Kincaid stopped and consulted his pocket map of Cambridge. To his right a lane led to an arched bridge over the river, and Vic’s college lay just the other side. He took the turning, and when he reached the summit of the bridge he paused for a moment and leaned on the railing, gazing downstream at the willows, whose drooping fronds reached out to touch their own reflections. The tightly furled pale yellow buds dotting the branches might have been painted there by Seurat, and the tethered punts provided contrast, solid blocks of green and umber, gently rocking.
Across the river a sturdy redbrick building stood guard over a walled garden. It would be All Saints’ Fellows Garden, he supposed, thinking it unlikely that the dons would allow mere students the best view.
As he turned to continue on his way, a bicycle whizzed soundlessly by him, nearly clipping his shoulder. He went on more warily after that, staying close to the railing and checking behind him for oncoming cyclists. The lane narrowed the other side of the bridge, with the walls of All Saints’ rising on the right and those of Trinity College on the left. At the first All Saints’ gate he stopped and peered into the manicured quad curiously. Didn’t Lydia’s file mention that the Nathan Winter who discovered her body was a don at All Saints’? And hadn’t Vic mentioned a friend called Nathan? Cambridge was indeed a small world, he thought, if the two were the same, and he wondered if Vic had met him in the course of her college duties, or as a result of her research on Lydia Brooke. Winter was a botanist, according to the file, and he vaguely remembered Vic referring to Nathan when they’d talked about her garden. It seemed a bit odd, now that he thought of it, that Lydia had named a botanist as her literary executor.
He shrugged and walked on, rounding the corner into Trinity Lane. And yet there was something odder still, he thought as he went over his conversation with Vic. He could only recall her mentioning one marriage, and that quite early in Lydia’s life. Why would Lydia have left everything to a man from whom she’d been divorced for almost twenty years?
He hugged the wall as another cluster of cyclists shot by, then he stumbled into a bicycle left standing outside a shop. Bloody bikes, he thought. You could hardly move for them in this town.
Newnham
16 November 1961
Darling Mother,
Your birthday gift was much appreciated, and was just enough to purchase a good secondhand bike. It has a few dents in the fenders and scrapes in the paint, but those just add character in my opinion. You’d be proud of me—I’ve got quite good already, and cycle my way round almost as easily as if I were navigating the lanes at home on Auntie Nan’s old clunker. I was sure you wouldn’t mind my spending the money before my actual birthday, as the bike was so sorely needed.
I can’t imagine Cambridge without bicycles. They fly by, the student’s black gowns flapping like crows’ wings, or stand riderless, clumped together in mute and inebriated herds. Even if undergraduates were allowed cars, there would be no place to park them, so I suppose the system works rather well.
Thanks to the bike I venture a bit farther afield each day, so that I am beginning to feel I own this place, with its narrow twisty streets and forests of chimney pots. I seem to find a fascinating little shop round every new corner. I gaze at knitting wools, and jumpers, and cookware, but I spend my pocket money in the secondhand bookshops. I love the dry, musty smell of the volumes, the tissue-thin feel of the paper. Even the typefaces speak of vanished elegance. Already the books are accumulating in my room, and nothing, I think, makes a place more like home. In the evenings I curl up in my window seat and look out over the rooftops as the light fades. Sometimes I read, sometimes I just hold a book, and I feel the strongest sense of contented elation.
If it sounds as though I’ve been leading a solitary life, I assure you that’s not the case. Cambridge has societies representing everything from doily making to penguin equality—well, maybe they’re not quite that outrageous, but some of them are certainly bizarre—and they are all enthusiastically recruiting. The major inducement at these functions is free drink, so one has to be rather carefully abstemious, and not carry one’s checkbook just in case one is too easily persuaded. The only thing that does NOT seem to be well represented is writing, but I’m fast making like-minded friends and perhaps we can create our own sort of society. In the meantime I am seriously considering joining the University paper. That should at least give me a creative outlet until I can schedule time for my own writing.
I’ve been invited out and about so much that I’ve decided it’s time I should reciprocate, so therefore I’m hosting my first sherry party in my room on Thursday. I’ve invited Adam, the boy I told you about meeting at King’s. He’s a Trinity man, reading philosophy, and he seems to see poetry primarily as a vehicle for expressing social views. On this matter we have already had some wonderfully heated discussions.
Adam took me to a Labour Club dance last Saturday, where I met a delightful boy called Nathan, whom I’ve invited as well. He’s sturdily built, with fair skin, dark hair, and the merriest brown eyes I’ve ever seen. A natural sciences student, he means to be a poet as well as a botanist, in the manner of Loren Eisley.
Daphne from across the hall will make up a fourth, and I intend to serve them decent sherry and biscuits, and feel oh so sophisticated.
And in case you think from this account that I’ve done nothing but swan about, I assure you, Mummy dear, that I have been a model student. I’ve chosen the three exams I will read for, and have begun the lectures Miss Barrett and I decided would be most helpful in preparing me. My lecture schedule is about eleven hours during the week and includes such luminaries as F. R. Leavis on criticism, and I must admit I feel quite intimidated, being lectured to by men whose books are filling my shelves. Most of my lectures are in the morning, and there are surprisingly few women. I usually cycle back to Newnham for lunch in Hall, then most afternoons are divided between supervisions and reading either in the library or in my room. Such order makes me feel as though I might possibly grasp all this, if only I am disciplined and dedicated enough.
I’ve chosen to celebrate my birthday this evening alone in my room. This is not because I’m feeling sorry for myself, mind you, but because this is the way I feel closest to home, and you. It’s a lovely crisp evening with the hint of wood smoke in the air, and I picture you and Nan sitting by the fire after tea, reading, talking now and again, perhaps deciding whether or not to make cocoa and listen to a program on the wireless. I know your thoughts are reaching out to me as mine are reaching out to you, and I think if I close my eyes and concentrate hard enough I could almost… be there.
Love,
Lydia
Vic pulled her old cardigan from the hook and slipped out the back door as soundlessly as possible, reminding herself to lubricate the hinges. She’d tucked Kit into bed at ten, amid the nightly routine of his protests. He thought eleven much too grown up to have a set bedtime, in spite of the fact that if she let him stay up much past ten o’clock, he’d sleep straight through his alarm the next morning.
Shrugging into her cardigan, Vic stood on the terrace a moment, looking up at the sky. The clear day had become a crisp night, but the stars looked blurred round the edges from moisture in the air, and to the north they
