Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [122]
A whisper of approval slipped past his professional face at my final phrase; I gave him a sympathetic smile and left him to his polishing.
It took me a while on the telephone (an instrument of white and gilt) but I succeeded in locating the woman I sought. She was a dispatch rider in London at the time I had met her, a suffragette doing war service, but she had been a driver in Belgium until a stray shell had hit her ambulance, killing the other VAD attendant and the patients they were transporting. She herself had been made deaf by the explosion, and although a certain amount of hearing had returned, she blithely declared that near-deafness was an advantage to a London driver. Having ridden pillion with her once and been fully aware of the curses on our trail, I could only agree.
Gwyneth Claypool was, her colleague who answered the telephone told me, currently in a meeting with the head teachers of several schools, which was due to finish at four o’clock but would probably go on until closer to five. She gave me the address and rang off. I raided my wardrobe for a dress suitable both for confronting feminists and sitting in the women’s dining room at Simpson’s, had Q ring for a taxi, and left, promising to return for further discussions on the house question as soon as I could.
London was cold and inhospitable, a dreary rain splashing against the taxi’s curtains and dribbling off of the passing hats and umbrellas. At the address I had been given, an assistant guarding the door refused to let me out of the freezing-cold entrance foyer and wouldn’t think of disturbing the meeting with a message. So I took a seat in the least draughty corner I could find, and slowly congealed inside my fur-lined coat.
Gwyneth’s voice half an hour later crackled through the building and rescued me from my icy perch. It had always been loud, I suspect even before her deafness set in, and the silent building quivered in reaction; the tinkle of shattering icicles seemed to follow it. She left the meeting as no doubt she had begun it, commanding action.
“—and I think you’ll find the situation much improved. Girls that age need a goal, or they seek out all kinds of trouble. We’ll meet again in the new year, see how it’s coming along.”
I unfolded myself from my cramped huddle and stumbled forward on numb feet to intercept her. She spotted me, squinted in uncertainty; then her face opened in a wide smile and she boomed a greeting across the echoing space.
“Hello, Gwyn,” I returned.
“Mary! What are you doing here? Looking for me? But why in heaven’s name didn’t you come and find me—you must be in an advanced stage of ice cube–ism. Come along; we’ll find a warm corner with drinks in it and bemoan the state of the world.”
Merely being in Gwyneth Claypool’s presence tended to have a warming effect on a person, even before she thrust into my hand a drink she’d bullied the barman into constructing. It looked like pond scum, smelt of the Indies, and went down with a jolt that tingled the toes and lifted the scalp.
“Lord, Gwyn!” I gasped. “What is this?”
“Rum butter. Does the trick, doesn’t it? Wish I’d known about it in 1914—if we’d issued the men rum in this form, they’d have overrun the Germans by Christmas.”
I loosened my coat and removed my gloves and hat, and set about getting the drink inside me, a quarter-teaspoon at a sip, while Gwyn and I caught each other up on our lives since we’d last met nearly three years earlier.
“Still married?” she shouted, raising the eyebrows of the other customers.
“Indeed I am. And you?”
“No time, no time for all the nonsense.”
So I asked her what she did have time for and she told me of her many projects related to the rights of women, and we talked of that and this and of times past and the feebleness of the present. No, she no longer sped