In the pink
By Serena Fairfax
Copyright ©2011 by Serena Fairfax
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ISBN: 978-0-9569748-7-7
IN THE PINK
It was difficult for Annie Pettifer, in fevered retrospect, to decide from which little acorn the pervasive influence of ISAS - the International Sisterhood for Action and Solidarity - had sprung. She did her thinking on her computer and had written down various beginnings, in code. Was it the time after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when ISAS was founded? Was it, on the other hand, when it had broadened its appeal to the anti-suffrage women after the Dorking Congress in 1889? Was it when it settled to social uplift in 1918?
Verene Widmer, the General Secretary of ISAS, had a tendency to breathe over Annie’s shoulder when she seemed not to be occupied, and as long as Annie looked busy, she was free from that extra unwanted attention. Annie searched restlessly until she ultimately decided it had really begun the month after she’d started work at ISAS, in the shape of an international fax signed simply HAIG.
‘That’s from the Secretary of the State Department,’ Verene told Annie unnecessarily. In her late thirties, Verene, who wore no makeup, was sharp featured and too muscular to be graceful, her criminally cropped, blonde hair looking as if it had been savaged by a rusty nail file which it had. She wandered over to the window and glanced across Russell Square where the trees stood gaunt and leafless defying the strong January wind.
‘Gosh,’ said Annie, knowing her response was inadequate and never sure, as usual, how it could be otherwise. A plump, pale, endlessly striving forty year old with silky ginger hair that fell yak-like over her face, she bought slimming magazines by the armful and read them while munching her way through crisps and bars of chocolate. Her entire existence, it seemed to her, was spent in trying to divine what response was expected of her and then miserably failing to provide it.
‘Not that he knows anything in particular about us, of course,’ Verene said the razor edge precision of her native Zurich more than usually apparent. ‘It’s just common form for a conference organised by the U.S. government.’
‘Still, it means it’s official, doesn’t it?’ murmured Annie, more inadequately than ever.
Verene experienced one of her frequent surges of irritation and wondered, not for the first time, why she and Rhoda Ribteen, the Chair of the ISAS Publicity and Grants Committees had ever hired Annie. Academically she’d achieved - she possessed three degrees - B.A. (Oxon), M.A. (London) and PhD (Oxon), could type at the speed of light and said she had committee experience. None of this could compensate for the deep depression she exuded when faced with a situation that demanded a modicum of initiative. She was exuding now.
‘Oh it’s official all right.’ Verene gave a superior sniff. ‘The Americans are organising a conference of Women’s International Non-Governmental Organisations for Development, and as the oldest WINGO of all, it goes without saying that we’d get an invitation. The question is who shall we send from this end?’
‘What about you?’ Annie asked. Somewhere outside a car alarm suddenly jangled raucously into life making her jump a little.
That is exactly what had leaped to Verene’s mind when she first read the fax. She shrugged, however. ‘Not a chance.’ Her gloom was evident. ‘The powers that be won’t wear it. It’ll have to be one of the members, not a paid official. They still have this thing of gentlewomen and players.’
When Verene used colloquialisms, which she did quite often to demonstrate her habitual and total mastery of everything including the English language, her Swiss accent made them sound newly-minted for the occasion.
‘How about Mrs Ribteen?’ Annie said, crushed. She prayed she was putting forward a plausible, a passably tolerable response.
Verene was resigned. ‘Oh she’s the obvious choice as Chair of the Publicity and Grants Committees. I’ll call her and then let the Americans know.’ She vanished out of the general office to her own room at the end of the corridor.
And that was how a fax went back to the State Department reading: Your fax received. Mrs Rhoda Ribteen representing ISAS. We await further details from you.
Rhoda Ribteen, after a lifetime of attending international conferences, hadn’t succeeded in being anything but enthusiastic about them. There wasn’t a hint of the blasé or the déjà vu about her as she put down the telephone at her home overlooking Clapham Common after Verene’s call.
Hugging herself with satisfaction she turned to her husband Ray. ‘They want me to go to Washington.’
Her thoughts flew ahead buzzing with arrangements and plans. Leaving Ray was no problem - he was adept at coping for himself - indeed could bake a creditable soda-bread loaf.
‘Good for you and quite right, too.’ Ray was balding and that day wore a maroon cardigan. He glanced at his watch. 11:55 a.m. The siren call for a drink couldn’t be ignored. Moving slowly rather like a tanker through the Bosphorous, he got up and mixed the ritual gin and tonics for them both.
‘Here you are, dear.’ He leaned back restfully in his chair. Consul in Spain until his retirement to an MBE and their double-fronted house, he hadn’t been a distinguished diplomat by any means but his wife made up for it by slugging all their diplomatic connections with the sheer weight of her voluntary activities and status in ISAS.
Rhoda was generally referred to, not always by men, as a wonderful woman and she generally acknowledged it with a deprecating gesture of her hand and a sudden exhalation of punctured and puncturing breath. ‘Whoosh. No flattery.’ To look at her she was rather like a pigeon with slim legs in spite of her sixty plus years, stiffly set iron-grey hair, a vast bosom and a definite pecking movement of her head and neck when deeply moved, which wasn’t often. She prided herself on her unruffled demeanour coupled with her informality. She’d terrified Annie at first sight, as Annie was congenitally scared to the gills of meeting anyone who prided themselves on their informality as it generally co-existed with a well developed sense of enormous and egotistic dignity upon which they tended to fall back if their informality were misconstrued. Annie had tried not to misconstrue her with the result that Rhoda had got her number immediately.
A bit of a bully if not checked, Rhoda had met plenty of people, including Verene, who had the same streak and measured up to her. It was with the totally unfit, like Annie, that she really took the measure of her full dominance. She spoke to her as though she were the skivvy that she’d never had, owing to unfortunate pecuniary circumstances in England, and totally without the saving grace she’d invested in her dealings with her Spanish maids, where she’d added a soupçon of civility in the cause of international relations. She divined, correctly, that Annie was one of nature’s non-coping victims, who’d have to be kept up to scratch with constant applications of whip and spur and edged consonants.
But easy to manage, oh eminently easy to manage, Rhoda thought, rightly, at the final interview when Annie was asked to join ISAS as Administrative Committee Secretary.
‘When do you go?’ Ray asked in his quarter-deck manner and they were back in the totally enjoyable ethos of making plans.
Rhoda made a feature of being happily married and was often heard to say, ‘Ray’s far more popular than I am,’ with great satisfaction. ‘It’s true,’ she would continue. ‘Everyone adores Ray,’ and her paunchy Ray fond of his sundown Scotch would smile modestly and reminisce over his days in Barcelona. He was indispensable to her as she was to him. They made a remarkable team. It was as a team that they tended their one hundred foot garden and the Victorian conservatory which they both loved, and for which they were always on the lookout for new and original ideas. Only the other day they’d gone to the hothouse in Kew and seen the tropical grasses and beautiful flowers, all out of season, out of continent, all out of history, almost.
And it was as a team that they discussed her future movements. In doing so Rhoda found she needed some external advice as well, and rang the ISAS office promptly at 9:30 the next morning.
The ISAS office in the heart of Bloomsbury consisted of several rooms on three floors in a period building, reached by a fine, narrow staircase with curved iron balusters but the nerve centre of the administrative section was a large open-plan office, complete with the original carved wooden chimneypiece, which wouldn’t, however, have been large enough to escape the censure of the Health and Safety at Work Executive had anyone been embittered enough to complain.
Verene, who had her own room - austere and businesslike sporting a single sombre poster of the Matterhorn in winter - a mountaineering challenge she’d yet to accomplish - nevertheless believed in spending most of her time in the cluttered general office in order to keep her finger on the pulse of things.
In addition to Annie’s desk – a sea of papers - there were those of Miles Myddleton, the accountant and Tim Fanshawe, the membership secretary. Miles, married to an artist, who still waited, as she’d been doing since her days, 10 years earlier, at the Slade to become an overnight success, was thirty two, a gentle, bearded man, in shabby cords and tweed jacket from which a button was missing, who commuted from Essex every morning and who dreamed of winning the pools and founding his own nature reserve. Till then he clocked in with admirable punctuality and the only sign of his dreams was a photograph on his desk of the toad that inhabited the pond in his back garden, and a list headed Birds Sighted in Squares of Bloomsbury, W.C.1.
Tim, 6’ 2", heartbreakingly rugged, with jade green eyes and a mane of dark hair, cycled to work every day from the spacious squat in Kentish Town that he shared with four others.
‘I’m following a long and honourable tradition’ was his enlightening response to anyone daring to question his morality. ‘The neighbours waltzed round with chicken sandwiches and flasks of coffee when we moved in as they said they’d hated having to live next door to a derelict, vacant place. And its heaven compared with the bedsitter I rented when I came down. That was terrible. Nobody in that house spoke to anyone else - not even to say good morning if they passed you on the stairs. They were so terrified of getting involved, I think.’
‘Probably so lonely they’d forgotten how to,’ Miles said.
Tim wanted to set up a bicycle sales and repair shop and be free of ISAS which he totally despised from the day he was hired, much as he’d written off Cambridge, where he’d read music and was awarded a first class degree, because it had actually accepted him as an undergraduate. He was twenty four and sported brown suede trousers and a blue spotted silk cravat, and had the clown’s licence to SPEAK TRUTH, even, on occasion, to Verene, without having her razor cleave his presumptuous jugular.
The men had a good working relationship and extended it to Annie who was almost, but not entirely, too frightened by life to reciprocate. She felt they were her allies, though, and opened up to them, only to freeze into mumbledom when the telephone rang. Annie picked it up and recognised Rhoda’s voice.
‘Oh Mrs Ribteen, good afternoon - I mean morning.’ Annie cleared her throat nervously.
‘Ah, Annie,’ said Rhoda, mellifluous in her informality. ‘I just wanted your valuable advice. I’ve been down to one of those instant photographic machines, dreadful little things, and I was so busy reading the instructions that I forgot to take my specs off for the snapshots. The question is will the Americans accept them as they are for the business visa, because my passport photo doesn’t have glasses on.’
‘I don’t know,’ Annie pushed her hand through her hair, totally panic stricken. ‘I’ll have to check.’
Not having mastered the knack of switching calls through to another extension, Annie scurried off to Verene whose instant contempt made her quail and who left her room clicking her tongue and marched competently into the breach.
‘Rhoda, this is Verene. Yes, it should be all right.’
‘Are you quite sure?’ Rhoda said. ‘It’s so important to get these things right.’
‘I’m POSITIVE.’ Verene said loudly.
‘And the visa application forms? This is the second time I’ve asked you for them.’
‘They haven’t arrived. It’s the second time I’ve rung the consulate for them,’ Verene said barely reigning in her impatience.
Rhoda said as a tremendous concession, ‘Of course! So you did! As always so efficient, Verene. Tell you what, I’ll drop into Grosvenor Square myself and pick them up.’
Verene replaced the receiver and mimed her exasperation to a suitably sycophantically sympathetic office.
But it was only the beginning. Accompanied by her visa, Rhoda swept into the office later that morning and sustained by quiche and cups of Darjeeling tea spent a whole day closeted with Verene, which meant that Miles, Tim and Annie were relatively unobserved and free to talk.
Eventually Verene managed to stem the flow and Rhoda emerged, making a beeline for the general office. Her eyes narrowed with distaste at Tim lolling in his chair with his feet on the desk and a phone jammed to his ear, Miles engrossed in the crossword and Annie deep into a sustaining peanut butter sandwich with a brimming ashtray at her elbow.
‘Annie,’ Rhoda’s voice was clear, slow and decisive as if speaking to a very small child. ‘I want a list of all the publications on women and careers since the inception of the Grants Committee, made out with sub-headings and ready for me when I call into the office tomorrow.’
‘But the Committee was founded in 1920!’ Annie gulped.
‘Quite so. I need to refresh my memory. There must be several hundred. Or several thousand.’
‘But-’ said Annie desperately.
‘See to it, won’t you?’ And Rhoda softened the unease with what she thought was an informal and winning smile.
Tim had reluctantly returned to the computer and hadn’t looked up during the exchange but he’d heard every word of it and now as Verene bustled in with a file and began to speak to Rhoda, he passed Annie a slip of paper. She read AMAZING ANAGRAM. Her head spinning with the prospect of her Herculean, her impossible commission, she simply gawped at him as he handed her another typed slip. RHODA RIBTEEN. HOT REAR IN BED. She gasped and suppressed a random anarchic shriek. Somebody was on her side.
When Rhoda had sallied out like a meteor and was safely out of earshot, Annie discovered, to her surprise, that she had another unexpected, albeit temporary, ally.
Totally overwhelmed, she said unguardedly to Verene. ‘I feel totally overwhelmed.’ She’d already found herself spending a good deal of time staying late and working overtime (unpaid) to get the day’s work finished.
Instead of sharply telling her to pull herself together as she usually did, the General Secretary seemed disposed to sympathise.
‘Really, Rhoda’slike a child. She has wasted a whole morning of good working time burbling on about what to expect when she gets there - I mean I went off to Bulgaria for three days and I didn’t make all this fuss. It’s not as though you’re expected to be a walking encyclopaedia. You can always tell them you’ll send on the bumpf when you get back to the office. However, if that’s what she wants, she’d better have it. But don’t kill yourself over it.’
But a feeling of doom settled in Annie’s chest and remained there for the rest of the day.
Two days before Rhoda left for Washington, the package of further and better particulars arrived from the State Department. Not one to let the grass grow under her feet, the waiting had tested Rhoda to the utmost and the atmosphere in the ISAS office was electric. It had been sent in error by surface mail which explained why Verene had had to send a stream of frenzied faxes to the State Department for the promised information. Then it turned out that accommodation in Washington was limited and Rhoda would be required to share a room. Her fares and expenses for three days would be met by the U.S. Government.
‘That should be enough for her to be getting on with,’ Verene announced with satisfaction to Tim, Miles and Annie who breathed a collective sigh of relief. ‘I’ll save the envelope for her so that she can kick up a fuss about sea mail when she gets to the other end.’ She knew Rhoda was a stickler for the niceties of protocol and would stamp out any inefficiency before further rot set in.
***
It was a fresh April morning and the sky was flecked with feathery clouds. In companionable married silence Ray drove the Volvo to Heathrow and saw Rhoda safely off into the Departures Lounge. She was dressed in a comfortable skirt and sweater that matched the colour of her eyes, blue as octopus blood, with a cameo brooch, bought one holiday in Capri, pinned to the neck of her blouse. She’d had her hair newly permed and splashed on some Blue Grass and carried a not-too-large suitcase. In a hide briefcase, veteran of many such Conferences, there was loaded promotional material about ISAS and the Grants Report which Annie had laboured over for her - drafted, re-drafted, amended, word processed, re-processed, collated and heat-bound.
The evening before, Rhoda had run over all her committee skills, burnished her manner, refurbished her responses, sharpened her dialectical apparatus, and was now ready for the Conference. It had taken the dedicated efforts of four salary workers to get her to the pitch at which she’d take the decisions.
Ray’s and her farewell embrace was warmly directed to whoever might be witnessing this touching moment of togetherness.
I have a man, Rhoda demonstrated and This is my woman, Ray equally unequivocally avowed. Then the plane hived her away from him and they were separated by continents but neither was disturbed. The teamwork over the ether sustained them. Security, total, absolute security was what Rhoda had wanted at age twenty-one when she’d married Ray and that was what she’d triumphantly achieved.
On her arrival at the Washington hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, in the process under-tipping the speechless cab driver, Rhoda signed the hotel register and was handed her room key.
‘I’ll take my own bag,’ she firmly told the hovering bellhop.
‘Third floor, mam,’ the receptionist said.
Emerging from the lift Rhoda peered at the numbers on all the doors in the corridor until she eventually found the one that matched her key, but the door was open. Slightly astonished and puffing somewhat, Rhoda stepped cautiously inside. The room was spacious - eggshell blue - with two single beds, and on one of these was sprawled with her eyes shut a large, smooth-skinned black woman, in a bright folk weave skirt, with her shoes on.
The woman didn’t move but she opened her eyes and her face expanded and split in an entrancing smile and she spoke first. ‘You are Mrs Ribbentrop, yes?’
‘Ribteen, actually,’ Rhoda said briskly, as one who wished to set the record straight before the mistake was compounded. She lowered herself into an armchair and smiling faced her across the room.
‘I am Rhoda Ribteen representing ISAS at the Washington Conference.’
‘I am Winifred Hokeki from Maphutsana. I have come from the Dajawari desert.’ The woman moved for the first time, waving an arm sculpted like a tree trunk over the side of the bed.’True, ‘she said with much emphasis, ‘all the way from the Dajawari to present our needs on technology at this gathering.’
‘What are you going to say?’ Rhoda asked crisply. Forewarned was forearmed, especially with all the probable jargon.
‘I am going to talk to them about Old Smokey which is a new kind of toilet used in rural areas,’ Winifred said. With rising excitement she heaved herself up on her other arm. ‘I am going to tell them about hay boxes. I am going to talk about technology. That is my speciality, technology.’
‘And computers and mobile phones. What about that?’ Rhoda shot back. Far from being overwhelmed, she wanted to seize the initiative.
‘There’s nothing like that in the Dajawari,’ Winifred said sadly. ‘You have to go to Ghoxa, the capital. That is city technology. That is not my province. I represent all rural women. Who do you represent?’
‘International women.’ Rhoda was forced back on to the defensive.
‘Where do you come from?’ Winifred said suddenly.
‘Clapham, actually,’ Rhoda said sticking rigidly to fact and choosing her own pitch.
‘That is in England, U.K.?’ Winifred wanted to pinpoint the newcomer to her own satisfaction.
‘In London, England,’ Rhoda said, not quite conceding the point but arriving at a mutually satisfactory compromise. The first exchanges were safely over with honours even.
‘Shall I put my bag over there?’ Rhoda looked around.
‘Forget about bags. Lie down, it is very restful,’ Winifred said placidly. ‘When did you arrive?’
‘Half an hour ago. Have you had lunch?’
‘I ate too much from the time I left the Dajawari,’ Winifred beamed. ‘I will not be hungry for another day.’
Rhoda, never averse to a little something, gave a tinkling laugh and said guiltily, ‘I’m starving.’
‘There is a restaurant, I think, but I am saving my dollars. I will eat at the appointed times which are paid for.’
Rhoda saw the force of this. ‘I think you’re right - very sensible. Now the plenary session is at six o’clock isn’t it? Do you know where to go?’
Winifred’s expression was serious. ‘I rely on you,’ she said solemnly. ‘We are in the West now. Where you go, I go.’
Rhoda, only momentarily thrown by this sudden abrogation of the iniative by Winifred, and at her immediately most responsible and constructive, said quickly. ‘I’ve got the address. We can share a taxi.’
But at that point the bedside telephone rang. Winifred sank back again on the bed.
‘I’ll take it,’ said Rhoda, unnecessarily.’
‘Is that Mrs Hokeki?’ asked a slow female American voice.
‘Do you want to speak to her?’
‘Who are you?’ the voice enquired.
‘I am Rhoda Ribteen from ISAS,’ Rhoda announced with more ferocity than she’d intended.
‘Oh, Mrs Ribteen, welcome to Washington. I’m Jan Grabowski, the deputy organiser. I hope you had a pleasant flight.’
‘Very,’ Rhoda said, being economical with her reply. ‘Mrs Hokeki is with me.’
‘Swell - just swell. She’s on the agenda for the plenary session. Now both of you stay where you are.Don’t move. I’ll call by to collect you in sixty minutes.’
She rang off and Rhoda turned to Winifred with a shade of respect tingling her relay of the message.
Winifred was unmoved. ‘Yes, I will talk. That is what I am here for. I will tell you ALL. I am the voice of the Dajawari. The Dajawari is not dumb. The Dajawari is not deaf. The Dajawari has eyes.’
‘Have you prepared your speech?’ Rhoda asked impressed with the oratory.
‘Oh yes indeed, I wrote it all myself. But I do not need to look at it again - I know it off by heart,’ Winifred said, crossing her hands across her ample bosom, ‘and the spirits of my ancestors will make sure that I forget nothing. It is a great chance for my country.’
Rhoda agreed with increasing warmth, and in the first flush of companionship she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the other bed. It was unexpectedly comfortable with a pretty Amish type quilt and large, soft pillows.
‘That’s much better,’ she sighed.
In the hour that followed Rhoda learnt quite a bit about Winifred, who responded like a slow but relentless tide to deft and skilful initial probing. Her husband had disappeared on one of his visits to the South African mines over the border from Maphutsana.
‘He was a no good man, and,’ Winifred added in a sudden rush, ‘he has found another woman, I think,’ she said heavily. ‘He never comes back. So I raise my seven children and I work for the betterment of rural women. My eldest child, my daughter, she is twenty three.’
‘Does she live with you in the Dajawari?’ Rhoda asked, for once at a complete loss to be on the receiving end of a complete stranger’s intimate confidences. All this made her ruby wedding anniversary celebrations, her architect son, her radiographer daughter and their 2.2 children each seem like the superfatted luxuries of the decadent West.
‘Yes, we are all together in the Dajawari,’ Winifred said cheering up at the thought of her family. ‘She helps in a market garden. She enjoys in making things grow.’
‘Do they grow in the Dajawari?’
‘With technology they grow. And she goes ballroom dancing in the evenings - waltz, tango, quickstep, rhumba. It is her hobby.’
‘Where does she do that?’ Rhoda asked faintly.
‘At the mission school in the evenings. She loves to dance. She has so many partners.’ She rummaged in her large handbag. ‘Here is a photograph of her.’
Rhoda took the photograph that Winifred held out. It was a beautiful, intelligent face, carved in ebony, with the hair close to the head, plaited in an intricate skull-cap weave over her head.
‘She’s a very lovely girl,’ Rhoda said sincerely. Suddenly an idea had just occurred to her and altruism surged inside her coupled with a masterly sense of being about to pull off a stupendous coup.
‘Do you think she’d like to come to England to train?’
The Grants Committee of ISAS had been looking for six months for takers for that year’s scholarship but they’d had an only too tumultuous response from painfully obvious places. Whatever could be said about Maphutsana, it was not obvious.
‘Training for what?’ Winifred asked, not unreasonably, her big black eyes travelling over Rhoda.
‘Rural development,’ Rhoda said, quite definite about what it should be.
‘I would like to send her to South Africa but it is all money, money, money. She is a very clever girl but she cannot leave the Dajawari with no money.’
‘If I could arrange it - ‘ Rhoda began very slowly and clearly.
Winifred sat bolt upright. ‘You can arrange it? You can arrange money?’
‘Well,’ said Rhoda on a note of unprecedented modesty, ‘Let me explain...’
Size twenty, 5’9¾" in her sheer stockinged feet, Dame Marjorie Sandringham had always been a big gel but this had worried her not at all. Large-busted, always elegant, with beguiling cerulean blue eyes and an ever-smiling mouth, her flawless, roses and milk complexion owed everything to nature whereas with her softly coiffeured pale gold hair art had played much the greater part.
Now she sat in a Queen Anne chair in the first floor book lined study of her house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in a flowing black, silver-embroidered kaftan, and read with considerable interest the incoming fax from Rhoda. Have offered ISAS scholarship to Maphutsana. Offer accepted. Dame Marjorie breathed deeply. She spent her entire existence in a state of intense relaxation which lesser people had been known to dub coma until they were lanced irretrievably on the disappearing edge of a kindly phrase delivered by Dame Marjorie in a dying fall with half-closed eyes.
A person with a fine grasp of situation, she said to herself, Think, Marjorie. Think. Maphutsana, a British protectorate, was the strategic key to Africa. With Zimbabwe back in the international fold there was only Maphutsana left to become independent which was due to happen the following year but it had given no indication of which way it would go in the Cold War.The ruling Cabal, all bar the elections, was nominally aligned with the West but it was facing a powerful challenge by the opposition guerrilla fighters backed by China. The full and free elections had to be fought and won, and the Union Jack ceremoniously hauled down in the presence of minor Royalty before the Governor, Sir Bevil Yeo, could come home to his peerage and his favourite chair at the Athenaeum Club.
Dame Marjorie knew Bevil well and thought of him fondly as a bit of a dinosaur before disposing of him with the annihilating rider that he was a bit too woolly to become an Oxbridge head. No, the Lords would be better. Other people had managed both, but not dear Bevil.
She gazed out of the window and its all-seasons view of the mighty Thames. She’d been born in this large four storied house, a wedding present to her parents from her mother’s family. Her father, Noel Sandringham, had risen to the rank of General - as a dashing young Wellington and Sandhurst educated captain whose conventional family background of long and honourable service to King and country at home and in the Empire commanded respect and admiration but not fame or fortune, he met, wooed and won the heart of Lady Louise Fotheringay, daughter of Earl Fotheringay, thereby gaining not only a society beauty but also a wealthy wife.
The birth of their first child Marjorie Prudence, who inherited charm and good looks from her parents in equal measure, was followed by three sons - Piers was now a High Court Judge, Dick, Director of a merchant bank in the City and the youngest, happy-go-lucky Harry, had followed in his father’s footsteps only to be blown up in Cyprus by E.O.K.A.
Vice Chair of the ISAS Grants Committee, Dame Marjorie, now aged sixty-nine had gone to Somerville College, Oxford from Benenden but had hitherto remained rather a shadowy figure in the politics of ISAS. In fact it was a mystery why she’d joined ISAS at all, as was it a mystery why she’d never married, but she’d been a member since leaving university after achieving the statutory double first in Greats and the Gaisford Prize for Greek verse, with a reputation as no mean flamenco dancer.Six months at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies saw her fluent in Persian, Arabic and Russian. A couple of years floating round Europe trying her hand at freelance journalism, as she put it, followed and then she entered the Foreign Office - a coup in those men-ridden days.
Her first posting was to Tehran. The Diplomatic Service had decided early on that she was an asset - she brought to it the fruits of breeding, delicate English rose looks, a first class mind, and a flair for languages. Her capacity for hard work, sense of duty, her quick sense of humour and generous nature, her ability to breathe life into protocol, her inflexibility on the basic rules of the game and her pliancy when it came to the inessentials, her spontaneity, unflappability and her ability to improvise, as when she went to meet the father of the now deposed Shah draped in a midnight blue embassy velvet curtain with the tasselled rope tie-back drooping sash-like from her waist. These were all listed in the confidential reports of the Foreign Office and made a formidable accumulation of assets in the total balance sheet.
But why join a WINGO, and above all, with so many to choose from, why ISAS?The International Sisterhood for Action and Solidarity had, as it happened, grown from a diplomatic base. The wives of the European statesmen and diplomats were no less determined than their husbands to rid Europe of the scourge of revolution after the downfall of Napoleon and had joined together to carry their message to the European Empire. The Concert of Europe played many conservationist tunes and none so fervently as the new and informal alliance of women. Internationalist from the start; even the isolationist American Ambassador’s wife ignored the Monroe doctrine and joined it, carrying its message to that seething continent.
Soon there grew up in all the European capitals, branches of the International Sisterhood, and when they were transferred to different capitals they took their battle cry and organisation with them, by insensible degrees channelling new members from the well-to- do home based ladies of the societies in which they temporarily found themselves.
It was an organisation of ideas to begin with - their heroines were Maria Edgeworth and Madame de Stael, their enemy and bete noire the unspeakable Mary Wollstoncraft. They were charming to a woman. They were talented almost to a woman. And their principles were steel. By 1870 the International Sisterhood had lost its exclusively diplomatic and informal character, and had a full-time Secretary, an Honorary President and Officers, and apart from the Indian princesses and Hungarian countesses among its members there were included the wives of the solid British middle class who’d come to power with the competitive examinations of the Civil Service and the Army. Those were all voting members.
It had a new category for non-voting sympathisers after Mrs Humphrey Ward and Beatrice Webb, among others had signed the anti-suffrage letter in the nineteenth century. Many women affiliated as sympathisers and so did several men including Lord Curzon. Many of its members engaged in active social uplift for woman but fought the vote.
When the vote was gained in Britain which had become the headquarters of the Sisterhood, the somewhat embarrassing fact that it was contrary to the founding principles of the movement was expunged in an amendment to the constitution which said its purpose was consensus and social aid to less privileged women in other climes. Its membership which should have dwindled, swelled, and its overwhelming advantage, that those women who were primarily their husband’s wives and their children’s mothers could achieve identity, office and power in the vast voluntary concourse of all that was gladdest and most glorious in consensus thought and action.
This fragile but real thread which bound it, the metaphysical concept of consensus, was ISAS’s greatest strength, and was reflected in the sizable contributions to its funds from five continents. While other WINGOs were run on shoestrings, ISAS had an embarrassingly large credit balance at Coutts which was periodically channelled into new Trust Funds, commemorating departed members and office holders.
When career women began to make their mark on the international scene there was a gap of two generations while ISAS arrived at a consensus position on career women. These were not, after all, women with a social cause, working as individuals. ISAS could accommodate those. They were women working from within a new framework with a new set of rules. Careers, the International Sisterhood decided after twenty five years of muted debate and just as everyone else had lost interest in the subject and retreated into the new wave of housekeeping and children, motherhood and apple pie, were on the whole desirable, so long as the home and hearth remained the supreme object of every woman’s focus. The career woman who, in the meantime, joined ISAS, mostly after retirement, refrained from poaching the husbands of the Sisterhood, slighting the voluntary contribution or in any way challenging the accepted framework of its existence and were welcomed into the fold.
But Dame Marjorie had always wanted to contribute voluntarily as well as, as it were, statutorily, and so she’d gravitated towards ISAS from the very first. After Tehran, postings elsewhere were interspersed by periods in London at the Foreign Office. Her first ambassadorial appointment, after serving as assistant under-secretary with responsibility for the Middle East, and then as Minister (the number two) in Rome, was to Ecuador where she remained for five years before transferring as Ambassador to Lebanon and then to Switzerland, places that tested her skills to the utmost. Heaped with honours, she retired from the Diplomatic Service just after her sixty first birthday to become Mistress of a women’s college in Oxford, St Ethelreda’s, which had been among the first batch to go unisex.From that she had, in turn, retired six months previously. Hers was a glittering career that had fulfilled all the expectations of early promise.
And now Dame Marjorie fixed the laser of her concentrated attention upon the new development in Rhoda’s fax. She decided not to acknowledge it - Rhoda would be back soon. In the meantime, she was certain Oliver Partridge would be most intrigued and he could be relied on to circulate the word.
Rhoda climbed the few steps to the front door of the house in Cheyne Walk and rang the polished brass bell push. It was opened by Evita, Dame Marjorie’s Filipino housekeeper, who smiled and ushered Rhoda into the large, flower-filled drawing room with its comfortable chairs, soft Persian rugs and pictures by Whistler, Berthe Morisot, Gwen John, Dora Carrington, Dame Laura Knight, Angelika Kaufman, a fiercely surreal one by the exotic Leonore Fini and an early Hockney. She glanced round - the sheet music on the gleaming Bechstein was turned to the first movement of the Moonlight sonata.
Dame Marjorie shook Rhoda’s hand warmly.’My dear, how very nice to see you again.’ She went straight to the point. ‘That scholarship! You were inspired!’
‘Indeed,’ said Rhoda highly delighted with Dame Marjorie’s reaction of acute interest, but trying not to show it. Privately, she was a little in awe of Dame Marjorie although she was far from intimidating.
‘If we can carry the Committee it’s the first step,’ declared Dame Marjorie resuming her embroidery.
‘The first step to what?’ Rhoda asked with less than total perspicuity. She couldn’t for the life of her see what Marjorie was getting at.
Evita entered with sure-footed efficiency bearing a tea tray on which stood Spode china and a seed cake and smoked salmon sandwiches. While she poured, Dame Marjorie continued, ‘To bringing in Maphutsana as a collective member of ISAS. It’ll shake us up. We can do a great deal there.’
‘But ISAS thinks it’s fully committed to developing countries already,’ Rhoda said vigorously as if to say that Dame Marjorie knew that only too well. ‘There was all that talk about too many begging bowls and too many lame ducks, and the need for consolidation rather than spreading the grants too thin.’
‘I do so agree,’ Dame Marjorie said reassuringly. ‘But if we could convince them that Maphutsana is a proper focus for concentration -’
‘Everyone has her pet developing area -’
‘But I think, my dear, given the choice, Maphutsana should be the opportunity ISAS needs.’ There was a distinct note of persuasion in her tone.
‘That’s two of us thinking along the same lines, then,’ Rhoda said with relish.
But first, as they knew, the Grants Committee - seven strong - would have to give approval to the award of the Victoria Woodhull Martin scholarship.
The meeting of that Committee had been convened for the week after Rhoda’s return. Spring was entrenched and the trees in the square had lost the skeletal look of winter with pale green leaves unfurling daily and plumping out their shape.
The members took their places in the ISAS Board Room, a large chamber decorated with tasteful restraint, with original woodwork and finely moulded ceiling and walls; in each wall panel was a classical figure encircled by garlands. A polished walnut table with leather seated chairs commanded the centre of a velvety Wilton carpet which complemented the heavy striped-silk curtains. Dotted about in corners were potted plants, a vase of sweet smelling freesias had been placed on the side-board and the walls themselves bore heavy framed portraits of past ISAS Presidents. A pantry and lavatory led off it so that they could remain closeted, like a conclave of cardinals in extended session, without undue discomfort or strain.
‘I’ve brought a bottle of the finest amontillado,’ Rhoda said to Annie with a roguish smile, convinced that a celebration was on the cards. It was small touches like that which she prided herself on.
At a reasonably dignified speed the Committee first reviewed the twenty applications from the whole of the developing world that a sub-committee had whittled down from six hundred, which in turn had been reduced from several thousand by local committees of ISAS delegates interviewing and reviewing in the capital cities of the developing nations to which had flocked girls in their hordes.
‘They’re all rather samey,’ Rhoda observed glancing at Dame Marjorie who seemed to have drifted off into a dream. She leaned back in her chair. ‘You’ve seen Annie’s summaries.’
They had. They agreed they were samey.
‘And not really star quality in raw material or prospects,’ Rhoda insisted with a dismissive gesture of her left hand.
Dame Marjorie said nothing, but that seemed to signify assent to that, too.
‘On the other hand,’ Rhoda said casually, ‘quite by chance we’ve had an application from Maphutsana.’
‘Who is it?’ demanded Mrs Narvik, a round faced, rosy cheeked Norwegian who flew over from Trondheim every three months to attend the meetings of the Grants Committee and was a thorn in Rhoda’s flesh.
‘It’s a twenty-three year old lass called Kezzia Hokeki who helps runs a market garden.’
There were murmurs of interest. This was more like it.
‘Kezzia - one of the daughters of Job,’ slight, white-haired Grace Crackenthorpe put in helpfully, eliciting a frown from Mrs Narvik who disliked such interruptions.
‘I have her application right here,’ Rhoda continued passing round for inspection the photocopies which Annie had made. There was the medical report - Mental or physical disabilities - none. General health - good and her school leaving report from the Mission School - an excellent pupil. There was also a certificate from the local British Council representative saying she was fluent in written and spoken English and should have no difficulty following an extended course of further education in England.
‘That seems very satisfactory,’ the members signified each in her own way.
But Mrs Narvik called a halt to the general drift of assent. ‘All this is all very well.’ She shot Rhoda a steely measuring look and her mouth was a hard line. ‘But are there not dangers in bringing so young a girl, so inexperienced a girl in the ways of the world out of her natural habitat?’
There was a surge of conversation and polite mutterings of interrogation. Strengthened, Mrs Narvik continued, ‘She might not go back. She might marry and stay in England. After all, it’s a mixed course, this rural development.’ Her streak of obstinacy was unfeminine its clarity. ‘She has nothing to persuade her back to Maphutsana -’
Radiating confidence and charm, Dame Marjorie intervened for the first time, bestowing on the company a brilliant smile. ‘The college keeps them very busy and after all she’ll have a student visa. She’ll have to return when the course ends - besides she has family back there and she won’t want to leave them permanently. Very little can happen in an academic year -’
‘Everything, anything, can happen in a day, at that age,’ Mrs Narvik objected sharply, believing that her battling nature was a cause for congratulations.
‘And, if I might add, by the same token, nothing. I rather think that’s a very minor risk which we’ll just have to take,’ Rhoda said as firmly as she could without managing to wince at Mrs Narvik’s index finger stabbing the table top. ‘It’s an outside chance and we’ll all be keeping an eye on her - holidays and visiting and so on. Besides she’ll be keen to return and put her development skills to use in her country.’
‘Just so.’ Dame Marjorie supported her nobly. She forbore to relate her experiences of girls from developing countries who’d been at St. Ethelreda’s. There’d been the one from Dhaka who’d become immersed in her subject, mediaeval European history, and had to be forcibly restrained from lighting votive candles in the Principal’s lodgings in aid of future financial aid for postgraduate work in Britain. There’d been the personality kid from Panama who did her best to get sent down so that she could get a work permit from commercial television in London. There’d been dozens others. The ones who went home wrote her pathetic letters saying how much in Oxford they’d been spoiled for daily life, and all in all there was enough material to fuel Mrs Narvik’s case to the moon.
There was a fractional pause.
‘Shall we put it to the vote?’ Grace’s beautiful voice was always level.
With two dissensions - Mrs Narvik and a cohort - the result was not, as Rhoda and Dame Marjorie had hoped, unanimous, but it was enough to award Kezzia Hokeki the scholarship.
Concealing her triumph as best as she could, Rhoda pushed back her chair and opened the sherry bottle, got out the sherry glasses from the side-board and chivvied Annie into handing them round with bowls of salted peanuts.
When the rest of the committee had left, Dame Marjorie, still seated at the board table, slanted her head at Rhoda and said slowly. ‘You know my dear, I’ve been wondering. It occurs to me that perhaps I should stand for the Presidency of ISAS.’
‘But you always said you never would!’ Rhoda cried, totally thunderstruck. She set down her quivering sherry glass.
Dame Marjorie gave a little shrug. ‘I’ve a great deal of time on my hands at present and things are at a very interesting point right now in ISAS,’ she explained. ‘I thought I’d like to steer it a little. Do you think it’s a good idea?’ she added, totally without anxiety, as she knew what the response would be.
‘It’s the best idea ever,’ Rhoda’s face was creased with excitement. ‘I would propose you, of course and I’m sure Hattie would need no persuading to second.’ A thin, whippety, humorous Australian who controlled the votes of the entire Southern hemisphere, Hattie, like Rhoda, was more king-maker than king.
‘That leaves the Scandinavians,’ Dame Marjorie said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know that Mrs Narvik and company would be altogether behind it. But to give them credit they’re very keen on developing countries although they’ve been somewhat disillusioned with Asia in the past. The time may just be ripe.’
‘Maphutsana - a branch of ISAS!’ breathed Rhoda savouring the almost intoxicating sense of a new challenge.
‘My very sentiments,’ said Dame Marjorie, steepling her fingers. ‘But, of course, everything depends on the girl.’
‘Her mother was quite something,’ Rhoda hurriedly testified.
‘It sometimes skips a generation.’ Dame Marjorie put up a hand to stifle a yawn. She looked round for her crocodile-skin handbag and rose to her feet. ‘Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.’