Then again, was he himself a serious person? A student. A student of medicine with ruined feet who wasn’t sure he could bear to continue his studies. Who couldn’t properly talk to Emma Wetherford (who wasn’t a Wetherford anymore, of course, although he’d mercifully forgotten what she was now) after she’d spurned him. When he’d arrived at the hospital, he’d found another space for himself—a pressurised, underwater space, where he didn’t need to think, where all his decisions could be suspended. It was like going under with his eyes open in the lake he used to swim in each summer, that green low world, with its stringed lake-weed that would shift in slow motion before him. He might quite comfortably die there. It was only when he came up, kicking, that he found the surface floating with women, like bushy-feathered swans.
One afternoon he’d come up to discover a particular creature waiting for him, and for the first time he found he didn’t want to go back down. It didn’t have a beak but a soft human nose. A woman, then, stubborn, with dark hair and a severe, slightly chubby face. She wasn’t really swanlike, or pretty, or especially feminine. She was young but had the seriousness of someone much older, and her face wasn’t impassive but crinkled and irritated, her complexion rather pinker than was attractive, and she had dark half circles slung under her eyes. Still, she was awake, even if she didn’t seem overly delighted to be there. She had a name: Hyde-Lees. Her eyes were always moving, as if she were outraged with the world for not giving her more. This intense gaze was reason enough for him to kick and kick, to stay above the green surface for as long as he could, just to watch, until eventually he realised he had forgotten how to get back to the green space at all. Now this was all the world he had.
“And what is his name, this poet?”
Hyde-Lees looked at him before she uttered the familiar name of a man twice her age, an ungainly, pretentious Protestant Anglo-Irishman who, it could be conceded, was a reasonable poet (if you went in for faeries and dream-dimmed eyes), but could under no circumstances be called a gentleman, or remotely right for this charming girl of no more than twenty-five. For a moment, he was disgusted. Why? Why was she so weak to fall for such a man?
But looking at her face, half in shadow, he recalibrated. If she were weak enough to fall for the poet, did this not mean she might be weak enough to fall for him? And wasn’t the poet a pathetic enough object that the girl’s affection for him could be broken down, diverted? He would get closer to her, he promised himself. He would start immediately.
SEVEN
SUMMER 1914
It had been the last of the Shakespears’ soirées before the war broke out. The usual crowd was there, and Dorothy and Ezra, newly married, would not stop gazing at one another. There was something vague about them; Dorothy could only half kiss Georgie hello, and Ezra smiled and ruffled her hair as though she were twelve years old instead of twenty-one. Georgie asked them about W. B., and Ezra managed to say that he had been feeling unwell and had left early.
To fend off boredom, Georgie drank too much wine and eventually found herself in that easy, dizzy state where her words were coming to her fluidly, and everything was imbued with a heightened sense, as if each word or movement contained great promise. She noticed, around Dorothy’s neck, a silver chain with a hanging butterfly, which quivered at her throat when she laughed. Georgie’s knees felt loose, as if the bones had gone soft, and no one seemed to notice when she wandered away from the group and stepped into the cool, dark hallway. There was a light on in the library, and she walked in.
“Oh, hello,” a voice said. W. B. was under a lamp, sitting on a narrow wooden bench with a book on his lap, and when he saw her come in, he pressed a finger on a particular passage. He was about to rejoin the party, he said, but he was checking something for a moment. Even though his accent was almost English, he had that lovely Irish turn to his consonants—she’d thought it was all in his vowels, but really it was his consonants. She came in and leaned over his shoulder to see what he was reading.
He looked up. “Didn’t Harkin say something about Taylor?” Dr. Harkin was the leader of the Order.
“Not that Taylor,” she said. “The translator of Plotinus. Thomas Taylor.”
“Oh,” he said, resting the book back down on his lap. “You’re right, of course. You’ve read him already, I suppose.”
“Of course,” she said. They smiled. Her thoroughness was a kind of joke between them. She sat down beside him; the wooden bench was rather high, and she swung her legs back and forth, thanking the wine for the ease she felt. She liked sitting close to him, being alone in the room with him.
“Are you quite well?” she thought to say. “Ezra said you were ill.”
He hesitated, and it was only when she saw his lips twitch and noticed the handkerchief between his fingers that she realised he wasn’t ill at all—he was upset. He must have come in here to get away from everyone. The book had been a ruse; he had shut himself in here for some privacy, and she had come in oblivious, with her wine-soaked boldness, and not only interrupted him but corrected him, and gone ahead and sat right down beside him. Embarrassed, she began to get up.
“Oh—I’m sorry—”
“No,” he said. “Stay if you like. I’ve been—you’re far too young to understand this, but I’ve been fussing about being too old. Regrets. You’re too young for regrets.” He was pushing the handkerchief back in his pocket.
“Like what?”
“I should have married.”
She sat back down and slowly returned to swinging her legs, as if to insist on the lightness of the conversation. “Don’t be silly. You’re not too old for that.” He was twice her age, but he was still attractive enough. He had been involved with Olivia at some point, and she knew there had been others too.
“Do you mean that?” He was looking at her.
“Of course.” She looked back at him and stopped swinging her legs. What was he asking, exactly? She looked away.
He had turned his attention to the desk, and as she watched him search for something in a drawer, flicking through the contents with his long fingers, she considered those fingers, that familiar mass of dark, greying hair. All the younger men she knew were unoriginal, fickle, and—despite Dorothy’s newly married status—still too busy pining after Dorothy. Willy Yeats turned his attention back to her and produced a rectangular box. He flipped a clasp, she heard a click, and the box sprang open. Inside was a pack of cards, the backs dark blue drizzled with silver. He tipped the pack into his hands and tucked the box back into the drawer. He shuffled the cards and splayed them out in his hands, face down, offering them to her.
“Pick one,” he said.
She reached forward and brushed her fingers over the cards. She paused her index finger on one, then another, then finally pulled a third one away from the pack. She turned it over so they could both see it. It showed a handsome young blond man, strolling jauntily towards the edge of a cliff. The black text said THE FOOL.
“The beginning of a journey,” he said, and he leaned back and smiled. “I had wondered, hadn’t you? What do you think?”
She stared back at him. They seemed to be sitting very close together, and she could feel sweat tingling at the base of her spine. He reached his hand out to her.