Dreaming of the bones

by Deborah Crombie

  Vic licked her lips and rang the bell once more.

  The door opened when she’d half turned away. She hadn’t heard footsteps, or the lock turning, and she took a sharp, surprised breath.

  “Hullo, I’m-”

  “So sorry, so sorry,” said Adam Lamb breathlessly. “A distraught parishioner on the telephone. It’s always something, isn’t it? And one can never get off when one needs to, not until they’re satisfied they’ve told you every detail three times over. Let me take your coat,” he added, and smiled at her.

  The vicarage hall was even colder than the porch, and Vic shivered as she felt a current of frigid air against her bare calves. She’d worn a tailored Laura Ashley suit in navy, a long double-breasted jacket over a short pleated skirt, in hopes both that she looked reassuringly businesslike and that Adam Lamb appreciated legs. Now it seemed that neither option was to do her much good. “No, thank you,” she said regretfully. “I think I’d better keep it.”

  “Quite wise of you. If you think this old place is drafty now, you should feel it in midwinter. But I’ve got the gas fire lit in the sitting room, and I thought we could have some sherry, or Madeira if you prefer.”

  “Sherry would be lovely,” Vic said as she hurried after his retreating back, trying to collect herself He was taller than the photographs had shown, and still thin. The dark curling hair had gone mostly gray but was still abundant. The thin face was heavily lined, as if he’d not lived an easy life, and he wore a heavy gray cardigan over his clerical garb. All this she could fit over the image in her mind as one would lay a transparency over a diagram-even the gold-rimmed thick spectacles that gave his blue eyes an owlish look-but nothing had prepared her for the grave sweetness of his smile.

  She registered faded lino beneath her feet and dark mustard color on the walls, then he opened a door at the end of the passage and ushered her through. It was warm, amazingly enough, and she sat gratefully in the armchair he indicated.

  “If you’ll just excuse me for a moment,” he said, “I forgot to turn the answer phone on, and I’d better do it, else we’ll be interrupted.”

  His absence gave Vic a chance to examine the room, and she saw that this was where he had made his mark on the shabby anonymity of the vicarage. A colorful rag rug covered most of the fitted mustard and brown patterned carpet, and deep red velvet curtains covered windows that she thought must overlook the narrow lane beside the church. A fine set of cut crystal glasses stood on the low table before her chair, and the jewel-like reds, greens, and blues winked at her in the light of the gas fire.

  Books lined every available bit of wall space, and that, at least, didn’t surprise her.

  She had just slipped out of her coat and stretched her feet towards the fire when Adam Lamb returned. He poured her a sherry from the crystal decanter, and when she sipped it she found it fine and very dry, just the way she liked it.

  He folded his long body onto the red Victorian love seat opposite her and raised his glass. “Here’s to warmth,” he said with feeling. “I spent five years out in Africa, and I don’t think my blood ever regained its good British fortitude. Sometimes I dream of the sun, and of nights under the mosquito netting. But you don’t want to hear about that.” He gave his disarming smile again and sipped from his glass. “You came to talk about Lydia.”

  “You’ve been very kind,” Vic said hesitantly, “and I don’t mean to seem rude, but I had the impression when I rang you before that you didn’t want to talk about Lydia.”

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk about Lydia,” Adam explained. “But, you see, I didn’t know you.”

  “Me?”

  Adam sat forwards, hands on his knees, his expression earnest. “I didn’t know if you were sympathetic to Lydia. You might even have been-if you’ll excuse the expression-a muckraker. And I couldn’t participate in a book that focused on the more scandalous personal episodes in Lydia’s life rather than her work. ‘The poet as neurotic,’ you know the sort of thing.”

  “You talked to Darcy, didn’t you.” It came out as a statement rather than a question. “To check me out.”

  “You said you were on the English Faculty when you wrote.” Adam seemed suddenly much preoccupied with examining his fingernails. “So he seemed the obvious person to ask for a reference. I didn’t know you knew Nathan. Personally, I mean, rather than merely as Lydia’s executor.”

  “And Darcy told you that I wasn’t academically sound, didn’t he? That I intended writing some hysterical feminist tract.” Vic could feel the hot patches of color burning in her cheeks. She told herself she wouldn’t undo Darcy’s damage by getting angry at Adam, and took a calming breath.

  “He didn’t actually say that…” There was an amused twist to Adam’s long mouth, and much to her surprise, Vic found herself smiling.

  “He merely implied it.”

  “Something like that.” Adam had the grace to look sheepish. “I think I owe you an apology, Dr. McClellan. I’ve lived in Cambridge long enough to know what interdepartmental rivalries are like, and I should have taken it for just that.”

  It was best to let it pass, she thought, and give Darcy a piece of her mind at the first opportunity. “You can start by calling me Vic,” she said. “My friends do.”

  “And Adam,” he responded. “Call me Adam. My motley flock calls me Father Adam, but there’s no need for you to do so.”

  Now that they were so cozily established on a first-name basis, Vic thought she’d better make sure they had no further misunderstandings. “Look… Adam,” she said, and found that the use of his name made solid the link in her mind between the boy in Lydia’s letters and the man sitting across from her. “I think it’s important I make my position clear to you. I don’t intend to focus on the emotional difficulties in Lydia’s life, but I can’t gloss over them, either. There’s not much point in my writing this book if I don’t attempt to portray Lydia as a whole person. Either you take Darcy’s deconstructionist view and hold that no artist’s life is relevant to his work because no one’s life is relevant, period, but is merely a feeble construction by the ego to camouflage our inadequacies…”

  Vic took a sip of sherry to wet her lips and continued, “… or you decide that art, or in this case poetry, springs from life and experience and is only truly meaningful in that context. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the power of language-that’s what draws us to poetry in the first place-but I believe that if you see it only as an exercise in style and imagery, you create a moral vacuum.” She found she’d sat so far forwards that she was in danger of sliding off her chair, and that she’d clenched her fingers round the stem of her sherry glass. Setting the glass carefully on the butler’s table, she sat back and said, “I’m sorry. That’s my soapbox, I’m afraid, and I do tend to get a bit carried away.”

  “That’s quite all right.” Adam reached out and refilled her glass without asking. “For a moment, I thought I was at college again. We used to have the most marvelous talks. Sometimes we’d walk all night in the courts and along the river, and we debated things with such passion. We thought that we were revolutionaries, that we would change the world.” He said this without cynicism or bitterness, and just for an instant Vic saw him as he must have been, an innocent beneath the sophisticated trappings of a university undergraduate. Was that what had drawn Lydia to him?

  “You came from a village, too, didn’t you? Like Lydia.”

  Adam smiled. “Only mine was in Hampshire, and had no literary distinction. I remember Lydia telling me the night I met her that she came from a place quite near Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s house. She was quite fascinated by Virginia Woolf.”

  “Do you suppose that was the beginning of her interest in Rupert Brooke?”

  “It could have sparked it, certainly. She’d read everything she could get her hands on about Bloomsbury, and would have come across a multitude of references to him, even though he was never officially a member of that group.”

&nb
sp; A gust of wind rattled the casements behind the red velvet curtains and Vic took another warming sip of sherry. “Bloomsbury, the Neo-Pagans… Why do you suppose Lydia was so drawn to the idea of an intellectually compatible group?”

  Adam shifted and recrossed his long legs, and Vic saw that his black lace-up shoes were scuffed and worn down at the heel. “Her background provides the obvious explanation. A fatherless only child growing up in a small village… If she had any real friends, she never spoke of them, so I suppose from the time she learned to read she longed for that sort of companionship.”

  “And her mother? Was Lydia really as dutiful a daughter as she sounds in her letters?”

  “They had an odd relationship.” Adam held up a hand as if to stop an expected response. “And I don’t mean in the sense that it was unhealthy, although nowadays any parent-child relationship seems to be suspect. They were more like sisters, or friends, and if Lydia felt she’d been pressured to live out her mother’s dreams, she never showed any obvious resentment.”

  “She was a schoolteacher, wasn’t she?” Vic prompted, although she knew all the recorded details of Mary Brooke’s life.

  “A very bright girl, apparently, who’d earned a place at Oxford before the war,” said Adam. “But she didn’t take it up. She stayed at home and married her childhood sweetheart, afraid he wouldn’t come back from France-”

  “And he didn’t,” Vic finished for him, and sighed. “I wonder if she ever regretted her choice.”

  “She’d not have had Lydia,” Adam said reasonably, as if that alternative were unthinkable. “What else would you like to know?” He cast a surreptitious glance at his watch, and Vic suspected he had another appointment but was too tactful to say so.

  “The impossible.” Smiling at Adam’s startled expression, Vic said softly, “You see, I want to know what she was like. I want to see her through your eyes, hear her through your ears…”

  Adam looked past her, and after a moment he said, “That was the first thing one noticed about her-her voice. She was small and quick, with a dancer’s litheness and that wonderful dark, wavy hair cut in a twenties bob-but when she spoke you forgot everything else.” He smiled at an image Vic couldn’t see. “She sounded as though she’d sung in every smoky bar from Casablanca to Soho. It made her seem exotic, and yet beneath the huskiness you could hear the Sussex village.”

  “Still endearingly English?”

  Adam laughed. “Exactly. But that’s not what you want to know, is it? How she looked, I mean.” Pausing, he refilled his glass and took a small sip. “How can I possibly condense Lydia?”

  “Pick an adjective,” suggested Vic. “Just off the top of your head, without thinking about it.”

  “Parlor games?” Adam sounded dubious.

  “You think that doesn’t sound suitably academic? Think of it as a poet’s game,” Vic challenged him. “After all, you were a poet, too.”

  Adam made a rueful grimace. “But not a very good one, I’m afraid. All right, I’ll give it a try.” He frowned and thought for a moment. “Intense. Moody, funny, bright, but most of all, intense. Intense about loves and hates-and especially intense about work.”

  Nodding, Vic gathered her courage to venture into painful territory. “You kept up with one another, didn’t you, after her separation from Morgan? I know,” she added carefully, “that it was you who found her, and saved her, that first time. What I don’t know is whether you had any idea what she meant to do.”

  “She certainly didn’t threaten suicide, if that’s what you mean. Didn’t even hint at it. But…”

  Vic felt her heartbeat quicken. “But her behavior wasn’t normal, was it? How was she different?”

  “Calm,” said Adam. “Much too calm, in a dazed sort of way, but I didn’t realize then. She’d forget what she was saying in the midst of a sentence, and then she’d smile.” He shook his head. “I should have known-”

  “How could you?” Vic protested. “Unless you’d had some experience dealing with depression.”

  Adam shook his head. “Oh, I see it so often now that I recognize the earliest symptoms. But common sense should have been enough, even then.” His hands moved restlessly over his knees. “If I had been thinking of Lydia, rather than myself…”

  “What do you mean?” Vic asked, puzzled.

  “I had another agenda, you see,” he said, not meeting Vic’s eyes.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It all sounds ludicrous… too ridiculous. But what harm can it do now, other than make me look as big a fool as I did then?” He pinched his lips together in a self-deprecating grimace. “I was glad when Morgan left her. I thought she would get over him soon enough, and then perhaps we could go back to the way things were in the beginning.”

  “In the beginning? You and Lydia?” Vic heard the surprise in her voice and silently cursed herself. She couldn’t afford to alienate him now. “Of course,” she added quickly, “what could have been more natural? And when she didn’t seem to be terribly unhappy, you thought-”

  “Well, it was all a long time ago, and hopefully I’ve grown less foolish in my dotage.” He set his empty sherry glass down on the butler’s table in a deliberate way that suggested he’d had enough of talking as well.

  He was the same age as Nathan, Vic thought, and yet she had the sudden impression that he felt life had defeated him.

  “Adam,” she said, before he could politely terminate their interview. “What about the second time Lydia tried to kill herself? Did she have the same symptoms of depression or disassociation? Surely there must have been some indication-”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he interrupted her. Then, as if afraid he’d been too sharp, added, “I was gone by that time. Kenya. Teaching in a mission school.” Standing up, he went to the bookcase behind the love seat and took something from the shelf. “One of my students made this for me.” He held out a small pottery vase for her inspection. It was clear glazed, the color of sunburnt skin, and black-etched antelope ran endlessly round its circumference.

  “It’s lovely.” Taking it from him, Vic closed her eyes and ran her fingers over the surface as if she were reading braille. “It reminds me of a poem of Lydia’s, the one called ‘Grass.’ I always wondered where the images came from. Did you write to her?”

  Adam shrugged. “Occasionally. The evenings could be very long. I suppose she didn’t save the letters?”

  “If she did, I’ve not seen them among her papers,” Vic said, not sure whether that would please or hurt him, but she felt a spark of hope on her own behalf. “Did she write to you, by any chance?”

  “Yes, but we had a fire in the mission not long before I came back to England. I lost most of my personal belongings, such as they were, and Lydia’s letters were among them. I’m sorry,” he added, and Vic knew her disappointment must have shown.

  “Never mind,” she said, forcing a smile. “I’m sure it was a much greater loss for you than it is for me. But I wonder…” She hesitated to push him, but on the other hand she’d best make the most of her opportunity. “Do you remember anything odd about her letters before-”

  “She ran her car into a tree?” For the first time, Adam sounded angry. “What a bloody stupid thing to do. I heard afterwards that she said she just lost control, but I never believed it for a minute. She was a good driver, very focused, as she was on most things she undertook to do well.”

  “But the letters-”

  “I wasn’t privy to anything but the most innocuous gossip,” Adam said, and stood up abruptly. “If you want to know about her state of mind, you had better ask Daphne.”

  CHAPTER 6

  In the silence of death; then may I see dimly, and

  know, a space,

  Bending over me, last light in the dark, once, as of

  old, your face.

  RUPERT BROOKE,

  from “Choriambics-I”

  Newnham

  20 June 1962

  Darling Mummy,<
br />
  There’s so much to tell you that I don’t know where to begin. I haven’t been to bed since night before last, but I’m still too wound up for sleep and so thought I’d try to describe May Week to you before the lovely details fade.

  As soon as I finished my exams (in a haze of exhaustion), the parties began, and a good thing, too, otherwise I think I would have felt quite ill while waiting for the results to be posted. It’s all a bit hysterical, as everyone is feeling the same sort of relief and trepidation, and most are muddle-headed as well from end-of-term all-night swotting. Daphne and I trooped bravely from college to college and staircase to staircase, determined not to miss out on a single invitation. Some of the do’s were quite elegant, while others were last-minute affairs dependent upon potato crisps and bottled beer, and often those were the jolliest.

  Even the posh parties were very relaxed and informal, with lots of drinking and talking and dancing and people wandering about. If anything marred our fun, it’s that I seem to have acquired a persistent suitor, through no fault of my own. He’s a dark, brooding Welsh boy named Morgan Ashby, an arts student who has a knack for turning up wherever I make an appearance. He then looks soulfully at me from across the room, which is quite off-putting. Finally, he mustered the courage to ask me to his May Ball, but I have no desire to play Cathy to his Heathcliff, and refused. Besides, I’d accepted Adam’s invitation months ago and wouldn’t have stood up dear, sweet Adam for the world.

  We made a foursome, Adam and I, Nathan and Daphne, and the heavens conspired to make it perfect for us-the end of our first year at Cambridge, and our first May Ball. Moon full, stars shining, an almost tropical night (truly a gift of the gods, it was so warm we could wear our gowns outside the marquee without wraps). In the garden, they’d strung fairy lights in the trees, making it look quite enchanted, and we danced on the lawn. Daphne and I both wore gossamer white, and pretended we were naiads (or is it dryads?) floating diaphanously about.