Gemma’s reading had grown more halting as she progressed through the poem, and now she stared at the page until the print blurred and the words began to shift and scramble. It was odd, she thought as she noticed the hair standing up on her forearms, that the words made her feel things which went beyond words. But there was something more here even than that, she was sure of it, if she could just sort it out… She looked up at Kincaid. “She’s telling a story, isn’t she?”
“I suppose you could say all poems tell stories; they’re a way of assimilating our experiences.” He tapped the page. “This one is probably a metaphor for coming of age, the loss of virginity—”
“No, no”—Gemma shook her head—“I mean, she’s telling a story about something that really happened. The beginning reminds me of the things I’ve been reading about Rupert Brooke and his friends swimming naked in Byron’s Pool—-the poets’ pool, do you see? There’s this feeling of tingling anticipation about it—but then something happens, something dark and unexpected—”
“Gemma, don’t you think that’s a bit far-fetched?”
“Is it? Lydia is dead. Vic is dead. And someone wanted these poems. Just because Nathan had them doesn’t mean that Vic’s killer wasn’t searching for them.” She stared at him, and after a moment he nodded.
“Go on, then.”
Slowly, speaking aloud as she thought, Gemma said, “Strip away the images. What does she tell us happens? Think like a policeman—find the bare bones.”
Kincaid frowned and ran a hand through his hair. “There’s a rape. A child’s rape.” He slid the page across the table, turning it his way up. “But she doesn’t actually say—”
“She only suggests it. But she tells us that a girl goes to a pool in the woods where the poets are waiting for her.” Gemma retrieved the page. “She’s naked—”
“Virginal—”
“They take her into the pool—”
“Rape her—”
“She’s lost, betrayed. What does Lydia mean?” Gemma asked as she skimmed the poem once more. “’Lost … in the mallow-tangles of the still black summer’?”
“Mallow grows round ponds,” said Kincaid. “Might she have drowned?”
Nodding, Gemma said, “But what has it to do with Lydia? Why is the girl waiting for Electra?”
“Who’s waiting for Electra?” asked Hazel, coming into the kitchen. She’d been settling the children in the sitting room with a video so the adults could have their dinner in peace. “It sounds like a play.”
“It’s the title of a poem,” said Gemma. “Who exactly was she, anyway? What we learned at school has gone a bit fuzzy.”
Hazel lifted the lid from a pot of chicken soup and gave it a stir. “Electra was the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who urged her brother Orestes to kill their mother in revenge for the murder of their father.” Tasting the soup, she said, “Just about ready,” then added, “I guess you could say that Electra was the voice of vengeance, although she herself was powerless to act.”
“The voice of vengeance,” Gemma repeated, rotating the page once more. “You see? It’s about women’s silence again, about the need to speak up … Does Lydia see
“How can you be sure Lydia’s not talking about herself?” asked Kincaid, still sounding skeptical as he spun the page back towards him. “What if it was Lydia who was raped? Surely that’s trauma enough to make one change one’s patterns.”
But Gemma felt like a terrier with a rat in its teeth—she knew she’d caught hold of the truth, and she meant to shake it until it gave itself up to her. “No. If the poets are Lydia’s poets, it couldn’t have been that—she’d slept with them all already. But what else didn’t they want anyone to know? Something Alec Byrne said today made me think…” Frowning, she searched her memory. “A missing child … he was looking for a missing child. But there was a girl who disappeared a long time ago …” She blinked as the scrap of conversation in Ralph Peregrine’s office came back to her. “The daughter of Margery Lester’s friend. What was her name? Hope? Charity?”
“Verity,” said Kincaid, and she heard the sudden spike of excitement in his voice. “Verity Whitecliff. The daughter of Henry Whitecliff, the former head of the English Faculty.”
Spoon still in hand, Hazel had come to sit with them, and now she reached out and rotated the page with the tip of her finger. “The poem talks about ‘Truth unmourned, untold …’ What if Truth is a person here, as well as an abstract quality?
Kincaid said slowly, “What if Verity Whitecliff didn’t run away, after all? What if she was murdered?” He took his notebook from his pocket and entered a number into his cell phone.
“Hullo, Laura? It’s Duncan again. I’ve a question for you. Can you tell me exactly when Verity Whitecliff disappeared?” He listened for a moment, then said, “Right. I’ll tell you what it’s all about when I know more, and in the meantime, I’d rather you didn’t mention this to anyone. Right. Thanks.” Disconnecting, he looked from Hazel to Gemma. “Verity Whitecliff slipped out of her house on Midsummer’s Eve 1963, and was never seen again. She was wearing a summer dress, and she took nothing with her. She was fifteen years old.”
“Dear God,” breathed Hazel. “The poor child. And her parents…”
“Lydia married Morgan in September of 1963.” Gemma felt a sense of the inevitable, as if she were powerless to stop the unfolding of the past. “Within weeks of Verity’s disappearance, she not only got herself dangerously involved with a man she’d refused to have anything to do with during the previous year—she gave up what had mattered to her above all else. She left university.” She met Kincaid’s eyes. “What could have been so terrible that it caused her to alter her life forever?” she asked, but even as she spoke, the truth felt cold and heavy inside her.
The gentle trill of Kincaid’s phone made them all jump. He fumbled for it, then barked, “Kincaid.” His mouth
