Linda gazed down her gently sloping garden toward the river. “Everything came out all right eventually, in my twenties. I think I managed to compartmentalize things, draw a veil over the experience. I knew it was there, and it infiltrated my dreams sometimes, but I could control it most of the time, if that makes any sense. As far as missing the sexual revolution was concerned, all I’d really missed was a dose of clap, crabs, premature ejaculations and probably an unwanted pregnancy. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to shock you. I shouldn’t say things like that, of course, but it seemed that was all so many of my girlfriends had to talk about when we were students. I suppose all I had to do was meet the right man. Charles. We married in my late twenties, had children. I started a career in teaching, always writing in whatever spare time I had. Poetry. Spent a few years teaching at a Canadian university in my forties. Creative writing.” She looked around at the garden. “We came back and settled here, then Charles became ill. I have to say, though, on the whole, that it’s been a happy and productive life so far. Fulfilled in so many ways. I count myself lucky.”

“Except for an encounter with Danny Caxton.”

Her expression darkened for a moment. “Except for him, yes. And it makes me feel terrible that he did the same thing to others. That he got away with it for so long. But I never thought of it like that until I heard about Jimmy Savile. In an odd way, it was that day in Blackpool that brought me to poetry, though. I mean, I’d been interested at school, but about a year or so later, when I came out of the deep despair, I picked up this book of poems. I don’t remember where. I don’t even know what made me pick it up. It was by Sylvia Plath. Ariel. Do you know it?”

“No,” said Banks. “I mean, I’ve heard the name, even seen her grave at Heptonstall, but I haven’t read the poems.”

“I won’t say I understood them, but they sent my head in a spin. Direct hit. Blew me away. Shivers up the spine, the whole deal. The violent imagery, the anger, the dark fire of her imagination, that fingers-on-the-blackboard feeling. It went right to my soul, if that’s not too melodramatic a way of putting it. I went right out and bought everything she’d written. As soon as I read her I knew I wanted to be a poet. I started writing poems myself. Imitating Sylvia Plath, of course. Then I branched out, read others, the Beats, the Liverpool poets, the Russians, Hughes, Heaney, Harrison, Larkin, Hill. And I’m sure I imitated them all. Except Hill. You can’t imitate him.”

“You didn’t dismiss Ted Hughes as a misogynistic swine?”