A Monstrous Regiment of Women (4 page)

The Ronnie Beaconsfield I had known was a lover of beauty who possessed the means of indulging herself, not for the desire of possession, for she was one of the least avaricious people I knew, but for the sheer love of perfection. Her uncle was a duke, her grandfather had been an adviser to Queen Victoria, there were three barristers and a high-court judge in her immediate family, her father was something big in the City, her mother devoted her time to the Arts, and Veronica herself spent most of her time and money trying to live it all down. Even while an undergraduate at Oxford, she had been the moving force behind a number of projects, from teaching illiterate women to read to the prevention of maltreatment of cart horses.

To her despair, she was short, stout, and unlovely, and her invariably unflattering hairstyle should have nudged the wide nose and thick eyebrows into ugliness had it not been for the goodness and the gentle, self-deprecating humour that looked out from her brown eyes when she smiled. That bitterness had been new, and I wondered when it had crept in.

This upper portion of the house was much more the Veronica I knew. Here, the floors gleamed richly, the carpets were thick and genuine, the odd assortment of furniture and objets d’art—sleek, modern German chair and Louis XIV settee on a silken Chinese carpet, striped coarse Egyptian cloth covering a Victorian chaise longue, a priceless collection of seventeenth-century drawings on one wall contemplating a small abstract by, I thought, Paul Klee on the opposite wall— all nestled together comfortably and unobtrusively like a disparate group of dons in a friendly Senior Commons, or perhaps a gathering of experts on unrelated topics trading stories at a successful party. Veronica had a knack.

The house had been converted to electricity, and by its strong light I could see clearly the etched lines of desperate weariness on her face as my friend pulled off gloves, hat, and coat. She had been out most of the night—on a Good Work, her drab clothes said, rather than a social occasion—and a not entirely successful Good Work at that. I asked her about it when I came out of the WC (indoor, though I had seen the outside cubicles at the end of the yard below.)

“Oh, yes,” she said. She was assembling coffee. “One of the families I’ve adopted. The son, who’s thirteen, was arrested for picking the pocket of an off-duty bobby.”

I laughed, incredulous.

“You mean he couldn’t tell? He’s new to the game, then.”

“Apparently so. He’s not very bright, either, I’m afraid.”

She fumbled, taking a cup from the shelf and nearly dropping it from fingers clumsy with fatigue.

“Good heavens, Ronnie,” I said, “you’re exhausted. I ought to go and let you have some sleep.”

“No!” She did drop the cup then, and it shattered into a thousand shards of bone china. “Oh, damn,” she wailed. “You’re right, I am tired, but I so want to talk with you. There’s something… Oh, no, it’s useless; I can’t even begin to think about it.” She knelt awkwardly to gather up the pieces, drove a splinter of porcelain into her finger, and stifled a furious sob.

Something fairly drastic was upsetting this good woman, something considerably deeper than a sleepless night caused by an incompetent pickpocket. I had a fairly good idea what in general she wanted me for, and I sighed inwardly at the brevity of my freedom. Nonetheless, I went to help her.

“Ronnie, I’m tired, too. I’ve been on my feet—literally— for the last twelve hours. If you don’t mind my disreputable self on your sofa, we can both have a sleep, and talk later.”

The intensity of the relief that washed over her face startled me and did not bode well for my immediate future, but I merely helped her sweep up the broken cup, overrode her halfhearted protestations, and sent her to bed.

There was no need to disturb the chaise longue. She had a guest room; she had a marvellous bathtub long enough for me to soak the aches from both the shoulder and my legs; she had a nightdress and a dressing gown and a deep bed that welcomed me with loving softness and murmured soporific suggestions at me until I drifted off.

I woke at dusk, to complete the topsy-turvy day, and rose to crane my neck at the smudge of heavy, wet sky that was visible between the roofs. I put on the too-short quilted dressing gown that Ronnie had given me and went down to the kitchen, and while the water came to a boil, I tried to decide whether I was making breakfast or afternoon tea. Veronica’s idea of a well-stocked kitchen ran to yoghourt, charcoal biscuits, and vitamin pills (healthy body, healthy mind), but a rummage through the cupboards left me with a bowl of some healthy patent cereal that looked like wood chips, though they tasted all right doused with the top milk from the jug and a blob of raspberry jam, some stale bread to toast, and a slice of marzipan-covered Christmas fruitcake to push the meal into the afternoon. After my meal, I washed up, went down for the paper, brought it up along with the mail, lit the fire in the sitting room, and read all about the world’s problems, a cup of coffee balanced on my knee and a very adequate coal fire at my feet.

At 5:30, Ronnie appeared, hair awry, mouthed a string of unintelligible noises, and went into the kitchen. In lodgings, she had been renowned as a reluctant waker, so I gave her time to absorb some coffee before I followed her.

“Mary, good morning—afternoon, I suppose. You’ve had something to eat?”

I reassured her that I had taken care of myself, then poured another cup of coffee from the pot and sat down at the small kitchen table to wait for whatever it had been she wanted to tell me.

It took some time. Revelations that come easily at night are harder by the light of day, and the woman who had cried out at a minor cut was now well under control. We talked interminably, about her needy and troubled families and the problem of balancing assistance and dependency while maintaining the dignity of all concerned. She enquired as to my interests, so I told her all about the paper on first-century rabbinic Judaism and Christian origins I’d written for publication, and about my work at Oxford, and when her eyes glazed over, I probed a bit deeper into her life. At some point, we ate pieces of dried-up cheese from a piece of white butcher’s paper and dutifully chewed at a handful of unpalatable biscuits, and then she opened a bottle of superb white wine and finally began to loosen up.

There was a man; rather, there had been a man. It was an all-too-common story in those postwar years: A friend in 1914, he joined the New Army in 1915, was sent virtually untrained to the Western Front, and promptly walked into a bullet; sent home for eight weeks’ recovery, their friendship deepened: He returned to the trenches, numerous letters followed, and then he was gassed in 1917 and again sent home: an engagement ring followed; he returned yet again to the Front, was finally demobbed in January 1919, a physically ruined, mentally frail mockery of his former self, liable to black, vicious moods and violent tempers alternating with periods of either manic gaiety or bleak inertia, when all he could do was silently smoke one cigarette after another, seeming completely unaware of other people. It was called shell shock, the nearly inevitable aftermath of month after month in hell, and every man who had been in the trenches had it to some degree. Some hid it successfully until the depths of night; others coped by immersing themselves in a job and refusing to look up. Many, many young men, particularly those from this young man’s class—educated, well-off, the nation’s pool of leadership, who died in colossal numbers as junior officers— became fatuous, irresponsible, and flighty, incapable of serious thought or concentrated effort, and (and here was the crux of this particular case) willing to become involved only with women as brittle and frivolous as they were. Veronica no longer wore the ring.

I listened in silence and watched her eyes roam over her glass, the tablecloth, the mail, the dark, reflecting window, anywhere but my face, until she seemed to run down. I waited a minute longer, and when she neither spoke nor looked up, I gave her a gentle prod.

“It does take time, that sort of thing,” I suggested. “A lot of young men—”

“Oh, I know,” she interrupted. “It’s a common problem. I know a hundred women who’ve been through the same thing, and they all hope it’ll solve itself, and every so often it does. But not Miles. He’s just… it’s as if he’s not there anymore. He’s… lost.”

I chewed my lip thoughtfully for a moment, and the image of those slick faces in the nightclub came back to me. Lost was a good word for a large part of our whole generation.

“Drugs?” I asked, not quite the shot in the dark it seemed, and she looked at me then, her eyes brimming, and nodded.

“What kind?” I asked.

“Any kind. He had morphine when he was in hospital, and he got used to that. Cocaine, of course. They all use cocaine. He goes to these parties—they last all night, a weekend, even longer. Once he took me to a fancy-dress party where the whole house was made over to look like an opium den, including the pipes. I couldn’t bear the smell and so had to leave. He took me home and then went back. Lately, I think it’s been heroin.” I was mildly surprised. Heroin had been developed only a couple of years before I was born, and in 1920 it was nowhere near as commonplace as cocaine or opium or even its parent drug, morphine. I had some personal experience of the drug, following a bad automobile accident in 1914, when it was given me by the hospital in San Francisco—it being then thought that heroin was less addictive than morphine, a conclusion since questioned—but an habitual use of the drug would be very expensive.

“Did you go with him very often? To the same house?”

“The few times I went, they were all different houses, though mostly the same people. I finally couldn’t take seeing him like than anymore, and I told him so. He said… he said some horrid, cruel things and slammed out of here, and I haven’t heard from him since then. That was nearly two months ago. I did see him, about ten days ago, coming out of a club with a… a girl hanging on his arm and laughing in that way they do when they’ve been taking something and the whole world is so hysterically funny. He looked awful, like a skeleton, and his cough was back. He sounded like he had when he was home after being gassed; it made my chest hurt to hear it. I do get news of him—I see his sister all the time, but she says he never visits his parents unless he runs out of money before his next allowance is due.”

“And they give it to him.”

“Yes.” She blew her nose and took a deep breath, then looked straight at me, and I braced myself.

“Mary, is there anything that you can do?”

“What could I do?” I did not even try to sound surprised.

“Well, you… investigate things. You know people, you and Mr Holmes. Surely there must be something we might do.”

“Any number of things,” I said flatly. “You could have him arrested, and they might be able to keep him until the drugs have left his system, though it would probably mean hospitalisation, considering the shape he’s in. However, unless he’s actually selling the drugs himself, which sounds unlikely if his parents support him, he’d be let free in a few days and would go right back to the source. You’d have put him through considerable discomfort with little benefit. Or, you could have him kidnapped, if you don’t mind great expense and the threat of a prison sentence. That would ensure his physical well-being, for a time. You’d want to let him go eventually, though, and then it would almost surely begin again.” It was cruel, but not so cruel as raising her hopes would have been. “Ronnie, you know what the problem is, and you know full well that there’s not a thing that you or I or the king himself can do about it. If Miles wants to use drugs, he will. If not heroin, then morphine, or alcohol. As you said, he’s just not there, and until he decides to find his way back, the only thing on God’s green earth you can do is make sure he knows your hand is there if he wants it, and leave him to it.” I offered her a pain-filled smile. “And pray.”

She collapsed, and I stroked her hair and waited for the storm to abate. It did, and when she raised her face, I felt a moment’s pity for the man Miles, confronted by this red-eyed, dull-haired, earnest young woman with her Good Works and her small eyes set into an unfashionably round face of pasty skin, now blotched from her tears. For someone terrified of responsibility and commitment, Veronica in her present state would loom huge and hideous, the embodiment of everything his former life held to reproach him with. Despite my harsh words, for her sake I should make an effort.

“Ronnie, look, I’ll see what I can do. I know a man at Scotland Yard”—this was a slight exaggeration—“who might be able to suggest something.”

“You’re right, Mary.” She fumbled with her sodden handkerchief. “I know you’re right; it’s just that it’s so damnable, feeling completely hopeless while Miles is destroying himself. He’s—he was—such a good man.” She sighed, then sat back, her hands on her lap. We sat together as if at a wake.

Suddenly, she looked up at the clock on her wall, and a curious look of shy animation crept onto her face.

“Mary, are you free tonight? I don’t know what you had planned, but there’s someone you might be interested in meeting.”

“Yes, I told you I’m free. I had thought to go up to Oxford for a couple of days, but it’s nothing that couldn’t wait.”

“Oh, good. I really do think you’d like to hear her, and I could introduce you to her after the meeting.”

“Meeting?” I said dubiously. She laughed, her face alive again and the signs of the storm fading fast.

“That’s what she calls it. It’s a bit like a church service, but tons more fun, and she gives a talk—her name is Margery Childe. Have you heard of her?”

“I have, somewhere.” The name brought with it an impression of disdain overlying unease, as if the teller (writer? in a newspaper?) had been uncomfortable with the woman and taken refuge in cynicism. Also a photograph—yes, definitely in a newspaper, a blonde woman shaking hands with a beribboned official who towered over her.

“She’s an amazing person, very sensible and yet, well”— she gave an embarrassed little laugh—“holy somehow. I go to the meetings sometimes, if I’m free. They always make me feel good—refreshed, and strong. Margery’s been very helpful,” she added unnecessarily.