Dreaming Of The Bones

“Dame Margery,” said Kincaid, “I’d suggest you leave this particular project on the shelf for a while. I’m concerned for your health in a more concrete way—working on Vic McClellan’s manuscript might prove very dangerous indeed.”

Cambridge

27 March 1969

Dearest Mummy,

You know ginger biscuits cheer me like nothing else, and I will nibble at them when I can’t bear the thought of real food. I’ve put the tin in the middle of the kitchen table, so that I can have them with my tea while I watch the chaffinches in the garden.

It’s a comfort to know you’re thinking of me. It has been a long winter, but I think I’m reconciled to things now. Morgan has a lover, I saw them in the marketplace. He looked white with misery, and I’m sure he thinks I wish him ill, but I don’t. I feel too empty for that, light and unanchored as an abandoned husk, and I think only when the divorce decree becomes final will I gain substance again. Writing comes slowly, if at all, and that I miss more than anything.

Old friends have rallied round—Adam with pots of nourishing soup and ministerial good cheer, and I’m grateful enough for his company to ignore the hopeful undercurrents. No one is worth what I’ve been through these last few months, years, really.

Every so often Darcy pops round for cocktails and shares all the academic gossip, and I daresay his acerbity is easier to take than outright sympathy. Nathan Winter and his wife, Jean, have just had their first baby, a girl called Alison, and I’m to be godmother. I managed my shopping for her christening gift (a silver cup with her name and birthdate engraved) with some fortitude, and treated myself to dinner at Brown’s afterwards.

Daphne’s been a rock, of course, but she had finally to make a decision about the teaching position in Bedford, and I could only encourage her to take it. It’s a well-known public school, and will do her career prospects good. Bedford is only an hour’s drive, and we’ll still manage to see one another at weekends, so I’m consoling myself with that thought.

I heard a rumor yesterday at the greengrocer’s that the Beatles are breaking up, and I found myself crying quite ridiculously among the cabbages and the carrots. It was utterly nonsensical—I thought to myself that they each had their own separate lives and families, that it was time for them to move on—but I felt an overwhelming sense of loss. It’s as if they symbolized our hopes and our innocence, and I felt suddenly that I’d lived through the passing of a generation.

I can see your lips curve in that knowing smile even as I write these words. When you were my age, you had lived through the war, been widowed, borne a child, and for you the loss of a generation was counted in hundreds of thousands of lives.

If only we could absorb one another’s experiences, altering our emotional as well as our intellectual perceptions, then we might prevent so much suffering, such sorrow.

But then I realize that we can do this, at least in a small way, through fiction, and poetry, so perhaps my battlefield has some merit, after all.

Love, Lydia

*   *   *

Kincaid had Gemma ring Laura Miller at home, asking where they might find Darcy Eliot on a Saturday afternoon, and she’d sent them to All Saints’ College. “He’s had the same rooms for aeons,” said Laura. “I’ve always envied the male dons living in college—drinking college wine, eating at High Table, being waited on hand and foot. I think that’s why Darcy’s never married—he couldn’t bear to give it up,” she added, laughing, and rang off.

They stopped at the Porter’s Lodge and were directed towards the back of the college. Gemma walked slowly, conscious of Kincaid’s impatience but ignoring it. She glanced down at the folded brochure she’d taken from the porter, then up again at the buildings forming the four sides of the quad they’d entered from the Porter’s Lodge. “This is the main court,” she said. “And that must be the entrance to the chapel on the left. We go through here”— she pointed to the building straight ahead—“and come out the other side.”

When that passage had been safely negotiated, she stopped and consulted her map again. “This must be the Elizabethan Library on the right. Isn’t it lovely? Look at all the tiny panes in the windows.”

“Gemma—”

“And these are the perennial beds,” she continued, pointing at the freshly turned black earth bordering the library. “It says here that they’re one of the college’s best features.”

“It looks like clumps of dead stems to me.” Kincaid gave her a withering glance. “You’ve been spending too much time with Hazel. You’re beginning to sound like a gardener.”

“They’ll be lovely in another month or two,” she said a little wistfully, with a sudden wish that she might see them then, but she knew it to be unlikely.

“Gemma—”

“All right.” She started walking again across the lawn, following the line of buildings that curved along the right-hand side of the parklike garden, ending at the wall overlooking the Cam. With the mutability Gemma was coming to expect from Cambridge weather, the clouds had again released the sun, and within the precincts of the daffodil-studded garden it felt quite like spring.

Darcy Eliot’s staircase proved to be the last in the building nearest the river. Following the porter’s instructions, they climbed to the first floor and easily found the door with ELIOT inscribed on its brass plate, but before they could knock it swung open.

“Bill rang to say you were on your way,” said Darcy Eliot, with every evidence of pleasure. “But I’d begun to think you’d fallen in the Cam.” He stepped back and gestured them inside.

“I’m afraid I was sight-seeing along the way,” said Gemma, with an apologetic wave of her map.

“And I can’t blame you. All Saints’ is rather a jewel—small enough to be accessible, don’t you think?” Eliot considered them curiously. “It’s rather refreshing to find anyone interested in architecture these days. The world is full of Philistines.” He wore a large cashmere pullover in a robin’s egg shade of blue, and looked considerably more rumpled, and more human, than when Gemma had seen him at the memorial service. “Do sit down,” he added, indicating a sofa upholstered in a velvet almost the same shade of blue as his sweater.