mind between the boy in Lydia’s letters and the man sitting across from her. “I think it’s important I make my position clear to you. I don’t intend to focus on the emotional difficulties in Lydia’s life, but I can’t gloss over them, either. There’s not much point in my writing this book if I don’t attempt to portray Lydia as a whole person. Either you take Darcy’s deconstructionist view and hold that no artist’s life is relevant to his work because no one’s life is relevant, period, but is merely a feeble construction by the ego to camouflage our inadequacies …”
Vic took a sip of sherry to wet her lips and continued, “… or you decide that art, or in this case poetry, springs from life and experience and is only truly meaningful in that context. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the power of language—that’s what draws us to poetry in the first place—but I believe that if you see it only as an exercise in style and imagery, you create a moral vacuum.” She found she’d sat so far forwards that she was in danger of sliding off her chair, and that she’d clenched her fingers round the stem of her sherry glass. Setting the glass carefully on the butler’s table, she sat back and said, “I’m sorry. That’s my soapbox, I’m afraid, and I do tend to get a bit carried away.”
“That’s quite all right.” Adam reached out and refilled her glass without asking. “For a moment, I thought I was at college again. We used to have the most marvelous talks. Sometimes we’d walk all night in the courts and along the river, and we debated things with such passion. We thought that we were revolutionaries, that we would change the world.” He said this without cynicism or bitterness, and just for an instant Vic saw him as he must have been, an innocent beneath the sophisticated trappings of a university undergraduate. Was that what had drawn Lydia to him?
“You came from a village, too, didn’t you? Like Lydia.”
Adam smiled. “Only mine was in Hampshire, and had no literary distinction. I remember Lydia telling me the night I met her that she came from a place quite near Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s house. She was quite fascinated by Virginia Woolf.”
“Do you suppose that was the beginning of her interest in Rupert Brooke?”
“It could have sparked it, certainly. She’d read everything she could get her hands on about Bloomsbury, and would have come across a multitude of references to him, even though he was never officially a member of that group.”
A gust of wind rattled the casements behind the red velvet curtains and Vic took another warming sip of sherry. “Bloomsbury, the Neo-Pagans… Why do you suppose Lydia was so drawn to the idea of an intellectually compatible group?”
Adam shifted and recrossed his long legs, and Vic saw that his black lace-up shoes were scuffed and worn down at the heel. “Her background provides the obvious explanation. A fatherless only child growing up in a small village… If she had any real friends, she never spoke of them, so I suppose from the time she learned to read she longed for that sort of companionship.”
“And her mother? Was Lydia really as dutiful a daughter as she sounds in her letters?”
“They had an odd relationship.” Adam held up a hand as if to stop an expected response. “And I don’t mean in the sense that it was unhealthy, although nowadays any parent-child relationship seems to be suspect. They were more like sisters, or friends, and if Lydia felt she’d been pressured to live out her mother’s dreams, she never showed any obvious resentment.”
“She was a schoolteacher, wasn’t she?” Vic prompted, although she knew all the recorded details of Mary Brooke’s life.
“A very bright girl, apparently, who’d earned a place at Oxford before the war,” said Adam. “But she didn’t take it up. She stayed at home and married her childhood sweetheart, afraid he wouldn’t come back from France—”
“And he didn’t,” Vic finished for him, and sighed. “I wonder if she ever regretted her choice.”
“She’d not have had Lydia,” Adam said reasonably, as if that alternative were unthinkable. “What else would you like to know?” He cast a surreptitious glance at his watch, and Vic suspected he had another appointment but was too tactful to say so.
“The impossible.” Smiling at Adam’s startled expression, Vic said softly, “You see, I want to know what she was
Adam looked past her, and after a moment he said, “That was the first thing one noticed about her—her voice. She was small and quick, with a dancer’s litheness and that wonderful dark, wavy hair cut in a twenties bob—but when she spoke you forgot everything else.” He smiled at an image Vic couldn’t see. “She sounded as though she’d sung in every smoky bar from Casablanca to Soho. It made her seem exotic, and yet beneath the huskiness you could hear the Sussex village.”
“Still endearingly English?”
Adam laughed. “Exactly. But that’s not what you want to know, is it? How she looked, I mean.” Pausing, he refilled his glass and took a small sip. “How can I possibly condense Lydia?”
“Pick an adjective,” suggested Vic. “Just off the top of your head, without thinking about it.”
“Parlor games?” Adam sounded dubious.
“You think that doesn’t sound suitably academic? Think of it as a poet’s game,” Vic challenged him. “After all, you were a poet, too.”
Adam made a rueful grimace. “But not a very good one, I’m afraid. All right, I’ll give it a try.” He frowned and thought for a moment. “Intense. Moody, funny, bright, but most of all, intense. Intense about loves and hates—and especially intense about work.”
Nodding, Vic gathered her courage to venture into painful territory. “You kept up with one another, didn’t you, after her separation from Morgan? I know,” she added carefully, “that it was you who found her, and saved her, that first time. What I don’t know is whether you had any idea what she meant to do.”
“She certainly didn’t threaten suicide, if that’s what you mean. Didn’t even hint at it. But…”
Vic felt her heartbeat quicken. “But her behavior wasn’t normal, was it? How was she different?”
“Calm,” said Adam. “Much too calm, in a dazed sort of way, but I didn’t realize then. She’d forget what she was saying in the midst of a sentence, and then she’d smile.” He shook his head. “I should have known—”
“How could you?” Vic protested. “Unless you’d had some experience dealing with depression.”
