Songs of Blue and Gold by Deborah Lawrenson Read Free Book Online

bastard, a stupid bastard.’ He held both arms out, half in supplication, half in honesty.
    There was a moment when she could so easily have closedthe distance between them and reached out too. She longed to feel his arms around her, the softness of his lips. Seconds elapsed and she stayed where she was.
    Her mobile rang.
    She answered it, listened and hardly spoke. When the conversation was over, Richard came closer.
    â€˜What’s wrong?’ he asked.

VI
    ELIZABETH DIED SUDDENLY of pneumonia in the nursing home on 5 October.
    The following afternoon, Melissa stood on the bridge where the two rivers met not far from her mother’s house. A turquoise kingfisher darted like a bullet down the river. A few flashy seconds and it was gone, leaving only a stab of remembered brilliance.

Julian Adie: A Biography
Stephen R. Mason
[
New Century, 1993
]
    Julian Adie could hardly believe his luck when he met Grace Heald at a party in Soho, still less when she swiftly became his partner. She was tall and languid, angular and with jutting cheekbones, considered a beauty. Ever ambitious, sexually as much as socially, he set out to win her and succeeded in less than four hours. He was twenty to her twenty-two.
    What was Adie’s appeal to Grace? Like him, she was trying to kick against convention, though she was gentle where he could be bombastic. She was surprisingly shy for all the attention she received. Perhaps she admired his self-confidence, the way he stood up so straight in company and held forth in such torrents of wit and amusing stories that his small stature was irrelevant.
    They were an unlikely couple. She towered over him by almost a foot when she wore heels. But they shared the same passions and bohemian ideals. Both were rebelling against solidly middle-class backgrounds in asocial circle where creative ambition burned. Grace was an aspiring painter, who had studied at the Slade.
    Soon they had set up home together: a bedsit in a house off the King’s Road in Chelsea that was owned by one of her wealthy old school friends, the actress Jill Mayhew. Through Jill they socialised with the rich, and occasionally the talented, of their generation, like the then aspiring playwright Brian Gibbs, and actor Henderson Spinks.
    But Adie was making little money. He supplemented his small private income by the tutoring he attempted in the late afternoons when he would rather have been at his typewriter, or preparing for a stint at the piano in one of the jazz clubs. He had also started to write seriously: mainly poetry and a novel. He made intensive studies of the Elizabethans, in particular Marlowe and Bacon. There was always a disciplined side to Adie. During the days when he was not working, he would spend up to ten hours at the British Library, reading and making notes. He felt keenly his lack of a formal university education and was determined to make up the shortfall. It was around this time that he forged what was to be a lifelong friendship with Peter Commin, then an assistant at the prestigious bookshop Sandwood’s in Chelsea, later to be his bibliographer.
    In January 1935, Adie and Grace moved to the country, to the rural hamlet of Poundsbridge near Tunbridge Wells in Kent where he imagined they would both be able to work in peace. Despite the glorious walksto nearby Penshurst with all its Elizabethan resonances and associations with Ben Jonson and Philip Sidney, even here, the young couple felt constrained, constantly suffering from colds, surrounded by the damp claustrophobia of their cottage walls. The experiment was not a success.
    A friend had gone to Corfu, an island so far off the north-west coast of Greece that part of it faced Albania. Edward Lear had lived and worked in the light and heat there in the mid-1800s. ‘Come,’ urged the letters. So they did.
    They took a packet boat from Tilbury, ploughing across the Bay of Biscay in the first week of March 1935. Grace’s parents were