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.”
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 Ty 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.
How much could the directory achieve? Although it was anti-Bolshevik, its chairman was a Socialist Revolutionary, Nicholas D. Avkentsiev. Fitz deliberately ignored him. The Socialist Revoutionaries were almost as bad as Lenin’s lot. Fitz’s hopes lay with the right wing and the military. Only they could be relied upon to restore the monarchy and private property. He went to see General Boldyrev, commander in chief of the directory’s Siberian army.
The rail carriages occupied by the government were furnished with fading tsarist splendor: worn velvet seats, chipped marquetry, stained lampshades, and elderly servants wearing dirty remnants of the elaborate braided and beaded livery of the old St. Petersburg court. In one carriage there was a lipsticked young woman in a silk dress smoking a cigarette.
Fitz was discouraged. He wanted to return to the old ways, but this setup seemed too backward-looking even for his taste. He thought with anger of Sergeant Williams’s scornful mockery. “Is what we’re doing legal?” Fitz knew the answer was doubtful. It was time he shut Williams up for good, he thought wrathfully: the man was practically a Bolshevik himself.
General Boldyrev was a big, clumsy-looking figure. “We have mobilized two hundred thousand men,” he told Fitz proudly. “Can you equip them?”
“That’s impressive,” Fitz said, but he suppressed a sigh. This was the kind of thinking that had caused the Russian army of six million to be defeated by much smaller German and Austrian forces. Boldyrev even wore the absurd epaulets favored by the old regime, big round boards with fringes that made him look like a character in a comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan. In his makeshift Russian Fitz went on: “But if I were you I’d send half the conscripts home.”
Boldyrev was baffled. “Why?”
“At most we can equip a hundred thousand. And they must be trained. Better to have a small, disciplined army than a great rabble who will retreat or surrender at the first opportunity.”
“Ideally, yes.”
“The supplies we give you must be issued to men in the front line first, not to those in the rear.”
“Of course. Very sensible.”
Fitz had a dismal feeling that Boldyrev was agreeing without really listening. But he had to plow on. “Too much of what we send is going astray, as I can see by the number of civilians on the streets wearing articles of British army uniform.”
“Yes, quite.”
“I strongly recommend that all officers not fit to serve be deprived of their uniforms and asked to return to their homes.” The Russian army was plagued by amateurs and elderly dilettantes who interfered with decisions but stayed away from the fighting.
“Hmm.”
“And I suggest you give wider powers to Admiral Kolchak as minister of war.” The Foreign Office thought Kolchak was the most promising of the members of the directory.
“Very good, very good.”
“Are you willing to do all these things?” Fitz said, desperate to get some kind of commitment.
“Definitely.”
“When?”
“All in good time, Colonel Fitzherbert, all in good time.”
Fitz’s heart sank. It was a good thing that men such as Churchill and Curzon could not see how unimpressive were the forces ranged against Bolshevism, he thought dismally. But perhaps they would shape up, with British encouragement. Anyway, he had to do his best with the materials to hand.
There was a knock at the door and his aide-de-camp, Captain Murray, came in holding a telegram. “Sorry to interrupt, sir,” he said breathlessly. “But I feel sure you’ll want to hear this news as soon as possible.”
Mildred came downstairs in the middle of the day and said to Ethel: “Let’s go up west.” She meant the West End of London. “Everyone’s going,” she said. “I’ve sent my girls home.” She was now employing two young seamstresses in her hat-trimming business. “The whole East End is shutting up shop. It’s the end of the war!”
Ethel was eager to go. Her giving in to Bernie had not improved the atmosphere in the house much. He had
