Two Loves

Rosamund, the protagonist of James's piquant romantic novel, is the 35-year-old widow of Anthony Gilchrist, a famous poet who took Rosamond as his third wife a year before he died, at 75. A locally known painter with a sufficient, though not extravagant, income and a nine-year-old son, Rosamund is interviewed by a journalist for a magazine feature about her latest canvases. The reporter informs her that Anthony's long-lost but truest love, Erica Underhill, now an octogenarian living in poverty and desperate for cash, is planning to publish a memoir featuring the erotic poems Anthony wrote her during their romance. Unfazed by this news, Rosamund, who knows and admires the poems, pays a visit to the elegant, lovable Erica. The two women become friends, even as Molly, Anthony's second wife (his first, Frances, died young), demands Rosamund's help in stopping the publication. Meanwhile, the friendly, comfortable affair Rosamund's been having with her married neighbor Thomas ends when his depressed wife begs him to come back. And Rosamund, vaguely disillusioned by love and beset with a lifelong ambivalence about intimacy, runs into an old flame who's now a heroin addict. The complicated but fast-paced plot involves questions of paternity, adultery, suicide and loveless marriages, within a British community of ex-spouses and estranged lovers, giving James ample opportunity to cast her incisive eye on the vagaries of love. With memorable secondary characters, clever dialogue, wry humor and a subtle control of her multifaceted narrative, James packs her short, lively novel with romantic drama for the sophisticated reader. (Dec.)