As they sat here that association filled the silence. At last, Lenox said, “You know, Graham—” He halted.
“Sir?”
“Oh, nothing. Only that I feel better for having had the wine and the biscuit.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir.” He checked his own watch. “And now perhaps you should go into the chamber. Don’t forget to bow to the Speaker and pay your respects to the opposition leader, before you shake the prime minister’s hand.”
The two men shook hands. Graham would watch from the sliver of the cracked secretaries’ door, and be waiting there when it was all finished.
The benches of the chamber were jammed, and the doorways, through which members were still streaming, a positive fire hazard. Lenox paid his proper obeisances and then took a spot along the first bench. All of it was rather a blur. He had imagined there would be a great passage of time in which he might steel himself to the task, when in fact it happened in no time at all that he was called to speak. He stood up, legs watery, and addressed the chamber.
“Mr. Speaker, Prime Minister, good evening, and thank you,” he said. “It is my humble honor to address the House of Commons at this opening, and my hope is that my words will incline you not toward partisan rancor but toward national pride; not toward meanness but toward generosity; not toward argument but toward reconciliation and progress. It ought only be such when we remember that we represent, together, the greatest nation the world has yet known.
“Indeed, we congregate here at the very center of the civilized world. I would ask you to set aside the next half of an hour to peer into the homes of those who still live as if in the last century, those who live solid, honest, British lives, but are afforded too little protection from the vicissitudes of fortune by their government. I would ask you to consider the poor.”
It was a good speech, Lenox realized as he read on, but not a great one. It moved too much perhaps in the direction of fervor — the subject was too close to his heart. There was a passage about a family in Somerset who had to choose between medicine and food that was the God’s honest truth, but might, he feared, have come across as nearly Dickensian.
But then why not? Dickens’s greatest gifts had been humor and a conscience, two virtues that belonged in a political speech. As he spoke on about the Somerset family, about the shoeless children walking down frosted dirt paths, about the father who had one hot meal in a week, about the terror of the workhouse, Lenox felt his conviction rising.
He was aided by the men around him. On both sides, the right, the left, there were murmurs of assent. This was not the House of Lords, that ivoried domicile of the rich and remote. Among the men on the benches were brewers, stockbrokers, even publicans. They understood poverty. Most had seen it.
He remembered to take a sip of water after some time and realized his hand was trembling. It gave him confidence, strangely.
Just when the speech might have become the first kind, a mumbling recitation of facts, he saw his brother, and his voice strengthened. He offered a series of proposals and saw the nods around the chamber.
His conclusion was perhaps fanciful. He had been talking for well on thirty-five minutes, and his heart fell when he came to the last page. Was it a mistake to mention the coining, to have a little joke? In Everley it had seemed a clever idea, but here it seemed self-important. It had made the papers, yes, but …
He needn’t have worried. “If only we could all turn coiners, the problems would be solved,” he said, voice unsteady, and was instantly gratified to receive an enormous laugh. Even the Speaker, propriety personified, smiled.
He wouldn’t remember finishing, only thanking the house and returning to his seat in silence. Ten or fifteen seconds passed before he realized that it was not silence at all, but wave after wave of applause.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
He’s gone,” Lenox called back down the hallway at Hampden Lane.
His brother emerged from the Ugly Room, a drafty, dark parlor toward the rear of the house, in which Jane and Lenox never set foot because they stored in it all of their least favorite pieces of furniture, all of their most unfortunate works of art, objects they could not in all scrupulousness throw away — usually because they were the treasured bequest of some relative — but with which they had no desire to live daily life.
Edmund had been hiding from a particularly tedious liberal minister who would have wanted an hour’s good conversation about India. He was only the latest in a long line of people who had come to congratulate Lenox on his speech.
“Was that tea coming in soon, Charles?”
“I forgot to ring for it. I’ll do so now.”
“It’s rather cold.”
“Well, you see the fire,” said Charles, somewhat irritably. “Presumably you have not forgotten how to turn over a spade full of coal.”
Edmund smiled. “Tired of your meetings?”
Lenox was at his desk, signing a stack of cards Graham had prepared to send to his constituents in Stirrington. “I am giving strong consideration to the idea of life as a hermit. On the one hand it would be irksome to grow a beard to my ankles; on the other I should never have to go to Lord Furze’s for supper tonight, unless Lady Furze’s taste has changed dramatically.”
Edmund put more coal on the fire, and ordered the tea himself while his brother worked on. These tasks accomplished he settled into an armchair with an out-of-date copy of Punch.
After a while Lenox looked up from his work and out through the tall window. It had gotten colder, it was true. The fall had sharpened and deepened, the leaves upon the trees shading from the red and orange brilliance of their dying into the crackled brown of their deaths. The sunlight was paler now.
Though he had received the garlands of a victor after his speech there was some vague dissatisfaction in his heart. Perhaps it was that for all of this congratulation there seemed to be little real will to implement his ideas, and he knew, with an exhausted familiarity, that to pass anything through the House of Commons would mean months of persuasion and wrangling — that a single speech, though it had seemed so important, could not trim the sails of the ship of state.
He consoled himself — and his brother and Graham had consoled him — by remembering that he had placed the issue of poverty directly before his colleagues now. The papers had reported it so favorably, for the most part, that perhaps it would shame them into action. Even then there was the House of Lords to deal with, however; he had always found it fitting that just three people, shouting across each other, each a king upon his own remote plot of land, could make a quorum there. Maddening.
Presently the tea arrived. “Much better,” said Edmund as they moved to Lenox’s couches, nearer the fire. Between this and the tea the book-lined walls immediately seemed more welcoming, the thick blue carpet warmer.
A footman followed the tea tray in with the post. Amid the shuffle of letters Lenox found one postmarked from Everley, with the Ponsonby crest upon the seal. “A letter from Freddie,” he said, slitting it open.
Lenox read in silence for a moment, while Edmund drank his grateful tea. “A pro forma thank-you, I imagine?” asked the older brother.
“No.” Charles leaned across and handed the letter over. “See what you think of that.”
Edmund read the letter.
September 23, 1874
Everley
Plumbley, Som.
Dear Charles,
First I must congratulate you on your speech, which we have just had details of this morning in the Bath papers. As you know Fripp and I are committed Tories, but both of us thought many of your points inarguable — as for those that break along party lines, neither of us doubts your good faith. Fripp did add that he hoped the next time you visited you worried less about farmers’ shoes and more about covering your wicket, but I put him down straight away.