Barry Maitland: The Marx Sisters

She reached to the pendant light switch on the pillow beside her and put on the light overhead. Brock’s book was on top of the bedside cabinet, and with a wince she reached over for it. It was called Eleanor Marx: a Socialist Heroine’s Tragedy. She turned towards the end and found the passage she was looking for, which described the circumstances of Eleanor’s death.

For some years beforehand, Eleanor had been living with Edward Aveling, a socialist activist with an interest in education and the theatre. Although not legally married, Eleanor considered their union a true marriage of free love. Aveling, however, was not a popular figure among her friends, who saw that he took advantage of Eleanor’s generosity, spending extravagantly on his theatrical friends the legacy from Engels which was her only capital, while she immersed herself in the hard work of Marxian scholarship, socialist politics and the development of the trade-union movement. On the morning of Thursday 31 March 1898 Eleanor received an anonymous letter revealing that Aveling had secretly married an actress some months before, changing his surname to that of the woman, but continuing to live with Eleanor in order to relieve her of the last of her savings.

Eleanor’s reaction was remarkable. She called Aveling and told him calmly that she proposed to commit suicide, and invited him to accompany her into death. While Aveling prevaricated, Eleanor sent her maid round to the chemist with a note requesting chloroform and prussic acid so that they could put down their dog. The maid duly returned with two ounces of chloroform and enough prussic acid to kill several people, together with the book which the chemist kept for purchasers of poisons to sign. Eleanor took the book into the room where Aveling was, and a little later brought it back, signed ‘E. M. Aveling’, for her maid to return to the chemist. Seeing that Eleanor was determined to go through with it, Aveling announced that he was ‘going up to town’, and promptly left.

Eleanor then went upstairs and wrote several letters and prepared certain packages, among them, presumably, one containing Marx’s manuscript on which she wrote her message to Rebecca Demuth. She gave all these with instructions to her maid, had a bath, dressed herself in white, and retired to bed. By eleven o’clock that morning she was dead.

Kathy let the book drop on to the bedcovers, as she tried to imagine Aveling’s reaction to Eleanor’s calm demand that he join her in suicide. If her death was noble, it was also impossibly implacable and remote. Suddenly Caroline Winter’s reaction to her husband’s infidelity, to go out and order a new kitchen, or that of her own lover’s wife, whose price had been a week in a luxury hotel in Grenada, seemed comfortingly practical and sane.

What happened to Aveling? She read a little further and discovered that Eleanor’s tragedy had had one final twist, when Aveling himself had died no more than a month after her, from a cancer which had been growing all the while in his side. She winced, conscious again of the throbbing pain in her own side.

Eleanor was dressed in white.

And something else. Kathy went back to the beginning of the account and read again until she found it. Eleanor Marx died on 31 March. So also did Eleanor Harper.

Something crawled up Kathy’s spine, the adrenalin beginning to feed into her system. Her heart thumped. The thought, blindingly obvious now, flashed into her head. If Meredith was expecting to meet with Bob Jones and Judith Naismith at 3, why did she take a sleeping pill at 2 that would knock her out for the whole afternoon?

She lay for a while, thinking, then rang for the nurse and asked for a telephone.

The woman on switch at New Scotland Yard was no help at all. There was no reply on Brock’s line, nor on two others she tried. Paging him produced no results. Similarly with Gurney.

‘I’ve already tried Chief Inspector Brock’s home number but there’s no reply. It’s really very important I speak to one of them immediately! I don’t have Sergeant Gurney’s home number. Could you let me have it, please?’

‘I’m sorry. We can’t give that sort of information over the phone. They both must have left for the night.’

Kathy’s brain was racing. She reached for the buzzer and got hold of the nurse again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped, the exertion of small movements draining her absurdly.

‘Don’t worry, dear. What can I do for you?’

‘My clothes. Are they around somewhere? There’s a telephone number I need in one of the pockets.’

The nurse nodded. A few minutes later she returned with a carrier bag. She grinned. ‘Anything else?’

‘No. that’s great. Thanks a lot.’

Kathy found her trousers at the bottom of the bag, rolled up in a ball, and fished out the screwed-up note which Bren had given her with the address and telephone number of Suzanne Chambers. She hesitated, then dialled the number.

‘Yes?’ A woman’s voice.

‘Er, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m trying to contact Detective Chief Inspector Brock on a very important police matter. Is he there by any chance?’

‘Who is this?’

Kathy felt a trickle of sweat run down her back.

‘I’m a colleague of his. I really am most sorry to disturb you, but this is a matter of life and death.’

‘He’s not here. Did he give you this number?’

‘Thanks. Sorry again.’ Kathy put down the receiver. ‘Shit!’ She bit her lip with embarrassment.

She didn’t know what to do, although she knew she had to hurry. She lay helpless, drumming the fingers of her left hand on the white bed linen.

At last she clenched her teeth and reached across her body with her comparatively good left hand and pulled the bedclothes back. With a grunt of effort she eased herself up into a sitting position, then swung round so that her feet could fall off the side of the bed. She saw her bandaged left knee under the hem of the white cotton gown they had given her. Her side was aching more insistently now as she began to shift into position to stand on her wobbly legs. She waited until her head was clear, then tried to stand. A wave of nausea flooded through her, and she put her weight on the side cabinet, ready to reach for the stainless-steel bowl. The feeling passed and she sat again on the side of the bed. Very slowly she bent her trunk forward and pulled the plastic carrier bag towards her, emptying it on to the bed. Inside were the clothes and shoes she was wearing yesterday. Her coat wasn’t there.

It took a painful, exhausting age to work her aching body out of the gown and into her underwear and trousers. Then she slipped her polo-neck sweater over her head. She had to stretch the right arm out of shape to get it around the plaster cast, and ease it carefully down over the pad of dressing around her right side. The laces on her shoes were the biggest problem. When she stretched forward to do them up, she gave a stifled yell as an agonizing pain shot through her side. She closed her eyes, gasping, then tried again, controlling the pain just long enough to tie the laces clumsily.

She scribbled a short note for the nurse. The pain seemed to help her to focus. She got to her feet, swayed towards the door, then stumbled down the corridor, blindly following a knot of visitors on their way out. She sensed that people were staring at her. She didn’t understand why until she passed a nurses’ station with a mirrored panel facing into the corridor, as if for visitors to fix up their smiles before facing the patients. Who is the weird woman who looks as if she’s been hit by a bus? She examined the mirror more closely. Tufts of fair hair sprouted through a swathe of bandages. The visible part of her face was mottled black and blue.