A Letter of Mary

Her hair had gone white, and instead of being gathered into its heavy chignon, it flared in an untidy bowl around her ears. She wore a pair of black, black glasses, like two round holes staring out from her face, hiding all expression. What bothered me most, though, was not her appearance— for she was still Dr Ginzberg, I knew that— but the fact that she held in her hands not her normal notepad but an object that looked like a small Torah scroll, spread across one knee while she made notes on it.

She stopped writing and tilted her head at me.

'Yes?' Ja.

I felt comforted, but gave a last glance at the scroll on her lap, and then I noticed her hands. They had wide, blunt fingers, and no ring, and a thick fuzz of dark copper hairs covered their backs. After a moment, the hands capped the pen, clipped it over the top of the scroll, and reached up for the black, black spectacles. I watched her hands rise slowly, slowly from her lap, past her ordinary shoulders, to her temples, and as they began to pull at the earpieces, I saw the shape of her head, the flat wrongness of it, and with a rush of childish terror I knew that I did not want to see the eyes behind those dark lenses, and I sat up with a moan strangling in my throat.

The boardinghouse seemed to throb with movement, but it was only the pounding in my ears. The shabby furnishings, grey in the light that seeped through the ungenerous curtains, were at once comforting and inordinately depressing. I sighed, considered and discarded the thought of finding the kitchen and making myself a hot drink, and squinted at the bedside clock. Ten minutes past four. I sighed again, put on my dressing gown, lit the gas lights, and reached for the colonel's manuscript.

It was not time wasted. By the time dawn overtook the streetlamp, I had confirmed a few hypotheses, drawn others into question, and given myself something to think about during the day.

FOURTEEN

xi

The day proved to contain a surfeit of things to think about, even without the manuscript. The first was the figure who greeted me as I entered the study: The son had arrived home from Scotland. He looked up from his coffee and gifted me with what I'm sure he thought of as a captivating grin, which might have been had it reached his eyes.

' 'Allo, 'allo, 'allo, the pater's new secretary is certainly an improvement over the last one. I see he didn't tell you that the prodigal was coming home. Gerald Edwards, at your service.' He was the quintessential 1923-model final-year Cambridge undergraduate, sprawled with studied negligence across the maroon leather armchair, dressed in the height of fashion in an amazing yellow shantung lounge suit. His dark hair was slicked back, and he wore a fashionable air of disdainful cynicism on his face, with a watchful awareness in his bloodshot eyes. He made no move to stand, merely watched my body move across to the desk and bend down to tuck my handbag into a drawer. I straightened to face him and answered smoothly.

'I'm Mary Small, and no, he didn't mention it. Is he here?'

'He'll be down in a tick. We were up until some very wee hours last night, and the old sarx doesn't recover as fast when you're Father William's age, does it?'

Looking back, I do not know what it was that raised my hackles at that point. His use of a Greek word to a marginally educated secretary could have been innocent, but somehow I knew, instantly, that it was not. The mind could not justify it, but the body had no doubts, and my heart began to pound with the certainty that this unlikely young man suspected that he was talking with no innocent secretary. Here was danger, totally unexpected, perceptible danger. I used bewilderment to cover my confusion.

'I'm sorry, I thought his name ... What did you say about sharks?'

'Sarx, my dear Miss Small, sarx. Corpus, you know, this too, too solid and all that. But surely you know Greek, if this is yours.' He held up yesterday's dictated notes and watched me calmly. 'I mean, this isn't Greek, though it's Greek to me, but there are a goodly smattering of thetas and alphas.'

'Oh, yes, sarx, sorry. Actually, I don't know an awful lot of Greek, or Hebrew, which is the other language there. Don't you use this system at Cambridge? Your father did tell me you were there, I think?'

'Aha, a secret Oxford hieroglyphic, is it? How did you learn it?'

'Well, actually, it was ... I mean, well, there was this boy who taught it to me one summer.'

'Taught you Oxford shorthand, eh, on a punt up the river? And did you learn a lot, moored beneath the overhanging branches?' He hooted most horribly, and I felt my face flush, though not, as he thought, with embarrassment. 'Look at her blush! Oh, Pater, look at your secretary, blushing so prettily.'

'Good morning, Mary. I didn't hear you come in. Is my son teasing you?'

'Good morning, Colonel. No, he only thinks he is. Pardon me, I'd like to get those letters typed.' I retrieved my notebook, and the temptation to kick one long fashionably clad young limb as I passed was strong, but I resisted. Russell, I thought as I wound the paper into the machine, that young man is going to be a capital P Problem, even if you're wrong about his suspicious nature. Roving hands and a happy drinker, Rosie had said. Of the first, I had no doubt.

And so it proved during the day. While the colonel was off dressing, young Edwards perched on the desk where I was typing and undressed me with his eyes. I ignored him completely, and through tremendous effort, I made not a single typing error. After lunch, at which he drank four glasses of wine, he began to find excuses to brush past me.

In between episodes of avoiding the son, the father and I got on with our work. That afternoon, I reviewed the manuscript with him, made hesitant suggestions for expanding one chapter and reversing the positions of two others, and extended his outline for the remainder of the book. He sat back, well satisfied, and rang for tea. I accepted his offer of a cigarette and steadied the hand that held the gold lighter.

'So, Mary, what do you make of it?'

'I found it very informative, Colonel, though I haven't much background in the political history of Egypt.'

'Of course you don't. I'm glad you find it interesting. What about going to Oxford the first part of the week and getting on with a bit of that research, eh? Think you could handle it?'

'Oh yes, I know my way around the Bodleian.' I paused, wondering if I should ask one of the questions that had come to me in the night.

'Something else on your mind, Mary?'

'Well, yes, now that you mention it. It occurred to me, after I read it, that you make very little of the activities of women.' That was putting it mildly: His two mentions of the female sex were both highly disparaging, one of them almost rabid in its misogyny. 'Had you planned on—'

'Of course I haven't put women into it,' he cut me off impatiently. 'It's a book on politics, and that's a man's world. No, in Egypt the women have their own little world, and they don't worry themselves about the rest.'

'Not like here, is it?' I deliberately kept my manner noncommittal, but he flared up with a totally unexpected and unwarranted violence, as if I had taunted him.

'No, by Jove, it isn't like here, all these ugly sluts running around screaming about emancipation and the rights of women. Overeducated and badly spoilt, the lot of them. Should be given some honest work to do.' His face was pale with fury, and his narrowed eyes fixed on me with suspicion. 'I hope to God you're not one of them, Miss Small.'

'I'm sorry, Colonel Edwards, one of whom?'

'The insufferable suffragettes, of course! Frustrated, ugly old biddies like the Pankhursts, with nothing better to do than put ideas into the heads of decent women, making them think they should be unhappy with their lot.'

'Their lot being laundry and babies?' He did not know me well enough, but Holmes could have told him he was walking on paper-thin ice. I become very quiet and polite when I am angry.

'It's a Godly calling, Miss Small, is motherhood, a blessed state.'

'And the calling of being a secretary, Colonel?' I couldn't help it; I was as furious as he was, though where he looked ready to go for my throat, I had no doubt that I appeared calm and cool. I readied myself for an explosion, at the very least for the drawer to be emptied over my head, but to my astonishment, his face relaxed and the colour flooded back in. He suddenly sat back and began to laugh.

'Ah, Mary, you've got spirit. I like that in a young woman. Yes, you're a secretary now, but not forever, my dear, not forever.'