girl in the turban called. ‘Let’s do them proud.’
Jake Silverman was beaming. He produced a hat and waved it. ‘Very well. We’ll begin here and now.’
‘There’s nothing Jake likes better,’ Tony whispered, ‘than orchestrating enthusiasm.’
The hat was passed along the rows and money clinked into it. When it reached the end of their row Amy fumbled in her crocodile-skin bag for her purse. There were two pounds in it. Never, Adeline said, leave yourself without money for a cab ride home. The hat reached her and she stuffed the notes into it.
‘Will you see me home?’ she asked Tony.
He winked at her. ‘Of course. It’s only a twopenny bus ride back to Bruton Street, after all.’
The meeting proceeded to heated discussions of where the marchers could be most comfortably and honourably accommodated, and how the money was to be raised to do it.
At last Jake Silverman waved his red and black plaid arms. ‘Thank you, all of you, very much. Our comrades in the South Wales Miners’ Federation deserve every effort. The meeting is closed now. Join us upstairs, if you can.’
At once, the crowd began to surge out of the room, which had grown uncomfortably hot. Amy had been engrossed and hadn’t noticed it, but now she pulled her hat off and shook out her hair. She saw the girl with the brass earrings looking at her.
Some people were clumping back down the stairs to the street door, but most of them were heading for the flat above. Tony and Amy were carried along with them.
Jake Silverman’s flat was a series of small, low rooms crowded with books, pamphlets and people. The jabber of talk hit them at the door. Hands were waving and gesticulating, voices were shouting each other down and clamouring to make a point before anyone else could refute it. Amy edged through the crowd in Tony’s wake and came to the kitchen. Jake Silverman was standing in the middle brandishing a wine bottle.
‘Come and get it,’ he shouted and a forest of empty glasses was thrust at him. He looked across at Tony. ‘Wield a corkscrew, Tony, will you?’
‘Jake, this is my friend Amy Lovell.’
Jake put down the bottle. ‘Pour it yourselves,’ he called out, and held out a hand to Amy. ‘Any friend of Tony’s is welcome here,’ he said simply, and took her hand in his large, warm one. Amy could almost believe that she felt the crackle as he touched her, he was so charged with energy. Jake’s arm enveloped her shoulders and he turned her to where the girl with the scarlet stockings and the earrings was frying sausages over a corner gas ring.
‘This is Kay Cooper.’ Jake kissed Kay enthusiastically on the mouth. ‘And Angel Mack.’ That was the turban girl. ‘This is Tony’s friend, Amy Lovell.’
Kay waved her sausage fork, and Angel said, ‘Hmm. Tony’s friend, eh? What did you think of the meeting?’
Amy glanced from one to the other. ‘Just that. It made me think.’
Suddenly, both the girls were smiling at her.
‘Have a sausage.’
‘And a glass of wine. Guaranteed to turn your tongue jet black.’
‘Thank you. I will.’ Armed with food and drink, Tony took Amy away into the throng. He introduced her to everyone in sight.
‘Wait!’ she protested. ‘I’ll never remember who everyone is.’
‘You wanted to meet different people,’ he reminded her. ‘What do you think so far? Changed your social perceptions, has it?’
He was teasing her again, but Amy looked straight back at him.
‘Do you know, I think it has, a little.’
She was enjoying the smoky, crowded rooms and the lively babble of talk more than the grandest society party she had ever been to. She thought that she had never met such opinionated people in her life. Or no, that wasn’t quite true. Peter Jaspert was opinionated too, but his opinions stood at the opposite pole from those expressed here. She had never found Peter Jaspert particularly congenial, yet she felt perfectly at home here tonight.
Was this, then, where her sympathies lay? For some reason the idea excited her. By listening very carefully to the talk, and by putting it together with what she already knew from newspaper reports, Amy understood that the hunger marchers were miners from the Rhondda, out of work now, who were marching on London to deliver a petition at Downing Street. Sixty per cent of men were out of work in the valleys.
Amy stared at Kay, whose black curls shook with her passionate recital.
‘This Depression can only get worse. We’re cushioned from it here, you and me and all the rest of us, by our education and because we live in prosperous London. But out there, in the mines and the rest of industry, people are suffering every day.’
Amy thought, who could be more cushioned than me? Bethan came from the valleys, but she had never so much as mentioned these terrible things. How much more don’t I know about? How much more have I never thought about, or bothered to enquire about?
‘Hello again.’ It was Angel Mack, with a jug of wine. ‘More of this stuff? Or there’s beer, if you’d rather. No cocktails or champagne, I’m afraid.’
Was it really so transparently obvious where she came from, then? Amy wondered.
‘Wine, thank you,’ Amy said firmly.
‘I’ve never been to a party like this before,’ she added. ‘Where everyone seems to have so much to say to everyone else.’
Angel laughed. ‘Oh yes, there’s always plenty of talk. That’s half the trouble with armchair comrades like us. Too busy talking about what’ll happen when the revolution comes to actually do anything about making it happen.’
‘Can it happen without you?’
‘Most definitely,’ Angel said. ‘And what about you? Are you on our side?’
Amy thought suddenly of Chance and the cedar tree shading the cool grass, and of the hunger marchers sleeping in village halls on their endless walk to London. And then of Peter Jaspert and his fluent talk of trade tariffs.
‘I’m not on the other side,’ Amy said at last. ‘Although I’ve only just discovered that.’ At once, she felt that she was a traitor to everything she knew. Quickly, to cover up her own uncertainty, she asked, ‘Does Tony Hardy come here a lot?’
Angel glanced curiously at her. ‘Tony comes and goes. Got his own fish to fry, as they say. As far as all this goes, he’s less committed than some but his heart’s in the right place. Does that tell you what you want to know?’
Amy wasn’t sure what she wanted to know.
‘What about Jake Silverman?’
‘Yes, everyone always wants to know about Jake. He’s probably much more like you than you would think. His father and the rest of his family are in the garment trade, rather prosperously so. Jake turned his back on all that when he was eighteen. I think he’d describe
