A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [9]
“Dear old Aristophanes,” she agreed. “Still, don’t you find it a drawback sometimes, dressing like a man?” she asked. “I thought that man was going to punch you.”
“It’s only happened once, that I didn’t have time to talk my way out of a brawl.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, I didn’t hurt him too badly.” She giggled, as if I had made a joke. I went on. “I had a much rougher time of it once during the War, with a determined old lady who tried to give me a white feather. I looked so healthy, she refused to believe me when I told her I’d been turned down for service. She followed me down the street, lecturing me loudly on cowardice and Country and Lord Kitchener.”
Ronnie looked at me speculatively, unsure of whether or not I was pulling her leg. (As a matter of fact, I was not, in either case. The old lady had been severely irritating, though Holmes, walking with me that day, had found the episode very amusing.) She then shook her head and laughed.
“It’s splendid to see you, Mary. Look, I’m on my way home. Are you going somewhere, or can you come in for coffee?”
“I’m going nowhere, I’m free as the proverbial bird, and I won’t drink your coffee, thanks, I’m afloat already, but I’ll gladly come for a natter and see your WC—I mean, your rooms.”
She giggled again.
“One of the other drawbacks, I take it?”
“The biggest one, truth to tell,” I admitted with a grin.
“Come on, then.”
It was nearly light on the street, but as we turned off into a narrow courtyard of greasy cobblestones four streets away, the darkness closed in again. Veronica’s house was one of ten or twelve that huddled claustrophobically around the yard with its green and dripping pump. One house was missing, plucked from its neighbours during the bombing of London like a pulled tooth. The bomb had not caused a fire, simply collapsed the structure in on itself, so that the flowery upstairs wallpaper was only now peeling away, and a picture still hung from its hook twenty feet above the ground. I looked at the remaining houses and thought, There will be masses of children behind those small windows, children with sores on their faces and nothing on their feet even in the winter, crowded into rooms with their pregnant, exhausted, anaemic mothers and tubercular grandmothers and the fathers who were gone or drunk more often than not. I suppressed a shudder. This choice of neighbourhood was typically Veronica, a deliberate statement to her family, herself, and the people she was undoubtedly helping—but did it have to be quite such a clear statement? I looked up at the grimy windows, and a thought occurred.
“Ronnie, do you want me to remove enough of this costume to make it obvious that you’re not bringing a man home?”
She turned with the key in her hand and ran her eyes over me, looked up at the surrounding houses, and laughed for a third time, but this was a hard, bitter little noise that astonished me, coming from her.
“Oh, no, don’t worry about that, Mary. Nobody cares.”
She finished with the key, picked up the milk, and led me into a clean, uninspiring hallway, past two rooms furnished with dull, worn chairs and low tables, rooms with bare painted walls, and up a flight of stairs laid with a threadbare, colourless runner. A full, rich Christmas tree rose up beside the stairs, loaded with colourful ornaments and trying hard, and long swags of greenery and holly draped themselves from every protrusion. Instead of being infused with good cheer, however, the dreary rooms served only to depress the decorations, making them look merely tawdry. We went through the locked door at the top and came into a house entirely apart from the drab and depressing ground floor.
The Ronnie Beaconsfield I had known was a lover of beauty who possessed the means of indulging herself, not for the desire of possession, for she was one of the least avaricious people I knew, but for the sheer love of perfection. Her uncle was a duke, her grandfather had been an adviser to Queen Victoria, there were three barristers and a high-court judge in her immediate