deprecating humour that looked out from her brown eyes when she smiled. That bitterness had been new, and I wondered when it had crept in.
This upper portion of the house was much more the Veronica I knew. Here, the floors gleamed richly, the carpets were thick and genuine, the odd assortment of furniture and objets d’art—sleek, modern German chair and Louis XIV settee on a silken Chinese carpet, striped coarse Egyptian cloth covering a Victorian chaise longue, a priceless collection of seventeenth-century drawings on one wall contemplating a small abstract by, I thought, Paul Klee on the opposite wall— all nestled together comfortably and unobtrusively like a disparate group of dons in a friendly Senior Commons, or perhaps a gathering of experts on unrelated topics trading stories at a successful party. Veronica had a knack.
The house had been converted to electricity, and by its strong light I could see clearly the etched lines of desperate weariness on her face as my friend pulled off gloves, hat, and coat. She had been out most of the night —on a Good Work, her drab clothes said, rather than a social occasion—and a not entirely successful Good Work at that. I asked her about it when I came out of the WC (indoor, though I had seen the outside cubicles at the end of the yard below.)
“Oh, yes,” she said. She was assembling coffee. “One of the families I’ve adopted. The son, who’s thirteen, was arrested for picking the pocket of an off-duty bobby.”
I laughed, incredulous.
“You mean he couldn’t tell? He’s new to the game, then.”
“Apparently so. He’s not very bright, either, I’m afraid.”
She fumbled, taking a cup from the shelf and nearly dropping it from fingers clumsy with fatigue.
“Good heavens, Ronnie,” I said, “you’re exhausted. I ought to go and let you have some sleep.”
“No!” She did drop the cup then, and it shattered into a thousand shards of bone china. “Oh, damn,” she wailed. “You’re right, I am tired, but I so want to talk with you. There’s something… Oh, no, it’s useless; I can’t even begin to think about it.” She knelt awkwardly to gather up the pieces, drove a splinter of porcelain into her finger, and stifled a furious sob.
Something fairly drastic was upsetting this good woman, something considerably deeper than a sleepless night caused by an incompetent pickpocket. I had a fairly good idea what in general she wanted me for, and I sighed inwardly at the brevity of my freedom. Nonetheless, I went to help her.
“Ronnie, I’m tired, too. I’ve been on my feet—literally— for the last twelve hours. If you don’t mind my disreputable self on your sofa, we can both have a sleep, and talk later.”
The intensity of the relief that washed over her face startled me and did not bode well for my immediate future, but I merely helped her sweep up the broken cup, overrode her halfhearted protestations, and sent her to bed.
There was no need to disturb the chaise longue. She had a guest room; she had a marvellous bathtub long enough for me to soak the aches from both the shoulder and my legs; she had a nightdress and a dressing gown and a deep bed that welcomed me with loving softness and murmured soporific suggestions at me until I drifted off.
I woke at dusk, to complete the topsy-turvy day, and rose to crane my neck at the smudge of heavy, wet sky that was visible between the roofs. I put on the too-short quilted dressing gown that Ronnie had given me and went down to the kitchen, and while the water came to a boil, I tried to decide whether I was making breakfast or afternoon tea. Veronica’s idea of a well-stocked kitchen ran to yoghourt, charcoal biscuits, and vitamin pills (healthy body, healthy mind), but a rummage through the cupboards left me with a bowl of some healthy patent cereal that looked like wood chips, though they tasted all right doused with the top milk from the jug and a blob of raspberry jam, some stale bread to toast, and a slice of marzipan-covered Christmas fruitcake to push the meal into the afternoon. After my meal, I washed up, went down for the paper, brought it up along with the mail, lit the fire in the sitting room, and read all about the world’s problems, a cup of coffee balanced on my knee and a very adequate coal fire at my feet.
At 5:30, Ronnie appeared, hair awry, mouthed a string of unintelligible noises, and went into the kitchen. In lodgings, she had been renowned as a reluctant waker, so I gave her time to absorb some coffee before I followed her.
“Mary, good morning—afternoon, I suppose. You’ve had something to eat?”
I reassured her that I had taken care of myself, then poured another cup of coffee from the pot and sat down at the small kitchen table to wait for whatever it had been she wanted to tell me.
It took some time. Revelations that come easily at night are harder by the light of day, and the woman who had cried out at a minor cut was now well under control. We talked interminably, about her needy and troubled families and the problem of balancing assistance and dependency while maintaining the dignity of all concerned. She enquired as to my interests, so I told her all about the paper on first-century rabbinic Judaism and Christian origins I’d written for publication, and about my work at Oxford, and when her eyes glazed over, I probed a bit deeper into her life. At some point, we ate pieces of dried-up cheese from a piece of white butcher’s paper and dutifully chewed at a handful of unpalatable biscuits, and then she opened a bottle of superb white wine and finally began to loosen up.
There was a man; rather, there had been a man. It was an all-too-common story in those postwar years: A friend in 1914, he joined the New Army in 1915, was sent virtually untrained to the Western Front, and promptly walked into a bullet; sent home for eight weeks’ recovery, their friendship deepened: He returned to the trenches, numerous letters followed, and then he was gassed in 1917 and again sent home: an engagement ring followed; he returned yet again to the Front, was finally demobbed in January 1919, a physically ruined, mentally frail mockery of his former self, liable to black, vicious moods and violent tempers alternating with periods of either manic gaiety or bleak inertia, when all he could do was silently smoke one cigarette after another, seeming completely unaware of other people. It was called shell shock, the nearly inevitable aftermath of month after month in hell, and every man who had been in the trenches had it to some degree. Some hid it successfully until the depths of night; others coped by immersing themselves in a job and refusing to look up. Many, many young men, particularly those from this young man’s class—educated, well-off, the nation’s pool of leadership, who died in colossal numbers as junior officers— became fatuous, irresponsible, and flighty, incapable of serious thought or concentrated effort, and (and here was the crux of this particular case) willing to become involved only with women as brittle and frivolous as they were. Veronica no longer wore the ring.
I listened in silence and watched her eyes roam over her glass, the tablecloth, the mail, the dark, reflecting window, anywhere but my face, until she seemed to run down. I waited a minute longer, and when she neither spoke nor looked up, I gave her a gentle prod.
“It does take time, that sort of thing,” I suggested. “A lot of young men—”
“Oh, I know,” she interrupted. “It’s a common problem. I know a hundred women who’ve been through the same thing, and they all hope it’ll solve itself, and every so often it does. But not Miles. He’s just… it’s as if he’s not there anymore. He’s… lost.”
I chewed my lip thoughtfully for a moment, and the image of those slick faces in the nightclub came back to me. Lost was a good word for a large part of our whole generation.
“Drugs?” I asked, not quite the shot in the dark it seemed, and she looked at me then, her eyes brimming, and nodded.
“What kind?” I asked.
“Any kind. He had morphine when he was in hospital, and he got used to that. Cocaine, of course. They all use cocaine. He goes to these parties—they last all night, a weekend, even longer. Once he took me to a fancy- dress party where the whole house was made over to look like an opium den, including the pipes. I couldn’t bear the smell and so had to leave. He took me home and then went back. Lately, I think it’s been heroin.” I was mildly surprised. Heroin had been developed only a couple of years before I was born, and in 1920 it was nowhere near as commonplace as cocaine or opium or even its parent drug, morphine. I had some personal experience of the drug, following a bad automobile accident in 1914, when it was given me by the hospital in San Francisco—it being then thought that heroin was less addictive than morphine, a conclusion since questioned—but an habitual use of the drug would be very expensive.
“Did you go with him very often? To the same house?”
“The few times I went, they were all different houses, though mostly the same people. I finally couldn’t take
