Intrusion

10. May Day

Hope stood in a side street in Finsbury Park clutching one pole of the North Islington Constituency Labour Party banner and ducking into a flurry of apple blossom and snowflakes. With her free hand she held on to the crown of her broad-brimmed straw hat. Her long blue serge skirt kept her legs warm, but her pin-tucked muslin white blouse felt far too thin for the wind, even with a wide green-and-purple satin sash across it. The look for the day was suffragette. Hope had pinned the sash into place with the new retro repro Party badge that had been enclosed in her welcome pack, and criss-crossed it with the strap of her shoulder bag. The red banner, gold-fringed and heroically embroidered, flapped and strained like a sail in the chill breeze. Bloody global warming, Hope thought, wishing she’d complemented the look with gloves.

There were scientists who claimed to have evidence that the climate was changing under the impact of human activity. They were called deniers. They argued that the New Trees and other engineered organisms were removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere far too fast, and that this – along with the increasing use of non-fossil-fuel energy sources – risked tipping the planet into a new ice age. Their work appeared only in the unregulated wilds of the internet, beyond the firewalls and filters that kept most discussion relatively sane. But even that was hardly necessary – it was generally taken for granted that the deniers were beholden to the polluting industries of the smokestack states, Russia and India, where denial was policy.

Hope was only sporadically aware of the deniers’ existence. In her mind, as in the online world, they inhabited the same spaces as people who posted bomb-making instructions, Naxal agitprop, and child-violation videos. But some days, such as this first day in May, she had the fleeting thought that they might have a point.

The street was one of the narrow residential streets like her own, ribs to the spine of Stroud Green Road, in which tall apple and cherry trees vied with New Trees to half-hide the pinched, overgrown front gardens and the frontages of three-and four-storey houses in which two or three families lived on top of each other. For about a hundred metres the carriageway was crowded by rank upon rank of May Day marchers. Although, now she thought about it, ‘marchers’ didn’t seem too apt a word for the few hundred people here, diversely clustered under union branch, community group and peace campaign and Woodcraft Folk as well as Party banners. The mood, as far as Hope could judge it, was more festive than militant.

Not that militancy had anything to do with the Party. Hope had been to two branch meetings – the date of the first had come up a few days after she’d joined – and had found them somewhat dispiriting affairs. The meetings were held in one of the junior classrooms of the primary school at the other end of East West Road, the very one Nick was due to start attending next September. Hope had found it difficult to take seriously a two-hour-long, procedure-dominated agenda earnestly discussed and minuted by people sitting on bright-painted wooden chairs designed for five-year-olds. It hadn’t helped that the third item discussed had been about the importance and urgency of getting the Council to close down the very same open-air back-yard smoking café where she’d talked with Maya. Hope had sat on her hands and kept her mouth shut through that one, and the following morning, after dropping Nick off – as always now, without any trouble – at the nursery, had nipped straight round to warn the shopkeepers of the exact time of the likely visit from Environmental Health.

Apart from that, and Hope’s total, gut-level disagreement with assumptions that everyone in the branch seemed to take for granted, Maya had been correct about her fitting right in. The North Islington branch of the Party was run almost entirely by Islington mothers and grandmothers. The only opposition came from the daughters, one of whom was – much to Hope’s surprise – one of the young women who’d joined in Maya’s flash mob. Her name was Louise and she betrayed no sign of recognising Hope. Her dissent was articulated as a grumble that the Government and the Council were ‘doing all right on the green issues, but not so well on the red issues’, a comment that Hope felt not at all inclined to ask her to elaborate.

The other person Hope had recognised, to her even greater surprise, and who had recognised her and welcomed her to the room, the branch, the Party and the whole great global movement in one rush and gush, was Deirdre, one of the friends whose unhelpful response to her initial panicked email about the nature-kids thing had been so disheartening. Deirdre was a tall, slim woman with slightly forward-placed teeth, a feature she evidently disliked but which – when she forgot it enough to let her lips open – gave her a bright, pleasant grin, and an enigmatic, questioning look when she smiled with her lips closed. She managed a café – smoke-free of course, but also sugar-free, fat-free, caffeine-free and salt-free – in Seven Sisters Road, just opposite Finsbury Park Station. Her two children, both New Kids and thriving with it, attended the school where the meetings were held. Her husband dropped the kids off and picked them up, made their breakfasts and their dinners, and minded the house with more or less competence, in between co-ordinating from the front room a vast, unending cameradrone operation over Peru, allegedly for some coalition of development and human rights NGOs but (Hope had long suspected) actually wirelessed in to the ongoing counterinsurgency: fingering militants to death squads, targeting air strikes on peasant villages. In short, an ideal Labour family.

At the second meeting, one soggy Wednesday evening in mid-April just after Hope’s first pre-natal check-up, Deirdre had introduced the item on the preparations for May Day, and gone on to explain the issue that the branch and the whole CLP and indeed all of London’s Party wanted to highlight, and the importance of the issue itself and the relevance of the suffragette theme, and had wound up by enthusing about how all the women in the branch had pitched into dressing up for it, a detail that had apparently been decided months ago and which had led on Hope’s part to an hour of indignant wardrobe rummaging for old maxi skirts and even older fancy blouses, followed by annoyed dusting and repairing and decorating of a much-despised straw sunhat that her mother had bought her on their last shared holiday, in her mid-teens, back when there were holiday flights.

And here came Deirdre now, carrying a ‘SAFE WORK FOR WOMEN’ placard that was, like all the rest that bobbed above the crowd (‘PROTECT WOMEN AND CHILDREN’, ‘SAFER WORKPLACES FOR ALL’), neatly printed to look as if hand-lettered with a marker pen.

‘Great, isn’t it?’ she said, glancing over her shoulder at the assembling marchers and doing her relaxed grin. ‘It’s so inspiring.’

‘Yes,’ said Hope, uninspired.

Deirdre did the closed-lips enigmatic smile.

‘Are you warm enough?’ she asked. She’d had the sense to wear a jacket, a neatly fitted long-sleeved and short-waisted velvet number in a dark blue that pointed up the white lace jabot at her throat. The whole look suited her a lot better than it did Hope, who felt dumpy in an old skirt that had fitted fine when she was a student but whose waistband opening was now secured by a well-concealed safety-pin halfway down the zip.

‘I’ll be fine when we start walking,’ said Hope.

Deirdre took glasses from her handbag and slipped them on, checking incoming messages. ‘Just a few minutes,’ she said. ‘See you in a bit.’

And with that she bustled off, up towards the front. Literally bustled, Hope noticed, as Deirdre trailed her hem up the street. She seemed to be taking the stunt far too seriously. Hope’s partner on the other pole of the banner, a stocky red-haired man in his sixties called Fingal, grinned across at her as she turned away from watching Deirdre.

‘Very committed, our Deirdre,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Hope. ‘Just what I was thinking.’

‘She can be a bit overbearing sometimes,’ Fingal said, out of the side of his mouth. ‘But still, can’t hold it against her. I remember when the branch could hardly muster enough warm bodies to hold both poles of the banner.’

Hope laughed, just enough not to show too much interest. She didn’t know Fingal very well, even for someone she’d seen only twice, sitting at the back of the meetings, precariously tilting his plastic chair, letting one or both of his straggly eyebrows rise as he listened to some point being made. She had a suspicion that at the slightest prompt he would want to talk about old times or, worse, inveigle her into internal branch or Party politics. He had the air of someone on the lookout for kindred spirits.

She was saved from having to answer further by the sound of the brass band at the front striking up.

‘Speaking of which…’ she said.

Fingal nodded. He and Hope leaned further into the wind and started walking forward.

Hope had never been on a demonstration before, and she’d found the prospect daunting. Hugh had been happy enough to look after Nick for the day – it was a public holiday, after all, and he’d intended to take it as a day off rather than a day’s overtime – but had worried about Hope getting into trouble.

‘Especially with you…’ he’d added, looking pointedly at her belly, which was showing the beginnings of a bump.

‘Oh come on,’ Hope had said. ‘It’s not like one of those demonstrations. The Party’s the Government, for heaven’s sake! We’re not going to get attacked by the police, now are we?’

Hugh had given her that sullen, doubtful, cynical look that Hope privately thought of as his Lewis face. She’d known exactly how his next sentence would begin.

‘As my father always said,’ said Hugh, blithely confirming her silent prediction, ‘you should never go on a march unless you’re ready for a fight.’

‘Piffle,’ said Hope. ‘Leosach whinge.’

‘My father’s not a Leosach,’ said Hugh, in a slow, deliberate way.

‘No, but the iron got into his soul. And the rain rusted it!’

Hugh laughed. ‘Spoken like a Leosach yourself,’ he said. ‘All right. But it wasn’t from Lewis he got that about the marching. It was from London, when he was young and marched against the war.’

‘The war?’ Hope asked. ‘It hadn’t even started then.’

‘The war before this one,’ Hugh explained.

‘Oh!’ said Hope. ‘Ancient history. Anyway, it’s not that kind of march. It’s May Day. It’s a celebration.’

‘Hands across the sea,’ said Hugh, again with the Lewis face. He scratched the balding patch towards the back of his head. ‘Oh well. Take care.’

‘Of course I’ll take care.’

But he’d left her worried. Her first morning sickness, the following day, hadn’t helped.

Now, however, out on the street and into the swing of it, Hope felt quite different. The brisk walk soon warmed her. The flurries of snow ceased. The brass band up at the front was blaring out something martial but bouncy, and a few dozen rows behind her a Jamaican steel band on a truck was playing a different tune and different music altogether, whose rhythm snaked around and intertwined with that of the band.

The local contingent swung around the corner into Stroud Green Road, past helpful police in no riot gear whatsoever, and slotted into a gap in the main march coming down over Crouch Hill. Now they were part of a column of thousands. Hope glanced over her shoulder, and along to the far front of the march, entranced.

‘Wow!’ she said, impressed despite her doubts. ‘There’s so many of us.’

‘That’s nothing,’ said Fingal. ‘Try your glasses.’

Hope opened her shoulder bag awkwardly, one-handed, as the banner pole tilted and recovered, and put the glasses on. Something local and eager pulsed in a corner of the sky. She blinked it up. The shopfronts and shoppers and trees of Stroud Green Road were rendered as a faint, pencil-sketch overlay, through which to her right she could see nothing but crowds all the way to the horizon, with red banners and balloons and long dragon puppets bobbing above their heads: Beijing, earlier in the day. Elsewhere, more or less in front of her, a similarly huge demonstration filled Tehran’s Revolution Square. From Mumbai and Calcutta came more recent images, of streets a mass of red flags, a sea whose every shore was pebbled with the black helmets of the police, and fringed with long black sticks beating down relentlessly and rhythmically on every head they could reach. Way off to the left, and almost in real time, a smaller march in Moscow was holding out against the traditional baton charges and tear-gas rounds, red and grey smoke intermingling merrily above the skewed flags and hurled placards. By late afternoon the view would no doubt include the gigantic May Day parades in Washington, Chicago, NYC and LA, but for now the Americans were mostly still abed.

It got dizzying, and Hope took the glasses off and put them away. Despite herself, despite her lack of interest in politics (‘but politics is interested in you’, some earnest lad at university had once told her, a remark she now recalled with a belated shiver, instead of the dismissive laugh she’d given it at the time) and in what she’d called, to Maya, all that, meaning all that justice and equality and progress stuff that the Prime Minister banged on about – despite all that, Hope found herself uplifted and enthused by the feeling, no, the perception of being part of something huge, worldwide, hands across not just the sea but across the stormy fronts of the Warm War. Her eyes, too, could sting to the tear gas in Russia; her shoulders could flinch and her feet stumble under the lathi slashes in India; and likewise, her feet could skip and dance along with all those enjoying the day in the parts of the world where they were free to celebrate it in peace.

America, Britain, Germany, Iran, China… she could see, she could literally see why they called the New Society countries the Free World.

On they went, down past the station and around the corner into Seven Sisters Road, and then into the broad open green space of Finsbury Park. Past the small enclosed patch of sand and swings and shelters where the One O’Clock Club had given her such a respite and Nick such fun when he was too young for nursery. Out on to a wide, sloping green, already dotted with stalls and fronted by a stage and sound system. As she and Fingal stopped, two women from the branch who’d walked behind them offered to take the poles.

‘Thanks,’ said Hope, letting her shoulders slump and arms hang loose. Her biceps ached. She looked at Fingal.

‘Well done,’ he said. He might have winked. ‘Be seeing you.’

He wandered away, but after a few steps into the crowd struck off in a purposeful stride. Hope looked around. The march, which had filled a main thoroughfare more or less from side to side and from end to end, now looked a small huddle in the wide-open space. Around its edges stood a scatter of stalls, some selling political literature and merch, others snacks and soft drinks. Faint smells of candy floss and veggie burgers drifted and mingled. Stray balloons floated up through the steady drift of apple and cherry petals and soared and sped through the silver sky like UFOs. The park was busy with its predictable public-holiday crowds, couples and kids and families and picnic parties braving the stiff breeze, and few of them paid any attention to the compact mass of the march. The latest hit of some local trash band that had made it big and daringly called itself Urban Heat Island thudded from the sound system. Police and park attendants – it was hard to tell which was which – patrolled the edges of the gathering and now and then, in an apparently random but (Hope did not doubt) algorithmically choreographed pattern, elbowed their way through it, sniffers and other sensors prominently deployed.

Hope headed for the front of the crowd, wending her way between clusters of people around various banners, avoiding eye contact with anyone who offered her leaflet, journal or chip. She arrived just a few rows away from the front of the low stage as the music stopped. The band filed off to loud applause and the dignitaries filed on, to lesser applause. The Mayor and her wife, the chair of Islington Council, a couple of other councillors, a trade union speaker, Deirdre, and Jack Crow, MP. Crow was a wiry man in his thirties who wore a leather peaked cap, a denim jacket, corduroy trousers, black yellow-laced Docs and a pointed ginger beard. He was greeted with louder applause than the band. He waved his thanks and sat down on one of the folding stools on the platform. Hope had a bit of grudge with Jack Crow. He hadn’t answered her letter. She ignored him and smiled up at Deirdre, who nodded and smiled back.

The Mayor took the mike, thanked everyone, and hastened to assure them that the speeches would be short. By her standards they probably were, but not by Hope’s; after twenty minutes she had resorted to putting her glasses on and catching up with her mail. Nick and Hugh had sent her pictures from Hampstead Heath, where they were flying a kite that Hugh had somehow magicked up from scrap plastic and an old fishing line. Hope found herself shame-facedly jealous and idly curious as to when Hugh had ever been fishing… he couldn’t have been more than, what, fifteen, when the sport was banned?

Deirdre’s voice cut across Hope’s reverie. She let her attention snap back, and put the glasses away.

‘Now, we’ve all heard what Louella, our sister here from Unite, has been saying,’ Deirdre announced, with a sisterly backward wave to the previous speaker, ‘and I find it hard really to add anything to what she’s so eloquently told us, so I just want to reiterate and emphasise how important this Safe Work for Women campaign is for all of us. More and more women are finding it difficult to work outside the home because of health hazards in the workplace. So we need to ensure that workplaces are safe for women – and that means safe for men, too, as well as safe for children. And if they’re safe for children, we could even have workplace crèches! And why not? Our mother’s generation had crèches –in a borough like ours, at least. We should build on that and take it forward again.

‘But really, the main thing I want to say is that Safe Work for Women won’t get passed without legislative action, and no amount of pressure is going to work unless we have MPs who are on our side, and I’m proud to introduce someone who of course needs no introduction, an MP who is and always has been on our side, Jack Crow.’

Everyone clapped, even Hope.

‘Thank you, Deirdre,’ Crow murmured, then went on in a raised, booming, platform voice: ‘Madam Mayor, councillors, brothers and sisters, it’s a tremendous privilege for me to speak to this splendid rally, which as you know if you’ve been checking the news is part of a magnificent mobilisation of tens of millions, all around the world.’

Yeah, yeah, thought Hope. Get on with it.

Get on with it he did. He outlined the Government’s and the Council’s achievements. He pointed out where the Government had back-slided from election promises, and proclaimed his intent to hold them to their commitments, if not in this parliament, then in the next, where he was sure the Party would have an even stronger majority. (Applause.) Then he leaned forward, clutching the mike and speaking quietly, so that people strained a little, listening.

‘But, brothers and sisters, comrades, this is no time for complacency. No time for smug triumphalism. No time for sitting back with our thumbs in our lapels and our feet on the table. The New Society, the free and social market, is under attack as never before. Not a military attack. Not a physical attack. Personally, as you all know, I have never aligned myself with those, even within our movement, whose first and last answer to any international problem is military action. Yes. The Russian imperialists, the Indian chauvinists, the Naxal nihilists – yes, these are all threats, and we all know about them. And we know how our brothers and sisters from Delhi to St Petersburg have been bludgeoned on the streets today, for exercising exactly the same rights as we are now, for celebrating the same May Day as we do here.

‘We stand with them. Shoulder to shoulder. But what they need from us is not military threats to their governments. It’s our solidarity itself. It’s what we’re doing here. Standing together. All of us, young and old. Peacefully and freely.

‘And in doing that, we are also dealing with the real threat, the serious threat, to all we’ve fought for. The insidious threat, the threat from within. The Conservative and Liberal Party…’

Crow paused. The expected roar of laughter came. He waited.

‘The Conservative and Liberal Party,’ he went on, smiling, ‘is not that threat. It merely gives a voice to it. That threat, my friends, is the stupidity, the short-sightedness, the greed of the business class, big and small. Let’s hear no nonsense about class conflict. No governments in history have done as much for free enterprise and honest profit as the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States – and, let me say, perhaps controversially, but in all fairness, the People’s Republic of China – over the past ten years. We have underwritten risky ventures with trillions in public money. And these ventures have paid off – in clean air, in a safe environment, in abundant energy, in vast, exciting new fields of endeavour, and – I need hardly say – in very healthy profits indeed. All we have asked from business in return is that they pay their taxes and co-operate with the government in its social policies.

‘Have they done anything of the sort? No! They’ve responded to tax reform by working through shell companies in India and Russia. And they fight tooth and nail against every tiny step forward on health and safety and regulation. The sort of opposition that Safe Work for Women faces from these quarters is astonishing, and frankly disappointing. I’ve even been lobbied myself, by the usual suspects claiming that it’ll put people out of work, like the same usual suspects have said about every piece of progressive legislation since the Factories Act and the Ten Hours Bill.

‘I need to be able to stand up in the House of Commons and show how this lobbying is outweighed by a deluge of support, and I know I can count on you to deliver that deluge of support, just as you know you can count on me. Thank you.’

Applause. Crow acknowledged it with a smile and a wave, and stepped back. Deirdre said a few closing words. Music, this time recorded, started thumping out. The speakers chatted to each other and began to leave the platform.

Hope made her way to the side of the stage to intercept Jack Crow as he came off the steps.

‘Uh, Brother Crow? Could I have a word?’

Crow stopped and moved aside, out of the way of others stepping down, and gave her a friendly but wary smile.

‘Yes?’

‘Interesting speech,’ she said. ‘Inspiring.’

‘Thanks.’ He still looked slightly puzzled. Hope imagined that she must cut a strange figure. She’d meant to ask Crow why he hadn’t replied to her letter, but when it came to it, she hesitated. She wasn’t sure how quickly MPs were expected to answer letters, and as she was hoping to get some help from him, she was wary of starting off on the wrong foot. Instead she found herself saying the first thing that came into her head – something that had genuinely puzzled her for weeks.

‘I’ve only recently joined the Party,’ she said, ‘and I’m not too clear on everything, how the ideas fit together, you know?’

Crow laughed. ‘Me neither!’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it. The Party’s, you know, a broad church, as the cliché goes. What do you want to know?’

He had his head cocked to one side, beard clasped between thumb and forefinger, elbow clutched in the other hand. A slight frown, barely more than a crinkle around the eyes, made him look like a teacher waiting to hear a question from a precocious child.

‘I was just wondering,’ Hope said, ‘how the Safe Work for Women campaign sort of fits into the “free and social market” you talked about?’

‘Ah!’ Crow’s expression cleared, and brightened. ‘That’s pretty straightforward. Glad you asked. The free and social market is one of our most successful and useful ideas, one I think the Government has got right. The economics are quite technical, there’s stacks of literature debating it – you know what academic economists are like, and if you don’t, ha-ha, count yourself lucky – but the basic idea is very simple, really. The neoclassical… uh, the standard model of a truly free market assumes that everyone in the market has perfect information. They must know what choices they’re making, otherwise it isn’t a free and rational choice, right?’ He raised a didactic finger, half-smiling in acknowledgement that he was about to forestall a sensible but predictable objection. ‘Now obviously,’ he went on, ‘this doesn’t actually obtain in the real world. Nobody really has perfect information. In fact, even if we make it a bit more realistic, they don’t have all or even most of the relevant information. So for the market to be really free, it has to work as if everyone involved had perfect information, or at least as if they had all the relevant information. This is where the social side comes from – the state, of course along with civil society, the unions and campaigns and so on, steps in to allow people to make the choices they would have made if they’d had that information. Because these are the really free choices.’

‘Not the ones they actually chose, then?’

‘Exactly!’ said Crow. ‘Because they’re not the choices they would have made if they’d known all the facts, which would have been the rational choices, so society helps them to make those choices. And that’s your free and social market, right?’

‘But it doesn’t feel very free,’ Hope said, ‘having other people make your choices for you.’

‘It feels a lot freer than making the wrong choices,’ said Crow. He pinched his lower lip for a moment, thinking. ‘Suppose you were a mother, right?’

‘Well, I am actually,’ said Hope.

‘Oh! Great!’ He gave her an up-and-down look, and met her eyes again with a wry glance. ‘And… if you don’t mind me saying… with another one on the way, yeah?’

‘That’s right,’ said Hope.

‘Congratulations!’ Crow beamed. ‘Perfect examples, then. When you buy a toy for your little…’

‘Boy,’ said Hope.

‘… you wouldn’t feel you’d made a very free choice if it turned out to be painted with lead paint that could be chewed off, or its head, say, was stuck on with a sharp spike that could injure the child if he pulled it off. Which they do, don’t they? Pull the heads off. Mine always did. Or if you were buying milk powder for the baby and it turned out to be contaminated with poison. These things did happen, and not so long ago. Tragic stories. The reason they don’t happen any more – well, hardly at all, because something will always slip through – is because the state – here, in China, and so on – makes regulations and employs inspectors to enforce them, and locks up and fines and even expropriates people who break them. Now, you wouldn’t feel very free if you had to do all that checking yourself, would you? Or if you couldn’t do that because it wasn’t practical, and just had to trust to luck, and you could never be sure, you’d always have a nagging doubt, and the effort of putting that doubt out of your mind. Whereas now, you can buy toys and milk and clothes and so on for the kids and feel free from all that worry. Not to mention free from the regret over making the wrong choice.’

Hope felt baffled. ‘But lead paint on toys and contamination in food is… something like fraud, isn’t it? It seems a long way from that to saying that everything needs to be controlled that way. And a long way from saying the government has to make choices for women about where they work.’

‘It’s the same principle,’ said Crow. By now he was beginning to look a little impatient. ‘The government isn’t making choices for anyone. Like I said, it’s enabling people to make the choices they would make for themselves if they knew all the consequences of those choices.’

‘But…’

‘I mean, would you want pregnant women to have the “choice”’ – he waggle-fingered the quotes – ‘to work down coal mines?’

‘Well, no,’ Hope conceded. ‘But working in offices where people once smoked thirty years ago doesn’t seem quite so risky.’

‘Oh, it isn’t,’ said Crow. ‘But it’s still risky. That foul stuff leaks out of the walls and floors for decades.’

‘Only in tiny amounts,’ said Hope.

‘Yes!’ said Crow. ‘That means it’s actually riskier than smoking itself, because the amounts are so tiny. I mean, we’re talking about femtograms per cubic metre. You know how small that is? It’s smaller than a subatomic particle! When you had actual smoke particles in the air, you could at least cough, you had some natural protection – not enough, of course, but some – whereas these nano- and femto-particles can slip right between the molecules and into your lungs and bloodstream. Not to mention your foetus’s lungs and bloodstream.’

‘Yes, well I do understand that,’ said Hope. ‘But what I don’t get is, this just excludes women from more workplaces.’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Crow. ‘The law will mandate that employers of women between the ages of blah-blah, et cetera, will have to strip out or cover with sheet diamond any surfaces that—’

‘But I work from home,’ said Hope. ‘Our house is over a hundred years old, and I’m pretty sure somebody must have once smoked in it. Does that mean we’re going to have to—’

‘Ah!’ Enlightenment dawned on Crow’s face. ‘That’s what you’re worried about. I’m so sorry, I was beginning to wonder if you were some kind of Tory infiltrator!’ He laughed. ‘No, you needn’t worry about that at all. Applying this law to home working would be going too far. It’s specifically excluded from the draft bill. Here, let me show you…’

He reached inside his jacket and pulled out glasses.

‘Honestly,’ he said, half to himself, ‘you’d think the branch would have made a better fist of explaining all this to our own members.’

He slipped the glasses on. Hope could see his eyes blink rapidly. A surprised look came over his face.

‘Oh!’ he said. ‘You’re Hope Morrison!’

‘Yes,’ said Hope. ‘Pleased to meet you, too.’

‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’ Crow gave a rueful laugh. ‘Mind you, if I’d known… you’ve no idea of the trouble you’ve caused me. Nearly got yourself into, too.’

‘How?’ asked Hope, taken aback.

Crow passed a hand across his eyebrows. ‘That letter you hand-delivered.’

‘What?’ Hope had that sick feeling of having done something she hadn’t known was wrong, and feeling guilty about it.

‘Nobody hand-delivers letters. Look, you could have written to me at the Commons, written to my office, heck, you could have posted the letter to the house. If you’d looked me up, you would have seen how to book an appointment – there’s even my personal phone number.’ He tapped the earpiece of his glasses. ‘You’d have got a message, but I’d have got back to you. But hand-delivering a letter without a stamp… we have to treat that as a terrorist attempt. Like the anthrax letters, way back before you or I were born. Standing regulation – I had to call the police, and they had to scan it and analyse it. Wasted a good couple of hours.’

‘Surely a bit of common sense…’

‘Out of my hands,’ said Crow. ‘It’s the rules. It’s the law, come to that. I admit it’s a nuisance, but still…’

‘It makes you feel free, does it?’ Hope asked, tartly.

Crow grimaced. ‘Well, again… freer than being blown up or poisoned. Anyway… I have to admit I was a bit annoyed. I’m afraid that’s why I haven’t got around to replying.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Hope said. ‘But now that we’re here, maybe you could tell me what you think.’

‘About your problem?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well…’ Crow took a deep breath, then let his shoulders slump. ‘I don’t agree with your stance, as I understand it, but I can certainly help you with practical matters – finding legal advice, dealing with the Health Centre, that sort of thing.’

‘I’d be very grateful for that,’ said Hope. ‘But I was kind of hoping you could, I don’t know, raise the matter in the House, or something? Because all it would take would be a tiny little tweak to the law, just to make a conscientious objection something that doesn’t need to be justified in terms of belief.’

‘Can’t help you there, I’m afraid,’ Crow said. ‘Personally, I think the exemptions go far too far as it is. And we can’t be seen to pass a law just to get around a judge’s ruling; it’d be interpreted as interference with the independence of the judiciary and the family courts. It would take a complete redraft of the relevant section of the Act, and to be honest, there’s not the slightest chance of any parliamentary time being allotted for that.’

‘You could put down an Early Day Motion,’ Hope persisted. ‘It wouldn’t have to be a law or anything, just… an expression of the sense of the House, isn’t that what it’s called?’

Crow took a step back, frowning. ‘You seem to have this worked out.’

‘I’ve been reading up on parliamentary procedure.’

‘Admirable,’ said Crow, still frowning. ‘So I’m sure you understand the practicalities. There’s no chance of anything getting through before – to be blunt – the matter becomes moot as far as you’re concerned, and in any case, quite frankly, as I said I don’t agree with your objection, and I have a great deal on my plate as it is. So, practical help, as your MP, yes, of course, but otherwise, sorry, no.’

‘Why don’t you agree with it?’ Hope demanded. She rapped a thumbnail on her badge. ‘Doesn’t “Liberty” on that mean anything?’

‘Yes, it does,’ said Crow. ‘As I’ve been trying to explain. Genuine liberty, based on informed choice.’

‘What about my choice?’

‘If you want that sort of choice,’ said Crow, sounding as if he’d lost patience, ‘you can go to Russia.’

Hope stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘That’s totally uncalled for!’

‘I’m not sure it is,’ said Crow, frowning again and blinking rapidly. ‘If you look at the sources of a lot of this sort of so-called libertarian rhetoric, you’ll often find a stack of Russian money behind it. Not to mention Naxal ideological diversionary operations.’

‘Naxal?’ Hope cried, in such a dismayed tone that nearby heads turned.

Crow nodded, then took his glasses off and put them away, with a sudden self-satisfied smile. ‘In any case, I have to go. Do please contact my office for any help we can give you.’

Then, taking her by surprise, he shook her hand, smiled artificially, nodded vigorously, and turned away. He’d disappeared into the crowd, nodding and chatting and glad-handing, before she could gather her wits.

So much for that. Unexpectedly hungry for a snack, Hope wandered over to the stalls. She bought a sugar-free spun-sugar-like confection and chomped into it as she drifted down the line. At one stall she found Fingal, the guy she’d carried the banner with, in earnest conversation with Louise, the young woman who’d joined the flash mob to support her.

‘This is completely insane,’ Louise was saying. ‘There’s no way the unions have enough power to pressurise employers to take on women rather than just declare their workplaces unsafe, so all we’re doing is just pushing women further back into the home or into small-business employment, where they don’t have any union representation at all!’

‘It’s a question of the balance of forces, innit?’ Fingal explained.

Yeah, thought Hope, you could say that.

Louise leaned forward to reply. Hope couldn’t catch her words, but from her tone it was clear she was giving Fingal a piece of her mind, giving as good as she got. Hope hadn’t the heart to get involved in the discussion. The candy floss suddenly tasted like paper. She tossed it in a bin, sucked her fingers and licked around her lips, careless of how unladylike this looked, and stomped off home.