A Monstrous Regiment of Women (10 page)

The only way to stop it had been to savage him and drive him away. That had bought me some breathing space, albeit brief and at a high price, but now I had it, I could not think what to do. Something would have to be done, that was obvious. I had not asked for this intolerable awareness, I did not want it, and I should have given a great deal to have it taken from me, but it had come, and I was in its grip.

I lay on the sofa long in what was left of the night, struggling with myself and my options, and in the end, long before dawn, I took the only possible action: I ran away.

I walked the streets until the sky was a fraction lighter than the rooftops, then went, shivering and wet through, to the door of the ladies’ club that I had joined the year before. It was a small establishment with the cheerless and misleading name of the Vicissitude, but it did not allow its right-thinking feminist policies to interfere with the amount of hot water in its pipes or the quality of food that came from its kitchen. The old matron on night duty greeted me with horror and bundled me off to a hot bath, brought me a mug of something scalding and appallingly alcoholic, retrieved my stored clothes, and found a bed for me. I did not sleep much, but it was nice to be warm, and alone.

I was in the museum at the agreed time, ill-rested, unfed, and hastily dressed. At 12:30, Veronica had still not appeared. I decided to give her until one, and ten minutes before then, she came around the corner, as carelessly dressed as I, but pale, red-eyed, and half-focused. I greeted her with apprehension, wondering what new upheaval had tossed her here in this condition, but she managed a distracted smile and seemed to be trying to pull herself together.

“Mary, I’m so sorry. Something happened this morning, and I totally forgot the time until Margery reminded me that I had a luncheon date with you.”

“Yes, I can see something happened.” Her stockings did not match, her hair was perfunctorily combed, and she was wearing a dark green woollen dress with a black coat, an infelicitous combination. “You should have sent a message; I’d have understood. Was it something at the Temple?”

“No. Well, yes, in a way. Miles’s sister died last night. She was a member. You met her, in fact—Iris. Tall, marcelled hair.”

“Cigarette holder, red fingernails, small opal ring on her right hand. She had a terrible cold,” I recalled. She had been one of those who had run a brief and disbelieving eye across my clothing and returned, politely amused, to the business at hand. Ronnie nodded.

“What happened?”

“She was mur—murdered.” Her control slipped for an instant before it caught again, and she drew a shaky breath. “She left the meeting with the rest of us, just after eleven, but she never made it home. A bobby found her in an alleyway at four this morning, in the West End. She was… her throat… Oh God.”

She gulped and put her hand to her mouth, and I grabbed her arm hard, putting a sharp twist into it to distract her, and hustled her out the doors and into the rain, down the steps, and through the gates. I kept pushing her until we had our seats in the restaurant. The owner knew me well and responded with alacrity to my demand for strong drink and food, and soon the greenish tones had faded from her face and she could begin to tell me about it.

“Iris’s father telephoned me early this morning—about seven, I think it was—wanting to know if I had any idea where Miles might be. I said no, and he said if I heard from him that Miles should go home immediately. I started to say that it was unlikely that I should see him, but he just rang off. After I’d had some coffee I realised that he’d sounded terribly upset about something, so I telephoned back—it took the exchange an age to get through—and asked if there was anything wrong. That’s when he told me Iris was… dead.”

“And Miles was—” I started, but she spoke over me.

“We were never close, Iris and I. We were too different, I guess. But she was devoted to Miles, and very involved in her Temple work—it was through her that I met Margery. We will all miss her so much.”

Her eyes filled, and I downed a few hasty mouthfuls to silence my hardhearted appetite before steering her with equal ruthlessness back from elegy to facts.

“When you spoke with their father, Miles was missing?”

She wiped her eyes. “Yes, but that’s hardly unusual. Iris told me he often disappeared from his flat for several days at a time.”

“What else did he say? Mr Fitzwarren, that is.”

“Major. Just that she’d been killed and that his wife—Miles and Iris’s mother—was under heavy sedation and wanted Miles. They had only the two,” she added, and sighed into her untouched salad.

“Nothing else?”

“No. I told him I’d call later today, but he said I ought to telephone first, to see how Mrs Fitzwarren was feeling.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I dressed and went to the Temple. I thought Margery ought to know, and I… I suppose I hoped she might tell me what to do. I wasn’t thinking very clearly.”

“Did she?”

“She wasn’t in when I first arrived, so I went into the chapel for some quiet. She came in after a while, and I told her. She listened in that marvellous way of hers, and she told me to pray while she made some telephone calls. She brought together the Inner Circle, most of them, and reached a friend of hers at the
Clarion
, who gave her the news about where and when Iris had been found and how she’d been killed.”

I interrupted briskly before the graphic remembrance could hit her. “Do you want to telephone the Fitzwarrens now and ask if they want to see you?”

“Yes, perhaps I ought to now. I get on well with Mrs Fitzwarren. I think she might like me to come.”

She went off to Tonio’s telephone while I paid the bill. When she returned, she was pale but composed.

“Yes, I’ll go there now.”

“Any sign of Miles?”

“None.”

“How long has he been missing? Do you know?”

“Two or three days, I think. The major is furious.”

Furious rather than worried, I noted, but I did not point it out. She had quite enough on her plate without that.

Tonio ushered us out the door and personally whistled up a cab. Veronica gave the driver the address and got 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

To the further declaration of the imperfections of women … I might add histories proving some women to have died for sudden joy; some for impatience to have murdered themselves; some to have burned with such inordinate lust that, for the quenching of the same, they have betrayed to strangers their country and city.

—John Knox

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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 Parks. Other than that, I had blessedly few distractions, and I managed to get through a great deal of work that day, as if some quirk of the weather served to oil the wheels of thought: Requested books arrived promptly; my pen skimmed the pages smoothly; problems and conundra fell with gratifying ease before the sharp edge of my mind. I ate well, and, to my surprise and relief, I slept like an innocent both nights.