Chapter Fifteen 1902 #2
‘The Englishwoman’s Review. I plan to write something in support of the rational dress movement, too,’ she said.
‘Did you hear about that latest young lady in Esher, who just dropped dead? Laced up too tight. She bent over to pick up a kitten and ruptured her spleen – a simply ludicrous way to die. And you, Mr Meriwether? What will you write next?’
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ he said, then blurted out: ‘I have the outline of a book in mind – just rough notes, as yet. A collection of essays using specific case histories to illustrate our country’s gravest social and legal injustices.’
He felt faintly ridiculous to presume he could author a book, so he hadn’t told anyone about it until then. But he was caught out by the unexpected urge to impress Mary Gladwell.
‘With an eye to encouraging reform, of course,’ he finished.
‘That sounds very much the sort of book that ought to be written,’ Mary said earnestly.
‘Well. Perhaps. There never seems enough time to make a start.’
‘I’ve always found that time expands to fit whatever you put into it.’ She smiled. ‘But you must come to dinner one evening – I wouldn’t dare call us a salon, but we usually have a stimulating time of it, don’t we, Mr Armstrong?’
‘Without fail,’ Dennis agreed.
Toby moved into Dennis’s apartment two weeks later.
It occupied the upper two floors of a spacious four-storey building at the top end of Fetter Lane.
They had a sitting room and eating room on the lower floor, and a bedroom each on the floor above, with a bathroom crammed into what had been a linen cupboard.
There wasn’t actually room for a tub, but there was a water closet that flushed, and a basin with taps.
Toby struggled with the idea of emptying his bowels indoors.
It seemed unhygienic, and more than a little unseemly. It was, however, considerably warmer.
The apartment wasn’t grand, but it was grander than anywhere Toby had lived before.
He’d acquired a few more pieces of furniture, but his room remained sparse and functional.
What he did have looked shabby alongside the ornate marble mantelpiece, and the heavy curtains with their pattern of heraldic beasts.
Below them lived their landlord, a retired army colonel, who liked to play laments on the bagpipes on Sunday mornings; and at the back was a small apartment for the live-in housekeeper, who was indeed excellent with pastry.
Toby looked around his new home, and saw that he was coming up in the world.
In due course, an invitation arrived to dine with Mary Gladwell at her well-appointed Chelsea townhouse. Toby was relieved to see that Dennis had one too. However confident he was now in his work, he still hated to walk into a social gathering knowing nobody.
‘Where’s Mr Gladwell?’ he asked, as they jumped aboard a tram.
‘Died of his heart,’ Dennis said. ‘Congenital. He was only twenty-two at the time. They married young – childhood sweethearts.’
The term caused Toby a barely-there memory of hurt.
‘He left her with stacks of money – not that she was exactly destitute beforehand. She’s from old money, in Surrey. Then her parents were shipwrecked off the coast of Rimini, and Mary inherited the entire estate.’
‘A wealthy heiress, no less.’
‘The genuine article,’ Dennis agreed. ‘Mary has money, property, and the freedom to decide what she wants to do with it all. And she’s done a tremendous number of things. She’s terribly clever, you know.’
‘I’d gathered that.’
‘Very determined, too,’ Dennis added, with a smile. Toby began to suspect that his friend was enjoying a private joke at Toby’s expense.
‘What is it?’
‘What’s what?’ All innocence.
Mary’s home was fully staffed and lavish, with – to Toby’s eye – far too many things in it, and more yards of fabric than could possibly be necessary for the exclusion of light or draughts.
Swags and bunches and festoons of fabric; damask on the walls; velvet on the furniture; embroidered cushions; twisted silk ropes and tassels everywhere.
‘You must wake from nightmares about moths,’ Toby said, after an initial glass of champagne had gone straight to his head.
‘Sometimes,’ Mary agreed. ‘But I shan’t take tips on decoration from a man – least of all one who just dropped the end of his cigarillo into Great-uncle Cedric’s mortal remains.’
‘Oh, good Lord.’
Toby was mortified – the urn had looked very like an ash-tray – but Mary only laughed.
‘Don’t upset yourself, Mr Meriwether – the old dear soul loved tobacco.’
Mary’s circle were all thinkers or writers of one kind or another. Toby slotted in neatly enough, and found himself enjoying the evening.
‘Aren’t you the fellow who got shot by the Right Honourable Member for Greenwich?’ someone asked him, once the wine had loosened everyone’s tongues.
Toby smiled. ‘I’m still standing. One shouldn’t believe everything one hears.’
The other guest cocked his head. ‘I didn’t hear a denial in there. Did anyone else?’
‘Havelock Pridde?’ Mary said. ‘I know him reasonably well, though I’d rather I didn’t. I’m Lady Captain of the Hampstead Golf Club. He, unfortunately, is the Gentlemen’s Captain. I find him so infuriating on the shortcomings of my sex that I challenged him to a round of nine holes last year.’
‘Please tell us that you beat him, Mary?’
‘Alas, no. He has a one-hundred-and-forty-yard drive. But I did come in under par, at least.’
‘I can’t imagine he was gracious in victory?’ Toby said.
‘He was insufferable.’ Mary sighed. ‘I was sorely tempted to brain him with my wedge.’
‘No court in the land would have convicted you, Mrs Gladwell.’
She smiled at him. ‘Would that that were true.’
Later on they moved to a cavernous drawing room, and Toby studied a series of pictures of ancient cities in the Levant: Palmyra, Samaria, Jerusalem and Petra.
‘Have you travelled much, Mr Meriwether?’ Mary asked, appearing at his side.
‘No.’ Toby pulled a wry face. ‘The sons of country schoolmasters tend not to.’
‘Ah. Well, should you ever get the chance, it is a wonderful thing. One returns not quite the same person as when one left.’
‘You mean to say you’ve been to all these places?’
‘I drew these pictures from life, Mr Meriwether.’
‘Good Lord.’ He was stunned. ‘They’re . . . really very good.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Wasn’t it terribly hard going, for a—’ Toby bit his tongue.
‘For a woman?’ She arched an eyebrow at him. ‘No, not particularly. I went with a large train of mules and porters, to carry the expedition’s camping equipment. We had a full kitchen array, and a bathing tent. It was perfectly comfortable.’
‘But . . . the language . . .’ Toby floundered.
‘There are local guides one can hire, who can translate,’ she said. ‘Though, in fact, I studied Arabic before I went. Just in case.’
‘You speak Arabic?’
‘Enough to get by in a tight spot,’ she said modestly.
‘Have you heard of the antiquarian Timothy Crudge? He’s explored a good deal of the archaeology of that area.’
‘Yes – I’m sure I’ve read something of his.’
‘He’s a . . . family friend,’ Toby said. ‘Left-leaning. He dabbles, politically, though I don’t think he has any real investment in it. But he turns up at meetings here and there – I could introduce you, if you’d like?’
‘I should like it very much, thank you.’
There was a pause, and Toby looked again at Mary’s drawings. Ancient temple walls with broken pillars, and men in their desert robes, all captured with a few deft lines of the pencil.
‘Mesopotamia,’ he murmured.
‘Well, no. Not really,’ Mary said.
‘No, I— I was thinking of somebody I used to know. She always wanted to travel to Mesopotamia. Though I don’t suppose she ever did.’
‘Why not?’
Toby looked down at his glass. ‘She got married. Had children. The usual things women do.’
‘Ah. You mean the usual things women are constrained to do.’
‘You can’t imagine that every woman would be off exploring the desert or . . . or . . . climbing the Matterhorn, if they only had the time and resources you have?’
‘Oh, I don’t think it, Mr Meriwether, I know it. Not the desert, necessarily, but whatever their equivalent passion might be.’
Toby smiled, not quite believing her. He thought Mary must be an exceptional sort of woman, to do all the bold and sometimes outlandish things she did.
But could that be wrong? Perhaps, given a similar freedom, more women would be like her – adventurous, autodidactic, politically astute.
The idea was unsettling. Like one of those optical illusions – a drawing that looked like a vase but transformed into two faces in profile without you moving your eyes one bit.
The realisation that you’d been looking at it all wrong, or from one side only.
‘Well, perhaps you could put in a word for your friend with Timothy Crudge?’ Mary said. Toby stared at her blankly. ‘Perhaps he might find a place for her on his next expedition, if she’s a useful sort?’
‘Oh, I see. Yes. Perhaps.’
At home, Toby rooted around in the cupboard under the stairs, moving clothes airers and broken lamps and shoes waiting to be re-soled, until he was able to drag out his old university trunk.
In it was his notebook of Hallewell Castle’s symbols.
In it were Theo’s unopened letters. He hadn’t looked at them, or even thought about them, in a very long time.
Now he took them to the table in the front window of his room, and poured himself a glass of wine.
He counted the envelopes: thirty-seven, in total; the first from before he’d even left for Durham, the last – he squinted at the postmark – from June 1892.
A decade ago. Of course, she could hardly have kept writing to him once she was married.