A Monstrous Regiment of Women (16 page)

“I don’t agree. We English are a sensible race, ready to overlook such minor foibles as an odd choice of religion or an inappropriate sex if the candidate is obviously the best one for the job. And after all, I’ve made a specialty of wooing sceptical males.” She flared her eyebrows and I chuckled with her.

She talked a bit more about politics, about the coming march on Parliament and a bill concerning divorcement soon to come up for its first reading, about the as-yet-underexploited usefulness of newspapers for exposing gross inequities in a variety of laws, showing as they did the human face of the problems at hand, and about the challenge of building a public face and future constituency without compromising herself. She might well have lectured me all night had Marie not come in, looking, as usual, disapproving.

“Goodness,” exclaimed Margery, “look at the time! Mary, I am sorry, but I must run. It was lovely to have such a nice long chat. I look forward to the next one. Will you stay for the meeting tonight?”

“Indeed.”

“Good. Even if you’re not politically inclined, you’ll find it interesting. There are a number of very fine minds and hearts working in the Temple, and Saturday nights are their chance to speak out and be heard. However, I’m afraid it’s time for me to excuse myself. Thank you for coming this evening. I look forward to our session on Monday. And… Mary? I’ll keep in mind the red strap.”

I went to the hall and took a seat in the back row, though Veronica would have welcomed me in the Circle’s box, and I tried my best to make sense of the proceedings. I am not, however, as Margery had put it, politically inclined, and much of what was discussed so vehemently was more foreign to me than the politics of ancient Rome. I slipped away while the opposing packs were still in full voice, then, lost in thought, walked across half of London to my club.

I thought of Margery Childe and about the mystics I had been reading about. I thought of Rabbi Akiva, and particularly about another dictum of his: that any nonessential words in a given passage must have a special significance, one not immediately obvious, yet of potentially great import. He was speaking of the interpretation of Scripture, but there was a broader truth in his dictum, one that Freud had recognised as well, and I could not help but wonder: Why had Margery so emphatically brought the ideas of discipline and self-abnegation into a discussion of poverty? The streets of London gave me no satisfactory answer.

TEN

Sunday, 2 January-
Monday, 3 January

She wavers, she hesitates: in a word, she is a woman.

—Jean Racine (1639-1699)

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Sunday dawned clammy and grey without, but it mattered not. Inside my head, the sun shone bright and hot. Birds sang. Today was the twenty-first anniversary of my birth, and I was free.

It cost me several expensive gifts to recompense my solicitor and the executors of the estate for going to the law offices of Gibson, Arbuthnot, Meyer, and Perowne of a Sunday morning, but the extravagance was worth it to me, and as they were all very familiar with my feelings concerning my guardian, and hers toward me, they were happy enough to oblige. They liked me, for some reason.

In deference to their sensibilities, I wore the sedate navy dress rather than one of my father’s suits, and took a taxi. Upon reaching the gleaming door on the deserted street, I emptied the entire contents of my small purse into the cab-driver’s hands. The last of my bridges having thus been burnt behind me, I reached past the spotless brass plaque for the equally spotless door handle, and entered my majority.

I walked out three hours later a wiser woman and a richer one, slightly tipsy from the goodwill showered on me and the glass of champagne somewhat subdued by the deluge of words and a precise knowledge of the responsibilities involved by my inheritance. I walked a short distance up the street and was hit by the realisation that I was also quite literally penniless. Feeling exceedingly sheepish, I went back and borrowed a few pounds from my solicitor. I also borrowed his telephone, but no message from Holmes had come to the Vicissitude in my absence.

I caught the next train to Sussex, and later that afternoon I supervised the gutting of my house. My aunt had left, at my instructions, taking her servants with her. Now on her heels, every stick of furniture, every carpet and curtain, every pot, pan, and picture was carried out and loaded onto an odd assortment of carts and motor lorries, some of it to be cleaned, some sold, but all to be purified: Of the entire house, cellar to attic, only my bedroom’s furnishings remained untouched. When the last heavy boot climbed into its lorry and drove away, I flung open all the windows and doors to the night and let the sea mist scour the past six years from my house. My home.

Mine.

Half an hour later, chagrined for the second time that day, I was cursing myself for an utter fool and an idiot and hunting for something to boil water in, when I heard a voice calling from the front door.

“Miss Mary?”

“Patrick!” I clattered the coal scuttle back onto my bedroom hearth and ran downstairs to greet my farm manager. He was looking around the stark, freezing rooms dubiously, and I had to admit that the house had a ravaged look to it, all bare bones and flocked wallpaper. “Hello, Patrick.”

“Evening, Miss Mary,” he said, touching his cap. “They’ve made a clean sweep of it, I see.”

“Precisely the words for it. The decorators come tomorrow and strip off the wallpaper, and then they’ll start painting— top to bottom, front to back, everything clean and new. Except the outside, of course—that’ll have to wait until the spring.”

“It’s going to be a different house.”

“It is,” I said in grim satisfaction. “Entirely different.”

He looked at me, deliberate, phlegmatic, a friend. He nodded twice and pursed his lips.

“Struck me, though, what with everyone leaving yesterday, you might be a bit lacking tonight. Can I offer you a bowl of soup? Tillie sent it over, with a chicken and some of her cheese bread, if you’re hungry.” Tillie was Patrick’s lady friend and the owner of the village inn, and her kitchen attracted patrons from Eastbourne and even London. I accepted with enthusiasm and walked with him down to his snug little house near the barn.

Later that night, warmed through and well fed, I reentered my house and stood without turning on the lights, listening to the faint shifting of 250-year-old beams, the whisper of the breeze from the kitchen window, the faint sensations of an old building adjusting itself to emptiness. I had loved this house as a child, our summer cottage before my entire family had died, killed by a car accident in California the year before I had met Holmes. I stood in the dark, wondering if I might coax back the shades of my mother and my father and my little brother, now that my aunt was gone, then walked up the stairs to stand in the door of what had been my parents’ bedroom, a seldom-used guest room during my aunt’s reign. It felt warmer in there, despite the swirls of mist. I smiled at my fancies, closed and latched the window, and went to bed.

In the morning, I rang Holmes, but Mrs Hudson had not seen him in some days. The house was miserably cold and damp and reproachful, and I abandoned it to the mercies of the decorators by returning to London.

Patrick drove me to the station in the old dogcart. When he had reined in, he dug into the pocket of his greatcoat and brought out a small wrapped parcel, which he thrust out in my general direction.

“Meant to wish you many happy returns, Miss Mary. Forgot to last night.”

“Patrick, you didn’t need to do that.” Indeed, he never had before. I undid the wrappings, which looked as if they had been used a number of times before, and found inside a fine lawn handkerchief with my initials twining in one corner and a row of tiny purple-and-blue flowers chasing one another around the border. It was impractical, pretty, ridiculous, and touching. “How absolutely lovely.”

“You like it, then. Good. Good. M’sister does ’em. Asked me what kind of flower you liked. Told her those what d’you call ’em, pansy things. Did I get it right?”

“Completely. I shall take it out and wave it in front of people all day and touch it delicately to the tip of my nose, and all of London will admire it. It’s the nicest birthday present I’ve had.”

“Get many, did you?”

“Er, no.” Excluding the pounds, dollars, and francs, three houses, two factories, and a ranch in California, but those did not count as presents. “But I’m sure Mrs Hudson will have something for me when I see her.”

“Mr Holmes not bein’ one for gifts and all.”

“The last present he gave me was a set of picklocks. This is immeasurably nicer,” I said, waving it about. I leant over and kissed him on his bristly cheek, ignoring the furious blush this brought on, and dashed for my train.

I was outside the elves’ shop when they put up the shutters, and I spent several hours there—expense I had expected, but I’d never have believed that clothing one’s self could be so time-consuming! The two of them seemed oddly apprehensive when they ushered me into the room used for displaying the finished product (they used no live mannequins—in fact, the only people they seemed able to put up with having under foot were the two grandsons who tidied up after them, refolding the patterns, rerolling the strewn bolts of fabric, and sweeping up the pins and snippets). One glance explained their apprehension—the elves, confronted with a rail-thin woman nearly six feet tall in her stockinged feet who walked like a woodsman and hated frips and frills, had opted for drama, plain and simple.

The first piece, the only finished one, was not too bad, a suit of soft grey-blue wool with a wide band of Kashmiri-style embroidery, white and a darker blue, set into the jacket and the skirt. The fit was nearly as comfortable as my father’s old linen shirt, for which I was grateful.

Then I caught sight of their idea of an evening gown suited to me.

One of the problems I have in clothing myself is a concern that never would have come up in my mother’s day, but since the war, with dresses becoming ever more skimpy, evening wear was nearly impossible, and I had tended simply to avoid those few formal affairs I might have been tempted by. On Thursday, I had been forced to strip to the skin before Mrs Elf to demonstrate just why low necklines are not suitable: I do not care to have my fellows at table or on the dance floor offended by, or speculating on, my scar tissue. The automobile accident that killed my family when I was fourteen had left me just able to wear a cautious degree of décolleté, but five years later the bullet through my right shoulder put an end to any thoughts of bare flesh below the neck.

This dress, though—as a piece of pure engineering, it was fascinating; as a piece of evening wear, even in its present incomplete state, it transformed the padded torso on which it hung. High on the right shoulder, it dropped down to expose the left and continued down and yet farther down, the fabric barely meeting at the waist before it began a slit up the left side, where the hem angled down in a mirror image of the bodice line. The ice blue silk made it aloof—in any warmer colour, it would have been an incitement to riot.

I gulped, smiled feebly at Mrs Elf, declined her eager invitation for me to try it on, and turned to the other two half-formed outfits. One was a rich brown with slashes of crimson that looked as if they would appear and disappear with movement; the other was an intense eau-de-nil sheath with lots of little tucks and ruches that made the dressmaker’s dummy look like the representation of a woman considerably more voluptuous than I. I clutched the fronts of my new overjacket and told them that I should have to return for a fitting soon, but I was not allowed to escape so easily. First I had to choose a pair of shoes from a huge stack they had caused to be delivered (I think they did not trust me not to wear mud-spattered brogues beneath their creation) and then Mrs Elf insisted on arranging her small cloche hat (matching embroidery, of course) on my hair, and even then I had to reassure them that I would remove my overcoat whenever possible.

I achieved the street, feeling like some child’s costly doll. My toes were indignant about the unfamiliar shape they were being pushed into, and cloche hats always made me feel as if I were wearing a soft chamber pot. I was hungry and ruffled and not in the best mood to approach Margery and her Temple of women, and I stood on the street and said aloud the first thing that came to my tongue: “Holmes, where the hell are you?”

I was immediately abashed, particularly as neither the organ-grinder nor the pie-seller metamorphised into him, and even the man on the delivery wagon merely glanced at me and flipped the reins.

I had to admit it: I wanted to see Holmes, who, although one of the most peculiar individuals I had ever met, was nonetheless the sanest and most reliable of men. Beyond that, I wanted to know what had been done with Miles Fitzwarren, four days ago. I had expected Holmes to be in touch before this. I stood undecided, until my eye caught on a post office sign, and then I knew what I would do. I used their telephone, but no, the Vicissitude was holding no message for me, so, before I could reconsider, I wrote out a telegram and had it sent to five separate places, including his cottage in Sussex, if by some remote chance he had landed there. Each one said:

AM UNEASY NEED CONSULT

     RUSSELL

I regretted it immediately the message had irrevocably left my hand. Perhaps he will not answer, I comforted myself, then took myself to Selfridges for something to eat.

My tutorial with Margery was for half-past four. Upon my arrival at the Temple, I sat down at a table and took out my chequebook, then handed the completed cheque to the startled secretary.

“This is for the library fund, which I believe Miss Beaconsfield is in charge of. Would you kindly give it to her when she comes in?”