time.'
'Well, live and learn.' He handed me back my notebook. 'Time for a little something. Sherry, I think, Miss Small?'
'Oh, Colonel Edwards, I don't think—'
'Now look, young lady.' His mock sternness was meant to be amusing. 'I never drink alone if I can help it— it's bad for the health. If you're going to be around here, you'll have to learn to be sociable. Here.' He handed me a brimming wineglass, and I sighed to myself. Oh well, at least the quality was decent.
An hour later, he stood up. 'I must go, though I'd dearly love to repeat last night's dinner. You go on home, take my manuscript, and finish the letters tomorrow. We'll go to dinner tomorrow night.'
Not with Holmes due back, we wouldn't. 'Oh, no, I couldn't—'
'Tomorrow or Saturday, one or the other, I won't take a no.'
'We'll, er, we'll talk about it tomorrow,' Mary Small said weakly.
'Or tomorrow and Saturday both, if you like. Here's the manuscript. Didn't you have a coat? Oh now, look at the rain out there. I'll have Alex run you home and come back for me; it'll take me that long to climb into my stiff shirt anyway.' Protests were ignored as he stepped out and shouted orders to his man. 'That's settled, then. I don't like to think of you getting wet. Here's your coat.'
He held it for me, and his hands lingered on my shoulders. 'Don't you think I should call you Mary?'
'Whatever you like, Colonel.' I busied myself with my buttons.
'Would you call me—'
'No, sir,' I interrupted firmly. 'It wouldn't be right, Colonel. You are my employer.'
'Perhaps you're right. But we will go to dinner.'
'Good night, sir.'
'Good night, Mary.'
* * *
My portrait of Colonel Edwards was filling out. It now included his home, his investments, his relationships with servants and hired help, and the suggestive knowledge that he had been duped by colleagues over the gender of D. E. Ruskin, for some as-yet-unknown reason, and was very angry about it. In addition, I now had eighty-seven pages of material written by his hand and shaped by his mind, and nothing, absolutely nothing, is so revealing of a person's true self as a piece of his writing. I hurried through the substantial tea provided by Billy's cousin, a tiny, whip-hard little woman with the unlikely name of Isabella, and shut myself in with the manuscript.
At page seven, there came a knock at the door.
'Miss, er, Small? It's Billy. There's a, er, gentleman on the telephone for you.'
'Oh, good. Thank you, Billy. You're looking well. Perhaps we can have a chat sometime, over a pint? Where's the 'phone? Ah, thank you.'
It was very good to hear his voice.
'Good evening, Mary,' he said, warning me unnecessarily of the need for discretion— he never called me Mary. 'How does the new job go?'
'Billy told you, then. It's very interesting. I've learnt a great deal already. He's a nice man, though I've heard some talk about him. Hard to believe, though.'
'Is it?'
'Yes, it is. And you? How are you getting on?'
'Well, as you know, the place is pretty run-down; there's a lot for someone like me to do. I spent yesterday morning weeding the rose beds and the afternoon digging in the potato patch.'
'Poor thing, your back must be breaking. Don't pull anything.' I more than half meant it— sustained physical labour was not his forte.
'I was inside today with a leaking joint in the kitchen, and she started me stripping wallpaper.'
'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
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.
