Deborah Crombie - Dreaming of the bones

I can’t imagine Cambridge without bicycles. They fly by, the student’s black gowns flapping like crows’ wings, or stand riderless, clumped together in mute and inebriated herds. Even if undergraduates were allowed cars, there would be no place to park them, so I suppose the system works rather well .

Thanks to the bike I venture a bit farther afield each day, so that I am beginning to feel I own this place, with its narrow twisty streets and forests of chimney pots. I seem to find a fascinating little shop round every new corner. I gaze at knitting wools, and jumpers, and cookware, but I spend my pocket money in the secondhand bookshops. I love the dry, musty smell of the volumes, the tissue-thin feel of the paper. Even the typefaces speak of vanished elegance. Already the books are accumulating in my room, and nothing, I think, makes a place more like home. In the evenings I curl up in my window seat and look out over the rooftops as the light fades. Sometimes I read, sometimes I just hold a book, and I feel the strongest sense of contented elation .

If it sounds as though I’ve been leading a solitary life, I assure you that’s not the case. Cambridge has societies representing everything from doily making to penguin equality-well, maybe they’re not quite that outrageous, but some of them are certainly bizarre-and they are all enthusiastically recruiting. The major inducement at these functions is free drink, so one has to be rather carefully abstemious, and not carry one’s checkbook just in case one is too easily persuaded. The only thing that does NOT seem to be well represented is writing, but I’m fast making like-minded friends and perhaps we can create our own sort of society. In the meantime I am seriously considering joining the University paper. That should at least give me a creative outlet until I can schedule time for my own writing .

I’ve been invited out and about so much that I’ve decided it’s time I should reciprocate, so therefore I’m hosting my first sherry party in my room on Thursday. I’ve invited Adam, the boy I told you about meeting at King’s. He’s a Trinity man, reading philosophy, and he seems to see poetry primarily as a vehicle for expressing social views. On this matter we have already had some wonderfully heated discussions .

Adam took me to a Labour Club dance last Saturday, where I met a delightful boy called Nathan, whom I’ve invited as well. He’s sturdily built, with fair skin, dark hair, and the merriest brown eyes I’ve ever seen. A natural sciences student, he means to be a poet as well as a botanist, in the manner of Loren Eisley .

Daphne from across the hall will make up a fourth, and I intend to serve them decent sherry and biscuits, and feel oh so sophisticated .

And in case you think from this account that I’ve done nothing but swan about, I assure you, Mummy dear, that I have been a model student. I’ve chosen the three exams I will read for, and have begun the lectures Miss Barrett and I decided would be most helpful in preparing me. My lecture schedule is about eleven hours during the week and includes such luminaries as F. R. Leavis on criticism, and I must admit I feel quite intimidated, being lectured to by men whose books are filling my shelves. Most of my lectures are in the morning, and there are surprisingly few women. I usually cycle back to Newnham for lunch in Hall, then most afternoons are divided between supervisions and reading either in the library or in my room. Such order makes me feel as though I might possibly grasp all this, if only I am disciplined and dedicated enough .

I’ve chosen to celebrate my birthday this evening alone in my room. This is not because I’m feeling sorry for myself, mind you, but because this is the way I feel closest to home, and you. It’s a lovely crisp evening with the hint of wood smoke in the air, and I picture you and Nan sitting by the fire after tea, reading, talking now and again, perhaps deciding whether or not to make cocoa and listen to a program on the wireless. I know your thoughts are reaching out to me as mine are reaching out to you, and I think if I close my eyes and concentrate hard enough I could almost… be there .

Love,

Lydia

Vic pulled her old cardigan from the hook and slipped out the back door as soundlessly as possible, reminding herself to lubricate the hinges. She’d tucked Kit into bed at ten, amid the nightly routine of his protests. He thought eleven much too grown up to have a set bedtime, in spite of the fact that if she let him stay up much past ten o’clock, he’d sleep straight through his alarm the next morning.

Shrugging into her cardigan, Vic stood on the terrace a moment, looking up at the sky. The clear day had become a crisp night, but the stars looked blurred round the edges from moisture in the air, and to the north they faded against the pink glow that was Cambridge. She doubted tomorrow would be as fine.

When her eyes had adjusted, she stepped from the terrace onto the lawn, crossed it swiftly, and let herself out the gate at the bottom of the garden. There was no moon, but she knew the path to the river almost by instinct. A shadow moved beneath the chestnuts at the water’s edge. As she drew closer the shape coalesced into a man, stocky, starlight gleaming faintly from the surface of his oiled jacket and his silver hair.

“Nathan.”

“I thought you might come. Kit giving you fits again?” So rich was his voice in the dark that it seemed to her it might stand alone, disembodied, a condensation of personality.

“It’s these dreams,” she said, huddling a bit more tightly into her sweater as she felt the chill rising from the river. “It’s odd-he never had nightmares when he was small.” She sighed. “I suppose it has to do with Ian, although if he misses Ian he never says so. And he won’t tell me what the dreams are about.”

“Children’s capacity for forming little hedgehog balls round their suffering never ceases to amaze me. Our adult propensity for exposing all our traumas to the world must be a learned behavior,” he said, chuckling, but she heard the sympathy in it.

“It’s silly of me, but sometimes I forget you’ve been through all this. I just see you as Nathan, complete in yourself, without all these family appendages that most of us carry round.” Then, as she realized what she’d said, she gasped and put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Nathan, I’m so sorry. That was incredibly thoughtless of me.”

This time he laughed outright. “On the contrary, I take it as a compliment. Have you any idea how hard I’ve worked these last few years to achieve that sort of self-sufficient independence? At first it was merely a defense against the well-meaning-I couldn’t bear being fussed over-and then it became something I needed to do for myself. I’d had twenty years of operating as one half of a whole, and there were times when the task seemed insurmountable.” He paused, as if aware of the weariness that had crept into his voice, then added more heartily, “And as for my girls, you just haven’t met them yet. You’ll have no doubt that I’m fully parentally qualified, though I have to admit I sometimes find it difficult to believe they’re my biological offspring. Perhaps all parents feel that way.”

How little she knew him, thought Vic, and how odd that she felt so comfortable with him, as she had never been one to form easy alliances. She must have come to All Saints’ shortly after his wife died, and she remembered having a vague awareness of him as an attractive, if somewhat abstracted, man with whom she exchanged occasional pleasantries over sherry in the SCR. But their paths rarely crossed outside college functions, and it was not until she began her preliminary research on Lydia Brooke that she’d learned Nathan was Brooke’s literary executor.