A QUESTION OF GUILT

''Londoners Love It,'' Eliot ended with a smile, after recounting his investigation to Crippen and Ethel Le Neve at Frascati's that evening.

'In Chicago,' Crippen said with quiet pride, 'they've got slaughterhouses so efficient, they say they use pretty well everything in a hog but its squeal.'

'Peter! You'll put me off my dinner,' Ethel dabbed her forehead with a tiny lace-edged handkerchief.

Crippen looked delighted. 'Ethel my dear, when you dine with two doctors you must be ready to hear strange things. Isn't that so, Dr Beckett?'

'Perhaps I should never have mentioned it at dinner at all, Miss Le Neve. But the Market made so strong an impression on me. There's a broad, tumbling Styx flowing into the heart of London,' he said dramatically. 'None of those beasts will ever return to their lush fields and flyblown byres, no more than we can reverse the torrents of the River Severn.'

'Yes, it is sad,' said Ethel. 'Ever so.'

Frascati's was large and handsome, a cafe and grill-room with the plush-curtained, palm-fringed winter garden upstairs. Ethel was prettier than Eliot remembered. She wore a plain cream blouse and a navy serge skirt, befitting the desk rather than the dinner-table. Her pearl necklace Eliot assumed a sham. When Crippen had introduced her with muted effusiveness, she shook hands in a ladylike way, whole arm delicately raised. Her expression seemed consciously subdued, a lively young woman wrapping herself tightly in a mantle of modesty to suit the company. She differed from Belle as a bunch of violets from a bunch of bananas.

Conversation continued untaxingly with Ethel's enthusiasm for her new typewriter. 'A Smith Premier, with complete control from the keyboard,' she explained triumphantly. 'It has a combination paragrapher and column finder, with removable and interchangeable plattens, a stencil key, a ribbon-colour change and a back-spacer.'

Eliot gravely congratulated her on command of such advanced machinery. Then Crippen said unexpectedly, 'Did you know, Dr Beckett, that Belle is my second wife? I was married to an Irish girl from Dublin, called Charlotte Bell,' he reminisced pleasantly. 'A student nurse at the Manhattan Hospital. I was an intern. A pretty usual combination, isn't it?'

'Peter has a son,' Ethel added.

'Yes. Otto. He's in California now. My wife had a fit and died in her next pregnancy. That was in Salt Lake City, in the winter of '91.'

'Peter makes the perfect husband,' Ethel said with sudden spirit. 'He had no vices, and Belle can do what she likes with him. Their house is an absolute disgrace, Dr Beckett. She won't keep a servant, you know. The gas stove's rusty and the kitchen's covered with cooking stains, there's dirty dishes, knives, flat- irons, saucepans everywhere, mixed up with Belle's false hair and even her precious jewellery. And as like as not, some beautiful white chiffon gown that Peter's paid a fortune for, tossed over a chair with his collars and shirts. Once she even took in lodgers,' Ethel said indignantly. 'Germans,' she emphasized the horror.

Crippen murmured in mitigation, 'Four young students.' He paused. 'I had to black their boots.'

'Why, she's even had Peter make a cage for the cats, for fear they'll be put in the family way.' Ethel stopped abruptly, pink from the outburst. She added firmly, 'Of course, Belle and I get along very well together. Sometimes we're like sisters.'

'Belle has an extravagant temperament,' Crippen excused her. 'She's Polish.'

'Really?' exclaimed Eliot. So she was one of a million Central Europeans who had jumped out of the frying-pan into the melting-pot.

'Her father had a fruit-barrow in Brooklyn-as we'd say in London, a costermonger. Her mother was German. She called herself Cora Turner, and only after we married did I discover she was really Kunigunde Mackamatzki,' he revealed in a mild voice. 'She was nineteen. I had to win her from the protection of a man called Lincoln-'

Crippen broke off his sentence. The orchestra began the waltz from Franz Lehar's _Merry Widow,_ which gave George Edwardes a _succиs fou_ at Daley's in Leicester Square in 1907. Crippen put his hand on Ethel's and exchanged a look of dreamy sentimentality. 'Our favourite tune,' he explained to Eliot. 'All that is needed to put the crowning touch on our happiness.'

Eliot stared down at his plaice-rather than sole, it was the five shilling dinner-to avoid laughing at a pathetic little doctor who created romance from a tinselly restaurant, a banal tune and a commonplace typist with pretty eyes. He had a talent for Gemutlichkeit, Eliot thought. He suspected suddenly that Crippen had invited him to meet Ethel, had indulged in such confidences, to enrol him as an ally against Belle. He remembered his father's advice, never be inveigled into marital conflicts or the beds of young married women. He spent the rest of the meal talking mostly about the House of Lords. It bored Ethel, but Crippen seemed to draw from it intellectual uplift.

Over the fruit-salad, Crippen passed Eliot the promised cheque. He saw it was for a guinea. 'You're very generous,' he said warmly.

'The most generous man in the world,' Ethel agreed. 'You've only got to look at Belle's dresses and jewels, haven't you?'

It was approaching midnight when Crippen hailed a hansom. Ethel lived in Constantine Road on the southern edge of Hampstead Heath, barely a mile beyond Hilldrop Crescent. Eliot avoided a lift on the excuse of some excitement in the streets of Westminster. He strode towards the river down Kingsway, intending to take a tram along the Embankment to the Houses of Parliament. He heard the newsboys shouting a special edition. He thrust a ha'penny at a ragged urchin for the _Evening Times,_ eagerly scanning the front page under a street lamp in the rain.

On Lord Lansdowne's resolution, the House of Lords had rejected the House of Commons' Finance Bill by 350 votes to 75. Eliot crammed the paper into the pocket of his raincoat. 'There'll be a general election,' he exclaimed excitedly. 'A general election as soon as the year's out.'

He walked with a springier step, seeing himself as Dr Eliot Beckett, MP.

12

'Well, you made a bit of a fool of yourself,' said Major Beckett.

'I misjudged the revolutionary passion of Englishmen,' Eliot told his father. 'It boils, but only as porridge boils. It plops sedately, then cools to a stodgy mass. Perhaps stodginess is our national genius? The French and Italians are like pans of fat, igniting and burning out the kitchen every so often.'

Major Beckett frowned. He was a tall, spare, man who wore his frock coat and starched collar and cuffs like a uniform. His son had developed a clever way of speaking, which he enjoyed in women and distrusted in men. He supposed those who played politics needed to wrap their opinions like Christmas presents, or their hearers would discern them no more intelligent than those of the man beside them on the omnibus. 'You did very badly.'

'Obviously, sir, as I lost my deposit. When I was canvassing with my red rosette, every working man in Holloway swore to support me. In the end, they chose the Liberal against the Conservative. They knew where they stood with both parties. They don't trust Socialism, because it's new-fangled. No one is more conservative than the British lower classes.'

It was noon on Monday, January 24, 1910. They sat in the smoking room of the Imperial Club at the corner of Pall Mall and St James's Street, a cavern hewn from mahogany and leather. Eliot sipped his sherry, his father being old-fashioned took madeira. To soldier away half a life in India made a man confident of election to the club. A factotum to a nobleman invited the sneering mutterings which could provoke blackballing. Colonel Beckett has risked it. He believed that the agent of a duke enjoyed a standing above that of a lord or even earl, like duke's servants taking precedence below stairs when their masters were guests at country houses.

'Had it occurred to you Eliot, the working men might have given their vote were you one of them, and not of a higher social station?'

'Should I have sported a cloth cap, like Keir Hardie?'

'I'm not suggesting you played the hypocrite.'

'Why not, sir? We're a nation of hypocrites. We created an Empire rather brutally. We stand appalled at foreign accusations of drawing economic and political strength from enslaved nations. We say we're only bringing them the