In her hand she carried a copy of John Hepworth’s lesser-known and only work of fiction, Vauxhall Bridge in the Rain, a postwar Graham Greene–style doomed-romance novella. A work his publisher had clearly felt obligated to print given his otherwise brilliant nonfiction output. It wasn’t that it was bad, Lucinda reasoned—having read all 156 pages of it that morning after the courier had dropped it off—it was that it was too studied. There was no heart in it, as if the author had been too shy of showing any.
