A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [11]
In his earlier life, the daily papers had been absolutely essential to his work. Dr Watson's accounts are as littered with references to the papers as their sitting room was with the actual product, and without the facts and speculations of the reporters and the personal messages of the agony columns, Holmes would have been deprived of a sense as important as touch or smell.
Now, however, his newspaper habits varied a great deal, depending on whether the case he was on concerned the politics of France, the movements of the art world, or the inner financial doings of the City. Or, indeed, if there was a case at all. He regularly drove the local newsagent to distraction, and vice versa. For weeks on end, Holmes was content with a single edition of one of the London papers, and the Sussex Express for Mrs Hudson. When he was on a case, however, he insisted on nothing less than every edition of every paper, as soon as it could reach him, and for days the normal serenity of our isolated home would be broken by the nearly continuous arrivals and departures of the newsagent's boy, a compulsively garrulous lad with skin like a battlefield and a wall-piercing adenoidal voice.
During one of my absences the previous spring, Holmes had inexplicably changed from one of the more lurid popular papers to The Times, which to my mind has always been eminently suited to morning tea and a discreet scattering of toast crumbs. However, The Times is a morning paper, and it has to travel from London to Eastbourne, from that town to our village, and thence to us. It never reached us much before noon, and often considerably later, if the pimply-faced bicyclist had a puncture or encountered a friend.
If Holmes was at home when the newspaper arrived, he would react in one of two ways, which I had come to watch carefully, as a bellwether of his inner mind. Some days, he would spot the boy coming down the lane and rush down the stairs to snatch it out of whatever hand happened to carry it through the door, hurl himself into the frayed basket chair in front of the fireplace, and bury his head in it, moaning and exclaiming for the better part of an hour. Other days, he would ignore it entirely. It would lie, folded and reproachful, on the table next to the front door. He would pass it by without a glance, drop letters to be posted on top of it, pull a pair of gloves from the drawer beneath it, until eventually, that evening or even the following morning, he would retrieve it, glance through it in a desultory fashion, and discard it in disgust.
Those were the days I dreaded, the days when he was deliberately resisting the pull of London and all it had been to him. He was also unfailingly polite and sweet-tempered on those days— always a signal of great danger. An unread paper meant an unsettled mind, and to this day the sight of a fresh, folded newspaper on a polished surface brings a twinge of apprehension. And for three days, he had only glanced at his newspaper over breakfast.
I lay awake and looked at the box on the table beside the bed, seeing the indistinct sparkle of the moon reflected off the blue eyes of a diminutive monkey perched on a miniature wall, and I felt, frankly, peeved at the intrusion of yet another concern into an already-full schedule.
Holmes had little love for the, as he saw it, irrational pseudodiscipline of theology. He judged it a tragic waste of my mental energies, described it as a more debilitating addiction than cocaine, and bemoaned his inability to wean me from it. I ignored him as best I could, accepted this as the one area of serious mutual incomprehension, and only occasionally wondered if I had chosen it largely to maintain my identity against the tide of Holmes' forceful personality.
Twice since our marriage, cases had come up that demanded my attention as well as his. I had only recently realised that it was not past him to invent something of the sort in order to remove me from academia's clutches. Not this one, of course;