‘The Fairy?’
‘Yes. Her they call the Fairy. Oh my God, a terrible Inglesaccia! She is the head of our police, the Institutional Police. Ecco, she come. I will present you. Miss Hardcastle, permit that I present to you Mr Studdock.’
Mark found himself writhing from the stoker’s or carter’s hand-grip of a big woman in a black, short-skirted uniform. Despite a bust that would have done credit to a Victorian barmaid, she was rather thickly built than fat and her iron-grey hair was cropped short. Her face was square, stern and pale, and her voice deep. A smudge of lipstick laid on with violent inattention to the real shape of her mouth was her only concession to fashion and she rolled or chewed a long black cheroot, unlit, between her teeth. As she talked she had a habit of removing this, staring intently at the mixture of lipstick and saliva on its mangled end, and then replacing it more firmly than before. She sat down immediately in a chair close to where Mark was standing, flung her right leg over one of the arms, and fixed him with a gaze of cold intimacy.
Click–clack, distinct in the silence, where Jane stood waiting, came the tread of the person on the other side of the wall. Then the door opened and Jane found herself facing a tall woman of about her own age. This person looked at her with keen, non-committal eyes.
‘Does a Miss Ironwood live here?’ said Jane.
‘Yes,’ said the other girl, neither opening the door any further nor standing aside.
‘I want to see her, please,’ said Jane.
‘Have you an appointment?’ said the tall woman.
‘Well, not exactly,’ said Jane. ‘I was directed here by Dr Dimble who knows Miss Ironwood. He said I shouldn’t need an appointment.’
‘Oh, if you’re from Dr Dimble that is another matter,’ said the woman. ‘Come in. Now wait a moment while I attend to this lock. That’s better. Now we’re all right. There’s not room for two on this path so you must excuse me if I go first.’
The woman led her along a brick path beside a wall on which fruit trees were growing, and then to the left along a mossy path with gooseberry bushes on each side. Then came a little lawn with a see-saw in the middle of it, and beyond that a greenhouse. Here they found themselves in the sort of hamlet that sometimes occurs in the purlieus of a large garden–walking in fact down a little street which had a barn and a stable on one side and, on the other, a second greenhouse, and a potting shed and a pigstye–inhabited, as the grunts and the not wholly agreeable smell informed her. After that were narrow paths across a vegetable garden that seemed to be on a fairly steep hillside, and then, rose bushes, all stiff and prickly in their winter garb. At one place, they were going along a path made of single planks. This reminded Jane of something. It was a very large garden. It was like–like–yes, now she had it: it was like the garden in Peter Rabbit. Or was it like the garden in the Romance of the Rose? No, not in the least like really. Or like Klingsor’s garden? Or the garden in Alice? Or like the garden on the top of some Mesopotamian ziggurat which had probably given rise to the whole legend of Paradise? Or simply like all walled gardens? Freud said we liked gardens because they were symbols of the female body. But that must be a man’s point of view. Presumably gardens meant something different in women’s dreams. Or did they? Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way? A sentence rose to her memory. ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god.’ Where on earth had she read that? And, incidentally, what frightful nonsense she had been thinking for the last minute or so! She shook off all these ideas about gardens and determined to pull herself together. A curious feeling that she was now on hostile, or at least alien, ground warned her to keep all her wits about her. At that moment, they suddenly emerged from between plantations of rhododendron and laurel, and found themselves at a small side door, flanked by a water butt, in the long wall of a large house. Just as they did so a window clapped shut upstairs.
A minute or two later Jane was sitting waiting in a large sparely furnished room with a shut stove to warm it. Most of the floor was bare, and the walls, above the waist-high wainscotting, were of greyish white plaster, so that the whole effect was faintly austere and conventual. The tall woman’s tread died away in the passages and the room became very quiet when it had done so. Occasionally the cawing of rooks could be heard. ‘I’ve let myself in for it now,’ thought Jane. ‘I shall have to tell this woman that dream and she’ll ask all sorts of questions.’ She considered herself, in general, a modern person who could talk without embarrassment of anything, but it began to look quite different as she sat in that room. All sorts of secret reservations in her programme of frankness–things which, she now realised, she had set apart as never to be told –came creeping back into consciousness. It was surprising that very few of them were connected with sex. ‘In dentists’,’ said Jane, ‘they at least leave illustrated papers in the waiting room.’ She got up and opened the one book that lay on the table in the middle of the room. Instantly her eyes lit on the following words: ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness. As obedience is the stairway of pleasure, so humility is the–’
At that moment the door was suddenly opened. Jane turned crimson as she shut the book and looked up. The same girl who had first let her in had apparently just opened the door and was still standing in the doorway. Jane now conceived for her that almost passionate admiration which women, more often than is supposed, feel for other women whose beauty is not of their own type. It would be nice, Jane thought, to be like that–so straight, so forthright, so valiant, so fit to be mounted on a horse, and so divinely tall.
‘Is–is Miss Ironwood in?’ said Jane.
‘Are you Mrs Studdock?’ said the girl.
‘Yes,’ said Jane.
‘I will bring you to her at once,’ said the other. ‘We have been expecting you. My name is Camilla–Camilla Denniston.’
Jane followed her. From the narrowness and plainness of the passages, Jane judged that they were still in the back parts of the house, and that, if so, it must be a very large house indeed. They went a long way before Camilla knocked at a door and stood aside for Jane to enter, after saying in a low, clear voice (‘like a servant’, Jane thought), ‘She has come.’ And Jane went in; and there was Miss Ironwood dressed all in black and sitting with her hands folded on her knees, just as Jane had seen her when dreaming–if she were dreaming–last night in the flat.
‘Sit down, young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood.
The hands which were folded on her knees were very big and bony though they did not suggest coarseness, and even when seated Miss Ironwood was extremely tall. Everything about her was big–the nose, the unsmiling lips, and the grey eyes. She was perhaps nearer sixty than fifty. There was an atmosphere in the room which Jane found uncongenial.
‘What is your name, young lady?’ said Miss Ironwood, taking up a pencil and a notebook.
‘Jane Studdock.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does your husband know you have come to us?’
‘No.’
‘And your age, if you please?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘And now,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘what have you to tell me?’
Jane