“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.
“I’d be happy to go, Ronnie, but I don’t have any clothes other than that suit.”
“There’ll be some stuff downstairs in the jumble box that’ll fit you, if you’re not too particular.”
Thus it was that scarcely half an hour later I, wearing an odd assortment of ill-fitting garments, followed Veronica Baconsfield out of the taxi and across the wet pavement, under the sign that read NEW TEMPLE IN GOD, and into the remarkable presence of Margery Childe.
3
MONDAY, 27 DECEMBER
Women should keep silence in church; for they
are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate,
as the law says. . . . It is shameful for
a woman to speak in church.
I CORINTHIANS 14:34–35
THE SERVICE WAS well under way when we arrived and found two seats in the back. To my surprise, my first impression was more of a hall filled with eager operagoers than a gathering of pious evening worshipers. The room was a hall, rather than a church or temple, had tiered seating, and was larger than it had appeared from the street. On the raised stage before us stood a small woman, a diminutive blonde figure on the nearly bare boards; she was wearing a long, simple dress—a robe—of some slightly peach-tinted white material, heavy silk perhaps, that shimmered and caught the light in golden highlights as she moved. She was speaking, but if it was a sermon, it did not resemble any I’d heard before. Her voice was low, almost throaty, but it reached easily into all corners and gave one the eerie impression of being alone with a friend and overhearing her private musings.
“It was shortly after that,” she was saying, “that I went to church one lovely Sunday morning and heard the preacher, who was a large man with a thundering voice, speaking on the text from First Corinthians, ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches.’” She paused and gathered all eyes to her in anticipation, then her mouth twitched in mischief. “I was, as you might imagine, not amused.”
The gust of appreciative laughter that swept through the hall confirmed her audience’s—congregation’s?—endorsement of her attitude and hinted at an admiration that edged into adoration. It was also overwhelmingly soprano, and I took my eyes from the laughing figure onstage and surveyed my fellows.
There were perhaps only two dozen obvious males in a gathering of some 350, and of the ones near me, three looked distinctly uncomfortable, two were laughing nervously, one was scribbling furiously in a reporter’s notebook, and one alone looked pleased. However, on closer examination I decided that this last was probably not male.
The laughter trickled off, and she waited, totally at ease, for silence before starting again.
“I was grateful to that large and noisy man, however. Not immediately,” she added, inviting us to chuckle at her youthful passion, and many obliged, “but when I’d had a chance to think about it, I was grateful, because it made me wonder, Why does he want me to keep silent in church? What would be so terrible in letting me, a woman, talk? What does he imagine I might say?” She paused for two seconds. “What is this man afraid of?”
Absolute silence, and then: “Why, why is this man afraid of me? Here am I, I thought to myself, barely five feet tall in my stockinged feet, where he’s over six feet and weighs twice what I do; he has a university degree, and I left school at fifteen; he’s a grown man with a family and a big house, and I’m not even twenty and live in a cold-water flat. So, can this man be afraid of me? Can he imagine I’m going to say something that might make him look a fool? Or . . . is he afraid that I might say something to make his God look a fool? Oh, yes, I thought about that for quite some time, I tell you. Quite some time. And do you know what I decided? I decided that, Oh my, yes, this big man with his big voice and his big God in the big church, he was afraid, of little, old, me.”
Her eyes flared wide and laughter came again at her mock glee. She held up a hand to cut it short and leant forward confidentially.
“And do you know something? He was right to be afraid.”
A second storm of laughter burst through the room, led by the woman herself, laughing at herself, laughing at the absurdity of it, collapsing over a good joke with some friends. After some minutes, she wiped her eyes along with half the room and stood shaking her head slowly as the room settled into silence. When she raised her face, the humour had died in it.
“I didn’t really mean it—you know that. Part of me wanted to stand right up and ask him a lot of uncomfortable questions and make him look foolish, but I didn’t because, truly, it was too sad. Here this man is working with God, thinking about God, living with God, every day, and still he does not trust God. Deep down, he doesn’t feel one hundred percent certain that his God can stand up to criticism, can deal with this uppity woman and her uncomfortable questions; he does not know that his God is big enough to welcome in and put His arms around every person, big and small, believers or seekers, men or women.”
She walked over to a small podium and took a couple of thoughtful swallows from a water glass, then resumed stage centre.
“In the book of Genesis, we see two ways of looking at the creation of human beings. In the first chapter, God ‘says,’ and the power of the word alone is so great, it becomes. The word becomes light and dark, sun and moon, mountains, trees, and animals as soon as it leaves the mouth of God.
“Then in the second chapter, we see God in another guise, as a potter, working with this sticky red clay and shaping a human being.” Her tinted nails caught the light as her child-sized hands shaped a figurine out of the air, then brushed it away. “Same God, just different ways of talking about His creation. But in either of them—just think about this now—does it say in either of them that God made man better than woman? The first account certainly doesn’t: ‘So God created man—humankind—in His own image, in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them.’ Humankind, male and female together, is in the image of God, not just male humans. The verse nails it down to make sure it’s absolutely clear.”
There was a rustle of disturbance in the hall, and her voice increased in volume to cover it.
“And the other story, about God the sculptor? I’m sure you all know the saying”—her voice climbed and turned saccharin—“that woman was made from man’s rib so she might stand beside him and under his arm for protection.” She made a
face as if she’d tasted something disgusting. “Have you ever heard such sentimental, condescending rot?” Her voice control was extraordinary, for she sounded as if she were speaking normally, yet the crack of the last word rose above the combined laughter and a handful of angry voices. “If you want to be logical about it, don’t tell me that the woman was given to Adam as a servant, a sort of glorified packhorse that could carry on a conversation. Tell me what the story really said, that God realised creation was incomplete, so He divided His human creature up, and created Eve, the distilled essence of His human being. With Eve, humanity became complete. With Eve, creation became complete. Adam was the first human, but Eve . . . Eve was the crown of God’s creation.”
Now she was having to shout.
“That was what my loud preacher feared, to be told that he and his cronies had no more right to tell me that I couldn’t speak in God’s house than I had a right to tell the sun not to shine. But all that’s changed now, hasn’t it, my friends?” A great roar drowned out her words for the next moments.
“. . . God’s image, you have the God-given right to use your minds and your bodies. You are in God’s image, and I love you. See you Thursday, friends.”
Abruptly, she waved, and in a swirl of gold and white she was gone. The place exploded in hundreds of voices raised in shouts of argument, pleasure, friendship, and confusion. Ronnie leant over and spoke loudly in my ear.
“This lot will go and have tea and biscuits next door, but if you’ll wait a few minutes, we can go back and say hello, if you’d like.”
I would like. I was fascinated, impressed, more than a bit repelled, and altogether extremely curious. The woman had played her audience like a finely tuned instrument, handling nearly four hundred people with the ease of a seasoned politician. Even I, non-Christian and hardened cynic that I am, had found it difficult to resist her. She was a feminist and she had a sense of humour, an appealing combination that was regrettably rare, and she came across as a person who was deeply, seriously committed to her beliefs, yet who retained the distance and humanity to laugh at herself. She was articulate without being pompous, and apparently self-educated since the age of fifteen. Her attitude towards the Bible seemed to be refreshingly matter-of-fact, and her theology, miracle of miracles, was from what I had heard radical but sound.
Oh yes, I should like to meet this woman.
I followed Veronica against the stream of chattering, gesticulating women sprinkled with fuming men to an inconspicuous door set into the wall next to the stage. The large, uniformed man standing guard there greeted Miss Beaconsfield by name and tipped his hat as his eyes gave me a thorough investigation.
Behind the door, the atmosphere was closer to that backstage after a theatre performance than to a vestry following a church service. Swirls of dramatic young women were calling “darling” to one another over the heads of trouser-clad women hauling spotlights and cleaning equipment. Gradually, we insinuated our way through to the hindmost recesses, and as Veronica’s face became more and more expectantly radiant, I became increasingly aware of the depth of her involvement and the degree of her authority in this organisation. We went unchallenged, followed only by envious glances directed at my companion, and these slid into frank curiosity when they took in the peculiarly dressed figure in her wake.
A door closed behind us and the cacophony shut off abruptly. The rough workaday backstage setting was left behind, and we walked through what looked like the corridor of some high-class hotel. A huge flower arrangement occupied a niche, dramatic orange-and-brown lilies and white roses, and Veronica paused to break off two of the latter, handing one to me without a word. Around a corner, she knocked at a door. Muted sounds came from within—several voices—but no answer. She fiddled shyly with her flower, shot me an embarrassed glance, and knocked again more loudly. This time, it opened, to a stout, suspicious woman of about fifty in a grey maid’s uniform, complete with starched white apron and cap.
“Bonjour, Marie,” Veronica chirped merrily, and stepped forward in expectation of the door being opened, as indeed it was. The woman looked as if she wanted to shut it in my face but did not quite dare.
Margery Childe was holding court. At first glance, it seemed that she was having tea with a dozen or so women friends, but when the eye took in the sitting-at-her-feet attitude and the openmouthed smiles on the faces, waiting for the blessing of a word, tea was the very least of what these women were drinking in. She looked up at our entrance and a smile came over her face as her eyes raked me from head to feet with the thoroughness of the doorman but in a fraction of the time, and then she was greeting Veronica with genuine warmth and affection. Ronnie handed her the flower, laying it into her hand like an offering at an altar, and the tiny blonde woman held it to her nose for a moment before placing it with a tumble of other delicate blossoms that spilled from a low table at her side.
“I’m glad you came, Veronica,” she said, her voice sweeter than in public speech but still remarkably low and throaty. “We missed you on Saturday.”
“I know,” Veronica said eagerly. “I tried to get here, but one of my families—”
“Yes, your families. I was thinking just this morning about that problem you were having with the young girl, Emily was her name? Would you come and talk to me about how she’s doing?”
“Certainly, Margery. Anytime.”
“Find out from Marie when I’m free in the next day or two; she knows better than I. And you’ve brought a friend tonight?”
Veronica stood aside and held back her arm for me to come forward into the circle.
“This is Mary Russell, a friend of mine from Oxford.”
The eyes that looked up into mine were a curiously dark blue, almost violet, deep and calm and magnetic, and the only truly beautiful element in her face. She lacked the currently fashionable high bones, her lightly tanned skin was ever-so-slightly coarse beneath the professional makeup, her teeth, though not protuberant, were a fraction overlarge, and her nose had at some distant time been broken and inexpertly set. Her looks, however, served only to increase her appeal, to make her seem vital and interesting, where a conventional beauty would have seemed insipid. It was a face to watch and to live for, not one simply to adore. She was calm and sure and filled with a power beyond her years and, I had to admit, enormously compelling. The room waited for me to lay my rose at her feet and do my obeisance so it could get on with its courtly rituals.
Without taking my eyes from hers, I raised the flower with great deliberation and threaded it into a buttonhole, then stepped forward and extended my hand to her.
“How do you do?” I said, and smiled with noncommittal politeness.
There was the briefest fraction of a pause before she sat upright, and her eyes gleamed as she leant forward and put her neat, strong, manicured little hand into mine. Her shake was by nature of an experiment, marginally longer than was necessary, and she sat back with something that might have been amusement in her eye.
“Welcome, Mary Russell. Thank you for coming.”
“Oh, that’s quite all right,” I said blandly.
“I hope you enjoyed the service.”
“It was interesting.”
“Please help yourself to tea or one of the drinks, if you like.”
“Thank you, I will,” I said, not moving.
“I think we may be seeing something of you,” she said suddenly, a sort of pronouncement.
“Do you?” I said politely, making it not quite a denial. Our eyes held for a long moment, and suddenly hers crinkled, though her mouth was still.
“Perhaps you might stay on a bit after my friends have left? I should like a word.”
I inclined my head silently and went to sit in a corner, much amused at the skirmish. This one might be as much fun as Holmes.
The next hour would have been excruciatingly boring had it not been for the undercurrents and interplay that I found absolutely fascinating. She played this room with the same ease t
hat she had played the hall, though to very different purpose. Before, her aim had been exhortation, inspiration, perhaps a bit of thought provocation. Here, she was acting as spiritual counsellor, mother confessor, and guiding light to this, her inner circle, drawing them out and drawing them together into a cohesive whole around herself.
Fourteen women (excluding myself), all of them young (the oldest was thirty-four or thirty-five), all reasonably attractive, all obviously wealthy, intelligent, and well-bred, and all of them with that ineffable but unmistakable air of women who had not sat still during the war. I found out later that of the women present, only two had done nothing more strenuous than knit for the soldiers, and one of those had been saddled with invalid parents. Nine had been VAD nurses at one time or other, three of them from 1915 until the end, nursing convoy after convoy of dying young men in France and southern England and the Mediterranean, sixteen-hour days of septic wounds and pus-soaked bandages, a baptism of blood for carefully nurtured young ladies. Several had spent months as land girls, backbreaking peasant labour for women accustomed to jumping hunters across hedges rather than wrestling with a plough horse, twisting elaborate paper spills for the fireplace rather than planting potatoes in heavy soil. These were women who had lost brothers and fiancés in the mud of Ypres and Passchendale, who had seen childhood friends return armless, crippled, blind, destroyed, women who had joined their lovers in the glory of a right war, the pride and purity of serving their country at need, and been beaten down, one ideal at a time, until in the end they had been reduced merely to slogging on, unthinking. Fourteen blue-blooded, strong, capable women, the kind of people who invariably made me feel gauche and clumsy, and all of them willing, eager even, to lay the inbred authority and absolute self-possession of their kind, along with the hard-earned maturity of the past years, at the feet of this woman as they had their flowers. She questioned them in turn, she listened with complete attention as each spoke, she elicited comments from specific individuals, and she gave judgement—suggestions, but with the authority of divine power behind her. Each received her share of words with gratitude, clutching them to her with the hunger of a child in a bread line, and when Childe finally stood to indicate that the evening was at an end, each went away with something of the same attitude of skulking off to a corner to gnaw. Finally, Veronica and I were left with her. I was still slumped into my chair, watching. Veronica turned to me.
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4 Page 38
