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
—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
