A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [63]
"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,