Free She Died Young by Elizabeth Wilson Page A

good-looking man and Charles, only slightly taller than she, fulfilled the role perfectly. He no longer resembled a Caravaggio boy. These days the classical planes of his face reminded her more of a marble statue looking impenetrably into – what?
    They turned left into the High towards the Botanical Gardens. ‘William says the climate isn’t bracing here. Unlike Cambridge. He was at New College. It’s because Oxford’s in a valley. Damp and slightly depressive, he says.’
    ‘That more or less sums up how I feel.’
    ‘Darling! I thought you were having such a good time …’
    ‘It’s different now – it’s nothing really – I suppose I’m feeling a bit glum – not exactly looking forward to Christmas.’
    Of course – Regine remembered now. It had been at Christmas a year ago that his mother had killed herself. And six months later his father had married again – his secretary or something.
    Regine squeezed his arm, but conventional platitudes were not her way. She excelled in the art of silent sympathy. If her companion didn’t choose to unburden himself (and it was usually a he) then things could go on in a perfectly companionable absence of words, but if he wanted to talk she’d listen with total understanding, conveyed with her body rather than with words: a tender bend of the head, the turn of a shoulder, a hand tactfully placed, in this case her linked arm. Yet while she had the reputation of being a sympathetic listener and believed her own myth, as often as not she listened for her personal ends, which were ever at the centre of her thoughts.
    ‘You’re looking marvellous, anyway,’ said Charles. ‘Very Pre-Raphaelite, this coat really suits you. So good with red hair – marvellous scent, too. Chanel Gardenia, isn’t it?’
    ‘How clever of you, darling.’ Few men noticed such things the way he did. They’d say you smelled lovely or looked beautiful, but they weren’t interested in the creation of the illusion. That was actually just as well. Yet it was amusing to parler chiffons with a man who had taste. ‘I’m so glad you like the coat. I simply had to have a mauve coat – not purple, you know, violet – and I couldn’t find one anywhere. I had it made specially in the end. William was furious. Such extravagance! And do you like the scarf?’ She pulled it forward over her collar. ‘From Liberty’s. They’ve reintroduced all the old William Morris designs.’ It was a leaf pattern in strange tones of spinach and moss and mauve. ‘We’re thinking of having the drawing room done in one of the Morris wallpapers. A lighter pattern than this, of course.’
    ‘How glamorous. I can’t wait to see it.’
    They walked on. Oxford was colourless in the still air. No wonder Charles was depressed and undergraduates attempted suicide; a whole ward was reserved for them at the asylum, William had told her.
    As if reading her thoughts, Charles said: ‘I’m not as gloomy as I sound. I’m doing a bit of tutoring this year, as well as slogging away at ancient Rome. I do enjoy the subject. The early Roman Empire was so fantastically modern .’
    ‘All those wicked emperors; rather like Stalin, I suppose. William says if there’s a book at the end of it – well, you will think of Drownes’, won’t you?’
    She acted as a scout for her husband’s publishing firm, keeping up equally with the Times Literary Supplement and the little magazines, prowling through literary parties, listening out for all the gossip.
    ‘Nice of him to say that. But I’ve hardly started writing – and my research isn’t meant to be about that side of it. Lurid perversions not the thing at all. And even if it were, Drownes’ isn’t that sort of publisher, is it?’ He smiled sideways at her. ‘And what I’m working on … it’s more about political change in the early Empire and its relation to the economy. Which is a problem as what I’m really interested in is not the economy, but all their