Dreaming Of The Bones

“I’m sorry,” he said, taken aback by her intensity. “I didn’t know that’s how you felt. You’ve never said.”

“Those aren’t things that are considered appropriate to say.” Her smile held little humor. “And that makes other women’s stories even more important, including Lydia’s. But if Lydia killed herself, it changes her story. I’m not saying that it makes it invalid, but it does make it a different story.”

“I don’t understand. Surely she would still have accomplished the same things?”

“But they wouldn’t matter in the same way. Suicide is an admission of defeat. It tells us that she couldn’t put all the pieces of her dream together, and if she couldn’t, maybe we can’t, either.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t have told Vic to leave it alone?”

Gemma took a belated sip of her wine. “Not exactly. I’m saying that it doesn’t matter what you said, because Vic needs Lydia not to have committed suicide, and she can’t let it go. And you didn’t see that.”

“What else could I have done?” he said defensively, feeling as though he’d been tried and found wanting. “You were the one who thought I shouldn’t bother with it at all.”

Shrugging, Gemma said, “I’m allowed to change my mind, aren’t I?”

Newnham

30 January 1963

Dearest Mummy,

Sometimes I think this poetry is a curse, not a gift. The words haunt me when I should be sleeping, haunt me when I should be working, and they’re black, cold beasts I can’t tame into acceptable shapes. Six rejections just this week, without even a hint of encouragement. Why can’t I give it up, concentrate on my studies?

Last term’s workload was difficult—this term’s may be insurmountable. If I had been better prepared I might not be floundering so now, trying to make up for the lack of depth and breadth in my reading. And what shall I do with this degree, if I somehow manage to earn one of any distinction? Teach sixth-form girls in some dreary comprehensive, in the hopes that one of them will possess the gift I lacked?

Do you know how many women manage to publish poetry? And of the few that do, most have their work reviled by the critics for being too pretty, too feminine, but if they write anything else it’s said to be unsuitable. If I’d had any sense. I’d have taken that clerk’s job in the Brighton Woolworth’s. I’d be taking the bus home in the rain, warm and dry on the upper deck, not cycling everywhere through slush and sludge, rain cape and boots perpetually soaked. I’d have met some nice fellow and I’d go to the cinema with him on Fridays, and if he were persistent enough I might bring him home for tea. Marriage and babies would lurk in the offing, and these spiky thoughts would not jostle so in my head.

Oh, poor Mummy, forgive me this outpouring of misery. I feel small and mean, burdening you with it, but I simply couldn’t go on without the hope of comfort. Tell me these feelings will pass, that the rain will stop, that my dreadful cold will go away, that someone, somewhere, will publish one of my poems.

Your Lydia

CHAPTER

7

Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes,

And smooth your quiet brow, and fold your thin

dead hands.

RUPERT BROOKE,

from “Day That I Have Loved”

Vic often thought that this was her favorite time, Kit asleep, the house still and quiet except for the occasional creak as it breathed. She sat at the kitchen table with a cup of milk hot from the microwave, for once neither reading nor writing, but simply thinking about her day. This was a habit begun in the last years with Ian as a way of avoiding bed until she knew he was asleep, and now enjoyed for its own sake.

They’d never had the money to do the kitchen up properly, so she’d got creative with paint and jumble sale finds, discovering an unexpected sense of pleasure in the process. Blue on the cabinets, sunflower yellow on the rough plaster walls, junk shop jugs and pitchers on the worktops and windowsill. The Welsh dresser with its blue- and-yellow Italian pottery she’d found for a song at an estate sale, along with the small oak, drop-leaf table and her Tiffany lamp. At least she always thought of it as her Tiffany lamp—it was probably a cheap imitation, but she meant to have it valued some day, just in case.

Her mother, whenever she came to visit, threw up her hands in despair at the sight of Vic’s kitchen. A proponent of hygienic, synthetic surfaces, with a fetish for appliances (her latest acquisition was a rubbish compactor), Eugenia Potts had no patience with her daughter’s contentment. It was a good thing, thought Vic, that she didn’t really want a dishwasher or a refrigerator the size of cave, because without Ian’s salary the possibility of refitting had receded further than ever.

For a moment, she allowed herself the luxury of wondering what her life would have been like if she’d stayed with Duncan. Would they live in the flat he’d described in Hampstead, with its sunset view over the rooftops? Would she be teaching at London University, in a department less difficult? Would she and Duncan have ironed out their differences, she growing less jealous of his work as she became more absorbed in her own?

The one thing she felt quite certain of was that she wouldn’t have begun a biography of Lydia Brooke, and she was beginning to think that might have been a blessing.

Even after so many years apart, it had felt quite odd today to see him with another woman. She hadn’t felt jealous—she had, in fact, found herself unexpectedly drawn to Gemma—but she had experienced a sense of displacement.

Just how honest had she been with herself about her reasons for contacting him? Oh, she’d had legitimate need, and he had been helpful, but now that he’d done as much as he felt he could in the matter of Lydia, she found herself wanting very much to maintain the friendship, for Kit’s sake as well as her own. Kit had few enough male role models, and it was especially important now that Ian—

The phone rang. She lunged for it instinctively, hoping it hadn’t waked Kit. Even as she lifted the handset from