Dreaming of the Bones

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 ex amining 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