Dreaming of the Bones Read Free Page B

know how I feel about the earnest politically correct,” he said as he lifted his spoon to his lips again. “They give me the pip. And there’s nothing I abhor more than the feminist biographer. They take some trivial piece of work and inflate it with Freudian psychobabble and grandiose feminist theory until you wouldn’t recognize it if it bit you.”
    Margery’s left eyebrow arched itself more pronouncedly, and Darcy knew that this time he had indeed gone too far. “Surely you’re not suggesting that Lydia’s work was trivial?” she asked. “And you make Victoria McClellan sound like some sort of unwashed bluestocking. She struck me as being quite sensible and well grounded, certainly not the sort I’d expect to lose track of the work in the process of theorizing about it.”
    Darcy snorted. “Oh, no. Dr. McClellan is anything but unwashed.Quite the opposite—she could model for an American shampoo advert on the telly, she’s so well washed and groomed. She’s an example of the perfect nineties woman—brilliant academic career, model mother and wife—only, she wasn’t good enough at the wife part to keep her husband from shagging a succession of graduate students.” The image made him smile. Ian McClellan’s only failure had been his lack of discretion.
    “Darcy!” Margery pushed away her empty soup bowl. “That was unkind as well as common.”
    “Oh, Mother, really. What it is is common knowledge. Everyone in the English Faculty knows all the libidinous details. They just take care to whisper them when the fair Victoria is out of earshot. And I don’t see what is so unkind about the bald truth.”
    Margery pressed her lips together, darting a still disapproving glance at him as she uncovered the main course and began serving their plates. Point to me, thought Darcy with satisfaction. Margery was no prude, as the increasingly graphic sexuality of her later novels revealed, and Darcy thought she merely enjoyed playing the shocked matron.
    He breathed a sigh of contentment as Margery set his plate before him. Cold poached salmon with dill sauce; hot buttered new potatoes; fresh young asparagus, crisply cooked before chilling—he would rue the day if he ever lost his ability to charm Grace. “And don’t tell me”—he put a hand to his breast as if overcome—“a lemon tart for afters?”
    Still unrelenting, his mother attacked her fish in silence. Darcy concentrated on his food, content to wait her out. He took small bites to prolong the pleasure, and gazed out into the garden as he chewed. He’d brought Lydia here once, years ago, to his family’s Jacobean house on the outskirts of the village of Madingley. His father had been alive then, tweedy and self-effacing, his mother sleek in her success. It had been a spring day much like this one, and Margery and Lydia had walked together arm in arm in the garden, admiring the daffodils and laughing. He’d felt an oaf, a lout, excluded by their delicacy and by their aura of feminine conspiracy. That night he’d lain awake wondering what secrets they’d confided.
    He remembered Lydia’s profile in the car on the way from Cambridge,pinched with nervousness at the thought of meeting Margery Lester, remembered her too prim dress and neatly combed hair—for once the rebellious young poet had become every inch the small-town schoolteacher’s daughter. It had made him laugh, but he supposed in the end the joke had been—
    “Darcy. You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”
    He smiled at his mother. He’d known her pique would pale against the appalling social prospect of a silent meal. “Sorry, Mummy. I was meandering among the daffodils.”
    “I said, What did Dr. McClellan want to know about Lydia today?” Margery’s voice still held a trace of exasperation.
    “Oh, the usual tiresome things. Did Lydia show any signs of depression in the weeks before her death? Had she communicated any particular concerns, become involved in any new