The front door creaked and Vic looked up from her desk, listening. She glanced at the clock. It must have been the wind, she thought—she had half an hour yet before Kit should be home from school.
When the second supervision of her Monday afternoon schedule had canceled due to flu, she’d taken advantage of the opportunity to come home early and put in an extra hour’s work. She’d cleared a space on her desk and laid Lydia’s manuscript pages out like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, shuffling and reshuffling the order of the poems.
That they were good she had no doubt—brilliant, even—a final step in the evolution of Lydia’s work. The poems reached back, integrating elements from her early, mythically themed poetry with the later confessional style, and in doing so achieved a new balance. And when these missing poems were added to the ones published in her last volume, the book gained a wholeness, a sort of unity not evident in her work before.
Vic would see that the book was published as it should have been, a testament to Lydia’s talent.
But there was something more, she thought as she swapped two of the poems again, a feeling that there was a sequence, a pattern to them that kept shifting just out of her mind’s reach. Perhaps if she read them once more, in a slightly different order—
The door slammed, Kit’s signature, and a moment later she heard the thud of his backpack hitting the floor outside her study. “Hi, sweetheart,” she said, not looking up. “How was school?”
No answer. She turned and saw Kit standing in the doorway, face set in a sullen scowl. Although he suffered from the occasional preadolescent mood, he was normally a good-natured child, and particularly boisterous when let out of school for the day. “What’s the matter, love?” Vic asked, concerned. “Are you all right?”
He shrugged and didn’t speak.
All right, thought Vic, try another tactic. She took off her glasses and stretched. “Bad day?” she asked mildly.
Another shrug. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Me, too,” she said as if he’d answered. “Maybe we’d both feel better if we took a walk. What do you say?”
This time she thought the shrug looked a bit more positive.
“Want a snack first?” she asked, and received a sharp, negative head shake. A bad sign—he was usually ravenous after school. “Then let me get my coat.”
She heard him stomp through the kitchen as she stopped in the loo, then the back door slammed. Oh, Lord, she thought, leaning against the sink for a moment. One was never prepared for these things, and she
The argument had started, of all the silly things, over whose turn it was to use the photocopier.
Vic had taken a stack of books into the photocopier room, intending to make handouts of some selected poems for her lecture on the Romantics, then had to run back to her office to retrieve a volume left on her desk.
When she’d returned to the photocopier a few moments later, she’d found her books moved and Darcy firmly in position over the humming machine.
“Oh, so sorry. Were those yours?” he’d said. “One should really be more careful about leaving one’s property untended. So much petty theft these days, even the hallowed halls of the English Faculty might not be sacrosanct.”
“You knew perfectly well that they were mine,” she said, exasperated. “And no one in their right mind would steal secondhand copies of Keats and Shelley.” She eyed the stack of papers in the machine’s In tray with dismay. “Couldn’t you let me run these few things, Darcy? I need them for tomorrow morning’s lecture, and I’ve got a supervision in ten minutes. After all, I
