After the War Is Over Read Free Page A

convenience, together with instructions on its
     proper submission.
    I remain,
    Your obedient servant,
    Mr. C. M. R. Hopkins
    Office of the Vice Chancellor
    University of Oxford

Chapter 3
    S he set off for work not much past dawn the next morning, her voting paper tucked securely
     in her handbag. How odd, that a single piece of paper could instantly make her feel
     more present, more engaged, as if she were somehow part of a greater whole.
    Even the task she’d set herself for the morning, collating information on rents and
     prices from a whopping great pile of files, seemed appealing, and by the time her
     wristwatch read half past eight, before anyone other than Miss Rathbone had arrived,
     Charlotte had opened, read, and made notes from each and every file.
    She took the voting paper from her bag, unfolded it, and smoothed away its creases.
     It was time.
    She went to the door of Miss Rathbone’s office and knocked lightly.
    “Do come in!”
    “Miss Rathbone? Do you have a moment?”
    Charlotte’s employer looked up from the papers that cluttered her desk and exhaled
     a great plume of smoke from one of her ever-present Turkish cigarettes. “Of course,
     my dear. Is everything all right?”
    At least fifteen years Charlotte’s senior, Eleanor Rathbone had been middle-aged since
     the day she was born. Some of the younger women who worked in the constituency office
     were intimidated by her, for she took no pains to hide her formidable intellect, nor
     did she have much patience for those who were less sure in their convictions than
     she. A generation ago she would have been called a bluestocking and dismissed out
     of hand for her ridiculous notions about equality between the sexes and the inherent
     value of women’s work. Two decades into the twentieth century, Miss Rathbone was beginning
     to make her presence and politics felt on the national stage.
    Like Charlotte, she had attended Somerville College at Oxford, and after finishing
     her studies, Miss Rathbone had returned to Liverpool and had joined her father in
     his work chronicling the lives of the city’s working poor. She’d been elected as a
     city councilor for Granby Ward in 1909; two years after that Charlotte had begun work
     as one of her constituency assistants.
    But Miss Rathbone’s work as a ward councilor was only one of the many hats she wore.
     Elsewhere in Britain she had become known as a committed suffragist and defender of
     women’s rights beyond the voting booth. If a cause was worthy in her eyes, she threw
     her considerable weight behind it. Rest could wait for the hereafter, she often told
     her assistants. What counted, in this life, were good deeds and hard work.
    She was far from perfect, of course. She tended to bully her opponents into submission,
     smothering their arguments with the weighty superiority of her own convictions. She
     was high-minded to a fault, maddeningly humorless at times, and entirely lacking in
     vices apart from her addiction to tobacco.
    Charlotte worshiped her.
    “Yes, ma’am, quite all right. I’ve come about my vote.”
    “I don’t follow you,” Miss Rathbone said, stubbing out her cigarette and regarding
     Charlotte with an air of heightened interest.
    “I can’t remember if I told you I didn’t vote in the general election. I wanted to,
     but I had to apply to the registrar at Somerville for proof of my status as a graduate,
     and by the time—”
    “I understand. By the time you’d jumped through all their hoops, registration had
     closed.”
    “I was so disappointed. But they’ve since called a by-election for Oxford University,
     so I will be able to vote after all. I know it’s one of the university constituencies,
     and not a proper riding—”
    “A vote is a vote, my dear.”
    “As soon as the writ was issued, I applied for my voting paper, and it arrived yesterday.”
     Her voice faltered; until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much it had meant to
     her. “I