A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [17]
“Perhaps you might stay on a bit after my friends have left? I should like a word.”
I inclined my head silently and went to sit in a corner, much amused at the skirmish. This one might be as much fun as Holmes.
The next hour would have been excruciatingly boring had it not been for the undercurrents and interplay that I found absolutely fascinating. She played this room with the same ease that she had played the hall, though to very different purpose. Before, her aim had been exhortation, inspiration, perhaps a bit of thought provocation. Here, she was acting as spiritual counsellor, mother confessor, and guiding light to this, her inner circle, drawing them out and drawing them together into a cohesive whole around herself.
Fourteen women (excluding myself), all of them young (the oldest was thirty-four or thirty-five), all reasonably attractive, all obviously wealthy, intelligent, and well-bred, and all of them with that ineffable but unmistakable air of women who had not sat still during the war. I found out later that of the women present, only two had done nothing more strenuous than knit for the soldiers, and one of those had been saddled with invalid parents. Nine had been VAD nurses at one time or other, three of them from 1915 until the end, nursing convoy after convoy of dying young men in France and southern England and the Mediterranean, sixteen-hour days of septic wounds and pus-soaked bandages, a baptism of blood for carefully nurtured young ladies. Several had spent months as land girls, backbreaking peasant labour for women accustomed to jumping hunters across hedges rather than wrestling with a plough horse, twisting elaborate paper spills for the fireplace rather than planting potatoes in heavy soil. These were women who had lost brothers and fiancés in the mud of Ypres and Passchendale, who had seen childhood friends return armless, crippled, blind, destroyed, women who had joined their lovers in the glory of a right war, the pride and purity of serving their country at need, and been beaten down, one ideal at a time, until in the end they had been reduced merely to slogging on, unthinking. Fourteen blue-blooded, strong, capable women, the kind of people who invariably made me feel gauche and clumsy, and all of them willing, eager even, to lay the inbred authority and absolute self-possession of their kind, along with the hard-earned maturity of the past years, at the feet of this woman as they had their flowers. She questioned them in turn, she listened with complete attention as each spoke, she elicited comments from specific individuals, and she gave judgement—suggestions, but with the authority of divine power behind her. Each received her share of words with gratitude, clutching them to her with the hunger of a child in a bread line, and when Childe finally stood to indicate that the evening was at an end, each went away with something of the same attitude of skulking off to a corner to gnaw. Finally, Veronica and I were left with her. I was still slumped into my chair, watching. Veronica turned to me.
“Mary, do you want to come back with me tonight? Or you could take a cab later… ?” The evening had done her a world of good, I would give Childe that. She was again calm and sure of herself, though she, too, had something of the crust-in-the-corner look to her that made me think she might rather be alone.
“No, Ronnie, I’ll go along to my club later, if that’s all right with you. They’ll give me a room, and I keep clothes there. I’ll send these things back tomorrow—or shall we meet for lunch?” I offered. It amused me to ignore the woman standing in the background, as it had amused me in our earlier exchange to deny her the last word. I looked only at Veronica, but I was very aware of the other figure, and furthermore, I was conscious of her own awareness of, and amusement at, the undercurrents I was generating.
“Oh, yes, let’s,” Ronnie enthused. “Where?”
“The Elgin Marbles in the British Museum,” I said decisively. “At midday. We can walk around to Tonio’s from there. Does that suit?