His supporters seem to have rallied round, and there’s little chance he’ll resign. If he apologises, I might reconsider, but not otherwise.
My best to the missus, and hope to see you both on the twenty-fourth.
Dennis Edwards
I did not think his resignation threat referred to the Society of Friends.
Two other letters followed, but I recorded them mechanically, taking little notice of their content other than seeing that they had nothing to do with my interests.
“That’s it for today, Miss Small. Do you want to read them back to me before you type them?”
“If you like, but I think they’re quite clear.”
“Didn’t go too fast for you, did I? Let me see.”
“No, not at all. Oh, do you read shorthand?”
“I read a bit, but I don’t recognise this. What is it?”
I couldn’t very well tell him the truth, that it was my own system, a boustrophedonic code based on six languages, three alphabets, a variety of symbols mathematical and chemical, and a hieroglyphic, designed to keep up with even the fastest of lecturers and leave me time to record nonverbal data, as well. It was totally illegible to anyone but Holmes, and even he found it rough going.
“Oh, it’s a system I learned in Oxford.”
“Were you writing right to left?”
“On alternate lines. Makes it much smoother, not having to jump back to the beginning of the line each 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 ja. It did not come.
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.
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.”
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