The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [70]
Miss Dace was waiting, and opened the door before they could knock. She was in her forties, and made of bone and muscle, with a fierce face, hooked nose, high cheek-bones and deep-set dark eyes under brows like bristling caterpillars. Her hair looked as though it had undergone intense applications of the curling-tongs, but in fact coiled itself naturally, as though she had African ancestors. She liked to be busy. She was the acting secretary of many groups: the local Theosophists, the local Fabians, the Winchelsea and District Dramatic Society, the Circle of Watercolourists, and a group which worked for women’s suffrage. She had taught at a London girls’ school in her time, and had worked briefly as an assistant almoner in a hospital. She had been very active in the agitation to extend the franchise for local authorities and Poor Law boards to married women, and women who were not home-owners. Last year the Liberal Government had abolished the property qualification for Poor Law boards and had made it possible for married women to stand for election. Miss Dace had rejoiced. She had stood for election herself, and had been defeated by a married woman, Mrs. Phoebe Methley, the wife of a writer, Herbert Methley, who had bought a smallholding near East Guldeford. Miss Dace had had a good Christian upbringing. She tried to feel neither disappointment nor resentment, and turned her attention to the cultural life of the community. She was the custodian of the Fabian book-boxes, which were despatched from London full of challenging and improving reading. She arranged lectures, both for the Fabians and for the Theosophists, and for combined groups of both. Until recently, she had also, through something called the Christo-theosophical Society, tried to arrange discussions of esoteric spiritual life, and especially the female aspect of Christian spirituality. Patty Dace wanted more life and thought it might reside in Theosophy. She had been put out to read, in the pages of Lucifer, a passionate denunciation of Christianity’s attitude to women, written by Blavatsky herself, studded with quotations from the Bible and the Church Fathers about woman as the organ of the devil, the hissing of the serpent, the most dangerous of wild beasts, a scorpion, an asp, a dragon, a daughter of falsehood, a sentinel of hell, the enemy of peace. Mme Blavatsky noted that in the New Testament “The words sister, mother, daughter and wife are only names for degradation and dishonour.”
Patty Dace the feminist, Theosophist and socialist sat down and argued with Patty Dace the vestigial Christian, condemned her nostalgia for the Church, and renounced it. This had led to a certain amount of embarrassment over what she felt to be duplicity in her dealings with Frank Mallett, with whom it was such a pleasure to collaborate in choosing lecturers and publicising lectures. She would, oddly, not have been comforted to know that Frank himself often felt that his faith was erected on shifting and slipping sands. She liked the Church to be there, like the overlarge, ancient solid mediaeval buildings in the marshes, a reality, even if she had to relinquish her connection to it.
She welcomed the young men, and gave them cups of tea, and homemade shortbread biscuits after their ride. They had, as a committee, secured a series of Thursday evenings in a community hall in Lydd, where audiences of local writers and teachers and shopkeepers were augmented by officers and men from the military camp near the town. She put on her spectacles, and said to Frank that they should perhaps