Percy was a child, the Metropolitan Board of Works had built two great roads in Soho – Charing Cross Road going northwards from Trafalgar Square, and Shaftesbury Avenue which descended to Piccadilly Circus: and before long Shaftesbury Avenue had become lined with theatres. But while Herbert had always loved raffish, theatrical Soho, Percy had always been drawn to the quieter side of Regent Street which merged, as one walked westwards, into sedate Mayfair. There were still some stately old firms of Huguenot clockmakers and craftsmen to be found there, but the chief occupation of the place, spreading out from the street behind old Burlington House called Savile Row, was that of the London tailor.
Though a tobacconist by trade Percy’s father had many acquaintances in the business. “The golden mile they call it,” he used to tell Percy. “I can always tell, the minute I see a customer step in the door, if he’s wearing a West End suit.” As for the new ready-made suits which had begun to appear in some clothing stores, his concave face would assume an expression of quiet contempt as he explained: “God did not make men in standard sizes. Each has his own shape and stance. A well-cut suit so perfectly fits that a man