A Monstrous Regiment of Women (11 page)

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 three 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.

I stood at the back of the crowd for several minutes before Veronica’s eyes, coming up from the deluge of words beating at her, latched on to me with unspeakable relief. I saw her lips move, saw her turn to the other target and mouth a phrase, at which the other woman’s eyes went wide with something close to horror before she marshalled her forces and, with a motion curiously reminiscent of a prodded limpet, nodded at Veronica and put her head down against the storm. Veronica worked her way across the room, towards me, shaking her head and putting a hand up at the entreaties along the way, until she plunged out into the corridor.

“Do you have a cab?” she asked, ignoring the two women hanging onto her coattails.

“I doubt it; I didn’t ask him to wait. Here are your clothes,” I said doubtfully.

“Just toss them over there. Come on, we’ll find one down the road.”

I made haste to deposit the parcel on the shelf of the coat-rack and reached the door just before the women. Smiling and nodding, I pulled it shut in their faces and scurried after Veronica, who had already rounded the corner.

“What on earth was that all about?” I asked. “And where are we going?”

“It’s of no importance. I did something for one family, and the others now think they deserve the same. My assistant will sort it out. Or rather, they’ll all get so tired of shouting at her, since she’ll speak only French to them, that they’ll go home. We have to go around to the Fitzwarrens’. Miles surfaced today.” She shot out a hand and a taxi peeled itself from the pack. Once inside, she turned to me with an anxious line between her eyebrows. “Do you mind? Going there with me, I mean? Major Fitzwarren telephoned about half an hour ago and asked me to come, but I—do you mind coming with me?”

If she wanted to use me as a shield against Miles, I did not particularly care for the idea, but I felt quite strong enough. I told her I was content to go.

“Oh good. I don’t know whether we’ll have tea or a drink, but afterwards we’ll go on for a bite and then to the Temple. Does that suit?”

“It suits.”

“I’m so glad,” she said, and to my astonishment she reached out and squeezed my gloved hand with hers. “Thank God you’re here, Mary. I can’t think how I could face this without your help.”

“What?” I said lightly. “Is this the Veronica Beaconsfield who single-handedly holds together half of London?”

She flashed me a nervous smile and looked at her watch. We rode in silence through the gathering dusk to St John’s Wood.

An elderly butler with the prerequisite long and lugubrious face admitted us into the marbled and gleaming entrance foyer and relieved us of our outer garments.

“Good evening, Marshall,” Veronica said, handing him her gloves. “Mrs Fitzwarren is expecting me. This is Miss Russell.”

“Good evening, miss,” he said. “It is good to see you again, Miss Beaconsfield. I shall go and inform Mrs Fitzwarren of your arrival, if you would like to wait in here for a moment.”

Veronica balked at the indicated door.

“Do you mind if we wait in the library, Marshall? I may be upstairs some time, and Miss Russell will enjoy looking at the books, I think.”

An instant’s hesitation was the only sign of a dilemma that would have undone a lesser man. Mere visitors were not normally given the run of the house, the hesitation said, but in the past Miss Beaconsfield had become more than a mere guest, and no formal announcement had been made to the contrary.

“Lieutenant Fitzwarren is currently in the library, miss,” he said, further explaining his hesitation and giving the decision back to her.

“Miles?” she said, and it was her turn to hesitate before squaring her shoulders. “Well, I shall have to see him sometime. Perhaps you’d best warn him I’m coming, though. I’ll show Miss Russell the drawing room, and you can come back for us.”

This diplomatic solution met with his approval. He ushered us in and faded away, to reappear shortly, bereft of coats and paraphernalia. I was relieved that I was not to spend more of the evening in the austerely formal room, with its grey walls more suited to a summer’s day and its collection of remarkably unsettling futurist paintings. The library for me.

Veronica’s face was serious but not apprehensive; however, the spine that I followed down the portrait-lined passageway belonged to someone about to confront a firing squad. She took two steps inside the room, then stopped, and I looked past her at the figure by the window.

It took no great medical knowledge to recognise in Miles Fitzwarren a sick young man, and no great cleverness to discern his ailment. He moved as if gripped by the ache of influenza, but the torpid lassitude of that illness was replaced here by a jittery restlessness, an inability to settle into a chair or a thought, which reminded me of a caged zoo animal. It was painful to witness. To Veronica, it must have been excruciating, but there was no sign of it in her face or her voice.

“Hello, Miles.”

“Evenin’, Ronnie. You’re certainly looking chipper,” he burbled gaily. “Surprise to see you here, don’t you know? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Did you have a good Christmas? How are your parents—your father’s sciatica, was it? Hope it didn’t interfere with the shootin’ this year. Oh, here, frightfully rude of me… Come and sit down. You a friend of Ronnie’s? Miles Fitzwarren. Pleased to meet you, Miss…”

“This is Mary Russell, Miles. A friend from Oxford.”

“Another bluestocking, eh, Miss Russell? Or do you go around doin’ good, too? How are the
opera sordida
, Ronnie? Most awfully embarrassin’, you know,” he confided to me, “bein’ surrounded by people who do good deeds right and left.” His attempt at gay and tripping laughter rang hollow even in his ears, and the fuzzy remembrance that he was mourning his sister, or perhaps the tardy realisation that he was giving away quite a lot, hurried him on. “I’ve heard about this church lady of yours, Childe. Supposed to be quite the thing. Friend of mine in the City went to hear her about a week or two ago, said she talked all about love. Quite taken with her, he was, though I must say it all sounded positively loose to me, love in church. Still, she probably means well enough.”

“Miles, I—”

“As a matter of fact, I saw her,” he prattled on desperately. “A week ago. Someone told me who she was. Tiny little thing, should have thought she was a child if I hadn’t seen her face. Suppose she is a Childe, though, isn’t she—the name, d’you see? Still, good things come in small packages, they say.”

I do not know what further revelations the man might have split, or what Veronica would have said, because the melancholy presence of Marshall appeared at the door and said that Mrs Fitzwarren would be pleased to see Miss Beaconsfield, if she should care to follow him.

Veronica stood up, bit her lip, took three impulsive steps forward to where Miles sat perched on the corner of a desk, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and turned to go. From his flinch, a person would have thought she was touching a burning coal to his skin. The look she flashed me held all her fear, her sorrow, and her hopelessness.