“What happened?”
“She was mur—murdered.” Her control slipped for an instant before it caught again, and she drew a shaky breath. “She left the meeting with the rest of us, just after eleven, but she never made it home. A bobby found her in an alleyway at four this morning, in the West End. She was… her throat… Oh God.”
She gulped and put her hand to her mouth, and I grabbed her arm hard, putting a sharp twist into it to distract her, and hustled her out the doors and into the rain, down the steps, and through the gates. I kept pushing her until we had our seats in the restaurant. The owner knew me well and responded with alacrity to my demand for strong drink and food, and soon the greenish tones had faded from her face and she could begin to tell me about it.
“Iris’s father telephoned me early this morning—about seven, I think it was—wanting to know if I had any idea where Miles might be. I said no, and he said if I heard from him that Miles should go home immediately. I started to say that it was unlikely that I should see him, but he just rang off. After I’d had some coffee I realised that he’d sounded terribly upset about something, so I telephoned back—it took the exchange an age to get through—and asked if there was anything wrong. That’s when he told me Iris was… dead.”
“And Miles was—” I started, but she spoke over me.
“We were never close, Iris and I. We were too different, I guess. But she was devoted to Miles, and very involved in her Temple work—it was through her that I met Margery. We will all miss her so much.”
Her eyes filled, and I downed a few hasty mouthfuls to silence my hardhearted appetite before steering her with equal ruthlessness back from elegy to facts.
“When you spoke with their father, Miles was missing?”
She wiped her eyes. “Yes, but that’s hardly unusual. Iris told me he often disappeared from his flat for several days at a time.”
“What else did he say? Mr Fitzwarren, that is.”
“Major. Just that she’d been killed and that his wife—Miles and Iris’s mother—was under heavy sedation and wanted Miles. They had only the two,” she added, and sighed into her untouched salad.
“Nothing else?”
“No. I told him I’d call later today, but he said I ought to telephone first, to see how Mrs Fitzwarren was feeling.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I dressed and went to the Temple. I thought Margery ought to know, and I… I suppose I hoped she might tell me what to do. I wasn’t thinking very clearly.”
“Did she?”
“She wasn’t in when I first arrived, so I went into the chapel for some quiet. She came in after a while, and I told her. She listened in that marvellous way of hers, and she told me to pray while she made some telephone calls. She brought together the Inner Circle, most of them, and reached a friend of hers at the Clarion, who gave her the news about where and when Iris had been found and how she’d been killed.”
I interrupted briskly before the graphic remembrance could hit her. “Do you want to telephone the Fitzwarrens now and ask if they want to see you?”
“Yes, perhaps I ought to now. I get on well with Mrs Fitzwarren. I think she might like me to come.”
She went off to Tonio’s telephone while I paid the bill. When she returned, she was pale but composed.
“Yes, I’ll go there now.”
“Any sign of Miles?”
“None.”
“How long has he been missing? Do you know?”
“Two or three days, I think. The major is furious.”
Furious rather than worried, I noted, but I did not point it out. She had quite enough on her plate without that.
Tonio ushered us out the door and personally whistled up a cab. Veronica gave the driver the address and got in, and I leant on the door.
“I’ll send you those clothes I borrowed,” I suggested.
“The clothes? Oh, yes, those. There’s no hurry; they’re just part of the whatnot I keep for people to use. My families, you know.”
“When are you seeing Margery Childe again?” I asked.
“Tonight or tomorrow, I suppose. It depends on the Fitzwarrens. Oh, that reminds me—she said to tell you she’d like to talk with you again, when you’re free.”
“Tell her I’ll look forward to it.”
“If you’re still in town in a day or two, would you ring me?” She shuffled through her bag for a pencil and wrote two numbers on the back of a receipt from an antiquarian booksellers’. “I’ll either be at home—the top number—or at the Fitzwarrens. Or at the Temple.” She wrote down a third number, then gave me the paper.
“Good-bye for now, Mary. Thank you for everything.”
“I’ll see you soon, Ronnie. I hope it goes well. Oh, and Ronnie? Sorry.” This last was to the taxi driver, who had slid the engine into gear and had to halt again. “Don’t say anything about my friendship with Mr Holmes, please. It’s a bother when people want to know all about him, so I don’t tell them at first. All right? Thanks. ’Bye now.”
I stepped back and slapped the roof, and the cab immediately slithered its way into the traffic. Veronica’s chin was up, and I could not help but wonder how the Fitzwarrens would feel if they realised that they had just joined the ranks of the downtrodden unfortunates to whom Lady Veronica Beaconsfield ministered.
As I stood on the pavement, unaware of the rain, unconscious of the flow of people—faceless figures with dull, sodden coats, dark hats, and dripping black umbrellas—and the dingy buildings that hunched their shoulders over the noisy street, a second cab swerved dangerously across the wet road to halt at my feet. I obediently climbed in and sat, meditating on the oddity that Veronica had asked my help for an impossible task, that of breaking her lover’s addiction, but not for the relatively straightforward problem of finding him, until the driver turned a face of exaggerated patience to me through the glass.
“Paddington,” I mouthed automatically. Dear God, I must get away from this city before I suffocated from her complexities. Even before this latest blow, I had felt like a compass needle, oscillating wildly between the dangerous magnetism of a new and unexpected Holmes and the appealing cool feminism of Margery Childe. Just now, I wanted none of it. I wanted to draw in a deep breath of familiar, clean, unchanging air, in a place where challenge lay in the mind, where even the greatest frenzies of passion were woven into a tapestry of serene stability.
Four hours later, I was seated at my table in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
SEVEN
Tuesday, 28 December-
Thursday, 30 December
To the further declaration of the imperfections of women … I might add histories proving some women to have died for sudden joy; some for impatience to have murdered themselves; some to have burned with such inordinate lust that, for the quenching of the same, they have betrayed to strangers their country and city.
—John Knox
The remainder of the Tuesday and all of the Wednesday, I buried myself in my work. The paper representing my coming of age as a scholar, the first part of which lay in a neat stack of typescript on my desk down in Sussex, was from a piece of research I was doing on women in the Talmud. The initial stimulus had been a vigorous discussion (an argument, it would have been, had it not taken place in Oxford) on the mouldy old theme of “Why Weren’t Women…?” In this case, it was: Why were women so conspicuously scarce in Jewish literary records? Essentially, the question was: Can a feminist be a Jew, or a Jew a feminist?
I am a Jew; I call myself a feminist: The question was of interest to me. A week after the discussion, I had presented the topic to one of my tutors, who had agreed to work with me on it, and in fact he was looking towards a joint publication. He had already scheduled a public presentation of our finds to date, on the twenty-eighth of January. It promised to be a lively meeting.
The focal point of the essay’s first section was a woman named Beruria, a remarkable member of the late first/early second century
rabbinic community, a milieu in which were laid the foundations of what could be called post-Temple Judaism, as well as those of the separating sect of Christianity. Beruria was not, strictly speaking, a rabbi, that title being reserved for men. She had, however, completed the customary rabbinic training, and she was accepted first as a student, then a teacher, and finally as an arbiter of rabbinic decisions. Her martyred father and fiery husband were both prominent rabbis, which no doubt lent her a certain cachet for privileged action, but it was Beruria herself whom we glimpse in the Talmudic writings, not some clever pet. There can be little doubt that if her brilliant intellect, razor-honed tongue, voluminous learning, and profound sense of God had been placed in a man’s body, the resultant figure would have rivalled Akiva himself in stature. Instead, she comes to us as an enigmatic and perplexing footnote, who tantalises with what is possible, while at the same time being the exception that proves the rule that the intensely demanding realm of rabbinic thought is an exclusively male dominion. Her prominence eventually proved too much for the sages who followed her, and a thousand years after her death, her memory was fouled by the medieval scholar Rashi, when he attached to her a scurrilous story of sexual misconduct, giving it out that she allowed herself, a married woman, to be seduced by one of her husband’s students and then in shame committed suicide.
Through Beruria, I had been led back into Scripture itself, into (and here the reader will begin to see the point of this excursus) the feminine aspects of the Divine. Use of masculine imagery in speaking of God, of course, abounds: God takes the masculine gender in Hebrew, and the anthropomorphic imagery used in speaking of the Divine is predominantly andromorphic, from a hot-tempered young warrior to the wise, bearded gentleman depicted by Michelangelo Buonarroti on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Feminine imagery, such as in the passage whose (I was certain) correct translation I had given Margery Childe, does exist: Buried by redactors, obscured by translators, it is nonetheless there for the observant eye. The verses in Genesis which Margery Childe had called upon in her sermon had occupied me for three very solid weeks the previous October. I had taken the Hebrew to pieces, pounded the verses flat and resuscitated them, traced them through the rabbis and into the modern commentaries, eventually reached a tentative though solidly based conclusion, and finally written it up with voluminous footnotes and cross-references into part two of my paper. And then, two months later, to hear this untutored religious casually bringing out my laboriously formed hypothesis as something both self-evident and indisputable was, to say the least, intriguing.
With some pique, I went back to the Hebrew text and read it through, then again with care. It only took five minutes to conclude that she was right: Three hundred hours of sweat and eyestrain had gone into proving the obvious. I had reinvented the wheel. I shook my head and laughed aloud, to the indignation of my neighbours, and then flipped the pages over and got to work.
Oxford between terms is a delightfully peaceful place. At the time, I had rooms in a house at the north end of town, took the occasional meal with my landlady, a retired Somerville don, and walked or cycled in. That December was unseasonably mild, and my path to the library on the Wednesday morning took a circuitous route through the Parks. Other than that, I had blessedly few distractions, and I managed to get through a great deal of work that day, as if some quirk of the weather served to oil the wheels of thought: Requested books arrived promptly; my pen skimmed the pages smoothly; problems and conundra fell with gratifying ease before the sharp edge of my mind. I ate well, and, to my surprise and relief, I slept like an innocent both nights.
Then Thursday morning dawned, like an incipient toothache. I buried my head back in my pillow and concentrated fiercely on the suggestive implications of a certain irregular verb I had uncovered the previous evening, but it was no good. The soothing interval was over, and my vision of burrowing into Oxford until my birthday on Sunday began to shrivel before the cold, hard demands of responsibility. I had run away, for the third time in as many days, and the small voice that pled the demands of labour and the threat of public disgrace on the twenty-eighth of January stood no chance against the stern thunder of my higher self. I had obligations, and I was not meeting them here.
I rose and dressed for Town. As I rummaged irritably through my drawers for stockings without ladders and gloves without holes, the stern voice relented a fraction: Considering the duties I was about to take on, I needed something more acceptable to wear than my father’s flannels and my mother’s readjusted tweeds. I had not bought so much as a pair of gloves since the summer. While in London, my imperious self declared with gracious generosity, I might buy some clothes. I cheered up a bit, went down to swallow some tea and a handful of biscuits with my landlady, and left for the station. On the way, I sent off six telegrams—three each to Holmes and to Veronica at various locations, all with the message that I was going to be at the Vicissitude and would they please get into touch with me there. I boarded the train with a disgustingly clear conscience.
The morning I spent being measured, posed, scrutinised, and tut-tutted over by the married couple whose skills had clothed my mother before me and who had graciously permitted themselves to be saddled with me, one of their more wayward clients, on her death. They were a pair of elves, all brown eyes and wizened faces and clever fingers, and between her eye for colour and line and his touch with fabrics, when they dressed me, I was more than presentable. Over glasses of hot, sweet, smoky tea we decided that I had finally stopped growing and might now have real clothes. Out came the luscious thick woollens and cashmeres and the silks and linens, and she began to sketch long and dramatic shapes on a block of paper while he heaved various bolts onto the worktables, and the two of them carried on a nonstop pair of competing monologues and shook their fingers at each other until I made to escape. Whether it was, as they claimed, a period of doldrums after Christmas, or whether, as I suspected, my appearance so pained them that they wanted to know that I was properly clothed, or even if the challenge I presented caught at their imaginations, I am not sure, but they practically begged me to accept the first of my outfits on Monday morning, a symbolic beginning to a new life. I was more than happy to agree, whatever the reason.
I left the shop feeling dowdy and drab, and mildly apprehensive. The last time I had bought a wardrobe, it had ended up slashed to bits on the floor of a decrepit horsecab. To raise my spirits, I took lunch upstairs at Simpsons, where to my pleasure the maitre d’ greeted me by name. Finally, I took a taxi to my club.
A telegram awaited me, from Veronica, asking me would I come to her house at four, and would I care to go to the Temple that evening?
Upstairs, I contemplated the two dresses hanging forlornly in the wardrobe. One was a lovely rich green wool, but it was two years old, had been let down twice, despite the shorter hemlines, and looked it. The other was a very plain dark blue, almost black, and it was a dress I disliked enough to leave in storage fifty weeks of the year. I wondered which of the two was less unacceptable, then realised that neither went with the shoes available. I thought of the elves and sighed. Perhaps I ought to do as Holmes had done—arrange to leave half a dozen complete sets of clothing and necessities stashed about the countryside. After Sunday, I could afford it, if I wanted. It would certainly keep the elves amused.
I put both frocks and the decision back on the rack and went down a floor to the club’s library-cum-reading room. I was not particularly interested in Iris Fitzwarren’s death, save that it touched the lives of Veronica and Margery Childe, but out of habit, and perhaps out of respect for Ronnie, I thought it would do no harm to catch up with what the newspapers had to say. I went to the neat stack and dug down to the early Tuesday editions. However, I walked back upstairs an hour later with ink-stained hands but a mind little enlightened. Iris Elizabeth Fitzwarren, aged twenty-eight, daughter of Major Thomas Fitzwarren and Elizabeth Quincey Donahue Fitzwarren, had died as a result of knife wounds between one and thre
e in the morning of Tuesday, the twenty-eighth of December. Scotland Yard had traced a taxi driver who reported dropping her outside an infamous nightclub late the night before, but intensive investigations had not yet succeeded in establishing when she had left the club or with whom—if anyone—she had been seen while in the establishment. Miss Fitzwarren was well known among the poorer classes (the phrase used by The Times), where she had worked to establish free medical services for women and infants. She had become interested in nursing during the War, had taken a course in nursing, and together with Miss Margery Childe, beautiful blonde directress (one of the more effusive afternoon papers) of the New Temple in God, Miss Fitzwarren had been instrumental in organising medical clinics in Stepney and Whitechapel. Miss Fitzwarren was survived by, and so on, and memorial services would be held, et cetera, et cetera.
In other words, I thought, scrubbing my nails, if the Yard knows owt, they’re saying nowt.
I did my hair with more care than usual, dropped the plain dark dress over my head, and examined the result. The elves would tut-tut, I thought, but at least it was better than Veronica’s jumble-sale clothes. I checked at the desk, but there was nothing for me, so I left a message with my whereabouts for the next few hours, to be given to Mr Holmes.
Veronica’s courtyard looked even worse by waning light than it had by waxing. A handful of urchins lingered outside her door, no doubt waiting there until their mothers might allow them inside their own homes for tea. Two had healing facial sores, four went barefooted, and one had no coat. An incomprehensible but identifiable noise echoed across the yard, and after paying the taxi driver, I followed the sound to its source: Veronica’s door was ajar and a pandemonium of voices came spilling out. I pushed my way gently through the children in order to lean my head inside, realised there was little point in knocking or calling a polite hullo, and walked in. The noise came from the second of the ill-furnished ground-floor rooms, in the back, and I stood at the door and tried to make sense of what was apparently a domestic squabble involving portions of at least four families, mothers with babies perched on their hips and sobbing children at their skirts, several bellicose men and male adolescents thrusting their chests out at each other, a matched trio of grandmotherly figures furiously casting anathema upon one another, and, in the middle, like a pair of crumbling rocks beset by a typhoon, two more people: Veronica Beaconsfield and another woman, small, squat, and foreign. A Belgian, I thought.
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