A Monstrous Regiment of Women

The door closed behind Veronica, and I was half-aware of her voice calling out to Marie and then fading down the corridor as I sat and allowed myself to be scrutinised, slowly, thoroughly, impassively. When the blonde woman finally turned away and kicked her shoes off under a low table, I let out the breath I hadn’t realised I was holding and offered up thanks to Holmes’ tutoring, badgering, and endless criticism that had brought me to the place where I might endure such scrutiny without flinching— at least not outwardly.

She padded silently across the thick carpet to the disorder of bottles and chose a glass, some ice, a large dollop from a gin bottle, and a generous splash of tonic. She half-turned to me with a question in her eyebrows, accepted my negative shake without comment, went to a drawer, took out a cigarette case and a matching enamelled matchbox, gathered up an ashtray, and came back to her chair, moving all the while with an unconscious feline grace—that of a small domestic tabby rather than anything more exotic or angular. She tucked her feet under her in the chair precisely like the cat in Mrs Hudson’s kitchen, lit her cigarette, dropped the spent match into the ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair, and filled her lungs deeply before letting the smoke drift slowly from nose and mouth. The first swallow from the glass was equally savoured, and she shut her eyes for a long minute.

When she opened them, the magic had gone out of her, and she was just a small, tired, dishevelled woman in an expensive dress, with a much-needed drink and cigarette to hand. I revised my estimate of her age upward a few years, to nearly forty, and wondered if I ought to leave.

She looked at me again, not searchingly as before, but with the mild distraction of someone confronted by an unexpected and potentially problematic gift horse. When she spoke, it was in an ordinary voice, neither inspiring nor manipulating, as if she had decided to pack away her power from me. I wondered whether this was a deliberate strategy, putting on honesty when confronted by someone upon whom the normal techniques had proven ineffective, or if she had just, for some unknown reason of her own, decided to shed pretence. My perceptions were generally very good, and although it did not feel like deception, she did seem watchful. Hiding behind the truth, perhaps? Anticipation stirred.

Her first words matched her attitude, as if blunt honesty was both her natural response to the problem I represented and a deliberately chosen tactic.

“Why are you here, Mary Russell?”

“Veronica invited me. I will go if you wish.”

She shook her head impatiently, dismissing both my offer and my response.

“People come here for a reason, I have found,” she said half to herself. “People come because they are in need, or because they have something to give. Some come because they want to hurt me. Why have you come?”

Somewhat unsettled, I cast around for an answer.

“I came because my friend needed me,” I finally admitted, and she seemed more willing to accept that.

“Veronica, yes. How did you come to know her?”

“We were neighbours in lodgings in Oxford one year.” I decided I did not need to tell her of the elaborate pranks we had joined forces on, opting for a dignified enterprise instead.

“Ronnie organised a production of Taming of the Shrew for the wounded soldiers who were being housed in the colleges. She also hired a hall for a series of lectures and debates on the Vote”—no need to specify which Vote!—“and dragged me into it. She has a knack for getting others involved—but no doubt you’ve discovered that. Her enthusiasms are contagious, I suppose because they’re based in her innate goodness. She even succeeded in getting me involved in one of the debates, and we became friends. I’m not really sure why.” I was astonished, when I came to a halt, at how wordy I had been and how much of the truth I had given this stranger.

“The attraction of opposites, I see that. Veronica is softer and more generous than is good for her, which I doubt would be said about you. The hard and the soft, power and love, tug strongly at each other, do they not?”

It was said in a mode of casual conversation, and followed by a pull at her glass, but the devastating simplicity of her observations immediately raised my defences. However, it seemed that attack was not her intention, because she went on.

“That is the basis of our evening cycle of services, you might say.” She reflected for a moment. “And of the daytime work, as well.”

“A cycle?” I asked carefully.

“Ah, I see Veronica did not explain much about us.”

“Nothing very coherent. A lot of talk about love and the rights of women.”

She laughed, deep and rich.

“Dear Veronica, she is enthusiastic. Let me see if I can fill in the gaps.” She paused to crush out the cigarette and immediately light another one, squinting through the smoke at me. “The evening services are what I suppose you might call our public events. Quite a few of our members came in originally out of curiosity, and stayed. Mondays, the topic is left general. I talk about any number of things; sometimes we have Bible readings, silent or guided prayer, even a discussion of some political issue currently in the news—I let the Spirit lead me, on Mondays, and it’s usually a small, well-behaved group of friends, like tonight. Thursdays are different. Very different.” She thought about Thursdays for a minute, and whatever her thoughts were, they turned her eyes dark and put a small smile on her full lips, and the magnetically beautiful woman I had seen earlier was there briefly. Then she reached down and flicked her cigarette over the ashtray and looked at me.

“Thursdays, I talk about love. It’s a very popular night. We even see a fair number of men. And then on Saturdays, we talk about the other end of the spectrum: power. Sometimes Saturday meetings get quite political, and a lot of our hotter heads are given free rein. We don’t get many men on Saturdays, and when we do, it’s usually because they want a fight. Saturdays can get very exciting.” She grinned.

“I can imagine,” I said, calling to mind the shouts of the “quiet evening” I had witnessed. “And you have other activities, as well?”

“Oh heavens, the evening services are just the tip. Our goal, simply stated, is to touch everything concerned with the lives of women. Yes”—she laughed—“I know how it sounds, but one has to aim high. We have four areas we’re concentrating on at the moment: literacy, health, safety, and political reform. Veronica is in charge of the reading program, in fact, and she’s doing fine work. She has about eighty women at the moment learning to read and write.”

“Teaching them all herself?” No wonder she was exhausted.

“No, no. All Temple members volunteer a certain amount of time every week to one or another of our projects. Veronica mostly coordinates them, though she, too, does her share of actual teaching. It’s the same in each of the four areas. In the health program, for example, we have a doctor and several nurses who give time, but it’s more a matter of identifying the women in the community who need help and putting them into touch with the right person. A woman with recurring lung infections will be seen by a doctor, but also by a building specialist who will look at her house to see if the ventilation might be improved. A woman with headaches from eyestrain will be given spectacles, and we’ll see if we can find way to put more light into her working area—laying on gas, perhaps, or even electrical lights. A woman ill from exhaustion and nerves who has eleven children will be educated about birth control and enrolled in our nutritional-supplements program along with her children.”

“You haven’t had any problems with the birth-control thing? Legally, I mean?”

“Once or twice. One of our members spent a week behind bars because of it, so we tend to give that information orally now rather than as pamphlets. Ridiculous, but there it is. It’s getting easier, though. In fact, I understand that Dr Stopes— you know her, the Married Love woman?—intends to open a clinic here in London specialising in birth-control methods, sometime this spring. She’s going to come speak to our members next month, if you’re interested.”

I grunted a noncommittal noise; I could just imagine Holmes’ reaction.

“And safety?”

“That was a branch off the health program originally, though now it’s almost as large and certainly causes more headaches for us. We run a shelter—for women and their children who are without a roof or in danger from the father. It is appalling how little help is available for a desperate woman who has no relations to turn to. Violent husbands don’t count as a threat in the eyes of the law,” she commented, her voice controlled but her eyes dark, this time with anger, and I was briefly aware of her once-broken nose. “So two years ago when one of our members left us two large adjoining terrace houses on the corner, we opened them as a shelter and let it be known that any woman, and her children, of course, who needs a warm, dry, safe place is welcome.”

“I can imagine the headaches. I’m surprised you aren’t overrun.”

“We don’t allow them to stay indefinitely. We help them find a job and someone to care for the small children, try to work something out with the husband—the shelter is not meant to be a permanent solution. There are still workhouses for that,” she added with heavy irony, though the hardness of her face bespoke her opinion of the institution.

“Only women, then?”

“Only women. We occasionally get men, who think we’re a soup kitchen, and we give them a meal and send them away. Men have other options. Women need the help of their sisters, and in fact, that to me is one of the most exciting things about what we’re doing, when women of different classes meet and see that we share more similarities than differences, in spite of everything. We are on the edge of a revolution in the way women live in this society, and some of us want to ensure that the changes that are coming will apply to all women, rich and poor alike.”

“Most of the women I saw here tonight, even in the service, seemed far from needy,” I commented.

She refused to be baited, and smiled gently.

“My ministry is twofold. On the one hand are my poorer sisters, whose needs are immediate, even desperate, but relatively straightforward: spectacles, treatment for tuberculosis, warm clothing for their children. On the other hand are the women you saw tonight at the service, as well as those who refer to themselves as the ‘Inner Circle’—young women like yourself who grew into maturity during the War, when it was common to see women doing work that would have been unthinkable ten years before, as well as older women who were running the country five years ago and are now made to feel harridans and harpies for pushing men out of jobs. My task is to bring the two hands together,” She did not literally clasp her own hands, but the speech had the odour of ink about it, and I suspected it was normally accompanied by the theatrical gesture.

“Poor little rich girls,” I murmured.

“Their needs are real,” she said sharply. “Their hunger is no less acute for being spiritual rather than physical. In some ways, it is greater, because there is no cause to point at, nothing to blame but themselves. An empty cupboard is an inescapable fact; an empty heart can only be inferred from the life lived.”

“And you say they lead empty lives,” I said. I was irritated at the cliché, particularly tonight, with the smell of London’s bleakest districts still in my nostrils. I wanted to push her into spontaneity, even if it meant ignoring my own opinions and playing devil’s advocate to the full. “I should doubt that most of the women in this parish would agree with you. Most of them would be very happy to trade their empty cupboards for the trials of education, physical ease, and leisure. It’s hardly 1840 we’re talking about, it is? Or even 1903. This is nearly 1921, and nobody I know is about to be forced back into whalebone corsets and hobble skirts. Why, half of the women here tonight can probably vote.”

“The vote was a sop,” she snapped. “Granting individual slaves their manumission after a lifetime of service doesn’t alter the essential wrongness of the institution of slavery, nor does giving a small number of women the vote adequately compensate the entire sex for their wartime service—to say nothing of millenia of oppression. All the vote did was break up the underlying unity of feminists and allow the factions to disperse. We allowed ourselves to be misled by a sop,” she repeated. This speech was more personal and had its glints of spontaneity, but it was still ready-made—careful words, though with an angry woman behind them.

“So you use these women; you put them to work on your various projects in order to make them feel useful,” I said.

To my surprise, far from taking umbrage at my words, she subsided with a laugh and winked at me conspiratorially.

“Just think of the vast amount of energy out there waiting to be put to use.” She chuckled. “And no man will touch it. No male politician dares.”

“You have political ambitions, then?” The newspaper photograph came back to me. A donation, had it been? To a Lord Mayor?

“I have no ambitions… for myself.”

“But for the church?”

“For the Temple, I will do what needs to be done. Part of that may involve my entering the political arena.”

“Using the vast resources of energy available to you.” I smiled.

“Representing a large number of people, yes.”

“And their bank accounts,” I noted, but she did not rise even to that gibe. Instead, she put on a face as bland as anything Holmes could come up with.

“If you mean the funds our members make available to the Temple, it is true, God has been very good in meeting our needs. Most members tithe; others donate what they can.”

My near accusation bothered her not in the least, and I had the distinct impression that she had searched her own heart on this question and felt certain of the truth in her words. She waited calmly. Her drink was only half-gone—whatever her faults, drunkenness did not seem to be one of them. I changed the subject.

“I was interested in your reading of the text,” I began. “Tell me, was that a personal interpretation of the Creation Story, or was it based on someone else’s work?”

To my astonishment, after all I had asked and intimated in the last few minutes, this apparently innocuous question hit her hard. She sat up, as amazed as if Lady Macbeth had interrupted a peroration to give a cake recipe, and watched me cautiously through narrowed eyes for a moment before an abrupt question was forced out.

“Miss Russell, what newspaper are you with?”

It was my turn to be astonished.

“Newspaper? Good heavens, is that what you thought?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or to be offended—my only contacts with the profession had tended heavily towards the intrusive and ghoulish. It did, however, explain her odd façade of easy intimacy combined with formal speeches. She thought I was an undeclared journalist, using an unknowing acquaintance to get in and prise at The Real Margery Childe. I decided laughter was more called for, and so I laughed, apparently convincingly.

“No, Miss Childe, I’m not a reporter, or a journalist, or anything but a friend of Ronnie Beaconsfield.”

“What do you do, then?”

I wondered briefly at the question, and realised that I didn’t give off the same air of easy affluence that the rest of them had. It was a pleasing thought, that I was not recognisably of the leisured class.

“I’m at Oxford. I do informal tutoring, and a great deal of research.”

“Into what?”

“Bible mostly.”

“I see. You read theology, then?”

“Theology and chemistry.”

“An odd combination,” she said, the usual reaction.

“Not terribly.”

“No?”

“Chemistry involves the workings of the physical universe, theology those of the human universe. There are behaviour patterns common to both.”

She had forgotten both cigarette and drink momentarily, and she seemed to be listening to some inner voice, head tipped.

“I see,” she said again, but I thought she was not speaking of my last sentence. “Yes, I begin to understand. You were interested in the way I read the stories of the Creation of woman. How might you read them?”

“In a very similar fashion, though I imagine we reached the point by rather different means.”

“The means does not matter if the result is the same,” she said dismissively, reaching down to rub the ash from the tip of her cigarette.

“You are wrong.” She looked up, startled more by the edge in my voice than the blunt words themselves. She could not have known that to my mind sloppiness in textual analysis was absolutely unforgivable, far worse than the deliberate falsification of results from a slipshod chemical experiment. I forced a smile to take the sting out of my words, then tried to explain.

“Interpreting the Bible without training is a bit like finding a specific address in a foreign city with neither map nor knowledge of the language. You might stumble across the right answer, but in the meantime you’ve put yourself at the mercy of every ignoramus in town, with no way of telling the savant from the fool. Finding your way through the English Bible, you’re entirely under the tyranny of the translators.”

“Oh, for subtle distinctions perhaps…”

“And blatant mistranslations, and deliberate obliteration of the original meaning.”

“For example?” she asked sceptically.

“Deuteronomy thirty-two verse eighteen,” I said with satisfaction. One single verb in this passage had occupied me and the librarians of the Bodleian for the better part of a month, and its exegesis was one cornerstone of the paper I had just finished and was due to present in a month’s time. I was very proud of this verse. It took her only a moment to pull the words from her memory.

“Of the Rock that begot thee thou art unmindful, and thou hast forgotten God that formed thee.” She sounded slightly puzzled. The passage was hardly controversial, being merely a segment of Moses’ final exhortation to his wayward people, reminding them to turn from pagan practices, back to the Rock that was their God.

“That’s not what it says,” I told her. “Oh, it’s what the Authorised translation says, but it’s not what the original says. The final phrase, ‘formed thee,’ is nowhere in the Hebrew. The verb used is hul, which means ‘to twist.’ Elsewhere, it is used of the movement in a dance, or, as it is here, in childbirth. The verse ought to be translated, ‘You have forgotten the Rock that begot you; you have forgotten the God who writhed in the effort of giving birth to you.’ The purpose of the verse is to remind the people of the intimacy of God’s parenthood, using both the male and the female forms.”

Well, I thought as I watched her face, if the hardened academics react to my paper with even a fraction of her response, it will prove a memorable gathering.

She came out of her chair like a scalded cat, moved across the room, and pounced on a drawer, emerging with a worn volume of soft white leather. She flipped expertly to the place and stared at the words as if she’d expected them to have changed. They had not. She turned and thrust the open book at me accusingly.

“But that’s… That means…”

“Yes,” I said wryly, pleased with the effect my idea had on her. “That means that an entire vocabulary of imagery relating to the maternal side of God has been deliberately obscured.” I watched her try to sort it out, and then I put it into a phrase I would definitely not use in the presentation in Oxford: “God the Mother, hidden for centuries.”

She looked down at the book in her hands as if the ground beneath her feet had, in the blink of an eye, become treacherously soft and unstable. She turned carefully to the drawer, riffled the gold-edged India paper speculatively, and put her Bible away. She returned to her chair a troubled woman and lit another cigarette.

“Is there more of this kind of thing?”

“Considerably more.”

She smoked in silence and squinted through the smoke. “Yes, I see,” she said yet again, her eyes far away. In a minute, she jumped up again and began a prowl around the perimeter of the room, and so strong was the image of cat that I should not have been greatly surprised had she leapt up on the sideboard and threaded her way between the bottles. She came back to her chair and stabbed out her cigarette.

“I see now why you’ve come. You have come to teach me.” I felt my eyebrow go up in a movement that was pure Holmes. “Could you teach me… to read the original, I mean?” she demanded urgently, as if ready to roll up her silken sleeves at that hour and begin.

“Neither Hebrew nor Greek is terribly difficult to learn,” I said noncommittally, then added, “given time.”

“You must show me this ‘God the Mother.’ Why don’t I know about this?” Before I could answer, she went on. “It makes all the difference. There is more, you said?”

“It’s no fluke. Once you’re looking for it, it’s everywhere. Job thirty-eight, Psalm twenty-two, Isaiah sixty-six, Hosea eleven, Isaiah forty-two. And, of course, the Genesis passages you cited tonight.” That gave her pause.

“Yes, of course. But I never thought…” And there was the essence of it, I knew. She had absorbed the words, had hammered a few of them into a shape that suited her purpose, but it had never occurred to her to question the underlying themes, to look for patterns other than those handed down over the centuries, patterns that did not include the uncomfortable idea of the motherhood of the Divine. This woman was no deep thinker; the life of the intellect was foreign to her, and whatever her prayers and contemplations were, they were not analytical. Nonetheless, she was like a substance in a beaker, ripe for the transformation of a catalysing agent. And I had just dropped the first measure of that reagent into her quick, hungry mind. Time to stand back.

As if she had heard my thoughts, she raised her hand to stop me from withdrawing, then dropped it with a rueful smile.

“I’m sorry, I get too excited about things and want to have it all, now. You have your own work to do.” The smile became wistful. “All the same, I’d appreciate any help you might give me. If there are any books… You can see how important it could be to me, though I realise you haven’t the time to wait around here and be my tutor.”

I protested that I should be happy to help and that the term’s responsibilities had not yet taken hold, and only when the words had left my mouth did I realise that her humility had trapped me as her authority could not, and her expressions of gratitude at my offer had an edge of triumph. Reluctantly, disarmed, I gave her my wry smile, and she laughed.

“I like you, Mary Russell. Please, do come and teach me. I think I shall learn a great deal from you. Even if it isn’t about Hebrew or theology.”

I laughed then, and she rose and pulled her shoes out from under the chairside table, and we walked through the now-silent maze to the entrance. She talked easily, mostly about flowers and the fact that she no longer had time for gardening, saying possibly that was why her friends (her followers) plied her with roses, though it still made her uncomfortable to accept them.

She was friendly and relaxed and self-deprecating, but I could not feel entirely at ease with her. Precisely what it was about her that I found unsettling, I could not pin down. Partly, it was the childlike size of her, which made me tower awkwardly in my ill-fitting clothes. Partly, it was the way she walked so very close, her shoulder occasionally brushing my sleeve, so that I breathed in her not-unattractive aroma of sweat and hot silk and some subtle and musky perfume. Partly, it was the awareness of how easily she had found a weakness in my ready defences and made me agree to help her. Mostly, though, it was an intangible, a low, pulsing wave of fascination and discomfiture that continued, even now, to radiate from her like some fabulous tropical flower whose heavenly fragrance mesmerises the insects on which it feeds.

It was with relief that I wished her a good night. However, the relief was tempered by a certain wistful regret, and by the awareness that I had not entirely escaped the trap after all.

The impassive door guard got up from his chair and his yellow-back novel to unlock the wide door for me. It was raining still, and though the street was well lit, it was quite deserted.

I hesitated for a moment, half-tempted to telephone for a cab, but the image of Margery Childe as a carnivorous plant and a waft of disapproval from the guard came together, and I realised that despite the wet, I wanted to be out of the building, away from the provocative scent and into the clean shock of the night. I pulled my thin borrowed coat up around my neck, settled my hat low over my spectacles, and set out resolutely towards the brighter lights at the end of the street.

Halfway there, the cloy had rinsed away. The rain had also gained both my shoulder blades and the inside of my shoes, and I was occupied with mordant thoughts about the English climate and ambiguous thoughts about the woman I had left, when a surreptitious movement from inside the unlit doorway I was passing brought me whirling around in a crouch. A tall, indistinct figure loomed up, darkness in a dark place, with a pale slash the only indication of its face. It whispered at me, a sly and salacious hiss that oozed suggestively into the night, barely above the sound of the rain.

“Pretty young ladies like you have no business on the streets at this time of night.”

I froze, but before the first immediate frisson of shock could pass on into gooseflesh, I straightened and began to laugh in relief.

“Holmes! Good God, what on earth are you doing here?”

He gathered his dark garments around him and stepped into the dim light, looking for all the world like some Byronic version of a vampire. (Thirty years before, I thought briefly, he’d have been run in, or strung up, for Jack the Ripper.) His face was largely in the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat, but one corner of his thin mouth was turned up in a familiar sardonic smile. When he spoke, his tones were half an octave lower than usual, which meant that he was feeling inordinately content with life.

“A whim, Russell,” he said, and tilted his head back so I might see his eyes, crinkled in silent laughter. “Merely a whim.”