A Monstrous Regiment of Women (13 page)

“For heaven’s sake, Ronnie, listen to yourself. What would Margery Childe say?”

“I know, it’s terrible. But honestly, it’s not nice to be alone… not forever.
Spinster
is such an appalling word somehow. You know, some of the women—” Her garrulity abruptly dried up, and I smiled to myself in the dark.

“Some of the women what?”

“Oh, you know, they say that the only true and equal love is Sapphism… marriage between women.”

“Is Margery Childe a lesbian?” I wondered.

“No, I’m sure she isn’t.”

“How do you know? Is she married?”

“No. Although she may have been. Someone told me she’d lost her husband in the Somme.”

“Who?”

“Who told me, you mean? Let me think. One of the early members, it must have been, who knew her before the war. Ivy? No—I know. It was Delia Laird. She was with Margery from the early days, when they used to hire village halls to preach in. Yes, that’s right, Ivy’s the one who told me she’d seen Margery with a gorgeous man in France a year or two back, all dark and Mediterranean and gangster-like. No, Margery’s no lesbian.”

“I didn’t meet Delia Laird, did I? You said she
was
with Margery. Has she left the Temple?”

“She died, back in August. Drowned in her bath.”

I stopped. “Good heavens.”

“It was suicide. That is, the verdict at the inquest was accidental death, but we all knew she’d killed herself. Tablets and gin, in the bath; what else could it be?”

“But why?” I allowed her to pull me back into motion.

“Margery. Delia was one of those women who might have been a lesbian if she’d come from a less repressed background, or if she’d received any encouragement. As it was, she devoted her life to Margery. An unfortunate woman, from a good family but there was something indefinably wrong with her. Not to speak ill of the dead, but frankly, she was rather stupid. When the Temple began to take off a couple of years ago, well, Margery just sort of left her behind. She needed people who could run an organisation, not just hire halls and carry bags. Plus, she just didn’t have the time to baby Delia any more. So Delia killed herself.”

“Does Margery know it was suicide?”

“Oh no. I’m sure she doesn’t. She was devastated.”

“How sad.”

“It was. Mostly it’s sad Delia couldn’t have made a match. She would have made someone an utterly devoted wife.”

“Even if that someone was another woman.”

“Well, yes.”

“Would Margery have approved?”

“There are several woman couples in the Temple, she certainly doesn’t seem to mind them. She seems to feel it depends on the people, that the love is the important thing.”

We walked a few steps before I passed judgement.

“Strikes me as dead boring,” I said flatly, and she started to giggle.

“I’d have to agree,” she said finally, and then: “Are you a virgin, Mary? Oh dear, that sounds blasphemous,” and she giggled again.

“Yes, I am,” I replied. She looked sharply over at me.

“But only just?” she asked shrewdly.

“But only just,” I confirmed. “And you?”

“No. We were engaged, after all.”

“Don’t apologise, for heaven’s sake.”

“Oh, I don’t regret it, not at all. To tell you the truth, I’ve missed Miles terribly. Not having him at all is almost worse than having him drugged. I hope to God…”

She didn’t need to say what she hoped. I put my arm across her shoulder and hugged her, thickly through all the garments, and we walked on in friendship to hear the words of Margery Childe.

As we approached the building, the air came alive with the vibration of voices raised in harmony. Ronnie smiled and quickened her step.

“Good, they’re still singing. We haven’t missed Margery. Come on.”

She led me, not in through the ranks of double doors that opened into the back of the hall, but up a side stairway marked ticket holders only. The usher/guard nodded at our greetings and we hurried as the noise from inside came to an end. Amidst coughs and shuffles and the dying hum of speech, we entered a door marked private. Inside was the Temple’s Inner Circle, most of whom I had met the other night. They made room for us, a couple of them looking me over and dismissing me because of my clothing, and then the hall dimmed and fell quiet as all eyes went to the diminutive figure on the stage.

She was wearing a robe of darkly luminous silver-grey, and she seemed to glow. It took me some minutes to realise that she was in fact being followed by a spotlight only marginally brighter than the stage lights, and I smiled at the professionalism of the effect. However, I had to admit that not all the glow was an artifice. The magnetic pull I had begun to discount as my imagination was there, stronger than on Monday already and building as the evening—I cannot bring myself to call it a service—wore on. Her movements were languid, her eyes dark as she talked about the nature of love.

She waited for complete attention, for utter silence, before she dropped her first words into the packed hall, nearly seven hundred pairs of ears, I heard later, a quarter of them men.

“My friends,” she said, her voice low and vibrant, “tonight’s topic is love.” Inaudible ripples ran through the room. She let them die down, then suddenly smiled. “On the other hand, love is hardly a topic about which we can speak. Love is the force behind speech. Love is the thing that speaks us. To quote my friend John, ‘God is love.’ A person who does not love does not know God. And, when one loves, one loves God.

“But, what does he mean by love? What do we mean by love?

“Think for a moment about another word:
light
. Light. If I were to take a stack of paper and give a sheet of it to each one of you and ask you to use it to describe what the word
light
means, do you imagine I should find even two pages that matched? I would get drawings: a lightbulb with its twist of filament, a gas fixture, a candle, the sun.” She looked out into the audience, her head tipped attentively, the attitude of a schoolmistress listening for answers. “A bolt of lightning,” she said, as if repeating what she heard for the benefit of the rest. “And—oh, yes, I see, a baby who doesn’t weigh enough. And”—her eyes shifted—“a woman who wishes she weighed less. And a brilliant hot summer’s afternoon when the sun bouncing off the street hurts the eyes. And the first gleam of sunrise, and the difficulties of an artist to capture the essence of a place in its light, and a man—” She did a double take, and her lips twitched. “A gentleman looking forward to igniting his cigar when this is over,” and she smiled with the hall’s laughter. “ ‘In the beginning,’ ” she chanted, “ ‘God created the heavens and the earth; And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters; And God said, ‘Let there be—’ ”

She stopped abruptly, holding the silence for several long seconds.

“If all these images can come from the word
light
, how many more from the word
love
, a thing invisible but for the movement it creates, a thing without physical reality or measurement or being, yet a thing which animates the entire universe.
God is love
. God creates, and when He sees His creation, He loves it and calls it good.

“The love of God, the joy God takes in Creation, is incomprehensible to us. We can catch a glimpse of it, at rare moments, and be left thirsting and alone, kept from the beauty and the power of divine love by the shackles of responsibility and weakness and doubt. But the soul thirsts, we thirst, and we look for the weak reflections of divine love where we might find them, that if we cannot have our thirst quenched by a gushing, pure stream, at least we might survive on the water from ditches.

“The forms of love are many, the faces of God infinite. A mother putting her baby to the breast is participating in the love of God. A child who finds a newly hatched bird under a tree and lays it back into its nest is participating in the love of God. A fox out in the moonlight stealing a chicken to take home to its young is a movement in the love of God. Two bodies in the night, moving in the dance we call love are, if the motive is pure, reaching for the reflection of divine love which they see in one another.”

She waited calmly for another inaudible swell of reaction to die down, then went on.

“We are born in water, and we spend our lives thirsting. We are like a woman out hoeing her field, a woman who is hot under the sun, who knows where the stream rises up pure in the hills but who drinks from the slow-moving, weed-choked waters nearby because the source is so far away and there is weeding to be done and soon it will be time to go home for supper. Is the farmer wrong to settle for less? No, of course not. The weeds must be chopped or the children will starve.

“But once, just once, should not that farmer lay down her hoe and walk off into the cool hills to lie down with her face in the water and drink her fill, then go home after dark with her eyes aglow from the memory of that one perfect moment when her thirst was quenched absolutely? Will not that memory sustain her? Will she not taste the echo of its cool sweetness every time she draws from the muddied water and be strengthened? Jesus called it living water and said we would not thirst again.

“Once we have tasted the love of God, its sweet flavour persists in all the lesser forms of love that we come across as we work our fields. We taste it everywhere, in greater or lesser concentration, and we try to find ways of making it flow into us more fully. And that is when we discover that the flow of love, like the flow of a stream, suffers from being blocked up and kept to one’s self. Water dammed up becomes stale, dank. Love not given out becomes dead and slimy. When we express our love, when we act as conduits for divine love, then the love within us is continually renewed, refreshed, restored.”

Margery Childe spoke of love for a solid hour, holding her audience rapt until her final blessing. There is little point in presenting her homily in its entirety, because in print, without the dramatic pauses and husky thrill of her voice, the words lose their fizz, like warm champagne. Indeed, even as she was saying the words I found them absolutely maddening, an often ill-suited amalgam of personal sophistication and scriptural superficiality, mixed metaphors and rambling thoughts held together only by the force of her personality and pierced at a handful of unforeseen points by bolts of blinding perception. Her theology was rustic in its training (if training it could be called), sporadic in its development, and often wildly unsuccessful in its attempts at exegesis or midrash. For someone like me, with my background and my own careful passions, it might have sent me gibbering away into the night, but for one thing: Despite her unread, unsophisticated, raw, rude, and unlettered approach to Scripture, when it came to zeroing in on her target, she was dead-centre accurate.

It hit me about halfway through her talk (talk?—what an inadequate word for the woman’s passionate display of exultation, despair, pity, joy…) what it was that I was hearing, and with that awareness I sat back in my seat with a jolt that startled my neighbours.

The woman was a mystic.

What I was hearing was an untutored woman singing to God in the only voice she possessed: a simple voice, unsuited to high opera, but not without beauty. With training…

I was disturbed. I was excited. I had told Holmes that I wanted Margery Childe to be someone who talked with God, someone actually doing what I and countless others had spent lifetimes scrutinising, and at that moment at any rate I was convinced that this was what I was witnessing. It was galvanic. Electrifying. I wanted to take notes. Yet it was also troubling, to see before me living evidence that the limpid stream I studied could become this crashing, unruly, primal force. It had the brutal effect of making me feel a trivialiser, as if I had confidently set out to analyse a minute section of a wall and stepped back from my completed work, only to find myself in the Sistine Chapel. It was depressing, but salutary. And quite fascinating.

She leapt and slithered through her discourse, losing her train of thought, shooting off into tangential metaphors, painfully misusing what I thought of as technical terms, and then, when all seemed lost, letting fly with the casual flare of illumination that left me stunned with its brilliance.

I have no great ear for music; I have only a degree more for poetry. What I do possess is a powerful and unerring sense for truth, particularly theological truth, and that night I heard it, ringing out clear and sweet in that unlikely hall from a woman who was working herself, and her audience, into a state that verged on erotic excitement.

She came back time and again to the concept of thirst, imbuing the word with a yearning that became ever more urgent. She called upon, inevitably, Canticles, but only obliquely, teasingly, and she shied away before committing herself to a full-blown orgy. (The Song of Solomon does become inordinately stimulating: “You are stately as a palm tree,” it croons, “and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I shall climb the palm tree and take hold of its branches… your kisses are like the best wine, going down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth.” And: “My beloved put his hand to the latch, and my heart thrilled within me.” It is regarded as an allegory of the soul’s desire for God, but the rabbis were forced to make strong injunctions against those who would sing it in taverns. It is, in a word, bawdy.)

She ended her talk, abruptly as before, with a phrase from Canticles: “ ‘Eat, O friends, and drink: drink deeply, O lovers.’ ” She smiled and gave a small bow. “Until Saturday, friends.” And she was gone.

There was a certain breathlessness to the wave of voices that broke over the hall, and the Inner Circle around me, though they must have heard her any number of times already, stood up flustered and met one another’s eyes with a defiant half embarrassment. Some of the gentlemen in the rows below seemed distinctly warm under the collar.

In the packed foyer, I could see a multitude of brightly coloured collection baskets, filling rapidly. Several of the circle picked up baskets and moved into the crowd, but to my surprise the others made their ways to the street doors. I turned and spoke loudly into Veronica’s ear.