Daisy grinned. ‘Nothing like taking the bull by the horns.’

‘Or Mrs Finnigan by the scruff of her neck but this will have to do.’ Rose smiled back, and then as they both laughed out loud she said, ‘I think a cup of coffee is in order. What say you, lass?’ Suddenly the day didn’t seem so bad after all.

PART FOUR

Decisions

1911

Chapter Twenty-Two

Alexander sat at the dining-room table looking over the crystal and silver and huge bowl of hothouse flowers in the middle of the splendour, listening to his father pontificate about the recent disastrous general election. It had produced a remarkable tie, Liberals and Tories with two hundred and seventy-two seats each, which had done nothing to change party fortunes since the last election eleven months ago.

‘Labour has been propping up the Liberals for months now, it’s a damn disgrace,’ his father was saying to Lord Rockingham, a friend of the family. ‘And all over this People’s Budget. Lloyd George and his lot are trying to push the government into equating robbery with democracy. The thing was thrown out by the House of Lords over twelve months ago but will the government listen? It’s bad for the country, this squabbling, blast it.’

Alexander had heard it all before over the last couple of times he’d been home, and if he was honest he would admit he didn’t give a damn, not tonight. He had hoped to be back at Christmas but that hadn’t been possible and it was now the beginning of February. He hadn’t seen Rose for over six months and had planned to dump his things and have a bath once he got home and go straight to the bakery before it closed, but he’d arrived to find one of his mother’s social gatherings taking place with an important – to her – dinner party beginning at seven o’clock. Realizing he would have to wait until the following day he had tried to show good grace, but the conversation was grating on him. He wasn’t a political animal by any means, but the fact that Lloyd George had proposed financing re-armament and the new old-age pensions through higher taxation of the propertied classes seemed fine to him.

He glanced around the table, at the men in their dinner suits and the ladies in their sumptuous dresses and jewels. The diamond necklace gracing the scrawny neck of Lady Rockingham would feed and clothe a working-class family for a year or two, he thought caustically, and here they were objecting that the new death duties Lloyd George had in mind might lead to economies on their massive estates.