Joan Smith by Never Let Me Go

always had friends to aid and abet him suggested he possessed a certain charm. His prose was written in an eminently readable style. I could almost feel I was there, watching his wicked doings. I preferred his prose to his poetry. Vanejul was a novelist manqué.
    It was impossible for a woman to admire him, and equally impossible not to feel a grudging interest. He was the sort of rake we would all like to think we alone have the power to reform. If only I had known him! It was easy enough to see why men through the years liked him. He led the scandalous life of a wealthy vagabond, doing just as he pleased, always surrounded by eager women. And there was the generosity, the humor, and eventually the heroic death to enshrine him in a dubious sort of respectability. Altogether a fascinating character, but one felt somehow sullied to read of his exploits.
    When I glanced at my watch, I was astonished to see it was one-thirty. I had a glass of milk and went straight up to bed.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    I awoke in the morning in the blue room with a deep ache in my heart, and some fast-fading fragments of a dream hovering at the edge of memory. I had dreamed again of him, that illusory ephemera, my phantom lover. He had come to me in the night. No spoken words remained in memory, but only a sense of anger so diffuse, I could not say whether it was he or I who had been angry. If I closed my eyes, I could almost remember his dark eyes flashing, his hot lips uttering accusations, which I was quick to refute. I had no idea what we had been debating, or who had won. I felt a great yawning emptiness within, and tried to convince myself it was only hunger.
    But the empty feeling continued after I had taken breakfast. Writing was impossible in such a restless state of mind, so I went to the garden to begin the weeding. At that primitive occupation I found peace. The warm sun beat on my shoulders as I rooted out the weeds, tossing them onto the compost pile. The flowers bloomed well enough along the border, but at the very heart of the garden, strangled flower stalks had grown pale and weak from lack of nourishment. Buds had withered. Those that had opened were stunted, but the stems could not support even these small blooms without the undergrowth of weeds. I felt, somehow, that the garden was whispering its ancient wisdom to me. People, too, must clear the underbrush out of their lives from time to time.
    An hour was enough to clear my head. I went indoors and wrote until noon. The interval until three, I spent with Vanejul, finishing the cynical poems and rereading bits of the biography and journals. Expecting to find them faintly repulsive, I was surprised to discover my heart had softened. A man was not born a misogynist. Vanejul had obviously been hurt by someone. Perhaps he had truly been in love with Arabella... What sort of woman was she? Had she been a Laura in training, with already the seeds of coquetry sprouting? I refer to the Laura of Vanejul’s poem, not Petrarch’s Laura.
    I had read the book to learn what I could about Arabella, but I found my interest, and even my sympathy, begin to change direction. I had to pull myself up sharply. Whatever she had done, he had no right to kill her. This Vanejul was an insidious character. If letters on a page could so easily warp judgment, what must the man have been like in person? I was very curious to see his picture, and Arabella’s, too. The paperback had no illustrations. I would stop at the library after taking tea with Emily. Surely the Lyndhurst library must have books on these local celebrities.
    As Emily Millar inhabited one of the finest houses in town and was connected to noble families, I thought a dress might be called for. I chose a white one with green flowers, fluffed out my hair, did my face, and was off.
    Driving on the left side of the road still seemed wrong, but I was getting the hang of it now. I reached Emily’s house without incident. No butler met me at the