Dreaming Of The Bones

after contracting blood poisoning on a Divisional Field Day. But Churchill and the others in the Cabinet found his death, and his sonnets romanticizing the war, expedient—he made a lovely martyr to the cause. It was probably just as well for them that Brooke died when he did,” she added. “I’ve always thought that his views on the war would have changed dramatically if he’d lived to see action, and that change would have been reflected in his poems.”

“Was he a good poet, then?” asked Gemma.

“I think he showed flashes of brilliance, but who knows what he might have achieved? Virginia Woolf thought he was destined to become a politician.”

“He knew Virginia Woolf?”

“It seems he knew everyone, and that an astonishing number of those connected with him became notable in their own fields. Virginia Woolf, James and Lytton Strachey, Geoffrey and Maynard Keynes, the Darwin sisters. The list goes on and on.”

“So he fascinated those who knew him, not just those who came after.” Gemma touched the photograph as if she might bring it to life.

“From the accounts I’ve read, he had remarkable charisma, and I suppose, in a way, it survived him.”

“It all looks so innocent,” said Gemma, who had found the photograph section in Geoffrey Keynes’s Collected Letters.

Hazel laughed. “There is something enchantingly nostalgic about that prewar idyll, but I daresay not as innocent as we’d like to think. There was probably a good deal of naughtiness going on beneath those blazers and boaters and garden-party dresses. And Rupert, certainly, was more than a bit sexually… complicated.” She yawned and stretched. “Stay for a last cup of tea. We’ll light the fire and put some music on, and we can recite dear Rupert aloud.”

As much as she would have enjoyed spending an hour or two in the warmth of Hazel’s sitting room, Gemma felt a strong desire to be home alone with Toby, to reinforce her sense of their identity as a family. “Thanks, Hazel, but I’d better not. Toby will forget how to go to sleep in his own bed, and besides”—she patted the books in her lap—“I’ve got a lot of reading to do.”

Llangollen, Wales

30 September

1963 Dear Mummy,

Please forgive me for giving you my news this way. It seems unfair at best, and cowardly at worst, especially when I know you wish only the best for me. But it all happened so suddenly, and we felt such a sense of urgency, that it seemed best to take the plunge and the conventions be damned.

Morgan and I were married, yesterday, in the Cambridge registry office.

I know what you’re thinking, darling Mummy, that we hardly know each other, that we’ve taken leave of our senses. But we’ve known each other more than a year, even though it’s only in the last few months that we’ve discovered that we see life with the same passion and intensity; and that we have the same goal, to record this life honestly, and to live it as well as we can.

And as for our senses, we’ve only just discovered them. Being with him makes me see things in ways I never imagined, and yet smell and taste and touch are magnified as if I were suddenly blind, and the beauty of the world round us is almost exquisitely painful. Oh, Mummy, his photographs will make your heart ache. He’s so brilliant, so talented, and I’m going to be his support and encouragement, as he will be mine.

I’m writing poems that are searingly good, and Morgan’s shown me that the rest—all the academic pretensions and stultifying traditions of university life—are only impediments to doing our best work. We are neither of us going back next week for the beginning of term. We’re going to live instead, and practice our chosen vocations.

We’ve found a tiny flat in Cambridge—little more than a bed-sit, really, but it’s ours—and we have already moved in our few bits and pieces. Morgan has an offer of a job as assistant at a photography studio in town, and while it’s the most boring of work (weddings, baby portraits, etc.), he will do it well, and it will give him the facilities to process his own photographs.

Dr. Barrett has been most understanding, and has kindly offered to send some tutoring my way, and when I’m not working I am going to write and write and write.

Don’t worry, Morgan’s very practical, and while we won’t be living in luxury we will make ends meet. And as long as we have food in our mouths and clothes on our backs, what else matters?

I promise you’ll love him, too, Mummy. His brooding dark looks conceal a wonderful sense of humor and the sort of kindness I’ve never met in anyone but you. He makes me feel adored, and safe.

Be happy for me—

Lydia

CHAPTER

11

Would God, would God, you could be comforted.

RUPERT BROOKE,

from a fragment

Adam found Nathan sitting in the sun in the garden, with a rug over his knees like an old man.

He walked across the lawn, his shoes leaving a dark trail in the silver-dewed grass, and hunkered down beside Nathan’s chair so that he could study his friend’s face. Pale, though not so pasty as yesterday, but his eyes were still dull as river pebbles left out to dry.

“How are you?” he asked gently.

“If you mean am I sober, the answer is yes,” said Nathan, then he sighed and looked away. “I’m sorry, Adam. Sit down.” He gestured at the other lawn chair. “If you want to know the truth, I feel as though an enormous wave has washed through me and left me weak and empty on the beach. It’s dull, and restful, and I wish it would last. But I don’t think it will.”

“No,” said Adam as he lowered himself into the canvas curve of the lawn chair, “I don’t suppose so. But the