“Certainly, Margery. Anytime.”
“Find out from Marie when I’m free in the next day or two; she knows better than I. And you’ve brought a friend tonight?”
Veronica stood aside and held back her arm for me to come forward into the circle.
“This is Mary Russell, a friend of mine from Oxford.”
The eyes that looked up into mine were a curiously dark blue, almost violet, deep and calm and magnetic, and the only truly beautiful element in her face. She lacked the currently fashionable high bones, her lightly tanned skin was ever-so-slightly coarse beneath the professional makeup, her teeth, though not protuberant, were a fraction overlarge, and her nose had at some distant time been broken and inexpertly set. Her looks, however, served only to increase her appeal, to make her seem vital and interesting, where a conventional beauty would have seemed insipid. It was a face to watch and to live for, not one simply to adore. She was calm and sure and filled with a power beyond her years and, I had to admit, enormously compelling. The room waited for me to lay my rose at her feet and do my obeisance so it could get on with its courtly rituals.
Without taking my eyes from hers, I raised the flower with great deliberation and threaded it into a buttonhole, then stepped forward and extended my hand to her.
“How do you do?” I said, and smiled with noncommittal politeness.
There was the briefest fraction of a pause before she sat upright, and her eyes gleamed as she leant forward and put her neat, strong, manicured little hand into mine. Her shake was by nature of an experiment, marginally longer than was necessary, and she sat back with something that might have been amusement in her eye.
“Welcome, Mary Russell. Thank you for coming.”
“Oh, that’s quite all right,” I said blandly.
“I hope you enjoyed the service.”
“It was interesting.”
“Please help yourself to tea or one of the drinks, if you like.”
“Thank you, I will,” I said, not moving.
“I think we may be seeing something of you,” she said suddenly, a sort of pronouncement.
“Do you?” I said politely, making it not quite a denial. Our eyes held for a long moment, and suddenly hers crinkled, though her mouth was still.
“Perhaps you might stay on a bit after my friends have left? I should like a word.”
I inclined my head silently and went to sit in a corner, much amused at the skirmish. This one might be as much fun as Holmes.
The next hour would have been excruciatingly boring had it not been for the undercurrents and interplay that I found absolutely fascinating. She played this room with the same ease that she had played the hall, though to very different purpose. Before, her aim had been exhortation, inspiration, perhaps a bit of thought provocation. Here, she was acting as spiritual counsellor, mother confessor, and guiding light to this, her inner circle, drawing them out and drawing them together into a cohesive whole around herself.
Fourteen women (excluding myself), all of them young (the oldest was thirty-four or thirty-five), all reasonably attractive, all obviously wealthy, intelligent, and well-bred, and all of them with that ineffable but unmistakable air of women who had not sat still during the war. I found out later that of the women present, only two had done nothing more strenuous than knit for the soldiers, and one of those had been saddled with invalid parents. Nine had been VAD nurses at one time or other, three of them from 1915 until the end, nursing convoy after convoy of dying young men in France and southern England and the Mediterranean, sixteen-hour days of septic wounds and pus-soaked bandages, a baptism of blood for carefully nurtured young ladies. Several had spent months as land girls, backbreaking peasant labour for women accustomed to jumping hunters across hedges rather than wrestling with a plough horse, twisting elaborate paper spills for the fireplace rather than planting potatoes in heavy soil. These were women who had lost brothers and fiances in the mud of Ypres and Passchendale, who had seen childhood friends return armless, crippled, blind, destroyed, women who had joined their lovers in the glory of a right war, the pride and purity of serving their country at need, and been beaten down, one ideal at a time, until in the end they had been reduced merely to slogging on, unthinking. Fourteen blue-blooded, strong, capable women, the kind of people who invariably made me feel gauche and clumsy, and all of them willing, eager even, to lay the inbred authority and absolute self-possession of their kind, along with the hard-earned maturity of the past years, at the feet of this woman as they had their flowers. She questioned them in turn, she listened with complete attention as each spoke, she elicited comments from specific individuals, and she gave judgement—suggestions, but with the authority of divine power behind her. Each received her share of words with gratitude, clutching them to her with the hunger of a child in a bread line, and when Childe finally stood to indicate that the evening was at an end, each went away with something of the same attitude of skulking off to a corner to gnaw. Finally, Veronica and I were left with her. I was still slumped into my chair, watching. Veronica turned to me.
“Mary, do you want to come back with me tonight? Or you could take a cab later… ?” The evening had done her a world of good, I would give Childe that. She was again calm and sure of herself, though she, too, had something of the crust-in-the-corner look to her that made me think she might rather be alone.
“No, Ronnie, I’ll go along to my club later, if that’s all right with you. They’ll give me a room, and I keep clothes there. I’ll send these things back tomorrow—or shall we meet for lunch?” I offered. It amused me to ignore the woman standing in the background, as it had amused me in our earlier exchange to deny her the last word. I looked only at Veronica, but I was very aware of the other figure, and furthermore, I was conscious of her own awareness of, and amusement at, the undercurrents I was generating.
“Oh, yes, let’s,” Ronnie enthused. “Where?”
“The Elgin Marbles in the British Museum,” I said decisively. “At midday. We can walk around to Tonio’s from there. Does that suit?”
“I haven’t been to the BM in donkey’s years. That’ll be fine. See you then.” She took a deferential leave of Margery Childe and fluttered out.
FOUR
Monday, 27 December
—Cyril of Alexandria (376-444)
The door closed behind Veronica, and I was half-aware of her voice calling out to Marie and then fading down the corridor as I sat and allowed myself to be scrutinised, slowly, thoroughly, impassively. When the blonde woman finally turned away and kicked her shoes off under a low table, I let out the breath I hadn’t realised I was holding and offered up thanks to Holmes’ tutoring, badgering, and endless criticism that had brought me to the place where I might endure such scrutiny without flinching— at least not outwardly.
She padded silently across the thick carpet to the disorder of bottles and chose a glass, some ice, a large dollop from a gin bottle, and a generous splash of tonic. She half-turned to me with a question in her eyebrows, accepted my negative shake without comment, went to a drawer, took out a cigarette case and a matching enamelled matchbox, gathered up an ashtray, and came back to her chair, moving all the while with an unconscious feline grace—that of a small domestic tabby rather than anything more exotic or angular. She tucked her feet under her in the chair precisely like the cat in Mrs Hudson’s kitchen, lit her cigarette, dropped the spent match into the ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair, and filled her lungs deeply before letting the smoke drift slowly from nose
