• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 348 0

her door, no doubt waiting there until their mothers might allow them inside their own homes for tea. Two had healing facial sores, four went barefooted, and one had no coat. An incomprehensible but identifiable noise echoed across the yard, and after paying the taxi driver, I followed the sound to its source: Veronica’s door was ajar and a pandemonium of voices came spilling out. I pushed my way gently through the children in order to lean my head inside, realised there was little point in knocking or calling a polite hullo, and walked in. The noise came from the second of the ill-furnished ground-floor rooms, in the back, and I stood at the door and tried to make sense of what was apparently a domestic squabble involving portions of at least four families, mothers with babies perched on their hips and sobbing children at their skirts, several bellicose men and male adolescents thrusting their chests out at each other, a matched trio of grandmotherly figures furiously casting anathema upon one another, and, in the middle, like a pair of crumbling rocks beset by a typhoon, two more people: Veronica Beaconsfield and another woman, small, squat, and foreign. A Belgian, I thought.

I stood at the back of the crowd for several minutes before Veronica’s eyes, coming up from the deluge of words beating at her, latched on to me with unspeakable relief. I saw her lips move, saw her turn to the other target and mouth a phrase, at which the other woman’s eyes went wide with something close to horror before she marshalled her forces and, with a motion curiously reminiscent of a prodded limpet, nodded at Veronica and put her head down against the storm. Veronica worked her way across the room, towards me, shaking her head and putting a hand up at the entreaties along the way, until she plunged out into the corridor.

“Do you have a cab?” she asked, ignoring the two women hanging onto her coattails.

“I doubt it; I didn’t ask him to wait. Here are your clothes,” I said doubtfully.

“Just toss them over there. Come on, we’ll find one down the road.”

I made haste to deposit the parcel on the shelf of the coat-rack and reached the door just before the women. Smiling and nodding, I pulled it shut in their faces and scurried after Veronica, who had already rounded the corner.

“What on earth was that all about?” I asked. “And where are we going?”

“It’s of no importance. I did something for one family, and the others now think they deserve the same. My assistant will sort it out. Or rather, they’ll all get so tired of shouting at her, since she’ll speak only French to them, that they’ll go home. We have to go around to the Fitzwarrens’. Miles surfaced today.” She shot out a hand and a taxi peeled itself from the pack. Once inside, she turned to me with an anxious line between her eyebrows. “Do you mind? Going there with me, I mean? Major Fitzwarren telephoned about half an hour ago and asked me to come, but I—do you mind coming with me?”

If she wanted to use me as a shield against Miles, I did not particularly care for the idea, but I felt quite strong enough. I told her I was content to go.

“Oh good. I don’t know whether we’ll have tea or a drink, but afterwards we’ll go on for a bite and then to the Temple. Does that suit?”

“It suits.”

“I’m so glad,” she said, and to my astonishment she reached out and squeezed my gloved hand with hers. “Thank God you’re here, Mary. I can’t think how I could face this without your help.”

“What?” I said lightly. “Is this the Veronica Beaconsfield who single-handedly holds together half of London?”

She flashed me a nervous smile and looked at her watch. We rode in silence through the gathering dusk to St John’s Wood.

An elderly butler with the prerequisite long and lugubrious face admitted us into the marbled and gleaming entrance foyer and relieved us of our outer garments.

“Good evening, Marshall,” Veronica said, handing him her gloves. “Mrs Fitzwarren is expecting me. This is Miss Russell.”

“Good evening, miss,” he said. “It is good to see you again, Miss Beaconsfield. I shall go and inform Mrs