Dreaming Of The Bones

“It’s that damned McClellan woman again,” said Darcy Eliot as he unfolded the damask napkin and laid it carefully across his lap. “As if it weren’t enough to have to put up with her at College and in the Faculty, she came round to my rooms yesterday to pester me with her tedious questions. Gave me the most frightful headache, I can tell you.” He paused while pouring himself a glass of wine, then sipped and rolled it round his mouth with satisfaction. His mother’s Mersault was excellent, almost as good, in fact, as the store All Saints’ set aside for its Senior Fellows. “If I’d had my way, she’d never have been given a Faculty position, but Iris absolutely dotes on her. What can you do with all these bloody—” With his tongue loosened by several glasses of his mother’s equally excellent sherry before their ritual Sunday lunch, he’d been about to say, “With all these bloody women about the place,” but a look at his mother’s raised eyebrow brought him to a full stop. “Never mind,” he amended hastily, burying his nose in his wine again.

“Darcy, darling,” said Dame Margery Lester as she ladled out the soup Grace had left in a tureen on the table, “I’ve met Victoria McClellan on several occasions and I thought her quite enchanting.” Margery Lester’s voice was as silvery as the hair she swept back in a classic chignon, and although she was well into her seventies, it sometimes seemed to her son that she had condensed rather than aged. The qualities that made Margery uniquely herself—her keen intelligence, her self-assurance, her dedication to her craft—all these seemed to have become more solid as her body inevitably diminished.

Today she looked even more elemental than usual. The pearls she wore against her pale gray cashmere twinset seemed to give a shimmery luster to her skin, and it occurred to Darcy to wonder if one would find quicksilver in her veins rather than blood.

“Just what is it exactly that you find objectionable about her?” Margery asked as she served Darcy his soup, adding, “Grace made cream of artichoke in your honor.”

Darcy took his time tasting the soup, then eased a surreptitious finger into his collar. Perhaps he had been imbibing a bit more than he should lately. His vanity had for many years provided a useful counterbalance to his appetites, but it might be that the flesh was gaining ground. “You 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?”