Deborah Crombie - Dreaming of the bones

“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, then 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.”

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.