London - Edward Rutherfurd [579]
Since then the memory of that winter had dissolved into a grey blur out of which his poor, pale, ravaged face arose to haunt her. And again and again over the years she had asked herself: should she have let the others do the marching? Why had she given such pain to the child who was gone?
As she sat alone in the house while Helen went for her walk it was hard to come to terms with the grim thought that she had not confessed to her daughter. Helen had not had her premonition alone. Violet had had it too.
Helen walked through Sloane Square then turned up Sloane Street towards Knightsbridge and Hyde Park. It still felt odd to look at the familiar streets which she remembered as a débutante and see all the windows taped against bomb blast and the piles of sandbags by every doorway. The place seemed strangely quiet, like a Sunday.
As she passed Pont Street, a few drops of rain began to fall. By the time she was nearing Knightsbridge it had turned into a shower. To escape it she dived left into the Basil Street Hotel where she waited, gazing out of the window as the raindrops streamed down it, feeling sad.
She had no wish to die. She did not think she particularly deserved it. Hadn’t she at least tried to serve some purpose all her life? She had always known that her mother was right to serve a cause, despite what the others had said. When she had been taken away to live at Bocton as a child her grandfather had tried to pretend that her mother was mysteriously called away, too, though she had known perfectly well from her brothers that she was in gaol. This had not detracted from the respect she had felt for the old man: she could see from the obvious respect that everybody had for him that apart from his disagreement with her mother his opinions were probably sound. Sometimes, having nobody else to talk to, he had discussed the issues of the day with the little girl as they sat in the old walled garden or went to look at the deer. And even now she could hear him, as clearly as if he were beside her, explaining gently:
“It’s the socialists who are the real danger to us all, Helen, far more than the Germans. Mark my words, that will be the battle you face in your lifetime. Not only in Britain either, but in the whole world.”
Had he lived just a little longer, to the end of the war, how right he would have seen his words to be. The Bolsheviks. The Russian Revolution. She had still been at school when these horrors occurred. The Tsar and all his children murdered. A wave of sympathy and disgust had passed across all Europe. As the horror of the war and the misery of the great flu epidemic receded, the Bolshevik menace was spoken of whenever people turned to serious conversation. Could such a thing, as the Bolsheviks themselves confidently predicted, come to Britain too, destroying everything she knew and loved?
In a way – her mother said so, everybody said so – a revolution in English society had already begun. The death duties introduced by Lloyd George had been cutting a swathe through the upper classes. There had been large sums to pay when old Edward had died at Bocton. Numerous gentry and aristocrats were being obliged to sell up. The coalition government during the war had been continued afterwards, on and off, but with the great difference that when the recently enfranchised troops returned demanding a better post-war world there had been a huge increase in the Labour Party supported by the Trades Unions. To many people’s astonishment, in 1924 the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald had even briefly been called upon to form a government. “If it’s not a bloody revolution,