A Letter of Mary (18 page)

"Lucky you."

"Yes, well, that's why I'm calling, Mary. I won't finish the job tomorrow, so she wants me to stay on until Saturday."

I shoved away the rush of disappointment and said steadily, "Oh, that's all right. Disappointing, but I understand."

"I thought you might. And, would you tell those friends of yours that we'll meet them Saturday night instead?" Lestrade and Mycroft.

"Sunday morning?" I asked hopefully.

"Saturday."

"Very well. See you then. Sleep well."

"Not too likely, Mary. Good night."

* * *

I read the manuscript through quickly, then took myself off for a long, hot, mindless bath. The second time, I made notes for improving it, the secretarial and editorial review. The third time, I went very slowly, reading parts of it aloud, flipping back to compare passages, treating it like any other piece of textual analysis. At the end of it, I turned off the lights and sat passively, wishing vaguely that I smoked a pipe or played the violin or something, and then went to bed.

And in the night, I dreamt, a sly and insidious dream full of grey shapes and vague threats, a London fog of a dream that finally gave way to clarity. I dreamt I was lying in a place and manner that had once been very familiar: on my back, my hands folded across my stomach, looking up at the decorative plaster trim on the pale yellow ceiling of the psychiatrist's office. One of the twining roses that went to make up the border had been picked out in a pale pink, though whether it represented a moment of whimsey on Dr Ginzberg's part or her painstaking attention to the details of her profession, I could never decide. As it was directly in line with the gaze of any occupant of her analyst's couch, I suspected the latter, but I liked to think it was both, and so I never asked.

In the dream, I was suspended by the familiar languor of the hypnotic trance she had used as a therapeutic tool, like a vise that clamped me to the padded leather while she chipped delicately away at my mind, peeling off the obscuring layers of traumas old and new. They all felt very old, though most of them were recently acquired, and I had always felt raw and without defence when I left her office, like some newborn marsupial blindly mewling its way towards an unknown pocket of safety. I had been taken from her before I had a chance to reach it. I was fourteen years old.

My voice was droning on in answer to a question concerning my paternal grandmother, a woman about whom I had thought I knew little. Nonetheless, the words were spilling out, giving such detail of fact and impression as to sound almost clairvoyant, and I was aware of the onlooker within, who, when I came up from the trance, would be faintly surprised and amused at the wealth of information that had lain hidden. I do not remember what Dr Ginzberg's question was— there was a vague flavour of an adolescent's concept of Paris in the nineties, the cancan and sidewalk bistros and the Seine running at the foot of Notre Dame, so I suppose it must have been to do with the early years of my parents' marriage— but it hardly mattered. I was quite content to chunter on in any topic she might choose— almost any topic.

And then she laughed. Dr Ginzberg. During a session.

It is difficult to describe just how shocking this was, even doubly wrapped as I was in the dream and the dreamy world of trance, but my sense of rightness could not have been more offended had she suddenly squatted down and urinated on the Persian carpet. Her kind of psychotherapist simply did not react— outside of her rooms, yes, when she was another person, but Dr Ginzberg in the silent room with the yellow walls and the pink rose and the leather sofa? Impossible. Even more astounding had been the laugh itself. Dr Ginzberg's laugh (and outside the yellow room, she did laugh) was a quiet, throaty chuckle. This had been a sharp barking sound, a cough of humour from an older woman, and it cut off my flow of words like an axe blade.

I lay, paralysed by the wrongness of the laugh and the remnants of trance, and waited for her inevitable response to an unjustified pause, that encouraging "Yes?" with its echo of the Germanic
ja.
It did not come.

I became aware, with that logic of dreams, that I was younger than I had thought, that my feet were imprisoned in the heavy corrective buttoned shoes I had worn until I was six, and that the shoes came nowhere near the end of the couch. Dr Ginzberg waited, silent, in her chair behind me. I drew up my right foot and pushed with the heavy shoe against the leather, then twisted my body around to look at her.

Her hair had gone white, and instead of being gathered into its heavy chignon, it flared in an untidy bowl around her ears. She wore a pair of black, black glasses, like two round holes staring out from her face, hiding all expression. What bothered me most, though, was not her appearance— for she was still Dr Ginzberg, I knew that— but the fact that she held in her hands not her normal notepad but an object that looked like a small Torah scroll, spread across one knee while she made notes on it.

She stopped writing and tilted her head at me.

"Yes?"
Ja.

I felt comforted, but gave a last glance at the scroll on her lap, and then I noticed her hands. They had wide, blunt fingers, and no ring, and a thick fuzz of dark copper hairs covered their backs. After a moment, the hands capped the pen, clipped it over the top of the scroll, and reached up for the black, black spectacles. I watched her hands rise slowly, slowly from her lap, past her ordinary shoulders, to her temples, and as they began to pull at the earpieces, I saw the shape of her head, the flat wrongness of it, and with a rush of childish terror I knew that I did not want to see the eyes behind those dark lenses, and I sat up with a moan strangling in my throat.

The boardinghouse seemed to throb with movement, but it was only the pounding in my ears. The shabby furnishings, grey in the light that seeped through the ungenerous curtains, were at once comforting and inordinately depressing. I sighed, considered and discarded the thought of finding the kitchen and making myself a hot drink, and squinted at the bedside clock. Ten minutes past four. I sighed again, put on my dressing gown, lit the gas lights, and reached for the colonel's manuscript.

It was not time wasted. By the time dawn overtook the streetlamp, I had confirmed a few hypotheses, drawn others into question, and given myself something to think about during the day.

FOURTEEN

xi

The day proved to contain a surfeit of things to think about, even without the manuscript. The first was the figure who greeted me as I entered the study: The son had arrived home from Scotland. He looked up from his coffee and gifted me with what I'm sure he thought of as a captivating grin, which might have been had it reached his eyes.

" 'Allo, 'allo, 'allo, the pater's new secretary is certainly an improvement over the last one. I see he didn't tell you that the prodigal was coming home. Gerald Edwards, at your service." He was the quintessential 1923-model final-year Cambridge undergraduate, sprawled with studied negligence across the maroon leather armchair, dressed in the height of fashion in an amazing yellow shantung lounge suit. His dark hair was slicked back, and he wore a fashionable air of disdainful cynicism on his face, with a watchful awareness in his bloodshot eyes. He made no move to stand, merely watched my body move across to the desk and bend down to tuck my handbag into a drawer. I straightened to face him and answered smoothly.

"I'm Mary Small, and no, he didn't mention it. Is he here?"

"He'll be down in a tick. We were up until some very wee hours last night, and the old
sarx
doesn't recover as fast when you're Father William's age, does it?"

Looking back, I do not know what it was that raised my hackles at that point. His use of a Greek word to a marginally educated secretary could have been innocent, but somehow I knew, instantly, that it was not. The mind could not justify it, but the body had no doubts, and my heart began to pound with the certainty that this unlikely young man suspected that he was talking with no innocent secretary. Here was danger, totally unexpected, perceptible danger. I used bewilderment to cover my confusion.

"I'm sorry, I thought his name ... What did you say about sharks?"

"Sarx,
my dear Miss Small,
sarx. Corpus,
you know, this too, too solid and all that. But surely you know Greek, if this is yours." He held up yesterday's dictated notes and watched me calmly. "I mean, this isn't Greek, though it's Greek to me, but there are a goodly smattering of thetas and alphas."

"Oh, yes,
sarx,
sorry. Actually, I don't know an awful lot of Greek, or Hebrew, which is the other language there. Don't you use this system at Cambridge? Your father did tell me you were there, I think?"

"Aha, a secret Oxford hieroglyphic, is it? How did you learn it?"

"Well, actually, it was ... I mean, well, there was this boy who taught it to me one summer."

"Taught you Oxford shorthand, eh, on a punt up the river? And did you learn a lot, moored beneath the overhanging branches?" He hooted most horribly, and I felt my face flush, though not, as he thought, with embarrassment. "Look at her blush! Oh, Pater, look at your secretary, blushing so prettily."

"Good morning, Mary. I didn't hear you come in. Is my son teasing you?"

"Good morning, Colonel. No, he only thinks he is. Pardon me, I'd like to get those letters typed." I retrieved my notebook, and the temptation to kick one long fashionably clad young limb as I passed was strong, but I resisted. Russell, I thought as I wound the paper into the machine, that young man is going to be a capital
P
Problem, even if you're wrong about his suspicious nature. Roving hands and a happy drinker, Rosie had said. Of the first, I had no doubt.

And so it proved during the day. While the colonel was off dressing, young Edwards perched on the desk where I was typing and undressed me with his eyes. I ignored him completely, and through tremendous effort, I made not a single typing error. After lunch, at which he drank four glasses of wine, he began to find excuses to brush past me.

In between episodes of avoiding the son, the father and I got on with our work. That afternoon, I reviewed the manuscript with him, made hesitant suggestions for expanding one chapter and reversing the positions of two others, and extended his outline for the remainder of the book. He sat back, well satisfied, and rang for tea. I accepted his offer of a cigarette and steadied the hand that held the gold lighter.

"So, Mary, what do you make of it?"

"I found it very informative, Colonel, though I haven't much background in the political history of Egypt."

"Of course you don't. I'm glad you find it interesting. What about going to Oxford the first part of the week and getting on with a bit of that research, eh? Think you could handle it?"

"Oh yes, I know my way around the Bodleian." I paused, wondering if I should ask one of the questions that had come to me in the night.

"Something else on your mind, Mary?"

"Well, yes, now that you mention it. It occurred to me, after I read it, that you make very little of the activities of women." That was putting it mildly: His two mentions of the female sex were both highly disparaging, one of them almost rabid in its misogyny. "Had you planned on—"

"Of course I haven't put women into it," he cut me off impatiently. "It's a book on politics, and that's a man's world. No, in Egypt the women have their own little world, and they don't worry themselves about the rest."

"Not like here, is it?" I deliberately kept my manner noncommittal, but he flared up with a totally unexpected and unwarranted violence, as if I had taunted him.

"No, by Jove, it isn't like here, all these ugly sluts running around screaming about emancipation and the rights of women. Overeducated and badly spoilt, the lot of them. Should be given some honest work to do." His face was pale with fury, and his narrowed eyes fixed on me with suspicion. "I hope to God you're not one of them, Miss Small."

"I'm sorry, Colonel Edwards, one of whom?"

"The insufferable suffragettes, of course! Frustrated, ugly old biddies like the Pankhursts, with nothing better to do than put ideas into the heads of decent women, making them think they should be unhappy with their lot."

"Their lot being laundry and babies?" He did not know me well enough, but Holmes could have told him he was walking on paper-thin ice. I become very quiet and polite when I am angry.

"It's a Godly calling, Miss Small, is motherhood, a blessed state."

"And the calling of being a secretary, Colonel?" I couldn't help it; I was as furious as he was, though where he looked ready to go for my throat, I had no doubt that I appeared calm and cool. I readied myself for an explosion, at the very least for the drawer to be emptied over my head, but to my astonishment, his face relaxed and the colour flooded back in. He suddenly sat back and began to laugh.

"Ah, Mary, you've got spirit. I like that in a young woman. Yes, you're a secretary now, but not forever, my dear, not forever."

I understood then, in a blinding flash of rage at his complacent, self-satisfied condescension, the deep revulsion a smiling slave feels for the master. It took every last iota of my control to smile wryly, take up my pen with my trembling hands, and move across to my place at the typewriter. At the same time, singing through me alongside the rage and the remnants of a fear I could not justify, was the triumphant sureness that here, at last, as clearly as if he had dictated it, was a motive for the murder of one Dorothy Elizabeth Ruskin.

* * *

I excused myself from dinner with a headache and insisted that the following evening I had an unbreakable engagement with a cousin. Yes, perhaps Sunday, we should talk about it tomorrow. No, the headache was sure to be gone by morning, and I should be happy to come in tomorrow. No, it was a pleasant evening, the rain had let up, and no doubt the fresh air would help my head. No need for Alex to turn out. I bid good night to Colonel and Mr Edwards.