Dreaming of the bones

by Deborah Crombie

  “But this isn’t your responsibility,” she said, leaning towards him, pleading with him. “It’s not your fault that Vic died. You couldn’t have done anything more, even if you’d known what was going to happen.”

  He stretched his lips into a smile. “You could be right. But I’ll never be sure, will I?”

  Gemma left the Yard at half past five. She’d hoped for another chance to talk to Kincaid, to persuade him not to act so hastily, but he’d still been in a meeting when she’d last looked in on him. He’d looked up and said merely, “I’ll be tied up for a while, I’m afraid, Gemma. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Even though she knew he couldn’t have said more, or excused himself from the meeting, without compromising her, it had made her feel shut out, dismissed. It was sadly ironic, she thought as she walked slowly home from the Angel tube stop, that her fear of Vic coming between them had come true only with her death. And what weapons had she against his guilt?

  She was simply too tired to shop for her supper tonight, she thought as she neared the Sainsbury’s on the Liverpool Road. She’d have to hope Hazel had made enough for her, or rely on the meager contents of her own pantry.

  The busker stood in his usual spot near Sainsbury’s doors, but for the first time in all the months Gemma had seen him there, he was without his dog. A few passersby had stopped to listen to him play his clarinet, and Gemma felt, as she always did, a thrill of pleasure at the sound. She stopped, too, closing her eyes in concentration. Was it Mozart? Or was it just that she’d thought of him when Hazel had put a Mozart clarinet concerto on the CD player the other day?

  When he’d finished, the busker nodded at his audience as they tossed a few coins in his instrument case, but he didn’t speak or smile. It occurred to Gemma that she’d never heard him speak, and she was suddenly curious to see if he would.

  As the other listeners moved off, she stepped closer and asked, “What’s happened to your dog? Is he all right?” What an arresting face he had, she thought as she watched him, with its prominent cheekbones, strong chin, and long, straight nose. The close cropping of his fair hair served to emphasize the planes of his face, and his very deep-set eyes were blue.

  He studied her with his usual wariness, then he shrugged and said, “A little mishap with a car. He’s in hospital.” His voice was surprisingly deep, and his accent suggested he was well educated.

  “Oh. Is he going to be all right? Can you manage…” Her spontaneous offer of help faltered under his stare. “I mean…”

  But he said politely enough, “A few cracked ribs. And yes, I can manage, thank you.”

  “Oh, good. It’s good that he’s not hurt too badly, I mean,” said Gemma, feeling more of an idiot by the minute, but she couldn’t resist one last curious question. “What’s your name?”

  She thought he wouldn’t answer, but after a moment he said reluctantly, “Gordon.”

  “I’m Gemma.” When there seemed to be nothing else to say, she added awkwardly, “Well, cheerio, then,” and turned away.

  She glanced back, once, and saw him lift the clarinet to his lips. The music followed her as she turned west into Richmond Avenue, fading until the last faint notes might have been her imagination.

  The damp and dreary weather of the past few days had cleared during the afternoon, and as she neared Thornhill Gardens, pale pink as uniform as a bedsheet spread itself across the sky, then darkened slowly to rose. Against this backdrop the Georgian houses took on a dark and calming geometry, and by the time Gemma reached her flat she felt a bit more able to adjust herself to what she thought of as the other side of her schizophrenic life.

  She found Hazel on the patio, watching the last of the sunset while the children played in the garden. When she’d hugged Toby, she sank into the chair beside Hazel and sighed.

  The small table between them held a bottle of sherry and two glasses, and Hazel filled the empty glass and handed it to Gemma. “Cheers,” she said, raising her glass. “It sounds as though you’ve had a long day.” She pulled her bulky cardigan a little closer round her throat and took a sip of her drink. “I couldn’t bear to go inside quite yet. The children have had their tea, but not their baths.”

  “Wouldn’t have done much good, would it?” said Gemma, as the children were digging happily in the muddy spot beneath the rosebush. “I’ll bathe them in a bit.” She leaned back into the cold curve of the wrought iron chair and closed her eyes. It would do her good to watch the children play in the tub, and to hold their warm and slippery bodies as she toweled them dry.

  The thought of hugging Toby brought with it the image she’d been resisting all day-Vic standing on her porch, laughing, with her arm round her son’s shoulders-and with it the fear that Gemma hated to acknowledge even to herself. What would happen to Toby if she died? His father, like Kit’s, was out of the picture, and just as well, for he’d certainly shown no aptitude for parenting, nor any interest in his son. She supposed her parents would take Toby, and that he would be loved and cared for, but it would not be the same. Or did she just want to think she was irreplaceable?

  Hazel reached over and patted her arm. “Tell me about it.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Gemma said, startled. “I was just thinking.”

  “Obviously. Your eyebrows were about to meet.”

  Gemma smiled at that, but then asked slowly, “Are we really indispensable to our children, Hazel? Or do they go on quite happily without us, once the initial grief has passed?”

  Hazel gave her a swift glance before answering. “Child psychology experts will tell you all sorts of complicated things about bereaved children suffering from an inability to trust or form relationships, but to tell you the truth, I just don’t know. Some do perfectly well, and some don’t. It depends on the mother, and the child, and the caretakers, and those are just too many variables to allow one to make accurate predictions.” She took a sip of her drink and added, “You’re worrying about Vic’s son, aren’t you?”

  “What’s happened to him is so dreadful it just doesn’t bear thinking of, but I keep thinking of it.”

  “And I take it today’s news is not good?” said Hazel.

  Gemma shook her head. “No. It looks as though she was poisoned.” She went on to tell Hazel about Kincaid’s decision to take a leave of absence, and of her fears for him. “He won’t listen to me, Hazel. He’s so stubborn, and so angry. He’s even angry with me, and I don’t know what I’ve done or how I can reach him.”

  “If I were you, I’d give him a day or two, let him start sorting it out on his own. And I suspect that his anger is due to more than the circumstances of Vic’s death. Men often substitute anger for grief, because anger is the only emotion they’re taught it’s acceptable to feel. I don’t know what else you can do, love, because I doubt very much you’re going to change his mind about this.”

  “The awful thing is that I understand how he feels, because I feel responsible, too,” said Gemma. “I thought Vic had legitimate cause to be uneasy about Lydia Brooke’s death, but I didn’t encourage Duncan to look into it any further.” She made a grimace of disgust, adding, “I didn’t want it to take his time away from me.”

  “And you think that Vic’s death must be connected to her suspicions about Lydia’s death?” asked Hazel.

  Shrugging, Gemma said, “It’s certainly possible. Unless someone knew enough about what Vic was doing to take advantage of it as camouflage.” She shivered. It was now almost fully dark, and the temperature in the garden had dropped. “But Lydia is as good a place to start as any. I wish I’d had a look at those things of Vic’s…”

  “Didn’t you tell me that Lydia was fascinated with Rupert Brooke?”

  “Yes, but I’m afraid I don’t know much about him, other than the golden young Edwardian poet stuff, and, ‘If I should die, think only this of me…’ We had to memorize it at school, and I remember thinking it was bloody stupid.” Gemma looked at the children, who had moved to the edge of the flagsto
nes and were giggling while doing something unspeakable to one of Holly’s dolls. “I hope Toby will have more sense.”

  “Men,” said Hazel, and they smiled at each other in tacit understanding. “Well, if you’re interested in Rupert Brooke, I’ve somethings you might like to see. Because you’re not going to let Duncan do this on his own, are you, love?”

  Gemma hadn’t made a conscious decision, but as soon as Hazel spoke she knew it to be true, and inevitable. “No,” she said. “I suppose I’m not.”

  After the children had been bathed, and Gemma had sat down to a vegetable lasagna with Tim and Hazel, Hazel left Tim with the dishes and led Gemma into the sitting room. Glass-fronted bookcases lined the walls either side of the fireplace, and Hazel studied them for a minute, her finger against her nose, before going to the right-hand case.

  “I think I put them all together, but it’s been ages since I’ve looked at them, and the children will get into the books.” Hazel opened the case and bent down to survey the spines. “Ah, here they are.” Removing a few volumes, she carried them to the sofa, and Gemma sat down beside her. “I had rather a thing for Rupert myself at one time, so I can sympathize with Lydia’s infatuation. Rupert Chawner Brooke, born 1887, son of a Rugby master,” Hazel recited from memory, grinning.

  She handed the first book to Gemma. “I’ve only a paperback of Marsh’s Memoir, I’m afraid, picked up at an Oxfam bookshop, but the contemporary introduction is worth reading, and it does contain all the poems.” Frowning, she added, “But these others Lydia wouldn’t have known when she was at college. The Hassall biography was published in 1964, the Letters in sixty-eight. And the collection of his love letters to Noel Olivier was only released a few years ago. Vic would have been familiar with all of these, though, I’m sure.”

  “Who was Noel Olivier?” asked Gemma. “Any relation to Laurence?”

  “The youngest of the four Olivier sisters, and I think they were cousins to Laurence,” explained Hazel. “Rupert met her when she was fifteen and he was twenty, and he was smitten with her for years. They remained friends and correspondents until he died.”

  Accepting each volume as Hazel handed it across, Gemma wondered what she had got herself into. She studied the black-and-white photo of Brooke on the cover of the Memoir, with his tumbled hair and penetrating gaze. “He was quite stunningly beautiful, wasn’t he? I wondered why everyone was so besotted with him.”

  “Yes, his looks were rather spectacular,” Hazel admitted. “But I doubt his looks alone would have generated such interest decades after his death. To me, he represents a slaughtered generation, a loss of innocence of a magnitude unimaginable before the Great War.”

  “He was killed in the war, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s the ironic thing,” said Hazel. “He never saw battle at all. He died in 1915, on the Greek island of Skyros, after contracting blood poisoning on a Divisional Field Day. But Churchill and the others in the Cabinet found his death, and his sonnets romanticizing the war, expedient-he made a lovely martyr to the cause. It was probably just as well for them that Brooke died when he did,” she added. “I’ve always thought that his views on the war would have changed dramatically if he’d lived to see action, and that change would have been reflected in his poems.”

  “Was he a good poet, then?” asked Gemma.

  “I think he showed flashes of brilliance, but who knows what he might have achieved? Virginia Woolf thought he was destined to become a politician.”

  “He knew Virginia Woolf?”

  “It seems he knew everyone, and that an astonishing number of those connected with him became notable in their own fields. Virginia Woolf, James and Lytton Strachey, Geoffrey and Maynard Keynes, the Darwin sisters. The list goes on and on.”

  “So he fascinated those who knew him, not just those who came after.” Gemma touched the photograph as if she might bring it to life.

  “From the accounts I’ve read, he had remarkable charisma, and I suppose, in a way, it survived him.”

  “It all looks so innocent,” said Gemma, who had found the photograph section in Geoffrey Keynes’s Collected Letters.

  Hazel laughed. “There is something enchantingly nostalgic about that prewar idyll, but I daresay not as innocent as we’d like to think. There was probably a good deal of naughtiness going on beneath those blazers and boaters and garden-party dresses. And Rupert, certainly, was more than a bit sexually… complicated.” She yawned and stretched. “Stay for a last cup of tea. We’ll light the fire and put some music on, and we can recite dear Rupert aloud.”

  As much as she would have enjoyed spending an hour or two in the warmth of Hazel’s sitting room, Gemma felt a strong desire to be home alone with Toby, to reinforce her sense of their identity as a family. “Thanks, Hazel, but I’d better not. Toby will forget how to go to sleep in his own bed, and besides”-she patted the books in her lap-“I’ve got a lot of reading to do.”

  Llangollen, Wales

  30 September

  1963 Dear Mummy,

  Please forgive me for giving you my news this way. It seems unfair at best, and cowardly at worst, especially when I know you wish only the best for me. But it all happened so suddenly, and we felt such a sense of urgency, that it seemed best to take the plunge and the conventions be damned.

  Morgan and I were married, yesterday, in the Cambridge registry office.

  I know what you’re thinking, darling Mummy, that we hardly know each other, that we’ve taken leave of our senses. But we’ve known each other more than a year, even though it’s only in the last few months that we’ve discovered that we see life with the same passion and intensity; and that we have the same goal, to record this life honestly, and to live it as well as we can.

  And as for our senses, we’ve only just discovered them. Being with him makes me see things in ways I never imagined, and yet smell and taste and touch are magnified as if I were suddenly blind, and the beauty of the world round us is almost exquisitely painful. Oh, Mummy, his photographs will make your heart ache. He’s so brilliant, so talented, and I’m going to be his support and encouragement, as he will be mine.

  I’m writing poems that are searingly good, and Morgan’s shown me that the rest-all the academic pretensions and stultifying traditions of university life-are only impediments to doing our best work. We are neither of us going back next week for the beginning of term. We’re going to live instead, and practice our chosen vocations.

  We’ve found a tiny flat in Cambridge-little more than a bed-sit, really, but it’s ours-and we have already moved in our few bits and pieces. Morgan has an offer of a job as assistant at a photography studio in town, and while it’s the most boring of work (weddings, baby portraits, etc.), he will do it well, and it will give him the facilities to process his own photographs.

  Dr. Barrett has been most understanding, and has kindly offered to send some tutoring my way, and when I’m not working I am going to write and write and write.

  Don’t worry, Morgan’s very practical, and while we won’t be living in luxury we will make ends meet. And as long as we have food in our mouths and clothes on our backs, what else matters?

  I promise you’ll love him, too, Mummy. His brooding dark looks conceal a wonderful sense of humor and the sort of kindness I’ve never met in anyone but you. He makes me feel adored, and safe.

  Be happy for me-

  Lydia

  CHAPTER 11

  Would God, would God, you could be comforted.

  RUPERT BROOKE,

  from a fragment

  Adam found Nathan sitting in the sun in the garden, with a rug over his knees like an old man.

  He walked across the lawn, his shoes leaving a dark trail in the silver-dewed grass, and hunkered down beside Nathan’s chair so that he could study his friend’s face. Pale, though not so pasty as yesterday, but his eyes were still dull as river pebbles left out to dry.

  “How are you?” he asked gently.

  “If you mean
am I sober, the answer is yes,” said Nathan, then he sighed and looked away. “I’m sorry, Adam. Sit down.” He gestured at the other lawn chair. “If you want to know the truth, I feel as though an enormous wave has washed through me and left me weak and empty on the beach. It’s dull, and restful, and I wish it would last. But I don’t think it will.”

  “No,” said Adam as he lowered himself into the canvas curve of the lawn chair, “I don’t suppose so. But the worst is over.”

  “Is it? I rather think not.” Nathan shivered and pulled up the rug a bit. “Because now the bloody instinct for self-preservation has reared its ugly head, and oblivion would have been far preferable to going on. It’s too bad you had your friend Father Denny come and confiscate my shotgun.”

  Adam had called the Grantchester vicar in a panic the previous morning, asking him to go round and not only remove the gun, but stay with Nathan until he could get there himself. Unfortunately, Adam had two terminally ill parishioners who depended on his daily visits, but otherwise he had delegated his church duties so that he could be with Nathan as much as possible.

  “Let me ring your daughters, Nathan,” pleaded Adam, as he had the day before. “It would do you good to have them here.”

  “No.” Nathan shook his head. “I couldn’t bear to have them fussing over me. And they’d be a bit condescending with it, because they can’t imagine anyone over thirty feeling… what Vic and I…”

  “Passion,” said Adam. “The young think they have a monopoly, and nothing but experience will disabuse them of it. We were the same.”

  “Were we?” Glancing at Adam, Nathan said, “You felt that way about Lydia, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. But age did temper it. You teach yourself to focus on other things, even to take pleasure in them. But still, I wished it had been me she’d called that last day. It took me a long time to forgive you for that.” Adam saw Nathan’s eyes widen in a surprise that mirrored his own. He hadn’t meant to tell Nathan that, not ever, and especially not now.