Inside, she goes to the on-hold shelves, which means a journey that requires running a gauntlet between two long Wi-Fi access tables. Any time Cate has come here, every monitor has someone sitting in front of it. Some of these are regular people, but more fall into the irregular category. Irregular and often talking softly, as though they have a Bluetooth thing, but they don’t. Or irregular in their intense smell. Today’s smelly person is a huge guy with a tattooed neck. The tattoo, half-covered by his jacket collar, appears to be of Daffy Duck. She catches a nice whiff off him as she passes to, then again fro, on her way back to the checkout desk. Not a urine smell. More like a bad egg. The patrons near him seem oblivious. Oblivious or resigned.

While she’s standing in line to check out, Cate reads a few of the Vita letters. She is so happy to have a shot at this gig. Tons of possibilities for the sets. Long Barn, the Tudor country house where Vita lived during the 1920s, and Sissinghurst, a crumbling castle Vita and Harold restored in the 1930s, are going to be amalgamated into one interior. Serious surroundings for romantic treachery. Treachery because Vita had nothing beyond sex and flattery on offer for Woolf, or the others who came before, or the ones who followed. She didn’t jettison them, just gently set them to the side and kept writing them flattering notes while she moved on to someone new. The teacup of jealousy stirred and stirred again.

“After their first night together,” Cate says, getting into the driver’s seat and tossing the book into Neale’s lap, “Virginia went out and bought gloves. I think she felt her hands were now erotic elements and needed to be covered. Poor Virginia. All that genius, but she didn’t see that Vita only liked beginnings.”

“I see you’re on a first-name basis with both of them now.”

“Well, the whole thing is pretty compelling. Aristocracy and Bloomsbury and queerness. Historically, all that rustling in the back of the closet. All the codes and signals. The letters within letters, the pinky rings. Something delicious about all the secrecy. Now everything’s so in the open, we’re free from fear and oppression, but we’ve traded it for being commonplace. Queer’s as boring as straight now.”

“Oh, I think you still have a little cachet. You still have a bit of shadow. There are still places where you could get beat up.”