Chapter 20 London
Chapter twenty
London
Penny’s first tactical assault on the offices of the Daily Mail had been unspectacular. The yawning subeditor had suggested she return when she had something interesting to tell him. Penny felt she had plenty of interesting things to tell him, but none which she thought he would appreciate.
The overheard conversation between the male members of her family was quite the windfall.
Dragons! Exactly the sort of subject Mail readers ate up with cream!
She did feel a twinge of unease at how she’d happened upon the story, but she hadn’t been trying to eavesdrop, and what was a journalist to do when her own family dropped sensational stories into her lap! Pick them up and hand them back?
“Well, don’t let the press get hold of this, they’d have a field day!” had been the delicious words that had fallen on her ear as she had gone in search of her brother.
Would the great newspaper editor Rachel Beer or the intrepid reporter Nelly Bly have stopped their ears? Of course not!
Besides that, it was quite in their own interest for her to keep them on their toes. Too much masculine complacency was bad for them, anybody could see that. Unchecked, it would make them dull and glassy, like the men you saw coming out of clubs in Piccadilly, some of whom obviously wore stays.
Yes, all the fully enfranchised members of her family ought to expect light sabotage now and then. It was only fair.
It was not difficult to remove the letter and sketch from her father’s study and replace them without detection.
She typed up the story in her room, leaving out the more personal details which Sir George had confided about Una’s state of mind following the attack—Penny felt really proud of her self-restraint here.
The sketch was more difficult. In the end, she took it to a street artist doing portraits of tourists to copy.
The original had a wonderfully ominous quality, and she regretted that a little of it was lost in the copying.
Penny had grown up with artists about the house and she knew without being told that Philip’s drawings were something out of the ordinary. What a shame he had turned out to be such a rotter.
When he’d first come to stay, he’d asked her about her work with the WSPU and she had spent a very pleasant evening telling him all about it while he listened attentively, his dark hair flopping in his eyes, a charming regional phrase escaping out the seams of his hastily stitched London-art-student persona every now and then.
Then term had started and the threads had tightened and his hair was never out of place again.
He became just like every other boy she knew—insufferable.
Once, he’d passed her selling Votes for Women with a friend in Kensington Gardens.
They’d had only a few issues left to sell and were hanging on doggedly, more than ready to reward themselves with a decadent tea.
Penny always knew the best tea shops within a manageable radius; it was one of her talents.
She spotted Philip in a crowd of well-heeled art students, and Penny had a felicitous vision of disposing of the last of the papers to them and going together in a co-educational throng.
If the cakes were particularly good and one of the boys paid for them, she might even allow herself to flirt a little—something she rarely indulged in, though she’d been told she was quite good at it.
Perhaps she’d flirt with Philip himself, she thought, in a fit of good nature.
Thus primed for friendliness, she had started to call out to him, but he saw her, quite clearly, just as she raised her hand.
He looked the other way.
Mother said it was because of Philip’s class consciousness and personal neurosis, but Penny thought that was bunk.
Penny had had her share of mockery and put-downs and she had never treated someone like that.
If there was anything Penny couldn’t bear, it was pretending to be something one wasn’t just to get ahead in life.
After the Kensington incident, she had studiously ignored him.
Penny felt a touch of spite now as she imagined Philip’s displeasure when his sketch appeared without attribution in the Daily Mail. She chose to think about this, instead of the shadow of uneasiness about the coming reactions of others.
The Ormdale people were all public figures now, and Penny wasn’t an ordinary journalist—she was a soldier. As Mrs Pankhurst said, this was wartime.
Nobody expected a soldier to worry about social niceties and hurt feelings, did they?