Dreaming of the bones Page 7

  “Listen.” Nathan put a finger to his lips. “Do you hear that?”

  Vic held her breath, listening. She heard the blood in her ears, then on the threshold of sound, a shriek. “What is it?” she whispered.

  “A barn owl. It takes some perseverance to hear them these days; they’re becoming quite rare. Reminds me of my childhood, that and the sound of the tree frogs. I loved the river then. Sometimes I would imagine it moving in my blood.”

  “Kit feels that, too, I think. I envy you both a bit. I appreciate this”-she gestured round her-“but it’s in an objective way. What you and Kit have seems to be almost organic. He can stay down here for hours at a time, watching bugs in the grass.” She smiled.

  “A naturalist in the making,” Nathan said thoughtfully. “I’d like to know him better. Does he read? He doesn’t look bookish, and I suppose I’d thought of him as a rugger and football sort of boy.”

  “Oh, he’s capable enough at games, and he does what’s necessary to fit in at school, but his heart’s not really in it. And it’s odd, because he’s always been ferociously competitive about his schoolwork-even more so since Ian left. The other day I found him crying over an exam score, and then he was furious with me for catching him at it. He didn’t speak to me for two days.” Vic hadn’t told anyone this, and now she didn’t know if she felt relieved, or guilty for betraying Kit’s confidence. These were the sort of things meant to be shared by parents, she thought, but she wouldn’t have told Ian even had he been round to tell. He’d have gone all pompous and preachy about it, and he’d somehow, as always, manage to miss the point.

  “Poor kid,” Nathan said, his jacket rustling as he moved in the dark. “Perhaps you could encourage him to love the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, separate from the carrot system of education.”

  Vic heard a soft plop from the direction of the river. A frog? Or a fish jumping? Did fish sleep? she wondered. She thought of asking Nathan, then dismissed it as being too humiliatingly ridiculous. How ignorant she was of anything outside her own little area of expertise. Tonight the river seemed merely a dark void in the landscape-she had never thought of it being full of life as complicated and messy as her own.

  Now she found that if she stared long enough at the water she could see light and movement, the reflection of starlight filtering through the chestnut branches. “So how do I go about it, teaching Kit to love knowledge for itself?”

  “Look at yourself,” said Nathan softly. “Have you forgotten why you do what you do? That’s a start. And I’ve some books he might like. Why don’t you come up to the cottage with me?” he added, cupping a hand round her elbow. “I’ve something for you, as well.”

  Vic found that her odd, new awareness had spread from the perception of outward phenomena to her body. She felt the heat from Nathan’s hand through the bulky sleeve of her cardigan and the sensation left her suddenly ripe, aching, weak-kneed with desire. Oh, Lord, she had forgotten this, the strength of it, and she was not prepared. She thought of Nathan’s hand on her breast and stumbled, gasping.

  “Are you all right?” He tightened his grip on her arm.

  “Fine,” she said, a bit breathlessly, fighting laughter, trying hard to stamp down the singing joy rising in her. “Just fine.”

  * * *

  “Fancy a drink?” Nathan asked. “Wine or-”

  “Whisky,” Vic interrupted decisively. She stood before the fire in his kitchen-dining area as if she were cold, but her cheeks were stained with pink.

  Watching her while he filled two tumblers from the bottle he kept in the kitchen cabinet, Nathan wondered if she might be coming down with something. Come to think of it, she’d been behaving very oddly these past few minutes. She’d not often touched him, yet tonight when he’d let go her arm on reaching the level path, fearing he’d overstepped his bounds, she’d walked so close beside him that their shoulders bumped.

  Nathan delivered her glass and raised his. “Cheers.”

  Vic took what on anyone less delicate looking he would have labeled a swig, then coughed and sputtered. When he patted her solicitously on the back, she shivered.

  “Honestly, Vic, I think you’re not well. Let me-”

  “No, I’m fine, Nathan, really,” she said, her eyes still watering. “I just got a bit carried away with this stuff” She took a much smaller sip. “See? I’m quite all right. Now, tell me about those books for Kit.”

  He went to one of the bookcases that lined the wall opposite the garden windows, and she came to stand beside him. “Gerald Durrell,” he said, running his finger along the shelves as he scanned, then stopping on some slender spines. “Has he read these? They’re marvelous, all about his childhood on Corfu with every kind of insect and animal imaginable. And what about Laurens Van der Post? He made me want to see Africa, follow in the tracks of the Bushmen. Or Konrad Lorenz, the grandfather of animal behavior?” Stop it, he told himself, pulling books from the shelves. You’re chattering like a bloody adolescent on a first date. And to make it worse, he was probably imagining that her nearness was deliberate.

  When Vic took the proffered books and retreated to the chair beside the fire, he excused himself. “Idiot,” he said aloud as he stepped into the darkness of the hall, then took a deep breath before going up to his study. When he returned, he found her leafing idly through a book, but her gaze was focused on the fire, and he suspected she hadn’t the least idea which volume she held.

  “I found this the other day,” he said, sitting opposite her. “There were still a few boxes from the Cambridge house in the loft. I thought you might like to have it.” She blinked and smiled a bit vaguely as she took the book from his hand, then her breath caught as she took in what it was.

  She touched the cover. “Oh, Nathan, it’s lovely.” Opening it, she lifted the tissue-paper flyleaf with care, then smiled as she looked down into Rupert Brooke’s eyes. “And what a wonderful photograph. I’ve never seen this one.” She went back to the cover, then looked at the back of the title page. “It’s a first printing of Edward Marsh’s Rupert Brooke: A Memoir,” she said unnecessarily, as if Nathan didn’t know perfectly well what it was. “Nineteen nineteen. Where ever did you get it?”

  “It was Lydia’s.”

  She looked up. “But… are you sure you should… are you sure you want to-”

  “I can do whatever I please with Lydia’s things, and I think it only fitting that you should have it.”

  “Surely it must be valuable.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Vic laid the book in her lap and spread her long, slender fingers over the cover, and he took it as acquiescence. “Nathan, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.” She paused and took another sip of her almost empty drink. “Lately, I’ve wondered if this biography was jinxed from the start. When I began, I’d never have imagined that two of the people who could help me the most were the two I’d feel the least comfortable asking. Does that make sense?” she added, tilting her head to one side and frowning. “Anyway, you can imagine how difficult it is to talk to Darcy…” She rolled her eyes and Nathan laughed. “He’s insufferable enough without further instigation.”

  “Are you saying you’ve found me difficult to talk to?” asked Nathan, refusing to be diverted.

  “It just seemed such an imposition. I was afraid it might upset you to talk about Lydia, and I didn’t want to do anything that might damage our… friendship. And the others…” Grimacing, she tossed back the last of her whisky. “Of course her ex-husband, Morgan Ashby, refused to see me at all.” She colored as if she found the memory unpleasant and hurried on. “Daphne Morris was perfectly cordial and as bland as unbuttered toast. You’d have thought she barely knew Lydia, from the way she talked. And Adam Lamb…” Vic looked away from Nathan, into the fire. “Adam Lamb wouldn’t even talk to me on the telephone.”

  “Vic, what is it exactly that you want me to do?”

  She placed the book on the side table, t
hen rose abruptly and stood before the fire, her back to him. “I hate asking favors. That’s all I seem to be doing lately, asking favors and apologizing to people. And now I sound churlish when you’ve been so kind.”

  “Vic-” He got up from his armchair and stood beside her, so that she had to turn and face him. She held her arms crossed tightly across her chest.

  “Would you talk to Adam Lamb for me?” she said in a rush. “Ask him if he’d see me for just a few minutes?”

  Nathan laughed. “Good God, is that all? I thought you were going to ask me for something I couldn’t do. Of course, I can’t guarantee I’ll have any influence with Adam-sometimes the Lord moves him in mysterious ways-but I’ll give it a try.”

  Vic smiled and seemed to relax a little. “And you don’t mind talking about Lydia?”

  “It’s not that I mind, exactly, it’s just that it was all so very long ago. You’ve been immersed in Lydia’s life in a way I never was, and you must understand that it’s much more immediate for you than it is for me. But you can ask me anything you want, and I’ll try.” He resisted the impulse to touch her cheek. Surely he had said nothing to deserve the intentness of her expression?

  “Nathan.” Vic took a breath and dropped her arms to her sides. “Take me to bed.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. This has nothing to do with Lydia, or Ian, or anything in the past. It’s just between us. Do you not want to?”

  So she had drunk the whisky for the Dutch courage to seduce him, and all the while he’d been bumbling round like an idiot, trying not to presume too much. “Of course I want to. But I didn’t think… and I’m old enough-”

  “Don’t you dare tell me you’re old enough to be my father. That’s absurd, unless you were a very precocious adolescent, and anyway, what would it matter?”

  “But it’s been-” He found his tongue hung on the words since Jean died. He swallowed and substituted, “such a long time,” but Vic was laughing now and he couldn’t go on.

  “It’s just like riding a bloody bike, Nathan, for heaven’s sake,” she managed to sputter. “You won’t have forgotten how.”

  Her laughter died as suddenly as it had begun. He reached out and touched her cheek, and when she turned her face into his hand he felt her trembling.

  “No,” he said, tracing the curve of her jaw with his fingers, then the corner of her mouth. “I think it will all come back to me very, very quickly.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Is it the hour? We leave this resting place

  Made fair by one another for a while.

  Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;

  The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.

  Ah! The long road! and you so far away!

  Oh, I’ll remember! but… each crawling day

  Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile

  Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.

  RUPERT BROOKE,

  from “The Wayfarers”

  Morgan Ashby pulled his battered Volvo into the drive of the house on St. Barnabas Road. There was just enough light left for him to see that the hedges needed trimming, yet the lamps in the houses next door and opposite had come on, defense against the evening. No light shone through the stained glass transom above the door of number 37.

  The door of the Volvo creaked as he swung it open, and he felt an answering ache in his knees as he stood. Rheumatism? The afflictions of age so soon in what he staunchly maintained was the prime of his life? Perhaps, he thought, but he knew the truth. It was dread.

  The bequest of this house had been Lydia’s last malicious joke, perpetrated from beyond the grave, and he had cooperated, God rot both their souls. Taking the key from his pocket, he fumbled at the front door’s lock in the dusk of the porch. He should have sold the house. He’d known then that he should sell it as soon as the ink on the probate papers dried. Francesca had pleaded with him to sell it, to sever the last link, and yet some perversity in him had made him hold on. Had he thought some positive thing would come of the nagging discomfort, some pearl of good character form under his hide? He snorted derisively in the darkness and the tumblers clicked over.

  In the end, he’d leased it to a married couple, both University dons, and their tribe of screaming children. They had stayed for five years, troubling him little but for the occasional request for a plumber or repairs to the roof, and had just last week decamped on the improvement in their financial fortunes.

  He felt for the switch inside the door, then blinked as light flooded the entry. Leaves had crept over the sill and littered the black-and-white tile floor, their twisted brown shapes looking for a moment like small dead birds.

  The pale pink striped wallpaper that lined the entry and climbed up the stairs looked even more dilapidated than he remembered. The seams curled, and in a few places near the ceiling it had come away entirely-Lydia would probably have said the drooping swags looked like stained petticoats, he thought with a grimace. At thigh level the children had scrawled across it with crayons.

  It would mean keeping the tenants’ bloody deposit back, he supposed, but he was not sure he could be bothered. Moving towards the back of the house, Morgan steeled himself to assess the rest of the damage. First the sitting room, cold and empty, the carpet threadbare and spotted, the cushion on the window seat ripped with the stuffing spilling out. Lydia had liked to read here on fine mornings when the sun flooded through the bay window, warming the room. He remembered her choosing this wallpaper, with its intricate pattern in rose and green and dull gold. It had been years before the resurgence in popularity of William Morris, but Lydia had been determined to find something with the feel of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

  They’d had a furious row over it, because even her innocent decorating enthusiasms had reeked to him of her involvement with her pretentious literary friends, and he had despised them.

  He moved on, down the hall, bypassing the door to Lydia’s study. Whatever havoc the little monsters had wreaked in there would have to go unremarked, because he could not bring himself to enter the room where Lydia had died.

  The kitchen was best, he thought as he opened the door at the end of the hall. First the little reception area with the space for the telephone, and the bookshelves for the cookery books. Then round the corner into the kitchen proper, and beyond that the dining area with its vaulted ceiling and windows overlooking the garden. This they had planned and built together, using part of his small inheritance, and it had been white and clean and untainted. His reflection stared back at him from the black mirror of the uncurtained garden window-a tall, thin shape, shoulders hunched, dark curling hair, a white blur of a face. He framed the shot in his mind, blinked.

  They had shared thinking in images, he and Lydia. He had understood her need to write poetry, for he had gone about photography with the same dedication. It was the other things he hadn’t understood: her need for drama and atmosphere, her desire to exist within a group, her obsession with the past.

  He looked upwards, towards the first-floor bedroom. For a long while, they had patched over their arguments with lovemaking so fierce it left them sobbing and exhausted. Destructive, yes, but he had never since known anything so intense, or so addictive. In his blackest moments, he wished he had killed her then, and himself, put them both out of their misery.

  The sound of a door closing came from the front of the house. Morgan stopped his prowling about the empty room to listen. Some neighbor come to investigate lights in a vacant house, perhaps? God forbid he should have to be sociable, especially here, and now.

  “Morgan, darling?”

  Oh, Lord, it was Francesca. The last thing he’d meant to do was upset her. How in hell had she found him?

  “In here,” he called out, and hurried to meet her in the more neutral territory of the hall. She stood beside the cold radiator at the bottom of the stairs, huddled in the old brown coat she kept for taking out the dogs.

  He grasped
her shoulders and looked down into her anxious face. “Fran, what are you doing here?”

  “I came into town with Monica to get some knitting wool. I ran out of the indigo. And then when we drove by I saw the car.”

  “The wool shop is nowhere near St. Barnabas Road,” he said gently. “Nor do you go to town in that old rag of a coat.” He put a finger under her chin and tilted her face up so that she had to look into his eyes. “How did you know?”

  “I knew you’d have to come. And I knew you wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Only because I didn’t want to worry you.”

  Francesca reached up and pushed a stray lock of hair from his brow. “When will you ever get it through your thick head that the not knowing, the not talking about it only makes it worse? You’ve been moping about the house for days, working yourself up to this. I could feel it.”

  “You’d think I’d have learned, by this time, that I can’t keep anything from you,” he said, forcing himself to smile. “But the house had to be attended to, and I didn’t see why you should be upset by it.”

  “Then let it go this time, Morgan. Let her go. You’ve been picking at this scab for more than twenty years and it will never heal unless you stop. Call an estate agent tomorrow and you need never set foot in this place again. We have a good life together. Let us get on with it. Please.”

  Morgan gathered his wife into his arms, her cheek pressed against his chest. He stroked the top of her head, then the thick plait of brown hair, now finely threaded with gray. Francesca had rescued him from the disaster of his first marriage, and he had loved her because she was everything Lydia was not. She had less pretension about her than anyone he had ever met, and though intelligent, she lacked any intellectual conceit. Steadfast, she had supported him in his battle with depression, buffered others from his moods and his temper, and she’d borne with grace and courage their failure to conceive the children she had wanted so badly.