A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [11]
At 5:30, Ronnie appeared, hair awry, mouthed a string of unintelligible noises, and went into the kitchen. In lodgings, she had been renowned as a reluctant waker, so I gave her time to absorb some coffee before I followed her.
“Mary, good morning—afternoon, I suppose. You’ve had something to eat?”
I reassured her that I had taken care of myself, then poured another cup of coffee from the pot and sat down at the small kitchen table to wait for whatever it had been she wanted to tell me.
It took some time. Revelations that come easily at night are harder by the light of day, and the woman who had cried out at a minor cut was now well under control. We talked interminably, about her needy and troubled families and the problem of balancing assistance and dependency while maintaining the dignity of all concerned. She enquired as to my interests, so I told her all about the paper on first-century rabbinic Judaism and Christian origins I’d written for publication, and about my work at Oxford, and when her eyes glazed over, I probed a bit deeper into her life. At some point, we ate pieces of dried-up cheese from a piece of white butcher’s paper and dutifully chewed at a handful of unpalatable biscuits, and then she opened a bottle of superb white wine and finally began to loosen up.
There was a man; rather, there had been a man. It was an all-too-common story in those postwar years: A friend in 1914, he joined the New Army in 1915, was sent virtually untrained to the Western Front, and promptly walked into a bullet; sent home for eight weeks’ recovery, their friendship deepened: He returned to the trenches, numerous letters followed, and then he was gassed in 1917 and again sent home: an engagement ring followed; he returned yet again to the Front, was finally demobbed in January 1919, a physically ruined, mentally frail mockery of his former self, liable to black, vicious moods and violent tempers alternating with periods of either manic gaiety or bleak inertia, when all he could do was silently smoke one cigarette after another, seeming completely unaware of other people. It was called shell shock, the nearly inevitable aftermath of month after month in hell, and every man who had been in the trenches had it to some degree. Some hid it successfully until the depths of night; others coped by immersing themselves in a job and refusing to look up. Many, many young men, particularly those from this young man’s class—educated, well-off, the nation’s pool of leadership, who died in colossal numbers as junior officers— became fatuous, irresponsible, and flighty, incapable of serious thought or concentrated effort, and (and here was the crux of this particular case) willing to become involved only with women as brittle and frivolous as they were. Veronica no longer wore the ring.
I listened in silence and watched her eyes roam over her glass, the tablecloth, the mail, the dark, reflecting window, anywhere but my face, until she seemed to run down. I waited a minute longer, and when she neither spoke nor looked up, I gave her a gentle prod.
“It does take time, that sort of thing,” I suggested. “A lot of young men—”
“Oh, I know,” she interrupted. “It’s a common problem. I know a hundred women who’ve been through the same thing, and they all hope it’ll solve itself, and every so often it does. But not Miles. He’s